Sperrin stood with his back two paces in front of a tall, jagged rock. His black sword swung easily in a two-handed grip. Five wolves faced him in a loose semi-circle, their fur bristling. Behind them stood a huge wolf, twice the size of any of the others. Its golden eyes glowed, even in the afternoon light. The wolf’s fur glistened, sleek and black like obsidian.
What is that thing?
Sperrin’s stance looked loose, his expression relaxed. He looks a lot more comfortable facing a pack of wolves than he does talking to my father, I thought.
One of the creatures surged forward, and Sperrin pivoted slightly. His blade flicked. I barely saw the motion before the wolf collapsed against the rock next to Sperrin. Another wolf snapped at him, then pulled back. Sperrin held his stance, waiting for them to attack. They seemed much more coordinated than normal wolves. Is that huge wolf controlling them? I wondered. Its golden eyes glittered hypnotically.
Three wolves leaped at once, at Sperrin’s face, groin, and calf. The fourth edged sideways toward the rock and the rear of the soldier’s leg. Without thinking, I pulled back my arm and launched a knife at the encroaching wolf. The blade buried in the wolf’s shoulder. It whimpered and stopped. A second later, Sperrin’s blade beheaded it.
All five of the normal wolves were dead.
I pulled back my arm to throw my second knife at the big wolf, but caught Sperrin’s look and stopped. “Let it go,” he said, as the huge wolf loped from the clearing. “Your knife won’t hurt it.” He reached down and pulled my other knife from the dead wolf’s shoulder and wiped it clean. He handed it back to me, hilt first. “I think we will be having more trouble from that one, though.”
“It was fey?” I asked. He just nodded his head, then cleaned his own blade and replaced it on his baldric. Squatting down, I resheathed the knives in my boots. I checked the Talisman as I stood, but it hadn’t shifted from its position at the small of my back.
“I told you to stay in the mill,” said Sperrin. The words sounded serious, but his face still looked relaxed.
“I wanted to help.”
“I can’t protect you while I’m fighting. You could have been killed.”
I shrugged. “I wasn’t.”
“I mean it,” Sperrin said. “You’re not ready for a real fight yet. That’s why I told you to stay.”
That sounded a little too much like my father to let go. “Do I look like one of your soldiers? I don’t have to follow your orders. And I wanted to help.”
He looked up from the fallen wolves and slowly scanned the rest of the clearing. Whatever he was looking for he didn’t seem to find.
“Was there another person here?” I asked. “What were the wolves attacking?”
“There was. He escaped down one of the paths when I distracted the wolves. Not the same path the fey took when it escaped.”
“Are we going to look for him? Or for the wolf?”
“We are going to take you back to your father. When I know you two are safe, I’ll scout for other survivors.”
He didn’t say anything else to me as we walked back to the mill together.
Still, his expression stayed calm as we walked through the trees. In spite of his criticisms, Sperrin seemed happy with me and with my actions. I wondered if I had passed some sort of test.
My father gave us a dark look as Sperrin and I returned. Sperrin seemed to take no notice of my father at all, though. Recovering his pack from its hiding place in the rubble, Sperrin turned back to the paved road, and resumed his walk toward the lake houses.
Chapter 15
Ketya
The Mountain Road: Fourteen days after the Loss
Early the next morning I found Sperrin sitting on a wall, by an empty house, looking at the lake. The sun had just risen over the crater’s edge, and the surface of the lake glowed orange-red in reflection. A bottle sat on the wall beside Sperrin.
We had spent the previous night in an abandoned mansion, barricaded in the wine cellar against fey attackers that hadn’t materialized. I supposed the bottle had come from that cellar.
“May I come up?” I asked. Not waiting for an answer, I climbed up and sat on the other side of the bottle—close, but not too close.
We sat in silence for a while, listening to the morning birds while the sun edged upward past the crater’s edge. Sperrin lifted the bottle and took a drink, then passed it to me. I took the bottle and lifted it to my lips. Fire touched my throat, and the taste of fruit. Some sort of yellowfruit brandy.
Finally, I broke the silence. “When I woke up and the door was open, I thought you might have run away from us again.”
“I never ran away from you,” Sperrin answered, slowly. “It wasn’t you I was running away from.”
“My father?”
A longer pause. “Not really. I did let him get me angry, but that wasn’t it.”
“Then what are you running from?” I asked him.
He sat in silence until the sun rose a finger’s width higher. Then he took a drink from the bottle and carefully put it down between them again.
“Did I ever tell you about why I asked to transfer from the regular army to the palace guard? What I remember of it, anyway.”
“Only that it meant leaving your family behind. You never said why.”
“They called it the Battle of Powder Gap, but most of it happened in a thin valley. There was a wall like this one overlooking it.” Sperrin’s feet kicked the wall as he spoke. “I was in tactical command along with another overcaptain named Nemias. There was a captain-general in nominal command, but I don’t think he ever came near the battlefield. Nemias and I ran it. And we did a great job.” Sperrin took another drink, then went back to kicking the wall. “We funneled a whole Central Alliance army into that valley. We had set up a killing field with our channelers, and our own army behind to seal the Alliance troops in. We took their channelers down right away, and then they were defenseless. Once the Alliance army was in that valley, they couldn’t get out.”
He stopped, and finally I prompted him. “What happened then?”
Sperrin sighed. “Nemias and I sat on the wall, and passed around a bottle of yellowfruit brandy, just like you and I are doing. And we watched them die. Even with everything the channelers threw at them, it took a long time, longer than you would think.” He took another drink, and passed me the bottle again. It still burned, but I didn’t care.
“It sounds horrible,” I said, thinking that’s what he expected me to say.
He smiled, almost wistfully. “It was the happiest day of my life. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy. Not the day I was married, not the day my daughter was born. That day, on the wall, watching people die from my plan while I drank yellowfruit brandy and watched. That was the day I decided I needed to leave the army. I was good at it, better than I’ve ever been at anything else. But I liked the killing too much.”
There didn’t seem to be anything for me to say. I wondered if there was something more to the story than that. Something he wasn’t telling me, or didn’t remember yet. But I felt like I needed to say something. We each took another drink in silence.
“How did your wife feel about it?”
He shrugged. “A lot of that part I don’t remember yet. If we ever spoke about it, I can’t remember it. I don’t think she knew that I felt that way. I think that she was proud I was a soldier. The Empress chose us as marriage partners because I was such a good soldier, and she didn’t seem to mind that I spent so much time away from her, fighting. I don’t think she would have understood.”
“Did you try to talk to her before you left?”
“We weren’t talking much by then. But I didn’t know that I would be leaving her. I wasn’t told that until the decision was made. Actually, I was never told it exactly, the Empress just ordered it and it happened.” He thought for a minute. “If I had been given a choice...? I don’t know. I don’t think I could have left my daughter behind, not for anything. But if the kind o
f soldier I was becoming affected me as a father...” He trailed off, his thoughts elsewhere.
“Thank you for saving me,” I finally managed. “I know it cost you a lot to be there, but if you had stayed in your old life I would have died in the palace with everyone else.”
He nodded, and stared at the red reflection on the lake.
“Give me a few minutes,” he said. “I need to think a bit. I’ll be in for breakfast presently.” I expected heaviness in Sperrin’s voice, but he sounded normal.
I thought I saw the hint of a smile on his face as he sat on the wall and stared out at the blood-red lake.
Sperrin
Somehow, thoughts of the battle had turned into thoughts of my daughter. I wondered why I didn’t think about my wife the same way I thought constantly about Lynniene. Why the memories of Lynniene seemed to return so readily, while memories of times spent with my wife remained stubbornly evasive. Maybe because I had resigned myself to my wife’s death, while there was a chance Lynniene still lived?
A chance that I could still find her.
A chance that she would still remember me after these long years.
Long odds, I knew. Still, I found myself smiling at the memories of her. She would have loved exploring this lake and the woods that surrounded it, would have insisted we climb to the top of the crater so we could look down from above.
I hoped she had never lost the fearlessness she had gotten from me, and the inquisitiveness that had come from her mother. The two of us hadn’t been a good marriage, but our traits had combined nicely in Lynniene. I hoped she had lived.
Ketya
Inside the mansion, I found my father awake and preparing breakfast.
The sight stopped me short when I first saw it. Throughout the trip, my father had rarely helped with the food or other camp tasks, not so much out of his elevated social status, I thought, but as a way of passively resisting what he saw as his captivity.
Something seemed to have passed out of him during the last few days of our journey. Whether defeat or resignation or even some sort of renewed sense of strength, I couldn’t say. He looked older, his face a little hollower. But this morning he puttered around the kitchen in a way I hadn’t seen since before my mother’s death.
The mansion had tins of cooking gel that burned smokelessly. What had been intended for neatness now allowed us to have a hot breakfast without attracting attention. Two pots simmered quietly while water heated in a kettle. I smelled lamb and raisins stewing, and some sort of porridge I didn’t recognize. I saw a pantry door ajar behind him, and several sacks open on the counter in front of him with dried meat and ground meal spilling out.
I watched in silence as her father worked, unsure if he wanted help or not and reluctant to ask.
“You need to simmer the bean meal but not boil it,” he said, sounding like an expert chef. When had he been in a kitchen in my lifetime? I wondered. Other than to order Mala and her parents expelled from the palace. But some of the anger and resentment of the last weeks seemed to have faded from his voice.
I half listened as he went on with the cooking lesson. In some ways he didn’t sound that much different from Sperrin lecturing about throwing knives, although at least with Sperrin I actually got to touch the knives. I tried to relax, enjoy the smell of the cooking food, and listen to what he was saying.
When Sperrin came in, my father had just put the food on the table. “Thank you,” Sperrin said, bowing his head toward the meal.
My father didn’t respond, and barely spoke again that day as we resumed our trek toward Whitmount.
* * * *
We worked our way slowly around the lake. Sperrin left us for hours at various shelters while he scouted. If he found what he was looking for he never told me about it. Periodically he returned from scouting with the same neutral expression on his face and started us walking again.
Finally I asked him, “You’re trying to pick up the trail of whoever the wolves were chasing, right?”
Sperrin nodded. “That’s part of it,” he answered. “I would also like us to not leave any more trail than we have to for the big wolf. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of that one.” He knelt to check his knives in their boot sheaths as he spoke. “And you two may be much quieter than you were, but you’re still noisy travelers.”
He left again later that afternoon, sheltering us in an abandoned ironworks whose earliest ruins dated back to the Holy Wars. “This may be the safest place in these mountains,” he said. “I’ll try to be back before dark, but we’ll camp here either way.” Then he was gone.
Darkness came early in the cold black ruins, and Sperrin hadn’t returned. The air chilled quickly as well. We dared not build a fire, but my father had brought tins of the smokeless gel. We set one of them in a small depression where no light could show and warmed water for tea over it. We tried to warm our hands as well, but it didn’t cast off enough heat. Sitting next to each other under blankets, we tried to stay warm while awaiting the soldier’s return.
Whether because we were alone, or because enough time had passed, or because the cooking lesson had been a harbinger of something, my father was actually in a talkative mood. For the first time since the disaster he spoke more than a few words to me.
We didn’t have a conversation exactly, but he told me about a similarly decaying ironworks he had inspected many years ago, before I had been born. I enjoyed just listening: When he was himself, my father spoke mesmerizingly. And tonight he seemed almost himself again.
Later, his tone seemed a little sadder, and when his stories wound down I tried to comfort him. Although I lacked his talent for consoling words, I did my best, trying to remember the tone my mother had used in speaking to him. I told him what seemed obvious to me: No one could have foreseen what had happened. The disaster wasn’t his fault. The words seemed to help, at least a little. I saw a grim smile on his face before my father finally curled up in his bedroll and fell asleep, in a sheltered nook near where I sat.
For long hours I sat thinking about my father, and what might save him. If he came back to himself, he might save us all.
I knew he remained unhealed himself despite the encouraging signs, the breakfast, the conversation. Some instinct still kept me from mentioning the Talisman that remained concealed between shirt and tunic at the small of my back.
The moon had nearly set before Sperrin slipped into the silent ironworks.
He sat beside me and seemed about to say something, but I stopped him with a hand held up.
“You should try to be a little fairer to my father,” I said. “He’s been through a lot. Even more than we have, I think. We need to help him heal.” I’d been rehearsing the words all night.
Sperrin didn’t even seem to hear me. “Get some rest,” he said. “Tomorrow morning I’ll be taking the two of you to meet with some other survivors.” I saw something in the fading moonlight, almost a shadow behind him. Then it hit me: He’s not alone.
Chapter 16
Ketya
The Mountain Road: Fifteen days after the Loss
When I awoke, my father and I were alone in the ironworks again. But by the time I had water heated over one of my father’s tins of gel, Sperrin and his companion had returned.
The girl who shadowed Sperrin looked at least a few months younger than me, maybe a year or two younger. But her thin face showed a confidence that I would never feel. The suppleness of the girl’s leathers and fighting harness spoke to a comfort in the mountains. Rather than a heavy blade like Sperrin’s, the girl wore a short, curved chopping sword and a small axe at her hips: a scout’s weapons. Her brown hair lay braided tightly against her head.
“This is Guthre,” said Sperrin. “You almost met her once before, but some wolves intervened. Guthre, these are Channeler Ketya, and her father, recently the Lord Chancellor of Ananya.”
The girl bowed her head briefly at each of them. “Sorry for leaving so quickly,” Guthre said, her voice pitched l
ower than I expected from her boyish frame. “My orders were to get back safely, and avoid a fight. I had to report what I saw.”
“You did right,” Sperrin said. “Getting word back was the most important thing. And I had the wolves handled. My only concern was if they chased you before you got a head start, wounded as you were.”
For the first time, I noticed several tears on Guthre’s leather tunic, neatly stitched up: a long one on her right arm, and two smaller across her chest.
“My thanks for the time to escape, ’Captain.”
Sperrin nodded in response.
The chancellor looked at her appraisingly. “You are very young for a soldier,” he said.
“Old enough,” Guthre answered, holding herself very straight. “I’m older than I look.”
“I’m sure you are,” said the chancellor. He looked more closely at her face. “You are very fine-featured,” he said. “Do you have fey blood?”
I drew in a breath sharply—even for my father, that was a bit much. The girl just shrugged, though. “I guess you’d have to ask my mother.”
I expected more, but my father left it at that.
I shouldn’t have been surprised the scout was a girl like me, but I was. I knew women could be soldiers, but almost all of the ones I saw at the palace were men. A lot of what the palace guards did was crowd control, so they wanted big husky men, mostly. Plus the palace was a showplace for the empire—and everyone knew the Empress liked to have processional routes lined with soldiers who filled out their uniforms nicely. Not to speak ill of the dead, of course—and to be honest, once I got to a certain age, I admired the soldiers as much as anyone, even if I would never have said so out loud.
I guess I had some prejudices against women as soldiers. I had nothing against soldiers, and I knew that there were more women in the scouts and other field units where endurance was more important than physical strength. Given how much of the heavy lifting in battles was done by channelers like my mother, that covered a lot of soldiers. But in the world I grew up in, the smartest girls became channelers or bureaucrats. I tended to think of soldiering as something for athletic girls without other options, which I supposed described Guthre. I knew she was brave, and lucky, but a part of me automatically assumed she wasn’t smart. Not really fair to someone who had stayed alive through all that had happened, I know.
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