Taniel felt his knees weaken beneath him. He put a hand on the bastion wall for support. “I would never have stood up if I had known it was him. Brajon was in Fatrasta at the beginning of the war. He almost ended it himself. Wiped out an entire Fatrastan army—singlehandedly. The war would have ended there if he hadn’t been called back to Kez by Ipille himself.”
“Well, I’m glad you didn’t know,” Gavril said. “They almost had us there. Their Privileged were dressed in infantry colors and hiding their gloves. Blended right in. Bo was too busy tending his shields to notice.”
And Taniel hadn’t had his third eye open until it was too late. He scolded himself. Stupid. He’d almost gotten them all killed. Taniel watched as Gavril took stock of the damage to the bastion. “You know,” Taniel said, “we could have kept firing after they sounded the retreat. Would have wiped out thousands on the mountainside. The Kez did that to us in Fatrasta a few times.”
Gavril snorted angrily. “War has to have some decorum. Otherwise it’s back to the Bleakening for all of us, and Kresimir be damned.”
Gavril left him then. Taniel looked over the edge of the bastion. He thought to open his third eye to track their Privileged, but decided it would just give him a headache.
A thought troubled him. If that was their big push, then where was Julene? He searched the hillside for the entrance to the sapper tunnels. There was some movement there, and he thought he saw a man empty a wheelbarrow of dirt.
Tamas stared up at the ceiling of a small room, his vision blurry. There wasn’t much to see even had his eyes been clear. He could make out the slanted logs of a roof, plain wood with mud in the cracks to seal them against the weather. It was light, barely. His body told him it was dawn. The light was gloomy, indicative of a stormy day ahead. He heard the crow of a rooster, and the sound of hoofbeats, followed by a muffled conversation. The men outside spoke Kez.
He couldn’t feel his right leg. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation, and combined with his blurry vision Tamas had to fight rising panic. Without a leg or good vision, what hope did he have of escape? He breathed deeply, calming himself, and assessed the rest of his body for wounds.
Both of his hands and arms still seemed to work. They moved when prompted. He could feel the stab of a straw mattress beneath him. His chest hurt when he took too deep a breath, but not enough for a broken rib. His side was tender, perhaps from a cut or a bruise. He touched it gently. A bruise, he decided. He was in short undergarments and nothing else, and years of instinct told him he was not alone in the room.
Tamas struggled to push himself into a sitting position. He’d been provided with neither blanket nor pillow, and lay upon a filthy straw mattress on a wooden frame. There was a window on his left, and stairs going down at the end of the bed. He rubbed his eyes, which improved his vision slightly. A Warden sat in the corner, his muscled, malformed body easy to recognize, though Tamas could not make out much more than the outline of the body.
“Where am I?” Tamas said.
The blurry mountain of flesh seemed to regard him for a moment, then mumbled something unintelligible in Kez.
“Where am I?” Tamas repeated.
The Warden left the room.
“Where am I,” Tamas shouted after the Warden. He pushed himself up farther. “Monster. Beast!” He lay back down, what little strength he had now gone. His head had begun to throb when he moved. He felt along the wrapping gingerly, grimacing. The slightest touch brought a jolt of pain, and he eventually left it alone. He’d been treated. They’d covered his wounds in strips of dirty linen. His leg was wrapped tight, but there was still circulation. He wouldn’t be walking on it any time soon. He heard steps from below, and two pairs of boots upon the stairs. The Warden returned, with him a smaller man.
“Field Marshal,” a voice said in accented Adran. Tamas felt his hackles rise at the sound of the voice.
“Nikslaus,” he spat. “I thought I threw you in the Adsea.”
The duke’s voice was genial. “My Wardens fished me out. How is your leg?”