Chapter 1335: Morale-Boosting Song
“Was that the right thing to do?” Nana turned back.
Wendy stepped out from behind the curtain and rubbed the top of her head with a small smile. “You’ve already made the decision. Isn’t it a little late to be asking me?”
“Because I’m not sure myself whether I did the right thing.” Nana pouted. “I’m not like Sister Anna — she can do everything with complete certainty. I’ve never understood how she manages that.”
“There aren’t many people like her,” Wendy said gently. “So just choose whatever answer you think you won’t regret.”
She watched the young woman fall quiet and turn inward, and felt something she recognized as wistfulness, though she would have found it difficult to name exactly.
She remembered Nana from their first meeting — a girl who still chirped back at birds on instinct, who fainted at the sight of blood, who had not yet developed enough of a self to have real questions about it. She hadn’t been able to understand her own problems then, let alone take someone else’s perspective.
In a little over four years she had become someone who looked out from inside another person’s experience before making a decision. The change was remarkable enough to be almost unsettling.
But it wasn’t only Nana. Lightning, Lorgar, even Mystery Moon — all of them had changed beyond what Wendy would have predicted. Different people, different directions, but the same quality underneath: they had grown into people willing to choose.
It didn’t matter whether the choices turned out to be right or wrong. That they made them at all was the thing.
A characteristic of the younger generation, Wendy thought. And perhaps not hers.
Her smile turned slight and a little sad.
As for herself — she had long since stopped having that kind of courage.
Kabala found the performance without needing to follow the posted signs. The lights and the noise of the crowd were their own map, visible against the night sky from a distance.
Her pace accelerated without her deciding it. Then she was jogging.
She couldn’t have said why her body felt lighter than usual, or why the prospect of returning to the First Army encampment felt — for once — like something to move toward rather than simply somewhere she was supposed to be.
She called up her magic and gave herself a quiet command: find Jodel in the crowd.
Only because he was the one person she could be certain had survived.
Naturally.
She moved through the crowd the way a cat moves through a room — efficiently, without collision, her eyes reading movement and gaps simultaneously and matching them to a mental register she’d built up over months of working alongside these soldiers. Fifteen minutes later, she spotted a familiar silhouette.
At almost the same moment, he spotted her.
“Jo—”
“Thank goodness — you’re okay!” He had already closed the distance and pulled her into a hug before she could finish saying his name.
Kabala went still.
Any other time she would have put space between them before the thought had fully formed. Any other time she would have made him regret it. But she looked at Jodel — the poorly-concealed relief on his face, the way he was more undone by this than she was — and the hand she had begun to raise simply did not complete its arc.
Less than a breath later he registered what he’d done and recoiled, releasing her and stumbling over his own words. “So-Sorry — I forgot you’re — I just — I’m sorry, I’m just so — it doesn’t mean anything, I wasn’t—”
Two other familiar faces were emerging from the crowd behind him.
So more had survived the belfry’s collapse than she’d realized.
Kabala used the hand she had been about to strike him with to pull him back toward her.
“In Iron Sand City,” she said quietly, leaning in so only he could hear, “a man who acts this way toward a Divine Lady can expect to be dragged outside and fed to the scorpions.” She held the position for exactly one moment. “But right now I’m not a Divine Lady. I’m a soldier from the Sand Nation — same as the rest of you. If you’re going to maintain that appearance, you maintain it completely. Do not let anyone notice anything unusual. If you do —” She paused. “I will be less lenient than the scorpions.”
“Y-Yes. I understand.” He had gone completely still under her arm.
“Good. Don’t forget it.” A shorter pause. “Besides — if I’m the one pulling you in first, then it’s an honor, not an offense, and you owe no apologies to anyone. Now.” She released him. “Go and celebrate with your teammates.”
“You were discharged already?”
“The arm isn’t too bad?”
The other two had already arrived, arms going around shoulders, and the four of them folded together in the stumbling, unrehearsed way of people who are genuinely glad to be sharing the same air. Alive. Together. Against all reasonable odds.
On the improvised stage, the play was drawing toward its end. The applause arrived like rain beginning — a few drops, then a rush, then a roar that moved through the crowd in waves.
Nobody in that crowd noticed the small reunion taking place among the nine squads.
Iron Axe walked onto the stage.
When he opened his mouth the noise fell away, not because people called for quiet, but because of something in the way he stood and waited.
“I know what these past eight days have been. There has never been a battle as hard as this one in any of our lifetimes.
“This is why: the demons are not fighting for territory. They are not fighting for power or for wealth. They have one goal, and it is to erase us — completely, without remainder. They want nothing from us except our extinction.
“And so they will not care whether we surrender. They will not count their own losses. Even when their casualty numbers far exceed ours, they will not stop.
“Even so — you have held. You are still here. This is not nothing. This is proof that the demons going all out have a limit. They are not what the old stories made them. The legends said they were undefeatable. The legends were wrong. What you have survived in these eight days is no less significant than the Battle of Taquila.
“At Taquila we defeated one demon army. In Wolfheart we are facing six. Seven. Their forces are everywhere — from the western mountains to the eastern coast. And we have not been destroyed.”
A murmur ran through the crowd.
He let it pass, then raised his voice one degree.
“Yes. I gave the order to retreat from Metalstone Ridge. I gave the order to retreat from Gust Castle. The same may be true of Sand City and Sedimentation Bay. But this is not failure. This is the ground prepared for a counterattack.
“I hear what you are worried about. But remember what I told you before this began: this war has nothing to do with territory or wealth. The only goal is to destroy the enemy. What we have abandoned is cold stone and empty buildings. For those cold stones, the demons have spent tens of thousands of their dead.
“You are the weapon. As long as the First Army exists, taking back every one of those cities is not a question of whether — only when.
“The war will reach Cage Mountain in time. This place will become a battlefield. But before it does —” He paused, and his voice dropped back toward something ordinary, something like a man talking to people he knows. ”— enjoy this night. Fully. We rest now so we can face what comes harder than anything we’ve faced before. We have walked through hell. When the time comes, we will send it back.
“Long live Graycastle. Long live His Majesty Roland. Long live humans.”
The uproar that followed was not polite applause. It was the sound of worry releasing — of questions that had been carried for eight days finding, if not answers, at least a place to be set down. Voices picked up the same cry and passed it through the crowd until it became a single voice with many thousands of mouths.
Then Echo walked to the center of the stage, and the finale began.
During the song — something that drove forward and upward, something that made the crowd’s pulse find a common rhythm — a vision took shape in Kabala’s mind: the First Army sweeping through the demon formation like floodwater through a canyon. She recognized what was happening. She understood it was an ability.
She did not resist it.
When she felt the sound of all those hearts beating together and arriving somewhere in the same moment, she thought: this is not the worst thing.
Beside her, Jodel was shouting with the rest, his voice cracking slightly on the high notes, his expression unguarded in the way it could only be in a crowd like this.
A thought arrived at the edge of her attention, quiet and unannounced.
After the war ended, after the Sandstone Clan had somewhere stable to live, her clanspeople would probably forgive her.
They might, at least, give her the chance to ask.
And when that time came, she would go back to find Miss Nana Pine. Have the scar removed.
Start over.