“He did?” I sign, even though I’m not sure anyone can see my hands.
“You were still paired with your brother,” Jeran tells Adena. “If I agreed, I would move into the Firstblade’s quarters in the National Plaza. My rank would surpass both my father’s and my brother’s.” He looks at his boots. “Even though I was inexperienced at the time, our fighting styles paired well. But more than that, he hoped to protect me from my father and brother.”
As he tells the story, I picture how it must have happened—Jeran meeting Aramin at the Firstblade’s office in the Striker complexes, the Firstblade offering him the position, careful to keep his tone unemotional, telling Jeran he has no obligation to comply. Jeran, mouth open, wanting more than anything in the world to say yes, yet unable to make a sound. Him bowing his head to the Firstblade, then getting up and walking away.
“Why didn’t you agree?” I ask him.
Jeran turns his eyes to me. “It wouldn’t have stopped Gabrien or my father. None of this was ever about my rank.” He looks down. “I didn’t want the reason I became Aramin’s Shield to be because of my family. As if they are the reason why the Firstblade approved of my fighting skills.”
A part of my heart resonates with his answer, and the words of Corian’s father come back to me. He felt sorry for you.
Adena reaches out to touch Jeran’s shoulder. He flinches, his mind far away. “Well, you’re my Shield,” she whispers. “You should have told me.”
At that, Jeran gives her a wry smile. “Why? So you could scold me about it?”
“That’s exactly right,” Adena replies.
Jeran laughs, and in spite of it all, I can’t help smiling a little. At least they have each other; at least we are in this together. Red shifts against me, and I feel the trickle of his thoughts turn in my direction, enveloping me in its warmth. He doesn’t let on exactly what he’s thinking, and I can’t read it, but I do pick up in his emotions a sense of yearning. I stay quiet, too afraid to reach out through our link to ask him what he’s thinking. He doesn’t say a word either. Instead, we let the wagon fall back into its creaking rhythm as the horizon yawns ahead, each of us lost in thoughts about those we love.
We travel in silence until the first hints of dusk cast the landscape outside our wagon in deep blue. Adena is snoring softly, and Jeran’s head lolls from side to side in sleep, but Red stirs awake beside me.
“The warfront,” he says, in accented Maran, another word he’s learned in the past few weeks.
And sure enough, I can see the outline of one of our defense compounds in the distance. There’s another, farther in the valley, but even from here, I can see Karensan flags flying over it. A few more big pushes from them, and they’ll break past the last lines of our defense compounds, making it into the soft belly of Mara and the open lands between here and Newage. Sickness roils in my stomach.
The wagon finally lurches to a halt here, and an instant later, Decaine’s face peeks in at us through the canvas slit. “You’ll have to go on from here,” he whispers. “There’s a checkpoint I can’t cross.”
I nod, my bag already slung over my shoulders. Across from me, Jeran shakes Adena awake. “Thank you,” Jeran tells Decaine for me. He shrugs, but his eyes are already darting nervously around, eager to unload his illegal cargo.
The four of us ease out of the wagon without a sound into the tall grasses, where our shirts and pants blend us into the surroundings. There, we watch the wagon rumble away, Decaine hunched over his cycle as he pedals it back in the direction of Newage. I turn my attention to the defense compound some distance away. There’s a fence with a narrow rampart running all the way from one compound to the next a mile away, and the top of it is patrolled by the occasional soldier. Right now, it’s empty. We should have plenty of opportunity between here and the next checkpoint to sneak into Federation territory. I’m about to map out the route we should take when an image tacked up against the fence makes me blink.
It’s a sketch of the four of us, along with words written in bold black ink: