1.

 

After two days of fighting, a sense of loss had grown in Ayae.

It was difficult to explain. In the lull between attacks on the Spine, she tried to reason it through. She stared across the broken ground from the stone wall, the shattered soil littered with bodies and, at the end, three huge catapults, half sunk into the ground. It was not a scene she felt was familiar with her home: it felt like an obscenity, an artist’s work intended to frighten and a horrifying warning for a choice she had to make in life. Every day a new element emerged. On the first day, unable to bring their remaining siege engines onto the field, the Leeran general had ordered boulders thrown to litter the approach and provide solid cover for his soldiers. It had proved a mixed success, and those who made it to the stone wall did so with heavy casualties, only to be driven back into the field.

The general and his soldiers must have expected that, and today green-and-white the Leeran flag had begun to emerge in the killing field, planted by those who had begun to establish small defensive positions behind stone.

None of that explained Ayae’s sense of loss.

Nor was it drawn from any person around her. The grief that she felt from Illaan’s death was different, personal, and as others died around her, abstract.

She had seen his corpse once, out the back of the tent hospital, and she had barely been able to recognize him. It was not just damage that had been done to his body, but the stillness, the emptiness of his remains. The man she had loved was, now, truly gone, an acknowledgment that struck her deeply when she walked back into the hospital, where the sick and dying lay. Though the real hospital had been cleared no injured soldier had felt comfortable entering it, so Reila had ordered makeshift series of tents strung up outside. The block itself looked like a series of giant, white sails, and she had heard a man say that if a strong wind came along, it would lift the city from the ground and allow them all to float to Yeflam in safety.

Zaifyr had been laid in a private corner of Reila’s makeshift office. When Ayae first visited him, she had found the elderly healer sitting by his side, her narrow fingers tracing his left arm.

“I cannot explain why he does not wake up,” she said quietly as Ayae slipped into the fabric chair across from her. “He has no signs of illness. There are no breaks, no welts, no burns, nothing. In comparison, a man and a woman who came in today show signs of rot in their bones. It is similar to the rot that was in those who died in the hospital. A rot that he is without any sign of. Yet here he lies.”

She had said nothing.

“I need to work on a serum. An antidote. On something to help those people.” Next to her hand was a syringe and three vials. “Do you think he would let me take his blood to help with that?”

“I do not know.”

“Do you agree?”

She was taken aback by the question. “Me?”

“Who else can speak for him at this moment?”

She said yes, he would agree, even though she was not sure. She had no idea what would come from it, but she could see little else that could be done and rightly feared that if an outbreak spread, such as was in the hospital, they would all be in a dire situation. As the afternoon’s sun began to set on the second day of fighting, her gaze drifted over the standards on the field, letting her sight settle on the movements around, a glint of steel. Tonight, tomorrow, any one of the people out there could die. It would happen easily. It could happen as it had done so earlier today, with archers picking the movements first, their arrows hitting shields and limbs, until the ladders hit the stone blocks and the Leeran soldiers began to climb. To climb into a wall of shields and swords. To be thrust back to the dirt at the base of the Spine, blood soaking into—

“Bring back memories?”

Meina.

“Not as much as it did before. I see less of Sooia every hour, and more of Mireea,” Ayae said. “You?”

The mercenary leaned against the wall. “I never believed that idea that all battlefields were the same. Some of it is all familiar. The smell of the dead. The flies. The crying. None of that is new. But each city has its own scars that make it unique.”

She pointed to the killing field, to the siege engines. “Especially with Heast’s plan.”

“It certainly will make sure the Leerans remember him, if not the rest of us.”

In contrast to her words, Steel had performed well over the last two days. They had held their section of the Spine with the lowest losses of any company along its length. Word had it that the Mireean Guards in Meina’s charge had already asked Heast if they could work under her command until the end of the siege.

It was easy to see why. The shields the mercenaries had used to escape the mill had also come to the wall and created a second terrifying and mobile defense that parted to reveal swords and pikes. So far it had broken only once, during the morning’s surge over the wall: a dozen soldiers had thrown themselves at the shields, using their combined weight to crash through, though it had cost all their lives. Ayae—further down—had heard Bael’s shout and turned to see the collapse just as he charged into the break, three soldiers behind him. For a moment the line of shields looked as if it threatened to break: it flexed and curled, soldiers shuffling, stringing the line out while they adjusted their position, but it quickly strengthened to cover where it had been broken. Bael formed the new center, bloody and roaring, his huge axe in one hand and the fallen shield in the other—the latter as deadly as the former.

Once the breach was driven back, it was revealed that only one of Steel had died. Meina’s uncle had saved the others who had fallen beneath the push, though two had gone to the hospital.

“It sounds melancholy considering our current state,” Meina said, as if guessing the other woman’s thoughts. “I don’t mean it quite that way, though. You become very matter-of-fact about the dead after a while. You start to treat them like a sword, in that you have favorites that you keep close and you try your best not to get too attached when one breaks.”

“Try to rationalize it when it does?”

“No, don’t do that. Don’t make excuses. My father always said that justification always made a mercenary weak. If it breaks, if you lose it, accept it. Take responsibility for it.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Some days.” She shrugged. “We have been requested by Lady Wagan, the two of us.”

“What for?”

“I was not told, but since more people are showing up sick at the hospital and neither Keeper has been seen attending, we can let our imaginations go wild.”