Chapter 49

Chapter 49: Chapter 49

The canvas ceiling of the medical tent hung low and sagged with dew. The marsh damp had gotten into everything.

I opened my eyes and was awake, all at once, with none of the old grogginess. Coming up out of sleep used to be slow and miserable. Not anymore. I lay on the narrow wooden cot and listened to the West Border Army wake up. Thousands of boots churned the mud. Iron cauldrons clanged against fire grates, and somewhere out in the fog a sergeant was bawling marching orders.

I sat up and shoved the thin wool blanket aside. The gashes from the centipede, the skeletons and the tree had closed into thick, raised pink scars. My left arm, where the rusted arrow had gone in, felt tight but worked fine.

The biggest change was in my right arm.

From collarbone to wrist, the Rune of Antiquity lay under the skin, dormant now: a fine web of pale, silvery scars, like a star chart someone had cut into me. When I wasn’t drawing on it, the light died away and left only a faint, icy hum in my veins. It was a cold with no bottom to it, and it balanced out the Ember’s heat in my chest almost exactly.

Astra trilled softly from the crossbeam of the tent, where he was going over his feathers one at a time. There wasn’t a ruffled one among them.

"Time to move," I told him. My voice came out low and rough.

The bastard sword went back across my shoulders. No fresh uniform had turned up, so I was still in the same ruined, bloodstained tunic from the tunnels. I ducked out through the flap into General Kaelus’s camp.

Rows of canvas tents ran off as far as I could see, a whole city thrown up on rotting swamp. Engineers were testing the tension cables on the Goliath Trebuchets, and lines of supply wagons had sunk to their axles in the black, churning mud.

I took the main road toward the mess. Astra flew out of the tent after me and settled on my right shoulder.

The regulars scattered when they saw me coming, wary in a way that had nothing to do with rank. They saw a woman taller and broader than most veteran sergeants, coated in the ash of the dead, with a humming sword on her back and strange pale scars running the length of her right arm. The rumor had already made its way through the ranks: one Swelled Bud, alone, had killed a Lizard Tribe assassin and slaughtered mutated swamp beasts. To them I wasn’t a normal soldier anymore.

I ignored the stares. My stomach felt hollow and on fire. Healing that fast had burned through every scrap I’d eaten.

The mess was a big open-sided pavilion under a canvas tarp, there to keep ash and rain out of the food. I took three dented iron bowls off the stack and went to the quartermaster. He looked at the starlight in my right eye, then at the raptor on my shoulder, swallowed hard, and filled all three to the brim without asking for a ration chit.

The stew was thick and unappealing: salt pork, boiled swamp tubers, barley gone stiff. I carried the bowls to the darkest corner I could find, sat on a crate, and lined them up on an upended barrel. Taste didn’t come into it. I shoveled the hot, flavorless stuff in and felt the Ember take it and turn it to heat almost before I’d swallowed. Astra hopped onto the barrel and tilted his head at the piece of salt pork I held out to him.

"Elvit."

The voice was hoarse and cracked, and for a second I couldn’t place it.

I stopped chewing, put the spoon down, and turned.

Captain Miklas stood ten feet away, at the edge of the pavilion’s shadow.

I’d never seen him look so wrecked. Mud and old blood lay in layers on his plate, but the real damage was in his face. The amber eyes, always sharp and measuring, had sunk into bruised hollows, and a ragged beard had grown in along his jaw. He looked like he hadn’t slept once since the ground swallowed me.

Myra stood half a step behind him. Her dark uniform was as neat as ever, but her face, usually shut tight, had come completely undone. Her eyes were wide and fixed on mine, her lips parted, no sound coming out.

I stood up.

Miklas skipped the salute and the report. Three heavy strides, and then his armored arms were around my shoulders, hard enough to hurt.

With his face against my shoulder, I was looking straight over his pauldron. We were almost exactly the same height.

"You’re alive." The words caught in his throat. He held me out at arm’s length, hands heavy on my shoulders, and his eyes went over my face, the thick scars on my neck, the pale lattice of stars along my right arm. "The ground gave way. The whole vanguard was buried. I dug through that mud with my bare hands for two days. I thought... I thought the swamp had you."

"It tried," I said. My voice stayed steady.

Myra stepped in without a word and wrapped both arms around my waist, her face pressed into the ruined leather of my tunic. I put my left hand on the back of her head. Something tightened in my chest, and I didn’t have a name for it. I was a weapon made for slaughter now, a Swelled Bud with nothing left of my old life. These two had walked straight through all of that without even trying.

"I survived, thank Jute", I said quietly, looking at Miklas. "Astra helped."

The falcon on the barrel chirped and fluffed his grey feathers. Miklas stared at him, then at the scars on my arm, and I could see the soldier in him trying to fit something impossible into a plan. He shook his head. The questions could wait.

"The Turtle Tribe is broken." Some of his old grit had come back into his voice. "The 7th brought down what strongholds they had left. Most of their warriors are dead in the mud. The rest surrendered or scattered into the deep bogs. The main objective is done."

"Then we go back to the front." My muscles were already coiling at the thought.

"No." Miklas stepped back and nodded west. "We go back to the Commander. Erula has set up the 7th’s forward command post three miles from here. She’s waiting."

Walking from Kaelus’s camp to the 7th’s was like crossing into another country.

Kaelus’s camp ran on mud, iron and desperation. Erula’s post was elite Imperial arrogance, plain as day: pavilions of dark crimson silk braced with polished black steel. The soldiers on the perimeter were Vanguard veterans, hard-faced and immaculate, their armor gleaming even in the damp. Not a speck of mud on any of them.

Miklas took Myra and me straight to the central pavilion. Two armored sentries stepped aside and hauled the heavy crimson flaps open.

Inside, the air was thick with expensive incense, spiced wine, and a faint tang of ozone.

Commander Erula was nowhere near a map. The towering woman who commanded the deadliest legion in the Empire lay sprawled across a heap of stolen basilisk hides and deep crimson cushions, her spiked black armor dumped in a careless pile in the corner. She wore a loose tunic of dark grey silk and balanced a goblet of wine on one knee.

She looked up as we came in. Those blazing red eyes landed on my face, then went down over me, taking in the width of my shoulders and the pale runes scarred along my arm.

For one second the bored, superior mask slipped. A real smile curled at the corners of her mouth, a hungry one. She was looking at something she’d had a hand in making.

"Well," Erula purred, after a slow sip from her goblet. "It seems the Coalition’s mud was only a whetstone for our little Lieutenant. Look at you. You survived the Swelled Bud threshold; sometimes the effect of such an upgrade can be felt for months, but it seems your ember it is now stable, and you found yourself a new toy." She flicked a hand toward Astra, who glared back at her from my shoulder.

"I’m ready to rejoin the vanguard, Commander." I stood at rigid attention. "General Kaelus says what’s left of the Coalition’s main army is gathering for a final clash in the central basin."

Erula let out a long, theatrical sigh and waved her free hand. "Kaelus is a butcher who likes wallowing in the dirt with his common infantry. The final clash is a formality. The Coalition is already dead. It just hasn’t stopped bleeding yet. And you, Elvit, are not going anywhere near that muddy brawl."

I frowned. "Commander?"

"You have far too much potential to die of a stray rusted arrow from some panicking mud-dweller." Her red eyes narrowed a fraction, and that was the end of the argument. "Your body is as dense as my heavy cavalry’s, and you’ve picked up a magic I don’t entirely recognize. I’m not wasting you on a clean-up operation."

Erula pushed herself up off the pelts with easy grace and set her goblet down. She crossed to a heavy oak desk at the edge of the pavilion, buried under tall stacks of parchment: supply manifests, logistical reports.

"From this moment on," she said, enjoying herself far too much, "you’re assigned to the administrative staff. You’ll work alongside Myra. Congratulations, Elvit. You are the new Secretary of the 7th Legion."

I stared at her. The word wouldn’t settle into anything that made sense. "Secretary."

"Precisely." Erula smiled, strolled back to her pelts, and dropped onto them with a contented sigh. "Myra is efficient, but the paperwork is piling up and I despise reading. You’ll handle the logistics, manage the personnel transfers, and translate the supply manifests. Dismissed."

"Commander, I’m a vanguard fighter." The Ember flared in my chest, indignant. "I’m a Swelled Bud. I belong on the front line, breaking shields—"

Myra moved up beside me and caught my left wrist, surprisingly hard. She looked up into my face, dark eyes dead serious, and gave one slow, tiny shake of her head. Nobody argued with Commander Erula once she’d made up her mind.

Three days later, the dull horror of my new life had set in.

I sat hunched over the heavy oak desk inside the command pavilion. The thump of siege fire and the muffled roar of the final battle carried through the swamp from miles away. The Coalition and the Empire were tearing each other apart out there, the last big fight of the war.

And I was stamping grain requisitions.

A delicate white goose quill sat between my thick, calloused fingers. I stared at the parchment, trying to work out the right ratio of medical supplies for the 4th Cohort. The rune on my arm kept flaring cold, my precognition trying to track the path of the ink before it reached the page.

My frustration finally boiled over. I clenched my jaw, and the strength in my body surged on its own.

Snap.

The quill shattered in my grip and splintered into a dozen pieces. Black ink sprayed over my hand and drowned the report I’d been translating for the last hour.

A low growl came out of me, an animal sound, and I dropped what was left of the quill on the desk.

I’d killed a tree as thick as a watchtower. I’d caved in an invisible assassin’s chest with one stomp. And here I sat, a landslide stuck in a wooden chair, doing the accounting for a Commander who spent twelve hours a day sleeping on pillows.

Myra, at the desk beside mine, didn’t so much as flinch. She reached over, slid the ruined parchment out of my way, laid a fresh sheet in front of me, and handed me a new quill. Then she gave me a small, sympathetic smile.

I looked at the fresh quill. Then I looked across the tent at Erula, dead asleep on her basilisk hides, not the least bit bothered by the administrative nightmare she’d made for us.

I gritted my teeth, took the fragile feather very gently in my lethal hands, and went back to work.