In a sweetly cordial voice, Mari murmured, “Going to show her off to your mother? Oh, how lovely.”

Dag’s shoulders hunched. “We’ll go by her farm, first.”

“Oh, and you’ll meet her mother. Wonderful. That’ll be a success. Can’t you two just hold hands and jump off a cliff together? It’d be faster and less painful.”

His lips twitched at this, involuntarily. “Likely. But it has to be done.”

“Does it?” Mari pushed off the post and stalked back and forth across the stable aisle. “Now, if you were a young patroller lout looking to dip his wick in the strange, I’d just thump him on the side of the head and end this thing here and now. I can’t tell if you’re trying to fool me, or yourself!”

Dag set his teeth and went on saying nothing. It seemed wisest.

She fetched up at her post again, leaned back, scuffed her boot, and sighed.

“Look, Dag. I’ve been watching you for a long time, now. Out on patrol, you’d never neglect your gear or your food or your sleep or your feet. Not like the youngsters who get heroic delusions about their stamina, till they crash into a rock wall. You pace your body for the long haul.”

Dag tilted his head in acknowledgment, not certain where she was going with this.

“But though you’d never starve your body to wasting and still expect to go on, you starve your heart, yet act as though you can still draw on it forever without the debt ever coming due. If you fall—when you fall, you’re going to fall like a starving man. I’m standing here watching you start to topple now, and I don’t know if any words of mine are strong enough to catch you. I don’t know why, blast and blight it”—her voice shifted in renewed aggravation—“you haven’t let yourself get string-bound with any one of the nice widows that your mother—well, all right, not your mother—that one of your friends or other kin used to introduce you to, till they gave up in despair. If you had, I daresay you’d be immune to this foolishness now, knife or no.”

Dag hunched tighter. “It would not have been fair to the woman. I can’t have what I had with Kauneo over again. Not because of any lack on the woman’s part.

It’s me. I can’t give what I gave to Kauneo.” Used up, emptied out, dry.

“Nobody expected that, except maybe you. Most people don’t have what you had with Kauneo, if half of what I’ve heard is true. Yet they contrive to rub along tolerably well just the same.”

“She’d die of thirst, trying to draw from that well.”

Mari shook her head, mouth flat with disapproval. “Dramatic, Dag.”

He shrugged. “Don’t push for answers you don’t want to hear, then.”

She looked away, pursed her lips, stared up at the rafters stuck about with dusty cobwebs and wisps of hay, and tried another tack. “Now, all things considered, I can’t object to your indulging yourself. Not you. And after all, this farmer girl has no relatives here to kick up a fuss for me.”

Dag’s eyes narrowed, and a fool’s hope rose in his heart. Was Mari about to say she wouldn’t interfere? Surely not…

“If you can’t be turned or reasoned with, well, these things happen, eh?” The sarcasm tingeing her voice quenched the hope. “But if you are so bound and determined to get in, you’d better have a plan for how you’re going to get out, and I want to hear it.”

I don’t want to get out. I don’t want an end. Unsettling realization, and Dag wasn’t sure where to put it. Blight it, he hadn’t even begun…anything. This argument was moving too fast for him, no doubt Mari’s intent. “All the great plans I ever made for my life ended in horrible surprises, Mari. I swore off plans sometime back.”

She shook her head in scorn. “I halfway wish you were some lout I could just thump. Well… no, I don’t. But you’re you. If she’s cut up at the end—and I don’t see how this can be anything other than a real short ride—so will you be.

Double disaster. I can see it coming, and so can you. So what are you going to do?”

Dag said tightly, “What do you suggest, seeress?”

“That there’s no way you can end this well. So don’t start.”

I haven’t started, Dag wanted to point out. A truth on his lips and a lie in his ground, perhaps? Endurance had been his last remaining virtue for a long, long time, now; he hugged his patience to him and stood, just stood.

In the face of his stubborn silence, Mari shifted her stance and her attack once more. “There are two great duties given to those born of our blood. The first is to carry on the long war, with resolute fortitude, in living and in dying, in hope or out of it. In that duty you have not ever failed.”

“Once.”

“Not ever,” she contradicted this. “Overwhelming defeat is not failure; it’s just defeat. It happens sometimes. I never heard that you ran from that ridge, Dag.”

“No,” he admitted. “I didn’t have the chance. Surrounded makes running away a bit of a puzzle, which I did not get time to solve.”

“Aye, well. But then there’s the other great duty, the second duty, without which the first is futile, dross and delusion. The duty you have so far failed altogether.”

His head came up, stung and wary. “I’ve given blood and sweat and all the years of my life so far. I still owe my bones and my heart’s death, which I mean to give, which I will give in their due time if chance permits, but suicide is a self-indulgence and a desertion of duty no one will ever accuse me of, I decided that years ago, so I don’t know what else you want.”

Her lips compressed; her gaze went intent with conviction. “The other duty is to create the next generation to hand on the war to. Because all we do, the miles and years we walk, all that we bleed and sweat and sacrifice, will come to nothing if we do not also pass on our bodies’ legacy. And that’s a task on which you have turned your back for the past twenty years.”

Behind his back, his right hand gripped the arm cuff till he could hear the wood creak, and he forced his clench to loosen lest he break what had been so recently mended. He tried clamping his teeth down just as tight on any response, but one leaked out nonetheless: “Borrow my mother’s jawbone, did you?”

“I expect I could do her whole speech by rote, I’ve had to listen to her complaints often enough, but no. This is my own, hard-won with my life’s blood.

Look, I know your mother pushed you too soon and too hard after Kauneo and set your back up good and stiff, I know you needed more time to get over it all.

But time’s gone by, Dag, time and past time. That little farmer girl’s the proof of it, if you needed any. And I don’t want to be caught underneath when you come crashing down.”

“You won’t be; we’re leaving.”

“Not good enough. I want your word.” You can’t have it. And was that, itself, some decision? He knew he wavered, but had he already gone beyond some point of no return? Ana what would that point be? He scarcely knew, but his head was pounding with the heat, and a bone-deep exhaustion gripped him. His drying clothing itched and stank. He longed for a cold bath. If he held his head under for long enough, would the pain stop?

Ten or fifteen minutes ought to do it.

“If I had died at Wolf Ridge, I would be childless now just the same,” he snarled at Mari. And not even my kin could complain. Or leastways, I wouldn’t have to listen. “I have a plan. Why don’t you just pretend that I’m dead?”

He turned on his heel and marched out.

Which would have made a grander exit if she hadn’t shouted so furiously and so accurately after him, “Oh, certainly—why not? You do!”