8
Megs pushed herself as hard as she could each day, gradually getting stronger, but it still took almost a week before she could walk an entire mile on her own without stopping or leaning on Linna for support, and it took another few days after that before she could lift a sword higher than her chest without excruciating pain. Megs despaired at how weak she’d become, wholly dependent upon Linna’s care, unable to defend herself or anyone else.
But on the other hand, what did it matter anymore? There was no one left to defend.
“Why are you even here?” Megs asked the girl one day, after exhausting herself through the simple act of refilling both their water skins and scrubbing her undergarments clean in the brook.
Linna, who had just come back from checking the snares she set each night and carrying a bounty of a rabbit and two tree martens on a line across her chest like a sash, furrowed her brow as though confused by the question.
So Megs clarified. “When I first met you, you told me that you would only stay in our camp a night or two, because you had some important business to the east that called you. Yet here you are.” She swept an arm out to indicate their primitive camp, where the lean-to had grown into a well-thatched hut for two, and where the racks of drying rabbit pelts, smoked meat strips, and worn river rocks that served as seats all gave the place a sense of semi-permanence. “Your injury healed long ago; my own injury is mostly healed, too. So why aren’t you gone?”
She sounded so angry, so accusatory. Megs knew it, but she didn’t care. It was hard to make herself care about much of anything these days, least of all social niceties.
Linna stared at Megs a moment, then pulled off her sash of rodent carcasses. She sat on one of the river stones and pulled out her rune-marked dagger to start skinning the rabbit, responding to Megs without lifting her eyes. “You would have preferred I left you here, on your own?”
Something about Linna’s characteristically patient tone, soft and kind and without a trace of condescension, caused Megs to deflate somewhat.
Linna wasn’t the one Megs was frustrated with, not really. Megs was frustrated with her own body, still so weak despite time and rest and Linna’s care.
“I didn’t mean to snap at you like that.” Megs tried to speak as gently as Linna always did, but it was a crude imitation at best. She took a breath. “I’m just… I’m curious why you’ve stuck around for me, a stranger. When we first met, you seemed to be in a hurry to continue your journey.”
Even as she said it, Megs realized she’d never actually asked Linna what her destination was, or why she was headed there. The only clue to that mystery Linna had volunteered was “east,” and since their initial meeting, Megs had been so consumed by her own inner battles of grief and recovery that she hadn’t thought to ask Linna where to the “east” she meant to go. After all, they were already as far east as anyone in the Empire ever went. Megs had lived in the East all her life, yet even she only had a vague sense that other lands, maybe even other empires, lay on the other side of those mountains. Every map she’d ever seen ended with the mountain range on the right-hand side, as though the Sunrise Mountains were the outer edges of the world. It certainly felt like the outer edges of the world was where she’d been living the last four years.
Linna at last lifted her face to meet Megs’s gaze. “Do you honestly believe I would just leave you like this?”
“I don’t need…” Megs started, but she stopped herself before she could say I don’t need help anymore, because it was obvious that she did. “You don’t even know me,” she said instead. “And you have somewhere to be.”
Linna studied Megs for a moment before turning back to her rabbit. “I don’t know what it’s like where you’re from, but when Terintans make an unexpected alliance on a journey, they say that the meeting is pre-ordained by Father Mezzu. And they pledge to protect one another, to treat each other as brothers and sisters, until their road forks.” She glanced up. “I just… didn’t think our roads had forked yet.”
“They will.” Megs hesitated, because she didn’t like asking for help, she didn’t like owing someone – and she already owed so much to Linna. But perhaps if she asked for one more favor, their business together would be done, and Linna wouldn’t need to linger to play nursemaid any longer. “I’m strong enough to bury my dead,” she said. “If I can get a little help. Then we can both go our separate ways.”
“I’ll help you. But are you sure you’re ready?” Linna grimaced, and Megs realized she wasn’t asking Megs if she was ready physically. She was asking something else. “The bodies have been there for a couple weeks now. And it’s rained a couple times. The corpses will be…”
Megs had seen enough battlefields to know first-hand the nauseating horror of encountering corpses that had been left to rot, picked over by crows and foxes and other scavengers for weeks on end.
“I know,” said Megs. “There won’t be much left to bury. But I need to do this for them.”
Linna nodded, and something in the girl’s face told Megs she understood. Wise beyond her years. Linna might not be even twenty summers, but Megs knew what a battle-hardened veteran looked like when she saw one. Her own face had looked like that before twenty summers. She’d already killed Milton by then.
And seeing that wisdom in Linna’s dark eyes shamed Megs. She’d been so focused on regaining her strength and her independence that she hadn’t even bothered being curious enough about Linna to learn her story. Granted, Megs had been unconscious for most of their short acquaintance. But still.
Megs picked up one of the dead tree martens, pulled her dagger free, and sat down across from Linna.
“Tell me something, Linna.”
“Yes?”
“When you said Joslyn of Terinto had been your teacher… was that really true, or were you just having me on?”
Linna gave a crooked grin. “I knew you didn’t believe me. No one outside the palace ever does. Which is why I don’t usually mention it.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Linna cocked her head. “Didn’t I, though?”
Megs only lifted an eyebrow in reply. Linna might not be a liar, but Megs still wanted the girl to look her right in the eyes and tell her that yes, the most famous – the most unlikely – Imperial war hero had truly been her mentor.
Linna obliged Megs’s wish.
“Yes,” she said, the amusement gone from her voice. “Commander Joslyn of Terinto was my teacher. She is my ku-sai.”
“Was,” Megs corrected. “She was your ku… whatever. Joslyn of Terinto fell at the Empress’s Last Stand, just like the Empress Natasia did.” She spread her arms to include the wilderness around them. Long-harbored cynicism crept into her tone. “Which is why we’re all here, hiding in the mountains four years later.”
“That’s what everyone believes,” Linna said carefully.
“Were you at that battle?” Megs demanded. “Because I was. So was Zan–” The name stuck in her throat. “So was Zandra. We saw the Imperial line break, saw the mountain men charge the rear guard where the Empress was. Zandra saw the standard go down with her own eyes. That was about the same moment that those of us who were still alive ran for our bleeding lives.”
“I wasn’t there. At least not for all of it. But I should’ve been. Maybe if I had been …” Linna looked away. “The Commander sent me back days before the line broke, back to the palace like …” She shook her head. “At the time, I thought I had valuable intelligence to bring back to the Emperor. But now I think the Commander and the Empress just wanted to protect me from what she knew was coming.”
Megs narrowed her eyes. “Why were you even in the East during the Empress’s Last Stand? You wouldn’t have been old enough to be a soldier. You had to have been… what, thirteen summers?”
Linna lifted her chin. “Fifteen.”
A year younger than the age Megs was when she and Milton left Druet Village with the recruiter from the Imperial Army. It made Linna nineteen summers now, about what Megs had guessed.
“And you’re right, I wasn’t in the army,” Linna went on. “The Empress and the Commander never wanted me to go to the East. Have you heard of Princess Adela? The Empress’s younger sister?”
“Yes,” Megs said cautiously. She was thinking of Strange Sellis again, the way he used to make grandiose, completely insane claims that Lord Albert of House Druet had personally consulted him on when to plant crops.
“The Princess convinced me to go, to sneak on board one of the ships transporting the troops from Port Lorsin.” Linna smiled to herself, and if she was aware that Megs was staring at her in disbelief, staring at her like she was as insane as Strange Sellis, her face didn’t show it. “The Commander was so angry when they found out I was a stowaway. But by then, the fleet was halfway across the Adessian Sea, so what could she do?”
Megs wrestled with what she was hearing. But Linna was no Strange Sellis. Besides the fact that she spoke almost like a highborn and wore the nicest armor Megs had ever seen – armor stamped only with House Dorsa’s double eagle, Linna was also, without doubt, the best fighter Megs had ever met. And Megs had joined the Imperial Army at sixteen. In a certain way, Linna’s version of events, incredible as they were, made more sense than any other story Megs could think of to explain her unlikely presence in the Sunrise Mountains and uncanny fighting skills.
“So you snuck aboard the Imperial Fleet into the East,” Megs said slowly, “but you went back to Port Lorsin during the Last Stand?”
Linna nodded.
“Then what are you doing back here? Why aren’t you in Port Lorsin?”
Linna took a long time to answer. When she finally did, she lowered her voice, as if the fir trees and the river rocks were spies who couldn’t be trusted with her secrets. “Megs … Commander Joslyn is a dreamwalker.”
“A what?”
“A dreamwalker. It’s a kind of shadow art.”
Megs shifted uncomfortably. She’d known that the Empire had been forced to deal with the reality of the shadow arts in the year leading up to the Empress’s Last Stand. For so long, their commanding officers had pretended not to notice that some battles ended with scores of injured soldiers being possessed by some dark force that gradually drove them into either madness or mutiny. The commanders locked the men away and did not talk about what was happening. But one day, about six months before the Last Stand, every squad leader, Megs included, was issued a rune-marked blade and matter-of-fact instructions on how to use it to liberate a shadow-infected enemy or comrade.
It was that matter-of-fact tone that infuriated Megs. As though the officers hadn’t ignored the shadow-infections for years. As though they hadn’t locked up injured soldiers with no explanation of why, starving them to death in makeshift prisons.
Megs could still remember turning the dagger over in her hands when she received it, thinking of Milton. If he’d just managed to last one more year before becoming infected, Megs could have used a blade to save him instead of to kill him.
“Are you saying… Joslyn of Terinto was part of the Brotherhood of Culo?” Megs asked.
She knew that the mountain tribesmen had shamans, as did the nomadic people of the Great Desert in Terinto and even some of the people of the Steppes, but within the Empire proper, members of the Brotherhood were the only people Megs knew of who openly practiced the shadow arts. The so-called Brothers, whom to Megs just seemed like shifty Wise Men, had joined the ranks of the Imperial Army at about the same time that the blades did.
“No, the Commander’s not a Brother,” Linna said. “Just a dreamwalker. It means she can communicate with others while they dream. That’s why I think – why I know – that the Commander and Empress Natasia are still alive. I came to the East to find them. And bring them home.”
Megs drew in a deep breath. She didn’t want to have to think about shadows or the shadow-infected or the shadow arts. And she’d accepted – hell, the entire bleeding Empire had accepted – that the Empress had died in the Battle of the Empress’s Last Stand. After all, that was what the battle had been named for. Besides that, Linna almost sounded as if she was trying to convince herself as much as Megs.
“So Joslyn of Terinto came to you in a dream,” Megs said.