He looked over. Marreck’s gaze was steady, the easy humour gone. It was rare, this tone—Marreck the soldier, not Marreck the friend.
“You carry yourself different now,” Marreck continued. “Not just older. Heavier. You wear that title like a chain, Commander.”
The word caught Clyde off guard. He’d heard it spoken a thousand times, barked in reports or shouted across the field, but from Marreck’s mouth it sounded strange. Weighted.
“You outrank me now,” Marreck added with a half-smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Feels odd, doesn’t it?”
“It shouldn’t,” Clyde said.
“But it does.”
Clyde’s hands tightened slightly on the reins. “I didn’t ask for rank.”
“No one ever does. You earned it.”
“I didn’t want it.”
Marreck shrugged. “Most good leaders don’t.”
They fell silent again, the horses’ hooves filling the space between words. In the distance, the line of forest marked the horizon; a dark edge beneath a sky the colour of old parchment. Clyde watched it, but his thoughts were elsewhere; hundreds of miles south, in a room lit by the low glow of candlelight on gilt. A desk scattered with letters. A man’s hand tracing the edge of a seal before breaking it.
After a time, Marreck spoke again, softer now. “You know, I remember when you used to talk about home.”
“I don’t have one,” Clyde said.
“You did once. Before the wars. Before all this.”
Clyde didn’t answer. The memory was there, somewhere behind his ribs—the weight of a wooden door, a mother’s voice, the smell of smoke from the hearth. But it felt like it belonged to someone else. Someone long dead.
Marreck exhaled through his nose. “You could still have one, you know. When all this is done.”
“When all this is done,” Clyde repeated quietly, as if testing the shape of the words. “And if it never is?”
Marreck gave a humourless smile. “Then we’ll die doing what we were born for.”
Clyde huffed a small laugh. “You think we were born for this?”
“Maybe not. But it’s what we’re good at.”
They crested a rise in the road, and the valley opened before them, mist curling between the trees, campfires burning like scattered embers. The sound of the marching column carried up from behind: hundreds of hooves, the clatter of armour, the living weight of all the men who trusted him.
It pressed against Clyde’s chest like a physical thing. He lifted his gaze to the horizon, to where the world grew hazy and distant, and thought, not for the first time, that his only true home was waiting beyond it.
Marreck must have felt it too. “They’d follow you anywhere, you know,” he said quietly. “You may not want to be Commander, but you are. And they trust you for it.”
Clyde looked ahead, the horizon hazed with distance. “Trust gets men killed.”
“So does doubt,” Marreck said.
The words hung there between them, simple and true.
When they reached the valley, Clyde raised a hand to signal the halt. The order rippled down the line, men dismounting, horses snorting, the first notes of camp beginning anew. Renn rode up a moment later, his face flushed with effort, and offered Clyde the day’s dispatches.
“From the scouts, sir,” he said. “They spotted movement in the eastern passes. Could be nothing, but…”
“But it never is,” Clyde finished.
Renn hesitated. “Sir—permission to speak freely?”
