Then he’d turned, quickly, so they would not see his tears, and mounted his horse, unwontedly awkward with a sword on his hip, and had ridden away with his Prince to war against those who had come upon them from over the sea. He’d embraced both children, and then he’d held his wife for a long time, in silence all the words had been spoken many times through all the years. He supposed that much the same expression had been in his own eyes. Saevar remembered the look on the boy’s face when they had parted. And his son, too young by a year to have been allowed to come north to war. The daughter whose eyes had taught him part of the meaning of life on the day she’d been born fifteen years ago. He thought of his wife and then of his own two children. He’d had his art, the joy of it and the spur, and had lived to see it praised by the great ones of his province, indeed of the whole peninsula.Īnd he’d known love, as well. It could not be said, Saevar thought, that he had lived a useless or an empty life. The Prince he had done of course, many times.

Saevar regretted that he had never had the chance to sculpt either of them. All they had was courage, and a leader whose defiant gallantry was almost matched by the two young sons who were here with him. Not since the battle at this same river five days ago. He couldn’t actually see any figures moving in the grass across the river, but he could see the fires and it wasn’t hard to judge how many more of them lay north of the Deisa than there were here behind him, where his people waited for the dawn.Īlmost certainly their last.

He wasn’t really a soldier, though, and he had never been good at hating. It was curiously hard to impute any absolute sense of evil to those harmonizing voices, or to hate them quite as blindly as being a soldier seemed to require. There was singing on the other side of the river too, he noted, listening to the enemy soldiers north of them. There was a glory to the night, Saevar thought, breathing deeply of the mild summer air, smelling water and water flowers and grass, watching the reflection of blue moonlight and silver on the river, hearing the Deisa’s murmurous flow and the distant singing from around the fires. And all the lines of light led to his eyes, to where he was sitting on the riverbank, hands about his knees, thinking about dying and the life he’d lived. Quietly flowing, the Deisa caught the moonlight and the orange of the nearer fires and cast them back in wavery, sinuous ripples. The campfires burned on either side of the river, stretching away into the night. Both moons were high, dimming the light of all but the brightest stars.

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