Darya was walking in a wide circle around the altar and the room beyond, one that covered as much free space as possible before bumping into the pews. She went slowly, with her sword naked in her hand and pointed toward the floor, and a line of green light appeared on the stone below it. As the circle grew, the light rose, slowly forming a dome half the height of the ceiling, until Darya came back to the point where she’d started and the structure closed.
A faint green hue tinted everything, but the air felt no warmer or cooler, and a breeze still stirred it; it wouldn’t go stale on them. Amris rose from his prayers. “May I touch the circle?”
“You can try, but you’ll go through,” said Darya. She sat, sword sheathed now, and Amris thought she was paler than usual. “It’s not really there to block passage for either of us. Gerant says it knows our souls.”
“Is the casting often so hard on you?”
“Not always.”
“That is to say, not without a second person to include. Once again, I’m in your debt.”
“It’s good practice.”
Amris joined her on the floor. It was stone, but as it was also smooth and not freezing, he’d had worse, and it was good simply to take weight off his feet. He pulled off his helm and gauntlets, which was a greater relief, and began to undo the catches on his breastplate, while Darya divested herself of her simpler armor far more quickly. With supple grace and long practice, she toed off one boot, then the other, and leaned back with a contented sigh.
“At times I thought,” said Amris, “that I could be dead three days and still enjoy this moment.” The last catch finally fell away. He lifted his armor off and took a truly deep breath for the first time in…in more than a hundred years. So it always felt, but the literal truth was disconcerting.
“Here,” said Darya, holding out a small parchment-wrapped bundle. “It’s not much of a first meal, but you probably need it.”
As Amris expected, the package contained a square of hardtack and two strips of dried meat. “Thank you,” he said, and was about to protest when he saw Darya take another such bundle out of her pack and open it herself.
“I can hunt when we’re outside the city. Here, all we’re going to get is rats, and I don’t want to risk their meat in a place like this.” She held out a leather bottle. “Water?”
He accepted and washed down his first few bites of hardtack. It tasted just as good as it had a hundred years before; for all he knew, it could have been made in his own time. Outside, the purple sky turned black, and the shadows inside the temple became darkness, lit only by the faint silver light of the stars.
In that light, Amris looked at his rescuer—Gerant’s companion, the woman who fought monsters and talked of eating rat meat as though it was commonplace outside of sieges. She met his gaze evenly, and her eyes glowed in the dark.
“I’d not bring this up at mealtime, nor just before bed,” he said, “but I fear I can’t choose my time. What has happened to the world since I left it?”
Chapter 9
“Good question,” Darya said. “Big question. Um.” It was also a question a more forward-thinking person would have been ready for. She took a bite of hardtack, which was good for stalling while she chewed. “All right. I’m going to start at the beginning, and this is going to be pretty general, and there’s a lot I don’t know. Probably a lot even Gerant doesn’t know.”
“A first in both of our experiences,” said Amris. “Still, I’ll value what you can speak of.”
Darya took a breath. “When you took Thyran out of the picture, it made the storms hit their hardest, right then.”
That was not Thyran’s plan, Gerant put in, all the more emphatic for the dismayed expression on Amris’s face, and Darya repeated his words as quickly and as strongly as she could. We may not have been able to stop the storms at all by that point. What we did—what you did, was interrupt the building of energy. Darya felt him struggle to put it into words that nonmages understood. Those that came before fed into one another, and the whole effect was like drawing back an arrow. Removing Thyran, we forced the storms to loose when they were only half-drawn. Because of what they were, that was still enough force to damage, but it could have been much, much worse.
Some of the shadow lifted from Amris, but not by any means all. “How bad was it?”
“Bad.” Gerant didn’t add details. Darya felt him withdrawing from contact slightly, as he did when she took lovers or attended to other bodily needs. He didn’t go as far off, though, so she felt an echo of his memories as she spoke, filling in details they’d never talked about and she’d never wanted. “For a full year, blizzards worse than there’d ever been. Plants died. Animals died. People couldn’t grow anything, or hunt, and that wouldn’t have mattered because the cold would mostly kill you in minutes if you went outside.”
It was summer, and they’d had no meat to cook, so she hadn’t bothered with a fire—there was nothing to burn in the temple, in any case. As she relayed the story, Darya wished for one. The warmth would have helped with the memories, and she could’ve stared into the flames. She rubbed her hands against her thighs instead, watching her fingers, pale against the dark cloth of her pants. They made her think of the plants in the city, and of dead things.
“The priests and the wizards did what they could, multiplying food and giving people protection from the cold, but there were limits to their power.” Without thinking about it, she fell back on the wording of the official histories, as her tutors had told them to her when she’d been barely a woman. “And while Thyran’s armies had scattered, the monsters endured the storms better than most humans. Death made others. So did desperate actions, or vicious ones. There were many threats in those days.”
Amris was silent.
“Some fared better than others. It wasn’t as bad in the south, or in places that could get food from the sea. Hills blocked the wind, and that helped too. But my teacher told me, when I was training, that there were half as many people living then as there were in your day. That was fifteen years ago, after a couple generations of breeding.”
She didn’t say: They ate the food, they ate dogs and rats and horses, they ate the candles for tallow, they ate the bark off the trees and the leather of their boots. She didn’t say: By the end, many of them ate one another, and it didn’t help.
All of that had been history before: sad, and horrifying to think about, but distant, and so well known that neither she nor Gerant had needed to speak of it. Now, Darya saw blood on the snow, faces that were half skulls, bodies burning in the streets, and those who wanted to live unable to move away from the stench.
A hand—large, warm, and callused—settled on top of hers. Darya looked up into Amris’s face and managed a quick, guilty smile. “I think I’m supposed to be comforting you, considering.”