Chapter 1456: Three Days South

Commander Vanessa’s hut still had the Name of Fire drawn in black sand around it, and the sandbags were still stacked where Northern had knocked her flat on top of them. She was sitting on the same sandbag now, with her elbows on her knees and the pot pipe smouldering between her fingers, and she did not get up when he came through the barricade.

He held up the folded list.

"Baletta and Han."

"I know."

"You drew them."

"Command drew them. I’m Command, so yes." She took a long pull on the pipe and let the black smoke out through her nose. "Sit down, kid. You’re making my neck hurt."

Northern did not sit down.

Vanessa studied him for a long time. Up close, in the grey morning light, she seemed older than she had on the rubble slope. The burn marks from his lightning had healed. The ones from thirteen years of this had not.

"You want me to tell you it’s unfair," she said. "It’s unfair. You want me to tell you the Eleventh is the only squad on this Keep that came back whole and that I’d be a fool to break it. I’d be a fool to break it. And you want me to tell you I’ll refuse the order." She shook her head slowly. "I can’t refuse the order. If I refuse, they don’t send us nothing. They send us a new Commander."

"I didn’t come to ask you to refuse it."

The pipe stopped halfway to her mouth.

"Then what?"

Northern unfolded the list and held it out to her.

"The order says two hundred soldiers. It doesn’t say which two hundred, and it doesn’t say they have to be able to hold a spear when they get there." He tapped the two names with one finger. "Han cracked two ribs on the stair. Baletta burned her arm. Put them down as unfit. Send two of the Gate Wardens’ glory-hunters instead. They’ll love the east."

Vanessa stared at him.

Then she laughed, one short bark that turned into a cough.

"Stars, you’re a nasty piece of work, aren’t you."

"I’m practical."

"That’s what nasty pieces of work always say." She took the list out of his hand and looked it over, and then she pulled a stub of charcoal from inside her coat and drew two thick black lines through the names. "The Wardens will scream."

"Let them."

She looked up at him once more. For a moment, the hard set of her shoulders gave, as though someone had finally taken hold of the other end of a load she had been carrying alone.

"Get out of my yard, kid."

The two hundred marched south on the last day of the month.

The whole Keep turned out to watch them go. They went down the southern road in a long grey column with their packs on their backs and their new spears on their shoulders. These were the good spears from the Keep’s own armoury, while the split ones stayed behind in their crates. Their boots cracked the frozen ruts in a long, uneven rhythm. Nobody cheered. The ones who were leaving did not look back, and the ones who were staying watched them until the road bent round the hill and there was nothing left to watch but the churned mud.

Two days later, the birds started screaming.

Tema came down off the western rampart at a run with her face white and caught Northern by the sleeve in the middle of the yard.

"Captain. Hollin’s Ford. The crows by the river say there’s a hunting party, thirty, maybe more, and they’re going for the mill." She was breathing so hard she could barely get the words out. "There are people in the mill."

Hollin’s Ford was a farming hamlet on the river, half a day’s march east of the Keep. Forty or fifty families lived there, and they had been told a dozen times to move south and had never gone. The hamlet was also inside the Fifth Squad’s patrol ground.

The Fifth Squad had nine soldiers left in it. The other eleven were two days down the southern road.

Northern was already moving.

"Iren. Run to the Fifth and tell them to hold for us. Everyone else, with me."

They reached Hollin’s Ford a little after noon.

The mill stood on the far bank of the river, a squat stone building with a waterwheel turning slowly in the current and ice crusted white along its paddles. The bridge that led to it was a narrow thing of old timber, just wide enough for a cart. The villagers were inside the mill. Northern could hear them before he could see them, children crying and someone praying loudly behind the barred door.

They were alive. Every one of them.

The Fifth Squad was on the bridge.

They had held it. Nine Drifters and Nomads, half of them not much older than Jalsket, had stood on a bridge wide enough for a cart against more than thirty Forest Hunters. They had held it long enough for Iren to find them and long enough for the Eleventh to arrive. The planks were black with blood, and it had run down between the boards and frozen in dark threads along the underside. Dusk-blue bodies lay tangled on the near bank, seven of them, and the rest of the hunting party had already melted back into the trees at the first sight of Northern’s lightning.

The Fifth Squad lay on the bridge where they had stood.

All nine of them.

Northern stopped at the foot of the bridge, and for a moment he did not go any further. Behind him, the Eleventh had gone completely silent. Baletta had one hand pressed flat over her mouth. Jalsket’s hair had gone white, and he did not seem to know it.

’Eleven more spears on this bridge, and I’d be looking at a different picture.’

It was Han who finally said it. He said it very quietly, still breathing hard from the march.

"If they’d had their other eleven."

Nobody answered him.

They carried the Fifth Squad back to the Keep on doors taken off the mill. The villagers of Hollin’s Ford walked beside them the whole way, and nobody told them to go home.

They burned the dead that night on the second ground.

The whole Keep came again, just as it had come to watch the two hundred march south, and it stood around the pyre in the snow. Vanessa said the names. She said all nine of them without a piece of paper. Then she stood with her back to everyone and watched the fire until it had eaten the mill doors down to their iron hinges. Northern stood with his squad at the edge of the light.

Iren was standing beside him. The noble had not said a word since the bridge.

"My cousin rode for the Central Plains in the spring," he said at last, to nobody in particular. "Lord Pyrrhus. With the whole of the Blue Orchid’s household guard and two regiments of the Imperial line. They were going to take some little kingdom nobody here has ever heard of."

Northern did not look at him.

"And?"

"And they’re gone. All of them. My father got the letter a month ago." Iren’s jaw tightened. "They had the men for that. Two regiments, for a kingdom nobody’s heard of. And we couldn’t get eleven for a bridge."

’...That might have been me.’

Northern kept his eyes on the fire, and kept his face very still.

"The Empire has grander wars," Baletta said softly, on his other side. They were Northern’s own words, from the first morning, but she did not say them like a quotation. She said them like a thing she had always known and only now had a name for.

Across the pyre, a soldier from the Second Squad was looking at them. Then another one. Then a woman from the grey-bearded captain’s old squad walked all the way around the fire in the snow and stopped in front of Northern. She had lost her captain on the rubble slope and had not spoken to anyone since.

"Rian, is it?"

"It is."

"The Eleventh came back whole from the wall. And you got to the Ford." She looked at the fire, then back at him. "What do we do?"

It was not a question about the Hunters. Everyone standing close enough to hear it knew that.

Northern looked at her for a moment. Then he looked past her at the soldiers of the North Guards gathered around the pyre in their black uniforms. He looked at the villagers of Hollin’s Ford standing among them with snow settling on their shoulders, and at Vanessa’s broad back in the firelight.

"We keep each other alive," he said. "Because nobody else is going to."

The woman nodded slowly. Then she walked back around the fire to where her squad was standing, and said something to them that Northern could not hear.

Later, when the fire had burned down to a red bed of embers and the crowd had gone, Vanessa found him on the western rampart. She leaned on the stone beside him and lit her pipe, and for a while neither of them said anything.

"Careful, kid," she said at last. "Talk like that travels south."

"Let it."

She blew smoke out over the dark forest, and did not tell him he was wrong.

After Hollin’s Ford, the forest went quiet.

There were no sightings that week, or the next. The hunting parties that had been probing the northern villages all autumn simply stopped coming. The patrols went out and came back with clean spears and nothing to report, and the soldiers of the North Guards began, cautiously, to sleep through the night.

Only Tema did not like it.

She stood on the western rampart every evening at dusk, listening. Every evening she came down a little later and a little quieter than the night before.

"The birds say there’s nothing moving," she told Northern on the twentieth night. "Nothing at all. Not even a patrol."

"Isn’t that good?"

She frowned out at the dark line of the trees.

"Captain, there’s never nothing."