The journey to the capital took two full days, along the same road Oren had known the first time, but without that vague excitement that had accompanied him then.
He thought he knew now what waited at the other end or so he believed, until the convoy passed through the capital’s gates and he saw the streets he’d memorized weeks before looking slightly different.
The difference wasn’t obvious at first glance.
The markets were still open, the vendors still crying out the prices of their goods, the carts still crossing the paved roads as they always had.
But as he passed the inn where he’d spent his first night in the city, he saw two windows shut that he wasn’t used to seeing shut, and a sign hanging announcing vacant rooms in a way he’d never seen before in a place he remembered as always crowded.
At the camp, it was clearer.
He knew the way to his tent without thinking, through the familiar training ground with its smell of packed earth and the distant sound of commands, but some of the tents that had been full of trainees before his last trip now seemed fewer in number, thinner rows than he remembered, and faces missing from their usual places in the food line.
He didn’t ask anyone why, at first, only noticed the emptiness the way one notices a room from which furniture has been taken without anyone telling him so.
He found Daren first, sitting before his tent sharpening a small knife with slow, familiar motions.
Then he said: “My father gave me this before I left.
Said its blade wouldn’t hold up long if I didn’t take care of it.” “He made it himself?” “Most of it.
The last part needed another man’s help at the shop.” He turned the knife between his fingers, then added, in a tone less interested in the knife than in something else: “Did you see how many tents here are empty?” “I saw.” Daren added nothing further, and the observation itself seemed enough to carry what he wanted to say.
After a few minutes Silen appeared, coming from the direction of the food line with quick steps and a small sack in his hand, his face carrying the look of someone who’d just found something worth discussing.
“You won’t believe what I just heard,” he said, sitting down directly before them without a greeting.
“The man handing out food said the price of salt doubled this week in the outer market.
Salt, imagine that.
Why would salt’s price suddenly go up?” “Maybe because of the war,” Daren said, without lifting his eyes from the knife.
“Everything’s because of the war these days.
But salt specifically?
It comes from the northwest, doesn’t it?
What does the north have to do with what’s happening on the eastern front?” He opened the sack he was carrying and took out a small onion, peeling it with a practiced motion and biting into it as he talked.
“I asked the man, and he said he didn’t know, so I asked another man, and he said the roads have gotten more dangerous, and some caravans have stopped traveling.
But that doesn’t explain everything.” “Maybe not everything needs an explanation,” Oren said.
“Everything needs an explanation.
The problem is no one bothers to find it.” He bit into another piece of onion with a clear, crunching sound, and looked at Oren with a wide smile.
“How was the village?” “Quiet.” “Good quiet or worrying quiet?” Oren paused a moment before answering, and Silen noticed the pause but didn’t press, instead moving quickly to another topic about something he’d seen at the market before they arrived, a shop selling farming tools he’d wanted to go into, had there been time.
The talk continued between them this way, drifting without any clear order between food, prices, news, and the dirt stuck to Daren’s boot that he couldn’t get off, until the shadows lengthened and the hour of training drew near.
Training was different this time from the first months.
The instructors no longer explained the basics with the patience of teachers with new students, but now watched more in silence, correcting a detail here and a motion there, expecting each trainee to find his own way within the boundaries of his path.
Oren stood before a row of objects set on a wooden table; an empty cup, a medium-sized stone, a piece of metal, and a small sack filled with sand.
The instructor asked him to move each of them to a fixed point several paces away, without touching them, and to do it as quickly as he could without losing control.
He succeeded with the cup easily, as he had many times before.
With the stone he felt greater resistance, a weight pulling his focus in different directions, and needed more time to finish it precisely.
As for the sack of sand, when he tried to move it quickly, part of it slipped loose midway and scattered on the ground.
“Slower,” the instructor said, in a voice carrying neither anger nor clear approval.
“Speed comes after precision, not before it.
Try again.” He repeated the attempt, and failed partly again, but the third try succeeded better, and the fourth better still.
He didn’t feel great progress in a single day, but he felt something like a recognition — his hands, or what served as his hands on this path coming to know the different weights in a way that hadn’t existed months before.
Nearby, Daren stood before a small piece of metal set on a stone base, passing his hand over it without touching it directly, trying to change something in its outer surface; its smoothness, or its hardness, or its color, slightly.
His progress was slow and silent, as was his nature, but the instructor responsible for him stopped twice to study the result with more seriousness than usual.
Silen, meanwhile, was at the other end of the yard, before two ropes tied to a wooden stick at each end, trying to link the movement of one stick to the movement of the other with no visible cord between them.
“If the two things are linked,” he asked the instructor responsible for him, in a voice that reached Oren from a short distance, “must they be adjacent?” The instructor looked at him with mild appreciation before answering: “Not necessarily, but distance costs you more effort.
Try a shorter distance first.” Silen tried it, and failed twice, then succeeded on the third with a small synchronized motion between the two sticks that made him laugh loudly in astonishment, as though he’d just uncovered a secret no one had told him.
He didn’t stop there, but asked another question the next day, then another after that, about the limits of distance, about whether more than two things could be linked together, about whether binding worked between a living thing and an inanimate one.
He didn’t get complete answers to every question, but each partial answer seemed to add a small stone to his understanding of his path.
On the third day, the news began to arrive.
It didn’t come all at once, but in fragments, from different mouths and in versions slightly different from one another, the way news arrives when there’s no single trusted source to turn to.
A soldier back from the eastern front, eating beside Oren in the food line, said the enemy had launched a major assault targeting a string of villages on the northeastern border, and that the losses were very heavy.
Another said an entire village had vanished from existence, erased completely.
A third said the number was exaggerated, that most of the residents had managed to flee before the forces arrived, and that the real loss was far smaller than what was being said.
No one was entirely certain.
The numbers varied from one teller to another, thousands turning into hundreds then back into thousands depending on who was speaking.
But one point remained fixed in every telling: villages had fallen, people had died, and large numbers of survivors were now heading toward bigger cities in search of shelter.
Oren listened to this talk without commenting much, gathering the scattered pieces in his head as he’d been used to doing with documents at the Archive, trying to form a single picture out of conflicting accounts.
That night, as he lay in his tent and silence settled over the camp except for the voices of late guards exchanging words at a distance, he found his mind drifting, without conscious decision, back to his village.
He saw the market as he’d seen it only days before, with its usual noise and the smells of bread and charcoal.
He saw the village bakery, and Koren’s shop, and the square where he’d played as a boy, and the dirt road leading to his house.
He saw Marin opening the door that morning he’d come home, and her smile that hadn’t changed despite everything.
Then, without his summoning the image on purpose, he began to see something else creeping into the very same scene.
Military carts crossing the dirt road, different from the village’s usual carts.
Doors flung open with a force he wasn’t used to.
Screams that didn’t sound like children’s screams at play.
The market where he’d bought bread that morning suddenly turning empty, its stalls smashed or abandoned, and one of those houses, any of them, could be his own.
It wasn’t a dream.
He knew he was lying in his tent, hearing the sound of a guard coughing at a distance, feeling the cold of the ground beneath the blanket.
But the image stayed there, hanging before his closed eyes, clear enough to unsettle him.
He didn’t cry.
He didn’t jump up from where he lay.
He only remained there, his chest tightening a little, and a cold thing settling in his stomach that didn’t leave him until sleep finally overcame him.
The next day, as he passed by the administration office on his way to the training yard, he saw a clerk posting a long list on a wooden board, names in small handwriting spread over several pages, their headers pointing to lists of the dead and missing from recent battles.
He paused a moment, not to search for a name concerning himself, but from an old drive he couldn’t suppress, the drive he’d known for years at the Archive, when his hands passed over hundreds of documents daily.
He noticed, without particularly meaning to look for it, that one village’s name appeared with a slightly different spelling between the first and second page of the list, an extra letter in one place and a missing one in another, as though two different clerks had written it without anyone checking the match between them.
He looked at the discrepancy a moment, then continued on his way.
It wasn’t important enough to stop over any longer, just a small error of the kind he’d been used to seeing every day in his old work, where no one cared to double-check as they should when the papers were many and the time was short.
That evening, the soldiers and trainees were asked to gather in the camp’s main square.
The priest arrived accompanied by two of his assistants, wearing his usual robe that Oren had seen before, and in his hands, hung on a metal chain, that round device with fine lines etched into its surface, which he’d once seen in his own village’s small temple without knowing its name or use.
He didn’t ask about it.
He didn’t approach closer than he should have.
He stood among the rows of soldiers, and felt only that vague sense of recognition, the way one recognizes something seen in an old dream without remembering its details.
The priest spoke in a calm voice about the necessity of discipline in these times, about the importance of steadiness amid unsettling news, about every soldier’s duty toward those he protected.
It wasn’t a long speech, and carried no direct threat, but the tone of a man used to giving the same speech in different places before different faces, certain his words would settle wherever he wanted them to settle.
The procedure ended faster than Oren expected, and no one was asked to approach the device or touch it.
The priest carried it with him as he left, that metal chain among them giving off no sound, light, or clear signal but its own silent presence.
The very next day, an order was announced that changed the course of the coming weeks.
The officer in charge of their unit gathered a group of trainees in a small square, and read from a page he held in the even voice used for reading orders: because of the recent losses on the eastern front, it had been decided to redistribute some of the support units and new paths across expanded corps, to make up for the shortfall and ensure a better spread of skills among units.
He began reading the names according to their new corps, many names distributed across different groups, until he reached a corps bearing a number Oren had never heard before.
“Oren, Daren, Silen.” He heard his name among the other two, and felt something like a quiet surprise, not a shocking one, the kind of news that seems logical after a moment’s thought despite not having been expected.
Once the announcement ended, the three stood close to one another, the page bearing the corps assignments still posted on a nearby wooden board.
“Together,” Silen said, with a quick smile that widened with every second.
“This…
this is good.
I mean, I didn’t know who I’d be with, and I’d been thinking about it since morning, and now…” He paused, then added quickly: “Where do you think they’ll send us?
Will we stay near the capital or go farther?
And who’ll be our commander?” “No one knows yet,” Daren said, without lifting his eyes from the page.
“But we can ask, can’t we?
I mean, someone must know at least some small details.” “You’ll know when they tell you,” Daren said, in a tone carrying no annoyance, but that usual calm with which he cut off the flood of Silen’s talk without wounding him.
Oren said nothing.
He stood looking at the three names written beside one another on the page, while Silen went on talking about different possibilities for where they might be sent, and a vague hope that the food there might be better, and a new question that suddenly occurred to him about whether the distance between corps affected how fast letters from families arrived.
Oren listened to his voice mingling with the camp’s noise around him, and found his mind, without meaning to, returning once more to the dirt road, the market, and the house he’d left only a few days before, which now seemed far more distant than the actual distance between them suggested.