Page 21 of The Summer Pass

“Please tell your wife she is welcome to take over command of my men any time she likes. If she’d rather not, she needs to go back to Tawakhura.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Yano of Tawakhura went out, looking relieved, and Vanu was left alone with Mikhi. There was a wine-skin on the table that Yano had brought with him and left, probably not by accident. Vanu looked at it for a long moment.

“Get that out of here,” he told Mikhi.

He dropped into his chair after she had gone with the wine, and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, hard enough to hurt. He felt a touch on his leg and looked down to see that the dog had stood up under the table and was nosing him. She put her long muzzle on his knee and looked up at him with dark, mournful eyes. He stroked the silky fur of her head and scratched behind her ears. Lill had named her Jin, the word friend in his native language. It wasn’t fair to ignore her just because she reminded him of Lill.

Jin had attached herself to Lill, and he hadn’t wanted to keep her. Vanu remembered the way he’d pointed out that he didn’t kill the dog, as if he had hoped for Vanu’s approval. It had seemed such a strange thing to say—why would you kill a perfectly good dog?—but Vanu could guess where it came from, all the same. He remembered the haunted faces of the boys from the Order of the Sworn Defenders, the first time he had come to the Tawa Valley. Some of those boys would have killed a dog the moment it got in the way of their mission. Some of them—the ones who’d go on to be masters, for sure—would kill it for fun.

Heart of the Blue Heaven, he missed Lill. He felt it suddenly as an ache in his chest. Lill’s voice, his laugh, the eager way he signed. The way he tasted. Sometimes Vanu worried about what Lill was doing out there, whether he was safe, where he had gone. Right now he just wanted Lill back. He wanted to listen to Lill talk about something for a while, pull Lill onto his lap and kiss him, slide his hands up under Lill’s shirt—or whatever he was wearing—and feel his smooth, warm skin. Lay him down on the narrow camp bed …

He nudged the dog’s head irritably off his knee and got to his feet. This was why he tried not to think about Lill. It was torment for no good reason. Vanu held open the tent flap and shooed the dog out into the twilit camp.

“Can we talk to you a moment, Lill?” said Zaraz, standing in the doorway of the forge.

“Of course. Let me finish sweeping, and I’ll come out.”

He knew what they wanted to tell him, but only because he’d eavesdropped on their conversation the night before. He couldn’t say that. He also harboured a hope that they might have changed their minds since then. He flicked the broom smartly around the last unswept corner of the forge, tugged off his apron, and went out to join Zaraz and Shan in the yard.

“We’ve decided to go to Tagra Degra with the men,” Shan said.

“I know you don’t think we should,” said Zaraz, twisting her hands together, “but … ”

But they thought he was just a boy bride and street performer, young and inexperienced in the ways of the world compared to them. They didn’t take his warnings seriously. He’d heard them say so last night. He wished he could explain why they should, why he actually knew more about sieges and warfare than they thought, but that would probably—should probably—make them scared of him, which wouldn’t help. And he wasn’t sure he was right; it might not be any safer for them outside of Tagra Degra than in.

“I see,” he said. “Well, be careful.”

“You won’t come with us?” said Zaraz. “We will worry about you if you stay here.”

“Not that you owe us anything,” Shan added quickly.

“No no, I just meant … we want you to be safe.”

Lill nodded. “Thank you. I promised Nakhana I’d stay and help out his family.” He didn’t say “protect” because they would have thought that absurd. But that was how he understood his duty. “We’ll all be taking refuge in the towers, and it’ll be quite safe. The army may not even come up this way.”

That seemed unlikely, but he wanted to offer his friends all the reassurance he could. He thought of something else.

“You’ll need someone to interpret for you. I’ll find someone who⁠—”

“Oh, we have already. Enu speaks some Zashian.”

“He was the one who encouraged us to come, actually,” said Shan. “He thinks the Boar of Hawakhurta is Vanu Urártu.”

“Oh, is that so?” said Lill stupidly, though there was no reason to pretend he hadn’t heard Enu say that himself.

There was also no reason to feel that Enu was stealing his friends. If Enu was right—and why shouldn’t Enu be right? What did Lill know about it?—and Vanu was at Tagra Degra, it would be the safest place to be.

“We were alarmed when we first heard it,” Zaraz was saying, “because where we’re from everyone tells terrible stories about Vanu Urártu—not that we’ve believed them for years—and we thought he was locked up somewhere in the west, but of course up here everyone knows him as a hero, and they say he may have escaped.”

“I really have to stay and look after Nakhana’s family,” Lill repeated.

“Of course,” said Shan. “You can’t break your promise.”

“But will you promise us something?” said Zaraz. “As soon as it’s safe, will you go back home to your husband?”

Lill hesitated. He could just lie and say he would; it would be the easiest thing to do, and then they wouldn’t worry about him. Clearly he should do that. He couldn’t tell them the whole truth, and anything that hinted at the reasons why he couldn’t go home would worry them. Worse, they’d know he hadn’t been honest with them up until now. They would no longer trust him, and he hated that thought.