Page 95 of Beds and Blades

I made a mental note to become extremely annoying about that later.

“Well,” Varia said, reassembling herself into a lieutenant with impressive speed. “If you find anything, report it to me.”

“Always,” Flavia said.

Varia looked at me. “Meghan, same time tomorrow.”

I nodded.

Varia departed briskly.

“What does a day patrol actually do?” I asked.

“Mostly it is quiet,” Flavia said. “The sun does our work for us. Nothing that wants to drain you can be out in it for long.” She swung up into the saddle. “But quiet is not nothing. We check the places the sun does not reach.”

“Caves,” Gaius said. “The ruins out west. There are deep places where the dark holds all day. Now and then, something is hiding in one, waiting for the night.”

“And the sellswords,” Flavia said. For the first time, the humor left her voice. “That is the real problem. Sellswords. Anyone willing to take coin for a body. They snatch people off roads, from the remote villages.”

She looked toward the mountains.

“Then they move them toward Druvenfall. The captives are kept there, alive enough to suffer and weak enough not to run. Morvanna and her command layer drain them again and again, right up to the edge of death.” Her mouth tightened. “They are not prisoners in the ordinary sense. They are stores of blood.”

“The handoffs happen at the edge of dark places,” Gaius said. “Caves. Ruins. Somewhere the undead can remain in shadow, but the sellsword can stay in the light. No sane sellsword follows the undead into darkness. In daylight, at the mouth of a cave or ruin, both sides have limits. The undead can stay just inside the shadow. The sellsword can stay just outside it. Neither one has to trust the other more than necessary.”

Gaius looked toward the hills as if the whole arrangement had left a bad taste in his mouth.

“They target people at the fringes. Travelers. Orphans. Convicts. Debtors. Hired hands. Women without families. Men who took the wrong work in the wrong season. Anyone who can vanish without the disappearance becoming a political problem.”

His voice stayed even, which somehow made it worse.

“Then the sorcerers pass word through whatever system they use. A person disappears at the edge of one kingdom, and something in Morvanna’s reach knows when and where to collect them.”

I thought about that, and felt my stomach turn. An entire economy of humans is transported like contraband. People as cargo, moved at a markup, the supply chain optimized around one fixed constraint: the customer could not stand in the sun.

It was grotesque in a way my brain did not want to make room for. A system. People making decisions, taking payment, arranging routes, choosing who mattered least.

“Most days we find nothing,” Flavia said. “Some days we find tracks. Once a season, we find a handoff in progress, and we ruin somebody’s afternoon.” She smiled again, but it was a different smile. “I like those days.”

“Can I come?” I said.

Gaius and Flavia exchanged a look that contained an entire conversation.

“I am not proposing to fight anyone. I am merely proposing to ride along, observe, and get out of these walls for an afternoon.”

“Daytime loop is the safest thing we do,” Flavia said, considering. “Gaius?”

“She stays between us,” Gaius said. “She does what she is told. If I tell you to get down, you stay down.”

“Agreed,” I said.

“Then you can come.”

I took that as permission and went to get Velox.

***

The valley in daylight was more familiar than the one I had arrived in half-conscious on my first day. The wrongness I had felt then, the sky pitched at the wrong angle, visible stars in a blue sky, had not gone away so much as settled into the background.