He’d used that tone before, when the minutes before battle bit into the throat like wire, but he’d heard it most often in that camp from the woman in front of him: Vivian Bathari, commander of the Sentinels who held the border.
As was usual with the Sentinels, her clothes—dark, plain wool beneath a mail shirt—gave no indication of her rank. The gold-worked hilt of a greatsword over her shoulder, and the eye-sized sapphire set in it, made a striking contrast.
That was Ulamir, the soulsword that made her a Sentinel, and the stone housed a spirit hundreds of years old.
Vivian wore the other marks of the Order of the Dawn on her face: a half-circle of bloodred tears beneath each gray eye, glowing against her light-brown skin. The gods had reforged her, like they did all of her order, turning them into weapons, and none who’d been through that process ever looked fully human again.
None ever were.
Many feared the Sentinels, even as they relied on them, believing them too close to the monsters they killed. Olvir was too familiar with them, and with Vivian in particular, to feel the slightest alarm at her presence once he recognized her.
Embarrassment was a different story.
* * *
How easily he startles, said Ulamir.
“Everyone’s jumpy right now,” Vivian replied, “and no wonder.”
She spoke in the half-voiced murmur that she’d spent eighteen years using with her soulsword, and which most people didn’t hear.
Olvir nodded, then contrived to look even more awkward than he had before. He carried it well, as always. Being tall and square-chinned with big hazel eyes helped. “Not talking to me, were you? Though you’re right. Or Ulamir is.”
“I forget I have to be careful around the knights,” she said with unspoken acceptance of his equally unspoken apology. “I’m still too used to people with normal hearing.”
Should your memory slip around any of them, he’s the safest, Ulamir put in. What could you say to him that you didn’t say in the Myrian lands, when that undead sank its teeth into your leg?
“You didn’t insult me,” Olvir echoed, “and you didn’t reveal any dark secrets.” Relaxing, he glanced down at the sword in his hand, then at the scabbard he’d drawn it from.
That and the rest of his belt lay behind him on the large rock where he’d been sitting, with a folded bundle of sky-blue cloth beneath them that Vivian assumed was his tunic. “Er. I should either put this down or on, shouldn’t I?”
“It seems like it would be easier on your wrist,” said Vivian.
She began to turn away as he put the sword down and picked up his tunic. It was a shame to do so, with rippling biceps and a flat stomach on full display—she was middle-aged for a Sentinel in the field, and weary, not blind or dead—but it was best to avoid lingering awkwardly, particularly when she’d be working with the man. Getting breakfast going early would win her some favors, Vivian thought, and starting a fire came easily, even two years past her journeying days.
“You weren’t looking for help, when you came across me, were you?” Olvir asked, making her turn. The tunic slid down over his broad back and narrow waist, concealing his head for a moment before his close-cut chestnut hair emerged. “If you’d be able to use an extra hand with any task, I’m more than willing.”
“No, but I do thank you for offering. I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I hoped a tour of the camp would help.”
“You too? Not that it’s so unusual, given the circumstances.”
“I’m surprised there’s not a crowd of us. Ample hard work or rotgut must be effective for the others.”
Olvir turned toward her. His belt was fastened, and his sword on it—“girt to his side,” as the old stories had said—and he mostly looked the picture of an upstanding knight, but with a far less certain expression than tapestries generally portrayed them having. “Forgive the question, but you haven’t been having dreams, have you?”
“I have,” she said slowly, “but only what you’d expect. And you sound like you mean another sort.”
“I’m afraid I’m not sure what I mean. I’ve never been a prophet, so I doubt it’s that, and yet they repeat more than any dream I’ve ever had.”
The name and the face were both starting to niggle at her. She’d heard of him before, not just as her past sometime-companion on missions or another friend in the camp. The mention had been more recent, more official. “I don’t want to pry,” Vivian said. “Or, rather,” she added, because she was talking to a servant of Tinival, whose dominions included truth, “I do, but only as far as it might be tactically significant. Tell me more?”
Olvir squared his broad shoulders, a man facing up to an unpleasant duty. “I’m in different places,” he said. “It was the village where I grew up in this dream, but in the last one I was at the chapter house where I trained. It’s always a place that I’m fond of. And it’s always burning. The smell of smoke is very vivid. The screams are too.”
“I haven’t studied the mind,” said Vivian, “but that doesn’t seem so out of the ordinary to dream about, given all of this.” She gestured, indicating the campfires but also the palisades and the army, and by extension the war. “It sounds like you put it a few degrees away rather than using memory straight out, but…minds do that, probably.”
“So I thought. But”—he swallowed—“tonight I saw where… I saw that I was lighting the fires. My own hands were piling up the wood, spilling the oil.” Olvir held them up and out in unnecessary illustration, or perhaps to try to get them as far
