What Feasts at Night (Sworn Soldier, #2)

by T. Kingfisher

The silence didn’t feel peaceful. It felt thick. Like the layer of fuzz on your tongue after a hard night of drinking, which you can’t see or touch but you can damn well taste.

What was wrong with me? It was just an empty house. Shadows lay thick in the corners, but surely no thicker than they lay anywhere else.

Angus sat back on his heels and began unloading his pack, setting out bread and cheese and a bottle of wine that was, fortunately, not from Gallacia. (You really don’t want to drink our wine. We export it because we don’t want to drink it either.)

I pulled the blanket up to my chin and felt very small, like a mouse myself, listening while something huge walked overhead.

Paying one’s condolences sounds well and good in theory, but in practice you have to walk up to a stranger and effectively say, “Ah, yes, that person you loved so much? Remember how they died horribly? So sorry about that.”

I’m keeping is what we say in Gallacia to any such inquiry, and it covers such a broad range as to convey no information whatsoever. It can mean “I am filled with unspeakable joy, my gout is cured, and angels attend my every step,” or it can mean “a bear just ripped my leg off and I am, at this moment, bleeding out, but please don’t make a fuss.” Either way, you’re keeping.

I don’t cry any longer. I’ve lost the trick of it. Lots of soldiers do, eventually, and only the lucky ones get it back.

If you have ever dealt with the possessions of the dead, you probably know what I mean. You take things away and leave behind emptiness, and everything you remove—every sheet and pillowcase, every lost sock and old razor—erases a little bit of the dead person’s footprint in the world. You picture your own home being carted away, piece by piece, hopefully by loved ones and not by strangers.

(Ha and Har are our particular Gallacian pronouns that are used only for God. When I found out that in English those are sounds associated with laughter, all I could think was, “Yeah, sounds about right.”)

I sometimes think the fundamental disconnect with civilians is that they think a war is an event, something neatly bounded on either end by dates. What anyone who’s lived through one can tell you is that it’s actually a place. You’re there and then you leave, but places don’t stop existing just because you aren’t looking at them.

She turned and stalked out of the kitchen, snatching a knife up as she went. I followed warily, wondering if she planned to take me outside and stab me and what on earth I would do if she did. Probably I would have to fire her for that. Dammit.

“My intimate knowledge of fungi does not translate to a knowledge of spiritualism or souls or life after death. I loathe people who assume that because they are an expert in one field, they are therefore infallible on a totally unrelated topic, merely because they gave it five minutes of thought.”

It would not have been something I understood, but I have had a great deal of experience with things that I don’t understand.

My hand still seemed to be working, despite what it had touched. I supposed that was good. I could cut it off later.

The silence grabbed the words as soon as they left my lips and spun them away into nothingness.

They tell you that everything gets dark at the end, but it went white instead, the color of snow falling outside a window, and all I had to do was sit and watch it fall, forever.

It was all very logical and very rational. I didn’t believe a word of it.