Snow Like Ashes(25)

Sir glances at me as he takes the pack from his shoulders. “We camp here tonight and head for Cordell tomorrow. No one’s following us. The sooner we get to safety, the better.”

Though the temptation of clean water sits a few paces away, I stay frozen. He’s talking to me. “Why are we going to a Rhythm Kingdom? I thought you hated King Noam?”

Sir turns to the water, his shoulders slumping a little, but he doesn’t respond.

“I can’t help until I know the plan. And like it or not, my help is all you have now.”

The bite in my voice startles me and I drop my arms. I move forward, hesitate, unsure what reaction will come. But when I step up next to him, all I see are the trails of dried blood that swirl off of his hands and into the water. He’s had Spring blood on him for days. Of course he has—when would he have been able to wash it off?

The face of the soldier I killed flashes through my mind. My fault. All the men who died at camp were my fault too.

Sir nods to his left. “Upstream,” he says, ignoring my snap.

I shrug out of my chakram’s holster and drop it in the grass before marching to the left, kicking my way through bits of undergrowth. Every part of me feels bloodied, dirty, like I’m coated head to toe in the guts of Angra’s soldiers. I drop to my knees and dunk my head into the water up to my shoulders. The coolness washes away a bit of the heat, flowing over me and chasing off my panic. My regrets.

I’ve killed before. I’ve seen Sir kill before. I’ve seen everyone at camp, even Mather, speckled with blood and limping from battle. I shouldn’t care that a few Spring soldiers have died; they’ve killed thousands of our people.

My lungs start to burn but I stay down, keep my breath trapped inside until the painful need for air is the only thing I feel. Nothing else. I don’t have room for anything else.

Fingers wrap around my arm. Before I can shake myself awake enough to realize who it is, I inhale. Water flows into my lungs, icy hot panic rushing into my chest along with the unwanted water, and I yank free of the stream, sputtering and heaving. Sir drags me into the grass, slamming his fist into my back in a few punches to get the rest of the water to pour out of my nose, a rush of earthy grime.

As soon as my lungs clear I launch to my feet, shaking dirt and water out of my eyes. “I’m—I’m fine. You startled me. I’m fine.”

But Sir doesn’t look convinced.

“None of this was your fault. And you’ve killed before,” he says. His creepily perceptive general senses finally work in my favor for once. “You’ll kill again. The trick is not to let it incapacitate you.”

“I don’t.” I curl my hand into a fist, dirt gritting between my fingers. The rest of me is calm, careful, forcing every bit of anger out in my clenched hand. “I don’t want it to get easy. Not even if it’s Angra himself. I want to feel it, always, so I’m never as awful as him.”

Or you. I don’t want to end up as hard as you.

I twitch at the thought, more guilt heaping atop the rest. He wasn’t always this way, I remind myself. Alysson told Mather and me about the night Jannuari fell to Angra’s men. The night twenty-five of us escaped, cloaked in a snowstorm created by Hannah’s last pull of magic before Angra broke her locket in half and killed her.

“William was the only reason we made it,” Alysson told us as we huddled near the fire one night, waiting for Sir to get back from a mission. “We could see the flashes of cannon fire and clouds of smoke over the city, and we wanted to race back to save our countrymen, but William kept us moving until we crossed the border, until we got away.” She paused then, stroking one hand down Mather’s cheek. “He was the one who carried you on his chest the whole ride out of Winter. Every time one of us begged him to go back and help save our kingdom, he’d put his hand on your little head and say, ‘Hannah entrusted us with the continuation of her line. This is how we will save Winter now.’ Even though a war raged behind us, even though we were caught in a chaotic blizzard to hide our escape, even though we wouldn’t reach safety for days, William was so gentle with you. A warrior with a tender heart.”

Sir had never told us that story himself, and after Alysson told it to us once, we never heard it again. But I’d watch Sir after that, looking for the tenderness that Alysson mentioned. Occasionally I could catch a flicker—a twinge around his eyes when Mather faltered in sparring, a twitch of his lips when I begged to learn how to fight. But that was all I ever saw of the general who once carried a baby for days to safety. Like all of his actual tenderness was gone, but every so often his muscles convulsed from the memory of it.