3
“I just don’t see why it always has to be you,” Azza said after Megs followed her back into her tent. “Why can’t Rom scout with Zandra and you stay behind to monitor this Lieutenant Clovis?”
“Because I’m a better scout than Rom,” Megs said.
“And Zandra’s a better scout than you,” Azza countered. “She could go by herself.”
“You know the rules,” Megs said. “No one scouts alone. And besides, there’s no way I’m sending Zandra towards a potential tribal gathering by herself.”
Azza huffed and turned her face away. The tent wasn’t tall enough for them to stand inside, so they both sat cross-legged across from each other, knees touching in the cramped space. It was always a strange place to have an argument. And despite the tent giving them the illusion of privacy, only canvas and a few hides separated them from the rest of the camp. Everyone would know that they’d had another quarrel by the end of breakfast.
“Hey.” Megs reached out, gently turned Azza’s face back towards her own. “Don’t make this about you and me. If Clovis is telling the truth and there’s a whole tribe practically on our doorstep, we need to know. There’s too much at stake to leave it to chance – or to someone else. That’s what being the leader means. It’s about taking responsibility.”
Azza laughed bitterly. “I wonder if that’s what the Empress Natasia said when she decided to lead the Imperial Army to the East herself.”
“This is different.”
“How?”
“Because I’m not leading the entire Imperial Army into the waiting jaws of the tribesmen,” Megs said. She shifted into a soothing tone. “All Zandra and I are going to do is sneak in, take a quick peek, and sneak back out again. We’ll be back by this time tomorrow. Or by midday at most.”
For a long moment, Azza didn’t answer. Then her face crumpled into grief, and her shoulders shook with sobs. The sobs were silent, but tears streamed down her face nonetheless.
Megs was taken aback. She hadn’t seen Azza cry since they first rescued her during a raid on a village taken over by mountain men. It was clear that the tribesmen had been using Azza and the other female slaves for unspeakable things, but Azza had never spoken of what had happened to her during the six months she’d been their slave. The woman rescued alongside Azza hung herself a few days after the rescue. Azza cried when she saw her companion swaying from the tree. She cried for a week straight. Then the tears stopped, and she hadn’t shed another tear until this moment, almost a year and a half later.
“Azza?”
“I have a sick feeling about this, Megs,” Azza whispered. “A sick, sick feeling. You shouldn’t go. None of us should. We should pack up, flee. Build another camp somewhere else.”
Megs let out a bitter laugh. “Build another camp? Where? Even though there are fewer tribesmen in the mountains than there used to be now that they’ve stolen our lands, there are still enough that any place halfway habitable – halfway defensible – is already taken.” Megs shook her head. “We’re not running. This place may not be much, but it’s our home.”
Azza didn’t respond, just continued to cry silently. Unnervingly.
“You joined this crew for the same reason everyone else did,” Megs said softly. “For protection, but also for the hope that, maybe one day, we might take our homes back. We can’t do that if we’re always running.”
“I didn’t join for protection,” Azza said. “There is no protection anymore. And there is no taking our homes back. I joined because of you, Megs. Because of what I saw in you.”
Megs had no reply for that.
Azza made a sound like she was choking. “And isn’t that what they said about us once – the mountain men? That we were on their lands, that they would take it back from us, no matter how long it took?” She looked up, eyes wide and vulnerable. “What if it never ends? What if we fight them and they fight us until we’re all dead and there’s no one left to fight? Then the only ones left to farm our fields will be the crows.”
“We’re not the same as the tribesmen. Never say that.” Megs spoke with conviction and command, but inside her secret heart, she couldn’t help but wonder if Azza was right. Although she had never expressed it, not even to Azza, there were days when she wondered if the woman who hung herself had the right of it. There were only so many horrible things a person could see and experience before they reached a breaking point.
But Megs hadn’t reached that breaking point. Not yet. And she wouldn’t let Azza break either.
“You claim you fight for our protection,” Azza said. “But are you sure? Are you sure you don’t just fight for vengeance like the rest of them?”
The very question threw Megs unwillingly back in time, back to a memory of a morning some five years ago when she lay on her belly in a wheat field just outside her village, watching in horror as a mountain man dragged her mother by the hair and forced her to her knees in front of Milo, one of Megs’s younger brothers. Mother said something – Megs was too far away to hear what it was – and reached up to touch her son’s face. The moment she did, smoke poured from Milo and into Mother.
Screaming.
Mother’s screams, Father’s screams, the baby’s screams. Even Milo’s screams. Megs had bit down on the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood to keep herself from screaming. Father and the other villagers surged forward, trying to get to Mother, who had collapsed to the ground, but the mountain men held them back.
Megs had seen smoke go into a person on the battlefield often enough to know what it meant. She’d seen it happen to her older brother, Milton, seconds before she drove her short sword into his chest, granting him the mercy they’d promised to give one another if it ever happened to them.
As she watched, frozen amongst the wheat, Mother finished her transformation from human to shadow and stood. If Megs had been closer, she knew she would have seen flames in Mother’s eyes.
Shadow-infected. Back then, before the Heroine of Port Lorsin drove the king of shadows away, the transformation happened fast, almost instantaneously.
Milo, Megs’s baby brother, had just turned their own mother into a shadow creature. How? More importantly – why?
Megs shook her head hard, as if the motion might force the memory back into the mental lockbox where she usually kept it.
“I don’t fight for vengeance,” Megs said evenly. “Vengeance is rash and it gets people killed. I fight to make everyone safer.” But Megs wasn’t sure if she was trying to convince Azza or herself.
Azza didn’t answer. She continued to weep in perfect silence.
“I should get going,” Megs said. “Rom told Zandra to be ready to leave as soon as she broke her fast. I’m sure she’s wondering where I am.” She reached for the backpack, which was stowed in one corner of the tent with her other traveling supplies.
But Azza grabbed her wrist. “Don’t leave. Please.”
“I told you – I’ll only be gone a short while. I’ll be back tomorrow.” Megs pulled her wrist free.
Azza watched as she started to pack. “I don’t think you will. I don’t think we’ll ever see each other again if you do this.”
Megs whirled on her, frustration boiling over. “Why are you acting like this?” she asked hotly. “I go on scouts and raids all the time. Why is this time so different? Are you scared because it’s a whole tribe instead of a clan or a patrol?”
Azza dropped her gaze. “It’s just a feeling, Megs. I don’t know how to explain it to you.”
Megs took a long, steadying breath. Every survivor she’d gathered in this camp had been through so much. Few of them talked about the horrors they’d seen; she wouldn’t tell Azza that her little brother had inexplicably turned her entire village into the shadow-infected any more than Azza would tell Megs what the mountain men had done to her in the months she’d been their slave. But even though no one ever spoke of their personal horrors, sometimes those horrors showed anyway. Dwennon, for all his blustery talk, occasionally woke the rest of the camp in the middle of the night when he screamed in his sleep. Allard had developed such a habit of drinking that his nose had taken on the bright red of a village drunk. And Big Seth, despite loving Little Seth with all his heart, sometimes spewed such vitriol at the boy that he scared birds from the trees.
Azza’s sudden, unreasonable anxiety over this latest scouting trip was no different than these other outbursts. Which meant that what she needed from Megs right now was not frustration but reassurance.
Megs set the empty backpack down and took both of Azza’s hands in her own. “Listen to me,” she said as gently as she could. “We will see each other again. I promise. Zandra is the very best scout we have – she’s as good as any tribesman in the mountains and she can shoot the fly off a horse’s arse at twenty yards out.”
Azza let out a reluctant chuckle but did not look up.
“If there are mountain men near,” Megs continued, “whether a whole tribe or a ten-man patrol, she’ll know well before they realize we’re there.”
“Promise me you’ll only look, not fight,” Azza said.
“I promise. Only look.” Megs had no idea if she’d be able to keep that promise.
“Even if you see a perfect opportunity to take out a patrol?”
“Even if I see Mother Moon’s own perfectly gifted ambush, I will only look,” Megs said.
Azza smiled. “I don’t believe you. But I do trust Zandra’s instincts.”
Megs laughed. “Zandra’s but not mine?”
Azza wiped her tears from her cheeks. “Maybe I should have asked you to promise me that you would listen to her.”
“You still can.”
“Listen to Zandra.”
Megs leaned forward and kissed her. She pressed her forehead against Azza’s when the kiss ended. “I will.”
On cue, they heard footsteps outside their tent, then a voice.
“Oi, Megs,” Zandra called gruffly from a few feet off. “Sun’s all the way up. Let’s go if we’re going.”
Megs grabbed her backpack and reached for the spare bedroll. “I’m packing now,” she called. “I’ll be ready in a minute.”
Megs hastily shoved her scouting supplies into the pack, trying not to feel the way Azza’s eyes lingered on her.