Chapter 21

They continued south. Arin kept his distance from her. Once or twice, she rode Javelin alongside his horse. It went badly. He didn’t know how to fix himself. He couldn’t accept this.

The first time she drew her horse up to him, he burst out, “For gods’ sake, you don’t even have armor.”

“I know you’re worried,” she said quietly.

“Your father wanted you to enlist. You fought him. Your music. You loved it more. You told me once that you didn’t want to go to war because you didn’t want to kill.”

“This is important to me.”

“You wouldn’t have done this before.”

“I know. I’ve changed.”

He heard the truth of this in a way he never had. She’d said this many times, even insisted on it: the woman he’d known was gone. He heard again his promise to her in his tent. He felt the absence of hers.

Yet it was wrong to feel hurt in the face of her larger grief, and the wrongness of it made him feel small. He looked at the sun in her hair, the ease of her seat in the saddle. Beyond her: a file of cavalry, an eastern pennant snapping blue and green. Fear choked him. It was hard to hear what she said next. A promise to be careful, to take no risks. It was so impossible and absurd to make any promise like that in war that he couldn’t even reply.

Eventually, she fell silent.

The next time, also on the road, he noticed her weaving Javelin through the ranks to approach him. He twitched his horse left and found a reason to be somewhere else. At night, he waited until she had pitched her tent. He made sure not to set his nearby.

She continued to glow at the edge of his vision. When camp broke at dawn, he’d catch sight of her bright hair, notice her talking effortlessly with the Herrani, or trying to learn Dacran from the easterners. He watched the soldiers’ wariness dissolve. They began to smile at her arrival, to like her despite themselves and her appearance: the very image of a Valorian warrior girl.

She kept close company with Roshar. Arin saw from afar the way the prince teased her. Heard her laugh. It squeezed a fist inside him. At dusk, the pair of them played cards. Roshar bled the air with a string of eastern curses when he lost.

On an evening when they were about ten leagues from Errilith, Arin came to Roshar’s tent, which was large enough to accommodate a small table, a set of canvas-backed chairs, and a collapsible bed woven in the style and colors of the nomadic plainspeople. The ticking had feathers, not straw, and the table offered roasted fowl, hulled red berries, and a bowl of eastern rice rendered a shocking orange by a spice Arin had tasted before, and found tangy, sweet, and a little bitter. There was a gourd of wine and two pewter cups. Two plates.

“And lo,” Roshar said from where he lounged in his teak chair with its swoop of green cloth. “The rains opened, and the stranger was a stranger no more.”

Arin looked at him.

“Poetry,” Roshar explained, “though it doesn’t scan so well in your tongue.”

“You’re expecting someone.”

“Maybe. You’ll do for now. Sit with me.”

“Kestrel?”

“Pardon me?”

“Are you expecting Kestrel.” The question came out flat.

Roshar coughed. “Nooo,” he drawled, but Arin didn’t like the humor in his voice. He sat anyway and watched Roshar prepare a plate for him, which wasn’t at all expected of an eastern prince and his guest, but Roshar sometimes liked to play the prince and sometimes didn’t. “Kestrel has raised the issue of Valorian scouts. We can’t expect to be wholly unnoticed, tramping along the main southern road.”

“There’s been no attack.” Which was what Arin thought would ensue if the Valorians became aware of their movements.

“She wagers that the general has noticed the concentration of our forces at Lerralen. Whether he knows of this contingent is unclear, but he might be refraining from attacking us because he doesn’t want to position forces north of Errilith when his supply lines run south of it. Or maybe he thinks we’ll choose to defend the wrong estate and he can seize his prize unchallenged. Why confront us now and pay the price in blood if we’ll waste our energies elsewhere while he takes what he wants? Of course, Errilith could be the wrong estate.”

“If Kestrel says that’s the one, she’s right.”

“I agree.” Roshar drank his wine.

Arin tried to eat.

“Have you ever bested her at cards? Borderlands? Anything? She murders me,” Roshar complained.