The smell of the rear camp was different from that of the front.
Oren didn’t notice the difference until he climbed down from the cart and his lungs filled with air carrying no smoke, no battle dust.
There was a smell of bread from somewhere, and the smell of wood burning quietly, and the smell of animals in temporary pens set up at the edges of the camp.
The place wasn’t entirely quiet, but it was quiet enough for Oren to feel his body could rest a little.
Many tents stood in orderly rows, simple wooden buildings recently erected, and soldiers moved between units at a pace carrying none of combat’s urgency.
Carts came and went through the main gate, some loaded with supplies, some carrying new conscripts whose faces had not yet learned the meaning of war.
Oren walked alongside Daren and Silen, the three of them carrying their bags without talking much.
Exhaustion was visible in their shoulders, but it was a different exhaustion from what combat left behind.
It was closer to the tiredness of a long journey nearing its end.
A man in an official’s uniform stopped before them, holding a wooden board with papers fixed to it, and looked at the names written before him, then at them.
“Your intake?” he asked without preamble.
Oren gave the intake number, and the man nodded and pointed them toward a small square where other conscripts had begun to gather, most of them faces Oren had come to know over the past week.
Kael was there, leaning on a stick he’d used more for jest than out of need, and Rafel beside him talking in a low voice with another conscript.
Once the numbers were roughly complete, the official stood before them and began speaking without a long preamble.
“From now on you’ll know how this works.
A week in service, then a week’s rest here at the rear camp, then a week of training.
After that, you go back to your units and it starts again.” He paused briefly, as though giving the words time to settle in their heads, then added: “This doesn’t mean every week will follow exactly this order.
Sometimes the need at the front changes and the service period is extended, or the rest period shortened.
But this is the basic pattern the army works on.” One of the conscripts raised his hand, a young man whose name Oren didn’t know, and asked in a voice carrying a note of complaint: “Why don’t we just stay at the front the whole time?
Wouldn’t that end the war faster?” The official looked at him with the look of someone used to hearing this question often.
“Because an exhausted soldier is no use to anyone.
You’re new conscripts your bodies and nerves need time to bear what you see there.
Anyone left at the front without enough rest either breaks down, or makes a mistake that costs his own life or the lives of those around him.
Rest and training aren’t luxuries they’re part of the service itself.” The answer seemed sufficient for the conscript, who lowered his hand without a further remark.
The official went on explaining other details, about mealtimes in the camp, about the training grounds, and about what was forbidden within the rear camp’s boundaries.
But Oren had already begun thinking of something else, and raised his hand once the official finished speaking.
“Can a conscript visit his home region during the rest week?” The official looked at him a moment, then answered in a practical tone carrying no surprise: “There are organized trips to the rear regions, yes.
But each conscript gets one personal trip every three months.
You can’t come and go as you please there’s a schedule, fixed places, and times that must be kept.
Anyone who misses his return date is considered absent from service.” Oren nodded, feeling something stir in his chest, something simple he hadn’t expected with this much clarity.
He hadn’t known this was even possible, and now here he was, knowing there was a chance before him, one chance every three months, but a real one.
Once the assembly ended, the three walked away from the square, looking for somewhere to sit.
Oren didn’t need long to think it over.
He had seen death only a week before, had watched Tofen fall before him and not get up.
And he knew Marin was alone there, in the village, working and waiting for his letters.
Her last letter was still folded in his bag.
“I’m going,” he said quietly, looking at Daren and Silen.
“I’m using my trip this time.” His decision wasn’t born of any collapse or sudden weakness.
It was simpler than that.
He wanted to see her with his own eyes, to make sure she was well, to ease the heart that had stayed clenched all the past week.
He looked at Daren.
“Do you want to come?” Daren thought a moment, moving his fingers as though remembering something tangible held between them.
“My father’s alone at the shop.
I don’t know if he’s found anyone to help him since I left.
And there are tools I left in their place I want to see if they’re still there.” He smiled faintly.
“Yes, I’ll come.” Oren turned to Silen, who had been sitting silently, thinking.
“My family,” he said at last.
“And our land.
I left it before planting season, I want to know how things went.
And I’ve had an idea for a while now, about the land, a new way of farming it.
I want to talk to my father about it.” He paused a moment, then added: “I’ll come too.” None of them said they were going together because they were friends.
There was no need to say it.
They were comrades in war, had shared a difficult week, and each had his own reason to return, but they found themselves walking in the same direction.
The journey this time was faster than the first, conscription journey.
The military cart carrying them was lighter and more efficient, and the horses, brought from the capital, were used to covering long distances without tiring quickly.
The journey took nearly two days, plus a part of a third, instead of the three full days the first time had taken.
There was no magic in the difference, only a better means of transport and a more organized road, and two clear routes that needed no waiting or detours, as had happened on the conscription journey.
The three sat in the cart, talking a little about Kael and Rafel and the day they’d first met them, and then the talk drifted, without meaning to, toward Tofen.
“He was quiet,” Daren said, looking at the road through the cart’s opening.
“He didn’t talk much, but he knew how to listen.” Oren said nothing for a moment, then added: “Yes.
He was.” The talk of Tofen didn’t last long.
None of them wanted to weigh down the journey with a grief they couldn’t carry the whole way.
The conversation soon shifted to what each of them intended to do during the rest week, the food they missed, the beds they wanted to sleep in for long hours without anyone waking them.
Oren watched the road through the cart’s opening.
On his first journey, heading toward conscription, his eyes had taken in everything with the curiosity of someone seeing the world for the first time: the roads, the small villages, the passing markets, people’s faces.
Now he looked at the same things in a different way, with the eye of someone who had lived a week at the front and seen what could happen when these quiet villages were no longer there.
He said this to no one, but noticed it in himself, that gaze that had changed without his feeling it change.
When the cart reached the outskirts of the village, nothing about it had changed.
The bakery gave off its usual smoke, the market buzzed with the same sounds, children ran through the alleys, and workers carried their sacks home.
Everything was exactly where Oren had left it.
But he felt that something in himself was what had changed.
It wasn’t a great change he could describe in a single word, but a new attentiveness to things he used to pass without noticing before: the sound of knocking on wooden doors, the smell of fresh bread, the way the merchants smiled at their customers.
He passed near the old statue of Alden in the middle of the square, as he had hundreds of times in his childhood, and this time didn’t stop at it, only glanced at it for a moment as he passed, a natural part of a road he knew well.
He parted from Daren and Silen at the crossroads leading to their houses.
He shook their hands with less warmth than befit men who had spent a dangerous week together, but it was enough between them.
“I’ll see you in two days,” Oren said.
Daren nodded and moved off toward the blacksmith’s shop, and Oren watched him quicken his steps the closer he drew to the place.
Silen walked the other way, toward the fields he had known since childhood.
Oren hadn’t told Marin the date of his return.
He wanted to surprise her, to see her face in that first moment before she could prepare herself for anything.
He walked toward the house, his heart racing faster than he’d expected.
He pushed the wooden door open slowly, and found the courtyard empty but for a faint sound coming from inside, Marin’s voice talking to herself while folding some cloths.
He stood at the door a moment, looking at her before she noticed him.
Marin suddenly raised her head, as though she’d sensed something, then saw him.
Her hands stopped in the air, and the cloth she’d been folding fell from her fingers without her turning to it.
She looked at him a moment as though she didn’t believe it, then stepped closer, then another step, until she stood directly before him.
“Oren?” she said, the words coming with difficulty.
“When did you get here?” “Just now.” She extended her hand and touched his arm, as though making sure he was real and not a vision conjured by her own longing.
Then she smiled a wide smile, and the words began pouring out of her quickly, about how much she’d missed him, about the last letter that had reached her, about how worried she’d been despite trying not to show it.
Oren didn’t interrupt her.
He stood listening, and felt a large part of the weight he’d carried all the past week begin to ease.
He suddenly remembered the bag he was carrying, and opened it, taking out a carefully folded piece of cloth, quiet in color and soft to the touch, the kind hard to find in the markets of a small village.
“I saw this at the market,” he said simply, holding it out to her.
Marin took the cloth in her hands and felt it between her fingers, and looked at it with eyes suddenly gleaming.
She didn’t ask him why he’d chosen this particular thing; she didn’t need to.
She knew, on her own, that he had remembered her on his way to conscription, remembered her dream, the one she’d always spoken of — to become a seamstress one day, to work with her own hands on beautiful fabrics.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, pressing it to her chest for a moment before setting it carefully aside.
“Thank you.” They sat together a while later, around a small table Marin had loaded with whatever she’d been able to prepare quickly: fresh bread, some cheese, and a dish of vegetables cooked with a little oil.
It wasn’t a feast, but it seemed to Oren more delicious than everything he’d eaten the whole past week combined.
Marin talked about the village, about a neighbor who’d quarreled with her husband loud enough for half the neighborhood to hear, and about a new merchant who’d opened a small shop selling strange tools he’d brought from a distant city.
Oren laughed when she told him how one of the children had tried to steal an apple from a vendor’s cart and ended up falling into a puddle in front of everyone.
She asked him about his work, about the money she’d begun saving from the small sewing jobs she did for some of the village women.
“I’m not as far from my dream as I used to think,” she said with a quiet confidence.
“Maybe after a year or two I can go to the capital and work there for real.” She asked him, in turn, about Daren and Silen, and he told her enough, about Kael and Rafel, about the first days at the camp, about the long road they’d traveled.
Then she paused a moment, as though remembering something, and said: “By the way…
did you see Tofen there?
I haven’t heard news of him in a while.” Oren felt something grow heavy in his chest all at once.
He remembered that Tofen had lived on the farms bordering the village, and that Marin knew him the way neighbors know one another, and had probably seen him more than once in their childhood.
Marin noticed the change in his face before he answered.
She stopped eating and looked at him with concern.
“Oren?” “He died,” he said in a low voice.
“During one of the missions.” A brief silence fell between them.
Marin put her hand to her mouth for a moment, her eyes widening slightly.
“Died?” She repeated the word as though she needed to hear it again to believe it.
Then she said, more quietly: “He always used to pass by our house in the morning carrying the milk pail.
I remember he’d stop his donkey at the door sometimes and give me an apple for no reason.” She gave a small, sad smile.
“He never talked much.” “No,” Oren said.
“He never talked much.” He added no further details.
Marin didn’t ask for them.
They sat a moment in silence, each carrying a piece of the grief in his own way, then Marin gradually returned to talking of other things, as though wanting to give them both room to breathe away from the weight the word had brought.
After a while, she asked him, looking at him directly: “Was the war as you’d expected?” Oren thought before answering.
“A little worse,” he said finally.
Then, after a brief silence, he added: “It wasn’t what I expected.” He said no more than that.
He didn’t explain, and Marin didn’t force him to.
She only looked at him, and understood from his silence that there were things he didn’t want to talk about now, and perhaps wouldn’t for a long time.
She reached her hand across the table and set it over his for a moment, without words, then withdrew it and went back to talking about something else, another neighbor, a cat living in the market that had become famous among the children.
Later that evening, once the sounds in the house had quieted, Oren sat alone a moment by a small window looking out onto the darkened courtyard.
He could hear, from a distance, Marin’s voice preparing an extra bed for him, humming quietly an old tune their mother used to sing years before.
He looked at his hands.
They were still his hands, the same fingers, the same old marks on his palms.
But he felt he was carrying something he hadn’t carried two weeks before, something not easily described, a light weight that had settled somewhere inside him and would not leave soon.
The village was as it was.
The house was as it was.
Marin was herself, with her laugh and her worry and her quick questions.
But he was the one who had come back a slightly different person from the one who had left.
He didn’t think this in clear words, only felt it as he sat there, waiting for the sleep that a full week of rest promised him, before he returned once more to a place where there was no room for rest.