Chapter 102. Hand in Hand Across Two Horses, And Carrying It All With Us

Chapter 102: 102. Hand in Hand Across Two Horses, And Carrying It All With Us

I got snow in my boot.

I swore loudly and continued to curse with a long, creative string of expletives that I had been saving up for a week, causing a few of the Nightclaw riders ahead of me to shake with silent laughter.

I let myself notice that. It felt strange and good to be the kind of person who said ridiculous things out loud again.

It wasn’t that the grief had gone away... It hadn’t.

Every time I looked up at the sky, there was a pale white disc hanging low in the west, even in the daytime, small and calm and impossibly far away.

I felt a small, hard ache in my chest every time I saw it. But the ache had a direction now.

It wasn’t a hole I was falling into. It’s more like... it was a road I was walking.

’I’m coming,’ I thought. ’Just hold on.’

I caught up with Sylvara around noon.

She was riding alone at the rear of the column, on a pale gray mare, with her head bowed and her hands loose on the reins.

Her staff was strapped across her saddle. She’d found a new hat somewhere, a plain gray traveler’s cap that looked absurd with her antlers, and she had pulled it down low over her eyes.

She looked like someone trying to disappear.

I let the mare drift back until we were side by side. And neither of us said anything for a while.

As usual... I regret doing things that I haven’t thought of in the seconds’ time. The awkward tension attacked us both ways.

The hooves thudded on the frozen road. And a crow cawed in a bare tree.

But I have to prove that I am a man.

"I... owe you an apology," I said. "Sylvara."

She turned her head. Her purple eyes were wide, startled, and a little afraid.

"Look... I really am a fool, and that proves me being angry at the wrong person." I kept my eyes on the road because it was easier to say it like that.

"I screamed at you for something that clearly wasn’t your fault... and I think I knew that while I was doing it..."

"You probably lost her too... someone’s important to you," I exhaled. "You’ve been carrying her for a thousand years... And I stood in front of everyone and yelled at you for it... like an asshole who doesn’t have the right to receive any forgiveness from you."

"Leon..."

"Well, uh... I’m not saying it was okay that you didn’t tell us." I swallowed. "It wasn’t... It really, really wasn’t."

"But I was wrong to say you didn’t care... and I could see how much you cared." I sighed in regret. "A human rage is easy to take over the mind that I say tons of stupid things to, and that’s why..."

"I’m sorry... I promise that I didn’t mean any of those words..."

For a long time, she said nothing. But I could hear her breathing.

"I did... not know that it would cost Bonette," she said at last, very quietly. "That is the part... I also cannot forgive myself."

"I had read the inscriptions... I had guessed."

"But I did not think it would come so soon... or like this."

"I thought there would be more time." Her voice shook. "And that’s why... I will carry that."

"Then we’ll carry it together," I said.

She turned to look at me.

I didn’t say anything else. I took my right hand off the reins and held it out across the gap between our horses, palm up, open.

It was a silly gesture... I’d made it a hundred times. But it was the only thing I knew how to say that was true.

She stared at it for a long time.

Then, slowly... she took off her glove, just so that she could lay her hand in mine.

Her fingers were cool and a little rough from years of holding a staff. They closed around my palm, lightly, and I felt her shiver.

She didn’t say anything, and neither did I.

We rode like that for a long while, hand in hand across two horses, through the quiet, snowy hills.

...

A few yards ahead, Velora was riding with her back very straight and her face turned carefully to the road. She hadn’t looked back once.

But I noticed that her horse had slowed, just slightly, until she was a good three lengths farther away than before, giving us room.

Further up the column, Magnara cleared her throat very loudly and let her mount drift ahead.

I understood that I’d been given a gift, and I didn’t say anything about it.

It was Sylvara who broke the silence, a little while later, in a voice that was almost normal.

"Velora," she called, without raising her head. "I am quite certain that the name Moonveil meant something to you, in the Covenant records."

Velora did not turn. "I assumed it was a coincidence."

"Did you?"

"I did not wish to appear foolish." Her voice was cool and dry. "A great many people are named Moonveil, I told myself."

"It is a common name for a woman with antlers."

"It is not."

"I am aware of that now."

I fell off my horse.

I didn’t fall far. I just slid sideways, out of the saddle, laughing so hard that I lost my seat, and landed in a snowbank with my boots in the air.

The mare stopped. She looked down at me with an expression of deep, weary vindication.

Sylvara put both hands over her mouth, and her shoulders shook, and a Nightclaw rider behind us dropped her reins in the snow.

I lay there on my back, looking up at the gray sky, and I couldn’t stop. It was the first real, helpless belly laugh I’d had in weeks, and it hurt, and it felt wonderful.

"I’m fine!" I wheezed. "I’m fine, I’m fine; it’s the snow, it’s very comfortable!"

Somebody pulled me to my feet. It was Magnara.

She held me up by the scruff of my cloak like a kitten, with an expression of profound disgust, and set me back on the mare.

"If you are going to die," she said, "do it in the proper place."

"You’re so sweet."

"I am not."

I was fairly sure that her lips twitched.

Elsbeth rode alone, a hundred yards behind everyone else, for the whole of the second day.

I’d given her space. I really had.

I’d kept my distance from the lake since the lake, because she’d asked me to, and because I knew that some kinds of grief don’t want to be fixed.

It looked like a stone sitting in the middle of a road. You can’t move it, but you can only walk around it and let it know that you’re there.

But I’d also been watching her. I’d watched her hold her back straight and her chin up, in the face of a loss that would have flattened me.

I’d watched her ride, hour after hour, with her gaze fixed on the road and her gloved hands steady on the reins.

She hadn’t eaten much. And she hadn’t spoken to anyone, except Bryn, a few days before, and that had been brief.

Late in the afternoon, I let my horse fall back.

I did it slowly, a little at a time, so it wouldn’t feel like I was hunting her.

First I was fifty yards behind the main column.

Then twenty.

And then I was riding beside the great dark horse with the white blaze on its nose, and the woman on its back didn’t turn her head.

I said nothing. I didn’t tell a joke, ask how she was doing, or offer her a drink of water.

I just rode beside her, close enough that she could feel me there, and looked at the same stretch of road.

An hour passed. Then another.

The sun slid lower in the sky. The shadows of the pines stretched across the snow in long blue bars.

Elsbeth didn’t tell me to go away.

I’m not sure how long we rode like that. Probably long enough for my back to ache and for the mare to lose interest in biting me.

And long enough for the light to turn gold.

At some point, I realized that she had stopped looking straight ahead and was gazing at the horizon and that her face... in profile, had begun to soften.

"She taught me to hold a sword," Elsbeth said.

Her voice was low and rough, as if she hadn’t used it in a long time. And she didn’t turn her head.

"She taught me how to stand... How to fall... How to rise again when everyone expected me to stay down." She took a breath.

"She never taught me how to be held."