Savarro shrugged. ‘I had no thought of us joining the ranks, Ristand. But our food is almost gone. The animals need shelter. The warm spell will not last much longer. The bitterest month of winter is soon upon us.’ She waved a hand. ‘The estate might take us in as guests.’
‘Guests! They’ll see us coming and lock the gates! Look at us, no better than marauders.’ Ristand was a big man, shaggy and broad-faced, and if not for the black hue of his skin he would have revealed a flushed countenance, wind-burned and filled with temper. ‘You said you had for us a destination – but you said nothing about a highborn’s shit-smeared estate! Sweet bung-hole, Savarro!’
‘Will you ever cease your complaints, Ristand?’ She faced Kagamandra again. ‘The lord isn’t even in residence. Lost his wife years ago. No children. We’re as likely to find the place abandoned as anything else, and if so it’ll serve us fine to wait out the season.’
‘What of forage and food?’ Ristand demanded.
Her head snapped round again as she glared at her companion. ‘Maybe they took everything when they left, maybe they didn’t. At the very least, it’s shelter!’
‘And what if there’s Houseblades and all the rest? What then?’
‘Then,’ Savarro said as if speaking to a child, ‘we ask kindly, Ristand. Meaning, a league from the gates, we bind and gag you. Sling your flea-bitten carcass over a saddle. That at least will give us a chance at some hospitality!’ She swung back to Kagamandra. ‘Now, leave us be, will you?’
Kagamandra studied her for a long moment, and then he lifted his gaze past her, to the score or so Wardens now gathered on the track. He saw children among them, and servants, cooks and maids. ‘You have come from the season’s fort, sergeant?’
‘We went there first, yes,’ she replied. ‘To take the news, and bring with us whoever wanted to come.?
?
‘Yet you and these others – you were at the battle?’
‘Late to it. Too late to make a difference. We were patrolling Glimmer Fate. Meaning we never drew blades against the Legion.’
Kagamandra was silent, but then gathered his reins and said, ‘Make room on the trail. Sergeant, I am not here at Hunn Raal’s bidding. You speak of a battle I know nothing about. You say Ilgast Rend commanded the Wardens? Then this is his problem.’
‘He’s dead.’
‘Dead?’
‘Hunn Raal executed him,’ Savarro said. ‘Why do you know nothing of this? From where have you come?’
‘I spoke to Commander Calat Hustain,’ Kagamandra said, seeing how this now caught their attention. ‘He was riding back to the fort, with news, one presumes, of events at the Vitr. But of that I can only surmise, as he was not forthcoming on the matter. He had wounded and dead in his company. I would think he has already arrived, only to find his base abandoned, and no answer as to why.’
‘Not true,’ Savarro said, confusion now clouding her features. ‘A few chose to remain behind.’
‘Ah. Well, then, lest you desire Calat Hustain to deem you deserters, hadn’t you better return to the fort?’
Voices rose then, arguments erupting. Pushing his mount forward, Kagamandra rode through the press. Once clear, he coaxed his horse into a slow trot, and before too long the shouting began to fade into his wake.
Houseblades. Do I even have Houseblades?
* * *
The winter fort of the Wardens bore a planked walkway along the length of the walls, accommodating patrols that, to Bursa’s mind, had never served much purpose, and even less so now. He stood at his post, feeling a fool, his gaze fixed upon the black wall of the Glimmer Fate’s high grasses, or, rather, upon the battered gap in its otherwise unbroken line, and the dragon that occupied it. Motionless as a massive boulder, with scales that, at this distance, looked no different from iron plates of armour, the creature appeared to be slumbering.
Snow covered its spine. Ice sheathed its folded wings, with long icicles, now dripping in the unseasonal warmth, depending from their ridges. The dragon had preceded the troop’s arrival by four days, according to old Becker Flatt, the retired Bordersword who had elected to remain when the survivors of the battle reached the fort with their terrible news. The man was in the habit of telling everyone that he had nowhere else to go, and the half-dozen others who had stayed no doubt felt the same. In any case, the dragon had been discovered the morning after the storm. Lying in a gap made by its own massive body, its eyes shuttered, conjured up into a sculpted nightmare, waiting like a promise.
Enough reason to flee this cursed place, as far as Bursa was concerned. When he had heard of the desertion of the battle’s survivors, he had not shared the outrage of the others. I would have done the same. I still might.
The Vitr’s slow assault upon the lands of Kurald Galain now held for him all the urgency of death by old age. Nothing could stop it, after all, and its mysteries tasted stale. The Wardens were finished. The world felt bloodless, the future an empty expanse devoid of purpose.
Beside him, Spinnock Durav leaned on the slumped bales that made up the fort’s wall. Like Bursa, he too stared at the dragon upon the edge of the grassline. ‘Seventy paces,’ he said. ‘More or less. Well, there are no caves anywhere nearby, are there? If the beast must hibernate …’
Scowling, Bursa said nothing for a moment. It still astonished him, this new hatred he fostered for the young man at his side. Unreasoning as it was, he relished its intensity. Envy was wasted unless it could do damage. ‘It bears wounds,’ he said. ‘The demon does not hibernate. It simply recovers.’
‘Ah, well. No one has studied it as you have done, sir.’
‘You consider mine an unwise obsession?’ Bursa asked. ‘Do you imagine these flimsy walls of grass can defend us from that beast? It could kill us all, at any moment. Yet you and the rest – still we stay here. Yes, I study the creature, and be thankful that someone does. What we unleashed from the Vitr will haunt the Tiste, and perhaps see Kurald Galain laid to waste.’