Torbjaer Mountains, Isendel
Winter 217, around the Swan ambush and after
She’d woken to the sight of a Swan raising a club above her and reacted instinctively, pulling at the threads of the world and willing herself away elsewhere.
Then she’d run, as she always did. Panic overcame her, the panic of a prey animal sighting a predator when it had thought itself safe, and she fled soldiers and memories and her own fear.
The three days she trekked alone were the worst since she’d woken in a sea of bodies.
She thought she’d grown hardened to silence and solitude, after her years in the sewers. Craved it, sometimes, traveling for months with nine others who had frequent, often clashing opinions.
Then the days of running, and hiding, and stalking after the wagons, searching for a trace of the taken. The frantic wonder if the Swans had also struck the forward camp at Rog Hodun. The knowledge that no matter which way she went—to pursue the wagons or to search for the others beneath the mountain—she would be giving someone up.
Each night, she passed out from exhaustion with but one thought: I shouldnae have run. I could ha done somethin. It could well be too late now.
When it turned out it wasn’t too late, that she could still save someone, people who were alive and not corpse-still, winter-frozen, she could have wept. (She did weep, later, after the battle was done, the matter dealt with.)
Then the most miraculous thing of all:
The Guard Captain had appeared in the air, power radiating behind him, power he should not have had. Horror froze her in place.
And then he ran.
He. Ran.
As they followed the road and made for the fort, the realization bloomed so softly within her it felt like the slow brightening of dawn, imperceptible to the steady eye but changing between one blink and the next:
She could no longer abandon those around her.
They had helped her, some to the brink of death; she must, then, help them. No—she needed them. For their conversation, for their laughter, their dour looks, their battle-hardened arms, their wisdom, their foolishness, their songs, their cunning, their unfunny jokes and anger and confusion. She could no longer run alone. If abandoning them meant living, it also meant killing the person she wanted to be, the person who aped the name of the bandit hero who’d shone defiantly against the darkness. The one who remained might walk and talk and call herself Sav, but the core of herself would be gone, transmuted into a coward and a traitor through the alchemy of choice. She would become like him—falling behind to observe and running when the odds turned.
She was stronger, now, tempered by winter, honed by study of the forces that bound the world. She was no longer the child who’d woken amidst the corpses of her unit, a pawn to be sacrificed by the Guard Captains of the world.
More, she had the alliance of other people like her: outsiders, power-stricken, power-seeking. Their goals were too broad to achieve separately, but the slaughter of the Swans and the flight of Kelwin—she could say his name now, in her head—proved that they could do greater things by far together.
As she stared at the dead lands and the empty keep beyond, her resolve hardened. The Suffering might be an eldritch power beyond cognizance, but if it had Talith or took one of the others, she would be damned beyond the reach of even the mysterious dark lady if she left them behind.
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