Pellin nodded. “Consider the worst possibilities and plan for those,” he said.
“That’s the soldier’s maxim,” Rymark replied.
Gael shouldered her way between Ellias and Rymark to stand by me. “I’ll stay by your side as long as I can,” she said. Then she leaned in close so that only I could hear her. “You must live.”
For once I had no desire to dispense with the polite pretensions others used to hide from their grief. I didn’t say anything about being dispensable or how the need for Cesla’s defeat outweighed my need to live. She knew. “Your eyes are like slate,” I said. “They only look that way when you’re angry.”
One of her hands found the back of my neck and pulled me close. Our foreheads touched. “Or scared.”
“When you’re bantering with me, they’re a deep rich blue, like the sky at sunset,” I said.
Her mouth quivered as she tried to offer some lighthearted jest, but after a moment she shook her head. “Then come back and see them that color, Willet.” She pulled away, making room.
Pellin and the rest of the Vigil closed in around me, and I prayed in desperation. Mirren and Fess had less experience in the gift than I, and the only time I’d fought within another’s mind, I’d been trapped there.
Pellin paused, looking at me. “Your vault has to be open.”
I knew what he needed. “My memories from the war are the key.”
Bolt came forward to wrap his arms around me. “It seems to me I’ve done this before.”
As one, Pellin, Toria, Mirren, and Fess put their hands on my head. Within the confines of my mind, I welcomed them to my construct and showed them where I kept my memories of war. I’d modeled it after Custos’s sanctuary in Bunard. Pellin opened a door into my past and lifted a stack of parchment sheets. Oddly, I wondered what had happened to Custos—and if he had anyone to bring him figs.
Then the past came for me.
I stood rooted to the spot, my feet refusing the command to run. The forest, the arrow, or the mercy stroke? “No one survives the Darkwater.”
The sergeant smiled, the long puckered scar across his forehead dimpling with the expression. “We have a saying south of the strait, Norlander. ‘If there is no second, it’s because the first hasn’t been tried.’”
The hiss of an arrow broke the spell binding my feet. “I hope you have a saying for surviving the forest.” I ducked behind a bole two paces across. The mercenaries followed and we headed deeper into the gloom.
The men gathered into a tight mass as the light faded from the thick canopy and the dying sun. “Ben, split the men into two squads of six, four to watch each point, one to watch the floor, and the last to watch overhead.” Strange smells, sweet and acrid, filled my nose, and I turned westward in an attempt to make our stay in the forest as brief as possible. “I’ll take the point on the lead group.”
Just before night fell, we improvised torches. Darkness closed in. A hundred paces in, some instinct warned me. I turned searching for the men behind me. Ben’s squad had vanished, no longer trailing behind us. “Curse it,” I said. “Where are they?”
“We have to return for them,” one of the men said. “We do not leave our countrymen behind.”
“We can’t stay here,” I said. “If we can get out of the forest quickly enough, we might escape its poison.”
The southerners around me nodded. “Then let us find our brothers quickly.”
We backtracked to the last spot I’d seen Ben’s squad, but there was no one there, and when I bent to examine the ground by torchlight, the forest floor was undisturbed. Panic made the air thick. When I stood, only three men stood with me. My torch made enough light to see perhaps twenty feet in any direction. Nothing moved.
“This place is cursed,” I said. “Stay if you want, but I will not.” I ran, trying to retrace our steps, but the forest betrayed me. Everywhere I went, the floor appeared undisturbed. Alone, I turned, trying to find west, but in searching for Ben and his squad, I’d gotten turned around. I peered harder, searching the darkness for any hint of light that might indicate the setting sun.
There! A glow in the darkness like the faintest witch light appeared, but it eluded me. For hours I ran until my soul became parched for light, but the black canopy of the forest never receded, and I imagined that I had died on the battlefield and some lightless hell had taken me as punishment for forsaking my vow to be a priest.
I slowed to a walk as my feet hit mud. Then they splashed water. How many days had I been in the forest?
I came to the shore of a lake bordered by massive cypress and sycamore trees, their trunks and leaves twisted and blackened. Dim moonlight glinted on the surface, but the glow I had chased was gone. A man knelt in the distance, his arms thrust to the elbows in the water. The cords of his neck strained as though he worked to lift a ponderous weight, and his eyes stared through me, unseeing, witnessing horrors.
I left the footing of tree roots to approach him, flinging my arms for balance as my feet sank through a depth of mud to find purchase on something smooth and hard. I reached down through centuries of detritus and decay, curious.
“No!” the man kneeling in front of me cried. “I cannot hold!”
But I was dead already. Too much time had passed since I’d entered the forest. I pushed through the mud until my hand touched
