Iron Rebirth: The Eagle Eternal

Theodahad and Sigeric left before first light, the way the ridge watch always did, and for the first hour it was the same as every other time.

Theodahad complained about the cold, which he did every time, and Sigeric ignored him, which he also did every time, and they climbed the south approach in the grey, breath showing, the settlement's fires falling away below them into the kind of smallness that made a person feel, briefly, like the only two people awake in the world.

"If we're up here all morning again," Theodahad said, "I'm telling Ragnaris I want the river patrol instead. At least the river patrol gets to sit down."

"You'd complain about the river too."

"I would. But I'd be sitting while I did it."

They reached the watch point an hour after dawn — a shoulder of rock with a clear line down to the Sucidava road, the view that had made this ridge worth a pair of eyes in the first place. And from there, further south than the road they were meant to be watching, they saw it.

A column. Moving slow, deliberate — not a patrol, not a trade caravan. Sigeric, who had the better eyes of the two and knew it, went still in the way he did when he was actually looking rather than just watching.

"Count it," Theodahad said, quietly now, the complaining gone.

It took a while. The column was strung out along a curve of road that disappeared and reappeared between low hills. Legionaries at the front — a full century, maybe more, in marching order. Then a long irregular middle section — wagons, men on foot who weren't carrying weapons the way soldiers carried weapons, equipment that caught the morning light in ways that suggested metal tools rather than arms. Engineers. Then, behind them, more legionaries. Front and back. Nothing in the middle unguarded.

"That's an escort formation," Sigeric said. "Not a road crew with soldiers along for the walk. That's a column protecting something in the middle of it."

"Three hundred? More?"

"At least. I can't see the tail of it from here."

They should have turned back then. The watch point's instructions were clear — note unusual activity, return, report.

"If we go back now," Theodahad said, eyes still on the column, "we tell them we saw soldiers on the road. They know that already. Everyone knows that already."

"And another mile?"

"Then we tell them how many. What kind — engineers or just escort. Whether it's bound for the settlement or past it." He was already moving, staying high, angling for the bend ahead before he'd finished the sentence. "That's a report instead of a guess."

Sigeric followed. Usually it went this way between them — Theodahad decided, Sigeric checked the decision held, and mostly it did. He checked this one too, out of habit, and found he agreed with it for a reason that had less to do with the column than with the fact that Adalric had been asking, gently, for weeks, for exactly this. Not alarm. Numbers. What kind. Where headed.

"One mile," Sigeric said. "Then back, whatever we see."

"One mile."

That was when the weather changed.

— ✦ —

Adalric came to the boundary himself rather than sending word, which told Abster how this one was being weighed before anyone said anything.

"Theodahad and Sigeric. Overdue two hours." He looked toward the southern ridges, where cloud was building the grey that meant weather, not just cloud. "They were assigned the south ridge. The Sucidava road, from height." He paused. "There's been more traffic on that road than usual. They may have gone further to get a better look."

"How far is further."

"Far enough that if the storm comes in fast, they're in bad ground in weather." He met Abster's eyes. "Alatheus and Ragnaris are both already moving. Separately. Both heading for the same ridge from different approaches."

Abster looked at the sky. The cloud was moving fast from the west, the kind of speed that compressed everything after it.

"Maps," he said. "Roman surveys go further into that ground than anything you have. Let's put them both at the same table."

— ✦ —

It was the first time Alatheus and Ragnaris had been in the same space since the council — not counting yesterday's defile, which Abster didn't mention and which, watching their faces now, he suspected hadn't been mentioned between them either.

Abster spread the survey sketches at the boundary. Both men came. Neither looked at the other. Neither walked away.

"The ridge splits here," Abster said, tracing it. "East and west face, divided by this spine. From the spine, you can't see the other side. If they're hurt or sheltering, they're on one face or the other, not both." He looked up. "Whoever takes the west gets the storm first and worst. Harder approach."

A pause. Then Alatheus, without looking at Ragnaris: "I'll take the west."

"You don't have to—"

"I know the west face. I've hunted it." Flat, practical. "You know the eastern approach — boundary patrols, years of it. Take the east. Meet at the spine if neither finds them before the storm's in."

Ragnaris looked at him a moment. Nodded.

Faster and cleaner than anything the council had produced in months, because there was a storm coming and two men were lost and none of the rest of it was useful right now.

As they turned, Hrodgar — who'd come down with Adalric, slower, the knee — said something to the air between them.

"Last time you two searched that ridge together," he said, "you were ten. Looking for Sigmar's dog."

Neither answered. But something passed through both their faces at the same moment — the same name, the same memory, the same loss neither had fully said aloud to the other. Then they were moving in opposite directions, and the moment was gone.

Faramund went with Alatheus. Vidimer went with Ragnaris. Wallia, for a moment, stood between the two groups as they formed — and then, after a beat that Abster noticed and didn't comment on, fell in with Ragnaris's group, not Alatheus's. Alatheus saw it. Said nothing. Went.

Abster filed it. Not a council vote — a young man choosing where to stand when something needed carrying. He didn't know yet whether those were the same thing.

— ✦ —

The storm hit before either party reached the spine.

Abster waited at the boundary with Adalric and Hrodgar. Rain came in sideways, cold, the particular May storm that arrived like winter's last argument. Visibility dropped to almost nothing.

Nearly two hours before anyone came back down.

Alatheus's group first — soaked through, Faramund and two others carrying a fifth on an improvised stretcher of cloaks and spear-shafts. Theodahad had a leg that wasn't taking weight, twisted on wet rock. Not broken cleanly, but bad enough that walking on it in this weather could have made it much worse. Sigeric walked beside the stretcher, soaked and exhausted, talking to Theodahad in a steady stream that didn't need to make sense as long as it didn't stop.

Ragnaris's group arrived from the other direction almost simultaneously — they'd heard the others through the storm on the spine, redirected, converged on the last stretch. Vidimer was first down, moving fast despite the slope; Wallia just behind him, white-faced, soaked, clearly having just seen something he hadn't expected to see on his first time out with this particular pairing.

The stretcher needed more hands on the final slope — slick, steep. Ragnaris took one corner without asking. Alatheus had the other. For perhaps thirty meters, the two of them carried the same weight in silence, rain making talk pointless anyway.

At the bottom, they set the stretcher down. Theodahad conscious, grey with cold and pain, but conscious.

Alatheus looked at the leg briefly. "He favors the right knee already," he said to Ragnaris. "This won't help that."

"No."

A pause. Rain on both of them.

"Sigeric stayed with him," Alatheus said. "Couldn't carry him alone, couldn't leave him. Sat with him through the worst of it." A beat. "Sigmar would have done the same."

Ragnaris was quiet a moment.

"I know," he said.

Nothing resolved. The men at Alatheus's fire were still at Alatheus's fire. But something had happened on that slope that wasn't an argument, for the first time in months.

— ✦ —

Sigeric, wrapped in a dry cloak afterward, gave the report himself — insisted on it, despite the cold still working through him, because it was the thing he and Theodahad had risked the storm for and he wasn't going to let the risk be wasted by not saying it clearly.

"Three hundred, maybe more," he said. "Couldn't see the tail. Legionaries front and back — full century at least at the front, similar behind. Middle of it wasn't soldiers. Engineers — tools, not weapons, and wagons. Heading northwest, toward the Sucidava road." He looked at Abster. "That's not a road crew with an escort. That's an escort with a road crew in it."

"Did you hear anything? Names, units, anything said."

Sigeric thought. "One thing. Wasn't close enough for most of it, but the wind carried a piece — one of the legionaries, complaining, the way soldiers complain. Said something like — " he frowned, working through the Latin he'd half-caught. "*'He'll have the road or he'll have someone's head for it, and either way we're walking it twice.'*" He looked at Abster. "Didn't know if that meant anything."

It meant something. Abster didn't say what, not yet.

— ✦ —

That evening, a second courier reached camp — exhausted, horse worse, having ridden through the edge of the same storm.

"Road crews," he said, while his horse was seen to. "Two days south, widening the Sucidava road. Big detail — engineers under heavy escort, advance work for the Augustus's column." He accepted water. "Whole road'll be chewed up before the real column comes through. Lucky I got through when I did."

He rode on within the hour.

Abster stood at the boundary afterward with the survey map Sura had drawn that afternoon — the ridge, the two search routes marked in different hands, the spine where Alatheus and Ragnaris would have met if the storm hadn't decided it first.

He added a mark in the corner. The road south. The column Sigeric had counted with his own eyes — three hundred, legionaries front and back, engineers in the middle, *he'll have the road or he'll have someone's head for it.*

The same map now had all of it. The search routes — Alatheus's hand and Ragnaris's, dividing a ridge for the first time in years to save two men neither faction could afford to lose. The roped-off crossing Liuva had complained about. The camp stakes Vidimer had spotted from a cart two days before any of this. And now, in the corner, a column on the move, with a soldier's complaint about it carried forty miles on the wind to a Gothic scout who'd risked a storm to count it.

Four hundred and twenty days. He had been writing some version of that number at the top of the vellum for over a year — a count, tracked the way he'd once tracked deadlines for papers due, distant and a little unreal no matter how carefully he wrote it down.

Looking at the map now, with the column marked fresh in the corner, the number didn't read like a count anymore.

It read like a date someone else had already put in their calendar.

The Vellum420 days.

Theodahad and Sigeric went another mile on purpose. A report instead of a guess, Theodahad said. One mile, Sigeric said, then back regardless. They were right. It cost them a storm and a bad knee.

Hrodgar: last time you two searched that ridge, you were ten. Looking for Sigmar's dog. Neither answered. Both their faces moved at once.

Wallia went with Ragnaris's group, not Alatheus's. Alatheus saw it and said nothing. I don't know what that costs either of them yet.

Sigeric, soaked through, insisted on giving the report himself. *He'll have the road or he'll have someone's head for it, and either way we're walking it twice.* One soldier complaining, forty miles of wind, and now it's the most important sentence I've heard all week.

Corvus is due back in two days. The number at the top of this page used to be a count. Tonight it's a date. I don't know when that changed.