B3Ch49-Sarah (Patreon)

This was one was harder write but one more sarah chapter coming after this. _______________________________________________________The hoarback's head dragged a furrow through the snow behind them, and Theo had been complaining about it for two miles.

"It's the neck," he said. "If we'd cut the neck we'd be carrying a third of the weight, and we'd still have the hide."

"Robert wants the neck," Mira said.

"Robert wants the neck." Theo mimicked, and hauled on the rope with both hands, shoulder into it, boots skidding. "Robert isn't pulling."

"Robert is pulling," Robert said as he hauled on the other rope.

Sarah had the third line and the worst angle. Snow to mid-thigh in the hollows, crusted hard enough on top to hold a man for two steps and then drop him through on the third. The wind had been coming down off the north face since noon, and it went through wool like a knife. She'd stopped being able to feel the last two fingers of her left hand somewhere around midday, and it was starting to worry her.

The hoarback was the size of a wagon and shaped like a bear that had lost an argument with a weedwacker. One of the ugliest monsters they had ever seen, and Mira had attacked it on principle when she had seen it. It had taken them most of the morning to put down. Jace opened it up under the jaw, Theo took two swings on the shield that dropped him to a knee, Robert broke its hip, and it had still gotten back up twice.

And it still hadn't given them a damn perk.

"Not one thing," Theo said, like he'd been reading her. "Not a perk. Not a token. No loot. Nothing."

"You already said that," Jace said.

"I'm saying it again," Theo grumbled.

Sarah shifted the rope off the raw spot on her shoulder and let them go. This was the part of the day where they talked. On the line they didn't. They'd gone whole days up here without anyone using their voice, hand signals, and the bond and nothing else. But coming home with a carcass, they talked, and she'd learned not to stop it.

"Two," Mira said. "In four months. Two perks."

"At least they all upgraded," Robert said.

Jace didn't turn his head. "Yea but it's almost impossible to get a perk now. How many have we killed up here? 100? 200?"

"It's the regen," Robert said.

"We know it's the regen; we need a way to turn it off," Theo said.

Robert stepped over a shelf of ice without breaking stride. "We just need to figure out a way to get ourselves past that threshold without being debilitating."

"And we don't get hurt bad enough anymore," Mira said.

Jace looked at her askance before Robert answered. "We get badly hurt all the time. This guy put his claws all the way through me. We just don't stay there." Robert adjusted his grip.

The rope creaked. Somewhere off the ridge, a bird made a sound like a hinge.

Sarah knew what he meant. They were the strongest they'd ever been, and they hadn't gotten any new perks in weeks.

"I liked it better when we were bleeding," Theo said.

"You'd have died," Mira said.

"Well yeah…but I'd have gotten a perk first."

---

They came up the last rise with the rope over their shoulders, and the sun was already going behind the massive mountains while the valley opened underneath them.

Sarah stopped without meaning to. Home, or at least temporary home. Now that Lord Dalen had taken it over.

There was a village down there now. The palisade ran a full circuit, Robert had taken the time to prepare cut trees for them, with gate towers on both approaches. Smoke stood up from a dozen chimneys. In the middle of it, the fire pit they'd dug was roaring, big enough to see from a mile out, and somebody had dragged a bench up to it and fallen asleep sitting.

People were working. That was the thing that got her every time. Sawyers at the pit saw, a man on a roof beam with a mallet, a line passing split shingles up a ladder hand to hand.

Four months ago they had come up this same rise on their bellies, ducking and dodging monsters while they hid in small hollows and caves.

Now there was a smithy.

She looked past all of it, north, where the Blackjaws stacked up range behind range. Massive snow-capped peaks taller than any mountain on earth. Passes she'd mapped from a distance and was dying to explore, and past those the map she carried just stopped.

Robert came up on her right and bumped her shoulder with his.

"What are you thinking about?" he said. "Still wanting to go deeper, huh?"

She smiled without looking at him. "I just can't help it."

She looked down at the village instead. The fire, the roofline, the people moving between the buildings with somewhere to be.

"I miss when it was just us out here."

Robert smiled and swung the axe up onto his shoulder. She turned to say something else and caught his eyes doing it, and her breath went sideways in her throat.

"So do I, actually," he said. "It was fun. Avoiding monsters and hiding all the time. Not having warm food. Having to butcher our own kills." He let that sit. "Not having a bed to sleep in and no fires most nights. It was a toonnn of fun. No one to share a bed with me." He winked at her.

Sarah shoved him hard enough to move him half a step.

He just looked pleased with himself in that quiet way that was somehow worse, and she felt her mental walls come down about an inch and got them back up too late, because down the slope Mira's head turned.

"Are you going to stop flirting or come help??"

"We're pulling!" Robert said.

"No you aren't! You're standing there looking into her eyes! I felt her get flustered!"

Theo, flatly, without turning around: "I'll just get this back myself. No worries y'all. It's ok. I don't want someone to flirt with."

Sarah picked up her rope. That village might have been where they were staying but these people were home.

---

The gate crew saw them pulling the carcass, and by the time they had it through the gate, there were thirty men around it.

The butchers took it from there. That was the arrangement — the team killed it, the outpost broke it down. She was just relieved it meant no more blood getting on her. A legion quartermaster with a slate walked the length of the thing, counting.

"Hoarback," he said. "Big one. That's four days of meat for the Cohort."

"More like six," Robert said.

The quartermaster looked at him.

"You're wasting the shanks," Robert said. "Bone them out and stew them."

"Six," the quartermaster grumbled, and wrote it down. "Good. Solstice is in tomorrow, and Lord Dalen wants to have a feast for it."

That was the other thing that had changed in the yard. A day ago the sky had turned a deep mirage-like blue, and the mana had exploded from the earth all around them. Sarah had felt it in her teeth. And then the panel, and then the arguing, and the arguing hadn't stopped since.

Two legionaries carried a trestle table across the yard and argued about Merits the entire way, neither of them able to say where a man was supposed to spend one. That was the other strange thing. Apparently now it wasn't only the humans from Earth the system affected. The legionaries were summoned, but they could earn merits?

---

The Hospitallers had the north half of the yard, and they'd made it look nothing like the rest of it. Where the Legion had rows, the adventurers had a sprawl — tents in a loose ring, weapon racks anywhere, a training circle scraped down through the snow to frozen mud that had four people in it and eight watching. They'd been here nine days. They'd arrived at the tail of a blizzard after six weeks on the road, and the first thing their commander had done was ask where the wall needed hands.

She'd heard about him before she met him. Everyone had. Mark's people had sent a letter ahead of the column and half of it was logistics while the other half was a Danish man they called the Undying, who had gotten a regeneration perk off a troll and then gone and somehow gotten a second one off a goblin berserker. As strange as the man was, the people within his order were good people. Most of them had some sort of regeneration perk, and they were well armed and armored. They even brought their own hired crafters to maintain their arms and armor.

He was in the circle now, taking a wooden sword across the ribs from a woman half his size, and laughing about it. Biggest man in the valley by a comfortable margin, red across the cheekbones from cold he clearly refused to acknowledge.

"Sarah Calder!" he bellowed. "Did you bring me a bear?"

"It's not a bear."

He laughed as he took another hit. "Ah! But it looks like a bear."

"It's got six claws and no eyes!" Mira called back at him.

He thought about that. "Hmm…perhaps is a slightly handicapped bear."

Sokha was sitting on the weapon rack behind him with her boots hooked in the crossbar and a bowl in her lap, eating with her mittens still on, and she pointed her spoon at Sarah without getting up. She'd been a schoolteacher in Battambang, and now she opened people's arteries with a short spear; she was a sniper with it.

"He has been talking about your team all afternoon," she said. "Please make him stop."

The Undying came over to the rail and put both forearms on it, which brought him down near Sarah's height.

"What did it give you?"

"Nothing," she sighed.

"Nothing." He said it like he didn't believe it, and looked past her at the carcass, at Theo, at Robert rolling out a shoulder that had healed on the walk in. "How many this year?"

Sarah rolled her eyes. "I don't know, four? five?"

"Four." He straightened off the rail. "That is very sad."

Mira called over. "Can it Undying! It's not impressive that you let yourself get hit just cause you can!"

"I have killed three. In nine days." He put the fingers up one at a time. "Because I let things hit me. Is very good perk from handicapped bear."

There was a seam under Sarah's ribs where a ridge cat had almost torn out her liver. She had held still for it on purpose as it tore her apart, and the system still had not given her a perk. Afterward she had thrown up behind a rock where nobody could see her and cried herself to sleep until Robert had found her.

"Huh, very interesting," she said, and kept walking. The heat off the big fire hit her from twenty feet out and got into her hands. She resented how good it felt.

---

Lord Dalen was at the long table under the half-built hall, which had a roof on the west end and open sky on the east, and he was working in the part with the roof.

He didn't look up. "You're late."

"We were dragging six hundred pounds."

"I heard. Quartermaster's already talking about it. That's the largest one we have seen." He moved a stone weight off the corner of the map and put it back down two inches over. "Sit down, Sarah. You look exhausted."

She collapsed into a seat near him. There was a mug in front of her before she'd settled, and it was hot. She wrapped her hands around it and let the warmth seep into her.

The months in Gravesend had changed him. He was thinner, browner, a scar coming in over one eyebrow, and he'd stopped apologizing before he gave an instruction. He still wore the same coat and still had the little notebook. But he was no longer the same man she had met before in the first month. If she had to have an opinion on the man, she would say he looked almost competent.

"North wall's closed as of yesterday. Settlement stone's seated in the square. Ground's ours as far as the system's concerned. We hold it through the winter, and this will be a real place in the spring the legion can launch from." His finger moved on the map. "Ridge road's about half cut. When it's done, a wagon can get from here to the next town in eleven days instead of twenty-two. We're bleeding men on a mountainside to get it, even with all of the healing potions we brought."

"And you want my team on the ridge road?"

"No," Dalen snorted. "I'm not here to order you to do anything. Your Lord brother made that clear."

She put the mug down. "Dalen."

He reached under the table and put a bundle on the map.

It was heavy enough that the stone weight jumped. Wool, wound tight and tied — she pulled the cord, and it came apart into a coat lined with something thick and gray, mittens with a second pair of liners folded inside them, felted boot liners, a hood, two pairs of wool socks so dense they held their shape.

"Five of those," Dalen said. "Yours is the one with the short cuffs. Don't argue with me about the cuffs, that's how they came."

Sarah turned the mitten over. Her hands were still burning from the walk in, but they were coming back.

"These came up the ridge road?"

"These came up on the first wagon, before the road existed." He went back to the map. "I had a century hauling them by hand through the notch for two days because the wagon wouldn't fit."

"Ahead of nails?"

"That's what the manifest said," he replied evenly.

She looked at him.

Dalen kept his eyes on the map, which was answer enough on its own. "The letter that came with them was three lines about the ridge road, some other instructions for me about this place, but most of it was about you," he said, "and half a page about the coats. Sizes. Which lining. Something about how you'd tell me you didn't need them." He turned a page in the notebook. "I wasn't going to bring it up."

Sarah didn't say anything, but she hugged the coat to her frame.

Hundreds of miles south, with a continent's worth of people pulling at him, her brother had sat down and written half a page about mittens for her and the team.

Her throat closed, and she clamped down on it hard, and knew she'd been half a second slow, and out in the yard she felt Mira's attention turn toward the hall like a lamp.

"He's got no business doing that," she said softly.

"He's got exactly the business. I don't think anyone can make him do something. Cept maybe Beth." Dalen said. "He's got no business making it my problem. But he did, and I'd have done it anyway, so." He shrugged. "Take the coat."

"I'm still not garrisoning here."

"I know you're not." Dalen tapped the palisade line with two fingers. "But I'll say this once and maybe you listen. You did alot of good work preparing this area for us. The items you got from the ruins in the area are on their way back to the Basin. The information and maps you have gathered have been invaluable to our planning. But we can use your help on the work here." He sat back. "Walk the wall with me, tell me what I got wrong. I've got good people here to help me. Help me make this place better and help me with the Hospitaller Order. They are dying to explore some of the ruins and caves you've marked"

"You've gotten better at this," she said.

"I've gotten louder at it." He almost smiled. "Drink your tea. There's a reason I wanted you at the table."

---

He put the second map on top of the first.

It was a copy in Harold's hand. She'd have known it from across the room, the cramped block letters, the little crossed circles he used for things he wasn't sure about.

"The Stair," Dalen said, and put his finger on a mark. Beside it someone had sketched a rough profile: a slope, and cut into it a run of enormous steps, each one drawn about the height of a man.

"This set of ruins. Big, old, nobody's been in. Goes down at least four levels and he doesn't know what's in it." He turned the sheet. "That's the reason the Hospitallers are here, by the way. Not the wall.."

"He sent forty adventurers a month and a half up a mountain to open one ruin?"

"He sent forty adventurers to bring back one item," Dalen said. "There's a key in there. That's what they are here to recover."

"A key to what?"

Dalen rubbed his thumb across his eyebrow, over the new scar. "It doesn't say."

"He always says. He doesn't do a good job hiding all the information he has. He's been shouting it on the forums." Sarah's finger had found the mark on the map without her deciding to. "He always has more than one reason for doing anything. Every time."

"Yeah," Dalen said. "That's about how I read it too. I think this is more of a test for me as well." He tapped a spot further up the range, well past the Stair. "My own Grail quest's up here somewhere too. At least I know what that one is though." He almost smiled. "Still, your brother left me plenty of work to do and I intend to see it through."

"So he left it out on purpose." Sarah mused. "You can stop worshiping him Dalen. He makes mistakes too."

"I think he's leaving me some information to figure out myself as well." He frowned. "You should respect Harold more. He has done more to preserve humanity than any other Lord."

She sat back down as she thought it through and ignored the second comment. That set of ruins was one they hadn't explored yet. To get there, you had to go through some rough terrain.

"He's afraid of it?" she wondered.

"Or he's afraid of somebody knowing about it." Dalen shrugged. "Doesn't change the job."

"No." Sarah was already looking at the elevation. "It doesn't."

She read the threat list down the margin. Ridge predators on the approach. Possible carrion drakes at the overhang. Entrance believed unguarded — threat begins at first interior level. Then, under it, in the same cramped hand: this is from memory and it is old. Verify.

"When can you do it?" Dalen said.

"After the solstice, we need a break and two days won't kill us."

"That's the first sensible thing you've said since you sat down. You'll have to take some of the Hospitallers."

---

The next morning she was walking out to get something to eat when he ran into her. "No," Sarah groaned. "You are not coming."

"You have not heard it."

"You've got a pack on."

He paused sheepishly. "I am coming with my people; it is dangerous this ruin. Yes?" he agreed, "We walked six weeks to get here. My quest is for that ruin. Not the wall." No heat in it. He talked it out like a thing she'd agree with once she'd heard it properly. "And you should let me take the front. You are careful, Calder. Your five are careful. Four months, two perks — that is a team that does not take risks."

Jace's head came up with a stony glare as Sarah stood there.

She had been opened from hip to knee and held the wound shut with her own hand to see how long the count would run. Theo had let a troll break him against a rock face on purpose. Every one of them had a list. And Troll's Regeneration was better than the two the Undying had stacked.

Keep your perks quiet. All of them, all the time, including allies. Harold's last warning given to her as she was leaving. And it was one she wholeheartedly agreed with. Especially with the conflict going on in the forums. Adventurers were starting to hunt each other.

"Pretty much, but we're still here," she said.

"Sarah." Mira said low and warm as she came up alongside her.

"He only knows what he can see," Robert said through the bond.

"He's had nine days to see it." Jace contributed through the bond. "He should see how we don't get sore and tired like everyone else."

"That's fair to nobody," Mira said. "Least of all him."

Sarah kept her eyes on the big man and got her walls up and shut them out again. The bond was amazing, but sometimes she just wanted her mind to be her own.

"You're not coming," she repeated.

He waited for the rest of it. But nothing came.

"Calder—"

"Nine of yours. Sokha runs them." She was already turning.

She got four steps before he answered, and when he did, he spoke simply without heat in his voice, which was somehow worse.

"Sokha is better than me," he said. "She sees everything. I only see what is in front of me." A pause.

Sarah lifted a hand without turning around.

Mira fell in on her shoulder. "You know what he's going to think. That we are pansies. None of these people know what we have been through these past few months."

"Yeah," she muttered. "I know."

"You could have given him something. Anything. He'd have taken it."

"Yeah," Sarah said, and kept walking. "I miss when it was just us."

---

The Cohort built the solstice fire that evening tall enough to block out the mountains.

By the evening it was twelve feet across at the base and stacked in a lattice, and a legionary who had been a mason was fussing over the airflow while four other men held things and offered opinions. The Hospitallers had claimed the cooking, and they were laughing uproariously as they traded stories with the legionaries. Somebody else had produced a fiddle; how they had gotten that no one knew.

Sarah leaned back into Robert as they relaxed by the fire. Mira was sprawled out over Jace, who allowed it with a smile.

"Mine's rougher. Like drinking from a river instead of a well."

"They said purity went up too—"

"Then why's it rougher?"

"Because you're bad at it, Berto."

The voices of the people around her washed over them, and she couldn't stop thinking about the ruins and what she would find within them.

Robert's arms wrapped around her, breaking her from her thoughts. "You should be thinking about the here and now, Sarah. Not about the journey we are about to make."

She snorted and scooted around to sit a little deeper into him. "I can't help it, you know how I get."

He looked at her worriedly. Blowing as he tried to get her hair out of his mouth. "That's exactly why I worry. I know your urges have been getting worse."

She took a sip of the beer and relaxed back into him. "I know, but I'm keeping a handle on it. It helps that we are always fighting monsters."

"Mmm, I worry about you."

She turned and kissed him on the cheek. "You're cute, but thank you. Now tell me how your carvings have been going."

---

Theo found the food, and he came back around the fire with two bowls and a shoulder of something and sat down on the crate next to Sokha without asking, which Sarah watched from thirty feet away with an interest she'd have denied under oath.

Sokha looked at the second bowl. "Is that mine or are you eating both?"

"It's yours. You didn't eat at midday. You were doing the thing with the spear against the post."

"It's called practice. You should try it sometime."

"Yeah. For two hours. You didn't eat."

Sokha took the bowl. She held it in both mittens for a moment without eating out of it.

"That is a strange thing to have noticed," she said.

"I notice food," Theo said. "And sometimes you."

She laughed, one short bark, and looked briefly annoyed about it.

"You were a teacher?"

"Six years. In Battambang. Nine-year-olds, reading mostly." She turned the bowl. "They all made it here together. The whole school, four streets, my mother's house. Most are all back at our town in Silverfin. Some are here with us in the Order."

Theo stopped chewing. "Some of your students are in the Hospitallers?"

"Previous students. They lived a couple of streets over when the transition happened. They were all 16 when we transitioned." She said it evenly. "Now they are large, and they carry shields, and they call me ma'am in a way I am certain they think is very funny."

"That's—" Theo worked on it. "That's an amazing story. I can't imagine how hard the first few weeks were for you all."

She looked at him softly before shaking her head. "Aren't I a little too old for you, Theo?"

He looked at her with an impish smile. "Perhaps." He chuckled. "Or perhaps I just have a more refined taste."

She laughed a little, and it twinkled in the snow-strewn court. "Are you an anime guy? Is that what this is. You see an Asian girl and you fall head over heels."

That was the thing about Theo, Sarah thought — blunt to the point of injury, no idea how to be charming, and he didn't know what small talk was.

"Can I ask you a stupid thing?" he said.

"Of course."

"Forums are alight with all of the bad things people are doing to each other. Prisons are emptied, rape, murder, and slavery are rampant." He paused. "My life has become one fight after another. I have taken wounds that would have killed me dozens of times on earth, but living out here has been one of the greatest times of my life. The sights we have seen, the ones I could show you. They would take your breath away." He paused as he found his next words. "But it is a hard life. It is rough out there sometimes. Lonely." Theo looked lost for a moment before looking her in the eyes. "But then I come back here, and you're always there. I see you in the corner of my vision when I'm not looking for you. You've become one of the brightest spots of good in a pretty violent life. Always helping people." He shrugged. "How do you do it. How do you bring yourself to always care about others the way you do?"

Sokha ate for a while before she answered.

"Where I am from," she said, "there is a court, at the end. King Yama sits, and there are two who keep the record — every action of your life, the good written on gold, the bad written on dog skin, and they read it back to you. There is no arguing with it, because it is only what you did." She scraped the bowl. "My grandmother told me this to make me behave. It worked very well. Now a panel appears in the sky and tells me the whole world is being written down and scored, and I look at it, and I think — ah. So it was true, and it is not at the end, and I do not get to die first."

Theo looked at her thoughtfully. "Is that better or worse?"

"It is worse," Sokha said. "In the story, the judging is honest. This one pays you for killing." She handed him the empty bowl, which he took automatically. "I'm not doing it to be nice to others. Those people have to watch my back out there, and I don't want it being done with weaklings."

She smiled wickedly at him. "I'd let you watch my backside out there. I see more about your team than our leader does."

Theo sat with the two bowls.

"Huh," he said. "You're good at this."

Sokha stood and knocked the snow off the crate. "Can you dance, Theo? It's been a while since someone has brought me food like that."

The fire went up an hour later, and the whole valley turned orange. And the Cohort roared in celebration.