Kolveth
Chapter eighteen
Iwoke before Skip that morning, which was unusual.
He was usually gone before I fully surfaced. His day as High Commander often began in darkness, while I lingered in the last soft warmth of sleep, wrapped in the afterglow of a body that had been very thoroughly tended the night before.
For once, he was still beside me, his breathing slow and steady. I slipped from the bed without a sound and crossed to the window, not bothering with clothes.
We always slept that way. Sleeping nude was comfortable, but more than that, it meant there were no barriers when we reached for each other in the middle of the night, half-awake and wanting.
Beyond the glass, the snow fell in soft, endless sheets.
The Zhaduun Mountains were washed white beneath a dull gray sky. They were usually dark and forbidding. Now, softened by snow, they looked almost serene.
Inside, the fire roared, filling the room with heat. It felt almost unreal to stand there naked before a winter world, untouched by the cold, my skin still warm from the fire and the lingering comfort of the night.
Outside: the first snowfall of winter. Inside: the fire he had tended, still burning.
It was now Kolveth, the twelfth month of the Elven calendar. Caen had explained the system when I had been in this world for only a month. That felt like another lifetime.
The calendar comprised twelve months of thirty days each. Three hundred and sixty days in total. The names came from the Elves’ ancient tongue and predated the Great Unification that followed the last great war. I memorized them immediately; imprecision irritated me.
There was a clean elegance to it. Every month exactly thirty days. No stunted Februaries, no leap years, no uneven alternation between thirty-day and thirty-one-day months. Just symmetry. Consistent, orderly, perfect.
I had arrived in the month of Telvorn, which was just before autumn. Now, it was Kolveth. Four months gone. One hundred and twenty days.
And every night, without exception, winter waited on the other side of the wall while we ended the evening sweaty and entirely unconcerned with the temperature outside.
The training yard was white. So were the walls. Everything lay covered, silent, and still.
On Earth, I had always thought there was something beautiful about the morning after a snowfall. Snow muffled the world overnight, swallowing the ordinary sounds of human life until everything became quiet in a way it never was otherwise.
The beauty of it. The stillness.
I had always loved the sense that the world had reset, temporarily, to a cleaner and more honest state.
The problem, in Philadelphia, was that it lasted approximately two hours.
The plows arrived. The cars started. The salt trucks came through with their grinding industrial persistence.
Within an hour, the white was gray, and the gray was brown, and the brown was a miserable slush.
The silence was gone before you had finished appreciating it, replaced by the noise of a world that did not believe in silence.
Here, the silence held.
There were no cars in Mytharo. There were no plows, no salt trucks, no engines of any kind converting the clean white into brown municipal misery. The snow lay where it had fallen, and the world was quiet.
The only sounds were the distant creak of leather and the shuffle of boots as the watch changed on the walls. Beyond the walls lay the deep silence of a place that had never once been crossed by a combustion engine.
I stood at the window for a long time. Behind me, Skip slept on. The ring on my finger glowed. Quiet, warm gold against the gray morning light.
Four months.
Long enough that this no longer felt like a place I had arrived in. Long enough that it felt like somewhere I belonged.
***
My routine in Mytharo had settled into place somewhere near the end of my first month and had not required revision since.
Skip was gone before dawn.
He always kissed my forehead before he left. I was always approximately seventy percent asleep when he did it. Through the bond came his familiar morning warmth, present and certain and already occupied with eleven things that needed to be done before sunrise.
I slept another hour. This was my one remaining civilian habit, and I was not giving it up.
When I dressed for training, the clothes fit differently than they had four months ago.
The trousers no longer sagged at the hips, and the tunic pulled more closely across my shoulders and arms. Varia’s drills had put muscle where there had mostly been stubbornness before.
I was still small, but no longer slight in quite the same way.
The outfit that had once made me look like a child borrowing a soldier’s clothes now looked as though it belonged to me.
After I dressed, I went to breakfast in the mess hall, usually with Flavia.
The rest of the soldiers had grown more comfortable around me. Months earlier, they had fallen silent whenever I entered the mess hall. By Kolveth, they spoke to me. Around me. As they did with each other. No adjustment. No carefulness.
In that context, it was the highest compliment available, and I had not missed it.
The food was still extraordinary: dense bread warm from the ovens, salted meat, thick pottage ladled from a communal pot, hard cheese, and the sharp bite of pickled vegetables.
Every mouthful tasted vivid and unmistakably itself.
Perhaps that was because the food had been made to be eaten, rather than preserved.
It was simple, unaltered, and entirely unapologetic.
After breakfast: Varia.
Training every morning, regardless of weather. Rain, wind, cold, and now apparently snow.
The war room came at midday. Over four months, it had become one of the most engrossing parts of my day.
Skip had given me a formal role that had gradually expanded from pattern recognition into strategic consultation, which was the most academically honest description of what I was doing.
It resembled the analysis I had done in my doctoral program.
Except here, the room listened first. The men did not begin forming their objections while I was still speaking. They considered the idea on its own terms, and responded to what I had actually said rather than what they had expected me to say.
Cato had conceded three separate points in the last month.
I was also quietly proud that the signal system was working.
The system I had proposed months earlier had moved from theory into practice with a precision that was deeply satisfying.
The villages behind the line each had its own signal configuration.
Two fires for contact, three for a turning in progress, horn patterns for fog and darkness when visibility failed.
So far, none had gone beyond contact.
The garrison responded quickly. Forces deployed. Incursions were contained before they could escalate.
The watchtowers extended that advantage. Small bands attempting to slip through the gaps between outposts were spotted early and intercepted before they could reach the interior.
Taken together, the line was holding.
More than that, it was functioning as intended.
Morvanna’s strategy had been clear: bypass the outposts, establish footholds in the villages, and convert them into sites of expansion.
I had identified it early.
And, just as importantly, I had identified how to stop it.
The afternoons belonged to the fortress. I helped where help was needed. I worked in the infirmary when Caen required an extra pair of hands, in the stores when inventory needed attention, and on the walls when repairs were underway.
I was not a soldier. I was not pretending to be a soldier. But I was capable of identifying where work needed doing and doing it, which was, I had concluded, the only credential that actually mattered.
My life in Mytharo had more purpose than it ever had on Earth.
I had not previously understood how much of my energy on Earth had gone toward managing the gap between what I was capable of and what I was permitted to apply it to.
The gap was gone.
The energy that had gone toward managing it was now going toward everything else.
Everything else was, I noted, considerably more interesting.
***
The training yard was empty when I arrived. Snow had been swept from the central area, almost certainly by Varia. She was always there before me and had probably been working since dawn.
Winter had changed the yard. The stone looked darker in the cold, denser somehow, as though it had drawn inward against the temperature. Frost silvered the iron fittings on the weapons rack along the eastern wall, making the metal look older than it was.
The practice weapons were arranged with Varia’s usual precision. Every item sat in its proper place. Nothing was wasted or neglected.
Beyond the walls, the Zhaduun peaks rose white beneath the early light. Dark stone showed through on the steep faces where the snow had failed to catch.
Varia was at the far end of the yard, moving through a sword sequence alone.
Her dark hair hung loose beneath the winter sky, and her breath clouded the cold air.
Even after four months, the economy of her movements could still make me stop and watch.
Every motion was the minimum required for the maximum result. Nothing performed. Nothing wasted.
She looked up when I entered and assessed my clothes, then my posture.
She nodded once.
This was Varia’s version of a warm greeting. I had learned to receive it correctly.
We took the horses out first.
Velox emerged from his stall with the resigned patience of a horse who had made peace with winter and saw no reason to complain about it. He regarded the snow with the equine equivalent of professionalism and allowed me to mount without drama.
I climbed into the saddle from the left without thinking.