She awoke, tired beyond measure.  A tingle echoed about her body, a hint of pain in the back of her mind that she recognized from the effects of some of the medicinal herbs she’d seen used to treat wounded.  She wondered where they had gotten them as last she heard they were out.  When her eyes reopened she wasn’t entirely surprised at her surroundings.  Airka seemed to recall a sporadic series of wakings and her mind was further reassured that what was around her was the inside of her tent.

She recognized the tables and chairs, sturdy and so easily disassembled for when the army moved on.  It was warm inside though, both braziers burned.  It had been so rare to use one, she wasn’t sure she could remember a time when she had used both.  It had probably been some event with Wignot.

Which of course brought the whole battle back.

The cry that escaped her throat was enough to wake the tent’s only other occupant.

“Airka?” came the confused call and then the man stood from the chair he had been resting in.

“Anders,” she called when her tired vision brought him into focus.  Her voice far more hoarse than she expected.  He stood beside the bed for a moment, gaze downcast even as he attempted a lopsided smile.

“Hey Sergeant,” Anders answered.  He hovered awkwardly for a moment, “I suppose it would be poor of me to ask how you are feeling.”

Airka glanced down at herself.  Even with the medicine her right arm protested strongly at her attempt to move it and so it was with her left that she lifted up the blankets that covered her.  She found her right arm heavily bandaged, her fingers would wiggle but only weakly.  Someone had changed her into a clean tunic.  There was a bandage at her shoulder, from Odelipen’s flaming blade, and another around her thigh from a wound she didn’t remember receiving.  Fresh bandages she could hardly imagine they had still possessed.  All of her skin that she could see was flushed red, like a severe sunburn, some spots even blistered with some sort of salve on it.

Tucked by her side under the covers, no doubt intended to bring her strength and comfort, was the Brokel’s spearhead.  Her fingers brushed it, the metal chilled now with no storm and nothing from her to feed it.  Even the blue tinted shard at its center seemed dull, it’s satin appearance so stark from the light it had admitted.  Airka drew her fingers back after a moment and shifted the blanket to wrap the spear, to keep it away from her skin.

“We found you pretty quickly after everything was over,” Anders continued.  “It wasn’t like there was much to do once you had finished it for us.”  Airka looked up now, at the corporal she had spent the last few months leading.  Defiant he had always been but now his gaze once again drifted away from hers.

“I don’t think I could…” Airka started, her voice burning her throat and sending her into a fit of coughs.  When she had recovered Anders had gotten a mug and offered it to her.  It was one of the tea mugs she had shared with Wignot.  A sip helped, the tea was warm but not hot and there was something sweet to it.  “Is this honey?”

“Umm, yeah,” Anders started as he sat back down.  “One of the things there was to do was Glout sent a group after the Silver’s supply chain.  They…” he paused, casting a furtive glance to Airka, “well, they clearly hadn’t expected what they had got and there really wasn’t anyone left with their baggage.  It’s been a few good days of eating, and it’s obviously helped with our wounded…Glout and Kara are working on getting everyone their share for their treks home.”

Airka smiled, even as it brought the tingle of her face into a slight pain.  Anders here, and Kara active.  That was two of hers that had survived.  The word that people were going home.  “We’re done then, the Council ordered us to disband?”  Anders didn’t respond and wouldn’t look at her when she glanced up from her mug.  “Has there been any news about…”

“Malcolm died during the battle Airka,” Anders interrupted, the words coming in a rush before he lapsed into barely a whisper.  “He died next to me when the irregulars rallied.”  The irregulars and their second attack spurred by Odelipen.  The attack she had been slow to blunt.  Anders looked to her now.  “And we found Wignot with you and their general.”  His gaze wavered and turned back down.

“I tried Anders,” she started, her voice cracking as her eyes stung.  “I tried to save as many of them as I could…it just…”

“Sergeant,” Anders dropped down to his knees by her bedside.  “I didn’t…Airka…I’m sorry.  It’s a miracle of the Sisters that you were here, that any of us got to be here now.”  He swallowed and she saw the tears forming in his eyes.  “I just wanted you to know, wanted to make sure that someone told you before everything else happened.”

“What else is going to happen?” Airka’s hand was growing tired just holding the mug and she shakily put it back on the stand.  Her lids were growing heavy.

Anders regained his feet and spoke as he moved back to the chair.  “Glout sent off their general’s flaming brand.  Figured it was proof enough of our victory.  Sent it with the swiftest riders.  We patched everyone up, and when that was done and we were still waiting we took care of our lost friends.  The Silvers we piled and burned.”  He rubbed at his eyes, Airka seeing now the heavy bags that resided there.

“That’s a lot of work…” she offered.

He nodded and looked back to her.  “Riders came back yesterday.  Treaty is still being negotiated but word is we’ll only be paying a quota of soldiers to Aus Argentum.  A force to help them as they claim to be readying to pick up the fight of Quartes against the Dragons.”  Airka’s stomach dropped, while it wasn’t giving up control of the Provinces to the Silver Kingdom it was still admitting that they were the lesser.  Anders chuckled, “I know that look, we don’t like it either but we’re trying to think of it as allies vice servants.”

“I suppose one battle doesn’t change all the others,” she whispered.

“I think you’re giving yourself too little credit boss.  We’ve been ordered to cease all movements while the treaty continues..”

Airka raised an eyebrow, despite her lids wanting to nothing more than close.  “That’s not exactly an order to discharge.”

Anders gave another dry laugh.  “Glout thought it was open to interpretation,” his face grew serious but Airka’s eyes had closed.  “The riders noted that Aus Argentum was sending a small group down.  Nominally to investigate the losses but…well we all talked and agreed that the real reason is they’re coming for you, or at least that the risk is that they’re coming for you.”

Airka forced her eyes open, for a moment felt the weight of the spearhead against her hand through the sheet.  “So we scatter?”

“You killed a whole army.  We go home because there’s no fighting that needs doing now and we go home so that you aren’t here for them to find.

“They’ll find me,” Airka whispered, her eyes closing once more.

“We sent the word about, no one is going to talk.”  Anders’ voice had conviction and it brought a smile to Airka’s face.  Even if she didn’t fully believe it.  If she was honest with herself, she knew from the beginning what using the spear had meant.  Anything but her death meant that Aus Argentum would be coming for her.  She wondered at that, wondered if the Dawn Queen herself would come.  How would the queen’s blade compare to Brokel’s spear?  She smiled to herself at that thought, knew it would be for another time.

“Airka?”  Anders asked after a moment but her breathing had leveled out.  He got up to stir the braziers before returning to his seat.  Kara would be in to relieve him soon, he only needed to stay awake for a bit longer as they traded off keeping watch.  “Sleep well boss.”

* * * * *

It was a few days later when Airka stood before the field.  It was not accurate to say that she was truly recovered but they had agreed that she had run out of time.  Down from the ridge line a couple other soldiers waited with horses.  They would help her ride to the city of Verken, and there amongst the towers she had fought to defend, hidden amongst the press of people who had fled there during the war, she’d finish her recovery before making her own trek home.  Airka had made that decision when she had next awoken, Kara waiting by her side that time.  However this all played out, she was going to return home and live out the days there with what remained of the dream she had held onto throughout the war.  Kara had told Airka then her own plan.  The stoic woman refused to live under the Silver Kingdom, even under the rumored terms of the treaty.  So, Kara instead planned to take her supplies, head north past the Hendark mountains, and then head west.  She if she could find the nomadic people said to live out there.

Brokel was said to have been one a chieftain of one of those nomadic tribes before he had joined the Last Landian in his fight against dragons.  Kara had offered to wait for Airka to join her, but even if Airka had a bloodline out there amongst the wide central fields of Illithiust, she had no interest in that life.  So it was that when Airka had the strength to stay out for a day Kara had deemed it time to head out.  It had been a shock to Airka when Anders had been there, his own bags packed, having decided to join Kara.

It had been lonely in the days since their departure.  While Anders was right that where ever she went Airka was treated as a hero, her actions and might had also instilled a distance between her and the remaining soldiers.  She’d gone on walks around the camp, at this point there weren’t many wounded for her to help tend to, and when her legs no longer ached from such forays she had decided it was time to leave.  Glout had offered her the choice of what they had taken from the Silvers but in the end she simply took enough supplies to bring her home, a horse with its gear, her old leather breastplate and vambraces, the trunk she had come into the war with, a few other items from throughout the war, and of course Brokel’s spearhead.

That left her with just one last thing to do.  Which is what lead her to the line of graves her fellow soldiers had dug and then laid to rest along the hillside.  They’d harvested wood from the wagons of the Silvers, rocks piled up, anything to be used as headstones.  Some had names carved on them.  Many were nameless.

The one before Airka read ‘Wignot’.

She and him had talked of this day.  Sometimes in hope after a major battle, other times as a source of hope after a fight was lost.  Sometimes simply when they found themselves stuck out in the rain.  Holding to going home as a warmth against their struggles.  She wasn’t sure either of them believed they would actually get to go home.  Airka certainly hadn’t when she heard that her parents had died in a senseless raid.

She certainly didn’t think that she would be going home without Wig.

As her eyes stung, she thought about what they had talked about.  Wig hadn’t had anywhere to really go, he’d been pulled off of the streets of Koric and sent to go fight.  A young man on the street wasn’t trouble that the city needed when a war had started.  Airka though had her family’s farm, had at the time still had a family.  At a minimum, they could both adjust back to whatever the world looked like after the war there before figuring out what either of them wanted to do.

She wasn’t sure she’d figure that out even if she had years there now.

More importantly in the moment she wasn’t sure what to say.  All the power she had wielded in the battle, her arm still bandaged up from what the magic of the spear had done to her, hadn’t meant she could save him.  Instead it had been Wignot that had saved her.  Which she suppose was a place to start.

“I don’t know what any of this is going to look like,” she started, her voice a whisper.  “I doubt I’ll have much time whatever it is, but if nothing else I owe it to you to try.  This all has been a short part of our lives in the grand scheme of things,” a laugh that was more of a cry escaped her.  “Yet everything else seems small by comparison.”  She took a breath, her right hand was at least able now to wipe away the tears that were freely flowing.  “I’m gonna miss you Wig.  I’m gonna miss your tea always being better brewed than mine.  I’m gonna miss talking when neither of us could sleep.”  She took a deep breath before she continued.  “I’m gonna miss having you to count on and help me look after…everything.”

She held a spear in her left hand.  It wasn’t Brokel’s spear, rather it was a simple one, one she had been issued.  Showing plenty of wear and unadorned.  The spear was the one she had used for most of the war.  She buried the spearhead in the dirt next to Wignot’s headstone.  “I don’t intend to need this anymore, and I want to send you off with one just in case you need to save someone else where ever you are.”  Airka stood silently for a moment.  Her throat ached like it hadn’t in days and after a moment of thought she nodded.  “Goodbye Wig, and thank you.”

With that Airka turned and slowly strode down to the waiting soldiers and the horses.  To whatever would come next.