――― ⚔ ―――
The fire was Liera's doing, as it always was. She had a way of building them — not for heat, not for light, but for the particular quality of silence they created. A boundary. A circle of amber that turned the darkness beyond it into something almost kind. Kaito had noticed this about her years ago, on their second mission together, when they were still suspicious of each other's competence and hadn't yet earned the right to be afraid. She built fires the way other people locked doors. When she was finished, her hands would settle in her lap and she would exhale exactly once, and the night outside would know better than to come closer.
Tonight she built it bigger than usual.
No one mentioned it.
They were camped in the hollow of the last ridge before the Ashfields — six hours from the Citadel of Ash, according to the maps; four, according to Daven, who had ridden that road twice on reconnaissance and still had the scar on his left forearm to show for the second time. The ground here was hard, black-veined granite that had been breathing distance from volcanic heat for so long it had forgotten what cold felt like. The tents were unnecessary. Nobody slept anyway.
Beyond the firelight, Alderon's second moon had risen — the small one, the pale blue disc the northern traders called the Widow's Eye. It only appeared in the final weeks of winter. Old soldiers considered it bad luck. Kaito had always thought it was simply beautiful, in the way that things are beautiful when you already know how the story ends.
Daven was sharpening his sword. He had been sharpening it for forty minutes. The blade did not need it — Daven's sword had not needed sharpening in years, because Daven sharpened it before every serious fight with the focused attention of a man who needed something to do with his hands. Kaito watched the motion: long, deliberate strokes, the whetstone moving in one direction only, never back. He had memorised this ritual years ago. He found it as steadying as Daven did, which was perhaps why they had been friends for so long. Some people calmed you not by speaking, but by continuing to be exactly themselves in your presence.
"You're going to sharpen through to the other side," said Orin from across the fire.
Daven didn't look up. "If I do, it'll cut twice as well."
"That is not how blades work."
"That is not how your blades work."
Orin made a sound that was not quite a laugh and returned to the small leather journal in his lap, which he had been writing in for the past hour with the methodical intensity of a man trying to finish something before he ran out of time. He was the party's archivist, technically — a designation he had invented for himself in the third year, when he decided that someone needed to be keeping records and the rest of them were too busy staying alive to care. He had fourteen of these journals. He'd told Kaito once, very quietly, that if he died on a mission, the journals were to go to the Academy library in Valdenmere, and that if they got lost, he would be genuinely more upset about the journals than the dying. Kaito had believed him completely.
He looked at them — really looked, the way he rarely let himself because looking led to the particular kind of grief that arrived before grief had any right to — and he counted what he had with them.
Fifteen years.
Fifteen years of Daven's sunrise runs and Liera's fires and Orin's journals. Fifteen years of Maren laughing at things that weren't funny until they became funny through sheer force of her conviction, and Tessa — absent tonight, three days' ride away on a mission Liera had quietly arranged — Tessa who hit harder than anyone twice her size and cried at stray dogs and had once threatened to resign from the party because Kaito ate her emergency rations and refused to apologise properly.
He owed her an apology for that. He'd been meaning to give it for two years.
❖ ❖ ❖
Liera came and sat beside him just after the second moon reached its peak. She didn't announce herself. She never did — she simply arrived, settled, and became part of the gravity of wherever she sat. Her healer's robes were folded neatly in her tent; she wore plain travelling clothes now, grey and worn, and her silver hair was loose over one shoulder. In the firelight it looked like water. Kaito had thought that many times and never said it, because there were things you didn't say to people whose company you depended on like oxygen.
"Can't sleep," she said.
"Wasn't trying."
She folded her knees to her chest. The fire crackled. Somewhere in the dark, something that was not the wind moved through the dead grass of the Ashfields, and then it didn't.
"Kaito."
"Mm."
"When this is over—" She stopped. Started again. "When we come back from tomorrow. What do you want to do?"
He thought about it. Not the diplomatic answer — the real one, the one he'd been keeping folded away in some interior pocket for years against the possibility that the war would actually, finally, end. "I want to go somewhere I've never been," he said. "Somewhere that doesn't know my name. I want to eat something I can't identify and sleep past dawn and not have a single thing to fight."
Liera was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "That sounds perfect."
Her voice did something on the second word that Kaito couldn't parse — a faint compression, a weight at the back of it, the way a door sounds when it's being closed gently so the latch doesn't make noise. He looked at her. Her eyes were on the fire.
"We should sleep," he said.
"Yes." She didn't move.
He stood, brushed granite dust from his trousers, and looked down at the camp — Daven still sharpening, Orin still writing, Maren asleep against her pack with her mouth slightly open and her hand resting on her sword hilt even in unconsciousness. His people. His absurd, irreplaceable, exhausting people, here at the edge of everything they had been building toward for fifteen years.
He felt something huge move through his chest. He named it: gratitude. Ordinary, enormous gratitude, the kind that embarrasses you when you feel it because it makes the world seem unbearably precious and you are not sure you deserve that.
"Good night, Liera."
"Good night," she said. And then, barely above the fire's breath, something else — two words that the wind took before he could be sure he'd heard them. Something that sounded like I'm sorry.
He was already walking toward his tent. He told himself it was the wind.
He believed it, because he trusted her. He trusted her completely, the way you trust the earth under your feet — not because you've tested it, but because it has never once given you any reason not to.
He went to sleep.
He did not know it was the last peaceful thing he would ever do in this world.
❖