We won, the proclamation said. A decisive coalition victory. The enemy line broken, their advance halted, the eastern territories secured.
They posted it on boards throughout the camp the following morning, the ink still wet, the language already polished into the shape of history. Kael read it twice, standing in the mud outside the eastern barracks, and then he read it a third time because he thought perhaps he was missing something.
He was not missing anything.
We won.
He looked around the camp. At the men sitting outside tents with the particular stillness of people whose bodies were present but whose minds were somewhere back in the valley. At the ones who were not sitting anywhere because they were in the medical tents, or past the medical tents, or already in the ground. At Bren, who was staring at his hands with the expression of someone who had discovered something in them he didn't recognize. At Orren, who had not slept and showed it. At the space where Sorin was not.
None of them felt alive enough to celebrate.
There was no celebration in the eastern section. Possibly there was celebration elsewhere — toward the western end of camp, where the better-provisioned regiments had been assigned, there was some noise in the evening that might have been festivity. From the eastern edge it was hard to tell and no one tried very hard to find out.
What there was instead: a ration distribution — smaller than the pre-battle ration, which Ysse noted without surprise. A brief address from a lieutenant they had never seen before, who thanked them for their service in the language of official documents, every sentence sanded smooth of anything personal. A list, posted next to the victory proclamation, of soldiers to be reassigned to the secondary eastern push.
Kael's name was on it.
So were Bren, Ysse, and Orren.
He stood in front of the list for a while. The victory proclamation fluttered beside it in the morning wind, bright and clean, celebrating a thing that had cost exactly what they had spent, written by people who had spent none of it.
We won.
He turned away from it and went to find the others.