Prince of Time

Chapter Fifty - Spoils of War

 

Maple wasn’t sure if it felt like triumph to be walking across the battlefield towards the tower. The field itself was littered with bodies. Her stomach twisted but only slightly. She had exchanged compassion for the ability to look at scenes like this without vomiting. Ane, clearly, had not.

 

“They made it,” Tobiah breathed out in a rush. “Thank the gods.”

 

“I suspect Finem’s death threw things out of balance,” Nicanor’s face twisted in disgust. “He was trying to control too much.”

 

“Where are the survivors?” Maple asked. “There must be some. Mustn’t there?”

 

“Oh,” Ane looked down at a child’s corpse. “She didn’t make it then.”

 

“One of yours?” Zeno wondered.

 

“One of mine,” Ane agreed.

 

Nicanor gave Zeno a confused look but he shook his head slightly as if to say, “I’ll tell you later.”

 

Maple gazed around and wondered if this was why warriors were trained the way they were. All those years of learning to put yourself backwards, to focus never on your emotions or the signals your body was sending but on instinct and need and the enemy you had to kill and the duty you had to do…they were all because of this.

 

 They were because it was impossible, otherwise, to do this more than once. It was impossible an ordinary person to see this devastation and ever agree to cause it again. But Maple knew she could, and knew she would, if required, do exactly the same.

 

  She realised, in the burst-of-light way that epiphanies had, why Tobiah had always been the way he was. Emotion was dangerous. Self was dangerous. When you had duties to perform and a painful world to live in, you could never be kind or caring and survive.

 

 They reached the tower door. Two children were propped up against it, swords lying across their chests. They were guards, and they were dead. Looking at them, Maple guessed they had been dead before someone set them up as doormen.

 

  The door wasn’t locked. It didn’t need to be. There was nothing to keep out that wasn’t already inside. The five of them stepped through into the gloom. Maple shot a look at Tobiah and saw his expression as guarded as hers felt.

 

  They could all feel it, in the air. You breathed it in. It seeped under your skin. It invaded through your eyeballs and ears, seeking out empty corners of your soul. The whole tower was drowning in grief.

 

 “Commander?”

 

A boy lay against the wall, his leg soaked in blood, face drawn and pale. He was young, far too young, but he wore a soldier’s face. If Maple had been the mourning type, she would have mourned the look in those eyes.

 

“Caran?” Ane knelt beside him. “Caran?”