Chapter 11
Duskweld’s training yard looked, at dawn, like something pulled from a soldier’s fever dream. Frost clung to the packed dirt in a thin blue shimmer beneath the torches, and the cold stung hard enough to make the nose ache. Smoke drifted in from the forges and blurred the horizon, yet nothing softened the wind. It cut straight through wool and leather and gnawed at fingers until they felt carved from bone.
The morning horn bellowed, a hungry animal’s call, and the recruits lurched from their bunks in uniforms that were once Dominion blue but now wore a crust of white at every seam and elbow. Some men came at a jog, driven forward by the fear of an angry reprimand from an officer. Others moved in a slow shuffle, shoulders drooped, boots dragging lines in the frost like men already halfway beaten.
Theron emerged from the barracks last, as was his habit. He knew that if you stood in the cold too long before roll call, you’d lose sensation in your toes by the time the drillmaster barked the first order. Rook was already in line, face half-hidden by a scarf he’d somehow liberated from the quartermaster’s storage, hands stuffed so deep in his pockets he looked like he might just fold in half from the chill.
“Lovely morning for dying,” Rook muttered as Theron fell in beside him.
“You’ll survive,” Theron said, voice so quiet only Rook could hear. His own breath came out in tight little plumes, each one erased instantly by the next wind.
The men grumbled as, at the head of the yard, Houlis appeared and paced with his arms behind his back, boots leaving black impressions in the frost. The captain rarely showed up anymore, leaving the training to others. But when he did, the men knew they were in for a miserable day. He didn’t need a horn or a bell. All it took was the wet sound of his throat clearing, and every man in the line snapped to attention. Theron could see that even the Brightwardens, who watched from the shadowed edge, regarded Houlis with a wary respect.
Houlis took stock of his recruits as if counting coins. “It’s colder than Jac’s feet out here, so let’s move quick. Line up by squad. Squad leaders, get your numbers straight.”
Squads drifted into place with a tired shuffle. Theron’s group formed up as seven, including himself, Rook, Hrengar, Sval, Carpen, and two others who looked half-carved from the dark. At this hour, they all moved like sleepwalkers. No one bothered with insults or chatter. The cold made even breath feel fragile, as if a spoken word might crack apart before it reached the air.
“Right then,” Houlis announced, “Let’s see how you’re feeling this morning.” He paced to the front, unbuttoned his coat, and pointed to the frozen ground. “Push-ups until the sun breaks over the top wall. If you stop, you run a lap and then begin again. If I catch you resting, you’ll wish you were dead.”
A collective groan rose from each of the squads, but nobody moved slowly enough to draw the captain’s wrath. They dropped to the ground as one mass, hands slapping the ice, some men cursing as the cold bit skin through their gloves. Theron braced himself and began, arms pumping in a steady, even rhythm. Beside him, Rook lasted maybe a dozen before his breath started coming in shudders.
“You ever wonder if they’re just trying to see who freezes to the ground first?” Rook hissed between sets, voice strained.
“Probably,” Theron said, not breaking stride.
Rook gave a soft laugh, but it died in his throat as Houlis drifted closer. The captain’s boots struck the ground in a slow, deliberate rhythm.
“Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen.” He moved past them like a man inspecting livestock. “Sixteen. Seventeen. Sval, keep moving. You’re not paid to enjoy the view.”
His eyes narrowed as he passed Carpen. “Nineteen. And Carpen, if you drop before thirty, I’ll drag you back from the brink so you can start again. Do not test my generosity.”
Carpen grunted and kept pushing, spitting onto the ice. “Thirty, sir,” he managed, then collapsed.
Houlis knelt beside him, voice pitched low but not cruel. “Right. Thirty. But you stopped, you thick bastard. That means you run a lap. Let’s go.”
Carpen groaned, but he got to his feet and started his jog.
When the sun finally crested the top of the wall, no more than a thin sickle of gold, Houlis raised his voice. “Stop. Stand. On your feet.” He did not bother to repeat himself. He called a dozen or so men over from where they were running laps as other men straightened as if yanked by their collars, breath steaming in the cold while the last echoes of running boots faded into the frost.
Theron helped Rook up, and the two of them staggered into line. Hands and faces burned, the sort of burn that meant you’d feel nothing by noon except the slow, terrifying realization your fingers might never fully move again.
“Not bad,” Houlis said, pacing. He eyed the line. “You’ve grown stronger these last weeks,” he nodded approvingly. “Some of you might even survive a real march. Let’s see if you can hold a blade.”
He signaled to the far side of the yard, where two Brightwardens appeared, arms laden with training swords. The blades were dull, but their weight was real and unforgiving. The Brightwardens tossed a sword at each man’s feet, letting them each bend down to pick them up off the ground.
“Sparring pairs. No killing blows, but you better make it hurt. If you don’t, I’ll make it worse for you,” Houlis said.
Rook groaned. “That’s all I need, a broken arm again. Took me a full year to get my mobility back the last time I broke it.”
Theron flexed his sword hand, feeling the familiar heft settle into his palm. “Just dodge,” he advised.
“That’s easy for you to say. I can’t ever get a hit on you.”
Houlis paired them off. Theron found himself matched against Hrengar, who circled with the predatory glee of a man who’d been waiting for this moment since his first taste of power. Houlis assigned Rook with Carpen, who was grumbling and moaning again.
“Begin!” Houlis called, and the yard erupted in a sudden, savage flurry of motion.
Hrengar came in hard and fast, trying to catch Theron off guard. The sword hissed through the air, but Theron parried, deflected, gave ground only to draw Hrengar in, then pivoted and let his own blade snap against the other man’s ribs. Hrengar grunted, more in surprise than pain, and swung again.
Theron let the rhythm build, always a half-beat ahead, his body remembering every lesson from a hundred battles he’d never spoken of. Hrengar pressed, but the more he pushed, the easier it was for Theron to turn the momentum against him.
Across the yard, Rook’s bout with Carpen opened badly for him. Carpen fought like a battering ram, smashing aside Rook’s guard and thudding heavy strikes into his shoulders and arms. Steel rang, boots skidded, and Rook gritted his teeth through each hit.
He shifted after the fourth blow, abandoning any pretense of meeting power with power. Instead, he slipped just out of reach, circling, baiting Carpen with little jabs and needling remarks. Carpen lunged, overreached, and grew more furious with every miss.
When the man finally slowed, Rook stepped in and clipped him across the side of the head. Carpen stumbled, blinking through sweat and rage. A nearby Brightwarden let out a short laugh, sharp as cold iron.
Houlis walked the row, watching each pair. He stopped behind Theron and Hrengar just as they broke a tie.
“Good work, Hrengar. Better. But you’re still thinking too much. You hesitate, and a Sylphar takes your throat,” Houlis observed.
He nodded to Theron. “You don’t think at all. You just move. That’s what I want to see.” The compliment was barbed, but it was still a compliment.
Houlis moved on, stopping at Rook and Carpen, just as Carpen knocked Rook flat on his back. “Rook, you’re agile but undisciplined. You fight like a drunk alley cat. Next time, try to stay on your feet.”
“Yes, sir,” Rook managed, grinning despite the mud now caking his cheek.
Theron offered his hand, pulling Rook up.
“Oddly enough, I’m beginning to think Houlis likes you,” Rook said under his breath.
“Maybe. But I find that I don’t care so much.” Theron said as he looked around the yard, sizing up the other squads.
The drill ran for another hour. Blades clashed. Men fell, bled, spat and cursed. Sweat froze on eyebrows, soaked uniforms clung to spines. By the end, most of the recruits looked like they’d survived a lynching.
Finally, Houlis blew a whistle and called, “Stop!” The yard froze, every man panting in the cold.
“Line up. Listen up,” he shouted, voice echoing off the granite. “Tomorrow, you all advance to the real trainers here at Duskweld. The ones who turned me into what I am. Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to live through it. For today, you earned your food and your bunk. If you want to keep them, do better tomorrow.”
He dismissed the squads with a flick of his wrist.
As the men filed back toward the barracks, Rook leaned over and muttered, “You think the next trainers will be any worse?”
Theron considered it. “I think the last weeks of training were just a test from Houlis. I don’t think our real training will even begin until tomorrow.”
Rook laughed, weak but real. “Always the optimist, aren’t you?”
They trudged back through the frost, battered, aching, but alive. The city’s bells tolled overhead, their sound lost in the wind and the heavy silence of men who knew that, tomorrow, the sun would rise again, and so would the misery.
The combined barracks’ mess hall was built for function and nothing else. The air hung heavy with steam from a thousand boiling rations, mixed with the sour tang of sweat and wood smoke that had seeped into the beams over years. By nightfall, every table was crowded with men in Dominion blue, their faces flickering orange and shadow under the uneven torchlight. Conversation was low, punctuated by the scrape of utensils against bowls and the occasional barked order from a sergeant. Hunger sharpened their movements, but it did little to soften the tension that clung to every shoulder and glance.
Theron sat at the far end of one table, squad arrayed around him. Rook was to his right, bowl already half-empty and a wedge of bread held like a prize between his fingers. The rest of the men crammed close. Hrengar sported a new black eye that had started to close, Carpen picked at a chipped molar with the tip of his knife, and Sval was already hunched and dozing upright. The bowls were filled with thin stew, grayish with cubes of turnip and the odd, chewy pellet of meat. Nobody complained. After a day like theirs, warmth was warmth, salt was salt, and the bread, hard enough to break teeth, still tasted wonderful to each man.
Rook was the first to speak, as always. “I have it on good authority,” he announced, brandishing a chunk of bread for emphasis, “that the cooks in the officers’ quarters use cinnamon. That’s why the officers look so happy all the time. It’s the cinnamon.”
Hrengar snorted, sending flecks of stew onto the table. “You ever see a cinnamon tree around here? Besides, it’s too cold. Next, you’ll tell us that the Luminarch Council all wipe their arse’s with silk.”
Rook didn’t miss a beat. “Course they do. That’s why there’s a silk shortage in the east. My uncle told me.”
Theron smiled quietly and sipped his broth as the others laughed. It burned his tongue, but the pain was preferable to cold.
The table’s conversation rolled from there, loose and uneven, men talking over each other and swapping insults without malice. Sval, eyes still half-shut, told a story about how his father once drowned a whole family of moles that was eating the roots out from under their potato field. Carpen insisted, through a mouthful of bread, that city folk had it easier and that he’d never have left his village if not for the Endless War.
“I ain’t got family or friends, so my village volunteered me for the quota,” he told them angrily. “Bastards gave me the ol’ boot out my door and told me not to come back.”
Rook stared at him for a moment, then said, “Well, I’m glad they did, Carp! Where would we be without your sunny disposition all the time?”
Everyone at the table laughed as Carpen glared back at Rook.
Hrengar, feeling bold, announced, “Back home, I was apprenticed to a blacksmith. Best job I ever had.”
Sval eyed him. “Then why aren’t you a smith instead of a soldier?”
“Well, ya see, it was sort of a favor to my mam that I was apprentice in the first place. She… er… and the blacksmith. Well…” Hrengar said, staring down with embarrassment into his soup.
Rook cackled. “Sounds like your mom prefers rough hands over smooth, eh?”
“Enough,” Theron said, not unkindly as the others roared with laughter. “Some of us want to eat in peace.”
This earned a round of muffled chuckles, and for a few moments, they ate in silence. Around them, the hall throbbed with life. Shouts rose from other tables, spoons clattered, and a plate crashed to the floor. Every sound pressed against them, alive and restless, making the room feel both enormous and claustrophobic at once.
Rook nudged Theron’s arm. “Your turn. Never heard you tell a story. What’s your scandalous past? What did you do before they pressed you into blue?”
Theron hesitated. He watched the steam spiral from his bowl, the way it distorted the torchlight. “Nothing worth telling,” he said. “I hunted. Trapped rabbits, deer. Basically lived in a forest.”
Hrengar leaned in, voice low. “You ever killed more than animals before?”
The question hovered, a thing with claws. Theron felt the weight of the medallion beneath his shirt, its shape pressed against the hollow between his collarbones. He didn’t answer, but the way his eyes dropped back to his food was enough.
Rook grinned. “I was a merchant-scout,” he said, rescuing the silence. “Before this, I ran goods up and down the roads. Learned to read a man’s intentions by the way he stood, or the way he drank his ale, and how to defend my caravan. Never thought I’d end up here, though. Never thought I’d see so many different kinds of desperate.”
Sval said, “So then, what’s the trick to surviving here, merchant?”
“Never volunteer for anything. Never challenge a man who has nothing to lose.” Rook gestured to Theron. “And always sit next to the best fighter in the squad.”
This got a laugh, and the tension eased.
After another round of bread and watered-down beer, the talk slowed. Carpen excused himself, muttering about checking on a blister that was threatening to turn gangrenous. Sval dozed outright, forehead pressed to the edge of the table. Hrengar gnawed at the last bit of bread, eyes glazed.
Rook sat back, arms crossed behind his head. “You know, it’s funny. Back home, I thought the world was big. Infinite. But here, every day is the same ten paces. Yard, barracks, mess hall, yard again. You ever feel like you’re just circling?”
Theron didn’t answer. He was clutching his medallion underneath his shirt and watching the flame of a nearby torch, the way it bent and snapped in the draft from the open doors. Rook followed his gaze, then noticed Theron’s hand grasping at something.
“What’s that?” Rook asked, voice soft, as if the question mattered more than any of the others.
Theron tensed, then dragged the medallion from beneath his shirt. It was a disc of metal, dull but dense, and clearly not silver or gold. Its surface shimmered with a faint, oil-slick pattern that looked almost alive. At its center, a spiral, etched with impossible delicacy, twisted in a way that made the eyes ache if stared at too long. Around it, twelve inlays of black and white stones, spaced evenly. The edge was carved with a looping line that seemed to have neither beginning nor end.
“Looks old,” Rook muttered, tilting his head as he eyed the thing dangling from Theron’s neck.
“It is,” Theron said. He rolled the worn medallion between thumb and forefinger, the metal catching the firelight in dull, uneven flashes.
Rook leaned closer, elbows on the rough table. “What’s it meant to do, then?”
“Bring luck,” Theron answered. His voice dropped a notch. “The old kind.”
Rook arched a brow, half mocking, half curious. “And does it?”
Theron slipped the medallion back beneath his shirt with a faint shrug. “I’m still breathing, aren’t I?”
Rook let out a low chuckle, softer than his usual bark, the sort that stayed between just the two of them. He rubbed the stubble on his face. “Could borrow a bit of that tomorrow. New trainers sound like proper bastards.”
Theron scraped the last of the stew from his bowl and set it aside. “Maybe. Or maybe they’ll surprise us.”
They sat together in companionable silence, watching the torches sputter and the tables slowly empty. Outside, the cold waited, hungry as ever. But inside, for now, there was warmth, and food, and the strange, unspoken thing that happened when men endured long enough to trust each other.
When they finally stood to leave, Rook clapped Theron on the shoulder. “Maybe one day you’ll tell me where you got that thing.”
“Maybe,” Theron said, and together they joined the slow river of men heading back toward the barracks, the last of the light painting long shadows on the stone.
A few days later, the wind changed. Instead of the constant, gnawing cold, there was a brittle clarity in the air, as if the entire city had been scrubbed raw by the night. Duskweld’s archery range sat on the outermost ring, pressed close to the city’s wall. There was no shelter from the wind, but the view was clear. It had rows of wooden targets, their painted circles already shredded and scored by the day’s work, and they stood at regular intervals out to a hundred paces. Between the range and the wall, a scattering of cedar trees added some shelter from the gale, their dark needles giving the air a faint resinous tang.
Rook had been waiting for this since dawn. He picked his way through the frost-blanched grass before their official training began for the day, clutching a bow and a quiver of arrows borrowed from the armory. Theron followed, hands in his pockets, his own bow slung over his shoulder.
“Could be worse,” Rook said, shivering in the cold and squinting at the targets. “At least the bastards gave us proper bows this time.”
“Don’t let them hear you call them bastards,” Theron said, stone-faced. “You’ll get extra laps.”
Rook grinned. “If I make a clean shot, maybe it’s worth it.”
He took his place on the first firing line, notched an arrow, and drew back. The bow creaked under the strain, slightly warped, much like Rook himself. The arrow wobbled in flight and thudded into the dirt three paces short of the nearest target.
Rook cursed and shook out his hand. “I swear this bow is impossible to draw. And my wrist, look, I still got a bruise from yesterday.”
“Grip is too tight,” Theron said, stepping up beside him. “You’re fighting the bow instead of letting it do the work.”
“Show me, then.”
Theron took his bow, knocked an arrow, and pulled back with unhurried precision. He let out half a breath, and released. The arrow whistled through the air and hit near the center of the target. He handed the bow back to Rook. “Try again.”
Rook shot a glare at Theron, but he did as told. The next arrow landed, at least, on the wooden rim of the target.
“Better,” Theron said.
They moved through the drill like a steady heartbeat. Shoot. Correct. Shoot again.
Theron nudged Rook’s stance with small, practical motions of his hand. “Left foot forward,” he said. “Shoulders loose. Keep that elbow soft.”
Rook absorbed every word without his usual grumble or smirk. Patience sat on him like an unfamiliar cloak, but he wore it all the same.
After a dozen shots, Rook’s arrows had begun to cluster toward the lower right of the target. He didn’t seem pleased, but he did look less angry at the bow.
“You ever do this before?” Theron asked.
“I used to shoot at ducks along the river by my village,” Rook replied. “Never was much good, but it made the long days less dull. Ducks don’t insult you when you miss, at least.”
Theron smiled. “And ducks are easier targets.”
Rook drew another arrow, hesitated, then lowered the bow. “You know, I doubt I’ll ever use a bow in battle. I’m training to be a swordsman. Why are we doing this? In the middle of a battle, I’ll just pick one up and start shooting things, if I need to.”
“Anyone can hit their first mark,” Theron said. “The trick is doing it a hundred times in a row. That’s what matters out there. And that’s why they’ll train and test us on it.”
A whistle split the air. Three recruits not from their squad sauntered down the line. The lead was a huge man, thick through the shoulders and with a jaw that looked like it had been broken and reset a dozen times. He wore a band of leather around his head, probably to keep his ears from freezing off.
“Well, well,” said the big one, eyeing Rook. “The joking merchant is learning to shoot now? Should we all be worried?” The two men flanking him smirked, letting their leader do the talking.
Rook rolled his eyes and tried to focus on the next shot. The arrow snapped off the string, clipping the edge of the target. Not perfect, but at least it hit something.
The big recruit walked closer to Theron. “You know he’s dead the first battle he sees,” he said, voice carrying over the wind.
Rook froze, hand on the next arrow. “Who says so?”
The man shrugged. “I say so.” His friends laughed low and ugly.
Theron’s face didn’t move. He stepped between Rook and the big man, not in a challenging way, but with a calm that was somehow more dangerous. “We’re practicing. Please leave,” Theron said, voice even and empty.
The man stared back, trying to size him up. “You’re the one they call Scarecrow, right? Heard you like to pick fights with officers. Want to try me next?”
Rook held his breath, waiting for the collision. But Theron just stared, eyes grey and utterly indifferent.
“Not worth it,” Theron said. “But if you want the range, you can wait your turn.”
For a moment, it looked like the big man might try his luck. But whatever he saw in Theron’s stare drained the fire from him. He spat in the dirt and flicked his fingers for his crew to fall back. “Whatever you say, Scarecrow.”
They left, not quite fast enough to seem unafraid.
Rook exhaled and gave Theron a look of genuine gratitude. “You didn’t even have to threaten him. How do you do that?”
Theron shrugged. “He wanted a reaction. Sometimes it’s better not to give it.”
Rook turned back to the line, hands still a bit shaky. “You think he’ll come back?”
“No, he won’t be bothering us anymore. I’ve known men like him before. That show was more for his friends than for us.”
Rook nodded and then drew another arrow and shot. This time, it hit the inner ring, a hand’s span from the bull’s-eye.
“Ha!” Rook said. “You see that?”
Theron nodded and smiled. “See? You’re learning.”
They kept at it, steady and sharp-eyed, loosing arrow after arrow until their shoulders burned and the quivers hung empty. While they stowed the bows and gathered the spent shafts, Rook stopped short and glanced over.
“You ever taught anyone else like this?” he asked. “You’re good at it.”
Theron felt old memories stir, ghosts of young recruits on muddy ranges, voices long silenced by war or worse. He met Rook’s gaze with a small tilt of his head.
“A few times over the years,” he said.
They walked back through the trees, Rook humming a tune under his breath.
Duskweld’s outer wall was an unbroken line of stone, running the length of the city’s outer ring. By night, the torches set along the parapet guttered in the wind, throwing trembling halos of light onto the icy battlements. From up there, the city below was a confusion of roofs and chimneys, smoke streaming in ragged lines toward the river. Above it all, the clouded sky blotted out the stars, making the world feel small and contained.
Theron and Rook drew night watch on the eastern quarter, along with a few soldiers from other squads. By now, everyone in Duskweld knew the two of them worked best side by side, so the officers tended to keep them paired. The partnership had started as convenience, then habit, and now no one bothered to separate them.
The wind on the eastern wall was merciless, peeling away warmth as fast as men could breathe it out. Armor clanked in the dark, and boots scraped frost from the stone. Each man carried a spear and a short sword, with Rook walking a half step ahead, humming something tuneless. Theron matched him without thought. Their footfalls settled into an easy rhythm, a steady counterpoint to the groan of the city and the distant throb of the forges. Up here, the world felt suspended, held in a kind of cold, brittle quiet.
“Lovely view,” Rook said, stopping at the battlement’s edge to look out over the moonless city. “If you’re a fan of darkness and smoke.”
Theron didn’t answer. He was watching the movement below, tracking the slow shift of torches as the other sentries walked their lines. Every few minutes, the bell in the north tower chimed a single note, a reminder of time’s passage for those who cared to mark it.
They paced in silence for a long stretch, Rook counting steps under his breath to fight off the cold. When they reached the southern end of their patrol, he finally spoke again.
“You ever wonder why we do this?” he said. “I mean, why put us on the walls when the Sylphar are hundreds of leagues away?”
Theron shrugged. “Makes people feel safe. Teaches us discipline.”
“Does it make you feel safe?” Rook asked, half-serious.
“No,” Theron said. “The Sylphar have never come this far south. It’s just a way for our superiors to get us to do something.”
Rook grinned and nodded. They turned and headed north again, boots scraping frost from the stone.
The routine was comforting in a way. Only the weight of the armor and the spear reminded Theron that, outside this brief stretch of stone and silence, the world was moving fast toward something only a few alive understood.
Rook stopped midway along the walk and leaned on his spear. “I’ve got another question for ya, because now I’m feeling existentialistic. You ever think about the end? Of all this, I mean. What comes after the Endless War? If it ever ends, I mean.”
Theron stopped too and looked back at the mountains that embraced the city. Their outlines were vague, giant dark teeth in the night. “I think about that question almost every single day, and I still don’t know the answer.”
Rook stared out at the darkened frost-rimed fields, breath curling white in the chill.
“We aren’t exactly brimming with hope in our lifetimes, are we?” he said. “This mess has dragged on for hundreds of years. Thousands, for all I know.”
Theron poked at the wall with his spear, the rasp of metal against stone rising into the dark.
“In my experience, hope is mostly for fools.”
Rook let out a long, weary breath that hung in the air like smoke.
“You’re a proper beacon of cheer tonight, aren’t you.”
Theron laughed as they walked on. “I’m sorry, it must be the gloom of the night getting to me.”
The city was quieter at night than Theron had expected. Once, he caught the echo of a woman’s laughter from somewhere near the river that wound through the city, but otherwise it was only the creak of the gates, the shift of men on their patrols, the endless, indifferent wind. Occasionally, another pair of sentries passed them, eyes hollow with exhaustion, voices dulled to a murmur. No one spoke more than they had to in the cold and dark of the night.
On the third circuit, Rook asked, “So, you once said you signed up for service intentionally. What made ya do that?”
Theron kept his eyes on the city below. “I just wanted to protect my village.”
Rook waited, expecting more. When nothing came, he offered, “For me, it was a woman. Well, three. Couldn’t decide which one I’d wronged most, so I let them sort it out together. Last I heard, they all agreed I was a bastard and wanted to kill me, and that was that. Easiest decision I ever made. The army beats a mob of angry and scorned women with knives any day.”
Theron laughed. “Three, eh? What’d you do that was so bad?”
“Well,” Rook said. “I sort of promised each one that I’d marry them and take them away from their miserable lives and go see the world with me.”
Theron stopped and stared. “You what?” he started laughing again.
“Listen, a man has needs, okay? And I never thought they’d take me seriously. Turns out, each of them did. It wasn’t so bad until they each found out about each other and started conspiring against me.”
They kept walking, Theron laughing and Rook lost in his own thoughts.
“Tell me something,” Rook said on the next pass. “What are you afraid of?”
Theron hesitated. “You’re the second person to ask me that in a short while. But who says I’m afraid of anything? Are you afraid?”
“I am,” Rook said, voice softer now. “It isn’t dying. It’s what comes before. I see men every day… good ones and bad ones, who just get emptied out by the army and what it means to fight in the War. Nothing left. They turn into husks of themselves. As if they’ve already admitted that it’s hopeless and they’re dead, and it’s just a matter of time. I’m scared I’ll turn into one of them, that’s all.”
Theron didn’t know what to say to that. He looked down at his hands, the way they flexed around the haft of the spear. “I don’t think you’re that easy to empty.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Rook said, and for a moment, he sounded old.
“Hey,” Theron said, slapping him on the back. “I promise if you get all melancholy, I’ll slap you around until you’re better, alright?”
Rook smiled. “Aye, thanks for that.”
As their watch neared its end, Rook leaned against the wall and looked up at the blank sky. “Well, I sure hope the end will come. The end of all the fighting and killing. The end of all the fear of having angry northern neighbors that we’ve been fighting for so long.”
Theron stared out at the horizon. “Everything ends eventually.”
He heard the finality in his own voice, and so did Rook. For a while, neither of them spoke.
When their relief finally came, a pair of fresh-faced recruits, Theron and Rook passed off the spears and made their way down the winding stairs, boots echoing on the stone. Inside, the torches seemed less bright, the air less bitter. But neither of them felt the warmth.
At the door of the barracks, Rook paused. “You ever need to talk, Scarecrow, I’ll listen. Not well, maybe, but I’ll listen.”
Theron nodded. “Thanks Rook. And same for you.”
Rook grinned. “Let’s go get some sleep.” And wandered off to his cot.