"Departure"

⭓ ⭓ ⭓

The Gate emptied at dawn.

It had learned how to spend its Given in increments, and the departure was the conscription reversed---Pashis and their picked riders drawn from every cadre, assembling at the north gate in the grey hour with their beasts and their packs and their orders sealed in clay.

The scouting reports had been stacking up for days---columns sighted, columns vanished, columns reappearing further south than any elder's map allowed. The Keep had done the cold sum and decided the only answer was eyes on the whole long spine of the wall, garrison by garrison, before the next new moon brought the Dustborn within striking distance of the sea forts. If the wall had a weakness, they needed to find it before the dead did.

The East Obi stood at the gate with a slate and marked names as they passed. He did not wish anyone luck. Luck was for people who had not drilled.

Kadrimani crossed the Yard with his pack already settled and the beast very still under the scar. Joint command, the orders said. Him and Fatifa. Osei and Dikou and Lesedi, and six Blooded scouts who had ridden the wall-line longer than he had been alive. The largest patrol the Gate had put out in a season.

And it was leaving Agan behind.

He found him at the edge of the Yard, by the trough where they had first spoken after the spear-holding. Agan stood with his hand on Nafra's flank. His beast was muzzled and the sight of it still sat wrong in his chest. Njira was beside Agan, her arakniga dark at her collarbone, and she stepped back when Kadrimani came, giving the space she always knew to give.

Njira met Kadrimani's eyes as she passed.

"Eighty days," she said, low, meant for him alone. "He'll be insufferable without you."

"He has you."

"I'm not the same kind of stubborn." She glanced back at Agan, then at Kadrimani, and something moved behind her eyes that she didn't let all the way up. "Come back. He's lost enough people. I've only just started keeping this one."

She walked toward the water-trough before he could answer.

Kadrimani had seen Agan bloodied, fevered, half-conscious under Dustborn poison during a drill, smiling with a split lip after Deka's hand found him. This was different. The face was too still. Whatever had happened in the three days since the hearing had gone somewhere no spear could reach.

"Did something happen?" he asked.

Agan looked at him for a long moment.

"Yes."

​Nothing followed. Kadrimani waited anyway, but the silence remained unbroken.

​He nodded once. "Then we'll talk when I get back."

​"You're leaving," Agan said.

​I will miss him, the beast murmured in Kadrimani's mind.

​"Yes," Kadrimani said, answering them both. "Me too."

"Eighty days. Maybe more," Kadrimani replied.

"That's a long time."

"It's a long wall."

They stood in the grey with the Gate emptying around them. Kadrimani had never been good at this. He had left Daufari without looking back. He had left his brother at the rim with a bundle and a promise, and had not known, then, whether he meant it.

He meant this one.

"The thing in the cells," he said. "The counting. You told me it stopped for you."

"Twice now."

"Then it knows you're here. Whatever it counts, you're in the tally." He held Agan's eyes. "Don't go down alone. If you go, take Njira. Take someone---whoever can pull you out if the count changes again."

"I will."

He's lying.

"And Deka. The muzzle won't be the end of him."

"Rumor has him riding east."

"With Mida?"

"I don't know yet."

Kadrimani looked at him---the shut-door face, the scar fresh under the wrap, the beast strapped silent, something behind the eyes that hadn't been there three days ago---and understood he was leaving Agan inside a box that was still closing. The hearing had taken the beast's freedom. The ledger had taken his blood. In three days the eastern wall would take Mida. And Kadrimani would be eighty days west, too far to come back if the last wall came down.

He did not say any of that. He reached into his wrap and took out a stone.

It had come up with the assignment orders---sent from the western garrison, dark and dense and carved on every face, the round old shapes the elders wore two fingers over their mouths to see. The runner had said the dead left it on the wall. He had carried it three days not knowing what it was, only that it was not for him.

He pressed it into Agan's hand and closed the fingers over it.

"It came off the western wall. Same script as the tower tiles. I can't read a mark of it." He let go. "Give it to Mida. Maybe it says something worth knowing."

Agan looked at the stone, then at him. "You could give it to her yourself."

"She's your---" The word would not come. "She's yours to give things to. Not mine."

The silence held.

Then Agan nodded, once---the short nod Kadrimani had given him a hundred times across the training ground.

"Eighty days," Agan said.

"Or more."

"Come back."

"Don't get soft."

​Agan smiled and tucked the stone deep into his wrap, pressing it against the scar where the cord rested.

"You will come back, right?"

"Mm."

"That's what you said to your brother."

Kadrimani had no answer ready for that. He had told Guleimani I'll come back at the gate in Daufari, and meant it, and still meant it, and did not know if meaning a thing was the same as being able to do it. But Agan was not asking for a guarantee. He was asking for the truth, which was the one thing they had ever traded.

"I told him I'd come back," Kadrimani said. "I'm telling you the same. I don't know if the wall will let me. But I'll try."

Agan held his gaze. Then he put out his hand---the crooked one, the wrist Jabahazi had made him hold the spear on, healed wrong and staying wrong---and Kadrimani took it, and the grip closed over the bad bones, and neither of them made the shake gentle.

"Eighty days," Agan said again.

"Eighty days."

They did not say goodbye. Goodbye was for people who did not expect to return.

Kadrimani crossed the Yard with Agan's grip still aching in his hand.

⭓ ⭓ ⭓

Fatifa was waiting at the gate.

She sat the tektek with the slouch of a girl who had ridden before she could walk, her pack already lashed, her gold-flecked eyes on the horizon and not the Keep. She did not look back at the Yard. The Delta elder had sent for her again the night before---he knew it, though she had not told him what passed---and whatever it was, she was carrying it out of the Gate on her own shoulders and letting no one take the weight.

The tektek started to laugh at his approach, the high broken chatter, and choked it off, the way it had in the Circle. It had never once finished the sound near him.

"You took your time," Fatifa said.

"I was saying goodbye."

"Goodbye is bad luck."

"Then I wasn't saying goodbye."

The sharp asymmetrical smile flickered at one corner of her mouth, there and gone before he could be sure of it. She turned the tektek west. He brought the beast up beside her, and the Obi marked the last two names, and the north gate stood open on a white nothing that ran to the seam of the sky.

⭓ ⭓ ⭓

They rode out.

The Blooded took the lead, reading the crust for the soft places. Osei and Dikou and Lesedi fell into the middle. He and Fatifa rode the rear, where the Pashis rode, where they could see everything ahead of them and everything behind.

Behind them the Gate stood a while, black against the paling salt---the wall, the Keep, the north stretch running its long line into the last of the dark. Then the flats took the ground up between, stride by stride, and the Gate went smaller, and smaller, until it was a dark smudge on the horizon and then only a thickening in the haze where a thing had been.

​He did not look back at it after that. A canyon man wants purchase. The flat gave none, and the salt gave none, and the only thing to hold to out here was the steady, silent presence at his left---a woman who would not say what she had been told she was.

​The beast was quiet under the scar. Quieter than it had been in weeks, as though the open salt and the long empty ahead had given it something the Gate had kept from it.

​And the pull---the pull north that had never once let go, day or night, road or wall, the thread that ran out of the scar toward a thing he had never seen---the pull eased.

​A fraction. Not gone. It was never gone. But every stride west put a little more salt between him and whatever counted in the deep, and for the first time since Daufari the thread had slack in it, and he traveled into that slack the way a climber leans back into a rope, testing it, not trusting it, using it while it held.

​Fatifa looked over at him.

​"What," he said.

​"Nothing." The smile again, sharper, surer this time. "Just looking."

​She turned her eyes back to the blinding white horizon, and they cut west into the morning together, leaving the Gate to dwindle to nothing behind them as the wall kept its long, lonely watch.