“Tell me the truth, Marita! What’s happened here?” Berin shook her, as if somehow that might jolt the old version of her back into being, and she might suddenly return to being the Marita he’d married all those years before. All it did was make her pull away.
“Your boys are dead!” Marita yelled back. The words filled the small space of their home, coming out in a snarl. Her voice dropped. “That’s what’s happened. Our sons are dead.”
The words hit Berin like a kick from a horse that didn’t want shoeing. “No,” he said. “It’s another lie. It has to be.”
He couldn’t think of another thing Marita could have said that would have hurt as much. She had to be just saying this to hurt him.
“When did you decide that you hated me so much?” Berin asked, because that was the only reason he could think of that his wife would throw something so vile at him, using the idea of their sons’ deaths as a weapon.
Now Berin could see tears in Marita’s eyes. There hadn’t been any when she’d been talking about their daughter supposedly running away.
“When you decided to abandon us,” his wife snapped back. “When I had to watch Nasos die!”
“Just Nasos?” Berin said.
“Isn’t that enough?” Marita shouted back. “Or don’t you care about your sons?”
“A moment ago you said that Sartes was dead too,” Berin said. “Stop lying to me, Marita!”
“Sartes is dead too,” his wife insisted. “Soldiers came and took him. They dragged him off to be a part of the Empire’s army, and he’s just a boy. How long do you think he will survive as a part of that? No, both of my boys are gone, while Ceres…”
“What?” Berin demanded.
Marita just shook her head. “If you’d been here, it might not even have happened.”
“You were here,” Berin spat back, trembling all over. “That had been the point. You think I wanted to go? You were meant to look after them while I found the money for us to eat.”
Despair gripped Berin then, and he could feel himself starting to weep, as he hadn’t wept since he was a child. His oldest son was dead. For all the other lies Marita had come out with, that sounded like the truth. The loss left a hole that seemed to be impossible to fill, even with the grief and anger that were welling up inside him. He forced himself to focus on the others, because it seemed like the only way to stop it from overwhelming him.
“Soldiers took Sartes?” he asked. “Imperial soldiers?”
“You think I’m lying to you about that?” Marita asked.
“I don’t know what to believe anymore,” Berin replied. “You didn’t even try to stop them?”
“They held a knife to my throat,” Marita said. “I had to.”
“You had to do what?” Berin asked.
Marita shook her head. “I had to call him outside. They would have killed me.”
“So you gave him to them instead?”
“What do you think I could do?” Marita demanded. “You weren’t here.”
And Berin would probably feel guilty about that for as long as he lived. Marita was right. Maybe if he had been here, this wouldn’t have happened. He’d gone off, looking to keep his family from starving, and while he’d been away, things had fallen apart. Feeling guilty didn’t replace the grief or the anger, though. It only added to it. It bubbled inside Berin, feeling like something alive and fighting to get out.
“What about Ceres?” he demanded. He shook Marita again. “Tell me! The truth this time. What did you do?”
Marita just pulled away again though, and this time she sank down on her haunches on the floor, curling up and not even looking at him. “Find out for yourself. I’ve been the one who’s had to live with this. Me, not you.”
There was a part of Berin that wanted to keep shaking her until she gave him an answer. That wanted to force the truth from her, whatever it took. Yet he wasn’t that kind of man, and knew he never could be. Even the thought of it disgusted him.
He didn’t take anything from the house when he left. There wasn’t anything he wanted there. As he looked back at Marita, so totally wrapped up in her own bitterness that she’d given up her son, tried to disguise what had happened to their children, it was hard to believe that there had ever been.
Berin stepped out into the open air, blinking away what was left of his tears. It was only when the brightness of the sun hit him that he realized he had no idea what he was going to do next. What could he do? There was no helping his oldest son, not now, while the others could be anywhere.
“That doesn’t matter,” Berin told himself. He could feel the determination within him turning into something like the iron he worked. “It won’t stop me.”
Perhaps someone nearby would have seen where they had gone. Certainly, someone would know where the army was, and Berin knew as well as anyone that a man who made blades could always find a way to get closer to the army.
As for Ceres… there would be something. She must be somewhere. Because the alternative was unthinkable.
Berin looked out over the countryside surrounding his home. Ceres was out there somewhere. So was Sartes. He said the next words aloud, because doing that seemed to turn it into a promise, to himself, to the world, to his children.
“I’ll find you both,” he vowed. “Whatever it takes.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Breathing hard, Sartes ran among the army’s tents, clutching the scroll in his hand and wiping the sweat from his eyes, knowing that if he did not reach his commander’s tent soon he would be flogged. He ducked and weaved as best he could, knowing his time was running out. He had been held up far too many times already.
Sartes already had burn marks on his shins from the times he’d gotten it wrong, their sting just one more among many by now. He blinked, desperate, looking around the army camp, trying to make out the correct direction to run among the endless grid of tents. There were signs and standards there to mark the way, but he was still trying to learn their pattern.
Sartes felt something catch his foot, and then he was tumbling, the world seeming to turn upside down as he fell. For a moment he thought he’d tripped on a rope, but then he looked up to see soldiers laughing. The one at their head was an older man, with stubble-short hair turning gray and scars from too many battles.
Fear filled Sartes then, but also a kind of resignation; this was just life in the army for a conscript like him. He didn’t demand to know why the other man had done it, because saying anything was a sure way to a beating. As far as he could see, practically anything was.
Instead, he stood up, brushing away the worst of the mud from his tunic.
“What are you about, whelp?” the soldier who’d tripped him demanded.
“Running an errand for my commander, sir,” Sartes said, lifting a scrap of parchment for the other man to see. He hoped it would be enough to keep him safe. Often it wasn’t, in spite of the rules that said orders took precedence over anything else.
In the time since he’d arrived there, Sartes had learned that the Imperial army had plenty of rules. Some were official: leave the camp without permission, refuse to follow orders, betray the army, and you could be killed. March the wrong way, do anything without permission, and you could be beaten. There were other rules too, though. Less official ones that could be just as dangerous to break.
“What errand would that be?” the soldier demanded. Others were gathering around now. The army was always short of sources of entertainment, so if there was the prospect of a little fun at a conscript’s expense, people paid attention.
Sartes