Chapter 13 – Behemoth #5
“No, I heard her tell Papa the other day that if she had to spend one more minute with her sewing basket, she was going to scream,” Elodie explained. “So, I bet she’ll like it.”
There was a small, suppressed explosion from Davi, but Ophele felt only deepest sympathy for Elodie’s mother. Her own sewing was the most excruciatingly tedious thing she had ever done in her life.
“Elodie, you ought not tell such tales,” Lady Verr said reprovingly. “But clothes might be another concern, Your Grace. If there is spare clothing to be had, it may be a good idea to have it on hand, just in case.”
“I can spare a few of my gowns,” Ophele agreed. She had more gowns now than she’d ever had. “Only…maybe they won’t fit. Could we get more from somewhere?”
“If nothing else, they could be tailored or cut down, Your Grace,” said Lady Verr, which was a tactful way of saying Ophele’s wardrobe might do for children. “I’ll gather what I can from the house.”
“We have some homespun put by in the storehouse,” said Sir Edemir, making rapid notes on his paper. “We have plenty of clothing for men, but not much for women and children. We’ll have to remedy that.”
“And it will give them some small work, over the winter, once they are better,” Ophele added. “I am sure they will want to feel useful. Please tell me when they arrive, I want to come and welcome them.”
“That…may not be a good idea, my lady,” Sir Edemir said with obvious reluctance, and glanced pointedly at Elodie.
“Lady Verr,” Ophele said after a moment. “Would you take Elodie and see which of my gowns can be spared?”
As soon as the heavy door shut behind them, she looked expectantly at the knight.
“They might not be terribly grateful,” Sir Edemir admitted. “They won’t be their best after such a journey, and they will have had a very hard time of it. They are likely to be angry. They might feel as if they were…abandoned.”
She hadn’t thought of that. Back in July, she and Remin had talked about the other villages, when his men had been testing and refining the caravan and mobile palisade.
She had worried for them then, and felt guilty that Remin hesitated to go, because of her.
But there had been so many other things to think about since.
“Were they abandoned?” she asked quietly.
“No.” He said it sharp and flat, but she had never seen the stolid Sir Edemir look so uncomfortable.
“I swear it to every star, my lady. Jinmin tried to go, and he said it would be suicide. We tried anyway in June and lost thirty men. Six lost arms or legs. Rem still would’ve tried to go himself if we hadn’t argued him out of it.
That many devils would’ve swarmed anything less than an army, and our army was needed on the border with Valleth. No. We could not go.”
But his broad face was red, and when Ophele glanced back at Davi and Leonin, she saw the same angry shame.
They had known, too. They would have been involved in all those plans and attempts at rescue; they had understood all of this when she hadn’t even thought to question it.
She had been busy hiding under her blankets, too silly to be grateful for the small army that stood between her and the devils.
None of that would matter to the people of Isigne, Selgin, Meinhem, and Nandre.
“I—I still want to go,” Ophele said. If Remin was not here to face them himself, then she would have to stand in his place.
“They have a right to be unhappy, if they needed help and no one came. Or at least, no one came quickly. Sir Huber, Sir Ortaire, and Sir Rollon did go, as soon as they could. And it was very dangerous, wasn’t it? ”
“Yes, Your Grace, it was.” It was as if she had given Edemir some absolution. He shrugged his shoulders and straightened. “Thank you. I will send a message when we see a signal.”
When he was gone, Ophele sat back in her chair and rubbed her eyes. Through the windows, she could see the forests and the faraway mountains, where gray clouds hung like a shroud.
* * *
It was snowing again.
It was as if nature itself had determined to thwart him in this final ascent, with sky and mountain and devils fighting to cast him down.
Howling winds, a treacherous climb, and snow swirling so thick that Remin could hardly see Auber four paces behind him, let alone a strangler concealed in a snowbank.
At last, they had come to a place where the snow was deep enough to hide the devils by day, and Remin kept to only the narrowest ledges and tested every foot of it with the sharp point of his sword.
Two nights had passed since they left Tounot and Jinmin behind, with bare supplies and six injured men to defend.
If anyone could do it, they could, but Remin knew he was flirting with catastrophe, torn between an instinct that swore the answers to all their questions were just over the next rise, even as his head warned that it was already too late to go back.
As if it had heard that thought, his stomach gave a roar of agreement.
They were all hungry. Remin was monitoring his own body as closely as everything else, and it took a lot of food to keep him going under these conditions.
His was always the heaviest and most dangerous labor: breaking paths through the snow, testing their footing to make sure it would bear everyone’s weight, and even just using his own tall body as a ladder in the high places, as one man after the next stepped into his hands and scrambled onto his shoulders, climbing to the next ledge.
His injured arm was not enjoying this at all.
And stars, when had he last slept?
The devils had come like a blizzard themselves the last two nights, a howling storm like nothing Remin had ever seen.
All he and his men could do was strap themselves down tight in the narrowest and most sheltered place they could find, too large to be dragged out in a mass and too protected by their shields and armor for the stranglers and ghouls to do any significant damage.
It was like spending the night rolling down a glacier in a barrel, and Remin felt like an old man when he finally staggered upright every morning, aching to his bones and colder than he had ever been in his life.
And still they pushed on. Climbing higher, aiming steadily north-northeast, following his own sense of where the devils had swarmed thickest. His vision narrowed to the slit between his hood and muffler, his breath hot and his face cold, the muscles of his thighs blazing with effort.
It wasn’t that the mountains were that high, but climbing in these conditions meant they might grind along for an hour and only cover a single mile.
When the sky began to lighten, at first Remin thought it was just his hood coming loose.
When the wind began to die, he thought the storm was finally clearing.
And then he stepped above the clouds into a high and empty space, where the icy glitter of the peaks spread for miles all around him, blinding in the sunlight.
“Stars and ancestors,” breathed Auber as he clambered onto the ledge beside him. They had not reached the mountaintop, far from it, but this shoulder was wide enough to give the illusion of infinity as they gazed east, floating above banks of clouds. “Where are we?”
“Still Mount Orval,” Remin replied, extending a hand to haul the rest of his men up, all of them pushing back their hoods and blinking dazzled eyes in the sudden brightness.
They hadn’t seen the sun in days. “On the north side, I think. That looks like Mount Grivald over there, and we wouldn’t see Mount Elun until we came around the other si—”
“My lord!” one of his men called behind him, and Remin turned to find that the adventurous Breccey had already gone off down the trail behind them and started climbing. “Your Grace, you’ll want to see this!”
“I’ll want to tie you to my belt with leading strings if you wander off one more time!” Remin shouted back, scrambling onto the rocks behind him. At least there was no danger of devils above the clouds. “Stay there, we haven’t tested our footing…”
Auber whistled.
“Stars, look at that,” breathed one of the soldiers, as a dozen heads swiveled upward.