"You look," Kada says, after they've spent some while travelling, days whiling past on the long road, nights by campfires or in rough roadside inns, "as if your sleep is none too restful. Should that concern me for you, or our mission, or both?"
Eislyn smiles wanly at the paladin of battle. It's true; she dreams of unseen pursuit, of a rising ill-feeling, of traces of gold dust on hands and lips and wounds. The terrible hole in her dreamt chest aches coldly; in the north, in the still-distant governor's palace, lies another someone, a perpetually fleeing figure, whose breast is likewise riven. The fae's trees crawl angrily across a shadowed land, and the shadows themselves bleed the vitality from them.
It is difficult to tell, as always, what of it means anything, and what is merely Eislyn's own muddied fear of what might be waiting for them. Her Monarch is not forthcoming.
"There is something in the north," she says simply, and shrugs. This, she is sure of; this, they all already know.
"Knight," Kada says, "you need rest."
"We have miles to cover," Eislyn says.
"Knight," Kada says. "If you run your health to a bedbound shred, it won't matter the miles; you won't be covering a single one of them. And if you don't, I shan't."
"Your temple's mission for you," Eislyn begins, and Kada shakes her head.
"Marcus can go," she says. "Someone should lend a shoulder, if you require one to walk."
"My health is not so bad." Eislyn smiles, to soften any rebuke the other paladin takes. "I mark your kindness, Sword-Arm, but either I'll keep pace or you should leave me to make my own way; I'd not delay your mission so badly."
"Eislyn," Kada says, eyes narrowed, "there is something in the north, and I'm but a humble sword-swinger. It's not kindness, to want someone of your subtlety and might beside us."
"I'm as humble a sleeper as you are a sword-swinger," Eislyn tells her. "And your mission is to impress on a provincial governer that the displeasure of the Throne looms over him; I scarcely think I add to your ability to do so."
"The Throne's desire for us, in the north, is to do that," the other paladin says equably, and smiles as sharp as the great blade she wears. "Which we'll do. Amidst the other things."
"I do not know," Eislyn says, "if the three of us are the equal of what waits in the north. When it wars with the fae, and they call it a poison and say it does not die...."
"I never met anything that didn't die," Kada says. "A few things that fancied they wouldn't. The god, and a sword, friend: they cure many things. And then we have you!"
"I'm not so mighty," Eislyn murmurs, and presses a palm to her chest. "Not so mighty as you imagine, Kada. Tricks, and small magics, and what knowledge and true omens I can purloin from the Monarch's realm. And the years of my full health are behind me."
The battle-paladin's eyes gleam. "They say," she says, "that in your youth you braved the eastern deserts, into the terrible ziggurat of an immortal sorceror-king, and tore out his unnatural life."
"Wine moves many tongues," Eislyn says. "But whether it moves them to truth — there was a ziggurat, I'll say that. And a fool who had her health and a wealth in her life, and spent both for the sake of adventure, and found herself only sick and impoverished."
"And the sorceror-king wakes no more."
"Does he not?" Eislyn murmurs. "Well, then; does he sleep? Tell me; think you slumber is a safe prison for something undying?"
"Your Monarch," Kada says slowly, and pauses, face troubled.
"I tell you the Blue-Winged Land is not a prison, and its Monarch not a gaoler." Eislyn coughs a little, and grimaces. "Sword-Arm, there is something in the north. And I have a fear upon me that it knows my name."
"And yet," Kada says, "poor and sick and foolish as you say you are, you walk toward it, and try to turn me aside and face it alone."
"Better than it knows only my name, and takes it into the forgotten dark alone." Eislyn reaches out to touch her elbow. "I do not think it an adversary for swords, Battlemaster," and Kada reaches in return to gently pat her back.
"Every adversary is one for comrades-in-arms, Dreamsinger," she says firmly.
