Part 1
About six miles from Podem, beyond the First Ridge, James sat just inside the mouth of a small linen tent for the wounded. A cloth windbreak sheltered it in a hollow where a willow-lined brook ran through reeds. The flap was tied back, and a covered brazier stood a pace outside it on the sheltered side of the windbreak, close enough to warm the tent without filling it with fumes. A little earlier, a white squall had swallowed Podem's hilltops in the fading light. Its roar reached them late and faint.
They had stopped in the Old North Channel briefly to warm those most affected by the cold and change the litter bearers, then kept moving through the afternoon. Serko had already sent most of the households ahead in smaller columns. This halt was for Velika's aid party, the last families and the men who had brought them out.
Marcus's pickets guarded the hollow's approaches from the bridge road and the Braids. Farther back towards Podem, Otchigin's mounted lookouts watched from the First Ridge. The fires were small and screened by the banks of the hollow.
The two parchment sheets lay across his knees, unwrapped from their linen and leather cover. Vesmir had arrived with the final detachment and insisted on handing them over. "She told me to keep these on my person. Then she told me to deliver them. So I will keep one and hand the rest over to you. If I die on the road, His Majesty's copy goes into the ground with me, while the Church's and yours shall remain safe with you. Hold them until they reach the right hands."
James found his name beside Bisera's, the hour, the witnesses, and the wavering script Vesmir's tired hand had left on the parchment. He remembered the cup passing between them and Saralta crying. Here was proof of a night that already felt like another life.
He touched the silver ring with his thumb. It fitted as it had in the chapel. Nothing in the mud or the smoke had changed that.
"Shall I wrap them?" Saralta asked.
He shook his head and did it himself, slowly, because his hands had begun to tremble. "No one loses these."
"No one will."
A rider came in along the track from the ridge and leaned from the saddle to speak to Saralta in Rosagarian. The translation service gave him the meaning whether he wanted it or not: Saralta was needed with the mounted screen before full dark.
She did not move.
"Go," James said. "You kept your promise."
"Not all of it," she said quietly. "I will come back."
She stationed five riders outside his tent for protection, rested a hand on his shoulder for a moment, and went.
Across the hollow, a child who had lost a shoe was crying while a soldier tried to coax a spare sock over his foot. James listened for several moments before recognising it as something he could help with.
He put the wrapped pages inside his coat and laid his ringed hand over them. Here, at least, was something he could do while he waited anxiously for news of Bisera's fate.
He rose to help.
Miles behind them, a veiled figure carrying a large wrapped bundle over her shoulder had slipped past every Vakerian lookout. Then she waited for the fires.
Part 2
The soldier had pulled the sock halfway on. The boy was already wriggling his foot out again.
"He kicks," the soldier said when James crouched beside them, as though reporting a fault in his equipment. He was one of Marcus's fifty, among the last men across. The river had soaked his clothes to the belt, and the afternoon march had frozen them stiff. "Every time I get it past the heel."
"It hurts when the warmth starts coming back," James said. "Let me see."
The boy was perhaps five, with a wet fringe stuck to his forehead. He hiccupped with the exhaustion of a child who had cried long enough to forget why. His mother sat on a bundle a few feet away, an infant tucked inside her shawl. James had seen that look on a hundred faces along the bank: she kept counting her children, afraid that the next time one would be missing.
James took the foot in his hands.
The foot was wet to the ankle and frighteningly cold. He turned it towards the firelight. He had learned that red and painful meant the flesh was still fighting; white and waxy was what to fear.
The toes were red and blotched.
He let out a breath he had not realised he was holding. "Good," he told the boy, whose expression showed that he did not believe him.
He gently dried the foot with the end of his scarf, without rubbing. With nowhere better to warm the boy, he opened the side of his coat away from the papers and placed the small foot against his ribs.
The cold shocked him through his shirt.
The boy stopped crying in astonishment. His mother stared. So did the soldier. James sat among the reeds with a stranger's foot inside his coat. For a few breaths, his mind stopped listening for riders. It was the nearest thing to rest he had known since the courtyard.
When the warming toes made the boy squirm, James worked the sock on and held out a hand without looking; the soldier put his knife in it. At the mother's nod, James cut a strip from her blanket hem and bound it over the sock. A man from the pack train passed with an armful of bread sacks and handed him a waxed one; James folded it around the wrapping and tied it loosely with the sack's cord.
It was ugly and met no standard he could name. It should keep the foot dry until morning.
"When we move again," he asked the mother, "who carries him?"
She looked at the infant, the bundle and the boy. She did not answer. There was no one.
The soldier shifted and looked down in resignation. He had to report back to his captain when they moved again.
Saralta's five riders had built a small, low fire a little farther up the brook. They sat around it with their reins looped over their wrists. James carried the boy over. They spoke little Vakerian, so he spoke Rosagarian, much to their surprise, and pointed to the boy, the absurdly wrapped foot, then the nearest saddle.
The oldest was Togrul, grey-bearded, with two fingers lost in a long-ago steppe winter. He studied the wrapped foot, then James. "In the Mage's country," he told the others in Rosagarian, "they shoe their foals with bread sacks." They laughed quietly into their collars, and he held out his maimed hand.
The boy would ride.
The mother looked at the old man's hand, then nodded. James placed the child in his arms. Togrul settled him on one knee beside the fire and tucked his cloak around the wrapped foot as though he had done it a hundred times. The boy, frightened for a night and a day, looked up into the grey beard and finally relaxed. He was asleep before James straightened.
The task was done, and James's hands were empty again. He looked towards the track. No one was coming.
He went back to the tent.
It was nearly full dark. Inside the tent, Velika had propped Vesmir against a pack saddle and was changing his dressing by the light of a shuttered lantern, swearing at the bandage in a low, steady, oddly comforting voice. Damp wool, sweat and the smell of old blood filled the tent.
Beyond the open flap, the aid party kept working. A woman shook out a blanket and refolded it into a smaller bundle. A muleteer knelt beside his mule's foreleg and checked a strap he had already checked. At the next fire, someone was asking anyone who would listen whether a family from the tanners' quarter had crossed—a man with a crutch and a girl of twelve. Someone else answered kindly that they did not know.
James sat down again at the tent mouth, beside the brazier.
Without looking up from Vesmir, Velika reached behind her for a heel of bread and pushed it across the groundcloth to James's knee. "Eat that," she said, "or I'll have to feed you myself." He had eaten half before he noticed.
Watching ordinary work felt crueller than silence. Everyone around him had another task: a strap to check, a blanket to fold, a name to ask after.
All day he had kept going by finding the next thing. The dressings. The litters. The wounded. The boy.
Deep down, he knew he was putting off the news he feared. As though not hearing it could somehow keep Bisera safe. He longed for word of her and dreaded what it might be. Keeping his hands busy was his only relief from the anxious need to know.
Part 3
His mind fell back on its training: when a forecast lacked information, find more. He kept searching for details to test against the possible routes by which Bisera might escape.
The northern postern became the prime theoretical escape route. But Vesmir had told him how it closed—twice, because James had asked twice. Bisera had counted Marcus's men through, followed by the last of her guards, then shut the leaves and dropped the bar herself.
Prisoners, then. Alexander took prisoners.
Alexander had returned Saralta with her horse and her dignity, and had offered Bisera terms more times than James could count. If she had been captured, James was certain there would be letters. There would be a price. James would pay almost any price now for Bisera's safe return.
But a woman who had married him for one night because she meant to die in the morning would not hand Alexander her sword that afternoon. James had heard her explain the oath until he could have recited it.
Alexander might have taken her alive. James tried to picture it, but every imagined capture ended the same way: Bisera fighting against impossible odds, defiant to her last breath, falling with her sword still in her hand.
He played each scenario countless times as he had once tested a failing investment in a spreadsheet. None gave him a reason to expect her back. But as long as there was no report of her death, he would still have room for hope.
At the next fire, a ward clerk with a wax tablet was calling names.
He worked as Serko's clerks always did: methodically and thoroughly. A name. A pause. A voice from the dark: "Here," or "With me," or a child's "That's us." Sometimes no one answered. Then the clerk marked the name and moved on. There were many names, and the night was cold.
James watched the stylus.
He had read about decisive sieges and fallen cities all his life. If he was honest, he had loved those accounts for their grandeur and historical significance. The three hundred at the pass. The last emperor of the Romans on Constantinople's walls—casting off his purple and entering the breach.
He had read many of those accounts on lonely nights when he first moved to Clairedon, seated in the quiet luxury of his private study, surrounded by dark oak-panelled walls beneath a coffered wooden ceiling, stirred by the courage, the scale, and the historical significance of those accounts.
Each time, he had turned the page after reading it, having lived through the thrill of it all in his mind.
At the back of those books were tables, their neat columns listing estimated garrison strengths, unknown civilian numbers, and casualties. He had studied the figures like a professional strategy gamer, analysing and mentally replaying each battle countless times in his mind.
The numbers had never made him feel the silence and weight behind each name.
He knew how a historian would reduce the day to a few sentences. By nightfall the city was in Gillyrian hands. He had read similar versions of that line a hundred times. The garrison's commander, having refused all terms, fell honourably in the final assault. An afternoon, a general, a wall—a date, one clause, a comma, then the consequences.
He pressed his palm flat over the papers.
If the papers survived—if they reached the right hands, then a chest, then an archive, and emerged centuries later—someone would read them. Married in the citadel on the eve of the city's fall: the general and her beloved foreign mystic. Perhaps a footnote. Perhaps a line in a better book than any James had read.
At the next fire, the clerk called another name. A woman leaned forward, listening. He repeated it for her. Nobody answered. When the stylus finally made its small mark, James realised he had pressed his hand so hard over the papers that the parchment crackled.
The record would preserve the hour and the witnesses. It would not preserve the brazier ticking in the old wine store, or the furs Velika had laid out for them, or their tearful farewell. It would not say that his wife had fallen asleep in the middle of a sentence, or that she had begged forgiveness for asking him to accept so little.
He had read those histories believing he understood the people in them, but he had always known how their stories ended. That knowledge had made their struggles seem grand, their outcomes almost inevitable. Yet on those walls, no one had known what would happen next. They were not living a legend. They were simply trying to survive another day, hoping fate would smile upon them. Only now did he understand the irony: events that appeared so momentous in hindsight could make those living through them feel utterly insignificant.
For months, he had stitched wounded men by lamplight, watched some die despite his best efforts, and kept charcoal tallies of the sick and dead. He had cared about them, deeply, but with a deliberate, almost professional distance, much as he had once dealt with his portfolio. Every loss mattered, yet he had kept a boundary between those losses and his personal feelings.
And in every future he had imagined beyond the war, Bisera had been beside him: explaining the world they had survived, arguing with Saralta, and coming home with him to a house where she would marvel at the simplest comforts he had always taken for granted.
A basin scraped against the groundcloth. Blood clouded the water by Velika's knee. Vesmir was breathing through his teeth. James turned towards the place where Bisera should have been. There was no hand reaching for his, no familiar voice to make this feel like something they would get through together.
He had meant it when he told Bisera the people here were his the moment their lives became entangled. He had never pictured having to tend to them alone, without her.
Part 4
Cold seeped through his boots. They had not dried since the Braids.
Then his mind drifted back to his old apartment in Bortinto, and the thought hurt more than the cold.
His bedroom, behind a locked front door. Outside that door, only a quiet hallway and a neighbour's recycling. No sentry. No one had ever needed to guard him while he slept. He had never gone to bed listening for a possible assault.
Food in bags. When he could not be bothered to cook, a stranger, summoned by a mere click on his phone, brought it to his door and was gone before he even finished reading the notification.
Bisera had gone quiet in a supermarket as she did before a battle. Later she told him it was more miraculous than anything he had manifested. He had smiled, thinking she was being kind.
And time. That hurt most. In Bortinto, he had been able to dwell on his unhappiness for months, sheltered from the daily struggles of survival.
He had lain awake over Natalie. At the office, he had learned to stay at his desk because conversations stopped whenever he approached the coffee machine. Everyone knew about the scam. Four of his five largest holdings had fallen into the red, and at the time he had considered the tech rout a catastrophe comparable in significance to the Sack of Rome.
He had taken stress leave, stood on the deck of a house outside the city, and felt lost.
Yet every morning, he had woken to another ordinary day.
No army had appeared over the hill before breakfast. No one had asked him to decide which street to burn. And yet, he had spent his days wondering when his investments would return to their former peaks.
His unhappiness had been real. So had the sleepless nights. What he suffered now did not erase that pain, but it had given him a different perspective.
Much of what people endured here would have appalled anyone in Bortinto. Nearly everyone seemed to carry some form of psychological trauma, yet no one thought to question it. They simply endured.
It reminded him of something Derick had once asked: was ageing a disease nobody called a disease simply because everyone suffered from it? James had laughed at the question then. Now he understood the point. When suffering became commonplace, it stopped being treated as an ill.
Normal for the period. He had used that very phrase once while describing the horrors of a famous siege to an appalled Natalie. Because those atrocities belonged to history, he had treated them as an unfortunate but ordinary part of the past. Had the same things happened in Bortinto, they would have made global news.
He had never noticed the double standard in his own thinking. He had simply assumed it was natural for people in the past to endure greater horrors and suffering.
But they were no different from him. The centuries had changed, not the human capacity to suffer. Time and customs had never made grief hurt less.
Across the hollow, the boy's mother shifted her bundle closer to Togrul's saddle. She had a blanket, two children, and whatever she could carry. James still had a house to return to, with a door he could lock against the world. Yet he could hardly bear to imagine entering it without Bisera.
The locked door, the bags of food, the peaceful mornings—he had taken them all for granted, dwelling instead on everything that wasn't going his way in his life.
Bisera had marvelled at everything. Watching children play in the snow in Clairedon, she had told him, "I do not think you know how extraordinary that is." He had thought it an exaggeration, especially from a noblewoman. Later, in a pharmacy, she had stood speechless with a bottle of grape-flavoured fever syrup in her hands.
It was not luxury that impressed her. She was no stranger to wealth. It was the fact that there could be a world where sufficiency, rather than deprivation, was the norm for the common people.
And she had begun to imagine a life in that world, hesitantly at first, then openly. She had dreamed of bringing some of its comforts and opportunities to her own people. A world where most children could survive to adulthood, where books offered answers to most questions one cared to ask, and where she could grow old beside James without spending her days killing to survive and her nights praying for forgiveness, only to wake and do it all again.
On that deck in Clairedon, he had prayed for meaningfulness. He had imagined significance on a grand scale, some great achievement to wash away his sense of failure. It seemed that something had heard him—something far greater than he had understood—and now he sat beside a frozen brook, engulfed in a titanic struggle between two empires.
He realised now that he had confused meaning with significance.
He had asked for something grand when all he really wanted was a life with genuine purpose.
A quiet, long life with her would have been meaningful enough.
Part 5
Have some faith.
The three words had returned all afternoon. On the march he had heard them as reassurance: hold on, help the next person, wait for her. He had begged Seraphina for help while Saralta held him in the saddle, and those words were all she had given him. He had taken emotional refuge in those words.
The strange part was that he did not doubt her power. Last night he had knelt on a chapel floor while gold returned to the broken mosaic and a voice containing more voices than he could count told everyone he loved to rise.
He knew, as surely as he knew the river was cold, that beings existed here that were far greater than he could understand. He had been haggling with one of them for months.
Over antiseptic. Over rice. Over interest rates. Yet he had never asked her where people went when they died.
He had not cared before. But now he did.
Each time the thought that Bisera might be dead arose, he pushed it down and took comfort in Seraphina's words instead.
But her power was not a promise. If Bisera was dead—he could barely finish the thought—he needed somewhere for her to go.
He could not bear to think of her as a name in a legend. He desperately needed a real place where Bisera could still … exist, even in death.
Then, despite himself, he asked Seraphina.
No answer came. He had not expected one. Still, he had asked, and knew he would keep asking.
In Bortinto, he had lived as though tomorrow were guaranteed. Locks and laws, hospitals and pensions, countless strangers working to keep ordinary life safe.
He had treated goodbyes as temporary. People moved away and he could call them. They flew across the world and returned for the holidays. He had left rooms and relationships quietly hoping never to see the other person again while knowing deep down that their paths would likely cross again someday.
Here, he could take none of that for granted. No apothecary could promise a child would survive until spring. James pressed his thumb against the ring. He wanted the hope behind Bisera's prayers: that losing someone did not have to mean losing them forever.
Vesmir's breath caught. James was beside him before Velika could ask, steadying the captain while she eased the cloth from the wound, then taking the basin from her shaking hands. This time James was not listening for riders.
Then he remembered the small things.
Not the walls or the chapel blazing gold. Ordinary moments.
The way she had said "I asked first" on the southeastern wall, as though that settled anything.
The way she had linked her arm through his at the recreation centre in Clairedon and announced, with great dignity and her eyes straight ahead, "He also said I was gorgeous." She had treasured the compliment like captured intelligence. James had called her beautiful a hundred times; his best friend had finally made her believe it.
The first breakfast he had given her in the cave, conjured onto two plates by the voice in his head. Starving, she had still cut her sausage into careful pieces with a fork she barely knew how to hold.
Her hands, so often cold that he had spent the winter warming them. And the warmth of her palm on his chest in the old wine store, rising and falling with his breathing while the brazier ticked.
He wondered whether, at the end, she had had time to think of anything but the wall. Whether she had thought of him at all.
Then he remembered her voice in the old wine store.
She had been lying against him beneath the furs Velika had prepared, her head resting on his chest, listening to his heartbeat. The brazier ticked softly nearby. They had spoken of ordinary things, of the life they might share if she somehow survived the war.
When she began talking about their future together, there had been such quiet happiness in her tired voice. Not the certainty of someone making plans, but the longing of someone imagining a life she desperately wanted.
I have decided that after the war, in your house, I will learn to make that breakfast myself, the one with the—the small—
And then she had simply fallen asleep.
He remembered waiting for her to finish, looking down at her face, and realising that she was already dreaming. He had smiled and drawn the furs more closely around her.
The small what? He had lain awake afterward, trying to finish the sentence until he, too, fell asleep.
He had believed they would have another morning together.
Then he remembered her words to him.
Remember me. If you can.
As though he could forget.
Part 6
Saralta returned after full dark, approaching on foot from the horse lines.
She carried a folded blanket over one arm and a steaming cup in her other hand, careful with both, as though she needed the tasks. A strip of cloth kept the bells in her hair silent. Blood still darkened her sleeve to the wrist. She had not stopped to wash it.
At the mouth of the tent, she stopped.
James had never seen Saralta hesitate at a doorway before. She had entered his basement and kitchen as though they were hers.
She stood in the brazier's half-light as though waiting for permission to come closer.
"There is no word of her," she said before he could ask. "The scouts nearer Podem saw lamps in the upper town and heard no more horns. That is all we have so far."
James nodded. Lamps in the upper town, no more horns.
He waited for Saralta to add something else. She did not.
She entered and let the flap fall shut against the cold. She set the cup on the frozen ground beside him. "It's only hot water. There was nothing else hot." She shook out the blanket, spread it over his knees and tucked it firmly around him, as briskly as she would check a rider's girth. Then she sat back on her heels, keeping a careful distance, and seemed unsure what to do with her empty hands.
He looked at the blanket. He looked at the cup.
Earlier, with the reeds turning grey around them, he had told her he understood what she had done, why, and for whom.
He looked at his silver ring. A borrowed ring in a broken city. He had promised Bisera just that on the southeastern wall, trying to make her smile.
The anger came up anyway, quiet and cold.
"You stood beside us," he said, "during the wedding."
Saralta did not look away. "Yes."
"You held the rings."
They had been hers, worn in her hair since Rosagar. In the chapel, they had lain in the curve of her palm.
"Yes," she said.
"And the whole time—" He stopped. He knew what came next; he had learned it in the courtyard while she held him in the saddle. Saying it again would change nothing. "The whole time, you knew what she meant to do in the morning."
"I knew what she had asked me to do." Her voice stayed level with effort. "First I asked her to let me save you both. One horse, if necessary. I told her I could carry you both."
Her lips moved, but nothing came.
"She said I knew why she could not."
"So you just… you just..."
"Yes." Saralta looked at her hands. "I will not tell you it was easy. I do not even know if it was right. I know it is done, and I am the one who did it."
Saralta pressed her lips together and lowered her chin. She had held herself steady through the market charge and the long ride with James fighting her. Now her breath shook.
Velika pulled the final knot of Vesmir's dressing secure. Without looking up, she said, "There is something you should know, Great Mage."
James turned his head.
"You've made your anger quite clear." Velika wiped her hands on her gown and looked at him. "Now you should hear the rest, because Saralta would never tell you herself."
Saralta made a small sound of protest. Velika ignored it.
"I was there. In the bathing room before the wedding, by the door with the towels. So there's another person who should share the blame. I knew." She raised her raw hands. "I carried the furs into that room knowing what Bisera had planned."
He stared at her. She let him.
"She begged." Velika nodded towards Saralta.
"I did not beg," Saralta said. "I argued." Her voice cracked on the last word, and she shut her mouth on whatever came after it.
"Loudly enough for me to hear," Velika said. "She told Bisera to trust her to carry you both. Bisera refused—you know why. You've heard her explain the oath more often than I have. Then Bisera knelt on the wet floor and begged a pagan princess to carry her husband out by force if necessary." Velika struggled to continue. "I have known her for years. I have seen her kneel to the Spirit and to His Majesty. Never to anyone else."
She drew a deep breath.
"You want to know why she chose Saralta? You once told Bisera that people in your world did not keep their word when it came to matters of the heart. She believed you. She knew how deeply you had been hurt, and she could not bear the thought of leaving you alone, only for someone else to break your heart again. So she chose Saralta, because she trusted her to keep her word. To cherish your love, if you ever gave it."
Saralta lowered her eyes. James's thumb moved over his wedding ring. Neither spoke.
Velika continued. "Perhaps some part of her also hoped that, with Saralta beside you, you would not leave all of us behind. This place. Her memory."
Velika's voice roughened.
"Be angry with her if you must. But know that she planned it out of love, in the only way she knew to honour both her duty to the Spirit and her love for you."
Saralta did not turn away. She knelt in the lantern light, no longer hiding her grief.
"I see," James said.
Silence settled over the tent. He had known that Saralta had tried to save them both. Still, he had turned his anger on her because she was here and Bisera was not.
He reached for Saralta's hand. It was cold, and the cuff above it was stiff with someone else's blood.
She flinched at the unexpected touch.
She held back for another breath, as though expecting him to remember what she had done and let go.
He did not let go.
"It is not your fault. You did what you could," he said.
Saralta's face crumpled. She leaned towards him until her forehead rested against his shoulder. Velika's words were still in the air. James hesitated, then kept hold of her hand and put his free arm around her as she began to weep.
Velika remained beside Vesmir, giving them what room the tent allowed. Vesmir closed his eyes.
The lowered flap hid them from view, but the lantern light threw James's and Saralta's enlarged shadows onto the linen: her head rested against his shoulder, and his arm was around her.
Farther up the brook, the five Rosagarians saw the silhouettes and pretended not to notice.
At the next fire, the ward clerk had finished his roll. The young man sat with the tablet in his lap, ink on his knuckles and his mother's patched wool blanket around his shoulders. His stylus lay forgotten in his hand. He saw the shadows and looked away, as he had been taught.
Three men from the last file were thawing their boots at his fire. They did not look away.
"Well," said the eldest, a militia spearman with a face like an old saddle. "That didn't take long."
No one asked what he meant. They had all seen the shadows.
"His betrothed not a day dead up there," the spearman said, jerking his head towards Podem, "and the pagan's already making her move. Why wouldn't she? Pagans only respect power. Who here has more than he does?"
"The Spirit says not to judge." The youngest spoke into his collar, expecting to be mocked. "Judgment's His. Not ours."
"My grandmother left milk on the doorstep for the house spirits every spring until she died," said the third man, grey-haired, with a bow across his knees. "Yours too, I'd wager, if you asked your mother. Half of us had pagan grandparents."
"Shush."
They looked at the clerk. He had not spoken since finishing the roll. He reddened to the ears but did not withdraw the rebuke.
"Don't offend the Spirit by gossiping about His servant," he said. "The archangel watches over the Great Mage. Do you think she can't hear us? I wouldn't want her hearing this. Not a rumour based on a shadow on a tent."
They fell quiet for a while. Then a sergeant came along the brook, calling the last file to the pickets. The three men rose, stamped feeling back into their feet and went.
By the time they reached the pickets, the spearman no longer mentioned shadows. At the next fire, his account had grown more elaborate. Before the column moved, it would reach men who had never been near the tent, each repeating a more elaborate version with greater confidence than the last.
Nobody in the tent heard a word of it.
Inside, Saralta had drawn back from James's shoulder, as though remembering something, and Velika had left Vesmir's side to gather her in. James stayed close, resting a hand against the back of Saralta's head as she continued to weep quietly. He had seen Saralta cry before, but never with such helpless grief.
Up the brook, the riders' fire had burned low. Something in it began to smoke, giving off a faint sweetness like bruised root beneath wet flowers, close enough to the smell of the reeds to pass unnoticed. The smoke stayed low in the still, cold air. It followed the brook from fire to fire; at the tent, it divided and slipped past on either side. Togrul sat beside the fire with the sleeping boy against him, his head bowed. The other four riders slumped against their saddles, which lay on the ground beside them. Their horses stood tethered nearby. At the aid fires, the muleteer slept against his mule's warm flank; the woman with the blanket slept with it folded in her lap. The clerk bent over his tablet, his stylus still in his fingers.
The smoke never reached Marcus's pickets or the lookouts beyond the hollow.
No one in the hollow saw who passed between the fires.
Part 7
Saralta's quiet weeping had become broken sobs. She clung to Velika while James gently stroked the back of her head.
"What is happening here?"
Saralta recognised the voice before either James or Velika saw the speaker.
She stiffened, her next sob catching in her throat. This was not grief but the sudden alertness of a rider who had heard something unexpected. She lifted her head from Velika's shoulder.
The voice came from just inside the tent. None of them had heard the flap lift. It was a woman's voice, low and unhurried, speaking Vakerian with a distinct accent. The nearby fires had fallen silent. James heard no shifting horse, no voice beyond the linen.
Saralta whispered one word in Rosagarian. James barely caught it: Mother.
He must have misheard. He had thought Saralta's mother was on the steppe.
The woman stepped into the light.
A veil covered her face below the eyes, like those some of Podem's widows had worn since autumn. She carried a long bundle wrapped in a dark widow's mantle, snow clinging to its hood and heavy folds. James saw no weapon. He watched the bundle, trying to make out what she held.
She wore no cloak at all, only a thin silk gown. Sleeveless and low across her upper chest, it ended just below her knees. It was quite opaque, yet it fitted her waist and followed the curves of her hips so closely that it did little to disguise the shape beneath. Nothing in its cut suggested it was meant for a crowded aid tent.
Heat rushed up James's neck and burned in his ears. It took a moment for it to recede.
Vesmir opened his eyes and lifted his head. Colour rose even in his exhausted face; he promptly looked away in confusion.
Velika stared over Saralta's shoulder. "What in the Spirit's name—" She broke off, looking from the silk to the snow on the mantle. Her arm was still around Saralta.
The woman's gaze passed over Saralta's tear-wet face and Velika's arm around her, then moved to James's drawn face and his hand at the back of Saralta's head. It rested a little longer on his silver ring.
Her eyes were dark with long eyelashes and steady above the veil. Through his shock, James recognised their shape: a moment ago, he had seen eyes just like them wet with tears in Saralta's face.
Saralta's face went scarlet. She looked from her mother's eyes to the silk. "Mother, why are you wearing that here?"
She looked back at Saralta. "It was the only spare dress I had." Then she added in a smaller voice, "It folds small."
Snow melted on her bare wrist, but she showed no sign of feeling the cold. "I used my mantle to wrap and conceal her." She glanced at the bundle. "Forgive the interruption, but she may need urgent assistance. Make room."
She did not raise her voice. She did not need to. Everyone who could move obeyed.
Saralta rose, and Velika released her as James withdrew his hand from her hair. Saralta pulled the blanket from his knees, spread it on the frozen ground beside him, and knocked the cup aside. She knelt at the blanket's edge, hands outstretched. They trembled, but she seemed not to notice.
Velika reached for the open lantern beside Vesmir and brought it closer.
The stranger knelt and lowered the bundle.
She eased it down with one arm beneath each end, supporting the hooded end until it rested on the blanket. She had carried that weight for miles through reeds and ice and was not even breathing hard.
James found himself on his knees without remembering moving. Velika knelt beside him, holding the lantern in her raw hand.
The woman folded back the hood and opened the mantle across the bundle's shoulders. Blonde hair spilled into the lantern light. Beneath it lay a woman's still figure in red-brown armour.
Bisera's armour.
He had taken it off her in a cave in September, his hands shaking. Before dawn today, he had watched her put it on with the ease of long habit: arming coat, mail and red-brown plates covering the woman he had held through the previous night. Her silver ring had disappeared beneath the gauntlet last.
Clean bindings showed at the edge of one vambrace. "I dressed the wounds beneath the armour," the woman said. "Then fastened it again before wrapping her."
Bisera's face was pale and slack in the lantern light, her lips slightly parted. She did not move.
James's heart lurched, then began to race. He reached towards her, scarcely daring to hope.
Please be alive.