“Why so slow?”
“Tired out, them. The way I heard it, their Lord Regent’s allied with the dead. Doesn’t mind a good forced march, because the men that die along the way can still fight when they get there.”
“That truth?” Clara asked.
Imbert’s eyes grew troubled. “I don’t know. Maybe. Tell you this, there’s something damned eerie about that army, and that’s not joking.”
“But you follow them,” Clara said.
“I do,” he said, and paused. “For now, anyway.”
The ’van master’s guess had been a good one. The carts passed through the gates of Bellin at noon the next day. The road was filthy. Between the droppings of the horses and cart oxen and the boots of the soldiers, the green of the road was covered in a churn of milky brown stink. The mountains rose up around them craggy and ragged. Little forests of pine and aspen clung to the sides, rising up so steeply Clara felt sometimes she must be losing her balance just looking at them. The road tracked upward, the jade keeping close to the curves of the land. Twice she saw great woolly sheep high above, walking along cliffsides she would have thought too steep for anything but birds and moss. Any game had been scared into hiding by the passage of the army before her, so the only food was briny sausage and beans that Imbert’s cook made in the back of one of the carts. At nightfall, they made camp on the road itself. There was no land flat enough to sleep on otherwise. The jade of the road and the stone at the roadside both defied tent stakes, so Clara and Vincen set their bedrolls beside one of the carts, and lay in the night looking up at the moon and stars and the vast, black bulk of the mountains on either side. They were filthy. They stank. Clara was developing a persistent itch on the back of her leg. She felt oddly at peace.
“Have you ever been on campaign?” she asked Vincen, her voice soft enough not to carry to the next group over.
“No,” he said. “My uncle went. He was part of the siege at Anninfort.”
“Which side?”
“The wrong one,” Vincen said. “Wasn’t his choice. My father begged him to desert, but what’s a man to do? His lord tells him to go, he goes. Or he winds up like those poor bastards we found. It was hard for my mother afterward. We were part of Osterling Fells. Working for your lord husband. Keeping his kennels and cooking his food, and him part of the force that killed Uncle Hom. They came over it, though. War’s war. Things happen there, you ought not carry them home with you.”
“Is that what your mother said?”
“Father,” Vincen said.
“I think Dawson said something very much like that to Jorey once. It’s hard to think of him and Vicarian. You realize that if I wrote them a note right now, we could likely pass it hand to hand all the way to their tents without anyone walking more than a dozen steps? If they knew I was here…”
“They’d send you back.”
“And they’d be scandalized. That they are going to slaughter a nation because Geder Palliako was disappointed in love doesn’t strike them as obscene. But my being here would.”
“You’re sure of that? The part where they think the war isn’t obscene, I mean. Because Jorey at least seems more like Uncle Hom.”
“You mean Geder called him and he had to go?”
“Yes.”
“Yes,” Clara said. “You’re right. It is like that.”
“The other now. Vicarian.”
“He isn’t like that. He’s here because he wants to be. Because it’s an honor. Because he believes.”
“The priests. They did that to him. It’s not his fault.”
“Perhaps. I also have a daughter whose opinions I can’t admire. Children are who they are. I may love them all, but I know them too. Their feet are as much clay as my own. It hardly matters what path we’ve walked to become what we are. Whatever it was, we’ve walked it. Vicarian has too. He’s become what he is. And I’ve lost him.” She put her hand out, took his in her own. His fingers laced themselves with hers. His body was so strong compared with hers, she could could almost understand his mistake. “Those men we cut down today. You didn’t want me to see them. You didn’t want me to feel that they had died in the same cause more or less that I’ve taken up.”
“I didn’t see the need.”
“You cannot protect me from the world or choices I’ve made.”
She was weeping now, but gently. For Vicarian as he had been. For the boy she’d known and loved. For her child, and what he had become. What he chose, and what was chosen for him. Her chest ached with it, and yet she knew it would pass and come again and pass again. Over and over, and likely would for the rest of her days. It changed nothing.
Farther down the road, someone began playing a flute. A pair of voices rose to join it, and another voice to protest and call for silence. It was cold, but not bitter, and the air of the mountains was thin. Vincen Coe sighed deeply, looking up into the moon and the stars and the darkness. She considered the shape of his face, the place where his collarbones met. The dim had robbed all color from him and left him like a sketch by an artist who had only blue and black to paint with.
“I’ve told very few people that I loved them,” Clara said. “And with each of them, I think I meant something a little different. Sometimes very different.”
He turned to look at her. “Are you telling me that you love me?”
“I think I am,” she said. “I am. I love you.”
“I love you,” he said, and squeezed her hand. How strange that in the depth of all this horror and war, displacement and fear, it would take so little to fill her with warmth and pleasure. She lay back, letting the hard ground bear her up. Letting her eyes follow the distant ridges of the mountains far above. The moon glowed cold white. A bird appeared, a deeper darkness against the sky, its wings spread to ride some great updraft. Only… no.
“What is that?” she said. “Is that… a hawk?”
“Hmm? Where?”
She lifted her finger, and he pulled himself over to sight along it like a stick. When she spoke again, she could hear the fear in her own voice. “What is that?”
He said something obscene and sat up, staring. His jaw was slack, his eyes wide. He shook his head.
“Vincen? Is that a dragon?”
Marcus
Marcus had spent years of his life bent over maps, planning his battles and campaigns. He’d looked down on mountains made from ink and rivers drawn in dust. Once, he’d even walked through one of the fairly idiotic miniature rooms where the full landscape had been recreated in tiny scale so that the generals and kings could play at striding across their territories like gods. The actual world seen from above was an utterly different thing. From his place strapped to the dragon’s leg, the land curved and curled in surprising and gentle ways. A hill could begin as an irregularity of the horizon, swell as if it were reaching up toward them, and fall away. Forests became a single, uniform texture of spring green. When they passed above farmland, he could tell the crooked furrows from the true. Vast herds of elk, surprised by this unfamiliar greatness in the sky, scattered before them like he’d poured blotting sand on a bare page and blown it.
Inys’s flesh was warm beneath the scales almost to the point of discomfort. The leather-and-wood slings that held them all in place creaked and groaned, and Marcus couldn’t help imagining one giving way. The long, slow fall and sudden stop. The wind of their passage roared around them and made all conversation impossible, but when he craned his head to look, he saw Sandr’s eyes squeezed closed, Cary’s open and her hair flowing back like a child’s icon of defiance. The great dragon himself was reduced to the scaled archway of his forelegs, a long, sinuous neck, and the lower jaw seen from below and ending in a sharp chin. From time to time, it screamed out a bloom of fire that stank and choked them as they flew through its dying smoke.