The Nightborn

by Isabel Cooper

  Olvir pulled on his boots, listening to the sounds near him. The camp was mostly still abed, but not entirely. Out of the three thousand or so souls who defended that part of Criwath’s border, fifty-odd were assigned to patrol the fortifications. He could look up and see two of them walking behind the wooden palisades, looking through cracks too small for arrows to spot any activity beyond. He could certainly hear their footsteps, regular drumbeats behind the more irregular noise of snoring sleepers and shifting horses. Their presence was reassuring, but he’d have been a fool as well as an oaf to distract them.

  A few rows of tents behind the defenders, the wounded slept restlessly. The Mourners, noncombatant servants of the Dark Lady whose domain included healing, kept their own vigil among them, watching for sudden declines. Letar’s priests were good company as a rule, but Olvir didn’t want to disturb the Mourners on their duty either.

  There was always practice. The few sets of pells were barely holding together after rounds of recruits, so by common agreement nobody used them except those who truly did need help hitting the target. Fighting the air, however, required only space. Olvir stood up and turned to retrieve his tunic.

  A woman stood a few feet away from him.

  That itself wouldn’t have been a surprise, or a problem—a relief, though he wouldn’t have wished it, to find another who couldn’t sleep—but Olvir hadn’t heard her approach. Coming on top of his dream, it was more than he could reason through calmly. Before his brain caught up with his body, he’d hissed in a wary breath and reached for his sword.

  “It’s a shade early for a duel,” she said.

  As usual, Olvir recognized her voice before her face. He knew the tone in particular: soothing amusement. The words beneath the words were we can laugh about this, we’re laughing already, we wouldn’t be joking if it was any great matter.

  He’d used that tone before, when the minutes before battle bit into the throat like wire, but he’d heard it most often in that camp from the woman in front of him: Vivian Bathari, commander of the Sentinels who held the border.

  As was usual with the Sentinels, her clothes—dark, plain wool beneath a mail shirt—gave no indication of her rank. The gold-worked hilt of a greatsword over her shoulder, and the eye-sized sapphire set in it, made a striking contrast.

  That was Ulamir, the soulsword that made her a Sentinel, and the stone housed a spirit hundreds of years old.

  Vivian wore the other marks of the Order of the Dawn on her face: a half-circle of bloodred tears beneath each gray eye, glowing against her light-brown skin. The gods had reforged her, like they did all of her order, turning them into weapons, and none who’d been through that process ever looked fully human again.

  None ever were.

  Many feared the Sentinels, even as they relied on them, believing them too close to the monsters they killed. Olvir was too familiar with them, and with Vivian in particular, to feel the slightest alarm at her presence once he recognized her.

  Embarrassment was a different story.

  * * *

  How easily he startles, said Ulamir.

  “Everyone’s jumpy right now,” Vivian replied, “and no wonder.”

  She spoke in the half-voiced murmur that she’d spent eighteen years using with her soulsword, and which most people didn’t hear.

  Olvir nodded, then contrived to look even more awkward than he had before. He carried it well, as always. Being tall and square-chinned with big hazel eyes helped. “Not talking to me, were you? Though you’re right. Or Ulamir is.”

  “I forget I have to be careful around the knights,” she said with unspoken acceptance of his equally unspoken apology. “I’m still too used to people with normal hearing.”

  Should your memory slip around any of them, he’s the safest, Ulamir put in. What could you say to him that you didn’t say in the Myrian lands, when that undead sank its teeth into your leg?

  “You didn’t insult me,” Olvir echoed, “and you didn’t reveal any dark secrets.” Relaxing, he glanced down at the sword in his hand, then at the scabbard he’d drawn it from.

  That and the rest of his belt lay behind him on the large rock where he’d been sitting, with a folded bundle of sky-blue cloth beneath them that Vivian assumed was his tunic. “Er. I should either put this down or on, shouldn’t I?”

  “It seems like it would be easier on your wrist,” said Vivian.

  She began to turn away as he put the sword down and picked up his tunic. It was a shame to do so, with rippling biceps and a flat stomach on full display—she was middle-aged for a Sentinel in the field, and weary, not blind or dead—but it was best to avoid lingering awkwardly, particularly when she’d be working with the man. Getting breakfast going early would win her some favors, Vivian thought, and starting a fire came easily, even two years past her journeying days.

  “You weren’t looking for help, when you came across me, were you?” Olvir asked, making her turn. The tunic slid down over his broad back and narrow waist, concealing his head for a moment before his close-cut chestnut hair emerged. “If you’d be able to use an extra hand with any task, I’m more than willing.”

  “No, but I do thank you for offering. I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I hoped a tour of the camp would help.”

  “You too? Not that it’s so unusual, given the circumstances.”

  “I’m surprised there’s not a crowd of us. Ample hard work or rotgut must be effective for the others.”

  Olvir turned toward her. His belt was fastened, and his sword on it—“girt to his side,” as the old stories had said—and he mostly looked the picture of an upstanding knight, but with a far less certain expression than tapestries generally portrayed them having. “Forgive the question, but you haven’t been having dreams, have you?”

  “I have,” she said slowly, “but only what you’d expect. And you sound like you mean another sort.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not sure what I mean. I’ve never been a prophet, so I doubt it’s that, and yet they repeat more than any dream I’ve ever had.”

  The name and the face were both starting to niggle at her. She’d heard of him before, not just as her past sometime-companion on missions or another friend in the camp. The mention had been more recent, more official. “I don’t want to pry,” Vivian said. “Or, rather,” she added, because she was talking to a servant of Tinival, whose dominions included truth, “I do, but only as far as it might be tactically significant. Tell me more?”

  Olvir squared his broad shoulders, a man facing up to an unpleasant duty. “I’m in different places,” he said. “It was the village where I grew up in this dream, but in the last one I was at the chapter house where I trained. It’s always a place that I’m fond of. And it’s always burning. The smell of smoke is very vivid. The screams are too.”

  “I haven’t studied the mind,” said Vivian, “but that doesn’t seem so out of the ordinary to dream about, given all of this.” She gestured, indicating the campfires but also the palisades and the army, and by extension the war. “It sounds like you put it a few degrees away rather than using memory straight out, but…minds do that, probably.”

  “So I thought. But”—he swallowed—“tonight I saw where… I saw that I was lighting the fires. My own hands were piling up the wood, spilling the oil.” Olvir held them up and out in unnecessary illustration, or perhaps to try to get them as far from himself as he could. “I tried to stop. It didn’t make any difference.”

  Chapter 2

  Talking didn’t actually help very much, which came as no surprise to Olvir. Knights were trained to meet fear boldly, both when it came from outside and when the source was inside their own heads. If he’d only needed to confront his dreams to make them stop, he would’ve done so months before.

  He’d harbored a small hope, as he began describing them to Vivian, that putting words to the image
s, the crying and the odor of smoke and flesh, would define them and thus trap them. That didn’t happen either—the dreams remained, as nebulous and unnerving as ever. Olvir sighed, then waited for Vivian to state the conclusion he’d already turned over, and still believed possible: worries about command, or about the war in general, and nothing more.

  She stayed silent. While the fires smoldered around them and sentries’ footsteps thumped out the moments, Vivian frowned, stared, and didn’t speak a word. She didn’t move either, adding to the sensation that gripped Olvir, a feeling of being looked not just over but through.

  Vivian didn’t resemble cheerfully profane Emeth and her earnest lover Katrine, who Olvir was most familiar with, or any of the other half-dozen Sentinels he’d met more casually. In that moment, facing her clear gaze, he experienced a little of what the uninitiated must have felt in a Sentinel’s company. Training helped him not to look down or fidget, for which he was profoundly glad.

  “You were at Oakford,” she finally said. “You played a major role, unless I misread the reports.”

  “I was.” That line of reasoning had also suggested itself. “But the dreams started long after that. I’ve only been having those for a handful of months. There could be a correspondence, I suppose, but—” He shrugged.

  “It’s not a clear connection,” Vivian agreed. “If you don’t mind, I’d prefer to hear what happened in your own words. You know what reports are.”

  “It was late in the siege,” he said, remembering a different set of walls, other sets of companions who likely wouldn’t all survive the next few days. Had it been more desperate? Perhaps, but a different sort of desperation. “Thyran himself came out to face us.”

  Nightmare had spawned nightmare then. They’d all heard that Thyran—the most famous servant of the traitor god Gizath, the man who’d locked the world in winter for years when his previous attempt at conquest had failed—had somehow returned. Olvir had thought he’d faced that fact until he’d seen the bone-crowned figure on his walking throne of corpses and looked into the rotting inferno of his eyes.

  “I didn’t know him,” he told Vivian, a year later and not a great deal wiser, despite a fair amount of scholarly effort. “Not the way people mean that phrase. I grasped his…frame, his pattern. A familiar tune, but not the whole of the song. I tried to find out more,” Olvir went on, gesturing to the badge on the shoulder of his tunic, where a blue sword signified Tinival, “and saw blackness, shining blackness in pieces, before I lost consciousness.”

  “The contact disturbed him too. Did I read that correctly? Darya, I think, said he seemed pained.”

  “If Darya said it happened, I believe her,” said Olvir. “I was in no state to observe anything.”

  “That was all?”

  “On that occasion. Later…” Olvir rubbed his chin, uncertain of the precise wording. Most of the magic he knew was the power Tinival granted his knights. Until a year before, he’d been content to let others attend to all else. “Gerant, Darya’s soulsword, cast a spell to extend his protection to General Amris, and to let the three of them speak directly.”

  Vivian nodded, with a quick breath of resigned laughter. “It’s a pity that the spell doesn’t work outside of their circumstances, and that those are so unique. If I could give Ulamir’s power to any lover I took…” She laughed again, a surprisingly light sound, clearly at a comment from her sword, then waved a hand. “Please continue.”

  “A few of us made a circle for them. We ended up connected. It was less intense for those of us on the outside, but I was aware of the others in a manner that I wasn’t before.”

  “I take it that wasn’t part of Gerant’s goal.”

  “No. And Darya said it hadn’t happened when the three of them had done the spell before.”

  “She and Gerant aren’t—weren’t—precisely used to having others nearby, to be fair. Even among us, she has an attraction to the remote.”

  “That’s so,” Olvir admitted, “and she said so. Silver Wind’s truth, I have no idea how closely any of these incidents are related, except that the second and third almost certainly are, and Gerant said that he thought the third had to do with me. Forgive me… I’m getting ahead of myself.”

  A bell chimed in the distance: five slow, measured strokes. A fresh—relatively speaking—sentry headed to the wall, sparing a quick glance at Olvir and Vivian but no more. Their focus was already turning outward.

  “At the end,” Olvir said, “Thyran tried to kill General Amris and me with magic. I saw Gerant’s protection taking a fraction of it. It wouldn’t have been nearly enough to save us. I knew that. I…” He brought back a memory he’d repeated until the words had worn holes in what he’d once known. “I felt as though I was being torn apart. I don’t recall what I was thinking, if I was thinking at all.”

  “Hard to be coherent at such times,” Vivian agreed. “But you turned Thyran’s spell back on him.”

  “I suppose so. All of us who’d been involved in casting the shield seemed to join in, but Gerant said my presence might have been the deciding factor.” A year later, and it still felt like boasting to say it. “More likely it was the god’s.”

  * * *

  “It’s possible,” said Vivian. She’d never heard of Tinival working like that, and she assumed that none of his priests had either, or one would have long since provided the clarity the god was known for. On the other hand, how often did a knight end up facing Gizath’s champion, let alone with all of the magical complications Olvir had described? “He may be behind the dreams too.”

  Olvir looked politely doubtful.

  Naviallanth wouldn’t veil his message, Ulamir said, using the stonekin’s name for the god, nor would he have any need of obscurity with his chosen.

  Doubly reproved, Vivian switched angles of approach. “I take it you had yourself inspected by all of the correct people.”

  “As many as we could find, before the war called me away. The Dark Lady’s Mourners said that my life force was normal, and her Blades couldn’t find any corruption in me.” Olvir made the fourfold sign of thanks, touching forehead, eyes, and mouth quickly with the fingertips of his right hand. “The mages said that my spirit had been altered somehow, shaped, but they couldn’t tell why, or whether it’d taken place before or after Oakford.”

  One or the other need not be the only choice. All gems are cut before they’re polished.

  “Fair point,” said Vivian, and explained, “Ulamir says the initial shaping could’ve taken place before Oakford, and then those events could have brought it out. Do you know when it might have happened?”

  “No,” he said, politely but promptly. Obviously he’d given the same answer a few times before. “I’ve had an active life, but no mysterious incidents with mages.”

  “And your childhood?”

  “Infancy, maybe. I was only a month or two old when my mother found me, and she would’ve told me if it had happened since.” His fond grin gave Vivian a little warmth in the chilly morning. “She was a dedicate of the Silver Wind herself. It had been many years since she’d held a blade, but the oaths don’t vanish.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  Vivian hadn’t sighed, and she believed she’d looked suitably casual, but a trace of her thoughts must have gotten through. Olvir’s large brown eyes briefly met hers in a moment of connection that had nothing to do with the war or his dreams. He was perhaps ten years younger than Vivian, but even he knew the point where a warrior, even one molded by the gods, had to see the ground shifting up ahead. Slower reflexes, fragile bones, and all the other frailties of mortal flesh were still mostly in the future, but not nearly as far away as they’d been at sixteen.

  A soldier or a mercenary without a vocation might have started considering small farms, or inns, or ceremonial posts with nobility. The paths were different for the servants of the gods. Vivian
had just begun to wonder about that when the war had really started. Now it was anyone’s guess how many of them, god-touched or not, would see that terrifying age.

  “That raises possibilities,” she said, pulling the conversation back to practicalities, or analysis, which was the next best thing, “but only those.”

  It happens at times that my people bestow gifts on likely humans, said Ulamir, but such favor is rare, and no land near here is missing a prince.

  Olvir shook his head. “No. If we’d had more time and could have consulted more mages, possibly, but I was more use with a sword than as a curiosity.”

  “You’re right on that point.”

  “Thank you…and thank you for listening.”

  “I wish I’d been able to help more,” said Vivian.

  The camp was slowly waking up around them, with quiet groans and mild profanity drifting through the air. Those who hadn’t had Olvir’s dreams, or the more normal nightmares of the battle line, had to return to a world of unwelcome facts: they were still here, the war was still going on. Bugger it was a frequent response, with no effort to be more specific.

  He shook his head. “I couldn’t have expected it of you and been reasonable, any more than I’d have expected you to have the same dreams. I only thought, well, it’s always worth asking.”

  “It is,” said Vivian, and then heard footsteps behind her, less regular and more purposeful than the sentry’s.

  Olvir’s gaze focused over her left shoulder. Olvir saluted just as Vivian was turning to see the newcomer. “Good morning, General. You seem to have a mission in mind. Can I help?”

  “Morning.” General Magarteach had a light, efficient voice. “Glad I caught both of you together.”

  “Glad to be of service,” said Vivian. The general was broad of shoulder and bosom, with red hair running to gray in streaks. Magarteach was roughly her height, which was not inconsiderable, so that the general effect was of a moving wall. Right then it was a troubled wall. “What’s today’s complication?”