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limp in Bragi's arms.
He wept. And, finally, rose to assume command of the fields that were now his.
Later Varthlokkur would suggest that Madgen Norath, unaccounted for, owed them
a life.
"He was the last," Bragi mused. "None of us are left but me." And, after a
while, "Why am I still alive?"
THIRTY-SIX: Home
Feng didn't go peacefully or quietly, with his tail between his legs. He went
in his own fashion, in his own time, underscoring the fact that he was leaving
by choice, not compulsion. He wouldn't be pushed. In Altea, when the Itaskian
became too eager, he gave Lord Harteobben a drubbing that almost panicked the
western army. In Kavelin, with Vorgreberg in sight, Feng whirled and dealt the
overzealous pursuit ten thousand casualties they need not have suffered.
Ragnarson got the message that time. His captains, though, had trouble
digesting it.
Feng was going home. But he could change his mind. The Gap was open. Bragi put
his commanders on short leash. Feng was no Badalamen, but he was Tervola,
bitter, unpredictable, and proud. He could still summon that vast armyat
Gog-Ahlan.
The west had no new armies. Feng had to be let go with hisdignity intact.
"Nothing's changed," Prataxis sighed their first night back in Ravelin's
capital. "In fact, they've shown a net gain. Everything east of the
mountains."
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"Uhm," Ragnarson grunted. He had other problems, like learning if his children
had survived.
Vorgreberg had been deserted. But as Feng withdrew beyond the eastern boundary
of the Siege, people began drifting in. Sad, haggard, emaciated, they came and
looked at their homes like visitors to a foreign city. They had no cheers for
their liberators, just dull-eyed acceptance of luck that might change again.
They ,were a shattered people.
There were, too, the problems of putting the prostrate nationonto its feet,
and of driving Feng through the Savernake Gap.
The first faced every nation south of the Silverband.
The latter task Ragnarson surrendered to Lord Harteobben. Derel, he hoped,
would manage the economic miracle....
And a miracle it would be. Shinsan now bestrode the trade route which,
traditionally, was Ravelin's major economic resource.
It was too much. "I'm going walking, Derel."
Prataxis nodded his understanding. "Later, then."
Bragi had never seen Vorgreberg so barren, so quiet. It remained a ghost city.
Dull-eyed returnees flittered about like spooks. How many would come home? How
many had survived?
The war had been terrible. Derel guessed five million had lost their lives.
Varthlokkur deemed him a screaming optimist. At least that many had been
murdered by Badalamen's auxiliaries. The small villages round which western
agriculture revolved had been obliterated. Few crops had been sown this
spring. The coming winter would be no happier than the past.
"There'll be survivors," Bragi muttered. He kicked a scrap of paper. The wind
tumbled it down the street.
From the city wall he stared eastward. Distantly, dragon flames still arced
across the night.
He lived.
What would he do with his life? There was Inger, if their hospital romance
hadn't died. But what else?
Kavelin.
Still. Always.
He stalked through the lightless city, to the palace, saddled a horse. A
sliver of moon rose as he neared the cemetery gate.
He visited the mausoleum first.
Nothing had changed. The Tervola hadn't let their allies loot the dead. He
found an old torch, after several tries got it sputtering half-heartedly.
Fiana looked no different. Varthlokkur's art had preserved her perfectly. She
still seemed to be asleep, ready to rise if Bragi spoke the right words. He
knelt there a long time, whispering, then rose, assured his service to Kavelin
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hadn't ended.
He would persist. Even if it cost him Inger.
He almost skipped visiting Elana's grave. The pain was greater than ever, for
he had failed abominably at the one thing she would have demanded: that he
care for the children.
The torch struggled to survive the eastern wind. It was, he thought, like the
west itself. If the wind picked up....
He almost missed them in the weak light.
The flowers on Elana's grave were, perhaps, four days old. Just old enough to
have been placed there as Feng came over the horizon.
"Ha!" he screamed into the wind. "Goddamned! Ha-ha!" He hurled the torch into
the air, watched it spin lazily and plunge to earth, refusing to die despite
dwindling to a single spark. He grabbed it up and, laughing, jogged to his
horse. Like a madman, by moonlight, torch overhead, he galloped toward
Vorgreberg.
They arrived two days later. Gerda Haas, Nepanthe, Ragnar's wife, and all his
little ones. They had been through Hell. They looked it. But they had grown.
Gerda told him, "The Marena Dimura were with us. Even the Tervola couldn't
findus."
Ragnarson bowed to the chieftain who had brought them, an old ally from civil
war days. "I'm forever in your debt," he told the man in Marena Dimura.
"What's mine is yours." He spoke the language poorly, but his attempt
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