First Blood
Chapter nineteen
Skip had night duty.
This happened periodically. Most of his responsibilities fell during the day—supplies, patrol rotations, reports, meetings, administrative work. But night was when Morvanna’s forces were active, and every few weeks he took command of the night watch himself.
Even when he was on a daytime schedule and theoretically sleeping after sunset, everyone understood that a major incursion would bring the High Commander running.
Part of it was practical. Part of it was morale.
Skip believed the soldiers standing on the walls should occasionally see their commander standing beside them. He had explained it to me once in the war room, in the straightforward way he reserved for things that mattered.
“A commander who never stands the watch eventually becomes a commander whose soldiers notice he never stood it.”
In Ely, where people trusted each other with their lives every night, that difference mattered.
I respected this about him. I also found it, on the nights it happened, extremely inconvenient.
I had tried to sleep. The bed was warm, and the fire was Skip’s work, and the room held the heat correctly. None of this was sufficient.
His alertness arrived at steady intervals. I felt him on watch, attention moving intensely along the wall.
His alertness made sleep nearly impossible. I tried taking moonroot, but even that could only quiet my body. It could not soften the hard, bright edge of Skip’s vigilance.
I got up.
I dressed in the leather, the outfit that fit now, with the shoulder guards at the correct width and the body pulling taut across muscle in a way it had not in the fall.
Over it, I pulled on a heavy wool surcoat lined at the collar and cuffs with fur, its weight settling warmly around me without restricting movement.
I laced the boots. I set the sword at my belt and the hunter’s hook beside it.
I went for a walk.
The fortress at night was a different place from the fortress in the day.
Quieter, though not entirely silent. The watch changed at the walls.
The night kitchen remained open, producing a reduced version of its daytime meals for soldiers coming on and off rotation, while the low voices of people whose jobs existed in the dark carried through the corridors.
I took the stairs to the eastern wall.
***
The watchtower at the far eastern end of the wall was the highest point in the outpost, raised above the place where the land began its descent into the valley.
Behind us, the villages stood on higher ground, safely beyond the line.
From the tower, they were visible in the dark as clusters of firelight scattered across the uplands.
The light from inside reached the landing before I did. Two guards were at the observation post, their attention on the darkness beyond the wall. And leaning against the far rail, her dark hair loose and her breath visible in the cold air, was Varia.
She noticed me when I came up the stairs.
She did not look surprised.
“I could not sleep,” I said.
“I know,” she said.
“Scipio has the watch. The bond makes you alert when he is alert.”
She said it matter-of-factly. Claiming bonds were ordinary knowledge to her, including their less convenient practical effects.
I stood beside her at the rail and looked out at the dark.
The valley was white and still, its snow-covered floor undisturbed beneath the night sky.
The Zhaduun Mountains rose beyond it in jagged layers of dark stone, their peaks cutting into the stars.
At the summit of the highest mountain, Druvenfall stood like a crown of blades.
Narrow windows burned red along its towers, too vivid and too steady to resemble ordinary fire, as though the mountain itself had opened its eyes.
Below, where the snow gave way to the dark line of the forest, nothing moved.
I turned from the valley toward the uplands behind the fortress. Thin columns of smoke rose from the village chimneys—steady, vertical, undisturbed. Each one was a signal of ordinary life continuing. From this distance, they all looked at peace.
I watched the columns of smoke for a long time. They rose from hearth fires burning in the dark, from homes where families slept in the knowledge that the outpost line stood between them and the mountains.
I thought about Varia growing up in a village like one of those, learning from childhood that the smoke from her chimney could be seen from an outpost built to hold back the dark. She had grown up knowing what stood beyond the line. I had only just begun to understand it.
We stood in companionable quiet for a while.
It was one of the things I had come to value most about Varia.
Her silence carried no obligation. It did not ask to be filled.
It had none of the strained texture of avoidance or discomfort.
It was the silence of someone who had nothing to say and no need to pretend otherwise.
Then one of the guards said, “There.”
His voice was low and level.
He pointed toward the treeline, at a gap in the trees approximately four hundred meters out from the wall.
I looked. I could see them.
Three figures moved across the snow in a loose line, dark against the white valley. At that distance, I could not make out faces or individual features, only the narrow silhouettes and the measured consistency of their pace.
None of them stumbled or adjusted for the uneven ground.
“Command layer,” Varia said quietly, beside me.
“How do you know from this distance?”
“The armor.” She pointed.
I looked again and saw the moonlight catching hard, regular edges where loose cloth should have moved. Varia was right.
“Fitted black plate. We do not see the command layer on intercepts. They do not come out for small operations.”
They were not moving toward Ely. Their path angled across the valley toward the uplands behind the line, where the village hearths still burned in the dark.
Whatever those three were doing, it wasn't reconnaissance. They were going to turn a village.
She was already turning from the rail. She moved to the stairs with focus.
“Rouse the Vanguard,” she said to one of the guards. “Ten riders. Fully armed. Two minutes.”
The Vanguard was Ely’s elite mounted response unit.
The guard was already moving.
I followed Varia down the stairs.
***
Varia was at the weapons rack outside the barracks when I reached her, selecting what she needed. By the time I closed the distance, she was already strapping on her armor, the motion practiced and unhesitating.
“I am coming,” I said.
“No,” she said emphatically.
“Varia…”
“No.”
She said it with the settled authority of a lieutenant who had been making decisions about garrison safety for four years.
“This is not a training yard exercise. This is the command layer. These are not recently turned farmers. They are old and fast and tactically intelligent, and Scipio would not forgive me if I brought you out there and something happened.”
“Skip is not here,” I said.
“Scipio is always here,” she said. “He will know what happened tonight regardless of whether he is standing in this courtyard.”
“I am not asking for his permission,” I said. “Or yours. I am telling you I am coming.”
Varia lifted one eyebrow and regarded me in silence, her mouth tightening at one corner.
“You told me I was ready for this,” I said.
“I told you that you were a warrior,” she replied. “That does not mean you are invincible. Warriors die in open fields at night. I have buried enough of them.”
“I will stay behind the formation. I will not engage unless I have to. If it goes wrong, I will get back to the wall. I have the sword and the hook and four months of your training and the analytical framework you have been telling me is an asset. Let me use it.”
The soldiers were assembling in the courtyard behind me. Ten of them, mounted and armed, breath visible in the cold air, waiting in focused quiet.
Varia held my gaze. Behind us, the soldiers were mounting. She had perhaps thirty seconds to continue arguing, and we both knew I was not going to spend those thirty seconds changing my mind. She looked toward the gate, then back at me.
I watched the calculation move across her face. She was my friend, which made her want to keep me behind the wall. She also knew exactly what I was capable of. And somewhere beyond the courtyard, Skip was going to be furious with both of us.
“Behind the formation,” she said at last. Then, sharper, “Armor. Now.”
I moved.
“You do not engage unless they come to you,” she continued as I reached for the straps. “If one comes to you directly, the hook. Understood?”
“Understood,” I said.
She held my gaze for one more moment.
“Get your armor on and mount your horse,” she said. “Keep your helmet on. They know who you are.”
They know who you are. A cold knot tightened in my stomach. I could still see the red eyes in the ruins speaking to me.
I shook it off.
I moved immediately.
The armor was where I had left it—maintained, ordered, ready. I stripped off the surcoat, set the plates over the leather, and pulled the wool back on once the last buckle was secure.
I had done this before. Repeatedly. In daylight. In controlled conditions. Without urgency.
Now there was urgency.
The weight settled onto me differently this time. Real. Functional. Intended. Ready.
I checked my range of motion once and reached for my weapons.
“Get your horse,” Varia said.
***
We rode out in formation through the eastern gate, ten soldiers and Varia and me, the horses moving through the snow with the quiet of animals that had done this before.
The cold hit differently outside the walls.
This wasn’t a contained training yard. This was the open cold of the valley, the wind moving freely across the snow without anything to interrupt it.