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Kai woke up to the sound of rain pattering on the canvas above his head. The light outside the tent was a weak, watery gray, a sure sign that somewhere overhead the morning sun was hidden behind a layer of heavy, low-lying clouds. He could hear Ziede moving around nearby, preparing for the day. He was relatively certain that the smell of blood and rot in the air was only his imagination.
Slowly, he sat up in his bedroll. Ziede glanced up at him from where she sat cross-legged on top of her own blankets, tying her hair up in a scarf.
“Bad luck to have weather like this today,” she observed. “They’ll have trouble moving the caravan.”
Kai got up and went over to the tent’s entrance to look out. Through a thick curtain of rain, he could make out the shapes of Arike soldiers hurrying between tents, hoods and cloaks pulled up over their heads against the downpour. The firepits had turned into puddles overnight, and the sodden grass was already being torn up into slick mud underfoot. The air was humid and cold and clung like a sticky film to Kai’s hair and clothes.
As he stood there looking out, a gust of wind swirled through the row of tents, setting dripping canvas flapping against tent poles and blowing a splatter of rain directly into Kai’s face. The water was shockingly cold and he jerked back from the entrance, dropping the tent flap closed like it had burned him. He scrubbed at his face with his sleeve to wipe the water away with a sense of urgency that didn’t match the time and place, and when he turned back towards the bedrolls he found Ziede watching him curiously.
“Are you alright?” she asked.
“Fine,” he said, and started on his own preparations for the day.
He yanked on a skirt and coat that didn’t seem to do anything to drive away the chill, then tried to braid back his hair but found his hands too inexplicably clumsy and shaky for the task. Outside the tent, someone dropped a pot that clattered loudly as it fell, then cursed as they were presumably forced to kneel down in the mud to collect it. It was an ordinary kind of sound for the camp, but today the sudden noise made Kai jump violently and lose what little progress he’d made with his hair. He gave up and let it fall into a loose tangle around his shoulders. It was only slightly damp from the brief spray of rain, but Kai could still feel his skin crawling with the sensation of phantom raindrops dripping down his face and neck. The smell of rotting flesh still hadn’t faded.
“Are you sure there’s nothing wrong?” Ziede said, frowning. She had already finished dressing and had on her boots and an oilskin cloak in preparation for the weather. He didn’t know why she hadn’t left yet, when she was clearly ready to go.
“Yes,” he said, and a little nonsensically, he added: “It’s just rain.”
He didn’t avoid her gaze well enough to miss the way her frown deepened, but he ignored it and finished getting his own boots on.
This shouldn’t be a problem. He wasn’t expecting to need any power from the underearth today, and the discomfort of being cut off from it by the running water wasn’t much worse than what everyone else in camp was putting up with as they went about their work getting wet and cold and muddy. He had worked through storms with the Saredi before, though back then allowances had been made for the demon members of the clan. They were generally excused from outdoor chores on stormy days unless it was truly urgent, and would often gather up around the central hearth of the great clan tent, drinking goat milk tea and telling stories until the skies cleared.
Those days glowed warm and pleasant in Kai’s memory, and he had never woken up in the Kentdessa clan tent and been afraid to hear rain falling on the canvas. Today was no different. Nevermind that this was the first storm he’d seen since before the Summer Halls, or that it had only been a few weeks since Bashasa took him away from the Cageling Demon Court. It shouldn’t matter. It didn’t matter. Kai wouldn’t let it.
He believed that right up until the moment he opened the tent flap and stepped out into the rain. He was soaked to the bone in an instant, his now-distant connection to the underearth winking out, but that wasn’t what made him stagger and gasp as the blood froze in his veins. It was the memory, the one he’d been ignoring from the moment he’d woken up to the sound of falling rain, the one that lingered always on the edge of his awareness, waiting to be called up by the touch of cold water or the smell of rot. He felt the rain on his skin and was abruptly dragged back to the utter helplessness of the Cageling Demon Court, the despair and the grief and the waiting to fall and rot where he lay on the paving stones beneath the endless rain. His hold on Talamines’ body felt flimsy and uncertain, like he was already half-gone, barely clinging to whatever thin thread of connection still tethered him to this cold, dead husk of a body.
“Kai. Kai!”
Ziede had a hand on his arm but he couldn’t feel it, couldn’t feel anything except the terrible numbing cold until she pulled him back beneath the shelter of the tent. She immediately tugged off his soaked coat and skirt, and Kai was too far gone to be embarrassed by it. He was shivering so hard he couldn’t have even tried to do it himself, his fingers locked into rigid, frozen fists at his sides.
Ziede guided him carefully to sit down on his bedroll, then wrapped one of the thick, dry blankets around his shoulders. Crouched on the ground in front of him, she brushed a lock of wet hair out of his eyes, then used the corner of her sleeve to gently wipe away the rivulets of rain dripping from his hair and mixing with the tears on his face.
“Kai?” she said quietly, looking searchingly into his eyes. “Are you with me?”
“I think,” he said, as hoarse as if he’d been screaming for hours, “something might be wrong.”
Her smile was strained. “I think you might be right,” she said. “Wait a moment.”
She leaned in and brushed a light kiss to his forehead, then stood up and went to the tent entrance. For a moment he was terrified that she would leave him here alone, but she just held the tent flap open and squinted out into the rain, then called to someone walking past. They spoke in low, urgent voices for a few moments, close enough that Kai could have heard the words if he’d listened, but it was too hard to focus on anything under the sound of the rain.
Ziede returned a moment later and sat down on the bedroll beside him, an arm held open in invitation. He leaned gratefully into the embrace, tucking himself up against her side with his face hidden in her shoulder and her arms around him. He was still shivering, but warmth was starting to seep back in, and as he breathed in the smell of Ziede’s clothes he started to feel a little less like a walking corpse.
Kai wasn’t sure how long they sat like that, curled up in silence under the blankets, before there was movement outside the tent. The entrance flap was pulled aside and Tahren appeared, herding Dahin inside ahead of her. He was wrapped up in an oversized oilskin cloak that scattered raindrops all over the tent when he took it off to flop down on Ziede’s unoccupied bedroll. Tahren folded herself down to sit next to him with more grace, but even she wasn’t too dignified to wrinkle her nose as she hung her own dripping oilskin up on an exposed tent pole beside the door and kicked off her muddy boots.
“Tahren says you’re sick today,” Dahin said to Kai frankly. Over Kai’s shoulder, Ziede raised an eyebrow at Tahren, who made an eloquent little motion that was as close as an Immortal Marshall ever got to a shrug.
“The weather doesn’t agree with him,” Ziede said when it became clear that Kai wasn’t planning on answering. “Don’t bother him.”
“Alright,” Dahin said, accepting that readily. “One of the wallwalkers rolled over in a giant puddle – more of a pond, actually – while we were on our way over here. The platform on top got completely crushed, and the whole thing was covered in mud. It was a mess.”
“I can imagine,” Ziede said, which was as much encouragement as Dahin needed to launch into a detailed description of how the soldiers and the wallwalker’s drivers had all been shouting at each other and trying to pull what was left of the platform out of the mud before it sank, and how the second wallwalker had seen what its companion had done and needed to be restrained from doing the same, which was no small undertaking for a beast of that size. Ziede responded that she had once seen a shellwhale beach itself, and that it had taken her entire cloister full of witches to shift it back into the sea. Dahin was fascinated, and the topic carried them through until the tent flap was pulled back a second time and Bashasa came inside, bringing a gust of windblown rain with him. Kai flinched and Ziede’s arms tightened around him, but Bashasa quickly closed the tent behind him.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said, shedding his cloak and boots. “There was a disaster with a wallwalker, I don’t know if you heard-”
“Dahin has been telling us about it,” Tahren said, and Bashasa nodded, looking a little harried, but he smiled at Kai as he settled down on the bedroll on his other side. There wasn't really enough room for five people in the tent, and Kai now sat sandwiched between Bashasa and Ziede, the warm length of Bashasa’s leg pressed up against his.
“Sometimes I think the beasts are more trouble than they’re worth,” Bashasa said, wiping his dripping hair out of his face. “I brought tea.”
He produced five dented metal cups from somewhere and filled them with a steaming dark liquid from a padded bottle that he’d apparently had stuffed inside his shirt. Dahin picked up the thread of the conversation as Bashasa passed the cups around, and Tahren unexpectedly added her voice to Dahin’s defence of the extreme usefulness of the wallwalkers.
They spent nearly the entire day like that, hours slipping away as outside the rain fell like it was never going to stop. The cups were emptied and refilled, and the talk meandered from the camp gossip to old memories and campfire stories and whatever else came to mind. For the most part they were undisturbed, though messengers sometimes ducked into the tent to confer briefly with Bashasa before disappearing again. Bashasa never left, though. Kai, who had been letting the conversation wash over him without much attention as his mind drifted, didn’t notice anything strange about this until the fourth time a visiting member of Bashasa’s cadre ventured back out into the rain. Then Kai uncurled himself enough from Ziede’s side to look around at Bashasa.
He smiled when he saw Kai looking at him. “Another message from the vanguarders stationed down by the river,” he explained, as though Kai had been present in the conversation and listening attentively all along. “There was some question of flooding, but it seems that all is well for now. We shouldn’t need to move camp.”
“Weren’t we supposed to go on towards Descar-arik today?” Kai asked. His voice came out an unused rasp, and Ziede pointedly nudged his cup of tea a little closer to him, which had been set down in front of him hours ago and he had yet to touch. He picked it up and drank, even though it had long since gone cold. It was sweet and spiced the way the Arike liked it, too strong for Kai’s usual taste, but the prickle of cinnamon in his nose drove away the last of the phantom smell of blood and made Kai feel a little more present.
“Ah, yes, we were,” Bashasa agreed. “But the wagon drivers tell me that they would be difficult to move in this weather – the wheels could stick in the mud. It’s best to wait and hope for dryer ground tomorrow.”
That struck Kai as unlikely. The rain showed no sign of slowing, and if the storm continued into the night it seemed likelier to him that the roads would only be worse tomorrow, not better. Kai opened his mouth to say so, then stopped. If the thought had occurred to Kai then it had certainly occurred to Bashasa too, and yet the Prince-heir of Benais-arik was sitting cross legged on Kai’s bedroll, drinking tea and smiling at him, having delayed the movement of an entire army for the sake of a single demon who could not bear to go out in the rain.
For a moment on the heels of that realization all Kai could do was stare. Then he said: “You could have just gone ahead without me.”
Bashasa’s smile vanished in an instant, and Kai only had a moment to mourn its loss before Bashasa seized his hand.
“No, Fourth Prince,” he said, with utter conviction. “I certainly could not.”
Kai could say nothing to that, held in perfect stillness by Bashasa’s steady gaze. Then Ziede nudged him with her shoulder.
“It gives us all a nice excuse for a break, anyway,” she said when Kai looked over at her. “It’s been a while since we had a rest.”
“We’ve certainly earned it,” Bashasa agreed, and the spell was broken. The conversation carried on its way, though this time Kai paid better attention, and even surprised himself by smiling a few times at Dahin’s jokes or Bashasa’s more outlandish stories.
Kai would have to go out eventually, he knew. There would be more storms, and Bashasa wouldn’t always be able to use the mud as a convenient excuse to put the war on hold for a day while Kai hid himself away in his tent. Someday he would need to push past this fear.
Someday, but not today. Today was for staying warm and dry in this tent he shared with Ziede, wrapped up in blankets while they told stories and drank too-sweet Arike tea. With Bashasa on one side of him and Ziede on the other, Kai felt more at home than he had since the day the Kentdessa Saredi burned to the ground. His friends were with him, and their laughter was loud enough to drown out the sound of the rain, at least for a while.