Free Havemercy by Danielle Jaida & Bennett Jones

happened nonetheless. There were men who were not as forgiving as I.
    Silence settled over the room like an additional layer of dust, and I could hear Hal getting up to leave with quiet, uncertain movements. Halfway there already, I decided to feign sleep so as not to prolong this visit any more than was strictly necessary. He was only with me as per request, after all, and I was not so old that I couldn’t remember what it was like to have no time to call my own.
    The door closed behind him with a soft but nevertheless grating creak. Everything in the country made noise, but it was never the right sort of noise. In the city everything was boisterous, vibrant, chasing you at the heels so that you had to step lively every second to survive.
    In the country, everything sighed like a dying man.
    I thought about what Hal had said, about the coming cold, and how I would possibly weather out the season trapped inside this house like a prisoner with a family I’d made a point of never visiting. Surely, I would sink as if to the bottom of a lake, slow and certain.
    When I dreamed, it was of another cold, another time. The war crept often enough into my dreams; there was nothing I could do about it.
    It had been a foul season in the mountains, frigid and unwelcoming when last the war had been at its peak, the Ke-Han magicians performing whatever barbaric rituals they needed to harness the wind. Blue was considered the color of our enemy, but it was also the color of the mountains, dark and deep as purest steel. The Cobalts bordered Volstov to the east and were our first defense against any attack.
    It had been nearly a three-week wait, our fingers as blue as the Ke-Han’s coats, before we saw any action. Such things happened—we’d heard of them—but the years had given me a patience and understanding that I didn’t have in the dream. I hadn’t had it there in the mountains either. In the end we’d come across an enemy battalion simply by chance of remaining in one place for long enough that the Ke-Han had run into us.
    The battle started very quickly. At that time, the fighting in the mountains was often a swift and violent business, ending when one side brought the rocky hills down onto the other. We were lucky enough to have come out victorious in that particular battle, leaving enough enemy magicians alive so that we could question them about their operations. The cold often aided such things, as the snow clotted the blood, so that we had a long time to question them. One of my fellows lost a hand in those hills.
    I have hated the cold ever since.
    THOM
    I’d changed my shirt twice in the morning. I was not so foolish as to think it would make a difference one way or the other with men trained to sniff out fear the way most of us were trained to speak, but it made me feel a little calmer, and so I allowed myself the indulgence.
    I was no longer quite so uneasy about my current project. As with anything—applying for the scholarship, taking the nation’s exams, et cetera—I found most of the worrying was spent in preparation for the event. When the event itself came, however, I was merely afflicted with the same fatalistic numbness that I’d heard afflicted soldiers during the war.
    What would come would come, and I’d deal with it to the best of my abilities, using the knowledge I’d gained. Laid out like that, it didn’t seem so overwhelming.
    Besides, I thought it rather unlikely that anyone would be taking it upon himself to slap my ass and call me Nellie. So it seemed I already had at least one advantage over the Arlemagne diplomat’s wife.
    Navigating the palace would take some getting used to, though. More than once I wished I’d taken Marius’s offer of company for my first day.
    “You’re more nervous than I am,” I’d accused him, after ensuring my materials were all in order.
    “No, I’m not,” he’d said, tugging at his beard all the while—which meant that he was nervous and trying not to