The message arrived on a folded scrap of parchment, delivered by a wounded knight who looked like he'd sprinted the whole way from the Gemheart entrance.
Harold read it twice, turned it over in case Brennig had written anything on the back, and read it a third time.
"Good news or bad news?" Hale asked.
"Both." Harold handed it across and picked up his cup. The coffee was cold, which was fine — he'd stopped tasting it around the fourth hour of cleanup.
Hale read it. When he finished, he folded it once along the original crease and held it back out. "How precise does that window need to be?"
"He said one day exactly." Harold took the parchment back, tucked it inside his coat, and drained the cup. "I get what he's trying to do, and it'll work, but you need to be exact on the timing."
They were standing at the edge of the shelf, the rock face dropping away below them into the valley. The cleanup was still running — legionaries moving in organized lines through the remnants of the lizardmen's positions, Carter directing the disposition of the dead while teams harvested material from the bodies. Extra sleds were being worked on. The caves at the back were lit now, the captives being processed, fed, and separated from the corpses. From up here, it almost looked orderly, which Harold appreciated, because it absolutely was not.
"If the ritual circle we have mapped out is accurate, we have another five to destroy to destabilize the rest and stop the waves." Hale pulled out a map. "Two on the lower approach, one on the eastern ridge. Take those down in sequence and we slow the next wave considerably. Take down the fourth and fifth — the ones on the far slope — and we stop the trial."
"That's what we need to do, then. Sundown of the day after tomorrow, we have to kill that final circle or Brennig's ploy falls apart." Harold looked at him. "We can't lose those knights."
Hale grunted and looked towards Harold. "I don't like this plan. If the Gemheart stone is as guarded as he says, he's going to have a hard time breaking through and making it out again. His whole play hinges on us destroying the circles in time so he doesn't have to escape. He would just leave the trail with the stone."
Harold looked at the letter again and nodded. "I don't like it either. But Lord Brennig was known for this kind of thing before. I’ll have to trust him."
Hale looked skeptically, then he just grunted. "You'll want to be back in the city to recruit those people."
"Once the trial completes, I'll have a little time here alone. I intend to use it, so I’ll need to be in the city."
Hale absorbed this and scratched the side of his jaw. "The knights go to Brennig."
"Send what's left of the century and Parker too. The legion takes out the circles." Harold watched him think through it. "Can you do it?"
Hale gave him the stink eye. "The question isn't if we can do it. The timing will be rough — what if it takes more than one circle to destabilize, or one less? To guarantee it, I need to strike three at the same time."
"His message says sundown tomorrow, so organize for it. Lady Renna is going to harvest some of those sunflowers for me — make sure you support her."
"Fine." Hale took the parchment back without being asked, produced a quill from somewhere, and made a note on it.
Harold glanced back at the shelf. Carter was looking up at them from the cave entrance, waiting. Harold held up two fingers. Carter nodded and went back inside.
"Keep the captives organized. We'll take them with us when we leave the trial."
"I know how to run a camp, sir."
Harold almost smiled. "Couldn't do this without you."
The road back was quieter than the march out had been — no movement in the tree line, no patrols probing the column's flanks. Someone had found Harold a second cup of coffee from God only knew where, and he was rationing it, the miracle fluid.
He fell into step beside Henri when the road bent south through a stretch of pine and the column stretched out in easier terrain. His remaining guard fell in around him; five of his guard had died on the shelf and the increased presence was missed.
"How's Dalen?" Harold asked.
Henri walked another ten paces. "Better than I would have been."
Harold waited.
"He is a good man," Henri said. He was quiet for a moment. "When I arrived here, I thought — voilà, enfin. Finally. My time." He didn't say it with his normal attitude. Which Harold found more interesting than if he had. "I had been trained for leadership since I could read. Every tutor, every lesson, every dinner with my father, where the conversation was actually an examination. All of it building toward a role I would eventually inherit." He glanced at Harold sidelong. "And then the world ended, and I thought — this is better. A man and what he could build. No inherited title, no cousins trying to position themselves in wills, no more of my father's shadow over everything." A dry exhale. "I was going to be Bonaparte. Alexandre le Grand. Every great French general at once, apparently."
Harold took a sip of the coffee. It was good, and he quietly updated his opinion of Elroy and Jenkins, who had brewed it for him.
"That dream lasted until your people in Haven ran from me." Henri watched the pines pass. "Do you know how strange that is — to have people run from you, when your entire life you have been told you are someone they should want to follow? I was furious. I thought they were wrong. Ungrateful." A small dismissive gesture. "Merde. So angry."
"And then the monsters didn't leave you alone," Harold said.
"And then the monsters." Henri nodded once as his hand brushed over his mustache. "And then my war with you, which I was absolutely certain I was going to win." He glanced over. "I made excuses. You have advantages I didn't have. Resources. The system favored you somehow. There was some edge I hadn't accounted for." He paused. "But the way you work with people — that doesn't come from resources. I watched you with your men, and I couldn't buy it in any currency I had ever used." He tilted his head toward the back of the column. "You have idiots who worship the ground you walk on."
From the rear of the column: "MY LORD HENRI—"
Harold turned around, his hand pressed to his brow.
Elroy had bent himself approximately in half, one arm swept wide, the other tucked against his stomach, head down. He looked more like a man who'd thrown his back out than someone executing a formal bow. Jenkins was attempting the same beside him, except he'd gone deeper and couldn't get back up, one hand braced on his knee, head still pointing at the ground.
They held it until Carter turned on them and started berating them for acting like idiots in unsecured territory.
Henri stared at them for a long moment. Then he turned back to face forward.
"Comment dire—" He stopped. Started again. "How do you—"
"Don't," Harold said. "Don't egg them on. They live on your reaction."
Henri pressed his lips together, then smoothed it away. "And then there is Carter."
Harold glanced back at him and turned back around.
"Carter looked at me once," Henri said. "Early on, when I was still performing. I said something intended to establish my importance — I cannot remember what — and he just looked at me and looked away. No contempt. I was simply not relevant." He said it simply. "I had never been irrelevant to anyone in my life."
Harold's was listening to him but checked his cup; it was getting light. He tilted it, checked. One sip left. He was going to make it count.
"After that night run," Henri continued. "The one around the town, when you brought me up to the overlook on the eastern hill." He was quiet for a moment. "I hated you for the first month. After Jack beat me every morning, after you put me in the barracks with your soldiers and they laughed at me, sang that song they made up — I despised you. I thought you were being petty and cruel. You didn't allow me into the bathhouse or to dine with you, and you kept me on soldiers' rations." He glanced at Harold. "And then we stood on that hill. You just let me look. I stood there for two hours trying to figure out how you had built what you built, and I could not do it. I could not find the place where I could have done the same thing and gotten the same result."
"So what'd you land on?"
"The result was the people inside them." Henri looked at his own hands. "You tried to show me that, but Dalen told me." His jaw moved. "After one of your legionaries stepped in front of a blood bolt that had my name on it. A man I had spoken to perhaps three times. Why did he do that…?" He paused. "I will never forget his face. Dalen yelled at me afterward, called me a child." He stopped for a moment and wiped the tear away without trying to hide it. "And then I saw that pile of bodies — the pile of chil—"
He stopped.
Harold finished the coffee as he tried to banish the image. He let Henri have the silence.
"He didn't have to do that," Henri said finally. "The legionary. He chose it. And I've spent the time since trying to figure out why."
Harold looked at him for a moment. “A wise woman once told me something that cost me a night's sleep to understand.”
"He was doing his duty," Harold said. "Same as you take pride in what you do — we have to cultivate that in them. They take pride in what they do. He was a soldier, and he did his job. And the only way to build that in them is to be worth it." He watched the road. "People don't fight for people they don't like, Henri. They don't step in front of bolts for lords they don't respect.” He snorted. “If anything, they push them in front of them. Something you did touched that man. You may not remember it. You may not even know what it was." He glanced at him. "But to that man it was enough."
Henri said nothing for a long stretch. The road curved, and the pines thinned out ahead.
"I don't know what I did," he said.
Harold smiled. "That's how it works. All we can do is be the best we can and try to be worth it. We’ll fail, of course. No one can live up to the expectations they place on us. But we have to do our best to try."
Henri looked over at him as they walked. "Bien…Well…That is why I went to help Lord Dalen. He cared enough to tell me something I needed to hear." Henri said.
Harold nodded once. He got it. A man who had spent his entire life being trained to lead had watched someone choose to die for him, and the only person who'd bothered to explain what that meant, honestly — was Dalen.
He tucked the empty cup under his arm.
"We're being hunted," Henri said. "Humanity. These things around us — they won't stop, will they? There is no point at which they decide we have proven ourselves and step back."
Harold looked back at him. The exhaustion was sitting across his shoulders like a second coat.
"Henri," he said. "I am so tired."
He said it, and Henri could feel the exhaustion leak from his voice.
"I have trouble sleeping unless I am completely wrecked. When I close my eyes, I see things from another life, and almost none of them are good." He watched the road ahead. "The only thing that keeps me grounded are the people here. And I worry for all of them. My sister especially — she runs toward the worst of it and calls it exploring." He paused. "Which she will do until it kills her or she finds something worth stopping for, and I have resigned myself to it. I fear one day I will get another letter of her death and there is nothing I can do about it."
Henri said nothing as he listened.
"Yes," Harold said. "We are being hunted. The other races cooperate better than we do, and humanity is by nature fractious — we argue about the stupidest things. And their systems—" He paused, choosing the words. "The Velthari do not gain perks the way we do. Every one of their people can bond with an animal. The longer the bond holds, the more of that animal's traits they absorb — bond with an eagle long enough, and you move faster; your eyesight sharpens; with a strong enough bond, you get some degree of air manipulation. As they grow stronger, they can take on new bonds, bond monsters, and gain those traits as well. You can see where that leads."
Henri's brow drew down. "They become as varied and powerful as the monsters themselves. And the monsters fight beside them."
"Correct." Harold rolled his shoulders, working out a knot that'd been there since the descent. "The Dragonkin cultivate inner power over decades, building it layer by layer until they resemble what they're cultivating. They follow the path of their Dao and become unstoppable in their pursuit. The other races have their own systems." He glanced at Henri. "And us."
"And us?"
"Our soldiers are powerful. Our adventurers have potential. Our mana swords are brutal when they work. But all of those things require us to overcome adversity to build them, whereas most of the other races just require time." He looked at the smoke on the horizon. "But our greatest advantage — the thing that kept us alive the first time, or would have — is our crafters. The perk system and what it lets them do— there is nothing else like it across any of the other races. We saw it here. I made a charge that cleared a wave. Potions that let men fly down a cliff face. There is no problem we cannot engineer our way through when the crafters have time and support."
"What's the catch?"
"It takes time. And to buy that time we spend lives." Harold's eyes closed briefly and relaxed. "We spend them like coins, because that is the only currency that keeps the threats off at night. And the last time—" He stopped. "The last time, Henri, we ran out of time. That is what I'm carrying. That is what I'm trying to stop." He looked at him directly. "So yes. I am terrified, and I will be, every single day."
Henri was quiet for a long time. The road curved south and the city walls came into view properly — the outline of them, solid against the late afternoon light.
"Mon Dieu," he said quietly.
The city gate was open, as it always was now that the lizardmen weren't pushing the approaches, and Aldric was standing in it.
He looked Harold over from boots to collar as the column drew up.
"My Lord, you look terrible."
"Thank you, Aldric." Harold handed him the empty cup. "Get me more of this, and then find me a room where I can bother you with a list of names."