ONE

It was raining again in Mecketer as Grey stalked across the encampment towards the command tent. She had nearly finished washing, was almost properly clean for the first time in days, when Kier had thrown her a tether and sent a pulse through it. They had so little time apart from one another that he didn’t usually disrupt hers, so it only meant one thing: he needed her for official business. It was too cold and her hair was still wet, the messy knot of it dripping on her cloak, but if he was somewhere . . . well. That meant she was needed, too.

They were not meant to be apart, and they took that duty seriously.

Each step across the sodden camp felt like a perpetual battle with some unseen enemy, as if the blood of those they’d fought and those they’d lost was determined to claim her boots for the bones buried below. Equally uncomfortable was the fluttering of her heart in her chest, the lump in her throat – she wasn’t anxious, really, but the station she and Kier shared required a sort of unhealthy co-dependency that Grey only allowed herself to think on very late at night when she was certain that Kier was asleep.

She didn’t know if the captain fostered the same reactions in her absence. She’d never asked. 

Grey slipped through the flap of fabric into command – which wasn’t one tent at all, but rather a shoddy collection linked together with otherworldly tunnels of fabric. She thought it had once been the color of natural canvas, but it was now a dingy gray with smoke from the campfires outside and speckled brown with mud. She hated the tents – they smelled like damp and mold, the inescapable result of rain seeping into every crevice, and it always made her skin itch. In other assignments, they were sometimes in one of Scaela’s many old fortresses, surrounded by candlelight and thick stone walls and real floors, but this was not the case with Mecketer. It wasn’t even near a city – the encampment was its own entity, and though it had persisted for most of the years of the war on the border between Luthar and Scaela, it had been burned down or shifted too many times for anything permanent to remain. It existed now, as it always had, to defend the supply road from the sea that ran between Scaela and one of Luthar’s old ports, constantly changing hands between the two nations.

What she wouldn’t give to be back in one of those fortresses, with a roof over her head and stone underfoot. What she wouldn’t give for dry boots and a warmer cloak.

The clerk looked up as soon as she entered, exhaustion plain on their face – they weren’t really a clerk at all, but either a typic being punished with secretarial work or a young person-at-arms too injured for patrolling. They stood, inclined their head to Grey and said, ‘Can I help you, Hand Captain?’ in the flat tone of someone who’d stopped caring a dozen deaths ago. 

‘I’m here to join Captain Seward,’ Grey said. She had not been summoned by Attis or Concord, but she didn’t have to be. If Kier was here, she was meant to be, too.

The clerk sighed, but led the way out of the administrative tent, through three drenched, gauzy passages, stopping at a tent flap marked with the High Lord of Scaela’s seal: an open hand, palm out, making the sign of justice over a light blue field. There, they paused and squared their shoulders – Grey tried not to read too much into this – then called, ‘Master Attis, Hand Captain Flynn is here.’

No sound on the other side. Master Attis was powerful with standard magics and the well she drew from was strong enough to make a difference, so she was able to hold a sound shield long enough to keep most of her business private. She was thorough. Grey appreciated that, even if the woman herself vaguely terrified her for reasons she hadn’t yet gotten to the bottom of.

Finally, a voice called, ‘Enter.’

Grey muttered a quick thanks to the clerk. She noted their limp, the way they favored their left side – she thought about directing them to visit Leonie, but the healers were already overworked.

She shook it off and slipped past Scaelas’s seal, inclining her head to Master Attis and her Hand before moving in further. Her ears popped slightly as she passed through Attis’s shield, and it took a lot of effort not to wrinkle her nose or rub her ear.

Like most other tents at Mecketer, there was barely any furniture within, and certainly nothing that could count as permanent or well constructed. An open brazier blazed on one side, filled to the brim with light purple magic- fed flame, and Grey relaxed slightly in the warmth. It was a small tent, containing only a table laden with maps, a desk and two chairs. Attis sat ramrod straight on one side of the desk, her salt-and-pepper hair pulled back into a tight bun that rendered her features even more severe, her Hand lurking against the back of it like a badly angled shadow. Kier had the other chair, somehow giving the impression of rumpled insouciance even sitting straight and prim as Attis herself. It was something about the untidy curve of his mouth, the lock of his hair that never quite managed to stay where he put it.

‘Apologies for proceeding without you, Hand,’ Attis said, not sounding apologetic at all. She barely even looked at Grey as she straightened the papers on her desk.

Who am I to delay you? Grey wanted to say, but she’d already gotten in trouble for her tongue more than once here. The mud made her irritable, and the constant salt scent of the sea a few miles off made her antsy, but Attis was no treat either. It was one of the many reasons this assignment grated on her: that she had to keep her true feelings quiet unless it was only Kier within hearing range. Usually, with only the fate of either a violent death or a lifetime of battle looming ahead, their masters had a better sense of humor. 

Grey nodded once, turning her attention to Kier. Grey scanned over him quickly, as she always did when they were reunited, even after the shortest period. It was another one of those anxiety-induced habits. The shape of Kier was committed to her memory, as familiar to her as her own reflection: the uneven hazel of his eyes; the deep, rich brown of his hair, curlier than usual, like it was when they were children, with the salt in the air; the variations of his skin, leaning darker olive whenever they had more than an hour of true sunlight in the day (but not now, because at Mecketer, there was rarely any sunlight, and Kier, who loved the sun as much as it loved him, was uncharacteristically pallid). The fullness of his lips and the crooked line of his nose, the shadow of his eyelashes over his cheekbones.

Nothing new broken. No wounds besides the scrape along his jaw from a skirmish the week before.

She slipped into place behind him. For his part, Kier's shoulders relaxed when Grey was there, if only a fraction. 

In the practiced pose of mages and their Hands, their wells, their power, Grey rested her own hand on Kier’s left shoulder, fingers curving so the tips just barely grazed the line of his collarbone, her thumb the merest inch from his skin over the collar of his cloak. Submission and protection. Fealty and power, all in one.

‘As I was saying, this is not going to be easy,’ Attis said.

‘It rarely is,’ Kier allowed in his calm, lovely voice, so far removed from the terror of what he could do. The small part of Grey that still tittered with anxiety quieted immediately. ‘But please, continue.’

Grey glanced over the papers on Attis’s desk. Most were maps: annotated with arrows and wins and losses, showing how the Scaelan army was spread across the borders. The main one showed all the nation states that made up the island of Idistra. Grey’s gaze traced over the corners: knots of fighting between their own nation of Scaela and the northern nation of Cleoc Strata, then to the east with Eprain, the south with Luthar. The western border with Nestria was quiet, thankfully – their new High Sovereign had no taste for blood – but who knew how long that would last.

It took her a half-second to realize that the paper on the desk between Kier and Attis was yet another map, badly marked up in an untidy hand, much smaller than the others that blanketed Attis’s large table. She didn’t lean close to scrutinize it – that was not her job. Thinking was not her job. Strategy was not her job.

Grey was a well, and beyond that, she was Kier’s official Hand, the well dedicated for his use. As such, she had two roles: the first, to feed her mage the power he needed to perform magic. The second, no matter what, to keep him alive. In the past, being a Hand was a lifelong position, requiring a ceremony of binding, but that practice had long since fallen out of favor, and recently had been forbidden.

‘This is their path,’ Attis was saying, tracing her finger along a marked ridge, clearly in the middle of a conversation Grey had missed. ‘And this is where the resource is. They are traveling with a retinue of eighteen mages’ – which meant eighteen wells, too, because within the system of Idistran magic, one could not operate without the other, but Attis didn’t mention the Hands, and Grey couldn’t keep her gaze from flicking to Attis’s own Hand – ‘and seem to be operating in shifts for constant movement. Four identical carriages, equally guarded. A complete decimation is the desired outcome, as ordered by the High Lord.’

Kier didn’t even flinch. After years and years of this, of course he didn’t. Grey had lost count of the lives on their hands, the blood staining every single skirmish they only just scraped out of.

‘Decimation might be tricky,’ Kier said. ‘How many am I taking with me?’

‘Your full company, Captain.’

He made a small noise. ‘Everyone?’

‘The High Lord’s orders.’

Grey didn’t realize how much her fingers were digging into his shoulder until he subtly dipped it, their signal to let her know she had tensed.

There had always been significantly more wells than mages in Idistra, but with the constant wars and waning power, that was no longer something to count on – even in Scaela, the nation that held the most power when everything changed.

‘Based on the last census of wells, it doesn’t seem like good strategy—’ Grey started. 

‘It may be more sensible to leave some of our wells behind,’ Kier agreed, taking the fall for her boldness, smoothly covering her misstep. She felt a tug on the tether between them, a pulse of caution, and pressed her lips together. Though she and Kier were as balanced as a pairing could be and treated one another as such, not every mage saw the relationship with their power source as one of equals.

And, of course, she knew what else Kier would say to her if they were alone: If you keep calling authority into question, you will draw attention, to which she usually replied, We always draw attention. It’s your fault, for being so alarmingly grotesque, to which he would almost certainly respond, Alarmingly striking, you mean.

Attis shook her head, aiming a warning glance at Grey before she turned back to Kier. ‘Not every specialty is as developed as yours. Every mage in your company must be accompanied by their Hand, with enough typics to match and cover, and all will move with you. I am not taking any risks.’

Kier had no protest to that, but Grey knew what he was thinking. In the time when magic was strong across Idistra’s nations, mages were only limited by the power of their wells. But now, everything had changed – everything had weakened. Though mages had always had affinities for flesh and blood, or materials, or natural forces, they were now restricted in what they could do with that magic. The mages with affinities for flesh and bone all had a specialty, a body part they had an ability to affect within their opponents; materialists could only home in on one type of metal or wood or object. In her time working as a healer in Scaela’s army, Grey had seen the whole bloody assortment of it: those with the ability to cut off air to the lungs, leaving the dead blue-lipped and haunted; flesh affinites who could stitch giant ropes of skin over the mouth that Grey had to cut through with narrow blades, covered in sluices of blood; bone mages who could lock jaws and break bones with barely a look. Though internal affinities were rare, when they occurred, what they were capable of was utterly ghastly.

Perhaps Kier’s affinity with the heart was better. Clean. They had limits, of course – a full aortal separation took so much of her well of power that they could only do ten an hour, maybe a dozen at a push, but there were other ways to harm the heart. Other ways to ensure the enemy did not fight back. And though Kier’s affinity lay with the muscle itself, he had every other benefit of basic magic.

‘They’re taking the trade route here. If they take the resource across the river into Luthar, we have no way to recover it. Do you understand, Captain Seward?’

‘Perfectly,’ Kier said, frowning at the map. Which was fortunate, because Grey understood very little. She sent a pulse down the tether – they could not fully form sentences between them, but they had been paired as mage and Hand for long enough that Kier could read her intentions by how she shaped her feelings as she pushed them through the tether of her power, and he could reciprocate in kind. He caught her curiosity and understood easily.

‘And what exactly is the resource?’

‘Not for you to know, Captain Seward.’

There was a short pause. Grey wished she could see his face instead of trying to imagine his expression based on the back of his head. Very carefully, Kier said, ‘Master Attis, surely . . . you must understand that I cannot retrieve the resource if I do not know what it is.’

Another pause. Grey kept her eyes straight ahead, face blank, trying once again to fit into the picture of a perfect Hand, more befitting of Kier’s station. Across from her, Attis’s Hand was doing the exact same thing. Her name was Mare Concord, and she was thirty-eight years old. She’d been Attis’s Hand for eighteen years, long enough that even her thoughts had long since become someone else’s. Grey had learned these facts when Attis had borrowed her two years ago, on another assignment, when Mare was injured in the field and required medical attention.

‘You’ll know it when you see it,’ Attis said, clipped. ‘That’s all you need to know. You set out before first light. Is that understood?’

A pause, and Grey knew Kier wanted to press. He knew better. That was the difference between them – Kier knew when to stop.

‘Yes, Master,’ he said.

‘Good,’ Attis said, already accepting the next paper from her Hand, already turning to the next task. ‘Dismissed.’

For just the barest of seconds, the Hand Master’s eyes locked on Grey’s. Grey remembered the skin of Mare’s face, gray with blood loss, her lips cracked and chapped as she’d drunk from the cup in Grey’s hand. Mare was unconscious while Grey sutured the wound in her liver, but by the time she moved to the external wound, the anesthetic draught had worn off and Mare’s gaze was empty, feeble as Grey stitched up the jagged gash over her ribs. She remembered what Mare had told her when it was done, the other woman’s bloody hand clenched around her wrist: Get out. Now. As soon as you can. They never need you as much as you need them.

She’d told Mare then that Kier was different and was rewarded with a pitying gaze so motherly that it made Grey’s heart ache. None of them are different.

Mare made a full recovery without infection, thanks to Grey’s careful action. That night, alone in their quarters, Grey lay awake long after Kier’s breathing evened, studying his face.

We’re going to die in this armor, Mare had told her, gripping her hand, slippery with blood. We’re going to die under Scaelas’s banner, and for what?

For what they did to Locke, Grey did not answer then, even though the truth of it echoed all the way to her bones.