Vigil
Later that evening, Math lay in a bunk bed in the barracks, staring up at the wooden slats above—uncomfortably close and suffocating. He wasn’t sure how many minutes had died agonizing deaths since lights out, but it felt like centuries.
He was finally going to be the knight he had always dreamed of becoming. He was twenty-two years old, he’d manifested his weapon (ten years late, but still—he’d done it, no thanks to his parents or Commander Talu), and if he followed orders, then by tomorrow morning, he was a dead man.
What would it feel like to be fully plant? Would he even notice? Maybe it would just hurt less, when his body sprouted to heal him.
How funny, to refuse King Sanistral’s generous offer of becoming his “ambassador” to the Parnathi, only to end up facing the same fate. Then again, maybe he’d be immune to that too, like he was with being controlled by the spores.
Maybe he’d just die.
That was what his dream—his honor—would buy him: a preventable, foolish death. One hundred and ninety-eight knights would cheerfully ride down to the Parnassa Forest, arrogantly certain they could handle anything the world threw at them.
Exactly two of those knights—men who’d, until recently, shared only being raised by the same man, a love for their order, and a profound sense of mutual loathing—knew differently.
Alik Nuhzar had been given orders. He’d follow them, even knowing death was waiting.
He would go.
Tri-Mother help him, so would Math. Not because he was an honorable knight who followed orders. He was increasingly of a mind to say the orders could go fuck a grave. But he couldn’t live with himself if he stayed behind, knowing what they were walking into.
Maybe he’d figure out a solution. Something.
No wonder Sanistral had let them escape. Why wouldn’t the wizard confess all his sins? He’d known the truth: Math couldn’t stop him.
That was when Math felt Kai’s pain.
Unlike before, though, this time she was close.
He rolled out of the bunk and started dressing before he’d consciously decided to leave.
Some of the other knights made protesting sounds; he ignored them.
He tugged on his boots in the hallway, waiting until he was outside the barracks before summoning a light and rushing to a window overlooking the cenobium entrance.
The gates were closed at night—probably locked and guarded, given recent events. But for Math, leaving now was just as easy as it had been earlier.
He glanced out the window to the street below, shifted his position to the sidewalk, and ran to Kai.
She was less than a block away, leaning against a wall that blocked the view from the cenobium.
Someone had tried to make her presentable for civilized company.
She now wore a large wool cloak with a voluminous hood over a dark dress with a fine floral print.
She had a hand clamped over the opposite arm, as if she was applying pressure to a wound.
Because that’s what she was doing.
“What happened? Who hurt you?” Math rushed up to her and immediately started healing the cut. He was immensely relieved to see that it wasn’t serious—a shallow slice that would have healed on its own, although not without scarring.
“The superior question is: Who hurt you? For you have been in the most disagreeable turmoil the entire day.” She nodded toward her arm. “This served to catch your attention.”
Math stared at the healed wound. “You hurt yourself.”
“Should I have knocked on the front gate? I know that Captain Nuhzar told his companions that I was to be a witness, but I think it unlikely anyone would look kindly on me calling at such an hour.”
Math pulled her into his arms and held her tight. He was just so relieved that she was fine. A little annoyed about how she’d signaled him to come meet her, but he couldn’t really fault her for that. It was hard to argue with success.
“Math.” She pushed back against his chest until she could look him in the eyes. “What happened?”
He glanced around. It was the middle of the night and the gas lamps he’d been so enchanted by when originally entering the city now seemed like a horrible inconvenience. He pulled her around the corner of a building, farther out of sight.
“The commanders didn’t believe me,” Math explained. “They let me back into the Order and agreed to knight me, but didn’t believe a word I said. They think the Queens are a grim witch cabal of some kind, so they’re going to send us all off to the Parnassa Forest in the morning to take care of them.”
She frowned. “Define ‘deal with’ for me.”
“As in ‘destroy.’ They’re sending two hundred knights—”
Kai’s eyes widened. “That is not enough.”
“I know,” he agreed. “But Commander Talu’s convinced them that I’m insane and making up all the stuff about Sanistral, which in turn means they didn’t believe me when I tried to warn them about Huraiik. Nuhzar tried to reason with them, but…”
The funny thing was, Math wasn’t certain that it would’ve changed anything even if they had believed him.
The Idallik Order didn’t have the authority to start wars with sovereign nations, and it seemed highly unlikely that the regent would’ve signed off on that idea.
From that point of view, the Order could only attack one of those groups without jeopardizing their status.
Attacking the Parnathi had the added benefit of removing Sanistral’s power source on the off chance that Math had been telling the truth.
Removing the Queens was a coldly pragmatic solution to the problem—assuming they could pull it off.
Kai closed her eyes for a moment, gathered herself. “I see,” she finally said. “Very well. If such is the case, then we shall have to see who else’s help we might enlist—”
“I’m going with them.”
She blinked at him as if he’d just spoken an unfamiliar language.
“I can’t—” He shook his head. “They assigned me as one of the knights heading out to confront the Queens. And I can’t just … run away, knowing what my brothers and sisters are about to walk into tomorrow.”
Kai continued staring at him.
“I’m not … I mean. Kai, please. Say something.”
Her eyes narrowed. “How much brain matter do the commanders allow knights to have? Did yours dribble out your ears when you were knighted?”
“Kai.”
She backed away from him, eyes blazing. “You shall go with them, and you shall die with them. For no reason except that apparently you have no wish to see them lonely when they’re killed?”
“Kai!” He reached over and grabbed her hands.
He tried, anyway. The task was made considerably more difficult because she had hers clenched into fists.
“This means something to me. I have to stop this if I can. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I just walked away.
And lest you forget, they have words for what you’re suggesting I do. Desertion. Treason.”
“But you would still draw breath.” If she lowered her voice, it was only because shouting in an alley in the middle of the night would likely be noticed.
“Don’t be so quick to assume I’ll die, Kai. Try to have a little faith.”
“I have all the faith in the world in you,” she said. “But I have fought the Parnathi and I know their strengths. Tomorrow, you and your knights shall walk into that forest and face enemies in the thousands…”
He chuckled bitterly. “They haven’t killed that many of us, Kai.”
Her eyes widened with dismay, and she unclenched her fists to grab his hands back. “Do you think that you’ve been fighting the same Huraiik each time? That there was only one of them?”
Math suddenly found it difficult to breathe. “I’m sorry, but what do you mean?”
“One slain human does not result in but one living Parnathi. I know not what they call it now. In my time, we called it clipping. From a single plant, a gardener might make many more, not by growing it from seeds, but by cutting the stems and branches into pieces, each piece to become a full plant in its own right.”
He flashed back to the logging camp, to the bodies of the dead, torn apart, divided into pieces. Tri-Mother. Math hadn’t thought it could get any worse.
It had just gotten worse.
When he’d told Nuhzar they’d be outnumbered, he’d been off by a factor of at least five.
“Thank you for letting me know,” Math said.
She searched his eyes. “Tell me you are not going.”
“I can’t do that.”
She stared at him for a second longer, then threw down his hands and marched away. He suspected she only turned around and came back because she was trying to avoid shouting in the street. “You are a fool, Mathaiik Kaven.”
“Seems so,” he agreed. “Look, Kai. I know this isn’t what you wanted, but I’m going to do everything I can to come back to you. The timing might not be great, but you deserve to know how I feel—”
“No,” she snapped at him.
“No?”
She looked so mad it wouldn’t have surprised him if she’d thrown a punch. “Have you forgotten, in your sublime moment of despair, what happens to me if you die?”
Kai absolutely had thrown a punch, just not with her hands.
Math’s heart lurched. “Oh, Tri-Mother, I didn’t—” Math paused.
Beneath her fury, he felt something else. Guilt. Anxiety. The prickly-sharp wariness of someone sitting down at a card game and hoping no one noticed …
Hoping no one noticed it was a bluff.
“You won’t die, will you?” Math said softly. “You figured out that the link isn’t fatal. Were you going to tell me? Or were you afraid I’d abandon you if I had a choice?”
Two could throw a punch, but even Math could admit that was a low blow.
She pulled herself up, angry and furious, and unfortunately for her, reminding him very much in that moment of a remarkably angry alley cat. “It does not seem to matter, given that you are abandoning me, regardless. Do you care so little for me that you’d take the chance that I might die—”
He grabbed her hands. “Look me in the eyes and tell me you’ll die if I do.”
Tears began streaming down her cheeks, but the look of fury on her face lessened not even the slightest amount. “If you die,” she said slowly, “I will die.”
Math knew she was lying, but at the same time, she was also completely sincere.
“How dare you,” she whispered. “How dare you hold your life so cheap, when to me it is more precious than all the stars! You are the only thing that tethers me to this world, the only person I want to share every tomorrow with. And you will steal that from me for honor and loyalty to a nation and people who care nothing for you. I am the one who cares for you!”
Her eyes were bright and red, wet with tears, as she pushed him away. “Tell me when you return, or do not tell me at all.”
He had no idea how to respond to that. He didn’t want to go, and yet he was going, anyway. Math saw the tears on her face and silently agreed with her earlier assessment.
He was a fool.
Since he didn’t have the words, he kissed her.
Math felt her arms wrap around his neck as she kissed him back—slow and sweet and more than a little despairing. He tasted salt from her tears before she furiously backed away from him to wipe her eyes.
She began searching their surroundings, as though looking for something. She pointed toward a high wrought-iron fence in the distance. “What lies beyond that?”
“I’m not sure,” Math answered honestly. “I don’t know Bashan very well, and we didn’t pass this way when we came to the cenobium. It’s a park? There’s a lot of parks in this city.”
“’Twill suffice,” she growled before taking his hand and pulling him after her. She walked at a surprisingly fast pace.
They quickly reached their destination, which was mostly dark because none of the gas lamps elsewhere were present here. The gate was closed and locked.
“What are we doing here?” Math asked her.
“I didn’t really find the idea of making love with you in the middle of an alley especially appealing, to be honest.”
Math’s mouth dried up. Then he started examining the gate with renewed motivation. “Oh, I’d have done it for you,” he admitted. “In the middle of the day, on a crowded street if that was what you wanted…” He eyed the lock—he could break it, sure, but not without half the city noticing.
“You still have enough magic to shift, right?” he asked her.
She responded by doing so, appearing on the other side of the wrought-iron fence.
“Perfect.” He followed her and then they were kissing again.
Kai began tugging them down to the ground through the simple tactic of grabbing his coat and letting herself fall, then gave a startled gasp and laughed when he caught her and swung her up into his arms. “Hold on there,” he said.
“Let’s get a little farther away from the street.
There’s some shadows over there that might be a building—”
Math began laughing as he realized what he was looking at.
Kai glanced around, searching for the source of the humor. “I don’t understand,” she said, looking up at him.
“It’s not a park,” he said, shaking his head. “This is a cemetery.”