The night stretched on as we continued to talk, lit by a full moon in the cloudless sky above and our slowly dying fire. Lia had dozed off with her arm intertwined with mine and her head against my shoulder, and Marin looked ready to follow her lead at any moment. Marten was finishing a particularly circuitous story about a merchant he met in Bale that had tried to swindle him out of a delivery fee. “...And so I packed up my wagon, waved goodbye, and took it all back with me without another word! Found another buyer in Yoria that was willing to pay in full,” he finished with a hearty laugh.
Hana nodded and patted him gently on the knee, her eyes glistening with a faraway quality that told me she had heard the story plenty of times before. She let out a loud yawn and stretched her arms over her head, bumping Marten intently with her shoulder. The signal was clearly received as he stood and held out a hand to help her up. “I suppose it’s time for us to leave you for the night,” he sighed. “We won’t want to be yawning tomorrow.”
“Thank you for the company,” Hana added. “It was nice to forget what’s waiting for us in the morning.”
“Well, I suppose we’ll have to do it again tomorrow night, then,” I responded with a grin. “We’ll all have quite the story to tell by then, I imagine.”
My voice woke Marin, whose forehead had dipped down to rest against the side of my arm. She looked up at me with sleep-filled eyes, blinking slowly as she attempted to remember where she was. “This way, dear,” Hana called to her, waving towards the wagon. Marin nodded and stood to follow along behind them, but paused to give me a soft pat on the head before leaving without further comment. I grinned as I watched the group disappear into the back of the wagon before turning back to Lia, who had managed to fully fall asleep against my other shoulder.
I brushed a stray strand of hair from her face as I spoke into her ear. “I think you’ll be more comfortable sleeping in the wagon than on my arm.”
Her eyes flitted open, and she smiled as she met my eyes. “Oh, Lux. I was just having such a nice dream. We were at the inn we stayed at in Attetsia, and everybody was there. You and me, my parents, Marin, and...Val. Everybody was drinking and having fun.” She paused as her eyebrows furrowed, and her smile faded to a frown. “Do you think we’ll ever see her again?”
“If I ever see you again, I’ll kill you. Make sure that doesn’t happen.” The memory of my last words to Val echoed in my head, and I held back a grimace. “I don’t know.” Her eyes fell, and I rubbed her back in comforting circles. “I’ll say this, though; fate seems to have an odd sense of humor when it comes to me. It seems unlikely, but it’s not impossible, either.” I stood up and offered her a hand. “Now, let’s get you to bed.”
I walked her to the wagon and said my goodnights, then returned to the lonely campfire. One small kick of dirt and snow was enough to extinguish the sputtering coals, and I sat down in a clear spot beside the smoking pit. The sky was relatively free of clouds, and the light of the moon reflected off of the fresh snow to perfectly illuminate the world around me. Our nearby surroundings were similar to what we had driven through for the past week, with thickets of trees and bushes dotting the roadside, but the path ahead was barren and uninviting.
The mountains that separated Lybesa from Kaldan dominated the view before me, with peaks stretching up to the clouds and spreading unbroken to the north and south for as far as my eyes could see. To the northwest I could just make out the tips of the ivory towers of Atsal; we had taken an intentionally wide path around the city at my request, following smaller and less used dirt paths in an effort to avoid as many patrols as possible. From our current position, we would reach the main road between the city and the Mountain Gate after a half day of travel and pass through the gate itself by sundown.
As I began my meditative watch for the evening, I was surprised by my lack of anxiety. Although I had lifetimes to practice, it was still commonplace for my stomach to churn in the night before a large battle, even with the rationalization that the feeling was only pre-fight nerves. The absence of any queasiness in my gut or trembling in my fingers was a welcome relief, but I began to order my thoughts in an effort to find the cause. It didn’t take long to find the source of the inner peace: for the first time in decades, I was fighting for my future and the future of my family.
Our mission to Attetsia had been on the orders of a man I didn’t trust, for the benefit of a country that wasn’t mine, and leading towards what I thought was the end of my life with Lia. Every step forward had been difficult, and my mental state suffered more and more as the mission came closer to ending. In contrast, the fight at the Mountain Gate was the only thing standing between me and the normal life I so desperately wanted. The paradigm shift after my encounter with Savitz
