I raised my head slowly. I didn’t have the energy to fight with Kletus, but his slight against the frontier—as if he blamed me for King Julius’s orders—wasn’t lost on me.
“Leave him alone,” Leander said, standing as if he would physically defend me.
Darius stood as well. “Conrad has lost as much if not more than anyone else here today,” he said.
“He lost nothing,” Kletus argued, standing to face them. “Nobody he loved has died.”
“He’s lost everything,” Leander said, raising his voice. “The mountain pass is gone. He can’t go home, and his lover and brothers are all on the other side of the mountains.”
I was shocked that Leander and Darius understood what the defeat meant to me.
It must have dawned on several of the others as well. They straightened and craned their necks to stare at me as our camp grew hushed.
“There has to be some way to get to the frontier,” someone said, more like a wish than a certainty. “How did people get to the other side of the mountains before the pass was built?”
“They didn’t,” someone else said. “At least, not really.”
“They climbed the mountains,” another student said. “They had to, didn’t they? A few, intrepid explorers climbed the mountains, following the legends of cities of glass and iron, from before the world was broken.”
“But they didn’t find anything,” the first student said. “Well, not cities and the like.”
“They found fertile farmland and forests,” I said. “They found rivers and a port to the western seas. They found a land they could build up to become their home.” I let out a heavy breath, hung my head, and whispered, “My home.”
The conversation continued, but I didn’t have the heart to pay attention to it. Honestly, I didn’t think any of us had the heart for more than idle words that didn’t mean much, but that could distract us from what we’d seen that day. I didn’t think any of us would soon forget it, though.
We all shuffled off to sleep another night in narrow cots, all lined up like soldiers ourselves. I only dozed. It was the best I could manage. My thoughts kept flying to the western side of the mountains.
Was Dushka lying awake, thinking about me too? Did he know that the mountain pass had been destroyed and that there was no way for me to come back to him? Had he tried to stop General Rufus, or maybe to find another way across the mountains to get to me?
Or was he unaware of what had happened? Would he think that I wasn’t writing to him, and when the spring came and the course finished, would he think I’d found someone else and decided to stay away for good?
That thought brought me close to sobbing. I curled to my side, clutching my pillow, and praying for some way to Dushka to hear my thoughts and to feel how much I loved him and how much I wanted to come home. I would have given anything to curl against his large, wolfish body, to listen to him teasing me about being a pup and liking grizzled old men.
It wasn’t the old men I liked, it was him. It was Dushka, with his wicked sense of humor and his sensible outlook on life. It was the way he liked to fuck me or watch me being fucked, because he knew it brought me pleasure. It was his kindness toward the refugees from the cities and the way he never judged any of us who had been born to finer things, even when we were forced to live a rougher life.
I needed to find my way home to him. Somehow, someday, in some way. Whether it meant I had to climb mountains to reach him, I would get home to my lover, to my friends, and to my frontier, or I would die trying.
ChapterEight
The student healers were asked to stay another three days. After the first of those days, our job was not so much treating the freshly wounded, but determining whether the injured men who had been lying in the sun and wind for a week were dead or almost dead, and also who was fit to join the work of digging the mass graves where their brothers in arms would rest forever.
I was sick by the time Magister Flaccus put his foot down and told the generals and leaders of Aktau that we were too valuable to be wasted doing the jobs that any midwife or country healer could do. I wasn’t sick with a disease or accidental injury—which happened to Kletus when he tripped over a sword that had been lost in the meadow grass and nicked his calf—but sick at heart with everything I’d seen.
And I wasn’t the only one.
“This entire trip was a fiasco and a waste of our time,” Magister Flaccus was overheard muttering as we all climbed back into the wagons and started home to Royersford.
“Thecampaignwas a fiasco and a waste of time,” Leander said in a low voice, shoulders hunched, as he and Darius took places along one side of the wagon we were assigned to travel in.
Darius shook his head. “Not just the campaign, the entire army.”
“It was a waste,” Lucius echoed the others, pale and wan, hugging himself as he sat beside me, not seeming to care much about everything around him. “My brother’s death was a waste.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I rubbed Lucius’s arm, but he jerked away from me. Our moment of camaraderie in the meadow seemed to have been wiped away.
No, that wasn’t exactly true. Things had changed between me and Lucius, that much was certain. But Lucius was angry now in a way that went so much deeper than his petty prejudices from before. I felt like I’d watch him grow up in the last few days, and watched his anger mature at the same time.
It took us the full three days to travel back to Royersford, since there wasn’t any hurry for us to reach our destination. Honestly, I needed that time. We all did. Even though we didn’t speak much. I was finally able to sleep in the jostling wagon, like I was being rocked to sleep by a slightly violent mother.