Page 61 of Beyond

She sat outside the shelter, which was full of equally tired mages, working slowly at the honey-soaked bread and the savory but tough venison. It was worth eating, however tough it was; those wild herbs that Alberdina had found gave it excellent flavor. Alberdina came to join her, and they gazed at the lake, the Gates, and the dark blue sky slowly going to black.

“Is this what it’s going to be like?” Delia asked, with the last piece of honey-soaked bread in her hand, nibbling at it slowly with tired jaws.

“You mean living out here, once we’re free of the Empire?” Alberdina asked. “Probably. Very probably. There’s going to be a lot of hard, physical labor, and everyone is going to have to pitch in. Your servants are going to be very busy doing other things than tending to you. You’re going to have to learn to wash clothing in a stream, and how to do your own mending. You’ll be set tasks like the ones I gave you yesterday and today, things that just need a pair of uneducated hands. It won’t be fun. It won’t be easy.”

“What if I just—don’t come along?” she asked in a small voice, because with the reality of what was going to happen setting in, living life out here in the middle of nowhere didn’t seem in the least attractive.

“Then when the Emperor finds out what we’ve done, and he will, who do you think he’ll take his wrath out on?” Alberdina countered. “It’ll be the ones who stay behind. The farmers and the laborers left, well, he might leave them alone, or he just might put everyone to the sword and move in an entire new population. But you? A known member of Kordas’s household? Anything you can imagine, it’ll be a hundred times worse.”

“So I don’t have a choice.” She felt like crying. What had Kordas and Isla gotten her into? She hadn’t asked for any of this.

“Well, you could always betray us,” Alberdina said coldly. “Then he’d probably marry you off to some old reprobate in his Court that’s gone through four wives already and is looking for a fifth. You’d still have the life of a lady. If that’s what you want, you can get it. Kordas is probably right in thinking that once we close and burn down those Gates, the Emperor won’t be able to find us, so betraying us probably won’t do us any harm. And it isn’t as if you have the ability to tell him where we are.”

Hearing it put that baldly just made her want to cry even more. She hadn’t asked for this! Was that really much of a choice, either hard labor in the wilderness, or being handed off to some nasty old man as a “reward” for telling the Emperor how everyone had fled to escape him?

Wasn’t there a third option?

But she couldn’t think of one.

“Just think of how Isla and Kordas have been feeling all these years,” Alberdina persisted. “Knowing that at any moment, on the Emperor’s whim, everything could be pulled out from under them. That at any moment, the Emperor’s troops could come pouring in, taking literally everything and almost everyone, all to feed his ego and his war machine. And everyone that was left would be starving on scraps and forced to build things back up again just so the Emperor could sweep in and take it all again. I’ve seen it happen to entire baronies. When the Emperor moves in, he takes every person under the age of fifty and over the age of thirteen, he takes everything that can be ridden, eaten, or drunk, and he sweeps out again.” She paused, and Delia wondered what else she was going to say. “I don’t think he’d spare you a second time, and your pedigree wouldn’t save you. He might leave Kordas. He might not. Kordas was educated at the Palace, so he knows the basics of military strategy. The Emperor’s wars need officers as well as soldiers.”

Delia felt cold and numb.

“That’s what the Plan is meant to save us all from,” Alberdina said after a pause. “Seems to me some hard work and blisters don’t look like a bad option.” She paused, and patted Delia on the shoulder. “It won’t be so bad. And you’ll get used to it. Hellfires, you’ve got Fetching Gift, so it’s possible Kordas will have you using that rather than gathering wood and herding chickens.”

“For what?” she asked, bleakly.

“Don’t know. But I suspect there’s a lot of things it could be useful for. Probably the best thing for you to do is to start thinking of them. You’ve got a head on those shoulders, so use it, so you won’t have to do as much work with your hands.” Alberdina chuckled a little. “I know for sure the mages aren’t going to be going out and gathering wood. Make sure you are so valuable doing something else that no one will want you to waste your time working like a mule.”

She got up and left Delia sitting alone in the dark, muscles aching and stiffening, feeling very much depressed. All she could see in front of her were a lot of more or less terrible choices, and no way out of them that she could live with.

When she went back to her bedroll, she was tempted to cry herself to sleep—but she was so tired that despite her aches, she fell right asleep before she could squeeze out a single tear.

She wasn’t the first one awake the next morning, so she wasn’t the one who had to fetch bags and baskets of breakfast from the Foothold Gate—that had fallen to Ivar and a couple of the younger mages. But as soon as she was up, washed and changed, and fed, Jonaton came looking for her as the mages packed up their things in preparation to go through the horse Gate once he’d tuned and opened it.

He found her finishing the last of a bacon roll, and tugged her to her feet. “Come along,” he said. “I need you to come anchor this thing, like you did with the Foothold Gate.”

“Why?” she asked this time, though she did get to her feet and follow him to the two uprights that formed what would be the horse Gate. “Why not Ivar or Alberdina? They don’t have magic either.”

“Because Alberdina is going to be looking after me, and Ivar and Bay are going to be guarding us. Remember, there are bears.” He grinned as she shivered. “Don’t worry. If a bear shows up, Ivar’s already got plans and a bear-trap in place. I promise you a bear-steak and a bearskin for your bed.”

That only made her think about where that bed was going to be. In the middle of winter. In the wilderness. Would it be in the dubious shelter of this ruined tower? Or in a tent? In the snow?

Had Jonaton even thought about any of this? Or was he just concentrating on the tasks at hand? Hakkon probably wouldn’t mind beds on cold, hard ground, but surely Jonaton would be as miserable as she was going to be!

And what about the Circle? They were all old men—

But they seemed made of whipcord and tanned sinew, and surely they already knew how awful this was going to be, and they didn’t seem to care. They even seemed to be happier, as if going from an easy life in a manor to swatting waterbugs in a wilderness, until they finished mummifying, was an invigorating playtime! Even their endless banter, swatting at each other, and quibbling, had tilted lately into increasingly absurd accusations of behavior she was probably too young to know about.

The mages—who still looked exhausted—lined up on their packs in front of what would be the horse Gate. She sat behind the Gate uprights where Jonaton put her and worried over it all without paying any attention to what Jonaton was doing. Besides, it wasn’t as if this was the cellar, where the whole place was alight with glowing diagrams and sigils. This was out in the open and broad daylight, and frankly it just looked like Jonaton was doing some sort of absurd dance. Her mind just kept going around and around in an endless, bleak play of how horrible it was all going to be, and how she couldn’t do anything about it.

She only looked up when the waiting mages broke out into weary applause, picked up their packs, and started filing through the Gate in groups of two and three, because there was plenty of room for that between those uprights. It was … unsettling, to watch them walking toward her, then suddenly disappearing.

Finally there was no one left on the round peninsula but her, Jonaton, and Alberdina. Jonaton staggered a little; Alberdina jumped to her feet and caught him. She handed him a leather bottle, and he drank everything in it down in several long gulps.

“Better?” she asked.

He nodded, as strangers suddenly started appearing between the Gate uprights, laden with all manner of boxes, bundles, and packs. They headed straight for the ruins as if they knew exactly what they were doing—which they probably did. There was a plan, after all. Just because she didn’t know what was in it, it didn’t follow that Isla had neglected to attend to the least little detail.