Part I
The attacks resumed today. This first was only a test of our guard: a score of twistedmen and five of the trance-birds. We drove them off handily enough. The spell that Hanyi and your Gerant came up with at Oakford shields our minds well, and our mages have been diligent about applying the sigils. Injuries were light, casualties nil, and the new fortifications hold well.
Still, the air here has changed. None, not the Order nor the soldiers from Criwath nor even the reinforcements from Heliodar, fresh as they are, can mistake the meaning of this attack or be in any doubt of what will follow.
For eight months, we’ve discussed what deviltry Thyran might be up to out in the forest, where we have no strength to reach. We have come to no conclusions.
I suspect we’re about to find out.
—In the Order’s Service,
Vivian Bathari
The Traitor that humans call Gizath murdered his sister’s lover, they say, because he thought it a disgrace that a goddess should lie with a mortal. Over the centuries, his hatred for mortal life has expanded far beyond that.
One hundred years ago, Gizath’s servant Thyran slew his wife and her lover out of jealous rage, and then his own servants to seal a pact with the Traitor God. Jealousy swiftly became spite: anger that the world did not give him what he believed was his by birth and blood.
In the north, when he called those of like mind to him and merged them with demons, perhaps they too wished to order the world by their standards. Perhaps even then Thyran had the same ambitions.
After a hundred years and two losses, I suspect his desires may have shifted.
He may strive still for conquest, if such a mild word can describe a world ruled by him and his twistedmen.
If he is thwarted in that, I think he will turn his sights to annihilation. And he will do so quickly.
—Lycellias, Knight of Tinival, “Musings in a Time of War”
Chapter 1
The dream left Olvir cold in the darkness. Sweat coated his limbs, cooling rapidly in the spring night. He tasted blood in his mouth: he’d bitten his lip again.
None of it was new, but it was worse this time. His heart was thudding between his ribs and his chin. Images danced evilly in front of his open eyes. Not even the sound of three other knights snoring could make the memories seem as unreal as Olvir knew they were.
Dreams, he told himself, as Edda had told him when he was far younger. Nightmares had been different then: shapes outside the window, ghouls behind the house, the sort of stories youth repeated and parents could generally dispel with warm milk and a few words.
Olvir doubted that soothing words would’ve helped completely. He’d long since grown to prefer whiskey to warm milk, too, and a liquor-mazed head was the last thing he’d need the next day, particularly considering the quality of whiskey that went around the front lines.
It was a myth that Tinival’s knights never surrendered. The training was very clear about recognizing lost causes. Sleep, at that moment, was among them.
He disentangled himself from his sweat-dampened bedroll as quickly and quietly as he could manage. None of his companions stirred. It was funny: their alertness was legendary, but any experienced warrior grew accustomed to certain sounds. In camp, these included both snoring that could shake the earth and the noises of a tentmate trying to make a stealthy exit in the middle of the night.
Tinival hadn’t given them heroic bladders, after all.
Putting on armor would be more likely to rouse his tentmates, so Olvir simply tugged on his breeches, then picked up his boots and tunic in one hand. He carried the belt with his sword on it in the other. The camp was relatively peaceful, no attack expected, but there was no point tempting fate.
Edda had taught him that long before he’d entered the Silver Wind’s order as a page.
He stumbled outside into a chilly gray predawn. The remains of fires made the camp a little brighter but, at that hour, mostly just added smoke to the air. A flash of Olvir’s dreams sprang from fading memory to vivid detail with the odor. He sat down hard on a rock.
Vomiting would only waste rations, and the army had a strictly limited number of those. Screaming would only wake soldiers who had too little rest as it was. Olvir scrubbed his hands hard across his face, wishing that he could do the same to his mind, trying not to look too long at his hands themselves. They had been the worst part, and that had been a new element of the dream.
If your thoughts are sour, turn to deeds. It was another of Edda’s sayings. And Olvir was already sitting down. Getting dressed was the obvious next step.
He pulled on his boots, listening to the sounds near him. The camp was mostly still abed, but not entirely. Out of the three thousand or so souls who defended that part of Criwath’s border, fifty-odd were assigned to patrol the fortifications. Olvir could glance up and see two of them walking behind the wooden palisades, peering through cracks too small for arrows as they tried to spot any activity beyond. He could certainly hear their footsteps, regular drumbeats behind the irregular noise of snoring sleepers and shifting horses. Their presence was reassuring, but he’d have been a fool as well as an oaf to distract them.
A few rows of tents behind the defenders, the wounded slept restlessly. The Mourners, noncombatant servants of the Dark Lady whose domain included healing, kept their own vigil among them, watching for sudden declines. Letar’s priests were good company as a rule, but Olvir didn’t want to disturb the Mourners on their duty either.
There was always practice. The few sets of pells were barely holding together after rounds of recruits had trained with them, so by common agreement, nobody used them except those who truly did need help hitting their targets. Fighting the air, however, required only space. Olvir stood up and turned to retrieve his tunic.
A woman stood a few feet away from him.
That itself wouldn’t have been a surprise or a problem—a relief, though he wouldn’t have wished it, to find another who couldn’t sleep—but Olvir hadn’t heard her approach. Coming on top of his dream, it was more than he could reason through calmly. Before his brain caught up with his body, he’d hissed in a wary breath and reached for his sword.
“It’s a shade early for a duel,” she said.
As usual, Olvir recognized her voice before her face. He knew the tone in particular: soothing amusement. The words beneath the words were we can laugh about this, we’re laughing already, we wouldn’t be joking if it was any great matter.
He’d used that manner of speaking before, when the minutes before battle bit into the throat like wire, but he’d heard it most often from the woman in front of him: Vivian Bathari, commander of the Sentinels who held the border.
As was usual with the Sentinels, her clothes—dark, plain wool beneath a mail shirt—gave no indication of her rank. The gold-worked hilt of a greatsword over her shoulder, and the eye-sized sapphire set in it, made a striking contrast to that austerity.
The sword marked Vivian as a Sentinel. Its stone housed Ulamir, a spirit hundreds of years old.
Vivian’s face showed the other signs that she belonged to the Order of the Dawn: a half-circle of bloodred tears beneath each gray eye, glowing against her light-brown skin. The gods had reforged her, like they did all of her order, turning them into weapons. None who’d been through that process ever looked fully human again.
None, in truth, were.
Many feared the Sentinels, even as they relied on them, believing them too close to the monsters they killed. Olvir hadn’t been nervous around the Order’s members in more than a decade. He’d known Vivian for nearly half that time and depended too much on her to feel the slightest alarm once he recognized her.
Embarrassment was a different story.
* * *
How easily he startles, said Ulamir.
“Everyone’s jumpy right now,” Vivian replied, “and no wonder.”
She spoke in the murmur that she’d spent eighteen years using with her soulsword. Most people couldn’t hear it unless they were trying to listen.
Olvir nodded, then contrived to appear even more awkward than he had before. He carried it well, as always. Being tall and square-chinned with big hazel eyes helped. “Not talking to me, were you? Though you’re right. Or Ulamir is.”
“I forget I have to be careful around the knights,” she said, with unspoken acceptance of his equally unspoken apology. “I’m still too used to people with normal hearing.”
Should your memory slip around any of them, he’s the safest, Ulamir put in. What could you say to him that you didn’t say in the Myrian lands, when that undead sank its teeth into your leg?
“If you have any dark secrets left where I’m concerned,” Olvir echoed, “you didn’t give them away just then.”
“Oh, good. I’m sorry for sneaking up on you, by the way. And for keeping you from getting dressed.”
She wasn’t entirely sorry for the latter. Vivian had seen Olvir with his shirt off on a few occasions. The sight had always been pleasant, particularly when he wasn’t bleeding. Tinival’s knights trained well, and Olvir’s appearance in particular suggested that he’d spent his mornings lifting small cows over his head.
Still, it wasn’t polite to say she’d be glad to keep him shirtless. The morning was a little cold too.
Vivian started to turn away.
“You weren’t seeking help when you came across me, were you?” Olvir asked, making her turn. The tunic slid down over his broad back and narrow waist, concealing his head for a moment before his close-cut chestnut hair emerged. “If you’d be able to use an extra hand with any task, I’m more than willing.”
“No, but I do thank you for offering. I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I hoped a tour of the camp would help.”
“You too? Not that it’s so unusual, given the circumstances.”
“I’m surprised there’s not a crowd of us. Ample hard work or rotgut must be effective for the others.”
Olvir turned toward her. His belt was fastened, and his sword on it—“girt to his side,” as the old stories had said. He mostly fit the picture of an upstanding knight, but far more worried than they generally appeared in tapestries. “Forgive the question, but you haven’t been having dreams, have you?”
“I have,” Vivian answered him slowly, “but only what you’d expect. And you sound like you mean another sort.”
“I’m afraid I’m not sure what I mean. I’ve never been a prophet, so I doubt it’s that, and yet they repeat more often than any dream I’ve ever had.”
There was a memory connected with his name, one more tactically significant and less personal than their missions together or the taverns afterward. It started rising in Vivian’s mind as Olvir mentioned dreams: an official document, one of a few hundred she’d read since the war started. She’d been startled to read the mention of Olvir, but the report, whatever it was, hadn’t seemed immediately relevant. It had gotten lost in a thousand tasks.
“I don’t want to pry,” Vivian said. “Or, rather,” she added, because she was talking to a servant of Tinival, whose dominions included truth, “I do, but only as far as it might be tactically significant. Tell me more?”
Olvir squared his shoulders, a man confronting an unpleasant duty. “I’m in different places,” he said. “It was the village where I grew up in this dream, but in the last one, I was at the chapter house where I trained. It’s always a place that I’m fond of. And it’s always burning. The smell of smoke is very vivid. The screams are too.”
“I haven’t studied the mind,” said Vivian, “but that doesn’t strike me as so out of the ordinary to dream about, given all of this.” She gestured, indicating the campfires but also the palisades and the army and by extension the war. “It sounds like you put it a few degrees away rather than using memory straight out, but…minds do that, probably.”
“So I thought. But”—he swallowed—“tonight I saw where… I saw that I was lighting the fires. My own hands were piling the wood, spilling the oil.” Olvir held them up and out in unnecessary illustration, or perhaps to try to get them as far from himself as he could. “I tried to stop. It didn’t make any difference.”
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