Beneath the starlight, Aned Heast sat on the back of a stationary cart and sewed Refuge’s insignia onto the arm of the heavy shirt he wore under his leather armour. It was his third shirt, but his final shirt. It marked the third cold camp that he had made since leaving Vaeasa. There would be another two, he suspected, before he and the others reached the camp of Refuge.
He had no complaints to make. The carts had made good time and Heast had spent most of the time talking to the soldiers who rode alongside him. He learned their names and listened to their histories. He had spent a night with Ko Dtnaa, packing and firing one of the lances. Heast’s own limited experience with the weapon meant that the pair were learning it together. But it was a simple weapon for all its brutality, one that did not require the finesse of a sword, or the targeting of a crossbow. On the second night, Dtnaa began organizing the other soldiers into small groups to learn the weapon. Watching the soldiers, Heast had to admit that the First Queen and her Eyes had chosen well. In the absence of either, he was not surprised to learn that the soldiers were fiercely loyal to the newly minted Lieutenant Lehana. In the last few days that he had ridden beside them, he had listened to them talk, had seen how they interacted with each other, and had watched as they stowed the insignia of Refuge into their packs or pushed them into their pockets. They were Ooilan soldiers, still. They were the Queen’s soldiers, not Refuge’s, not yet. When they died, they would die in the old service they believed they were in.
It was entirely likely that they would die, as well.
How many armies had been raised against the Innocent? Hundreds? There was no way to know exactly. In Sooia, generations had fallen to Aela Ren, and each time, a new rival, a new hope, had risen from the survivors. In Sooia, Heast had once met a young woman whose hands had been horribly scarred by burns. She had been the head of one such hope. But when she asked Captain Denali to ride with him into the heart of the deserts in search of Aela Ren, the Captain had told her no. He said that she should instead look to resettling her people.
Heast could not tell the First Queen’s Guard they would survive the upcoming war. They had already seen what the Innocent could do, and he would not lie to them. But he did not want any soldier to believe that she was going to die. Such thoughts made a soldier careless. Heast had seen it many times: when faced with the inevitability of death, a soldier forgot the lessons she had learned in the battles she had survived. She would take risks that she knew she should not take. It did not matter if she was part of the First Queen’s Guard, or if she was from the back alleys of Gogair. Once she decided that her death was inevitable, she would search for that moment, and in doing so, she would take others with her.
‘My grandmother always said you had fine needlework. I thought it was a metaphor for your skills with a sword.’ Anemone approached him with a tin cup of water. ‘It surprises me how literal she was.’
Heast took the cup. ‘I have probably sewn more flesh together than cloth.’
The witch eased herself onto the cart next to him. ‘I will forever think of you as a seamstress then, sir.’ In the dark, the tattoos that showed beneath her collar and wrists lent her the illusion that she was, in part, made from darkness. ‘Do you marvel at how easily they sleep around us?’
She meant Lehana and her soldiers. ‘No,’ he said.
‘Some of them could have been at Illate. Or at their parents’ houses. You would think it would make things harder.’
‘Your grandmother was in Illate as well.’ Heast set the cup down. ‘Also, you should remember that Refuge lost.’
‘It does not feel it tonight.’
No, he supposed it did not. ‘We all have moments in our life where we must redefine who we are. What the soldiers around us go through is no different to what you went through in Vaeasa.’
‘Or you after Illate.’
‘Your grandmother tells you too much.’
Anemone smiled. ‘She did not need to tell me that, Captain. I have watched the title settle on you since Maosa. It has been like watching a person pull on a shirt after winter. It fits, but it is tight. As the days wear on, as the rituals of the summer return, it fits more naturally.’
He thanked her, but was not sure that he believed her, not now. Before he left Vaeasa, he would have agreed with what Anemone said: he was becoming more the man he used to be, the man who had been the Captain of Refuge. But after Lehana had told him that Onaedo had organized the crates that they carried, he had begun to feel a strangeness about him, as if he was not entirely within control of what happened around him. It was a feeling of insignificance, unlike one he had felt before. He had felt that he was but a small part on a larger board – that was, after all, the nature of being a mercenary, and the way in which war felt to the individual – but he had before been able to see the board in its entirety. To be unable to see it, to feel as if something was being kept from him, but that he was still being pushed towards a final conflict, was not an experience he enjoyed. It was similar, Heast thought, to the games he and Samuel Orlan had played in Mireea. They had been the games of old men who knew too much and who had wanted to test what the other knew. Heast had often felt that the cartographer played the game on a different board to his, one larger than the one Heast saw, and quite often he felt that Orlan played a much more complex game than he did.
It was a thought that he could not resolve easily and, as the morning’s sun rose, he put it aside as he had done every other morning. His immediate concern remained the soldiers around him. Before any of them rode out against the Innocent, he wanted to dull the certainty of their own deaths. He did not yet know how, but he had to give them a future, had to offer them a world that did not end with the Innocent.
When they came across tracks on the fifth day from of Vaeasa, he still did not have an answer to that question.
They were close to Celp and, instead of making camp for the night, they had pushed onwards in the dark. The tracks appeared as slivers of shadows and were made by horses, more than Heast could count, but one of Lehana’s soldiers – a tall, slim black woman she called Fenna – said that it was three distinct groups, days apart. The second, she insisted, was the largest. She told him that the first and third groups were about a hundred each, but that the second was about three hundred strong, though not all were mounted. She stopped in the middle of her explanation when smoke began to drift across them from the east.
‘Break open the crates,’ Heast said. ‘The Leerans have found Refuge.’