Whisper (27 page)

Jay would never believe this. For the first time in awhile, I ached to share something with him – wished he was nearby to consult. His actions had delivered my Fly, and now I had news of his well-being. I had a guardian
angel
out here because of it.

Fly tossed his head once, drawing a smile to my face, and then broke from his statuesque pose and turned in the grass, trotting off into the dark. I wanted to open my mouth and stop him – say something that would bring him back or ask him why he was leaving, where he was going. But I was speechless, couldn't find any words. My lips stuttered, wanting to protest, but it was too late.

He was gone.

The notion of sending Char charging after him came to me, but something held me back. Going for a midnight ride was one thing, but sending myself on a chase across the dark wilderness was another. I couldn't just turn myself loose out here when no one knew where I was, without any notion of where I was going, chasing ghosts.

It would have to be enough that I had seen him. That I
knew
. And that was incredible. I couldn't help it – I smiled again, charmed and somehow victorious, having received the good graces of such coincidence.
Char, you rascal,
I thought. He had known ex
actly
what paths wild horses traveled, had tapped right into that current and followed it until we encountered another on that track. The one that was out here, that we all wondered about.

Because of Char's good sense, and my willingness to go along for the ride, I'd had the privilege of being led to something out here that others might never have stumbled upon, keeping to their own quarters, relying on their own system, their own routine – stuck in the rut of their own practicality and assumptions. There were fascinating undercurrents in the world that were ripe for encountering if only we put ourselves out there to encounter them. Tonight's revelation was one of many I would be able to attest to from my time of sharing my world with that of the horses, of seeing things through their eyes and experiencing things from atop their backs. Chance liked to play with angles. The more angles, the better chances of some of them colliding.

How often, I had to wonder, did these collisions take place, but no one had been positioned to witness them? How often did they end up being a mere brush of two relevant forces, because someone had glanced away, had missed it, or not known what to look for? For of course, to Char, Fly meant nothing. Only someone bridging the gap between our separate worlds and lives could appreciate what I had just witnessed, what I had learned this night, from the ignorant coincidence Char had produced.

My beloved Fly was alive.

Not everything in the world had become a product of corrupt, human ambition. There were angles of fate yet alive and thriving, if only we knew where to look. Giddily inspired, I returned to camp with my midnight ride having served its purpose –
more
than its purpose.

I returned feeling like fate was on my side. And Jay, too, in his own way. Because he
had
been on my side, had done that thing for me – let Fly go, back when the raids had first set things in motion. And that deed was still on a roll, lending itself to current affairs.

*

A scout came in the next evening, and I had to work some serious magic to bring his mount out of its over-exerted panic. The poor thing was delirious, and it took a good half hour to calm it from its fits and coax it to where it rightly should have been long before then: collapsed on the ground. Finally, it lay with its legs splayed out, head in my lap – sufficiently in a daze, its ribcage moving up and down in slow swells. I ran my hand over and over again over the muscles of its neck, slow and steady.

“Are you hypnotizing it or euthanizing it?” Lady Alejandra asked from the sidelines, frowning with intrigue at the effect I was capable of having.

I glanced up, but did not cease the rhythm of my motions. “Closer to hypnotizing, in his case.”

“But you're capable of the latter?”

“If it's completely necessary.” Fortunately, my present patient did not require such drastic measures. But I had sung a horse into its final resting place before, in a case that had called for as much. It was not a perk of the job that I actively sought, but it was not altogether an undesirable gift to possess in my field, to be able to relieve a horse of suffering, if it came to it.

A thoughtful, admiring smile came to Lady Alejandra's eyes. “You're something special, Alannis,” she said, and I watched her as she left me to my vigil and went back toward the tents. Normally, I was not one to thrive on compliments – but with the fantasy that I had ahead of me to pull off, I allowed this one to serve as what Lady Alejandra might very well have intended, and let it go to my head.

*

The scout had come to inform us: Gabriel's armies were pushing east farther to the north, abandoning this fruitless front. We had been watching for as much, and responded accordingly, packing up this defensive headquarters to stake a new one in fresh territory.

It was nerve-wracking, changing the game. As we traveled north I couldn't tell if it was excitement or trepidation that coursed through my veins in anticipation. I weighted it mentally as excitement, though. An invigorating, stimulating change in the status-quo. We would arrive on new soil with a new game plan – and a new face to brand our motion.

The face of a goddess, pulled out of a hat.

The face I now saw when I looked in the mirror.

The face our enemies would now see, right before the final blow.

*

Sonya had warned me not to count, but there were two different sides of me that went out onto that battlefield – the one that reveled in the fantasia perception of it, seeing nothing for its reality, fulfilling it all as a magnificent dance of predestined choreography... And the one who sat back, sedated, witnessing every terrible moment of it through drugged eyes.

The latter saw it all. Somewhere deep inside me, I knew just how many men I killed over the course of the next three battles. It was just lucky for me that those memories were garbled – drunken perceptions that I couldn't rightly piece together, or really grant any credibility to at all. But they were in me. And if they ever chose to align themselves and come to light, they might just have the grounds to destroy me.

But for the time being I stuck to my mirage-fest of blissful ignorance, living in the dream that my co-conspirators and I had cultivated. And I found an interesting new dimension in the fanciful antics: music. My own soundtrack, a great orchestra of mood music that simply existed at that depth, issuing from the heartstrings of the earth, the hooves that were drums, the dramatic chords that were struck as raucous voices and animal sounds harmonized. No one else could possibly pick out the harmony in that chaos – but I could.

And it was as if Char could hear it too – or could feel the invigoration that coursed through me because of it. He performed like a born warhorse every minute of his time on the field. The train of my war gown flapped behind us like our very own flag, spilling off his haunches and billowing in our wake like a stream of blood. Like the stream of blood that we left there.

They tore open Char's shoulder, once, and I slashed open my hand on the shaft of a harshly-driven lance; and I hunched, bent low over his neck as he cantered and plastered my raw palm against his dripping wound. Blood to blood. Raw life against raw, gritty life. And we were one, our lifeblood shared. I smeared the resulting concoction over my chest and collarbone as I straightened, a new light shining in my eyes, and we plunged back into the turmoil with savage renewal.

It was safe to say: Cambrie and Lady Alejandra had created a monster.

They had brought supplies to work on a new war gown for me while we were at the front, and it quickly became clear it was a smart idea. The first one became swiftly sullied and tattered – although, if I wasn't going for their 'goddess' look, I might be perfectly happy to continue flaunting the savage look.

My next gown was black and gold – same style as the first, but altered details here and there just for a twist. Cambrie had no trouble getting comfortable with the black makeup theme, jumping right in to making me over as some over-the-top Gothic wonder. The only addition she played around with was a trick of gold eyeshadow caked across my lids and dusting my temples, which then faded into my hair. Hair which was swooped up this time instead of braided, pulled particularly tight at my temples to pull at the corners of my eyes, and arching up over my head like a folding wave that crashed at the nape of my neck, spilling its frothy wavelets down my back.

I went out there, dressed like that, and mounted that pedestal that was Char's back, returning to my post at the top of the world – at the top of my
own
world – and thus, I was in no position to notice when the battle took a turn for the worse, and we started to lose. I kept right on going, plowing through my accustomed routine, feeding off of the same invigoration as usual and remaining oblivious to the bigger picture.

It was only when one of the soldiers cantered by going the other direction, and cast a hand out to snag Char's bridle, hauling him around to follow, that my focused perception slipped. It was rather like being awakened when you were not ready to get up – a rude trick that left me confused, and vexed, for a few slow-motion moments until I snapped out of it completely, and realized what was happening. The special harmony that I heard gave way to the other sounds that had been numbed – shouts and cries and a change in orders being followed. The dance I had been immersed in fell apart before my eyes – the pattern broken by the movement of riders sweeping around and retreating.

Finally absorbing the memo, I let my resistance collapse, and urged Char after the soldier who had thought to save my skin. Somehow, the thought that things could take a turn for the worse had not occurred to me, not while in the state I had assumed. It had never been relevant. Never a possibility, though in hindsight I should have bothered to wonder if the more uneven ground of this new battlefield would play a part. It was not like our beloved K.S. field, flat as a pancake and accommodating to our regular, mortal mounts. It was cracked, split down the middle, great sections of it buckled from pressure, jutting upward and overlapping. Throwing that element of the Shardscape into play that everyone had been dreading. I should have taken all that into account, but I hadn't. I had merely danced around it all, a meaningless obstacle course that wasn't the object of the game.

And that was the folly of fantasy, I reminded myself.

As the orchestra in my head erupted into a ringing discord of exploding drums and crashing cymbals behind me, we ran from that intruder that had come to rain on my parade: reality – still a viable contender in this war.

*

And that night, for the first time in a long time, I was saddlesore.

Twenty-Six –

T
hey drove us east, after that. All they needed was one taste of gaining purchase, and then they latched on to whatever they could overtake.

The men talked strategies as we retreated across the countryside, thinking on their feet, striving to deliver us through the safest, swiftest paths. But they didn't know the territory, and two days out, we were cornered. The only redeeming friend in the world out here was Fly, now, and this he had no power against.

We prepared for battle, readying to face our pursuers despite our depleted numbers. Cambrie looked like a ghost as she helped to lace me up, her eyes spooked and haunted as she saw to my makeup, avoiding my gaze. In that moment, my heart went out to her.

But she was not the one going out on the battlefield, so I didn't waste my pity for long. I got out there – mounted a beat-up Char and stood with the others. Going down with a fight was romantic. Was something I could feign as my element.

Gabriel's army did not overtake us in some violent catch-up act. They didn't have to. Knowing we were cornered, they sauntered up, those smoke-panting beasts restrained to taunt us.

Then a peculiar turn of events took place. The commander of their army separated from the others, moving forward, a white canvas draped over the end of the lance that he carried. He stopped in the center of the space between us, and waited.

A moment of silence passed, and then the Lieutenant moved forward from our ranks, drawing a single escort with her, and made her way out to meet him. The rest of us looked on, uncertain, curiosity and suspense making us sweat.

The exchange lasted a few minutes before the Lieutenant's mount shifted, and she cast her eyes over her shoulder. They landed on me – a considering glance, and something in me clicked in response. Bemusement, intrigue, dread... I couldn't say which. All of the above, perhaps. What did this have to do with me?