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Sixty leagues north of Cimmura, it was raining, a persistent February drizzle that limned the trees with silvery mist and churned the road into sticky mud. It was too damp to tinder a campfire, even with the aid of magic, and Berit sat shivering in his tent, watching patches of rust bloom on his mail shirt and listening to the water drip from the branches overheard onto the canvas. Aside from the rain, it was unusually quiet for a camp full of knights. The bad weather dogging their travel for the last three days had worn down their spirits. On the road they barely spoke, hoods pulled close across their faces to ward off the cold, and as soon as the horses were staked out and fed they scrambled for what cover and warmth they could find in their tents.
It seemed like an ill omen for Berit’s first command.
He had protested when Sparhawk told him that he would be leading a dozen knights north to investigate rumours of unrest from one of the border estates. It had only been a year since they returned from Matherion, and while the shine was starting to wear off his spurs, Berit knew that in the ranks of the Pandion he was still little more than a novice.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sparhawk had said, implacable behind the Preceptor’s desk. “Everyone in the order knows what you and Khalad did against the Cyrgai. I doubt you’ll have a mutiny on your hands.”
His eyes had softened a little. “I don’t expect you’ll have much to do up there, anyway. The border barons are all grumble and swagger, right until we show up with our nice big swords to remind them of their loyalty. For some reason the sight of the church knights takes the rebellion right out of them.”
There had been a faint smile on his battered face, but his tone allowed for no further argument. The rest of the afternoon he briefed Berit on the men he’d chosen to go with him and the scant information that their spies had gathered. By the time they opened the city gates the next morning, Berit had almost convinced himself to think of it as an opportunity to prove himself.
Now, after five days of riding to reach the furthest edges of Baron Ostgar’s estate, Berit cursed Sparhawk with every soaked and frozen bone in his body.
They rose before dawn and ate a hurried breakfast of cold bread and cheese; it was still most of a day’s ride to the baron’s manor, and Berit knew the rest of the knights were as eager as he was to finish their task and return to the relative comforts of Cimmura and the chapterhouse. The rain had stopped sometime in the night, but it had left behind a dense wall of fog. The clearing where they camped seemed suspended in a bubble, and the edge of the road faded into nothingness. Berit felt the hairs on his neck prickle as he rode, half-convinced there were enemies hiding behind every tree.
The snap of a branch underfoot alerted the knights to the patrol long before they could see them.
When the five men rose up out of the fog, Berit already had his axe in hand, the others their swords unsheathed. The men drew their weapons, a motley collection of well-worn short swords and daggers, but they were badly out-matched, and Berit could see the realization in their wide eyes.
“We are knights in the service of our holy mother the church,” Berit said, making sure they could see the keen edge on his war axe. “And I order you to put down your arms.”
They didn’t hestitate; the men threw their swords down at their feet, and two Pandions stepped forward to kick their weapons away and bind them. Berit dismounted his horse and approached what seemed to be the leader, a wiry man with a bald head and a stubbly greying beard.
“Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?” Berit said. “If you’re that good at following orders, we might even let you live when we’re done.”
The man glared at him. It was a fierce glare, though somewhat lessened by the fact that his hands were tied behind his back. “I dun know nothin’.”
Berit considered this for a moment. Then he swung back his arm and buried his fist in the man’s stomach. He dropped to his knees, gagging and gasping for breath.
“Want to try again?” Berit asked him. The man shook his head.
“We’re just the patrol, my lord, they dun tell us nothin’. Just to watch out for folks traveling on the highway, so as we can tell my lord back at the town.”
“That’s awfully cautious of him,” Sir Edin said evenly.
“He’s private, my lord is. Dun like folks coming in to meddle in his business. That’s all I know about it, I swear.”
Berit raised his fist again, but the man was nearly sobbing now, and he doubted there was any more he could tell them. Perhaps Ostgar was just a paranoid border baron who wanted to be forewarned when the tax collectors came. Perhaps not. Either way, Berit didn’t like the idea of leaving the men behind to run back and report to him about the arriving knights.
Berit turned. “Leave them,” he said. “Drag them off the road where they won’t be seen. We’re going to need a new plan.”
As a rule, Pandion knights weren’t built for stealth, but Berit had no intention of riding blindly into a trap. Sir Betiner led the group through the woods; his family had land to the west of Ostgar, and he professed some knowledge of the terrain from his youth. They approached the town of Tallit from the north, where Betiner said it butted up against a steep ridge that would let them observe in secret. The thick carpet of fallen pine needles muffled the sound of the horses’ hooves, while the fog swallowed up their breathing and the clink of their armor. All the men kept their hands on the hilts of their swords, and Berit’s axe was a reassuring weight slung across his saddle.
“Hold,” Betiner whispered, raising a hand. The knights reined their horses to a halt in a ragged line.
“See how the trees thin out? The crest is just ahead of us. Sir Berit and I will go on - the rest of you stay with the horses.”
Berit nodded - even doing their best to conceal themselves, a dozen men on horseback could too easily be seen by anyone glancing up at the treeline. He and Betiner dismounted, and crept forward on foot.
“Keep very quiet,” Betiner breathed into his ear as they walked. “Any noise you make will carry down through the valley.”
He meant to reply with a sarcastic quip. Before he could, however, they pushed through the last of the pine trees, the ground fell away before him, and all Berit could do was gasp.
Tallit was a large farming town set at the wide end of a broad valley, with squat stone houses sprouting like mushrooms in clusters on both sides of a languid river, bordered by barren fields and raw-scraped pastures. Smoke rose from many of the chimneys below them, but the streets were deserted, the square empty and desolate looking. And ringing the town, cutting it off from the highway, was a military encampment.
Berit choked off a savage oath.
“Well that does make things more difficult,” Betiner said. “200, would you say? A full company, certainly.”
Berit scanned the camp quickly. Three rows of canvas tents walled off the village, with crude common areas scratched out in the dirt between them. The wind carried the reek of cooking fires and wet steel up to their hiding place, along with the sound of bickering men and the clang of metal on metal. There were guards stationed at the four corners of the camp, and Berit suspected that had Khalad been with them, he would have spied more look-outs concealing themselves in the trees.
“Look there,” he whispered to Betiner, gesturing at the nearest guards. “See the crossbows? Those are Lamork mercenaries.”
Betiner’s face was grim. “Better and better.”
“Sparhawk’s going to have to have a word with Platime,” Berit said. “His spies said Ostgar might be stocking up weapons - they didn’t say he bought an army.”
Berit was prepared for the other knights to argue when he suggested they return to Cimmura immediately; clearly he had traveled with Kalten and Tynian for far too long, because he was surprised when none of them did. Even Edin and Villier, who had long reputations as hotheads whose brains rested in their scabbards, only made a few half-hearted suggestions of building siege weapons or taking the baron hostage before they admitted it would be wiser to report back to the Preceptor about what they’d found. If they thought he was taking the coward’s way out they kept it to themselves - and so did he, reminding himself that there was no Bhelliom and no Troll Gods to turn the odds in their favor now, and that he’d be in a lot of trouble with Sparhawk if he didn’t come back in one piece.
So Berit bit his tongue and ordered the knights back through the woods the way they came. It was still a few hours until dark, and he wanted to be sure they were well clear of Tallit and its guards before they made camp for the night.
They found the refugees almost a mile from the town, trudging through the mud and making so much noise Berit couldn’t believe they hadn’t already been captured. There were perhaps twenty of them, mostly women and children, wrapped in scarves and thin coats that were clearly doing little to shield them from the chill. A raw-boned, horse-faced woman with an infant strapped to her back led the group, rounding up wandering children and and issuing orders in a voice cracked with exhaustion.
“If you’re here to take us in,” the woman said when she saw the knights approaching. “We aren’t going. You can kill us if you want.”
“Melodramatics already,” Sir Edin muttered under his breath, and Berit resisted the temptation to snicker.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” he said instead. “Do you come from Tallit?”
“Veras. It’s at the other end of the valley - or it was.”
“Was?” asked Betiner.
The woman’s baby whimpered, then began to cry, thin and aching. When she struggled to settle him again, another woman with her arm in a sling and a gash across her cheek stepped forward.
“Lord Ostgar’s soldiers burned it when they came through three days ago, my lord,” the young woman said. “They took most of our husbands with them. They killed Ylna’s man when he wouldn’t go. There wasn’t anything left for us there.”
Berit looked at the group of villagers. Most of them showed signs of injury, faces and hands peppered with cuts and raw burns, limbs swaddled in crude bandages, and all of their faces were tight with tiredness and hunger. If Ostgar’s mercenaries didn’t round them up, Berit doubted they would last another day before they succumbed to the weather.
He drew the knights aside, away from the women. Betiner was already shaking his head.
“No,” he said. “No, no, absolutely not. Why don’t we just tell Ostgar’s soldiers exactly where we are? It would be easier than bringing them with us, and it would end the same.”
“We’re not bringing them with us,” Berit said firmly. “We’re staying here with them.”
Berit waited until the protests died down before he continued, “Sir Betiner was right. The refugees will slow us down too much if we try to take them along. One of you can go ahead to the chapterhouse, and the rest of us will find somewhere safe to hole up for a few days until you bring back reinforcements.”
Betiner scowled darkly at him. “That is a fool’s idea, and I want no part of it. You’re going to get us all killed.”
Berit pulled off his gauntlet. “I’m not leaving these people to die,” he said. “If you have a problem with your orders, we can settle it now, Sir Betiner.”
The gauntlet landed in the mud at Betiner’s feet with a muted thump. The other knights stared at it, and at the two of them.
“You aren’t serious,” Betiner said.
Berit replied, “You can do as you’re told, or you can fight me. But we aren’t leaving them behind.”
The silence stretched out, and still Betiner refused to pick up the gauntlet. Finally he snorted, and muttering to himself, stalked back to his horse.
“Does anyone else want to raise a complaint?” Berit asked. No one spoke, and after a moment he picked his gauntlet up, wiped the mud off the knuckles, and put it back on.
Edin whistled under his breath. “Did Sir Sparhawk teach you how to do that?” he asked.
“He likes to do it to church soldiers,” Berit said, grinning. “And elder gods.”
That was enough to break the tension among the knights, but when he turned back to the villagers they were watching him expectantly, even the children sprawled boneless and exhausted on the ground.
“We’ve decided to stay here,” Berit announced.
“We heard it,” the horse-faced woman said dryly.
“Then you know we need a safe place to hide,” he said. “Is there anything nearby?”
The villagers exchanged significant glances, and then an old man spoke.
“There’s a fort, Sir Knight, half a mile to the east of us. It’s all run down but Lord Ostgar doesn’t know about it. Some of the folks here about use it for smuggling in the summertime, so I’ve heard.”
The knights were mounted again, and the mothers urged their whining children back to their feet. Sir Donal turned his horse to the south, back on to Cimmura, and the rest of them marched east.
The fort, as it turned out, was more than run down. It was a ruin. Berit thought it might have been a relic of the civil wars centuries before, or back even further, before the Zemoch invasion, though what was left of the architecture was too deteriorated to place - Bevier would have known more about it. The outer wall had crumbled entirely, most of the stones long since cannibalized for the construction of other buildings. The upper level of the tower had collapsed, strewing rock and rotted timber across the hillside.
But the roof of the central keep was still holding, and the mortar in the walls was solid. Berit wouldn’t have chosen for a prolonged siege, but he thought they might be able to hold it safely for a few days, until the rest of the Pandions came.
He sent the refugees into the keep to make camp, while he and the other knights did what they could to shore up the fortifications in the few hours of daylight that remained to them. They couldn’t make the place truly secure, but they deepened the ditch around the wall and lined it with sharpened logs. They tested the strength of the walls and rigged a rope ladder next to the remains of the staircase so they could post a sentry at the arrowslit in the upper level of the keep.
As the sun sank below the treeline Berit entered the camp to be handed watery broth by a withered old woman, and he sat by the small fire and drank it while he watched the other men put up their arms for the night and spread out their bedrolls.
But despite the long day he found himself restless, unable to sleep, and he wandered over to the other side of the camp where the villagers huddled in small groups and spoke quietly to each other. He helped a woman put her fussing daughter to bed, rewound the bandage wrapped around the old man’s leg, listened to Ylna complain about her dead husband.
Still he couldn’t sleep. Villier had volunteered for the first watch, and Berit offered to relieve him, hauling himself up to sit in front of the narrow window and trading a cup of soup for the longbow across his lap. Berit stretched his long legs out and resigned himself to a dull evening.
He sat there for nearly an hour before he heard someone else grunting as they pulled themselves up the rope, and then Betiner’s dark head popped up over the ledge. The space was broad enough for two men to sit on either side of the window, and Berit shifted to make room for him.
“I owe you an apology,” Betiner said stiffly. His gaze was fixed firmly on the sliver of trees visible through the window. Berit wondered what it had cost his pride to make even this much of a concession.
“Do we have to do this, brother?” Berit asked him. “You’re still here, and we didn’t even knock each other down, so there’s no reason to tell anyone else you lost your temper.”
“But I-”
“We should have built up the wall,” Berit said, pointing at a place to one side where the scattered stones left a broad gap. “At least we’ll hear them if they try to sneak up on us in the night. And we can do more in the morning.”
Betiner seemed to take this as the offer it was, and for a long moment the two men lapsed into silence.
“Sir Sparhawk must put a great deal of faith in you,” Betiner said at last. “At your age I was still doing as my elders told me, not issuing orders.”
Berit shrugged, and ran a hand through his short hair. “Do you think so? I thought this was his way of punishing me for some sin I didn’t know about.”
Betiner had a thin smile, tight-lipped and slightly crooked, that made his gaunt face look somehow even grimmer. “You are very lucky, my young brother,” he said. “I used to dream about being able to prove myself in a quest like yours.”
“I - it wasn’t -” he stammered, unsure of how to respond. “It was Sir Sparhawk’s quest, not mine. I just followed along and tried to stay out of trouble.”
“And yet everyone in the four orders knows your name by now,” Betiner said. “You’ll make a good knight yet, mark my words. And the rest of us shall have to resign ourselves to the knowledge that there will never be ballads in our names.”
His tone was light, and that same thin smile still on his lips, but there was something bitter in his eyes.
“We give ourselves up to the will of the Church,” he continued. “We live our lives as nothing more than a sword in her hand. Even my own family thinks of me now as a tool to be used in their games.”
He shook his head, and seemed to come back to himself a little. “But come now, you shouldn’t have to listen to an old knight venting his sorrows. I have the next watch, if you’d like to go back down to sleep.”
His restlessness had worn away, and Berit was struggling not to yawn and let his eyes slip closed. It seemed like a well-meant offer, and he passed the longbow off to Betiner, swung his legs over the ledge, and slid down the rope back to the ground.
Berit knew little of Sir Betiner. The man had a score of years on him, already a knight long before Berit had begun his novitiate, and while he had seen him in prayers at the chapterhouse and a few times on the training ground, he couldn’t recall ever speaking to him. On the trip north he had kept to himself, and Berit’s impression had been of a stern and rigidly formal man, distant but not unfriendly to his companions.
But as he laid out his bedroll and prepared to sleep, the conversation by the window lingered in his mind, and Berit could not shake a sense of uneasiness, or forget the brief flash of bitter loathing he had seen on Betiner’s face, before the man looked away from him again.
He dreamed that there were lights flickering in the air over his head, and when he tried to catch them they flew away from him out of the windows, racing off to burst against the trees into golden sparks and the sound of footsteps and men’s voices.
He woke at the sound of a crossbow bolt shattering against the wall.
Head muddled with sleep, he thought at first it was part of his dream, until a second bolt skidded across the floor dragging up sparks. Outside the window the moon caught glints of light off metal and Berit knew they’d been surrounded.
He didn’t know how they had gotten so close without raising an alarm, until he glanced up at the sentry’s post, and saw that it was empty. His stomach sank, but he had no time to wonder where Betiner could have gone, or why. He threw himself to his feet, fumbling for his axe and shield, and shouted to wake the rest of the knights.
It wasn’t the first time most of them had woken to action, swords in hand before they even knew what was happening. The refugees were slower to move, bleary-eyed and staggering as Berit directed them to the furthest corner of the keep away from the windows. Several of the children began to wail as their mothers frantically tried to hush them, their own eyes wide with fright. Sir Edin climbed up to the arrowslit with a bow; the other knights arranged themselves between the refugees and the door. It was too late to escape, too late to hold them off at a distance. All they could do now was stand and fight.
The men had barely gotten themselves into position before the soldiers broke down the door.
The battle that followed was short and bloody. The soldiers vastly outnumbered the Pandions, but they were bottled up at the entrance, and for a few minutes Berit thought they had a chance. He swung his axe mechanically, shearing off limbs and biting deep through leather armor, wading through a heap of bodies to get to the next soldier. Edin fired volleys of arrows out into the courtyard, picking off men before they could make it to the doors. Villier bellowed orders to the other knights, directing them around the small space and away from the terrified refugees.
He wasn’t certain when exactly the tide of the fight turned. The knights began to weary, their swords growing weightier in their hands, and there were always more soldiers pouring into the room. A chance bolt caught Edin in the throat, and Berit saw him topple from the wall and lie unmoving on the ground.
He felt a blaze of pain and looked down to see a saber run through his thigh. He beheaded the man who held it, and yanked the blade out of his leg. Blood streamed freely from the wound, and when he tried to put weight on it his knee buckled under him.
On the other side of the door, Sir Herward hacked at half a dozen soldiers surrounding him. Berit dragged himself back up by the handle of his axe and swung at one of them, spraying blood across the wall. He killed two more, and then he saw Sir Herward fall with his skull split.
He didn’t see the second soldier, the one who stabbed him in the stomach.
The slim dagger slipped between the links of his mail and buried itself up to the hilt in his flesh. When the man jerked it out again Berit collapsed like a rag doll, unable to move. The fighting moved past him, and as from a great distance he could hear the sound of shouting and the clash of swords. He was cold all over, except where the blood was soaking through his mail shirt.
His axe had fallen when he fell, and he could see it in front of him, a few feet out of his reach. Berit pushed himself up on his elbows, though it left him breathless and shuddering in pain. He crawled forward a few inches and dropped, gasping. If he could get to his axe, he could get up again, join back in the fight. A few more inches. One of the women was screaming. A few more. His hand closed around the shaft.
As he sank into blackness Berit thought he could hear very faintly the sound of someone playing a set of simple wooden pipes.
Something was licking his face. Berit couldn’t tell what it was, and he slowly realized that that was because he still had his eyes shut.
Berit blinked. The lamb blinked back at him and nudged at his cheek with a damp black nose. He blinked again and recognized that he was lying on his back in the grass, with the lamb curled up beside his head. For the first time in days he felt warm and dry, almost reluctant to move and spoil the easiness of the moment.
Then he noticed the heavy weight pressing down on his legs, and he sighed and pushed himself up so he could see. A small girl in a diaphanous white dress was perched on his lap, smiling at him with a mouth like a pink bow.
“Oh,” he said. “Am I dead then?”
Aphrael prodded him in the hip. “Don’t say that!” she exclaimed. “You aren’t dead. You aren’t even dying. Not anymore.”
Berit pressed a hand gingerly to his stomach, but it didn’t hurt. There wasn’t any trace of blood where he’d been stabbed, or even a mark to show where it had healed.
“Your wounds will be there again when I send you back,” Aphrael said rather sadly. “I didn’t have time to do much, I’m afraid.”
Berit looked around him. The two of them were sitting on a grassy hillock, shaded from the sun by a handful of apple trees. Wherever they were, it was spring there already, for the trees were wreathed in fragrant white blossoms. Further away, he could see a glassy-surfaced lake and a pavilion on an island in the middle. It was familiar somehow, like a place he had visited in a dream and then forgotten.
“This is your home, isn’t it?” he said. “You brought me here to heal me, like you did with Lord Vanion, and Atan Engessa.”
She nodded. “I’m going to be in trouble with my family for this,” she said. “I’m not supposed to do it unless you ask me to. And your Elene god gets so tetchy when people don’t follow his rules.”
“Tell them I was thinking about you very hard while I was bleeding all over the stones,” Berit said.
Aphrael threw her arms around his neck and kissed him soundly. “Such a good boy. I knew I was right to keep you.”
It seemed very natural then to stretch out in the grass with his head pillowed in Aphrael’s small lap. While she stroked his hair she hummed a Styric hymn in a minor key that lulled him into lassitude, and then back into sleep.
Every Pandion who had trained at Cimmura in the last hundred years could recognize the low-beamed ceiling of the chapterhouse infirmary. Berit didn’t bother wondering how he’d gotten there; he just lay as still as he could and tried not to breathe too deeply. Every exhalation made his stomach throb, and when he tensed against it his leg protested with echoing twinges of pain. He groaned pitifully.
Talen’s face swam into focus above him. The younger man studied him intently, and when he realized that Berit’s eyes were open, and he was not merely mumbling in his sleep, he broke into a broad grin.
“You look like a troll tried to eat you,” he said. “Are you really awake?”
“I feel like it spat me out again,” Berit whispered hoarsely. The words caught in his dry throat and made him cough, and the coughing sent spikes of pain juddering up his spine and left tears pricking the corners of his eyes.
“I’ll fetch the doctor,” Talen said. “He didn’t want to give you anything until he knew you hadn’t addled your brains, but-”
He disappeared. He came back with a man who helped him to drink something cold and bitter that washed away the pain and jumbled his thoughts. He didn’t know how much time passed after that. But the next time he came back to himself, it was late afternoon, and Sparhawk was sitting beside his bed.
He helped Berit sip from a glass of water, holding him up with an arm braced under his shoulders. As Berit recovered from the effort, Sparhawk leaned back in his seat and said, “My daughter has given me strict instructions to tell you never to scare us like that again. It might be a binding proclamation. I’ll have to ask the Earl of Lenda.”
“Tell Her Highness I’ll do my best,” Berit said. “I don’t think I much like having my insides rearranged.”
Sparhawk chuckled. “A lesson many young knights have learned before you, lad.”
Now that the pain was beginning to ebb, and the drug had loosened its hold on his mind, Berit was able to give more attention to his surroundings, and the first thing he noticed was that the infirmary was empty. Aside from him, none of the other beds were occupied, and he and Sparhawk were the only people in the room.
“Did – did anyone else – ” he stammered. If he didn’t name the question, perhaps it wouldn’t be true.
Sparhawk shook his head. “We caught up to Ostgar’s soldiers on the road to Tallit – we were only half a day behind you. After we dealt with them, we followed their trail back to that fort, but all there was to do there was bury the dead. You’d have been with them, if one of the novices hadn’t noticed you still breathing.”
Berit’s stomach twisted. “Sir Betiner,” he said weakly. “He betrayed us. He lit a signal so the soldiers could find us in the middle of the night.”
“I know. He was Ostgar’s nephew. His family was pressuring him to side with Ostgar when he rebelled against the crown.”
“Did he tell you that?” Berit asked him.
“He died with the rest of the soldiers. But we found a letter on him afterwards from his mother ordering him back from Cimmura. That was convincing enough.”
Berit swallowed hard. He’d known, as soon as he looked up at the ledge and realized what Betiner had done, that he would have to die for it; there was no other punishment for turning traitor to the order. He wasn’t sure why it hurt to hear that it had already been done.
He paused a long moment, and when he spoke again, it was very quiet. “Are you angry with me, my lord? Because of what happened?”
Sparhawk took a deep breath, and then a second. “You are spending too much time with Bevier,” he said at last. “All that honour and noble thinking is rotting your head. We should talk about this when you aren’t three-quarters dead, Berit.”
He pushed himself wearily to his feet, and gathered up his cloak.
“You should get some rest, before the doctor comes to lecture me again,” he said, and then he left.
Berit was exhausted down to his bones, but for a long time after Sparhawk left he lay in bed, unable to sleep. His stomach had started to ache again, dull but persistent. And every time he closed his eyes, he remembered Ylna’s face as it had last been that night in the keep, or Edin’s, or Herwerd’s. Or Betiner’s.
The next four weeks passed slowly. Berit spent five more days in the infirmary, in alternate fits of dozing and excruciating boredom, before the doctor deemed him fit to hobble back to his own cell.
Even then he wasn’t allowed to leave his bed for anything more than relieving himself. Not that he would have been able to do much if he had – his leg could barely support his weight, and for the first week even the lightest exertion left him doubled over in pain. He suspected that without Aphrael’s blessing to heal them cleanly, his wounds would have crippled him for good, even if he had somehow survived.
Even if he knew it was necessary, the inactivity grated on him; he’d spent too much of the last few years in training, and then in traveling the world, and the forced confinement left him edgy and irritable. One of the Pandion instructors had left him a stack of histories to study, and that offered a bit of a distraction. And some evenings Talen and Khalad came to his room to trade stories and stolen wine and cheat at dice with him. Now that they were both in their novitiate though, the training masters jealously guarded their time, and they could never stay long. Left alone, Berit found himself spending far too much time in his own head.
He couldn’t stop reliving that day in Tallit, trying to discover where he’d made his mistake, and how he could have made it right. The nightmares refused to fade – every night he fought the battle again in his dreams, and every night he lost, waking up with his jaw aching from trying not to scream.
It was the nightmares, in the end, that stiffened his resolve and made his course of action clear to him. So it was that five weeks after Sparhawk had sent him out to Tallit, and four weeks after he brought him back again, Berit found himself standing across from the preceptor’s desk once more.
“Ehlana keeps telling me I’m getting old,” Sparhawk said, his eyes glittering dangerously. “My hearing must be going at last. I don’t know why else I would have thought you just said you wanted to leave.”
Berit stared at the rough stone between his feet, where generations of young knights had worn a shallow groove in the floor. He had known Sparhawk wouldn’t make this easy for him.
“I don’t think I’m cut out to be a Pandion,” he said again. “I want permission to leave the order, my lord.”
“And pursue your dream of becoming a fish monger, perhaps? Or should we apprentice you to Platime as a house-breaker? You don’t have the build for a pickpocket, I’m sorry to say, whatever Talen’s told you.”
“I don’t think –”
“No,” Sparhawk said. “You really didn’t. And that’s my answer.”
“But–”
“You asked my permission. And as the Pandion Preceptor, and the Prince Consort, I’m telling you you don’t have it. Once of those nice little privileges of rank, you know. I get to refuse when people make stupid requests of me.”
His voice was more serious when he continued. “I don’t want to watch a friend make a mistake like this,” he said. “And I don’t want to lose a good knight if I don’t have to.”
Berit bit his lip and didn’t say what he was thinking, which was that Sparhawk wasn’t.
Sparhawk’s desk was covered with papers stacked up into messy, uneven piles. He picked one up now, and glanced at it.
“Do you know the cloister the order owns on the road to Cardos?” he asked abruptly.
“All the novices had to help rebuild it three summers ago,” Berit affirmed.
“The abbot wrote to me last week. All that rain they had made the roof cave in. I’ve been trying to decide which knights I can spare to help them repair it. Are you fit to ride yet?”
Berit nodded. “Although the doctor said I’m not to get stabbed again for at least another month.”
“I’ll warn the monks, then,” Sparhawk said, and sighed. “Go to Cardos, Berit. Get yourself sorted out. You’ll still be a knight when you’re ready to come back.”
“Yes, my lord,” said Berit, bowing his head, and knew he’d been dismissed.
Khalad slammed into the room while Berit was packing his armor. He had abandoned a Pandion’s plain brown robe for his own black vest, and with his solid arms bare to the shoulder he looked as immovable as a stone standing in the middle of the doorway.
“You’re leaving,” he said flatly. “Were you going to tell anyone? Or are you just running off in the middle of the night?”
Berit busied himself with his packing, pretending that his shirts and socks required all of his attention. He had planned to visit Khalad in the morning, just before he left, but if he were honest with himself he had wished he could slip out of the chapterhouse unnoticed, before anyone else had the chance to yell at him.
“You’re not changing my mind,” he said instead, holding up a pair of breeches to see if they still fit. “Sparhawk couldn’t talk me out of it either.”
Khalad snorted, glowering at him. “That’s fine,” he said. “But I’m going with you.”
“Khalad, you don’t –”
“It’s not because I’m worried about you,” he replied. “The last time you knights repaired the cloister the roof fell in. Someone there has to actually know what they’re doing.”
“You’ll be a Pandion soon enough too, you know,” Berit said.
“No,” Khalad corrected him. “I’ll be a farmer with a sword. I still have too much sense to be a knight.”
The silence that fell between them was slightly awkward still. Then Berit tried to close his pack, only to have the seams groan and threaten to spill its contents back out onto his bed. Khalad rolled his eyes and shouldered him out of the way, muttering something about how Sephrenia ought to have taught them the Styric spell of folding clothes properly. Berit shoved him back, grabbing at his smallclothes, but Khalad dug his heels in. Finally he gave up, and the two of them repacked the bag together, pressed shoulder-to-shoulder beside the narrow bed.
The Pandion cloister was set several leagues off the road, nestled in a gap between the rolling hills at the end of a winding path. When the novices had rebuilt it, they had left most of the overgrowth of wild fruit trees, and in the years since the monks had tamed them down in something resembling a sprawling orchard on the cloister grounds. It was a small compound, just a handful of slate-roofed buildings with arched windows in the rough-dressed stone, and from the crest of the last hill it had the look of a painted pastoral.
The effect was lost on Berit, however.
The trip hadn’t been an easy one for him. Just making himself leave the chapterhouse had been more difficult than he expected. It had been a grey, miserable morning, not unlike the last time, and the fog over the cobbled streets had disoriented him. For a moment he had thought he was back on the way to Tallit, and that the other knights would be behind him if he looked. It was only when Kalten emerged from the stable instead, whistling cheerfully, that he came back to himself.
His memory didn’t falter again, but the incident set the tone for the trip. He had reassured Sparhawk that he was safe to travel, but his leg started to ache only a few miles outside the city, and by the time they dismounted in the evening it was all he could do to stagger to his bedroll. The nightmares were worse than they had been since the first week out of the infirmary. Kalten’s presence was the only thing that made it bearable – in the face of Berit’s ill temper and Khalad’s natural taciturnity, the man had sung, teased, and kept up a steady chatter of jokes and tales of his latest disastrous exploits in domestic life. But even his good cheer could only go so far, and by the time the cloister came into sight ahead of them, Berit was ready to collapse into bed and never stir again.
The abbot came out to meet them himself. The plump, brisk little man shook all their hands as the stable-boy led their horses away, and explained apologetically that because of the damage to the roof, they no longer had sleeping quarters. Most of the monks were bedded down in the refectory, and two small storage rooms had been emptied next to the kitchen for the visiting knights.
The next thing Berit remembered was waking up on the floor in a room that smelled faintly of sour bread, with Khalad tangled in the blankets beside him, one leg thrown carelessly over Berit’s hip. He had shared a tent with the other man before, but he had never been close enough to see that he had a smattering of freckles across his collarbone and the back of his neck, a fact that was oddly fascinating to Berit in his languid early-morning haze. He stared at them, almost entranced, until Khalad rolled over with a grunt and sat up, groping blindly for his shirt.
After breakfast one of the brothers took them around to see the gaping hole in the roof of the largest building where the ceiling had split and fallen in on itself, and then to the shed where they had stacked the planks and slates to repair it. Khalad had started muttering to himself as soon as he first glanced at the roof, and for the rest of the day he commandeered a table in a sunny corner of the refectory, sketching plans and scribbling calculations in the margins while Kalten and Berit restlessly explored the grounds of the monastery.
The next morning they set to work, the three of them assisted by two under-grown novices who had been the only ones the cloister could spare from the spring planting. Khalad took charge readily, barking instructions to the novices and the knights with equal ease as they began to prepare the slate and timber for building. By his estimate, it was a month’s work at least - after the timber had been cut and the slate trimmed and punched, the knights would have to mortar new blocks into the walls, replace the wooden frame of the roof, and nail the tiles down.
Berit spent three days with his hands covered in blisters, too tired to move and too sore to sleep by the time they stopped for dinner each night. Then his blisters started to scab over into callouses, his muscles adjusted to the labor, and his life fell into a new rhythm. Breakfast and morning prayers with the monks, long days up in the scaffolding with Khalad laying mortar, dinner in the refectory and more prayer, falling asleep to the sound of Khalad snoring. The repetitiveness of the work and the monastic routine lent the days a sameness that blurred them together, as if the cloister had been shifted into the no-time of the Troll Gods.
Some days he thought about nothing more trying than slotting a roof beam into its bracket without cracking the wood, or the way the muscles in Khalad’s bare chest flexed when he stripped off his shirt under the balmy April sun. One afternoon he and Kalten ambushed Khalad, carried him thrashing across the cloister yard, and dumped him into the pond, then stripped down and dived in after him, whooping and splashing water in each other’s faces.
Except for the livid scars on his stomach and thigh, he could have forgotten that Sparhawk had sent him here to convalesce, that he had ever been to Tallit. He did his best not to think about it, and Kalten and Khalad, for their part, carefully did not speak about what would happen when their work at the cloister was done. Berit slept too hard to dream, or didn’t remember it if he did.
It was Sunday, and between lunch and the afternoon prayer Berit and Khalad were cleaning, or at least cleaning as much as two young men whose mothers were very far away ever did. Berit shook out his pallet while Khalad sat cross-legged on the floor polishing and sharpening his knives.
When he finished, he looked up and said, “Where have you hid your axe, Berit? I might as well do that too.”
“It’s in with my armor,” Berit answered before he thought about it.
Berit’s armor was packed up in a chest pushed into the corner of the room; Khalad rummaged through it, then frowned and grunted in surprise as he lifted out the axe.
“This is filthy,” he said, giving Berit a disapproving look. “You know better than to let your weapons go to rust like that. It’s going to take me half the night to put an edge on it.”
Berit froze. He hadn’t cleaned it, it was true, in all the time he’d been at the chapterhouse, and when he’d left he’d just thrown it in with everything else, not wanting to touch it or look at it longer than he had to. Looking at it now though, he could see that the surface of the axe was pitted with rust, the edge darkened and slightly sticky-looking. He wondered, a little queasily, whether any of the blood marking it was his, and had to turn his head.
“Put it away,” Berit said sharply. “It’s not as though I need it anymore.”
Khalad huffed. “This again?”
“What?” Berit asked. “I could chop wood with it, I suppose, but Sir Ulath might find out and set an ogre on me.”
“When you leave the order, you mean,” Khalad said flatly.
Berit sighed. “I’ve left already,” he said. “Just because Sir Sparhawk didn’t believe me -”
“Because it was an idiot idea,” Khalad replied. “He shouldn’t have humoured you as much as he did.”
Berit bristled at his words. “You don’t understand,” he retorted. It felt pathetic even as it left his mouth, and Khalad rolled his eyes at him.
“I understand that you’re acting like a child,” he said. “And everyone feels too sorry for you to say it to your face. We were all hoping you’d come to your senses if we just left it alone long enough. But it seems not.”
Berit wrapped his arms around his stomach, trying to press out the phantom pain of steel passing through his flesh. “Come to my senses?” he said hollowly. “I failed, Khalad. I wanted to play the hero and I got those villagers slaughtered. I didn’t notice Sir Betiner was a traitor when he was sitting next to me shouting it out. I’m not running away, I’m facing the truth. Whatever it is that made Sir Sparhawk and Kalten and the rest of them - I don’t have it. I’m not good enough. I don’t deserve to be a Pandion.”
Khalad snorted. “I think that’s enough of that,” he said. “Do you think you’re the first knight in the world to make a mistake that got other people killed?”
“Why does it matter to you if I want to leave? You wouldn’t even be taking oaths if Sparhawk hadn’t made you. I thought Kurik’s son, of all people, would know how it feels to try to live up to someone else’s expectations.”
Khalad punched him in the face. Berit reeled back and staggered, and punched him back.
By the time two of the brothers in the kitchen heard the commotion and ran in to pull them apart, Khalad had Berit pinned to the ground, knee gouging into his chest. His face was smeared with the blood still streaming from his nose, and one of Khalad’s eyes was bruised and already starting to blacken. The brothers threatened to fetch the abbot, but Berit shrugged off the man holding him by the collar and stormed out of the room.
He spent the rest of the afternoon outside in the orchard, pacing in circles. When nightfall came he stretched out under one of the trees to sleep, but for the first time in days he was wracked by nightmares. Sir Betiner’s skin burned as he lit himself into a signal fire. Village women pleaded with him to save them as he cut them down with his axe. And every time he tried to run Sparhawk and Khalad stood in the doorway and forced him back into the hopeless battle.
For two days Khalad didn’t speak to him, and Berit slept outside in the orchard. On the third morning, Kalten sat down at the table with him at breakfast.
“Fine morning, isn’t it, brother?” Kalten said, slinging a companionable arm around him.
Berit grunted. Kalten was much less tolerable in the morning when there hadn’t been any wine for him to overindulge in the night before.
“Have I ever told you about the time Sparhawk and I got captured by pirates?” he asked.
The story was long and rambling, involving a trade dispute between two of the noble houses in southern Elenia, an accusation of smuggling, and Sparhawk’s infatuation with the earl’s exquisitely lovely adolescent daughter, culminating in her abduction by the rival sailors, and Sparhawk and Kalten’s botched attempt to rescue her.
“And then what happened?” Berit asked, captivated in spite of himself.
“Well,” Kalten said, “being young and generally dashing we fought our way out. And got back to land to find out the whole thing had been a set-up and the wicked little minx had been in on it all along. The men we’d killed were perfectly innocent traders. Now that was a long ride back to Cimmura to face Lord Vanion.”
His blue eyes were suspiciously innocent, and Berit flushed scarlet down to his collar.
“You heard our argument then,” he mumbled.
“Along with the rest of the cloister.” Kalten nodded. His face turned more serious.
“You know that if the Church Knights kicked out everyone who had a task go up in flames, our horses would ride into battle by themselves,” he said. “Ulath’s picked fights with trolls. I’ve gotten besieged by Lamorks for flirting with their daughter. Sparhawk once led a campaign in Rendor that ended in the deaths of 200 Pandions.”
“Honestly?” Berit asked.
“I’ve known bad knights,” Kalten said, ignoring him. “They wouldn’t admit they made mistakes, or they didn’t know how to stop making them. Just - something to think about while you’re making up with Khalad.”
Berit knew a not-order when he heard one.
“He’s up on the roof!” Kalten shouted after him as he left.
Khalad was on his knees nailing slate. Berit stood back on the top rung of the ladder and watched him. He enjoyed watching Khalad, as he’d enjoyed these last few weeks at the cloister together - it had been like being back in Matherion again, when it had been just the two of them traveling together, though with none of the threat of assassination or the destruction of the world.
“If you’re going to stand there, you can make yourself useful,” Khalad said, without looking up from the roof. Berit clambered up over the edge and claimed an armful of Khalad’s tiles. For several minutes the two of them worked side-by-side, silence punctuated by the blow of their hammers.
When he finished his row, Khalad rocked back on his heels. “That’s solid work,” he said, thumping the slate with a broad fist. “My father would be proud of it. He appreciated good construction.”
Berit flinched. “I shouldn’t have brought Kurik into our fight,” he said. “It was a cruel thing to do to a friend. I’m sorry. I just -”
“Feel like a house where someone’s sawed through the roof beams.” Khalad replied. “From the outside it looks solid. But every time it snows you’re waiting for it to fall on you.”
Berit stared at him for a moment, then burst out laughing. “Were you - were you very proud of that metaphor?” he asked when he finally caught his breath, wiping tears from his eyes.
“I was, yes,” Khalad said. He tried to glare, but couldn’t keep an answering smile from teasing across his lips. Berit had always wished the other man would smile more.
Berit leaned back on the roof, hands behind his head, and felt the afternoon sun soak into him. “I do, though,” he said. “Feel like my roof’s fallen in. I think I liked being a novice better. If we’d all died in Zemoch, I could have blamed Sparhawk for it. But now...”
“Now you build a new roof, and move on,” Khalad said firmly.
“I wish it were that easy,” Berit said. But there was no sting in it. The anger of the last few days had gone, and Berit realized now that it had taken the worst edge of the hurt with it, like poison drawing out of a wound. He remembered what Kalten had said to him.
“It’s not easy,” Khalad answered. “Look at my lord Sparhawk, or Vanion - do you think old guilt never keeps them up at night? It’s the hardest thing any of us have to do. But the Pandion order would miss you. And - I would miss you.”
He was still smiling a little, not quite meeting Berit’s eyes. Berit didn’t have an answer to that, so he did the only thing that seemed sensible then - he leaned closer, and he kissed him.
For a moment Khalad went rigid and unyielding against him, and Berit pulled back, thinking he had misunderstood the feelings under Khalad’s words and made an even bigger fool out of himself. But before he could stammer out an awkward apology Khalad grabbed him by the back of the neck and dragged him down into a second, deeper kiss. The tiles were sun-warm underneath him, and Khalad’s hand was clasped with his, and for the first time in too long Berit was utterly happy.
That night they fell into bed together, tangling themselves in the blankets and laying sloppy kisses on every bit of skin they could find. They slept wrapped around each other, Khalad’s arm thrown over Berit’s chest and his nose rubbing against the back of his neck. When Berit woke sobbing from yet another nightmare, Khalad was still there, a warm and reassuring weight pressed all against his skin. And in the darkness they held each other, and Khalad showed him more pleasurable ways to work himself back into dreamless exhaustion.
When Khalad came into the room, Berit was sitting on the floor in the middle of a pile of armor. He had his helmet in his lap, and he was working it over with a polishing cloth, rubbing out the last few traces of rust. In the corner his axe rested on a stand, the blade gleaming and newly sharpened.
“Well,” said Khalad, taking in the scene in front of him calmly.
“It’s not a promise,” Berit said. “I haven’t made up my mind yet. I just thought - you were right about taking care of my axe. In case I need it.”