Memories

Sudden cold dreads crowded into her chest, rioting against her gut and shoving her heart up into her throat. Not going? Forcing a hoarse whisper around the congestion, she asked, "And there's a reason?"

"A few." He held her eyes for a moment, then looked into his mug of tea, bringing it up to sip, needing something other than words in his mouth.

"Right. A few reasons. A few reasons that you just came up with this morning? Nothing you could have told me about last week, or last month, or last friggin' season?" Her hand trembled so it splashed a slop of hot tea over her knuckles and she swore again, sitting the mug onto the flat back of the bench. Her throat went dry, and a cold rash of fear grew with realization. It spread up her neck and across her cheeks as the blood left her face.

"I've been thinking." He watched his own hand intently as he settled his mug with deliberate care. "Not just about going back to the front this season. About everything. About why we're here. Why we're fighting. Whether we've got any hope of coming home this time." Still studying his hands, he rubbed at the scars that crossed his knuckles. Softly, he said, "I want to know what you're going to do if I don't go."

He said if, and she dived on the faint hope. Trusting her voice not to break, she cleared her throat. "I'm going. What else can I do? Spend my last months in lock-up; make my life up to now a disgrace; every damn thing I've done a waste, and then starve in a ditch begging for coppers? Of course I'm going."

"You can't go without me."

"Damn right. But are you offering me a choice? I haven't got one. You go; I go. You don't go; I have to go alone. New partner. And not a lot of hope." Her throat tightened, screwing tears up close behind her eyes. "I might make it back; I've only got three months of service left."

"They won't send you back in three months though, you know that. You go out there and you're fighting 'til the season ends. On top of that, they'll have you in the front line; there are too many raw kids in this new rotation. They'll hold them back and send veterans up to the front." He spoke softly, his eyes were closed again and his hands were still, fingers laced like a prayer or a promise of inaction.

"Is that meant to make me feel better?" She would have stood to pace, but her knees were weak. She felt sick. "Why didn't you give me some warning about this? By all the gods, Dragan, this is my life we're talking about. Didn't I deserve a hint?"

He pushed himself into a stand, reluctantly, as if all of his decisions came at a cost and Freya gagged on the thought that he was leaving. Walking back into the cold shadows of the room, from the soft gold of sunrise into the red echoes of firelight, it seemed he carried burdens no man was built to endure. But if he left now, if he walked out the door, she would never see him again and he would leave with far more than her answers and the weight of the world on his shoulders.

He filled a second mug of tea, pouring unmeasured sugar into the dark liquid and stirring sluggishly. When he turned back, he had the little wooden box in his free hand and he held it out to her as he approached. "Shove up," he said and she made room on the bench beside her.

Staring numbly at the box in her hands, she watched him tap the lid with a callused finger. "Want to look through my things?"

"Your thing. This is it. Where is all your stuff?" Dull realizations were forming, clearing and drawing the nausea closer. "Oh hell, Dragan, you already packed everything up, didn't you? Sent it home." Why hadn't she seen this coming? Solid rock was buckling, slipping underneath her.

"No. Open it up."

The little box offered its treasures humbly. Not quite a foot long and completely unadorned, its pale wood had been carved out by an unskilled hand. Freya lifted a wide brass buckle and a cock's tailfeather from among an array of small things: a broken spearhead, pebbles, some squares of bloodstained cloth. Some were familiar, some weren't. "Why am I looking at this? I have to get ready."

"No you don't. They won't go without you. There'll be pounding on the door long before then. Do you recognize these things?"

The hollow, sickening distance in her head was making it hard to concentrate. It was irritating, and this box of bits was not answering any of the questions she needed to ask. "Why am I looking at this?" Her words were louder this time, more urgent. "Is this a little pack of mementos for me to remember you by? Or for you? Is this my epitaph? A little box of 'I remember when…'?" Anger was clearing the fog, but the sickness remained, the terror.

Dragan laughed; if her hands had been empty she might have hit him. "That's my life, or ours, same thing." Gently he took the feather from her fingers, curving its silky length across his lips. "This is everything I kept; all the rest is burned."

He slid the feather over her mouth, just as he had done his own. "Do you remember the year you wore these? All stitched up your shoulders and around like a collar." His lopsided smile was still there and she looked from the feather into the foolishness of her youth.

"Yes. I remember." She couldn't smile, but the touch of the feather brought the past crowding back around her like someone else's ghosts. "Vain. Stupid. How did we ever survive?"

She had been twenty, fresh from two years in light cavalry, when the ranks were redesigned. Someone somewhere decided there would be a Dyad force, pairs fighting as a single guerilla unit, and she had been first in line to enlist for the change. Cavalry had been fast and fearless; a sisterhood of warriors who held the lines at the front, all speed, skill and adrenaline, and wagging your smartass tail at the boys on the ground. But all these years later she still dreamed the screams of horses run onto pickets.

So she'd made the change and met the partner she'd live or die beside.

She picked a brass stud out of the box and held it beside the buckle. "I had to make something spectacular. You were wearing a ton of black leather and brass. All long hair and bare chest. And I kept cutting mine down, remember. Each season wearing less, 'til I had that cut away leather thing; just a bustiere with capped sleeves and studs, a segmented kilt, gauntlets and greaves."

"It looked good too."

"Well yes, as long as I didn't mind freezing to death, and I parried every single slash."

"And we did, didn't we. Every single slash, or nearly." He didn't look at her shoulder when he spoke; he moved his thumb absently across his own chest, tracing a ragged scar that crossed his ribs.

"And look." He lifted out a small lock of her hair; darker than his, tied with a long silver thread and glass beads.

"Where did you get that?" She looked directly at him for the first time since he'd sat, but he didn't meet her gaze. She faced him squarely and tried to imagine the man she'd known so long collecting all these tiny souvenirs. This was a side of him she'd never seen.

He shrugged. "When you cut it short."

"I remember that day. Or night, actually. It kept falling across my face, tangling up. Plus we had lice, remember?" It had been a hard campaign, and the images and smells of a battlefield filled her head.

"Yes, I do. You were tired and cranky, so you just took the knife and cut it all off."

Freya nodded and twitched a smile in remembrance. "I had to." Until then her hair had always been long, and yet she'd never had a second thought about cutting it. She couldn't remember the year, things like that blurred together after a while, but it must have been then that she first started to consider the risks. "When does common sense start to cut through the adrenaline and bravado?"

"When it starts to hurt." His answer was a simple truth: age, experience, mortality; and with them the knowledge of how many ways you can fall.

"You didn't even want me with you, at first, did you?" She kept staring at his face, and just as carefully, he studied the contents of the box.

"It wasn't you; it was being a little girl. Cavalry is the best place for women. You're fast, light, and agile; at least that's what I thought. But you trained beside me until you puked. You just wouldn't quit." He smiled. "And I did sort of hope we'd make a good team."

"Why won't you look at me?" She moved a hand up to the rough stubble of his beard, turning his face toward hers, but he kept his eyes down. His thick lashes were fair; his eyes deep and wide-set under knotted brows. His nose really was too big, and the green of his eyes, though she couldn't see them, were flecked with golds and browns like pebbles in a stream.

He closed the box, sighing and looked up. "I don't want you to go."

"I don't have any choice." There was a plea in her voice she didn't like, but her options were too awful for pride. "You've always said you'd finish with me," she reminded him. "I know your contract's ended, but you promised me one more season. I wish you'd told me when, and why, you changed your mind."

"I changed my mind when I carried you back from the front last year. Because I thought you were going to die. And after all these months of healing, and watching you train back up to fit…" he paused amid an unfamiliar stream of words.

His gaze was too intense to hold, livid with the remnants of excess and emotion. Hot blood rushed into her cheeks on fires of humiliation, as she readied herself to hear him to say she was no longer good enough. Not good enough. Suddenly she wished she had not asked for answers.

When he spoke again it was barely a whisper. "You are, without a doubt, the finest, surest–" he smiled "– most fearless soldier I have ever known. I never had to guess where you were, I just knew you'd have my back.

"We had an understanding of each other in a fight. A trust. I never thought you would get hurt. I did what I had to do and I knew you'd be behind me." He stopped again, rubbing his palm slowly over the surface of his box of treasures. If he'd thought so long about this, he had failed to find all the words he was going to need.

Riding the rise of returning nausea, sure of his next words, Freya hurried him. "And now my shoulder is shagged and your back is open. Now I'm a liability?"

"No, that's not it." He took her hand. It wasn't the soft dough-white hand of the camp followers; it was brown and calloused, marked across the knuckles with scars, like his own. And hers wasn't the hard, grime-grained hand of the farm girls he'd grown up among. It was a strong hand, lean and certain. "It's what I said before; you only stop to count the cost once it starts to hurt.

"I thought you were going to die, and I had never considered what I would do if you weren't out there with me."