And Geth felt nothing but joy at seeing them again. There was no grief at seeing Adolan. There was no anger at confronting Robrand and no shame at seeing the Frostbrand-even though Geth knew he should have felt it.
In the way of dreams, that moment of doubt started everything unraveling. Geth’s arms felt heavy suddenly, gauntlet and sword dragging on them. Enemies stopped falling so easily. The faces of allies faded, becoming as shadowy as those of the figures they fought. Above the sounds of battle, Robrand’s clear calls became bitter, directed at him rather than the company. “Fight, you coward! Fight! The city depends on you-fall and you kill Narath and the Frostbrand!”
“Frostbrand!”
The cry brought him around. One of the Frostbrand had left his position. Black curls shone as the man bounded forward to meet a charging band of enemy fighters.
“Coron!” Geth shouted after him
The first of the enemy fighters sidestepped the mercenary’s attack, dropped to his knees and swung a knife in a tight arc. Coron’s right leg collapsed under him. Even as he fell, though, he thrust with his own blade, and one of the enemy jerked back. Clear as sun on a bright day, Geth saw red blood burst from an ear cut away by a chance blow.
The sound that reached him would have been terrible coming from the throat of any living creature. Geth’s gut collapsed into a knot as the injured man kicked the sword out of Coron’s hand, grabbed a handful of black curls, and raised a knife so heavy it looked like a butcher’s tool. Coron’s eyes rolled back as he saw his death ready to fall.
“No!” Geth roared. He leaped forward. “No!-”
“-No!” He sat up with the cry on his lips, his heart thundering in his chest. He might have jumped up and drawn Wrath if there hadn’t been an orc lying across his legs. The warrior grunted and opened eyes bleary with sleep and drink to glare at him.
“Hacha, shekot, hacha!” he groaned and rolled off Geth’s legs to fall back into slumber.
Geth sat still, letting the world come back to him as the dream faded. He was in a tent, the air close and heavy with the mingled smell of bodies and ale. It wasn’t the tent Batul had assigned to them. Orcs lay around him. Some were twitching slightly, some were snoring. All were asleep. Kobus sat propped up against a pile of gear, his head lolling on his massive chest, a mug still in one hand, a huge chunk of gristly meat in the other. Sunlight pierced the gap of the tent flap in a hot, yellow bar. When Geth felt capable of movement again, he rose, pulled his shirt and vest from under the head of an orc who had been using them as a pillow, and stepped carefully to the flap.
Opening it let more light into the tent, bringing a new moan of protest from the orc Geth had woken. The shifter ducked out into the open air quickly and let the flap fall behind him. The camp of the Angry Eyes horde lay quiet except for a few warriors making a valiant attempt to carry on their celebrations with quiet singing and music, the same strange combination of drums and bone rattles that had filled Geth’s skull through the night. A good number of warriors hadn’t even made it into tents or huts and lay asleep on the bare ground. The sun had climbed just high enough above the horizon that the softness of dawn had given way to the harsher heat and light of morning. At the center of the camp, a strong fire still burned, heating rocks for the Gatekeepers’ sweat lodge and sending a thick column of smoke into the air, but everywhere else fading embers gave up only thin threads of smoke that clung to the ground in a foul mist.
All told, the camp looked exactly how Geth felt. Vague memories of drinking, singing, and dancing with the warriors of the horde came back to his throbbing head. Something else came back to him and he reached up to touch his face above and below his eyes. Thick smears of red paint crumbled under his fingers. The other warriors of the horde, he corrected himself. He remembered taking the horde marks from Kobus’s hands.
He groaned and stumbled for the nearest campfire with orcs still around it. The lingering warriors gave him a hero’s cheer. Geth answered with a vague wave that seemed to satisfy them. A mug had been abandoned beside a big skin bag that could have held water or ale. He threw away what liquid remained in the mug and refilled it from the bag. Water. He grunted in disappointment and looked at one of the orcs.
The dream clung to him like a curse. He needed to talk to someone about it. “Gede Orshok?” he asked thickly. He’d tried to master a few simple questions in Orc on the journey from Tzaryan Keep-Wrath let him understand the language but didn’t help him speak it. The warrior, however, just shrugged. Geth tried again. “Gede Ekhaas? Gede Dhakaani?”
The orc broke out in laughter and started babbling to one of the other warriors, who also laughed. Geth considered using Wrath to find out what was so amusing, but couldn’t quite summon up the energy. Taking his mug of water, he found the shady side of a tent and squatted down on the ground.
For all that the majority of the dream had been pleasant, there had been something distinctly unnatural about it. He hadn’t dreamed about the Frostbrand in years, and he’d never dreamed about them in such a happy way. He had happy memories of the company, of course, but in his experience, those weren’t the memories that came back to him in dreams.
Coron’s death, that was more typical, though even it was something he hadn’t seen in his nightmares for a long, long time. The thought brought visions of the man’s murder rising up within him. Geth squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his teeth, choking the memory back. The effort left his stomach aching.
Why had the dream come to him at all? If he was going to dream about fighting, a battle wouldn’t have been his first choice. A good brawl would have been better. His fight with Kobus. Any number of scuffles in camps and taverns with the Frostbrand to back him up. Good-natured fights with members of the Frostbrand. People didn’t die so often in brawls as they did in battles.
Maybe, he thought, it was because of the night spent with the warriors of the horde. That would explain the strange presence of the Bonetree mound in his dream. Even so, how could the spirit of the horde-the wild unity that gave it strength-have affected him so quickly and so deeply …
Something stirred at the back of his mind, a half-buried memory. He frowned and tried to recall it, but it kept slipping away as if it didn’t want to be remembered. Geth concentrated hard, pulling back the wisps of his dream and the haze of the night. Something Batul had said. Something about the warriors of the horde sharing fires …
The old druid’s words crept into his mind like scared dogs. “Warriors arrive in the camp and fall into the horde as if they’ve been sharing a fire for days,” Batul had said. “The council is nearly ready to make a decision and getting a dozen Gatekeepers to agree on dinner usually takes weeks of debate.”
Geth’s eyes narrowed and he drew a long breath. What was going on? He raised his mug and sipped at his water.
When he lowered the mug, he saw Ekhaas coming toward him. In contrast to Geth, she didn’t look like she was suffering after the night-she might have been turned out for a Blademarks inspection. There were no horde marks on her face. Geth tried to remember if he’d seen her at all through the night. If he had, it was only in passing, a face in the shadows observing the celebrations as he took part in them.
As she passed the campfire, the orcs called out something to her. She stopped and gave them a glare of such loathing that they shrank back in silence. The hobgoblin continued on and stood over Geth.
“Why did they just call me your ‘honeycomb-dancer’?” she said in a voice that made Geth flinch.
“No idea,” he said and gulped more water.