Tirlav went about his day in a haze. He hadn’t been sleeping well since they left the shore, and he had stayed with Jareen all night, walking the paths of the High Tir. She had grown so distraught that he did not want to abandon her. She had wept twice more before the rising sun streaked the dissipating clouds with pink. For the most part, Tirlav kept silent, not knowing what he could say. Except for regret at the death of Coir and concern for the lost trade of steel, he had heard the news of the destruction of Drennos—a land inhabited by hundreds of thousands—with little feeling. Now, seeing how deeply Jareen grieved, he felt ashamed. Was Selniel right in believing it was an act of Isecan? Did they have such power? If it was true, then the people of Drennos had died because of their trade with the Embrace.

  As she’d cried, Jareen’s shoulders shook. She gasped as if something deep in her chest was erupting. Passersby had stared at them, and Tirlav tried to swallow the embarrassment. He was a plume in a company of riders, and there he was with an Insensitive vienu weeping in the night. He despised himself for such vanity. Coir’s letters he would miss, but she had lost so much. He couldn’t feel what she felt, but he would stay with her.

  Yet when the sky brightened, Jareen appeared to realize how much time had elapsed.

  “I must return,” she said, her voice thick. “I must check the afflicted.”

  “We are not far,” Tirlav said, turning her down a narrow path toward the House of Lira.

  As she passed through the small side door, she glanced back at him with bleary red eyes. They looked startlingly bright in her unpigmented visage.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, and then slipped inside.

  What was she thanking him for?

  As soon as he was through the tunnel gate, Tirlav broke into a run. If his absence had not caused concern in the contingent already, it would soon. Circling around so that he emerged from the herd of vaela as if he had been checking upon them, he greeted the sentry on duty and walked up to where Glentel and Tereth were sitting together and picking apart pomegranates. The two vien had become his left and right hands, each responsible for half of the contingent when they were divided.

  Tereth appeared occupied with his food, but Glentel glanced at Tirlav and then back toward the vaela.

  “Blessed morning, liel,” Glentel said. His hair was drawn back tightly over his head, sleek from wet, indicating he had been up early to wash.

  “We have grown negligent in our riding,” Tirlav said, “and the vaela need exercise. Today we will ride hard to the coast and back.”

  Tereth looked up, raising an eyebrows.

  “That will take all day,” he said, “even if we push the vaela hard.”

  “We will push them hard,” Tirlav said. “And ourselves with them. We should ready ourselves for haste.”

  And so they did, the whole contingent racing their mounts through the groves and woods. By early afternoon, they smelled salt on the breeze. They passed by sentries of the new company that guarded the shore, but Tirlav paid them no heed, nor did the sentries challenge them. The contingent wet their vaela’s hooves in the waves, but Tirlav did not allow a dismount. Turning again toward the High Tir, they rode the vaela into a lather north again.

  If there was any suspicion about his absence from the camp at night, they would not find him lax during the day. Though his legs ached by evening, the ride gave him the chance to let his mind drift. Mostly, he thought of Jareen and Coir and pictured what the wave that destroyed Drennos must have looked like. Could such a thing strike the shores of the Embrace?

  That night, Tirlav waited outside the door for Jareen, though he drifted off to sleep more than once, his head resting against a tree-trunk. In the middle of the night, he awoke and walked back to the camp, avoiding the few sentries posted to watch over the tired vaela. He had hung his hammock at the edge of the bivouac, a little away from most of the others. The next day, he drilled his contingent hard again, this time forcing the alternation of archery, sword, and grappling drills without pause, straining their endurance and bruising their bodies. Tirlav took part with his vien, driven on by a mix of pride and guilt despite his fatigue. The Aelor contingent would work harder than the others. They were all weak by mid-day, but he drove them on into the afternoon before he allowed the sweat-soaked warriors to stop. Until evening, he set them to waxing bowstrings, shaving new arrows, honing blades, and polishing the individual rings of their mail. Tirlav did not spare himself in this, either.

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  On the second night, Jareen looked out of the door not long after Tirlav arrived. He had settled cross-legged upon the moss beneath the magnolia tree. His eyes were already closed, but he heard the movement of the hinge. She smiled when she saw him, and Tirlav blinked and smiled back, raising his hand.

  “You’re here,” she said, her silks swishing in the night as she approached.

  “I am. . . I wanted to see if you were alright,” he said.

  “I live. The Synod has sent more afflicted here. The son of Lira I do not think will live in another three days.”

  “That is dire news,” Tirlav said. “Would you care to walk?”

  “I cannot stay,” she said. She must have seen a flicker of disappointment on his face, for she hurried to add: “I wish I could. Perhaps we could take just a few steps down the path?”

  They walked to the joining of the main path and turned around, speaking all the while, and when they returned to the house, they turned and walked the path again. They did this three times, Tirlav asking Jareen all he could think to ask about her life. She did not seem eager to answer about herself, and she often tried to steer the conversation to him. He, in turn, deflected. What was so interesting about his life, compared to hers?

  “I really must go,” she said as they reached the house again. They stood for a time at the little servant’s door. At last, she grasped the latch and opened it.

  “Tomorrow?” he asked. She glanced back.

  “I will try.”

  ***

  Over the next days, two other plumes took note of how hard Tirlav was driving his contingent, and they asked to join Aelor in training. At dinner, Hormil commented on it, though how word had reached him, Tirlav didn’t know. The commander was rarely in the camp, preferring to stay in the city or ride to the coast.

  “Take note of Aelor,” he said. “They do not waste this time of waiting.”

  By the fifth day, Tirlav was more fatigued than he’d ever been before. Still, he tried to come up with new ways to stretch the skills of the contingents, and he spent part of every night walking with Jareen. To be together as much as they could, he waited beside the House of Lira while she checked on the afflicted at intervals and returned to the gardens. A few times, a servant or other passerby saw them speaking beneath the magnolia. While it annoyed Tirlav to be seen, he did not stop his visits.

  By the end of the week, the last plumes had come to Tirlav requesting to join together in training, and Tirlav found himself ordering the exercises of the entire company. He made a point to go early to dinner to see Hormil and Selnei to ask for new ideas and methods. It was Selnei who put him on his course, in the end:

  “You can train all you want, and it has some value,” the veteran said. “But only killing makes you a killer.”

  Tirlav knew he could not have his company do any killing camped within a short walk of the High Tir, but he could have them fight. They had often staged skirmishes with padded arrows and carven sticks for weapons, but now he set the company against itself in large mock battles. One day, he selected two contingents to hold an orchard while fighting the overwhelming numbers of the rest of the company. The odds made the defenders more desperate and determined. It also made the attackers more foolish and over-confident. The defenders lost in the end, but Tirlav and the other plumes learned much from the mistakes made. Day after day, Tirlav divided the company in new ways. There were injuries—broken fingers, bloodied noses, lost teeth, but nothing that would not mend.

  “It is the price,” Hormil said, shrugging, when the plume of Veroi arrived to dinner with a split scalp and a sour frown. “Maybe now it will not be a split skull from a Quth axe. You need not be pretty in the Mingling.”

  Day after day, Tirlav watched to see what worked best in each scenario in which he placed the company, fighting alongside them and subjecting himself to the same pains. Now, the vien of the contingents fell quiet when he approached, and obeyed his command even if they were not of Aelor.

  Fear of the Mingling drove him, and fear that the time he spent with Jareen would be discovered and stopped, or that he would be deplumed and bring dishonor to Aelor. If such discovery was made, he would not be thought slacking; the company could not endure much more. He drove them hard, ensuring they could perform every maneuver, every stratagem at the sound of the varied signals blown on the silver whistles the plumes carried. In the thick of the Mingling, they would have to rely on it, Hormil said. Whether the company hated him for it or not, he hardly paid attention. He didn’t have the energy to care.

  Happily or not, the other plumes deferred to him in the daily training, and he might have been more surprised at the ease of command except he was fighting so hard not to let his fatigue show. For a vien, a couple nights of missed sleep was little concern, but getting only an hour or two of rest per night over an extended period—that was hard. He rebuked himself for encouraging the movement of the camp away from the High Tir, for he could have slept instead of making the walk. Taking a vaela into the High Tir was not an option, either. Vaela were not commonly brought into Vien cities for reasons of cleanliness. It would raise too many questions from the other plumes attending Hormil’s dinners.

  The more Tirlav observed the mock fighting, the more he realized that simplicity tended to defeat complexity, both in overall strategy and the tactics and techniques of fighting. The advanced techniques of blade-work might win an individual duel, but in the confusion of the fray, fundamental cuts and thrusts served most. So he drilled the fundamentals over and over between battles. Once or twice, he had to remind his vien that the fights were not true battles, and they should not harm indiscriminately. They had grown fierce, and more than one bone was broken.

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