[ Torvald ]
I had never been this far from anything.
That sounds dramatic. My whole life sounds dramatic when I say it out loud, which is why I say most things out loud, because drama is just honesty with better timing. But it was true. I had never been more than a day's walk from a place I knew — first my father's tannery in the western provinces, then the Southern Shield. My entire world, sixteen years of it, fit inside a circle you could draw on a map with your thumb.
Now the circle was breaking. The desert stretched behind us — flat, familiar, the specific shade of nothing that I had learned to call home — and ahead, the road went somewhere I had never been. Two days of riding toward a town called Alden's Cross that I couldn't picture because I had no pictures to work with. The imagination needed material, and my material was sand, stone, and the interior of a barracks that smelled like feet.
I rode at the back. Not by choice — by Stamp. My horse was a brown gelding with the motivational drive of a retired bureaucrat. He moved at a pace that suggested he had carefully considered the concept of urgency and rejected it on philosophical grounds. Kess had tried, once, to explain that horses responded to rider energy. If that was true, Stamp was responding to the energy of a boy who wanted to go somewhere but wasn't sure he deserved to arrive.
My father was a tanner. I need to say that because it explains things. Tanners are not romantic. Tanners are not noble. Tanners take dead animal skins and turn them into leather through a process that involves chemicals and water and a smell that you carry with you everywhere, that lives in your hands and your clothes and your hair, that follows you to school and the market and the rare social events where other children's parents looked at your father's stained fingers and made the specific face that meant ah, a tanner.
I loved my father. I need to say that too. He was quiet — not the impressive quiet of soldiers and princes, the tired quiet of a man who worked with his hands twelve hours a day and didn't have words left over for conversation. He communicated through the quality of his work. Each piece of leather he produced was a sentence — smooth meant satisfied, rough meant tired, the occasional perfect piece that gleamed like water meant proud. I read his leather the way Marten read horses. Fluently.
He hadn't wanted me to go. Not because he was selfish — because he was practical. Tanners' sons became tanners. That was the shape of the world he knew, and the shape was comfortable, and comfortable shapes didn't produce soldiers. He signed the recruitment sheet because I asked him to and because his quiet was the kind that listened even when it disagreed.
I signed because I was bored. I can say that honestly. Not unhappy — I wasn't unhappy in the tannery. Not ambitious — ambition required a target, and I didn't have one. I signed because the recruitment poster existed and because looking at it made me feel something in my chest that I couldn't name and that I later identified, after eight months of Hallam's drills and Dek's insults and the desert's relentless, stripping honesty, as potential. The feeling of being able to become something that you hadn't become yet. The feeling that the shape of the world might be larger than your father's workshop.
"Torvald." Marten, from two horses ahead. "You're falling behind."
"I'm not falling behind. Stamp is making a strategic decision about pace. I support his autonomy."
"Stamp is eating grass."
I looked down. Stamp had, indeed, stopped walking and was sampling the sparse scrub that grew along the roadside with the leisurely dedication of a horse who had decided that meals were more important than missions.
"Stamp. We talked about this."
Stamp ignored me. Stamp always ignored me. Our relationship was built on mutual incomprehension and the shared experience of being the slowest entities in any group.
I nudged him forward. He resumed walking with the grudging acceptance of an employee returning from an unauthorised break.
The desert continued. Hours of it. The sameness — the flat, beige, undifferentiated expanse of sand and sky — was hypnotic. My mind drifted. To the tannery. To my father's hands, stained and sure. To my mother's kitchen, where the bread was fresh every morning and the windows faced east so the sunrise came in golden and warm.
I missed them. Not the sharp, cutting miss that Marten carried about his prince — the kind that changed the direction of your life. My missing was softer. A background hum. The awareness that somewhere far behind me, in a workshop that smelled like chemicals and leather, two people who loved me were going about their day and hoping I was going about mine.
By evening, we made camp. Desert camp — bedrolls on sand, a small fire that Kess built with the silent efficiency of someone who had built ten thousand fires and found none of them interesting. Rations. Water. The specific, bone-deep tiredness that came from a day on horseback when your primary equestrian skill was not falling off.
Marten sat beside me. The farrier's son. Twelve. Smaller than me, quieter than me, better at approximately everything except being tall. We had become friends the way garrison friends become friends — through proximity, through shared suffering, through the specific alchemy of two people who annoyed each other just enough to form a bond and not enough to form a grudge.
"Torvald."
"Mm."
"You're thinking."
"I think all the time."
"You TALK all the time. That's different. Right now you're quiet. Quiet Torvald means thinking Torvald."
He was right. I was thinking about the circle. About how it was breaking. About whether the thing on the other side of the break was better or just different, and whether different was enough, and whether a tanner's son from the western provinces had any business riding toward a town he'd never seen to do a job he'd barely learned.
"I'm thinking about stairs," I said.
"Stairs?"
"Alden's Cross has buildings with second floors. Second floors mean stairs. I haven't climbed stairs in eight months. I'm concerned I've forgotten how."
Marten laughed. The sound — warm, real, the laugh of a boy who understood that the joke was covering something and who chose to laugh at the joke anyway because sometimes covering was the kindest thing — carried across the camp and up into the sky where the stars were coming out, thick and bright and impossibly many.
"You'll figure it out," he said.
"Probably. Or I'll fall down them. Either way, it'll be memorable."
I lay back. The stars. The desert. The fire that Kess had built, small and steady and exactly sufficient.
Tomorrow we'd ride again. The day after, we'd arrive. And the circle that had held me for sixteen years would open, and whatever was on the other side would be what it was, and I would meet it the way I met everything — loudly, clumsily, with more heart than skill and more words than sense.
That was enough. It had always been enough.
Stamp snored nearby. Even his snoring was unhurried.
I closed my eyes.