Our War

Part 2

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She put the visitor in the trundle bed beneath her own. She kept it clean and made up, still, in case her brother should come by--he was out at the front as well, but his little-gift was healing, and it meant he had to return once every few weeks to the village to sort out the folks there, their cuts and scrapes and pulled muscles. None of the real Healers could be spared from the war, so Halder's measly little-gift had to do for those who weren't fighting the Empire. He never had much time to visit, but whenever he came by he'd drop in for an hour or two, tell her how the front was looking and how her Jackem was getting on.

It had been a while--quite a while--since he'd last dropped in.

She didn't draw a bath for the strange woman--the weather was too poor for the trek out to the well and it was somewhat dangerous, this close to the front, to go out any distance in the dark anyway. The Imperial soldiers had a way of sidling across the front in ones and twos where they were least expected, and they weren't known for being kind to women out alone in the dark. They had gotten to Keeri Lal, last month. Halder had been by in time to heal her face, but he after all wasn't a real Healer, and the scars remained. They were pink, livid, like veins in marble. She stayed in the house now, mostly, and some of the less feeling girls had speculated it wouldn't take her long to die of shame.

Treeny had enough water left in her bucket to bathe the visitor's face. She was handsome, under all that dirt--a grim sort of handsome, but handsome nonetheless. She seemed only a few years older than Treeny herself, less than ten certainly. Treeny rolled up the woman's sleeves to wash her hands as well.

She gasped.

Burned into the woman's forearms, writhing in the guttering candlelight, were the blue tattoos of the necromancer.

For the first time, when Treeny looked up, the woman's eyes were looking directly into hers. There was intelligence there, and strength, and power.

Still, she said nothing.

"Aren't you all supposed to be at the front?" Treeny said. "What happened? Did you run away? We're supposed to turn in deserters, you know. To my brother, to Halder."

Still there was no response. The woman's eyes were once more impassive, fixed straight ahead. Treeny found herself looking at the tattoos again. There were an awful lot of them, more than Halder had. They crawled up and down the woman's arms like pinstripes.

"Who are you?" she asked. "Why are you here?"

No answer.

Treeny scrubbed the woman's hands, scrubbed her dirty forearms until the skin between the blue lines reddened with the force of it.

She wasn't much inclined, she decided, to turn in a deserter. She couldn't blame the woman for running away--she wished, in fact, her husband would do the same. She was ashamed of wishing it, but she wished it.

If he still lived.

Poor Jackem. He had been too old for war--too old to leave with the same fanfare and pomp the younger men had left with. He knew what he was facing. He knew, and he had faced it anyway--for their home, their country, their lives.
The Emperor Barin-Jan, he had told her, was a warlord. Nothing more and nothing less. But such folk were not kind to the territories they conquered. And the Bonemaker, the mysterious shadow that stood always beside him, looked to be even less gentle.

That was all well and good. Treeny believed him--it made sense.

But war was a thing that killed, no matter how good the reason, no matter how airtight the logic. And Treeny, gentle farmwife that she was, couldn't bring herself to understand how killing for good overcame killing for evil. She had no doubt the soldiers who sat on Barin-Jan's side of the line had good reasons to want the Borderlands. Starving as they were, those folks had reason to want fertile farmland. She had no doubt the soldiers on her side of the line--perhaps even her sweet Jackem--had killed folk they cared about, folk who had done no wrong worthy of death save possibly to follow where others led.

"Don't worry," she told the visitor. "You're safe with me. Come on. Let's get you in bed."

She led the woman up the creaky old stairs and into the bedroom. She pulled out the trundle and turned down the coverlet.

It was only once she had gotten the woman tucked in--once Treeny, in shift and bare feet herself, was leaning over, lips pursed, to blow out the lamp--that she heard the visitor speak.

"There is no front," the woman said, in a voice like cinnamon and cloves. "Not any more."