How did he know exactly what to say? He was normally stiff and abrupt, and as the suffering mounted and they listened to awful story after awful story, Ophele lost her own words completely. It was just too horrible. She couldn’t listen to them and not cry, and if she started crying, who knew when she would stop. Twenty-three people had died of the valley fever, and Azelma had nearly died, and Remin had been so sick, and she hadn’t even figured out how to deal with that and now here was this fresh tragedy, orders of magnitude worse than anything that had come before.
But…no. This wasn’t a fresh tragedy, she thought, looking at all these starved people, their faces so gaunt as to show all their teeth. This had been happening for months. While she was cowering under blankets in her cottage, devils had beensmashing down their doors. While Remin and his men had been bringing in the harvest, these people had been starving, trapped on the other side of ten thousand devils. While she was marveling at her first blizzard, they were walking through it on frozen feet. And leaving a trail of dead from here to Isigne, according to Miche.
The thought was overwhelming. It made her angry and ashamed and so sad and she didn’t know what to do with these feelings.
“How do you always know what to say to them?” she asked Remin as they walked out of the cookhouse. Snow was falling thickly outside, and the first groups of bathers were coming back, scrubbed pink and warm and well-wrapped for the short journey back to their cots.
“I’ve said it all before.” Remin swung up onto Lancer’s back and extended a hand to lift her before him in the saddle. “More times than I can count.”
“During the war?”
For a while, she thought he might not answer. There were many things he didn’t like to talk about. Lancer moved beneath them, his satiny black hide covered in a thick wool blanket, and Remin was warm behind her as he wrapped his cloak about them both.
“I never knew what to say, when my men came back,” he said finally, and she looked up to find his face was remote. “After a battle. I was the one that sent them. And they came back hurt, or didn’t come back at all, and I didn’t know what to tell them. They didn’t want to hear,I’m sorry.Why had I sent them, if I was going to be sorry about it? So I told them they did well, and they were safe, and to get better. And I told them when the war was over, we would have a good place, where they would never want for anything again.”
“Siyoun Arpelle is a fisherman,” she remembered, looking toward the river. “That first man. The stuttering one. There are a lot of fish in the Brede, I bet.”
Lancer’s hooves clopped onto the cobblestones of Eugene Street. The snow drifted, soft and silent.
“Then we’ll build boats,” said Remin.
***
Thirty miles north of the caverns system of the Aven Bede, there was a trail that Remin’s men called the goat track.
High, narrow, and precarious, it vanished a dozen times on the way up the mountain, so cold and windy that it seemed only the wooliest creature could survive. In some places, the gaps between rocks were so narrow, a man had to crawl to get through, and the summit of the mountain was almost always a blinding storm, capped with snow year-round.
If Valleth knew of it, they almost certainly had dismissed it as a strategic vulnerability. Only a madman would attempt it.
But one September night, Remin Grimjaw did exactly that.
The fourth year of the war was a low point. He and his army had smashed into the Berlawes like the sea against the Cliffs of Marren, and Valleth had been defending their mountain fortresses for nearly a year. Remin was never defeated, but that year saw a string of increasingly bloody victories at Marcke and Lunbren, culminating in the horror of Sanghin.
For Juste, that was the winter of Iverlach, the starving place, which he took and held through seven months of siege. When Remin broke through the following spring, Juste was so starved, he had to be carried out.
Everything depended on breaking this line in the mountains. Valleth hardly needed to build walls in the Berlawes, much less defend them; the sheer granite of the mountains was impassable, and Remin had had scouts out for months,searching for the slightest weakness. The goat track was the key to the impervious gates of Valleth. Once he broke the doors down, he would roll up the other mountain forts like a carpet.
To that end, Tounot was marching north with a substantial force to Kernne, though unless Remin got over the goat track in time, all he was going to be able to do when he got there was yell insults at the men in the gate tower. And fifteen miles south, Victorin and his much smaller group of men were moving into position to intercept any Vallethi reinforcements.
He just had to hold them off long enough for Remin and Tounot to take the fort.
“You could lose everyone.” Huber had come to Remin’s tent the night before all these pieces were to move into place, gaunt and grim and hollow-eyed. “You don’t even know if you can get over the mountain.”
“If we don’t take these mountains, we don’t take the valley,” Remin had replied, rummaging through the gear that would take him up and over the mountain. “You had a chance to propose an alternative an hour ago. Do you have one now?”
“At least give Victorin more men,” Huber argued. “Give him achance.That’s not a small force to the south, if they push him out onto the flat—”
“Every extra man I give him is another man who might be spotted by a Vallethi scout. Victorin just needs to hold out long enough.” Remin sent a black look over one shoulder. “He’s not arguing, so why are you?”
“Of course he’s not going to argue, he’ll do whatever he thinks you need him to do,” Huber snapped. “That’s why you picked him, you bloody bastard.”
Four years into the war, no one questioned whether twenty-one-year-old Remin could lead an army. He was a prodigy that had broken the Brede, the general who could not be defeated, a knight out of legend, with a string of victories eventhe Emperor could not contest. After twelve years of assassins, even Valleth’s pain-mages could not stop him. With Juste’s singers building his legend in both Valleth and the Empire, even his friends had begun to regard him as something not quite human.
Except for Huber.
“I chose him because he can do what I need him to do,” Remin said flatly. Outside, he was ice. Closing himself off was the only way he knew how to cope. But inside, it felt as if his guts were boiling in oil. “If you don’t have anything useful to say, then leave. I have things to do.”
“You said…hold outlong enough,”Huber repeated slowly. “You don’t think he’s coming back.”
