“Few of them looked like they had any reason not to be walking around. Some had fallen in the battle that had been going on when the Mourning happened, but most were unscathed. All of those had one thing in common though: their eyes and mouths were frozen wide in absolute terror.”
Kandler felt Sallah shudder against him, and he fell silent.
“Go on,” she said quietly. “I didn’t mean …”
“It’s all right,” he said. He took a moment before he started again. He felt all the long-buried emotions welling up in his chest once more. It had been more than four years since that horrible day, but it still ate at him.
“I got there before anyone else. Over the years, scavengers have started to strip the place. There’s so much of it though, so many bodies, it’s hard to imagine how long it might take before they’re done.”
“Did you ever find your wife?”
Kandler bowed his head. “I looked for three days. Most people would have given up, but I knew what her unit’s standard looked like. I had some hope. Besides, I knew that getting back through the mists again would be chancy at best.
“On the morning of the third day, I found her. It was in that spot near that black stream, right where Burch and I and the rest of Mardakine raised that monument after the Last War ended, right where Gweir was killed.”
Sallah wiped her eyes at this. Kandler could tell she’d been thinking of her fellow knight already, before he’d mentioned the young man’s name. He’d been the first of the knights they’d lost on this mad chase through the Mournland trying to save his daughter or, in the case of the knights, to keep her from permanently falling into the wrong hands.
“I found her collapsed near her unit’s green and gold standard, face down in the turf. It looked like she’d been trying to run toward Breland, where she knew Esprë and I waited for her.
“I don’t know if she made it more than a few steps. She had the same horrified look on her face as everyone else, although on her I saw the tracks of the tears that had fallen from her eyes.
“I buried her right there next to that foul, awful stream. I recognized some of the others in her unit, and I thought about burying them too. When I looked out across the swath of bodies, though, I knew if I started down that path I wouldn’t be able to stop.
“Instead, I lay Esprina to rest by herself. I said a few words as I knelt over her fresh grave, and I left her there to rot.”
“Only nothing ever rots in the Mournland, does it?” Sallah said.
Kandler shook his head. “I couldn’t leave her lying out in the open like that,” he said. “I wanted to give her back some of the dignity she’d had so much of in life.
“That’s one of the things I hate about this place,” Kandler said as he gazed out over the low hills that separated them from the deserted city of Metrol in the distance. “The whole land is an insult to everyone who ever lived here. It’s bad enough they’re all dead. There’s no one left to bury them.”
Kandler fell silent. He hadn’t ever said so much about that fateful day, not even to Burch. He stood there holding Sallah to him.
He hadn’t been with a woman since Esprina. Until the end of the Last War, two full years after the Day of Mourning. He’d been too busy. The time since then was, if anything, more of a blur than those first two years: helping found Mardakine, building a town in that forsaken crater; trying to maintain some semblance of law in a new place on a merciless border; trying to raise Esprë the way he thought his wife would want, knowing that the elf girl would barely be an adult by the time he was a doddering old fool.
Now, though, he couldn’t stop thinking about Sallah. He hadn’t known a woman like her since Esprina: strong-willed, beautiful, powerful.
When Kandler had first met the lady knight, he’d chalked her off as just another religious fanatic. The intense time they’d spent together showed him that she was much more. She was devout, to be sure, but she didn’t let her faith define her so much as she lived within it. He didn’t know everything about her, yet, but he knew that he wanted to know more.
Kandler turned to Sallah, and she raised her face to meet his, their eyes locking together, saying more than their words could ever. He leaned in to kiss her, and she lowered her head so that his lips met her forehead.
“My apologies,” he whispered to her. “I thought you might want that too.”
Sallah nodded, Kandler’s lips still on her brow. “I do,” she said softly. “I do. You are an amazing man, the kind of man I could give my heart to.”
“But?” Kandler’s heart fell into his stomach. He desperately wanted to hear this answer—needed to—but it terrified him.
“But I need someone who’s not still in love with his wife.”
With that, Sallah turned and walked back to the fire that Burch had set. The fast-blazing, grass-fed thing was already starting to die.
Kandler watched her for a moment, then turned back and stared out at distant Metrol once more.
5
Walking through Metrol as night fell over its silent streets was like wandering through a mausoleum, only the bodies still lay out in the open rather than encased safely and respectfully away in their graves. The riders, with Xalt loping along behind, had yet to enter any of the buildings in the place, but Kandler was sure that the mayhem inside was if anything worse than that without.
Parts of the city seemed almost untouched, apart from all the bodies, almost as if everyone in them had simply fallen asleep and was trapped in an eternal dream. Some moments, Kandler felt that a simple spell would cause the people to climb to their feet and resume their interrupted lives as if nothing had ever happened.
Other parts of the city, though, looked as if they’d been trampled by a pack of iron-booted giants. Buildings lay toppled against each other like felled trees in a forest of cut stone and treated timbers. Stacks of cobblestones crunched up out of streets as if the land itself had tried to vomit upward in the aftermath of the horror. Large, deep holes occupied what had once been thriving neighborhoods.
“This must have been a magnificent city,” Xalt said as he trotted alongside Kandler’s horse.
“It was,” the justicar nodded, then shook his head in a mixture of wrath and despair. “The crime committed here …” He couldn’t finish the thought, much less the sentence.
“Better find a place to hole up for the night,” Burch said.
Kandler glanced at his old friend and saw the hairs on the backs of the shifter’s arms standing on end. He could sense that something was wrong here. He might not be able to give voice to his concerns, but they were tangible even so.
“True,” Sallah said. “We could run into scavengers or worse.”
“We could take them,” Brendis said. The young knight was healthy again finally. He seemed embarrassed by how badly he’d been hurt, now determined to show through false bravado that he would never be laid so low again. “How many of them could there be?”
Kandler knew that Brendis was deluding himself, but he decided not to do anything about it. If the young knight needed to believe he was invulnerable to get through the coming days, he wasn’t about to disagree with him. False bravado was better than nothing at all.
Sallah, though, wouldn’t let the younger knight get away with it. “We are not here to do battle with the ghosts of Metrol,” she said. “We are passing through as quickly as possible on our way to rescue Esprë. Keep your focus.”
“Yes, Lady Sallah,” Brendis replied. Although Kandler didn’t turn around to look at the young man’s face, he could hear the tension in his voice.
Kandler looked up at the sky overhead. Although the Mournland’s ever-present mists still smothered the place, the rushing in of the dusk almost made it possible to ignore the mysterious overcast, as if it were little more than the thick cloud cover of a wintry day. Kandler had spent many a night in Metrol under just such a sky, wishing for a glimpse of even one of the moons that danced through the heavens on a clear night. Now, though, the break in the clouds he longed for—a sign of an encroaching spring—might never come.