Blades
Chapter twenty-one
Skip assembled the garrison in the courtyard before dawn. Every soldier who could be roused.
He issued the order in the command voice.
“Meghan Callahan is not to leave the walls after dark without my direct knowledge and authorization. Not with any person, regardless of rank or circumstance.”
The order was garrison-wide, permanent until revised, and witnessed by everyone present.
Every soldier present swore to it. By midday, the order had been given to the rest.
This included Varia, who had stood at the front of the formation. She would not argue with the order, regardless of what she thought of it privately.
Skip was not finished.
“Two soldiers outside our quarters from dusk until dawn,” he said. “Every night. Rotating. Not the same pair twice in a row. If anyone attempts to enter or remove her from those quarters after dark—for any reason, under any authority—they are in direct violation of their oath.”
Varia nodded once. “Understood, High Commander.”
“This is not a precaution against her making a poor decision,” Skip said. “It is a precaution against Morvanna making a good one.”
The distinction was clear. A sworn order addressed my choices. Soldiers outside the door addressed hers.
The garrison dispersed.
I stood in the cold courtyard for a moment and thought about what it meant to be a target of Morvanna. It was not a comfortable thought.
“Meghan.”
I turned.
Varia had remained behind after the others dispersed. She stood a few feet away, waiting for me to notice her.
“I did not thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
“In the field. The command-layer vampire.” She held my gaze. “You saw it coming for me before I did. You left the formation, broke my direct order, and saved my life.”
“Earlier, you seemed more interested in discussing the broken order.”
“I was only angry because you could have died.” Her chin lifted.
She stepped forward and pulled me into her arms, one arm firm across my back, her cheek briefly against my hair.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
I held her just as tightly.
“Ride or die,” I said.
She drew back enough to look at me.
“Ride or die,” she agreed.
Then she released me and walked toward the keep.
***
A week passed.
That morning, I went down to the training yard, and Varia was not there.
The yard was empty. The snow was swept, the practice weapons were racked at the eastern wall, and Velox was visible through the stable door. Everything in its correct place. No Varia.
I checked the mess hall. The barracks. The section of the eastern wall she sometimes used for sequences when the yard was occupied.
I found Gaius repairing the crenellations. He had a chisel in his hand, and he set it down when he saw my face, which told me he had already been looking for a way to avoid this conversation.
“Torch signal,” he said.
“Last night. Village of Nema, four miles from the line. Two fires and then three—contact, then turning in progress. Lieutenant Varia took the Vanguard to intercept. She left at midnight.”
“And she has not returned?” I asked.
“No.”
It was past dawn. More than six hours.
Skip felt present and focused, the High Commander in the middle of his morning.
His emotions carried strain. He knew.
I looked at the eastern gate.
“She is going to come back,” he said. He said it like he was attempting to convince himself.
“Yes,” I said.
Then the eastern gate opened.
Varia came through alone. On foot.
Her horse was not with her.
Her armor had the damage pattern of real sustained engagement. The dents and deformations of the metal conveyed that her armor had been hit hard by something fast and powerful. There was blood on the steel. Some of it was dried and dark.
She was pale. The olive warmth of her skin was gone.
She was still on her feet. Still conscious. Driving herself forward with the hard, narrowing focus of someone who had decided on the gate and meant to reach it, no matter the cost. Sweat streamed down her, as though her body were fighting off some brutal illness.
Gaius, two garrison soldiers, and I reached her at the same time.
She let us take her weight.
“The village of Nema,” she said.
Her voice was wrong. Not weak. Just wrong.
“They were waiting. More than the signal. The others…”
“The others are gone,” she said. “The Vanguard. Dead. I slew the remaining undead. Three confirmed down. The village is clear.”
She paused, and something in the pause was wrong. It was too measured, too final. It sounded like she had rehearsed the sequence rather than lived it.
“I am the only one who survived.”
She was reporting. That was what I registered before anything else.
Not the words. The register. The flat, operational cadence of a soldier giving an account.
Whatever she had been through in that field, whatever had happened to the soldiers she had taken with her, the first thing she did when she came through the gate was report.
“Don’t continue,” I said. “Infirmary.”
Something was wrong with her eyes. They were still blue, but the color seemed washed thin, as though the cold had leached something out of them. Around each pupil, a faint amber ring appeared when the light caught it and vanished again when she moved.
“Infirmary,” I said. “Now.”
***
Caen was there when we brought her in. The pendant brightened the moment Varia crossed the threshold. It was not the warm blue of active healing but something more careful.
Caen looked at Varia. Then she looked at me. Something passed between us in that look that neither of us put into words.
Later—much later, after everything—I would come to believe that Caen had made a choice in that moment. She had allocated her limited magic to healing rather than to unraveling the truth.
I did not blame her for it. I understood it.
Caen chose to believe that the wounds were the whole story. She began to work.
The armor came off. The wounds were significant, the result of sustained contact with something faster and stronger than a human opponent.
The pendant pulsed. The wounds began to close.
I had seen wounds like this before, in the infirmary after the siege. They looked like the wounds of someone who had survived something she had not been supposed to survive.
Varia remained pale. Sweat gathered at her hairline despite the cold room, and her skin had the drained, bloodless quality I had noticed at the gate.
I thought of Varia in the snow. Her voice even, her flask in her hands, telling me what it had felt like when her claimed man joined the dark bond. The warmth had shifted but had not disappeared. Not right away.
I thought of what she had said: I could not say it to myself in the specific privacy of my own mind.
Now it made sense to me.
I was doing the same thing. The data was present, the conclusion was possible, and I was not going to arrive at it yet because arriving at it meant it was true.
Varia had been in a battle. She had been in the cold all night. She had lost blood. She had walked miles alone through the dark.
People looked different after those things.
Pallor was blood loss. Sweating was shock. Exhaustion was exhaustion. These were facts. The conclusion I was not drawing was not yet required by them.
I sat with her until she slept. Deep and immediate, the unconsciousness of complete depletion.
I went to find Skip.
***
I told Skip about the eyes. The skin. I told him what I had observed, what I had not concluded, and what I was asking him to consider.
“She was in a sustained engagement,” he said. “In the open field. In the cold. She lost blood. She walked back from Nema alone. People look different after those things. The body pulls everything inward. The eyes go flat. The color changes.”
“Yes,” I said.
His words said Varia could still be saved. The bond carried no matching certainty.
“Watch her carefully,” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
***
I went back to the infirmary late that afternoon.
Caen was no longer there, presumably resting after the effort of healing Varia’s wounds.
Varia was still asleep, her breathing deep and even. Her skin remained unnaturally pale, and she was still sweating.
I stood beside the bed and watched her breathe.
Nothing about it was proof.
That was the problem.
I told Skip what I had seen.
He said the same things. The cold. The blood loss. The body under extreme stress. The strain of healing. He said the words as if he needed them to be true, not as if he believed them.
He agreed to post a single armed soldier at the infirmary door, positioned where he could watch the bed. Varia was freshly healed but still depleted by blood loss. If she woke changed and hostile, one guard should have been enough to kill her before she reached him.
His emotions carried the same deliberate not-naming I was doing. We were holding the same line together, the two of us, by unspoken agreement. Holding it because the alternative was something that we didn’t want to face.
Not long afterward, the sun went down.
***
I was in our quarters when it happened.
The watch arrived before dusk.
The fire was burning. I had been reading a book from Caen’s library called The Rise and Fall of the Sovarith Elven Imperium. This was an effort to distract myself from Varia, and it wasn’t working.
Through the bond: Skip.
It was sharp and immediate.
Anger.
Then the anger became fear.
I was at the door before I had finished processing what I was feeling. The soldiers outside straightened when I opened it.
“Stay here,” one of them said. His voice was not unkind. It was the voice of a man following an order he had sworn to and intended to keep. “The High Commander ordered us to remain with you after dark.”
“I’m not leaving the walls. I need to search the outpost. There is something wrong with the High Commander.”
He nodded. “Then we go with you.”
Skip’s fear arrived in steady waves.
“Something has happened to him,” I said. “We move now.”
***
The infirmary door was open.