Chapter 65: Captain Voss

Aren lay in a hollow under the ridge with his coat over his head and couldn’t sleep.

It wasn’t the rib. The rib was already knitting nicely under the bruise, the way his bones did now. It wasn’t the bite either, though that throbbed every time he moved his shoulder, a neat curved line of tooth marks that hadn’t quite broken the skin.

It was the whole ridiculous thing.

He went over it again in the dark: a pool he couldn’t see into, a stranger at the bottom of it, steam, lanterns, a furious woman in a soaked shift, and a fight that ended with both of them slammed against a wall, and then teeth.

In his old life he had read a great many cheap stories on his phone late at night, about young men who woke up in strange worlds and became very powerful very quickly. Sooner or later, in every single one of them, the hero walked into the wrong bath at the wrong moment, a girl screamed, and something was thrown at his head.

He had always thought it was the stupidest thing he had ever read.

’And now I’m living it, except my version has a blood pool and a lance class.’

"Ghost." Roderick’s voice came from the other side of the hollow. "Are you still thinking about the woman?"

"What woman?"

"The angry one. The one who bit you."

"Shut up, Roderick."

"You are." Roderick was obviously smiling in the dark, because Aren could hear it. "You’ve been thinking about her all night."

"I’ve been thinking about how she wants to take my eyes. That’s not the same thing."

He pulled the coat tighter over his face, irritably.

At least, he thought, she couldn’t have been anyone important. Nobody important went down into a mine at midnight alone, or bathed in a pit of blood with no guard at the door. An officer, maybe. A sergeant who wanted to get ahead. Someone who would be angry for a week and then be moved to some other wall, and he’d never see her again.

He held on to that thought until the sun came up, and then he went to find a new face.

The Aldermere camp sprawled across the southern valley below the fortress, rows of grey tents running down the slope as far as he could see, with cook fires and horse lines and wagons and the endless noise of three thousand men who had nothing to do yet but wait.

Three thousand men needed water.

There was a spring at the foot of the southern wall, but it was slow, and it was the King’s spring, and the soldiers who guarded it didn’t carry buckets. So every morning boys from the farms in the lower valleys came up the road with a wooden pole across their shoulders and a bucket at each end, lined up at the spring, and carried water to the tents for a copper a load. Nobody really looked at them, and half of them didn’t even give a name to get paid.

Aren took the scarf off his face for the first time in weeks, washed it in a stream and tied it around his neck instead. He rubbed dirt into his hair until the white streak was grey and dull, like dust. He looked critically at himself in the stream: a thin young man with a hollow face that nobody in Kharn had ever seen.

He walked down the road at dawn and stood in line with the farm boys, and when the quartermaster’s clerk looked up from his tally and said "Name?" without any interest at all, he said the first thing that came into his head.

"Ren."

The clerk wrote it down lazily, and that was all. By midday Aren had carried forty loads of water up the slope and knew which tents belonged to which companies, where the officers ate, where the guards changed, and which sergeants threw boots at boys who were slow.

He also knew about the monster.

Everybody knew about the monster, naturally. It had come over the wall in the night, and by the cook fires it was already three different monsters. A creature of shadow with no face. A man with white eyes who drank blood through his skin. A thing from the old stories, the soldiers said, laughing the nervous laugh of men a long way from home.

"Broke into the Pools on the Imperial side." A corporal was telling the man next to him while Aren filled their barrel. "Bells went off half the night. The Empire’s turning their whole garrison over looking for it."

"Good. Let them."

"You won’t say that if it comes over to our side."

"What did it do, anyway?"

The corporal lowered his voice as if it were very good news. "Attacked their commander. In the baths. Alone."

Aren’s hands stopped abruptly on the bucket.

"The Voss woman?" The other man whistled. "I heard she can put a lance through a horse and the man behind it."

"Well, she didn’t put it through this thing. They say it got away."

Aren finished filling the barrel, picked up his pole, and walked away down the line of tents at the steady, ordinary pace of a boy carrying water. His face showed nothing at all.

’Their commander. Their commander! Of course she is.’

He asked about her very carefully over the next three hours. Mostly he listened, which was easier. Soldiers talked about the enemy like people talk about the weather, all the time and without noticing. By the middle of the afternoon he had most of it.

Captain Voss. Commander of the Imperial half of Kharn. Every soldier on that side of the wall answered to her. She was young for it, very young, and she had been given the post over the heads of men twice her age, and nobody on the Aldermere side could agree on why. Some said she was somebody’s daughter. Some said she was simply that good. Everyone agreed she had held the northern wall for two winters without losing a tower, and that the Imperial soldiers feared her more than the King’s whole army.

And that she had a temper.

He sat on an upturned bucket behind a supply wagon and looked at the mountain.

She was not a sergeant, or someone who would be moved to another wall. The commander of half a fortress, three days before the most important meeting in either kingdom, and he had walked straight into her bath, eaten four months of her life, fought her blind, and been bitten.

In the stories, at least, the girl in the bath usually turned out to be someone harmless, a maid or a classmate. Nobody ever walked into the bath of the enemy commander three days before a peace summit.

He had one more thing to learn, and he learned it at sunset, at the central gate.

That was the only place in Kharn where the two halves of the fortress touched, a great stone yard under the tallest tower with the grey half of the wall on one side and the black iron half on the other. During the Summit the gate stood open, and both sides used the yard to bring in supplies and set up the great hall where the lords would meet. There was a cistern deep under the flagstones that served both halves, and the water boys from each camp went down to it at the end of the day.

Aren was halfway across the yard with a pole on his shoulders when the Imperial soldiers on the far side snapped to attention all at once.

He knew what that meant before he turned around.

She came through the iron side of the gate with four officers behind her, walking fast, like someone who’s angry and has decided not to show it. She wore black armor, plain and scarred, with a short cloak over one shoulder and a long lance carried upright in one hand as if it weighed nothing. Her dark hair was tied back tight. She was talking to the officer beside her without looking at him, short and sharp, and he was nodding at everything.

Aren stood in the middle of the yard with his pole and his empty buckets, one water boy among a dozen, and looked at her.

He hadn’t really looked at her in the Pools. He had been busy not dying, and then very busy keeping his eyes shut.

She was older than him by a year, maybe two. Her face was all straight lines, a hard jaw and a narrow nose that had been broken once and set a little crooked, with dark brows drawn down in a frown that looked like it lived there. A thin pale scar ran through one of them. Nothing about her was soft. She looked as if someone had started forging a blade and decided halfway through to make it a woman instead.

She was also, he admitted to himself, standing in the yard with buckets on his shoulders, quite beautiful.

It wasn’t a helpful thought. He set it firmly aside, the way he set aside most thoughts that weren’t going to keep him alive. It didn’t go very far, unfortunately.

[Kaela Voss. Hostility: 100%.][Rank D: Blood. 36%.]

She was walking toward the cistern, toward the line of water boys, toward him.

He looked at the ground, because a water boy looks at the ground when officers pass. He shifted his pole on his shoulders, ordinary and slow, and felt the collar of his shirt slide sideways with it.

He felt the cold air on the top of his shoulder, where the curved line of tooth marks had turned a deep, ugly purple.

He could have written it off. But Write-Off didn’t make wounds disappear. It made them old. The bite would turn into a ring of pale tooth marks on his shoulder that would never fade, and it would cost him a memory he would never get back. For a bite!

He had kept the bruise, because bruises went away.

She was three paces away.

He didn’t move his hand to cover it. Moving would be worse. He kept his eyes on the flagstones and his face empty and his breath slow.

Two paces.

Her boots stopped suddenly.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the black armor turn, very slightly, toward him. He felt her look land on him just as he’d felt it in the Pools through closed eyes, heavy and close.

The officer beside her said something, and she didn’t answer.

She was looking at his shoulder.