A Facet for the Gem by C. L. Murray Page B

in the East for as long as possible. Felkoth’s hand reached nearer every day, and they could ill-afford to lose any more men trying to halt it while other threats closed in.
    “You’ve done well with them,” he praised his daughter. “They seem eager to fight, eager for honor. Perhaps the Wildland Test will take some of that wind out of their sails, as it did for most of us.”
    “They’re ready for it,” she assured him. “I’ll take them over the river before month’s end, and they’ll earn their horns as we’ve all done.” She proudly glanced at the scythe of sharpened bone fixed into her spear’s base, a trophy as lethal as the ones that her brothers and father each had fastened to theirs.
    “You may not need to,” said Ondrel. “The ferotaurs may come to you in droves before you send your students onto their final task.”
    “Perhaps if you traveled more often down to the kingdom’s most dangerous corner, you’d see the droves we frequently repel,” she replied.
    “Aye,” said Ivrild, “but when your boys get their first glimpse of what it’s like not to have the river between them and what’s out there, they’ll lose half their body weight through their trousers. Do you remember your first time, big brother?”
    Verald nodded. “One never forgets.” He gazed off in silence for a moment, not eager to dredge up the memory. “We were dropped about twenty miles in. And on the journey over you finally grasp how few we all are, next to the packs that cover the land like insects. But I still felt separated from that place, safe somehow, until the instructors ordered us to dismount. After all the ugly things I’d seen, watching them fly away was by far the worst. You’re never deadlier than when you hear those first snarls closing in to welcome you.”
    With a chuckle, Ivrild chimed in. “Even though they didn’t drop my group near the biggest clusters, and they seemed confident they’d return for us before we got overrun, we thought we were as good as dead. We ran more that day than in the four years leading up to it. All those exercises they make you do when you’re just starting out, not a single hair on you from knees to nose—scaling walls, crawling on your elbows through mud. It’d be more authentic if they sicced the dogs on you while you’re at it, and you had to bash their heads in every time you stopped to breathe.”
    “We emptied our quivers in the first half hour,” said Ondrel. “There must have been four hundred of them littering the fields when we fired our last shots, and that was barely a fraction of what came after.”
    The three glanced at Valeine, waiting for her to give a similarly suspenseful account. Their father, though, knew that she was never one to conform.
    Instead, she turned her head to look out over the distant Wildlands that stretched fallow and brown to mountains that concealed a vast network of caverns, which crawled with enough vermin to make the ones they fought in the open seem like barely a trickle. “I felt strangely alive there,” she said, and her brothers scoffed as though it were nothing but false bravado to shame them.
    “Not because I wasn’t afraid,” she added. “We all were. But because I was outside the world we were born into, back to the way everything was in the beginning, when there were only monsters and chaos. And I realized we’ve been in their world all along. We’re just a patch of moss on their rock, and we’re on borrowed time.”
    “What are you saying?” asked Ondrel. “That we should stop patrolling the river, abandon our garrisons, and let them pour in? Make it like it was centuries ago, when there were no Eaglemasters, and a good day for a man was not getting his leg chewed off?”
    Valeine shook her head. “I’m saying it’s easy to think that this way of life is what’s meant to be. But when I stood in that chaos, I saw so much more that could have been, so much that can be. Our tradition that demands