ELLIA:
I had never seen a division of soldiers prepare to travel and it proved to be a more complicated business than I could have guessed. There were somewhere between one or two hundred of them, I was poor with numbers. Two sections flanking the outer sides rode horses, and more, a group of scouts, rode out ahead periodically. The middle was foot-men forced to march quite fast to keep pace with the trotting horses. These were divided up cleanly as well, four groups; a row of crossbowmen in each and swordsmen the rest. There were no women, no captives. The procession was nearly as wide as it was long.
At the back of the whole thing there were wagons, driven by two horses each to make good time. I could only assume they were loaded up with things like weapons, food, clothes… If Cyric had had his way, I would have been in one of them as well, but I’d refused to go any where except riding Fauna. I’d also shirked servants, handmaidens, and I’d demanded to ride up near Cyric at the front of the right column of horses—where he’d only ceased barking orders now that we were out of sight of the city.
I thought that if he weren’t afraid that I would run away, he never would have let me ride near him.
“Have we left Akadia, yet?” I asked. The land all around us was already green and golden grass. What rocks cropped up were spaced and didn’t upset the landscape. There was also a rare splashing of trees, turning brown with the autumn weather. I thought that Cyric would ignore me, blaming the rumble of hooves, wheels, and boots for his deafness, but instead he looked at me immediately.
“We left an hour ago. Are you stupid?”
It was harsh and sudden and his face showed disgust, but I found that it didn’t make me angry. He looked away and I felt trepidation, but then I forced the next words out. “You know that I’ve never been good with geography…”
This made him look at me again, but now with surprise that he couldn’t hide quickly enough. It was so incredulous though that there was nothing vulnerable about it. He could have stared forever like that and only made me feel worse and himself more invincible.
His eyes turned darker, then grazed Fauna, then fell back on me. “You’re aware I know whose horse that is. I think about its master sometimes, and the day he died. Do you remember that day, Ellia? You were upset at me.”
Despite myself, and my mission only moments ago, I felt my chest flame with anger, then despair, then hatred.
Cyric watched me a second, then snorted and turned ahead.
I become conscious of Fauna beneath me, her brown eyes soulful. I was one to believe, unquestioningly, that horses could understand human words. For this reason I put a hand against her shoulder. Her pulse beat steadily beneath her coat. I whispered an apology to her for I was not going to let Cyric’s words stop me and I did not know what he might say next.
“I know what your horse is,” I told him. There was no response—except from the horse, which flicked its ear. I quickened Fauna’s pace a little. “It’s called an ivoronsu, isn’t it? I saw one in the market district and Slark told me about it, but that one was much scarier than yours. It had a bright white mark on its face. I can barely see yours.”
Still nothing. Not even in the grip of his reigns. I hoped he wouldn’t decide to send me off and braved coming up all the way beside him. “It’s a granted animal, you know.”
He gave me an immediate glare. “What? No it’s not.”
I nodded.
“It is not. Slark’s an idiot if he told you that.”
“Slark didn’t tell me—I know for myself. What’s his name?”
“Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“Stop talking or I’m going to put you back in the wagons.”
“Why haven’t you already?” I asked.
His eyes flared; I really was a little afraid, and even his horse responded with a whinny. His brows went up in challenge. “You really want to know?” he said.
“I asked.” My voice was weak croak.
He pointed behind him. “Because there are two-hundred soldiers back there, and with your stupid dress, and the ridiculous amount of time you spent making yourself up to go travelling, I imagine one or more of them might try to have a good time. Then I’d have to kill them because they disobeyed my orders. And I don’t feel like wasting soldiers on you.”
His horse gave a grand shake. And I was glad, for it distracted me from Cyric’s glare, which might have trapped me. I gave the closest soldiers a glance. None of them seemed to be paying me a lot of attention. One or two of them had noticed Cyric’s outburst. I did feel, for the first time that I could remember, the desire to be wearing something other than a dress. Then I realized something.
“But there are female soldiers too,” I said.
His eyes went a little wide, though he didn’t look at me.
“This is Akadia,” I went on. “There are female soldiers. And they like to kiss the men and I’ll bet the soldiers don’t care for me at all when they have willing candidates.”
There was a second of background noise and the jerky trotting of our horses. Cyric looked over, his mouth actually a little bit slack, then suddenly, remarkably, gloriously, he laughed. He laughed and he was twelve again and I had tripped over my own feet. The only difference this time was in the response of his horse, or ivoronsu rather, which went absolutely wild at the laughter. It swung its head around so quickly that it startled even Fauna. Then it was craning its ear and nose back and forth in what seemed an impossible motion towards Cyric’s face. Cyric batted him away, looking dreadfully unlike an evil war-lieutenant, then the ivoronsu started shaking—in its chest and its head—with a clicking, short and successive sound that could only be described as a laugh. It made Cyric start again, which made the horse start again, and so on until I spoke.
“What’s wrong with your horse?” I said.
Cyric stopped short and seemed to realize, for the first moment since the whole ordeal had begun, that I was still there. He batted the ivoronsu away with fresh fervor, now using a name in the effort. And the name was Tosch. And I felt then, I felt more delight than I thought my heart could hold.
“I don’t know. It’s defective.” Cyric gave the ivoronsu, Tosch, one more good smack on the side of his head. “He knocks into things too. Even though he shouldn’t. They’re supposed to be able to hear well enough to keep them from it.”
“Hear? Why would that matter?”
Cyric looked at me half-distractedly, a sort of focus fell across his features and I thought I might lose him, but instead he readapted the distracted expression and looked ahead. “They can’t see. Didn’t Slark tell you?”
“They can’t see?” My tone was full of surprise. “How is he walking?”
“I already said, they’re supposed to be able to hear well enough. Plus I can guide him. Haven’t you ever seen a horse with its eyes covered for battle?”
I thought about this. I did remember once seeing a horse’s face covered, the very one Cyric was riding, in the battle of Karatel. No wonder it had had its eyes covered, if it couldn’t see anyways.
“Luffie would hate that,” I said.
Cyric didn’t reply to this. But then, he didn’t know who Luffie was, I’d of course never spoken with him about her. I could not bring myself to now. I thought only that it was a good thing she wasn’t present; for the protective chimera that would scarcely allow my mind to wander on rainy days, would certainly not approve of what I was doing now.
“What else can he do?” I asked. “Does he have abilities?”
“No. Because he’s not a granted animal.”
Tosch rolled a huff. Fauna regarded him with a look that said he made much too much noise.
“Cyric, he has smoke pouring off of him. He must be faster than other horses or you wouldn’t be riding him. And he must be strong too, strong enough to compensate for the fact that he’s blind.”
“If he’s a granted animal, then where is he from?” Cyric challenged.
I tried to think of an answer, I ended up lifting my shoulders in a shrug. “I don’t know. Where did you get him?”
He didn’t answer this.
“He is faster than other horses,” Cyric finally admitted. “And he’s not completely blind… He can see at night.”
I blinked slowly. I looked from Cyric to Tosch, an unsaid connection forming between them. I wouldn’t risk bringing it up, for Cyric had always gotten easily upset on the point of his night-blindness. “Just at night?” I asked, “or whenever it’s dark?”
“Whenever it’s dark,” he confirmed eventually. There wasn’t much to his tone.
I grasped another realization; this one I didn’t think first to keep quiet. “That’s why you named him Tosch,” I said.
The Akadian lieutenant lost all his expression completely, what little was there to begin with anyways.
I didn’t speak my meaning, for I was sure he grasped it. This horse was blind in the day, with good hearing, and good navigation in darkness. Like a bat. Like the bat Cyric had named Tosch and nursed to health so many years ago. The one he’d undoubtedly named his horse after.
Cyric looked at me. Its variety gave me the same sort of uncertainty I’d experienced just before he’d kissed me. I was out of depth in an instant, and suddenly drained. Certainly he was much more powerful than I was. Certainly all his words and looks had a greater effect on me than mine did him. This was a dangerous game I played; at the end of it I hoped to be set free, but it might turn out to be my utter destruction.
No matter what, I wouldn’t let myself hope that it could win me back my friend.
CYRIC:
I’d always thought Ellia was crazy, now I knew for sure. And that’s how I categorized her for the rest of our ride, and it made everything that much easier. I was also reminded, inevitably, that this was what seemed to happen whenever I kissed her. I supposed it was a good thing that I didn’t run around kissing all the women that asked, because I might have started mass hysteria by now.
But kissing was off the table. One thing at least she had cured me of today: I had no interest in kissing her or doing anything else of the sort.
We made camp near a large mound of grassy rock. Few trees surrounded us and the rise made a good lookout point. Since we were in Karatel, we didn’t have to worry about being seen and attacked by men, only monsters, and open fields were best for avoiding that. Torches helped too and, as was my practice when I led a division, the camp was filled with them. Then there were the horses to cage and water, meals to be cooked and portioned out, posts to be organized. The men would sleep outside; I would sleep in a tent thanks to my charge who—whether she believed it or not—required some separation from the rest of the men. Whether there were women here or not, they were too few, and too inferior to Ellia to matter much.
It was fall and we were not in the desert anymore so the air was rightly cold. I took a seat by the largest bonfire, close to the center of the camp, and most the food and men. I couldn't have predicted—but probably should have—that Ellia would come to sit beside me. I'd left her in our tent with a guard. She'd changed at least, into what could only have been scraps of soldiers uniforms, but she'd fitted and wrapped them so that they more closely resembled riding clothes, albeit foreign ones. I snorted because it did little good with her face still what it was, in fact I thought it might have made it worse.
A soldier offered her a plate of food. She waved it off politely, no doubt because I'd already sent her one. I had my own in front of me and ate with great appetite.
"Pardon, Lieutenant," one of the soldiers beside me said. Because of the set-up, we were all close around the fire. Most of the men talked merrily enough while they ate, but at this one’s words and with my attention, they began to quiet. "I'm from the west, Birmha,” he said, “and I've never been to the Ghaundian Crag. I've heard that you fought there before. I was wondering, can you really see the Geryon Peaks?"
This should have been a normal enough question, and the rapt attention from the soldiers normal enough as well, but Ellia's eyes were on me, so large and curious waiting for my response, that I found it affronting.
"You'll see the peaks tomorrow afternoon, before we even reach the border."
"Will there be wyverns?"
"You'll be fighting with wyverns," I said, smirking at him.
A few men broke off into wyvern drinking songs. Which there indeed were—drinking songs for everything in Akadia.
"We're to fight with goblins, too?" another asked. This one was obviously from the far west, his tone reverential.
Not that I wasn't always treated with great regard, but there was certainly something to be said about a change in attitude when going off to war. Soldiers tended to start treating their leader as if he were a sort of immortal, or at least this was what always happened to me. I supposed it went a long way that I had trained most these men myself.
"Are you worried about that?" I replied by way of answer.
"I've heard stories they turn on their own in battle."
I laughed outright. "I wouldn't put it past them, but you know they come to only about here—" I held my hand a few feet of the ground. "You can blow them over if you like."
Most the group chuckled.
"What about the ones on wyverns?" a man asked. "What if the wyverns should get hungry and there are no enemies around?"
This, certainly, wasn't the first time I'd heard that question. "You want to know the secret to killing wyverns?" I said. The soldiers looked eager, the youngest of them nodded. "Get right in front of them. They can't see anything in front of them, I suppose for some reason to do with the way their eyes work, or maybe the size of their mouths."
The soldiers made remarks of astonishment.
"Just don't try it if you're on the ground and they're in the air. They can see straight from a distance. But more often than not, they land before attacking, especially if it’s an ally they're after."
"So you have witnessed them turn?" a soldier said.
I regarded him with a steady look. "Stinkin' greedy goblins? Sure as the sun in Akadia and twice that likely if you’re carrying loot.”
This drew some laughs, some cries of agreement on the greed of goblins, and some anxious mutters. "Don't worry," I told them, "We rarely fight in the same groups, and there are always enough of us to dissuade revolt. Just don't go wandering off—or running close to a wyvern's jaws should you get slashed up. And remember you aren't fighting for the goblins, you're fighting for Akadia. Given the choice, kill them before letting them harm you."
There were a fair number of nods to this. The men fell back to talking, many of them about my aptitude and accomplishments. And I felt content for a moment, until I looked at Ellia. I was beginning to grow tired of that face she kept giving me. Like the face she made when I left her. Did she not see that there were men around—a fair number of them staring at her—and that she couldn't have been making a more girlish, fanciful expression?
I stood up, then said goodnight to the men and left the fire. I didn't care enough at this point to see to Ellia's safety; not that it mattered, she was quickly following behind me. And this had the happy side effect of earning me the loudest succession of hoots and whistles that I had ever expected or wanted within my lifetime.
I should have expected it, because as far as the men were concerned it was the only reason Ellia was present.
Besides Molec, Lox had told no one about our planned jaunt to Echren. It ran too great a risk that the Cirali Warriors would get word and intercept us if more found out. As it was, they might hear she was in Ghaund, but of course she wouldn't be. I was wishing, about now that I'd told the whole of Akadia where we were going, so that the Warriors might come and find her and take her away. Then I could give up this constellation animal business and go to war with these men, relying on our own strength to win, not the strength of animals.
But this was just my stupid idea of what would work, and my stupid ideas didn't win wars, Lox's much more brilliant ones did. So I suffered hollers and sent the guards watching the tent away so that the playacting could stop at the door.
The tent was under an outcropping formed by the large mound. Inside, it was cramped; the size of my bed, with a space of maybe four feet around three edges, a trunk of my things in one corner with candles on top. The walls were golden canvas, doubly-thick. Blankets and pillows had been scattered to an extent that the soldiers must have expected we'd be utilizing every corner, and also probably meant there were a good deal too many men short of covers tonight.
In my consideration of the room, I'd stopped, and the space was such—or rather Ellia was such—that she plowed right into me coming inside. I caught her shoulders to straighten her before she got too close, and meant not to look at her again, but then I noticed the shade of her face. It was so red that the straps of Akadian-red cloth in her clothes looked pale.
I laughed at her while the calls trailed off outside.
"This is an atrocity,” she said, jerking her arm away and glaring back at the exit. "I'm a princess, not a…" she moved her gaze to me "I should have expected this sort of treatment from Akadia."
"You could help to dissuade them. Stop riding your horse so close to mine. Stop staring at me." This was the first time I'd said anything about her strange behavior, or her stares, and though I'd delivered the lines lightly, they made me feel anything but.
"All right, I've had enough,” she hissed. “I've followed you to the middle of nowhere without any idea why. Now tell me why I've come."
"As if you didn't want to leave Akadia."
"This may come as a shock to you, Cyric, but what I want isn't the basis for what I decide to do. Tell me why I'm here."
"You heard the soldiers," I said thickly. I sat down on the bed, facing away from her. The quickest way out of this argument would be to upset her principles. Then she would be angry with me and anger I could manage. Anything, so long as she stopped talking as if we were back in Shaundakul.
She grew quiet as I removed my boots and I thought it must have worked. Then I thought of something else. Lox, and what he had told me about using what power I had over her to get her to join Akadia. Here I was doing the opposite, and what was more, if I didn't retain some hold on her, I was going to have a time of it in Echren.
In considering how to handle this, I found my mind wondering (off on its own, not by my order) what it would be like if Ellia were to join Akadia. I couldn't even imagine. What? She would stop sneering at soldiers and start winning them over for me like Veera did? Flirt with the king just enough to make him jealous of his lieutenant? Wear the tighter, lower, and more-overly see-through dresses of Akadia instead of her Shaundakulian ones, or her hair down long and curly instead braiding it? And would she send me off to battles hoping that I would win? Or would she demand to come just so she didn't have to leave me like we were now? And if we didn't spend our time fighting about right and wrong all the time, if she would just be bad if she thought it was so bad to be Akadian, what would we do instead?
By the time I realized which way was up and which was down again, Ellia was behind me, getting into the bed, with much whimpering and sniffling.
I turned around, putting one hand flat on the center of the mattress and leaning on my arm while I spoke to her.
"You're not going to Ghaund at all. I'm taking you north to Echren. They’re our allies and they've asked to meet with you."
She was turned away from me. There was one deep sniffle, then she looked my way. "To Echren? I don’t even know that place."
"No, I'm sure you do. You just need the right association."
She shifted her body a little more, something eager in her glance.
"They're the country that owns the vermillion birds as its granted animal."
She jerked up suddenly, sitting full upright. "Vermillion birds?"
I nodded.
"You mean the fire birds?"
I nodded again, over my shoulder.
She started to smile, then did a poor job of hiding it to glare at me. "You'll try and use me to make them help you."
"I already said, they're our allies. They mean to help us no matter what."
"Do they know about the war?" she asked.
Leave it to Ellia to buy my made-up story without suspicion, but force it to intricacy with her many questions.
"They've already joined our side of it,” I answered.
This made her pout considerably. I could see her visions of sweet little bright-red pigeons popping into giant fiery monsters.
"I don't want to go see Akadia's allies," she said.
"Come on, you'll like it better than Akadia. And it’s not so bad, the idea of travelling for a few days?" I tried to sound convincing, thinking less of what I was doing and more of what I had been a moment ago.
Her eyes went to mine then and they seemed to start swimming around or rippling, even though they weren't wet. Her brows were narrowed slightly. "I think that I will understand you at times, Cyric," she said mechanically, "For so long it was all I tried to do to understand you. Then I hated you and I forced myself never to think of why you'd done all that you had. When I heard you talking with the soldiers tonight, I thought despite myself that there was something good in what you were saying and doing. And I thought you were very good at it. They think highly of you, Cyric. Maybe some for the wrong reasons, but many of these men think much of you because you're brave, and because you understand them, and because you fight hard in battle." She paused for a moment, only to move her gaze away. "But this is who you've always been. And it wasn't until you came here that you were ever treated this way. I can't bear to think it, Cyric, but I can't help but imagine that this must be part of the reason you joined Akadia. I feel shame for my country, and myself, because I did not do more. And I don't know how I'll bear it if you tell me it was Shaundakul that put you on this path." She lifted wet eyes to me, but there was nothing helpless in them. "I have loved Shaundakul, Cyric. But I think that I have loved you just as much, and I don't know how I will choose if the both of you are enemies."
I don't know how long I just stared at her. If I'd thought I'd lost my head a minute ago it was nothing in comparison to this. I really felt as if I was back in Uldin Keep, watching her cry for my father and not understanding why she was, or why she did anything the way she did, but seeking it out anyways, and letting it do whatever miraculous thing it did to make nothing else matter. Only, I didn't want things not to matter anymore, things were good for me. I had everything. She was going to ruin it. She was going to ruin me. I'd spent too much time convincing myself that she couldn't affect me, clearly she could, what I needed to do was figure out a way to stop her. I couldn't let her control me, I couldn't even begin to think what that would mean.
"You don't know about love, Ellia," I told her, "And you don't know what you're saying."
She made no reply. It was the worst thing she could have done. I wished that she would argue with me. I thought to add more, but could think of nothing that made any sense or even sounded like it did. I looked away from her. And I felt too tired to move, to do anything but lie down and go to sleep, but I moved. I put my boots back on, then I stood, and I left the tent. I walked around to the backside of it, where I would not be seen by any soldiers—not that I cared much about that at this point. Then I sat down. Then I put my hands on my head and tried to think of a way to preserve myself.