They marched for six days.
No one told them where they were going. Sergeant Drav said east, and then he said further east, and eventually he stopped saying anything at all and just pointed, and they followed the point because there was nothing else to follow. The road — if it deserved the name — was a pale scar through dry scrubland, wide enough for four men abreast, rutted from what looked like weeks of supply cart traffic ahead of them. Someone had already passed this way. Many somebodies. The ruts were deep.
The first man collapsed on the third day.
His name was Aldric. Kael didn't know him well — he was from the Millside, older, maybe forty, a heavyset man who had sweated through his uniform before noon on the first day and had been quietly struggling since. He went down without much drama, which somehow made it worse. No cry, no stumble. He was simply walking, and then he was on the ground, and the column kept moving around him the way water moves around a stone.
Kael stopped.
He looked at the officers riding at the column's side — two of them, mounted, wearing the clean grey coats of the provisional command. Neither slowed. One glanced at Aldric and then looked forward again.
Kael crouched down. Aldric's face was the color of old ash. His breathing was shallow but present. Heat, probably, and poor water rations, and the particular cruelty of being marched in full kit through a landscape that offered no shade.
"Get up when you can," Kael told him, because there was nothing else honest to say. He pulled the man's water skin from his belt — nearly empty — and gave him what remained of his own. Then Sorin was beside him, and together they got Aldric upright, one arm each, and half-dragged him back into the column. He walked on his own within the hour.
No officer acknowledged this.
No officer acknowledged anything that happened in the column unless it slowed their horses.
On the fourth day, Ysse pointed out what she had been quietly tracking since they left camp: the supply cart that followed their column was lighter than it should have been. Rationing was expected in wartime — she knew that, they all knew that — but the numbers were wrong in a particular way. Their daily provision matched the count of soldiers on paper. But the count on paper, she had noticed at registration, was padded. Names that didn't correspond to real bodies. She had seen the lists when the officers processed them, the way she noticed most things — carefully and without making it obvious she was noticing.
"Someone is taking the difference," she said quietly, that evening, when the five of them sat at the margin of the camp perimeter and kept their voices below the wind.
"Taking it where?" Bren asked.
"I don't know. Back toward the city, probably. Sold. Skimmed. It's an old trick."
"How do you know that?" Orren asked.
"My father ran cargo on the river docks for fifteen years," Ysse said. "I know what a padded manifest looks like."
Kael thought about the recruitment officers, writing fast through the Low Quarter streets. Every name taken. More names than the supply line could honestly feed. The gap between those two numbers, quietly filled into someone's pocket somewhere between the city and wherever they were being marched.
We hadn't seen the enemy, he thought. But we were already disappearing — eaten up by the distance, the heat, the quiet arithmetic of people who had decided in advance how many of us were expendable.
He said none of this aloud. He passed Bren the last of the hard bread from his ration and watched the boy eat it too fast, the way you do when you are young enough that your body still trusts there will be more.
He kept the symbol on the spear in mind. He kept Ysse's numbers in mind.
He added both to the list of things he did not yet understand, and he promised himself he would survive long enough to understand them.