SSS Awakening: I Become The Strongest Breeding Knight

Chapter 103: 103. A Man Who Said Their Names Every Night So He Wouldn’t Lose Anyone

I choked on a laugh and had to bite my sleeve.

Eveline stirred, mumbled something that sounded like ”no, the other hat,” and settled back down.

’Shut up,’ I thought, at the panel.

[Compliment withdrawn.]

I closed it and let out a long breath and checked inside myself the way you’d check a pocket for a missing coin.

I wanted to know whether the feeling would still be there with no numbers behind it. Whether I’d still want to sit on a cold rock and listen to this girl talk about hats.

Well, it was... That was the annoying part.

It was completely, stubbornly, and unmistakably there.

I felt a small, warm pressure at the edge of my awareness. It was Alicia, somewhere on the far side of the camp, about a hundred meters away.

Ever since the Triune Link had unlocked, I’d been able to feel her like a distant lantern, always faintly present.

Now the lantern turned, just slightly, as if she’d lifted her head. I looked across the dark toward her shape.

She was sitting up on her bedroll, with her blanket around her shoulders, and in the starlight I saw her raise one hand and give a tiny, deliberate nod.

She’d been watching. She’d seen the whole thing, or she’d guessed it.

And she’d decided that it was all right.

I nodded back. I don’t know what it would have looked like to an outsider.

Two idiots, nodding at each other across a mountain, with a sleeping rabbit between them. But it was one of the most important conversations I’ve ever had.

Eveline mumbled something into my sleeve, and I sat very still, and for the next two hours I didn’t check any numbers at all.

She woke up a little before dawn with a gasp, and I watched her work out, one slow second at a time, where her head had been and for how long.

Her face went through every shade of red I knew, and a few I didn’t.

She muttered something that sounded like ”the watch, the watch, I have the second watch,” scrambled to her feet, and bolted for her tent so fast that she tripped over the waterskin on the way.

I decided that the kind thing to do was to look at the sky until it was over.

We came over the rim of Harrowmere Hollow a little after sunrise on the third morning, and Garrick stopped walking.

He didn’t announce it.

He just stood on the last bare shoulder of the ridge with his crutch planted in the gravel, and the rest of us bunched up behind him, close enough that I could hear Holt breathing through his nose.

Below us the land fell away into a great round bowl of broken stone, maybe a mile across, with a thin stream cutting through the bottom of it like a crack in a plate. There had been a village down there once.

I could see the bones of it: a line of low walls, a few blackened roof beams leaning against each other, fields so choked with weeds that you couldn’t tell where one family’s land ended and the next began.

Against the far cliff, where the old mine mouth used to be, somebody had built a wall of raw timber, and a cluster of black tents sat in front of it like a nest of beetles.

Nobody said anything for a while.

”That was the baker’s,” Garrick said at last, pointing his crutch at a heap of fallen stones. ”Marta Quill.”

”She made a honey loaf at midwinter that you could smell from up here...”

”Every kid in the valley climbed this ridge on the shortest day of the year just to see if the wind was blowing the right way.”

”Was it?” I asked.

”Usually... I think she bribed it.”

Alicia gave him ten minutes. She didn’t have to say why, and nobody asked.

The graves were on the east side of the hollow, behind the foundation of what had been the chapel, in a dip where a fold of rock hid them from the palisade, and Garrick knew a way down that kept us out of sight.

I went with him. I don’t remember deciding to.

Eveline came after us a few paces behind, and I heard her stop when we got to the bottom, the way you stop at the door of a room where somebody is sleeping.

I’d expected a churchyard, with rows and headstones and maybe a low fence. But what I found was a long, uneven field of mounded earth, each mound marked with a flat stone, a wooden stake, or in some cases only a ring of pebbles.

There were too many of them.

I started counting without meaning to and gave up at ninety.

A few of the mounds had fresh flowers on them, tiny yellow things that must have bloomed somewhere on the ridge and been carried down by hand.

”The crystal guards did that,” Garrick said quietly. ”Some of the older ones...”

”We buried them ourselves the first winter, and nobody told us not to.” He lowered himself onto a flat rock with a grunt and laid the crutch across his knees. ”I dug the last grave on my own...”

”I had the red crystal in my chest the whole time, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how steady my hands were...”

”I remember being furious at them... Like they were somebody else’s.”

I sat down on the ground in front of him. I didn’t say anything wise, because I don’t have anything wise to say to a man in a graveyard, and I wasn’t going to fake it.

”Aldous Penn, the priest, under the birch with the split trunk,” he said. ”Marta Quill, Edric and Hana Fell, who ran the forge, and their boy Tobin, who wanted to be a knight.”

”Old Bess the midwife... Ruth, Ruth, and Ruth, because three families had a Ruth, and nobody ever figured out how to tell them apart.” His voice was level and dry and very careful, like a man carrying a full pot of boiling water across a crowded room.

”I used to say them every night so I wouldn’t lose anyone.”

”I’m not sure I ever told anybody that.”

Behind me, Eveline made a small sound, and I heard her wipe her face with her sleeve.

He got up slowly and walked to the end of the last row, where a small mound sat under a flat gray stone with two letters cut into it by an uneven hand. An L, and under it, a V.

The V was upside down.

”I carved that myself,” Garrick said. ”I couldn’t remember how Lena used to write it, so I did it the way she did...”

”She was nine when she learned to make her letters, and she was so proud of that V that she put it on everything.”

”The barn door... The well... Father Aldous’s hat.” He crouched, with a hiss through his teeth as the bolt wound pulled at his chest, and put one hand flat on the earth. ”Every morning she stole a heel of bread off Marta’s windowsill for the goats.”

”She thought she was being sneaky about it... It took me about three years to figure out that Marta was leaving it there on purpose.”

”That sounds like a good woman,” I said.

”She was the best of us.” He didn’t look up. ”I don’t want to ask you for a promise...”

”You’ll say yes, because you’re the kind of idiot who says yes, and I’d rather not have that on you.”

”So I’ll just ask this... If you find something under my village that doesn’t belong there, don’t let it stay.”

I thought about how to answer that. I thought about all the easy things I could say, and every one of them sounded cheap.

”I can’t promise what we’ll find,” I said. ”But we’re going to stop that place... And you’re not going to do it alone, because I’m not going to let you.”

”That’s the only version of this I’m willing to sign.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, and sat back on his heels.

I picked a small yellow flower from the patch growing against the nearest wall and laid it on top of Lena’s grave, next to a pebble somebody had left there before us.

When I straightened up, a hand came to rest between my shoulder blades.

It was Eveline’s.

She didn’t say anything, and she didn’t pat or rub. She just put her palm flat against my back and left it there, warm and steady, as if she were holding up a wall.

For a few seconds I forgot about the hollow, the palisade, and the twenty armed men waiting in it.

I forgot about the panel.

I stood very still, afraid that if I moved she’d take her hand away.

She didn’t, until Garrick stood up.