The Nightborn by Isabel Cooper (howl and other poems TXT) 📗

from himself as he could. “I tried to stop. It didn’t make any difference.”

Chapter 2

Talking didn’t actually help very much, which came as no surprise to Olvir. Knights were trained to meet fear boldly, both when it came from outside and when the source was inside their own heads. If he’d only needed to confront his dreams to make them stop, he would’ve done so months before.

He’d harbored a small hope, as he began describing them to Vivian, that putting words to the images, the crying and the odor of smoke and flesh, would define them and thus trap them. That didn’t happen either—the dreams remained, as nebulous and unnerving as ever. Olvir sighed, then waited for Vivian to state the conclusion he’d already turned over, and still believed possible: worries about command, or about the war in general, and nothing more.

She stayed silent. While the fires smoldered around them and sentries’ footsteps thumped out the moments, Vivian frowned, stared, and didn’t speak a word. She didn’t move either, adding to the sensation that gripped Olvir, a feeling of being looked not just over but through.

Vivian didn’t resemble cheerfully profane Emeth and her earnest lover Katrine, who Olvir was most familiar with, or any of the other half-dozen Sentinels he’d met more casually. In that moment, facing her clear gaze, he experienced a little of what the uninitiated must have felt in a Sentinel’s company. Training helped him not to look down or fidget, for which he was profoundly glad.

“You were at Oakford,” she finally said. “You played a major role, unless I misread the reports.”

“I was.” That line of reasoning had also suggested itself. “But the dreams started long after that. I’ve only been having those for a handful of months. There could be a correspondence, I suppose, but—” He shrugged.

“It’s not a clear connection,” Vivian agreed. “If you don’t mind, I’d prefer to hear what happened in your own words. You know what reports are.”

“It was late in the siege,” he said, remembering a different set of walls, other sets of companions who likely wouldn’t all survive the next few days. Had it been more desperate? Perhaps, but a different sort of desperation. “Thyran himself came out to face us.”

Nightmare had spawned nightmare then. They’d all heard that Thyran—the most famous servant of the traitor god Gizath, the man who’d locked the world in winter for years when his previous attempt at conquest had failed—had somehow returned. Olvir had thought he’d faced that fact until he’d seen the bone-crowned figure on his walking throne of corpses and looked into the rotting inferno of his eyes.

“I didn’t know him,” he told Vivian, a year later and not a great deal wiser, despite a fair amount of scholarly effort. “Not the way people mean that phrase. I grasped his…frame, his pattern. A familiar tune, but not the whole of the song. I tried to find out more,” Olvir went on, gesturing to the badge on the shoulder of his tunic, where a blue sword signified Tinival, “and saw blackness, shining blackness in pieces, before I lost consciousness.”

“The contact disturbed him too. Did I read that correctly? Darya, I think, said he seemed pained.”

“If Darya said it happened, I believe her,” said Olvir. “I was in no state to observe anything.”

“That was all?”

“On that occasion. Later…” Olvir rubbed his chin, uncertain of the precise wording. Most of the magic he knew was the power Tinival granted his knights. Until a year before, he’d been content to let others attend to all else. “Gerant, Darya’s soulsword, cast a spell to extend his protection to General Amris, and to let the three of them speak directly.”

Vivian nodded, with a quick breath of resigned laughter. “It’s a pity that the spell doesn’t work outside of their circumstances, and that those are so unique. If I could give Ulamir’s power to any lover I took…” She laughed again, a surprisingly light sound, clearly at a comment from her sword, then waved a hand. “Please continue.”

“A few of us made a circle for them. We ended up connected. It was less intense for those of us on the outside, but I was aware of the others in a manner that I wasn’t before.”

“I take it that wasn’t part of Gerant’s goal.”

“No. And Darya said it hadn’t happened when the three of them had done the spell before.”

“She and Gerant aren’t—weren’t—precisely used to having others nearby, to be fair. Even among us, she has an attraction to the remote.”

“That’s so,” Olvir admitted, “and she said so. Silver Wind’s truth, I have no idea how closely any of these incidents are related, except that the second and third almost certainly are, and Gerant said that he thought the third had to do with me. Forgive me… I’m getting ahead of myself.”

A bell chimed in the distance: five slow, measured strokes. A fresh—relatively speaking—sentry headed to the wall, sparing a quick glance at Olvir and Vivian but no more. Their focus was already turning outward.

“At the end,” Olvir said, “Thyran tried to kill General Amris and me with magic. I saw Gerant’s protection taking a fraction of it. It wouldn’t have been nearly enough to save us. I knew that. I…” He brought back a memory he’d repeated until the words had worn holes in what he’d once known. “I felt as though I was being torn apart. I don’t recall what I was thinking, if I was thinking at all.”

“Hard to be coherent at such times,” Vivian agreed. “But you turned Thyran’s spell back on him.”

“I suppose so. All of us who’d been involved in casting the shield seemed to join in, but Gerant said my presence might have been the deciding factor.” A year later, and it still felt like boasting to say it. “More likely it was the god’s.”

* * *

“It’s possible,” said Vivian. She’d never heard of Tinival working like that, and she assumed that none of his priests had either, or one would