“That doesn’t surprise me. You’re serving as a scout as well?”
“You mean even missing one eye and half-deaf in one ear? We lost almost all of the Saroese spider scouts. However many recruits signed up for training in the regular army, they didn’t get so many volunteers for the desert posting. I’m doing all right. Will you come?”
I take my leave of Gira, Shorty, and Ro and his admirers, and I can’t help but notice how the young women effusively claim to be devastated that I’m leaving. I flash him the kiss-off sign as I go, and he blows me a kiss back.
Dusty has a brisk walk and a way of turning his head to catch sounds on his impaired side.
“You look good, Dusty. Tell me about training.”
It’s a long walk across town to the East Gate. My two guards keep well back, and I’m not sure Dusty even notices them. He regales me with stories of rising at dawn and drilling all day and dropping exhausted onto a cot at dusk, for two months without a break. Of how half the recruits dropped out or transferred because they couldn’t get the hang of the spiders or found the eerie presence of the spark too disturbing.
“We finished up with a ten-day march, got assigned into squads and our sergeants commissioned, and now we are headed out because if any place needs guarding it’s the Eastern Reaches and the desert crossing.”
“You sound content, Dusty.”
“I thought I was going to die when I was captured at Crags Fort. I wanted to die after what they did to me. But now I am a soldier in Efea’s army, and they’re dead or crawled home in defeat. So I can live with that for now. Here we are.”
I thought maybe we were going all the way to the army camps outside town, but then I remember they were trashed by the enemy during the siege. Instead he shows me into a run-down boardinghouse of the kind common in this cheap part of town. This is the kind of place where Father first lived when he arrived in Saryenia as a young man.
Despite the late hour people are bustling around, stuffing gear into canvas bags and polishing short swords and oiling harnesses. They’re a mix of men and women, mostly Efean but with a few Saroese and a random foreigner sprinkled among them. It’s so odd to see soldiers walking around so casually who look so much like me. It might take me a while to get used to it but I like the thought that I will.
“Jes! Just in time.” Mis strides up.
I thump her as hard as I can on the shoulder. “Excuse me, Sergeant. I’m sorry I’m late, Sergeant. Whatever did you do to deserve this, Sergeant?”
“Performed too well, so I’m told. It’s my adversary reflexes.” She grins. “They had to elevate a few people to official command ranks, even me.”
“You’re not nearly bossy enough yet. I could get you lessons with Maraya.”
“We’re being posted to the desert forts for six months, so I’m sure I’ll get better at it. But listen, Jes…” She scratches her forehead and gets a funny look on her face, like I’ve caught a disease and no one has had the courage to tell me yet. “I didn’t mean to be party to keeping this from you, but—”
That’s when I see Father’s spider, with its distinctive dent. It’s drawn up in proper resting configuration beside a gate that opens onto an inner courtyard where more spiders squat in the shadows. Traceries of light flash and fade on the brass surfaces like hope and pain. So much anger floods me that I start shaking.
“So that’s why my family has all been so cagey when I ask about the spiders. They made it seem like you were already gone off to the desert. They didn’t want me to know the new scouts were training right here. They hid it from me!”
That’s when I see him.
He’s standing in the deeper shadow cast by the looming spider, and his back is to me, but of course I would recognize those shoulders anywhere.
Someone calls, “Sergeant Kallos!”
He turns into the illumination of the courtyard lamps.
My legs give out. It happens so fast Mis and Dusty can’t catch me, and I don’t even feel the transition. First I’m standing. Then I’m sitting on the ground and my tailbone is throbbing and someone’s strong arm is pulling me up.
“Jes?”
I open my mouth. Close it. Words flee like shadows at midday.
“You fainted.”
I touch his face. He’s real. The same lips. The same eyes except for bruising around the right. He studies me with the familiar wrinkle of concern on his brow.
“I thought you were going to yell at me,” he adds.
“I will. I just need to catch my breath.”
He helps me up. Mis opens a door into a cramped barracks room where a couple of Efean soldiers are stretched out on their cots. They look up as we come in.
“You need us to leave, Sergeant?” says one with a laugh, then subsides as the other kicks him.
I think Kal is going to let me sit on one of the cots but he’s headed for an inner room that’s slightly wider than its narrow bed, with just enough extra space to stow a storage chest at one end. In this bare closet I sink onto the bed while he lights a lamp. My souls are so jumbled that I can’t make sense of what I’m seeing.
“Not the reunion I was imagining,” he says, gesturing to the mudbrick walls and the mudbrick floor and the curtain for a door. There’s not even a side table with a basin and pitcher for washing. They must all wash together, in the trough outside.
He’s wearing a keldi and vest. His kit is packed away except for his spider scout gear, folded neatly on the bed. They’re marching out in the morning.
“You don’t have to do this,” I say.
He folds his hands behind his back at parade rest, feet braced apart. “I do have to do this. I was never trained to do anything else. I have to earn my own way now.”
“How is it you’ve already made sergeant, then?”
His grin peeps out. He’s honestly embarrassed. “I couldn’t disguise that I had experience as a spider scout and as a commander.”
“Don’t they know who you really are?”
“Kallos is a good name to hide behind, as Ro taught me. The truth is so unbelievable it’s easier for people to accept the lie. It’s helped that Mis and Dusty have had my back since the first day, said they knew me when we were fledglings training together.”
“Someone punched you. Have you been fighting? Usually you have the knack of settling fights before they start.”
“In the first week of training I got into a few fights to prove I have the right to be here, because I’m Saroese. Sometimes a fistfight is the only way to settle things.”
I study him. Like the sea-phoenix, he rose as if out of his own ashes from the waters, but I wonder how much of the boy I love was burned away and how much remains. “That bruise on your face is recent. Is that from a training accident or are you still having to prove you belong here?”
He looks away, deciding whether to keep something from me.
“You’d better tell me, or I’m going to give you a second black eye.”
“This fight was different. It was over my spider.”
“Your spider?”