Chapter 656: Hail Mary
Pip had been reenacting it for ten minutes and showed no signs of stopping.
"And then," Pip said, straightening to his full height and adopting an expression of theatrical gravity, "he just walks in. Doesn’t knock. Doesn’t announce himself. Just walks in like he’s been expected and everyone forgot to tell him." He pointed at an imaginary map on the wall of their narrow room. "The Ardenmere pass. Three days. You are already encircled." He turned to Nami with both hands spread. "And the entire war cabinet just sat there."
Nami was sitting on the bunk with her knees drawn up and the expression she wore when she was trying not to show that she was enjoying something. She was not succeeding.
"The king told Lord Fenwick to be quiet," Pip continued. "Lord Fenwick. Who has been on that council since before we were born. The king told him to be quiet so a seventeen year old tavern boy could finish his sentence."
"Burt," Nami said, looking at Noah, "that was either brilliant or catastrophic."
"Pip said the same thing," Noah said.
"Pip was right," she said. Then the expression she had been managing broke through entirely, warm and genuine and completely unguarded in the way Nami’s expressions were when she stopped managing them. "We’re going to the front. Like real knights."
"We are real knights," Pip said.
"We are recruits with blessed items," she said. "But after tonight." She looked at Noah with something in her eyes that she would not have called starry and that was starry anyway. "After tonight we are something else."
Noah looked at them both and felt something sit warmly in his chest that he was not going to examine too carefully.
"Where’s Werner?" he said.
The warmth in the room shifted. Pip and Nami both did the small adjustment that people did when a question landed that redirected the energy of a moment.
"He went ahead after the briefing," Pip said. "Said he needed air."
"He’s been gone a while," Nami said.
They went to find him.
---
The castle at night had a different texture from the castle in daylight. The ceremony drained out of it, the wide corridors becoming just corridors, the high ceilings just stone overhead. Torches at intervals. The sound of boots on flagstone carrying differently in the quiet.
They found him by the sound of the voices.
The corridor that ran along the back of the council wing’s east side was narrow and poorly lit, the kind of passage that connected important spaces without being one itself. Noah slowed first, something in the quality of what he was hearing making his feet reduce their pace before his head had finished deciding why.
Pip and Nami slowed behind him.
They rounded the corner slowly and stopped.
Werner was against the wall. Not leaning, not relaxed. His back was flat against the stone and his chin was up and his one remaining hand was at his side and he was looking at his father with the expression of someone who had made a decision before the conversation started about how they were going to receive whatever the conversation delivered.
His father was not shouting. That was the thing that made it worse. He was speaking at a volume that carried no further than the corridor but carried within it with a clarity that found every surface and came back unchanged.
"A boy from a tavern," his father said. "The son of nobody. A woman who scrubs floors and a father whose name is remembered for the wrong reasons. That boy stood in the king’s war room tonight and made a contribution that the senior commanders of this kingdom’s military could not make." He looked at Werner with eyes that were not cruel exactly but were doing something that cruelty would have been kinder than. "And my son. My son, from a line that has served this kingdom for four generations, who has been given every advantage and every preparation that I could provide, came back from his first real test missing an arm."
"The gate was—" Werner started.
"I know what the gate is," his father said. "I went through the gate. Your grandfather went through the gate. Your uncle went through the gate and came out intact and went on to serve for thirty years." He stepped closer. "The gate is the gate. It has always been the gate. People die in the gate, yes. People are injured, yes. But they do not come home to tell me about nightmares inside the Black Room as though the nightmare is an explanation."
"It is not an excuse," Werner said. His voice was steady in the way that things were steady when the effort of keeping them steady was visible in every syllable. "It is what happened."
"What happened," his father said, and now the volume did climb, not all at once but in increments, each word carrying more than the last, "is that a hundred and fifty recruits went into that room and twenty-nine came out and you came out without an arm while a tavern boy came out and proceeded to demonstrate capabilities that have the instructors whispering about him like he is something out of the old accounts." His father’s face had changed, the composed surface giving way to something underneath that had been building pressure for longer than tonight. "Do you understand what it means for our name? Do you have any idea what people say? What they will say when the story spreads? The Aldric boy rides dragons and my boy can’t keep both his arms."
"Father—"
"I told your mother this would happen." The volume reached its peak and sat there, his father’s voice filling the corridor, veins visible at his temple, something at the corners of his mouth that Werner was looking at and not looking at simultaneously. "I told her that sending you to that camp when you were not ready, when you had not done the work, when you were relying on the family name to carry what your preparation should have carried—"
"I was ready," Werner said.
"You were not ready!" His father’s hand came down flat against the wall beside Werner’s head, the impact ringing off the stone. "Ready men come home whole! Ready men do not stand in corridors making excuses about what happened in a room that every knight in this family’s history has walked out of intact!"
The silence that followed had a physical quality.
Werner had not moved. Had not flinched when the hand hit the wall. He was looking at his father with the expression he wore when he had decided what he thought and was waiting for the situation to finish, and his jaw was set, and the gauntlet on his remaining hand was doing nothing, just present, the channel patterns dark.
His father straightened. Adjusted his collar. The volume came back down to conversational as quickly as it had left it, which was somehow worse than if it had stayed elevated.
"We leave at dawn," his father said. "Try not to embarrass the name further."
He walked away down the corridor without looking back.
Werner stood against the wall for a moment after the footsteps faded. Then he pushed off from it and turned and found Noah and Pip and Nami standing ten feet away.
He looked at them.
"How much did you hear," he said.
"Werner—" Nami started.
"How much."
"Enough," Noah said.
Werner looked at the floor for one second. Then he looked up and the expression was back, the composed unreadable one, the one that showed nothing it had not decided to show.
"We leave at dawn," he said. "I’m going to sleep."
He walked past them toward their quarters. Pip opened his mouth and Nami put her hand briefly on his arm and he closed it.
They watched Werner go.
---
Noah’s mother had not expected three people.
She had been expecting Burt, from the message he had sent ahead, and she had prepared accordingly, which meant there was soup for one and bread for one and a look of genuine alarm when Noah came through the door with Pip already talking and Nami behind him.
The alarm lasted approximately thirty seconds before she had redirected it into producing more soup, which was what she did with most problems, and within ten minutes Pip was sitting at the table telling her about the harbor with the enthusiasm of someone who had found an audience that was both engaged and not yet aware of all the context.
Gertrude had been in bed.
Past tense, because Gertrude was now sitting at the top of the stairs in her nightdress with her chin in her hands watching the main room through the bannister with the attention of a ten year old conducting field research.
Noah looked up at her.
She looked back at him with enormous eyes and mouthed, very clearly, is that her.
Noah looked at Nami.
Nami was talking to his mother about something, turned away, unaware.
He looked back at Gertrude and shook his head.
Gertrude’s expression said she did not believe him and was going to conduct further research.
She came down in the manner of someone who had decided that being observed conducting research was preferable to missing the research, wrapped in a blanket and trailing it behind her on the stairs with complete disregard for the dignity of the entrance.
She sat next to Nami.
Nami looked at her. "Hello."
"Hello," Gertrude said. She looked at Nami with the direct assessment of someone who had not yet learned that staring was considered rude and had also not particularly cared when informed of this. "Are you Burt’s friend?"
"Yes," Nami said.
"Just his friend?"
"Gertrude," Noah said.
"I’m asking," Gertrude said, with great reasonableness.
Nami’s cheeks had gone a color that Noah had not previously seen on Nami’s cheeks. She looked at the table for a moment. "Just his friend," she said, and her voice came out even, which was an achievement.
"Oh," Gertrude said, with the specific tone of a ten year old who had formed an opinion and was choosing not to share all of it.
"We are friends," Noah said, to the room, with the finality of a man closing a door.
Pip was looking at the ceiling with the expression of someone deciding not to say anything, which for Pip was its own kind of statement.
His mother fed them all. She asked Pip questions about his family and where he was from with the genuine interest of someone who had spent years cleaning other people’s floors and had learned to find people interesting as compensation for finding the floors less so. Pip answered with more honesty than Noah expected, talking about a merchant family in the northern district, a father who had wanted him to take over the business and a moment at seventeen when a test result had made both of them understand that the business was not what Pip was for. He left out the disaster part though.
Nami talked to his mother about the harbor, the cleaned up version, the version that had the brave recruits and the defensive tactics and left out the parts involving wyvern caves and tamed black dragons diving on warships.
His mother listened and watched Noah across the table with the expression she had been wearing since he came home, the one that said she knew the version she was being told was not the complete version and had decided that was acceptable for now.
Gertrude fell asleep against Nami’s shoulder halfway through the soup.
Nami looked down at her with an expression that she was not managing at all and did not seem to know it.
They said their goodbyes at the door. His mother held his hands the same way Mistress Edra had, flour-dusted palms and all, and looked at him for a moment.
"Come back," she said.
"I will," he said.
She nodded and went inside.
---
The column north left at first light and arrived at the forward camp as the second day’s light was going flat.
The camp sat in the valley below the Ardenmere ridge, a collection of organized structures that had been built fast and showed it, the kind of camp that existed because a situation had required it rather than because anyone had planned it. Tents in rows. Supply wagons in the back. A medical section that announced itself by the sounds coming from it before you could see it.
The sounds were bad.
Knights coming south passed them on the road as they arrived, some on horses, some on foot, some on litters carried by others, and the ones on litters were not moving in ways that suggested they were going to be walking the return journey. The ones on horses were not looking at the column coming north. They were looking at the road ahead of them and the capital beyond it and the distance between where they were and somewhere they were not going to have to go back.
The recruits saw this and went quiet in the way that people went quiet when an abstraction became specific.
Pip watched a knight pass on a litter and said nothing, which was its own kind of measure of the moment.
The commanding officer of the forward camp was a man named Ser Cott, short and dense through the shoulders, with the look of someone who had been managing a deteriorating situation through competence and will and was running low on one of those. He found Noah within ten minutes of the column’s arrival, which suggested he had been looking.
"The king’s directive came ahead of you," Ser Cott said. He said it without ceremony, without preamble, without any of the performance of a man who was comfortable with what he was saying. "Command of the dragon knight units is yours. Senior advisory position on tactical deployment." He looked at Noah with eyes that were tired and direct. "What would you like to do."
Noah looked at the camp around him. At the medical section. At the knights coming south on the road. At the ridge to the north where the pass sat in the last of the day’s light.
"How far is the front from this camp," he said.
"Four miles," Ser Cott said. "The pass is currently contested. We lost the ridge on the eastern side this morning."
Noah looked at the ridge.
Then he smiled.
It was not a large smile. Just the small one that came when a problem had a shape he recognized and the shape had a solution attached to it.
"Shade," he said. "Mask."
Nothing happened for one second.
Then the air beside him moved, and then there was a displacement of something large deciding to stop being elsewhere, and Shade materialized out of nothing with the absolute composure of a dragon that had been there the entire time and had simply stopped declining to be visible. The black scales caught the camp’s torchlight and threw none of it back, and the violet-rimmed eyes looked at Noah with the patient attention they always carried.
Three soldiers nearby made sounds and stepped back.
Ser Cott did not step back, which said something about Ser Cott.
Noah looked at Pip and Nami.
"Coming?" he said.
Pip was already moving toward Shade with the purposeful stride of someone who had decided the answer to that question before it was asked. Nami was beside him.
Noah looked at Ser Cott. "Recon," he said. "We’ll know the eastern ridge situation within the hour."
Ser Cott looked at Shade. Looked at Noah. Nodded once, the nod of a man who had stopped being surprised by his own day.
They went up.
The camp shrank below them, the valley opening out, the ridge line of the pass resolving from a general northward darkness into something with detail as Shade carried them up through the cold air. The sounds of the camp faded and the wind replaced them and the stars were very clear up here above the cloud layer.
Pip sat behind Noah on Shade’s back and looked at the northern dark ahead of them where the cloud cover sat over the pass.
"Something tells me," Pip said, "that we are not just doing recon."
"Nope," Noah said.
He was smiling properly now. Not the small one. The one that came when the variables had arranged themselves into something workable and the next part was just execution.
From ahead, beyond the cloud layer, in the direction of the pass and the ridge they had lost that morning and the four miles between this position and where Arthur’s forces currently stood, a red mist was gathering.
Moving toward them through the dark, rolling across the cloud tops, warm against the cold night air, carrying the heat of something very large that was very glad to see him.
Noah’s smile went wider.