Chapter 3 — The Last Knight

The road to Isope was long enough to have a personality.

It started wide and well-maintained near the border city of Varnhem, the kind of road that had seen armies march it enough times that the stones had given up trying to be anything other than flat. Then it narrowed. 

Then it forgot it was a road entirely and became a suggestion two worn lines through grass and loose rock climbing steadily into the hill country that separated the border territories from the capital.

Kaine Magnus had been riding it for six days.

"You'd think they'd fix this part," he said.

Hosna's ears moved back toward his voice the way they always did. She had strong opinions about roads. Kaine had learned to read them over four years of shared travel ... the particular way she stepped when she disapproved of the terrain, 

the specific angle of her head when she was hungry versus tired versus simply annoyed at the world.

Right now she was picking her way through a stretch of loose shale with the focused displeasure of someone performing a task beneath their dignity.

"I know," Kaine said. "I agree completely."

She snorted.

"That's not what I said."

The hills rose around them in long green folds, quiet except for wind and the occasional distant cry of something Kaine didn't bother identifying. He had his sword. Whatever it was could make its own decisions.

Six days since Varnhem. Six days since he'd ridden out of that border city alone when he should have ridden out with forty three men beside him.

He didn't think about that during the day. During the day there was the road and Hosna and the specific practical problems of staying fed and watered and pointed in the right direction. The mind could be managed during the day.

It was the nights that had their own ideas.

He made camp when the light failed, in a shallow depression between two hills where the wind broke enough to make a fire worth the effort. Hosna folded herself down beside him without being asked, 

the way she had started doing after Varnhem without any discussion between them about it. She was warm against his back. He could feel her breathing.

The moon was up and nearly full, turning the hills silver and strange.

Kaine lay on his back with his hands on his chest and looked at it.

The fire had burned down to embers. Hosna shifted slightly in her sleep, a small movement that pressed her flank more firmly against him. He didn't move away.

Forty three men.

He had their names in the right order. He had made sure of that on the first night, when the shock was still loud enough to drown out the names if he didn't say them deliberately. 

He had said them into the dark one by one until they stuck. He wasn't going to be the kind of survivor who forgot names.

Sir Aldren who laughed too loud at his own jokes. Sir Mourne who had been planning to retire after this march, had talked about a farm near the coast for two years. 

Sir Petyr, youngest of all of them, nineteen years old and convinced he was immortal the way nineteen year olds are.

They had come over the ridge outside Varnhem in good spirits, the annual border training finished, the march home begun. 

Forty three knights in full formation, banners up, the particular pride of men who had just spent three weeks proving to themselves they were still sharp.

The Abyssal corpses had come out of the valley below like a tide.

Not a skirmish. Not a raid. A tide ... black-eyed and silent and too many to count properly in the moment, moving with the specific wrongness of things that wore human shapes without being human things. 

The valley had looked empty from the ridge. It had looked completely empty.

Kaine's horse ... Hosna, always Hosna, four years and she had never once failed him ... had already been turning before his mind caught up with what his eyes were seeing. 

He had told himself later that it was instinct. That any knight would have done the same. That the turn was tactical, not...

I'm a coward.

He said it out loud to the moon. The moon offered no opinion.

"Everyone died with honour." His voice was flat in the night air. "And I'm living with shame."

Hosna breathed steadily behind him.

He turned his head toward her. Her eyes were closed, her great chest rising and falling with the slow rhythm of deep sleep. Four years. Through weather and bad roads and worse situations than bad roads. 

She had turned when he turned and carried him out and never once made him feel like the last man leaving.

"At least I've got you, girl.

The embers ticked quietly. Above them the moon moved its slow arc across the dark.

Kaine closed his eyes and waited for morning.

Isope announced itself the way capitals did gradually, then all at once.

First the road remembered it was a road. Then the traffic appeared, merchants and messengers and the particular busy purposefulness of people moving toward a center of gravity. 

Then the walls rose against the sky, dark stone and old, the kind of walls that had been built by people who understood that the Abyss was not a rumor.

Kaine straightened in the saddle as they passed through the gate.

He had been to Isope twice before, both times with the full complement of Jaigan's knighthood around him.

The city had felt different then ... loud and alive in the way cities felt when you moved through them with forty three brothers and the collective confidence that implied.

Alone it felt larger. More indifferent.

He rode through the main avenue without hurry, drawing looks he didn't return. A lone knight was unusual enough. 

A lone knight with the specific hollow look of a man carrying something heavy was apparently worth staring at.

He was three blocks from the palace gates when he saw her.

Not inside the palace. Not surrounded by the full apparatus of court. Just standing at the edge of the avenue with a single attendant beside her, 

watching the city the way a person watches something they own and are still deciding what to do with.

Kaine knew the queen's face from the portrait in the Varnhem barracks. It had not prepared him for the actual quality of her stillness.

He pulled Hosna to a stop.

For a half second his training and his exhaustion ran into each other and he nearly stayed mounted out of pure tiredness. 

Then he was off the horse and on one knee on the cobblestones before the motion was fully conscious, 

head bowed, the formal posture his body remembered even when his mind was elsewhere.

"Stand up, Knight."

Her voice was even. Not warm, not cold. Simply the voice of someone who expected to be obeyed and had long since stopped being interested in the moment of compliance.

Kaine stood.

Up close she was younger than he'd expected and older in the eyes. The attendant beside her ... small woman, watchful, 

hands folded ... observed him with the careful blankness of someone trained to see everything and show nothing.

"What is your name?"

"Kaine Magnus, my lady." He kept his eyes level, the way knights were taught. "I am the last knight. Everyone else..." he stopped for half a second. 

"There was  an unexpected engagement between our column and Abyssal corpses on the march back from the border. 

Outside Varnhem." His eyes dropped to the cobblestones despite himself. "Everyone else died."

The queen looked at him for a moment without speaking.

"Kaine Magnus," she said, as if filing the name somewhere. "I see."

The city moved around them. A cart rattled past. Somewhere nearby someone was frying something that smelled of cumin and oil, 

the mundane persistence of city life entirely indifferent to what was being said on this particular stretch of cobblestone.

"Tell me, Kaine." Alice's head tilted very slightly. "Do you want to see your queen sad?"

He looked at her. "No. I won't."

"You won't." She said it back to him not as a question but as a thing she was deciding whether to believe. Then she stepped past him.

Hosna stood patient at the avenue's edge, reins loose, watching the queen approach with the mild curiosity she directed at most new humans. 

Alice raised her hand and ran it slowly along the horse's jaw, fingers moving through the dark mane with something that might have been appreciation in someone else.

"What is her name, Kaine?"

"Hosna." He turned to follow the queen with his eyes. "She is..." he paused, reaching past the word *friend* for something that fit better and finding it insufficient. "She is all I have left, my lady."

"Hosna." Alice withdrew her hand. "What a curious name." A pause. "I don't like it."

Kaine said nothing. There was a register in the queen's voice he was just beginning to identify, a particular evenness that arrived slightly before things changed.

Alice turned to face him. She stepped close ... not threateningly, just close enough that the conversation became private in a public street.

"Kaine." Her eyes held his without effort. "Kill her."

The city continued its noise around the silence that opened up between them.

He didn't answer.

"Don't make me repeat myself."

He bowed. The motion felt like it belonged to someone else's body. "Yes, my lady."

He turned to Hosna.

She looked at him the way she always looked at him ... present, uncomplicated, ears angled toward his face waiting for whatever came next. 

Four years of whatever came next. Bad roads and worse nights and one valley outside Varnhem that he was still trying to find the right name for.

He drew his sword.

His hand found the place behind her ear that he knew without looking, the angle his first riding master had shown him a decade ago. Quick and certain, the old man had said. You owe them that.

"Good girl," he said quietly. Just for her.

She didn't move away from him. She never had.

It was quick. He made sure of that. He owed her that much and intended to pay it precisely.

When he straightened up his hands were trembling in a way he couldn't stop and didn't try to.

"Good." Alice was watching him with the focused attention of someone observing a result they had predicted. "I like you, Knight."

She turned to her attendant. "Hilda. Use the hide to make gloves for Knight Kaine."

Hilda bowed once, already moving.

Alice looked back at Kaine. Something in her expression shifted almost imperceptibly ... not softness exactly, but an acknowledgment of weight.

 "The horse was going to die eventually. As a reminder of what you carried, and as a gift for your loyalty..."

 she gestured toward where Hilda was already working with the quiet efficiency of someone who had received stranger instructions, "...you will wear her."

Kaine bowed.

"It is my honour to receive a gift from you, my lady."

His voice came out steady. He had no explanation for that.

Alice held his gaze for one more moment. Then she turned and walked back toward the palace, Hilda falling into step behind her, 

leaving Kaine standing alone on the cobblestones of Isope with his sword in his trembling hand and the city moving past him like none of it had happened.

His eyes were wet.

He did not cry.

He stood there until the trembling stopped. It took longer than he would have liked.

Then he sheathed his sword, straightened his back the way knights were taught, and walked toward the palace gates alone.

Behind him the city continued its noise, indifferent and alive, the way cities always were.

To be continued.