POV: Lucien
The second lamp burned at the table's far end, set where his hand would throw no shadow on the page. He had told them the pages were for the morning, and he had meant it. Then he counted what the morning held. Pack, saddle, the five guards already at the picket, the long road south to the records. There was no hour in it for six careful pages. So he sat down to write them the moment the tent was his.
Brennan had left him a cot, a stool, and the table. Thalion had said to ask for anything else, so he had asked for the second lamp and gotten it without a question. He asked for nothing more, and bent to the work.
He laid out the sheets and started. The paladin's words first, in the old script, then in plain letters, then what they meant. He wrote them as he had said them at the fire. Where he was sure, he wrote it plain. Where he was guessing, he said as much in the margin, so she would know which ground under her was solid and which was only his best reach across a gap.
After that the rest of it. Both directions of the bond, the keeper families, the trials her line had been put through and what each one had cost, the seventeen estates and what the bond had fed every one of them while it ran. He set it all down so she would have it in writing once he was gone, something she could go back to on a bad night and check.
He would do more than leave paper behind, though. He would go through the important parts with her himself in the morning, in whatever hour he could find before the road. He wanted to be the one to put it in her hands and answer what she asked. He found he wanted the hour with her more than the work needed it.
Then he put down the pen and took up a cloth square. Into it he folded a pinch of ginger for the sickness that came after a heal, and the compound for the fever, both of which she always needed and never asked for. He wrote the dose across the wrapping in a clean hand. Under the dose he wrote her name. He looked at it a while. Then he set the square on the camp kit he was leaving for Brennan's stores, where the morning resupply would find it and take it to the physician, so he would not have to stand there while anyone read what he had written.
He took a fresh sheet, this one his own. He wrote one line at the top.
She was never the work.
He read it once, folded it small, and put it inside his coat against the seam. The six pages went into the case, and the case lay by the cot where his hand would find it before light.
Through the canvas he heard the watch change, and it took more men and more time than a watch change should. The boots moved toward the north line and settled there in a doubled count. He listened until they went quiet, and they stayed just short of quiet. He put out the lamps and lay down in his clothes.
Sleep was slow to come. He lay in the dark and thought about the morning, and about her, and sleep was a long time after that.
POV: Seraphina
Suri slept at the foot of the cot where Thalion had set it down. Outside, the center fire had burned down to coals. Somewhere past the flap a boot shifted on the grass and went still.
Seraphina took off her coat and sat down on the cot's edge. Her arm ached under the bandage, the dull ache of a wound her own fire had sealed days ago, healing slow under the wrapping now that she kept the fire off it. The cold under her breastbone had eased since dusk. It was smaller now, still there but smaller, and she had stopped waiting for it to go for good.
She thought of the old words and what Lucien had said they meant at the fire. I accept your flame to heal me and restore me. She thought of Thalion's mouth on hers, and how he had stopped one step short of the cot, and how he had taken his hand off her back slowly, one finger at a time, before he made himself leave.
She touched the betrothal ring on her finger and left it where it was. She had moved it onto that finger herself, the same night she laid Caelan's letter away in the chest and said her goodbye to him. Neither asked anything of her now. In the morning she would have Lucien's pages, the whole history of the bond written out in his own hand, hers to keep and read alone.
He had taken his answer and gone without asking for more. Good. She had no room for more yet. Her body had been plain about what it wanted, there against him with his heartbeat under her knuckles, and she had heard it and put it aside, the same as she put aside everything she could not afford that day.
She lay back with the bandaged arm across her stomach. Outside, boots crossed the grass and a watch changed and went on too long for a quiet night. She stayed where she was and let the watch have it. Liora was ten feet off, her lamp lit, her sword across her knees. The line was the line's to hold tonight, not hers.
The watch faced outward, but she knew by now that some of what it guarded against was already inside the camp, one of their own who kept coming to her tent in the dark. It did not keep her awake, and the cold did not either.
She closed her eyes. The cold was still there, low and faint, and she let it be.
POV: Thalion
He had meant to stay awake, and he had. He lay on the cot with the map still open beside him and went back over the last hour. The kiss, and the sound she made the second time that she had let him have on purpose, and her voice level on the answer because the answer in him ran the same. He was still on it when the watch on the north line broke its rhythm.
He heard it before the runner got to him. An hour back the doubled watch had settled into a slow, even step; now the step came fast and uneven, and a man's voice went up short and low so it would not carry. He was off the cot and into his boots before the flap moved.
"The slope," the runner said. "Eight, maybe more. Out of the valley."
He was already past him. The camp's north edge stood over the dead estate, and something had come up the slope out of it. He saw them at the picket as he came, low and fast and moving wrong, hugging the ground. They had come up out of the valley itself, bred in the dead soil where the broken ley line ran into it, early, ahead of the descent, because the ground down there had stopped holding them.
Gavrel had the line up and facing them, bent at the north point and holding, two paladins to every gap, as he had drilled them. Thalion went down on one knee and pressed his hand flat to the dirt. The ground rose under the first demon and folded its legs out from under it, and a paladin put a blade through it where it dropped. He pushed up a low ridge of earth along the bend, and the next ones stumbled climbing it, and that was time enough for the line to cut them down.
One of Gavrel's men was stronger tonight than the rest. Anton, the one they had started calling the Shard, his dark armor throwing the moonlight back at odd angles. Pale light came up through the stone of his breastplate, and nothing that reached him got past. He held the worst of the bend on his own until the line closed up behind him. Thalion saw it and held onto it for the morning. Three of them carrying the gift now, a little more of it at every estate they cleared. He would take it to Liora when it was light. Tonight he only wanted the line to hold, and it was holding.
It was over fast, with so few of them. Eight, and then the dead soil was taking the last of them back down into smoke. One man hurt, a corporal, a claw opened across his thigh at the second gap, deep but clean. Corwin came up from the medical tent with his kit and knelt to him, needle and thread, by hand, slow, because slow was the only way to do it with her fire kept dark.
His eyes went to her tent before he could stop them. The center fire had dropped to a low red glow, and her tent stood dark and shut beside it. She had stayed in. He had given that order before they made camp and Corwin had backed it twice over, and he believed in it, and he hated it anyway. Her fire would have closed that man's thigh in a breath. It would also have lit the whole camp up for everything down the slope to see and brought twice as many up before morning. So the corporal bled, and Corwin sewed, and she sat in the dark with Suri against her side, and Thalion stood there with what it cost and made the same call he had made at dusk.
The fighting had died down by the time the rider came up from the lower watch. Brennan reached him first and brought him to the rim.
"The well below the manor," the rider said. He was more winded than his horse, which was saying something. "It is going. The water came up brown at dusk and stopped after. They are on the cistern now, and the cistern is low."
She had stood on this same rim, watched the smoke bend with no wind behind it, and told him the well under the manor would go first. It had gone first.
He looked down into the dark where the valley was, and he did not like the next two days from where he stood. They had wanted to give her both of them, her fire rested and her arm sound, before they took her down there. The valley had less than two days left in it. The rest would end when the night did. At first light they would go down, and somewhere in tomorrow he would find out what her fire cost her on that ground, and every way it could go looked bad to him.
He went back inside. The map lay where he had left it, the dying estate along the bottom edge, Brennan's count of the people still alive down there written small beside the well. He pulled the stool in and sat with the count, awake, while the rest of the night passed around him. The doubled watch held the north line. Smoke kept rising off the valley below. And somewhere in among his own sleeping men was the one thing his watch was pointed the wrong way to catch.