assure her, her and Donar, that it was all right, but he seemed, unbelievably, to be weeping, for the first time in almost twenty years.
For the first time since the year he had been a fourteen-year-old boy forbidden to go to war by his Prince's orders and his father's. Forbidden to fight and die with them by the red banks of the River Deisa when all the shining had come to an end.
"Be easy, Baerd," he heard Donar saying, deep and gentle. "Be easy. There is always a strangeness here."
Then a woman's hands were briefly upon his shoulders and then reaching around him from behind to meet and clasp at his chest. Her cheek rested against his back and she held him so, strong and sharing and generous, while he brought his hands up to cover his face as he cried.
Above them on the Ember Night the full moon was green-gold and around them the strange fields were fallow, or newly sown, or full with ripened grain before the planting-time, or utterly bare and desolate and lost, in the west.
"They are coming," someone said, walking up to them. "Look. We had best claim our weapons."
He recognized Mattio's voice. Elena released him and stepped back. Baerd wiped his eyes and looked to the west again.
And he saw then that the Ember war was giving him another chance. A chance to make right what had gone so bitterly wrong in the world the summer he was fourteen.
Over the hills from the west, far off yet but unnaturally clear in the unnatural light, the Others were coming: and they were clad, all of them, in the livery of Ygrath.
"Oh, Morian!" he whispered on a sharply taken breath.
"What do you see?" Mattio said.
Baerd turned. The man was leaner, and his black beard was differently trimmed, but he was recognizably the same. "Ygrathens," he said on a rising note of excitement. "Soldiers of the King of Ygrath. You may never have seen them here, this far east, but that is exactly what they are, your Others."
Mattio looked suddenly thoughtful. He shook his head, but it was Donar who spoke.
"Be not deceived, Baerd. Remember where we are, what I have told you. You are not in our peninsula, this is no battle of the day against your invaders from overseas."
"I see them, Donar. I know what I see."
"And shall I tell you that what I see out there are hideous shapes in grey and dun, naked and hairless, dancing and coupling with each other as they mock us with their numbers?"
"And the Others for me are different again," Mattio said bluntly, almost angrily. "They are large, larger than men, with fur on their spines running down into a tail like the mountain cats. They walk upon two legs but they have claws on their hands, and razored teeth in their mouths."
Baerd wheeled again, his heart hammering, looking west in the eerily lucid green light of wherever they were. But still, in the middle distance, pouring down out of the hills, he saw soldiers with weapons: swords and pikes and the undulating knives of Ygrath.
He turned to Elena, a little desperate.■本■作■品■由■■網■友■整■理■上■傳■
"I do not like to name what I see," she murmured, lowering her eyes. "They frighten me too much. They are creatures of my childhood fears. But it is not what you are seeing, Baerd. Believe me. Believe us. You may see the Others in the shape of your heart's hate, but this is not the battle of your daytime world."
He shook his head in fierce denial. There was a deep surging in his spirit, a rushing of blood in his veins. The Others were nearer now, hundreds of them, streaming out of the hills.
"I am always fighting the same battle," he said to her. To her and the two men. "All my life. Wherever I am. And I know what I see out there. I can tell you that I am fifteen years old now, not fourteen or I could not be here. They would not have allowed me." A thought struck him. "Tell me: is there a stream west of us, a river below where they are descending now?"
"There is," Donar said. "Do you want to join battle there?"
A red, fierce joy was running through Baerd, wild and uncontrollable.
"I do," he