Refuge left Celp in a line defined by smoke and exhaustion. It took a day to leave the burned land and return to where they had left the carts.
After they made camp – picket lines for the horses, saddles removed, soot rubbed from their coats, food and water for each and for the soldiers, tents for the wounded – Heast set a small guard and let the rest of Refuge find patches of ground to sleep on. The soldiers from Maosa did so with rolls and blankets that they borrowed. They had left Celp with nothing. They slept in the smoke-stained clothes they wore beneath their armour and slept with their swords close. He didn’t blame them: a hundred and forty-three of Refuge’s soldiers had died in the burning ruins of Celp. Another half-dozen would die from their wounds, another dozen would not fight again. The numbers hurt Heast, but he did not deny it. He could not. He had lost just under half of his force in Celp: one hundred and fifty-three of the soldiers who had left Maosa walked out of the city. They did so beside soldiers who had been the First Queen’s Guard, who had been trained to hold a sword by some of the finest instructors, and who wore armour none of Refuge would have been able to afford, but they walked out as equals. Lehana ensured that. She demonstrated no favouritism, and any familiarity she showed with the soldiers she had known for years, she made sure to share with the soldiers from Maosa. When she told Heast of her own losses, she said that ‘three soldiers’ died in the battle and named them. She made no mention of the First Queen, of ethnicity, of anything that would begin to build a divide between the two groups.
‘Captain.’ Kye Taaira’s clothes were stained so heavily with soot that the hilt of his old sword appeared coloured by it as well, though Heast knew it was not. ‘The prisoner is awake,’ the other man said. ‘He asked to speak to you.’
‘Has Anemone seen him?’
‘Briefly,’ Taaira replied. ‘She doesn’t believe he will last until morning. I am surprised he survived the ride here.’
‘Gje Dural was born stubborn.’
The Leeran soldier had been found at the edge of Celp. He had been crawling with his hands over the blackened stones, trying to make his way into the burned landscape that lay in front of him in an awful premonition. An arrow had pierced his right leg and shattered the bone, but it was the fire that had done most of the damage to him. Around the blackened arrow, his clothes had melted into his skin, up to his waist, as if he had been dipped into burning liquid, and then removed.
He had not recognized the Captain of Refuge. Dural had been crawling mostly on instinct, and when one of the soldiers from Refuge bent down to lift him on Heast’s command, he thought her one of his own. He whispered thanks, whispered that their god hated them.
Dural lay beneath the dark night sky, no tent roof above him, and no blanket beneath him. The arrow in his leg was broken against the wound and he had been cleaned, revealing the burns that ran up his chest and neck, breaking apart a tattoo of a whole sun before reaching his face. He had been a nondescript man before, a man whose face slid easily out of memory, who worked in the background of camps and kept order, a captain’s best asset.
But no more.
‘Has he said much?’ Heast asked Lehana as he approached.
‘No.’ She sat on a fallen log behind the burned man, her bastard sword laid against it. On her lap she held one of her shirts, a needle and a half-sewn insignia of Refuge. ‘He asked for water, and whose command I was under, nothing more.’
‘She told me Aned Heast.’ Dural’s voice was rough, filled with pain. ‘I half expected it to be Bueralan Le.’
‘I haven’t seen him for a long time. He could very well be dead.’
‘I doubt it. Rats like him don’t die.’
Heast came over to the man, looked down at him, and met his brown eyes. ‘I have seen a lot of things in my time, Lieutenant.’
‘Nothing like this.’ He grimaced. ‘Is the General dead?’
‘Yes.’
‘She said he’d die.’
‘Your god?’
‘Se’Saera.’ His right hand spasmed, almost forming a fist. ‘What kind of god tortures a man with the knowledge he’ll die for years? Who tells him he’ll be glorious, until he – he fails. Until she orders his soldiers to douse themselves in oil to feed her flames.’
‘Why would your god give you that order?’ Across from him, Taaira asked the question, not with his customary tone of respect, but with a barely concealed anger Heast had not heard before.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ He coughed again, the force running through his pain-racked body. ‘I don’t know,’ he repeated. ‘She pulled most of us back to Ranan. Gave the order to retreat a week or so after she pulled back those monsters she made. But the General – she told him to ride to Celp. She told him he would die there. But if she knew that, why send him?’ His rough voice broke. ‘You tell me, Captain, why you’d send a man you knew was going to die to the battle he’d die in.’
Heast could not understand it. ‘A god is not like us,’ he said. ‘Surely that has become evident to you?’
‘She – yeah, yeah. It . . . the things we did. The things she asked us to do.’ He fell silent and closed his eyes. His chest still moved, however. ‘He was a teacher,’ Dural said, finally. ‘The General. Waalstan. He was a teacher in Ranan. He taught children language. How to write. He had never been a soldier. I don’t know if he was a good teacher. I never had kids, but he – she made him different. When she began to speak to us. All of us. When the first priests began to come out. When they started to speak against the old king. She awoke something in him. I thought it was a gift, at first, but now I think maybe she awoke a madness in him. He would do what she said, but he would forget things. He would wake in the morning and you would think he might be horrified by what he had done. But he never – he never questioned her. He was always loyal. Even when she told him to order everyone to douse themselves in oil. To set themselves alight. A lot of us didn’t want to do that. We – I mean, it wasn’t disloyalty. It was fear. It was – who sets themselves alight, Captain?’
‘You didn’t,’ Heast said gently. ‘Why didn’t you?’
‘My faith was not . . . not that strong.’ Dural closed his eyes. ‘Waalstan told us to be strong, but not even he could convince all of us. We would fight for him, but – but to set yourself on fire? Some of them died – the screams.’ His hand spasmed again. ‘I thought she loved us, Captain. Until then, I thought our god preferred us over everyone. I felt her love inside me. It was guiding, but – but when she told us to set ourselves on fire, how can that be love? You burn a man if you hate him. That’s what you do. You burn a man because you hate him.’ His breath expelled so loudly that Heast half expected it to be filled with smoke. ‘What kind of god does that?’
‘One we don’t need.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You get some rest, Dural,’ Heast said. ‘You think of anything else, you tell it to me, or to anyone else. Don’t hold it in.’
‘She keeps the dead,’ he muttered. ‘She’ll find me. She’ll . . .’
He didn’t finish his sentence. Instead, the soldier stared up into the night sky, into the stars and moon and darkness, where whatever thought he had extended itself beyond the ears of those who stood around him, carried by lips that moved silently.