Amara tried to picture the intervening terrain in her mind, especially elevation. “It shouldn’t be,” she said. “We must be thirty or forty feet higher here than at the river’s nearest point.”
The plume doubled and redoubled again, and the rising column of steam began to approach their position on the wall.
Bernard whistled. “Serious crafting. And they did it far enough out so that even if the Queen was in on it, we’d never come within sight of her. Invidia’s idea, you think?”
Amara shrugged. “It would take several crafters working together to accomplish this. Water is heavy. To make it move against its nature that way—I’m not sure if even Sextus could have done it.”
Bernard spat on the ground in frustration. “I make it maybe three-quarters of an hour before they can walk right on up to the wall again.”
Amara shook her head. “Less.”
“Figured we had two, three hours at least.” Bernard clenched his jaw and turned to descend the steps toward the waiting horses. “We’d better get moving.”
CHAPTER 38
Tavi had been tricked.
Kitai, of course, had been in on it.
He hadn’t meant to sleep, not with so much work left to do securing the city. But between the recent bleeding for Marok and the enormous effort the furycrafting of the Rivan gates had required, he had already been exhausted. And Kitai had been particularly… he searched his thoughts for the proper descriptive word. “Athletic” didn’t seem to convey the proper tone. “Insistent,” while an accurate description, fell somewhat short in any but the most objective sense. He decided that his language lacked entirely a word sufficient to the task of describing such hungry, joyous, utterly uninhibited passion.
There had been food, at some point, discreetly left on the wagon’s seat. Tavi suspected, in retrospect, that it had been laced with a tiny amount of aphrodin, which would explain both his, ah, extreme focus on the evening as well as the nearly comatose state he’d found himself in afterward.
He looked down at Kitai’s hair. As he lay on his back, she was pressed up against his flank, her head pillowed on his chest. Her fine white hair veiled her face, except for the softness of her lips. A strong, slender arm draped over his chest. Her leg was half-thrown over his thigh. She was sleeping heavily, occasionally emitting a sound that an uncharitable (and unwise) person might have called a snore.
Tavi closed his eyes in contentment for a moment. Or perhaps they had simply wanted one another that much. Either way, he couldn’t find it in himself to be upset about being given a night’s… sleep, however duplicitously it had been arranged.
She murmured something in her sleep, and Tavi felt a stirring of vague, flickering emotion from her, rapidly shifting from one feeling to another. She was dreaming. Tavi stroked her hair with one arm and spread his focus, trying to get a sense of the camp around him. If something had gone amiss during the night, there would be some sense of it. And the air itself, the general emotional ambiance in a Legion camp, could tell him a great deal about the state of mind of his soldiers.
There were half a dozen guards posted around the wagon at a distance obviously meant to be discreet, but they couldn’t have helped but overhear everything, unless Kitai had remembered to put up a windcrafting. Or one of the men had. Tavi found that fact to be far less embarrassing than he would have a year before.
There were a great many bad things in the world, which perhaps helped put such things into perspective. There was nothing earth-shattering about others knowing that he and Kitai enjoyed one another’s company.
The guards were on alert and calm. A pair of valets, nearby, had the sense of men going about routine tasks—making breakfast, then. The general air of the camp was one of anticipation. Fear blended with excitement, rage against the invaders mixed with concern for fellow Alerans. The men weren’t stupid. They knew they were about to go to war, but there was not a trace of despair—only anticipation and confidence.
That, by itself, was very nearly the most valuable attribute a Legion could possess. Legion captains had known for years that the expectation of victory breeds victory.
He should get up and get moving, rousing the nearer men, playing the role of a Princeps with boundless power, confidence, and energy. But the simple bedroll felt extremely comfortable. He turned his attention to the warm, relaxed, sleeping presences beside him, and—
Presences?
Tavi sat bolt upright.
“You didn’t tell me,” Tavi said quietly.
Kitai looked sideways at him, then away. She thrust her arms into the steel-stained padded vest she wore beneath her mail and began to buckle it on.
Tavi pressed gently. “Why didn’t you tell me, chala?”
“I should never have come here with you,” Kitai said, her voice hard. “I should have remained in my own bedroll, alone. Crows take it, I knew you would sense it if we were together. I was weak.”
Tavi heard his own voice gain an angry edge. “Why didn’t you tell me, Kitai?”
“Because your people are insane about the birth of children,” she snarled. “What may happen! What may not happen! When it must happen, and within what order of events! Circumstances over which they had no control whatsoever dictate how they will be treated for the rest of their lives!” She finished buckling the vest and glared at him. “You should know this. Better than anyone.”
Tavi folded his arms and met her gaze. “And how did you expect things to be made better by keeping this from me?”
“I…” Kitai stopped speaking and slithered into her mail shirt, a task made awkward by the cramped space of the wagon. “I did not wish you to aim your further insanity at me.”
“Further insanity?” he demanded. “Don’t bother with the armor, Kitai. You won’t be using it.”
She lifted her chin as she began binding her hair back into a tail. “There? You see? Because I carry our child, you expect me to sit quietly in some stone box until it is time to give birth.”
“No,” Tavi said. “I expect you to keep our…” He tried not to choke over the word. “… child… safe.”
“Safe?” Kitai eyed him. “There is no such place, Aleran. Not anymore. Not until the vord are put down. There are only places where it will take longer to die.”
Tavi had no real answer to that. He leaned back on his heels and stared at her for a long moment.
“This is why you insisted on a courtship,” he said. “On us sleeping apart.”
Kitai’s cheeks flushed. “It… is another reason, Aleran.” She swallowed. “There were many reasons.”
Tavi leaned forward and offered her his hand.
She took it.
They held hands for a quiet moment.
“Our child,” Tavi said.
She nodded, her eyes wide and difficult to read.
“When did you know?”
“Toward the end of the voyage back from Canea,” she said.
“How long?”
She shrugged, and for one of the few times in Tavi’s memory, failed to look calm and confident. “Six months. If the father was Marat. But our people and yours… this has never before happened.” She swallowed, and Tavi thought that she looked, in that instant, fragile and beautiful, like a flower coated in ice. “I do not know what will happen. No one knows what will happen.”
Tavi sat in total silence for a long moment, trying to get his head around such a simple and enormous truth.
He was going to be a father.
He was going to be a father.
A little person was going to come into the world, and Tavi would be his father.
Kitai’s fingers stroked over his hand. “Please tell me what you are thinking.”
“I’m…” Tavi shook his head, at a loss. “I’m thinking that… that this changes things. This changes everything.”