POV: Seraphina
The morning was grey, and no one in the camp had slept well. She heard it before she left the tent. The voices outside were low and quick, wrong for a rest day. When she came out, the smoke over the north rim was thicker than the night before. Something had come up out of the valley in the dark, and the soldiers had fought it without her.
She had heard the end of it from inside the tent, lying with her hand on Suri while other people did the fighting that should have been hers. Steel and shouting at the north rim, a man who cried out once and then went quiet, all of it coming to her through the canvas while she held still. She knew why she had to stay back. It did not make the lying there any easier.
Corwin reached her first. He came across the camp with his sleeves still pushed up, set two fingers to the inside of her wrist, and counted. He did that every morning, and he never asked first.
"You got a quiet night," he said. "The north line had a hard one."
"How many?"
"Only one man hurt badly enough to matter. A corporal caught a claw across the leg. He will keep it, and the limp should be gone within the week." He let go of her wrist. "You did the hard thing, staying down. I know what it costs you to hear that and hold still."
"It costs me less than the other way would cost the rest of you." The other way was her fire, and her fire lit the whole camp up for everything down the slope to see. Staying back kept the demons off them. It also meant lying in the dark while her own people bled for a fight that was hers, and that was the part she did not say. Corwin let it pass. He let most of what she said pass.
Before he moved off she asked the corporal's name, and his company, and whether the leg would carry him down the slope tomorrow. Corwin gave her all three. She would go to the man later, once the camp had quieted. The ones who bled in her place got a name and a face from her, at the least. It was a small thing, and she did it every time.
Then Thalion crossed the camp toward her, and she forgot the corporal.
The night before he had been just a man. This morning he had his armor back on and his rank with it, the crown prince again, walking the length of his own camp with everyone awake and watching him.
He stopped a full step away from her, the polite distance a commander kept from the Flamebearer in front of his men. His eyes went to her bandaged arm first, as they had every morning since she took the wound.
"How is the arm?" he said.
"Healing clean. Corwin said so this morning."
"And did you sleep?"
"I slept through most of it." She had not, and he knew it. They were the right words for the camp to hear, and they both said them cleanly. They could not say the rest with the camp right there: that they had kissed the night before, and that both of them wanted to again.
She had pushed the kiss out of her mind in the night. Standing this close to him now, it came back, and so did the hum. It started in her chest the moment he stopped in front of her, low and steady. It was his earth reaching for her soulfire, the way it did whenever he came near. Neither of them asked it to. She looked at his mouth before she could stop herself and wanted to do it again, right there. A step apart was the correct distance in front of the camp. It was nowhere near close enough, and the hum paid no attention to how far apart they stood. She held still because people were watching. So did he, his hands easy at his sides. She could feel the hum had hold of him as well, and that holding still cost him what it cost her.
"We go down tomorrow," he said. "The ground down there is failing faster than the rest of it."
"I heard the rider come in the night. The valley well has gone bad already. I told you that one would go first."
"You did." For a second his face changed and she saw the man under the commander. Then it was gone. "Rest today. I need your fire whole tomorrow." He said it as an order, and it was one. It was also him wanting her safe, and she heard both.
"You will have it," she said.
He gave her the same polite nod he would give any officer and stepped back. He stayed close, though. There was a camp to break tomorrow and riders to send today. He spent the morning at the edge of the command ground with Brennan, in sight of the picket, running things. She let her breath out slow. The hum faded as he moved off, the way it always did once he put space between them. The scars on her chest stayed warm a little longer, then cooled.
Lucien was at the picket. His five guards were already mounted. He stood beside his own horse, and he had been watching for her. She caught him at it, and saw him cover that he had been waiting. When she came up he put the case into her hands. He held them there a moment, his hands over hers on the worn leather, before he made himself let go.
"It is all in here," he said. "The words, the history, every estate. Read it when you have the quiet for it. Where I was sure, I wrote it plain. Where I was not, the margin says so."
"And the margins are the honest part," she said.
He stopped. "I said that at the fire."
"You did. I was listening." She turned the case over and looked at him. "Tell me the part you would rather not put on a page."
He went still, caught out. Then he stepped in closer, close enough that no one else could hear. "The valley you go down into tomorrow is one of the estates the bond used to feed. A hundred years ago the keepers who ran the bond were killed off, and it stopped feeding this ground. After that your mother's line fed it themselves, with their own fire, to keep it from dying. Your mother was the last of them. But their fire could only keep the ground alive. It could not make the bond work again. Soulfire can. Yours will be the first it has ever had. And the records of this valley stop a hundred years ago as well, all at once. Records that old do not usually stop that clean."
"You think someone cut it out."
"I know someone did." He said it slowly. "Wards do not all fail in the same year by chance. Someone made them fail, then wiped the records after. I wanted you to know that ground was drained on purpose before you stood on it."
"And that is what you are riding south to find."
"The hand behind it, if the records still hold a trace of who it was."
"Then I am glad you told me, and not the page." She meant it. For a moment, being thanked seemed to throw him.
What he had given her sat heavier than the pages did. The ground she would stand on tomorrow had been bled dry on purpose, a hundred years before she was born, and the men who did it had been careful enough to cut their own names out of the record after. She would carry that down the slope with her, on top of everything else.
He took the case back and turned it the right way before he closed her grip around it, flat and shut. "Hold it like this. Let it swing open and the old stitching goes inside a week." The advice was true. It was also an excuse, and they both knew it. He wanted to touch her, and he was not going to say so.
He cleared his throat. "The water down there will be foul. Boil what you drink. All of you. Even out of the cistern."
"I will."
"And if you find a mark you do not know, copy it exact and send it on after me. A cut in the stone, a scratch under a sill, anything the place kept that I missed. Trust the copy. By morning you will remember it wrong. I will know it, whatever it is." It was an archivist's request, to be told what stood on ground he could not reach himself. It was also a way to keep her writing to him while he was gone.
"I will send it exact," she said.
He nodded. He should have mounted. His horse stamped and pulled at the bit. He checked a strap that needed no checking, looked at the road south, and stayed where he was.
"Lucien." She waited until he looked at her. "Go. Three days is three days whether you start now or at noon."
"It is." But he took her free hand in both of his first and held it, plain and earnest. "Keep your fire rested. That ground will take everything you give it and reach for more. Do not let it have more than you can spare. I will send word when I reach the records."
Across the camp, Thalion looked up from Brennan and saw Lucien holding her hand. He went still. For a moment his face gave away how much he hated it. Then he put it away.
He turned back to Brennan and made himself stay where he was. She could see what it cost him not to cross the camp and pull her hand out of Lucien's. She drew it back herself instead, slow, in her own time. He had wanted to come and do it for her, and he let her do it instead, and she was glad she had seen it.
Lucien missed all of it. He got up on the horse, awkward as ever, a man who belonged at a desk. Even up there he looked back at her once before he took the road south with his five around him.
She stood holding the case as he had shown her. For a man with three hard days in front of him, the archivist had been a long time leaving.
She watched the dust the horses lifted until the road took them south. Three days of dead ground lay that way, and whatever the records still held at the end of it. Tomorrow she went the other way, down into the valley that was already dying, with the case in her hands and not much rest behind her.