One thing she would never play, however, was that game of masks. No, she would meet the future with a knowing look in her eye, unapologetic, yet defying the prospect of her own innocence. No, be as guilty as everyone else, but announce the admission with bold courage. She would point no fingers. She would not reach for her weapons blazing with the lie of retribution.
Hetan found she was glaring at those celestial tears in the sky.
Her husband wanted to be a coward. So weakened by his love for her, for the children they shared, he would break himself to save them. He had, she realized, virtually begged her for permission to do just that. She had not been ready for him. She had failed in understanding what he sought from her.
Instead, I just kept asking stupid questions. Not understanding how each one tore out the ground beneath him. How he stumbled, how he fell again and again. My idiotic questions, my own selfish need to find something solid under my own feet-before deciding, before making bold judgement.
She had unknowingly cornered him. Refused his cowardice. She had, in fact, forced him out into that darkness, into leading his warriors to a place of truths-where he would seek to frighten them but already knowing-as she did-that he would fail.
And so we have our wish. We go to war.
And our Warleader stands alone in the knowledge that we will lose. That victory is impossible. Will he command with any less vigour? Will he slow the sword in his hands, knowing all that he knows?
Hetan bared her teeth with fierce, savage pride, and spoke to the jade talons in the sky. ‘He will not.’
They emerged in darkness, and a moment later relief flooded through Setoc. The blurred, swollen moon, the faint green taint limning the features of Torrent and Cafal, casting that now familiar sickly sheen on the metal fittings of the horse’s bit and saddle. Yet the skirl of stars overhead seemed twisted, subtly pushed-and it was a few heartbeats before she recognized constellations.
‘We are far to the north and east,’ said Cafal. ‘But not insurmountably so.’
The ghosts from the other realm had flooded the plain, flowing outward and growing ever more ephemeral, finally vanishing entirely from her senses. She felt that absence with a deepening anguish, a sense of loss warring with pleasure at their salvation. Living kin awaited many of them, but not, she was certain, all. There had been creatures in that other world’s past unlike anything she had seen or even heard of-limited as her experience was, to be sure-and they would find themselves as lost in this world as in the one they had fled.
A vast empty plain surrounded them, flat as an ancient seabed.
Torrent swung himself back into the saddle. She heard him sigh. ‘Tell me, Cafal, what do you see?’
‘It’s night-I can’t see much. We are on the northern edge of the Wastelands, I think. And so, around us, there is nothing.’
Torrent grunted, clearly amused by something in the Barghast’s reply.
Cafal nosed the bait. ‘What makes you laugh? What do you see, Torrent?’
‘At the risk of melodrama,’ he said, ‘I see the landscape of my soul.’
‘It is an ancient one,’ Setoc mused, ‘which makes you old inside, Torrent.’
‘The Awl dwelt here hundreds of generations ago. My ancestors looked out upon this very plain, beneath these same stars.’
‘I am sure they did,’ acknowledged Cafal. ‘As did mine.’
‘We have no memory of you Barghast, but no matter, I will not gainsay your claims.’ He paused for a time, and then spoke again, ‘it would not have been so empty back then, I imagine. More animals, wandering about. Great beasts that trembled the ground.’ He laughed again, but this time it was bitter. ‘We emptied it and called that success. Fucking unbelievable.’
With that he reached down to Setoc.
She hesitated. ‘Torrent, where will you ride from here?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘It didn’t before. But I believe it does now.’
‘Why?’
She shook her head. ‘Not for you-I see nothing of the path awaiting you. No. For me. For the ghosts I have brought to this world. I am not yet quit of them. Their journey remains incomplete.’
He lowered his hand and studied her in the gloom. ‘You hold yourself responsible for their fate.’
She nodded.
‘I will miss you, I think.’
‘Hold a moment,’ said Cafal, ‘both of you. Setoc, you cannot wander off all alone-’
‘Have no fear,’ she cut in, ‘for I will accompany you.’
‘But I must return to my people.’