he war didn't end when we died. It simply forgot us.
They were almost through.
The corridor was exactly as Orren had assessed — defensible, passable, running east along the supply line toward the border junction like a seam in the geography that no one had thought to close because no one had anticipated anyone finding it from this direction. They moved fast and low through the terrain, using the noise of the engagement behind them as cover, putting distance between themselves and the front line with the focused efficiency of people who have a very specific reason to still be alive.
They were three hours out and the border junction was visible on Orren's map as a two-hour march when the artillery found them.
Not deliberately — they were not the target, they had not been tracked, the coalition's command did not know or care that four soldiers from the eastern regiments had removed themselves from the front line. The artillery was covering a flanking movement two hundred feet north of their position and the shells were landing in a pattern and one of the shells landed wrong.
Kael was not conscious for the part that came immediately after.
He came back to it slowly, in pieces, the way consciousness reassembles after a significant interruption — sound first, then sensation, then the slow arrival of understanding. He was on the ground. His ears were producing a high sustained tone that was replacing all other sound. He could see sky. The sky was the same grey it had been all month, uninvolved, containing nothing useful.
He moved his hand and it moved. He moved the other hand and it moved less but it moved.
He turned his head.
Orren was there, kneeling beside him, mouth moving in words he couldn't hear yet. Behind Orren, Bren was standing, upright, blood on his face from a cut above his eye, eyes clear. He was counting something on his fingers.
Ysse.
He raised his head.
Ysse was sitting against a tree ten feet away with her eyes open and her hand pressed to her side and her expression doing the careful work of not communicating the severity of what her hand was covering.
He got up.
He got up despite the fact that his body had strong opinions about this decision, and he went to her, and he did what he had learned to do in four weeks of being near the medical tent and watching the things that helped and the things that didn't, and she looked at him with her precise unwasted eyes and said, at a volume adjusted for his impaired hearing:
"Still functional."
"Yes," he said.
"How far is the junction?"
"Two hours."
"Then we're going."
Behind them, very faint through the ringing in his ears, the battle continued its vast business. The eastern regiments were on the front line, holding the door open with their bodies, serving their function in the design they had never agreed to. The flags snapped over the command pavilions. The princess's face smiled from the supply wagons. The post-phase maps waited in their folders, ready to replace the current version of the territory the moment the current version had finished being used.
The war was proceeding exactly as planned.
It had already moved on from the four of them. They had been marked as losses in some internal accounting, or not marked at all — moved past, uncounted, added to the gap between the official number and the real one. By tonight they would appear in no record. By tomorrow their positions on the front line would be filled or not filled and the advance would continue regardless.
The war didn't end when they disappeared.
It simply forgot them.
Kael looked at his three remaining people — Orren steady, Bren bloodied and standing, Ysse hurting and moving — and felt the fire in him, smaller than it had ever been and burning cleaner for it, and he turned east toward the border junction and everything that might lie beyond it.
He had the record books.
He had the map.
He had four weeks of assembled truth in him like a stone that could not be dissolved.
He had their names, all of them — his squad's, the uncounted dead's, Sorin's — held in a part of himself that the war had not reached and would not reach.
He put one foot in front of the other.
He walked east.
The spear was still on his back, and the symbol was still on the spear, and he still did not know what it meant.
But he was still here.
And he intended to find out.