Chapter 84. The Number Kept Falling, the Grief Kept Growing, and I Let Both Happen

Chapter 84: 84. The Number Kept Falling, the Grief Kept Growing, and I Let Both Happen

We held the council that morning in the wreck of the great hall, around a table that someone had righted and scrubbed.

I wasn’t speaking to Sylvara... and she didn’t try to speak to me.

She sat at the far end with her hands folded, quiet and pale. Velora sat to my left, rigid as a statue.

Magnara loomed at the head. Elsbeth leaned against the wall by the cold hearth, with her arms wrapped around herself and her eyes on the floor.

Nobody wanted to say what had to be said... so Sylvara said it.

"We cannot stay," she said. "The pillar is not safe, the keep is badly damaged, and the chain will return when the moon descends."

"Cassian is not yet defeated, but he is wounded..."

"He will be preparing, and so must we."

"Prepare... how?" Magnara asked.

"With the Fivefold Covenant." Sylvara drew a long breath. "There is a mural in the Hall of the Covenant in Elarune... It is very old."

"I believe it will tell us what the pact truly is and how to use it." She hesitated. "I should have taken you there before, and... I did not know how to ask."

"No," I said.

Everyone looked at me.

"I’m not leaving her."

"Leon," Sylvara said, very quietly. "She is not here... and she is a week away."

"She’s right there." I pointed at the ceiling. "Right there...!"

"She’s right there, and I’m supposed to just walk away and ride off to a... a mural..."

"She is a Sovereign now," said Velora.

I turned to look at her.

She was sitting very straight, with her hands flat on the table, and her golden eyes were fixed on mine. There was no anger in them.

She spoke slowly and clearly, as if she’d rehearsed it.

"You promised a dead woman that you would hold her hand," she said. "You cannot hold it if you are dead on the seventh night."

I opened my mouth to answer. But... I found that I had nothing.

"The pillar does not need you," Velora said. "All it needs is time."

"You cannot give it that by standing in a ruined hall and glaring at the roof..."

"You can give it an army and an answer and a living man at the end of the road." She paused. "Go to Elarune... Find out what you must."

"And then come back."

Nobody said anything. The wind moaned through the broken windows.

I stared at the table. A long, long minute went by.

At last, I pushed my chair back and stood up, and I walked out of the room.

I didn’t say yes. But... I didn’t say no, either.

And when the column assembled in the courtyard an hour later, I was there, climbing onto my horse with my bandaged hands, staring straight ahead.

Elsbeth rode up beside me.

She didn’t look at me. She sat on her big dark horse, with her eyes fixed on the road, and her face was the color of paper.

For a while, neither of us spoke.

"I will ride with you," she said, at last.

Her voice was barely a whisper. "But I cannot speak to you now."

"Okay..."

"I wish to be near."

"Okay," I said again, hoarsely.

It was enough. And it was more than enough.

I kept my eyes forward, and I felt her presence beside me like a small, steady flame.

The ride south was the worst two days of my life, and I was in no shape to remember them.

I did not eat... and I did not sleep.

And how rare for me that I did not speak or crack any jokes, except to answer the occasional question with a nod or a grunt.

I rode in the middle of the column with my eyes fixed on the road, and at night I sat up on my bedroll and stared at the sky.

I checked the number every morning because I couldn’t help it.

[Lust Energy: 27/100]

[Passive Decay: doubled.]

[Condition: Severely Exhausted.]

The window didn’t care that I was grieving... It cared more about my body, which was dying by inches, and it didn’t have a particular opinion about whether I deserved it.

And yeah... I didn’t either.

I just let the number fall.

The others tried... God, they tried so hard that I’ll give them that.

On the first night, I came back from the latrine to find a slab of meat sitting on a flat rock outside my tent.

It was a whole roasted haunch of wild boar, glistening with fat, still warm. And there was no note... It sat there like an offering.

I knew exactly who had left it, because there was only one person in the column who thought a boar’s leg was a love letter.

I stared at it for a long time... Then I went into my tent and lay down.

...

In the morning, it was gone. I never found out who ate it.

I like to think it was Magnara, sulking.

On the second night, I found a mug of herbal tea steaming beside my bedroll and a scrap of paper folded into quarters.

I opened it, and then... I saw that the handwriting was small and neat.

’I am not asking forgiveness. I am only asking you to drink.’

I read it twice. And then I picked up the mug.

I knocked it over before I could lift it.

The tea poured out across the dirt and soaked into the ground, and I sat there watching it go, with my hands shaking.

I didn’t have the strength to be sorry... I just crumpled up the note and put it in my pocket, and... I’m not sure why.

Elsbeth rode at the back of the column, alone, a hundred yards behind everyone else. She didn’t speak to anyone as well.

And she didn’t try to speak to me. But every time I glanced over my shoulder, she was there, a dark shape against the snow, keeping her distance, and I understood that she had meant what she said.

I didn’t know, then, that on the second night, Velora had gone to find her.

I learned it later, from Velora herself, in one of the long, quiet conversations we had in the weeks that followed.

She’d found Elsbeth beside the picket lines, tending the horses with her back to the camp. She hadn’t said anything for a long minute.

Neither had Elsbeth.

"I cannot go to him," Elsbeth had said, finally.

She hadn’t turned around. Her voice was low and rough and perfectly steady.

"I do not have the strength to be gentle... Not right now."

"I have only enough for one thing, and it is to be here." She took a breath. "Please... Will you take over?"

Velora had looked at her for a long time. Then she’d nodded.

"I was going to anyway," she’d said.

I think it was the most honest thing that either of them had ever said to the other.

We reached Briarhollow at sundown on the ninth day.

It was a tiny border village at the edge of a pine forest, a scatter of snow-covered cottages with smoke curling from their chimneys, and a single crooked street that wound between them like a dropped ribbon.

It sat in a fold of the hills, halfway between Hearthfang and Elarune, and it had the look of a place that had been forgotten by everyone but the people who lived in it.

They were not pleased to see an army.

Faces appeared at windows. And even curtains twitched.

A woman with fox ears pulled a toddler inside and slammed a door. But the column moved slowly and quietly, with its banners furled and its swords sheathed, and a stooped old man in a patched coat came out of the nearest building and watched us pass with calm, tired eyes.

He was human. He leaned on a cane carved with a pattern of little cat paws, and he had the weathered face of a man who had seen a great deal.

He looked at Magnara, at the Elarune banner, and at the long line of weary, battered riders.

"You will want beds," he said.

His voice was dry as paper. "I have eight."

"But we are three hundred," said Velora.

"Then I have eight, and a barn, and a field... That will have to do."

His name was Old Tobin. He was the keeper of a roadside inn called the Sleeping Fox, and he’d been there for forty years.

His wife had been a catkin, he told us later, and she had died the winter before last. He still kept her slippers by the fire.

He was one of the few people in that village who looked at the beastkin in the column and saw neighbors.

Some of the villagers saw me, too.

I noticed it as I rode past. They stared and whispered, and a girl of about ten tugged at her mother’s sleeve and pointed.

I heard her say, in a hushed voice, "That’s the human... The one who held out his hand."

I didn’t look up.

The inn was a low, rambling building of dark timber, with a sagging roof and a painted sign over the door showing a fox curled in sleep.

They gave me the smallest room, at the end of the upper hall, with a narrow bed and a single window.

And so I went in... I closed the door.

I locked it. Just to make sure that no one barged in and tried to talk to me.