resisted the urge to touch him in return, to be sure he was solid and real.
With a shaking hand, he brushed her hair back from her face, then sat up straight on the edge of her bed, setting his hands in his lap. “You were no’ breathin’,” he said, never taking his eyes from her. His thick accent showed the depth of his agitation. “You shouted, like you did before. I came to wake you, but you would no’ wake. Then you quieted. I thought the dream was over so I went back to bed. But you called my name.”
He stared at her, his eyes haunted. “You called my name, and you stopped breathin’. And no matter what I did, you would no’ start again.”
Kallista shuddered. Had that been while she was in that strange place talking to the woman who claimed to be Belandra of Arikon? Could some part of her have literally been in another place? That place? Impossible.
“I’m breathing now,” she said.
“Aye.” He was shaking, trying to hide it, but failing.
She reached for his hand. He took it, gripped it tight. But it wasn’t enough. She used his hand to pull herself up. She put her arms around him and held on tight until her trembling and his went away.
“Do no’ do that again,” he said over and over. “Ever. Do not.”
“No,” she said again and again. “No. I won’t. Never.”
When she could let him go, Torchay picked her up and stood her beside the bed.
“What are you doing?” She had to catch his arm to keep from staggering.
“Moving your bed. I’m too far away across the room. You’ll be sleeping next to me till the dreams stop.” He lifted the bedding, mattress and all, from its rope frame and set it on the floor. “We can bring in a larger bed in the morning.”
“It’s against regulations—” Kallista began, but fell silent at the flash of his eyes.
“It’s against regulations for me to allow you to die. It’s against nature for you to stop breathing like that. I want you at my back.” He crossed the room to collect his mattress from the doorway and laid it beside hers. He was on his knees rearranging the blankets when he paused.
“What’s this?” Torchay plucked a small object from the tangle of her blankets.
“I don’t know.” Kallista held her hand out for it. “What?”
“It’s a ring.”
She could see it now as he held it up to the candlelight, examining it. Cold coursed through her veins.
“I didn’t know you had a ring like this. Pretty.” He set it in her hand and went back to straightening blankets.
Kallista didn’t have a ring like this. It was thick and gold, bearing the marks of the hammers that had shaped it. Incised deeply into the flat crest was a rose, symbol of the One. The ring was primitive and powerful. It called to her, demanding that she put it on. Kallista curled her hand into a fist, resisting the urge. She did not own this ring. She could not. Because it had been given to her in a dream.
She opened her hand and let the ring fall to the floor. She didn’t want it, didn’t want what it might mean.
“Careful. You’ve dropped it.” Torchay shifted to his other knee and picked it up. He held it out to her but Kallista ignored it, so he set it on the chest. “You’re too tired for words. Not breathing’ll do that to you. Come to sleep.”
She was tired. Tired of strangeness and impossibilities and mysteries she couldn’t comprehend. She wanted her life back the way it had been before the Tibran invasion, but she feared that was one of the impossible things, and it frightened her.
Torchay lay down and turned his back to her, waiting for her to set hers against it. Careful in her weariness, Kallista stretched out on her own pallet. Rather than turning her back, she tucked herself in behind him and wrapped her arm around his waist. He startled, then lay still. Too still, as if afraid to move, to breathe.
“I need to hold on to something tonight,” Kallista said. “Let me hold you.”
He didn’t reply, but the tension slid out of him. She snuggled closer, the tip of her nose just touching the top of his spine. This was against regulations, rules she had carefully kept for years. The rules had a purpose, one she agreed with. But right now, tonight, she didn’t care. She needed to hold on to something that was real, that was flesh, blood, bone, against the dreams coming again.
Aisse lay in her hiding place for a day, a night and another day. She crawled out only for water. By the second night, though every inch of her body ached, she could stand, and even walk without too much dizziness.
The noise of the camp—animals bellowing, men shouting, warriors marching—sounded much too near. Now that she could walk, she needed to move farther away, to a hiding place where they couldn’t find her no matter how hard they searched.
She crawled back beneath the tree and gathered her few pitiful belongings, then she returned to the riverbank. Aisse looked downstream, toward the camp. That way lay death. She turned her face upstream and began to walk. This direction might not hold life, but as sure as the sun rose every morning, she knew it at least held hope.
Three days later, Kallista had finished all ten of her damned notification letters and delivered them to headquarters, to be included with the next set of dispatches to the capital. River traffic had returned almost to normal. The Tibrans no longer had enough manpower to interdict travel by boat along the Taolind, and they’d never had enough boat power. The river was the best means of travel to the interior, to Arikon far to the west, and regular dispatches were getting through again.
But now, Kallista had nothing to do. She had no younger naitani to train in their magic. She had no call on her own magic once she chased the cannon from closing on the river gate. Her paperwork, the bane of her existence, was complete. She’d even had time to experiment on her hair with Torchay, settling on simply tying back her front hair in a small horsetail on the back of her head, and leaving that behind her ears to fall free over her neck. She was bored.
Boredom and curiosity had her taking the long way from her billet to the Mother Temple’s library by way of the breach in the western wall. Repairs had begun already and Kallista wanted to see how they were going.
Torchay stalked at her side like some bright avenger, scowling at anyone who came close. He didn’t like all the gossip about the “scythe of death” as the dark magic she’d done was beginning to be called. He took the epithet personally, unable to shrug it off as well as Kallista could, which wasn’t all that well. She tried to tell him it was useless to resent people for their ignorance, but he didn’t seem to hear.
The streets grew thicker with people as they neared the breach. Kallista could see the two walls of mortared stone that formed the inner and outer surfaces of the city wall, and some of the rubble filling the wide gap between the two walls that provided much of its strength. Civilians and a few companies of infantry conscripts swarmed the breach now, clearing away the broken and fallen stones so the walls could be repaired.
She frowned, squinting against the sun’s fierce brightness. The scene seemed familiar, as if she had been here before. A woman dressed in darkest blue straightened, beckoned to the child carrying the water bucket.
