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It has been twenty-eight days.
She sits at a table overlaid with maps, intertwined in rivers and all the places that are not home. They bear the marks of being rolled, unrolled, stuffed into satchels, marked on until the ink has begun to fade. She has reviewed them so many times; she sees them when she sleeps.
Casca sighs, holding her head. Her temples throb. A lantern throws her into half-light, all warm browns and soft yellows, but inside there is a coldness which no flame has yet to thaw. Her armor rests in one corner, unpolished.
Tomorrow, she tells herself, rolling the maps up again, the rough parchment rasping against her calloused palms. Tomorrow, she thinks, as she quells the lamp, her world sucked into inky darkness. Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.
Cannot let herself admit she said the same yesterday, the day before.
Casca closes her eyes. The wind outside her tent smells of embers, peat moss, earthy things which remind her too much of him. Her heart pricks with anger. She rolls over, stuffing her arm beneath her head, thoughts drifting, drifting.
Tonight, she dreams of the tide…
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-she’s ushered into an open tent, which smells of wood chips and the smoke of a long-burning fire, and a boy – not much older than she – smiles like the sky and beckons her inside.
“I’m Judeau,” he says, offers his hand, calloused palms, bitten fingernails. She doesn’t take it, only stares at him through the fringe of her hair.
“Casca,” quietly, spoken against her teeth.
Judeau hangs his thumbs from his belt. “It’s good to meet you. I was told you wanted to cut your hair.”
She nods, stiffly, fingers grasping her skirt. The fabric itches against her skin.
Judeau steps away, pulling up a stool and patting the seat. Casca worries her bottom lip, still tasting of blood and the salt of her tears, which have been wiped away but not erased. Her dark brow comes together.
“Yes,” she says, looking him in the eye for the first time; moss and flint.
He grins. As she watches her shorn tresses fall to the earth, he says, wistfully, softly – “It’s almost a shame, y’know. You have pretty hair.”
Casca swallows, irons her shoulders. “It’s just hair.”
When he’s finished, she steps out of the tent, the sunlight heavy against her face, in her eyes, and she walks with confidence, and leaves her little-self on the ground, as the wind sweeps down the hills, blowing, gently, through her cropped hair.
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She remembers her first battle in a dreamy sort of way, where the edges of wet paint come together, smudged, mixing to form new colors – and she was the canvas. She has been through so many, now, that all sorts of different paints are crusted upon her, miles-thick, in all manner of shades.
Mostly, she remembers following the flash of white hair beneath a silvery helmet, a slash of marble against murky browns and oily reds. She cast men far older than herself onto the earth, her blade stuck deep in their chests or stomachs, always keeping that flash of white within her sight. And the battle was over. So too were many after.
Casca pushes away from the desk, scattered with maps, each leading to nowhere, nowhere she wishes to go. No map in the universe has the answer.
Outside her tent, her men shrink around their fires; bleed their hope into the soil. Heavily, she marks another day in her notebook, a neat line of coal, veering into dust at the edges, blackening her hand. Forty-two days since their exile….
She blows out her lantern, falls asleep in full armor, closes her eyes. In her dreams, she searches for that sliver of white among the gray winter of her memories, never finds it, a sunset lost to the darkness
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-he looks strange in finery, she thinks, the first time she sees him in it.
The gloss and glitter of the fabric brings an odd pallor to his face, once golden-colored skin slicked down to a pale, runny yellow. The textures are all wrong, the cut, the way it hangs from his thin wrists, brings out a watery shimmer in his beautiful hair.
But he wears it with the grace of any King, as if the crown already rests upon his brow, as if she never watched him scrub the dirt beneath his fingernails an hour prior. He shines.
Casca looks away from the window she’d been peering into, gazing instead across the courtyard. Another victory seized from the hands of their enemy. Another rich man wishing to say thanks, although his tongue tangles in the lie of it when he speaks. Casca hates it. She would burn the entire estate to the ground if she could.
The sky is dark, yet the wind is cool against her heated cheeks, smelling of the evergreens, of wild things dwelling within them. She breathes deeply of it, allowing, for a moment, a vision of herself in heavy silks, but the image is too foreign to commit.
She wonders, briefly, of his thoughts of her in such attire, wonders if its splendor would ever match his own, if she would only look a fool– and chides herself for such silly thoughts. But she wonders.
When she looks into the window again, Griffith is gone.
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She awakes with a crust in her eyelashes.
Casca keeps her eyes closed, watching as ephemeral spots swirl beneath her eyelids, breathing through her nose, dry lips parted.
If she opens them, she will be made to face another day, day forty-six, wonder who will die this day, which edge of the map they will cross. She keeps her eyes closed as long as she can, stilling a bitter wish of dreams on her tongue.
She rises. She dresses. She greets her men. She never smiles.
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That night, she searches again for the white in the darkness.
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-finds nothing.
She is up to her knees in cold water, sleeves bunched above her rough elbows, skin flecked with sand. From the banks, Judeau and Rickert snicker at her, their feet dug deep into the silt. When she gets the chance, she vows to steal one of their valuables and toss it into a river, just to watch them fumble as she is. And they would laugh together when it was over.
Casca swears, wipes the hair out of her eyes. She was fishing when her bandolier came loose, right in the middle of the creek, as her catch flitted away in a spray of silver-blue scales.
The afternoon sun is unforgiving as it spreads against her nape. There will surely be a burn there come morning. Casca swears again, buries her hands once more into the sandy bottom, fingers tripping over stones, unknown things beneath the water.
Her hand bumps something familiar. She grabs at it with a clumsy fist, splashing more water onto her clothing, into her face. When she brings her hand up again, she finds it is only a pebble, veined in deep threads of orange and black.
She almost throws is back. Instead, she runs the fleshy pad of her thumb against it, testing the grain. She stows it in her pocket. Though she searches for another hour, she never finds her lost possession, but she has found a new one, not knowing why she keeps it, a useless pebble unbirthed from its mother-river. She likes to think it brings her luck, because she never finds one exactly like it again.
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She tosses it back into a river the morning that Guts leaves.
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Day seventy-two is much like the rest.
There is snow. It lies thickly on the ground and in the trees, across the shoulders of rocks, blankets the graves before her. The soil is too hard to break, so they made due with the boughs of trees, sticks, and the dry, dead things winter has left behind. Their swords rest atop the mounds.
“We should go,” says Judeau, his breath a frosty mist.
Casca stares, unblinking, eyes twin pools of black. The air is too cold even for tears.
“Go without me. I’ll catch up.”
Judeau presses his lips, the wind blowing his wheat-yellow hair across his brow. He leaves her, footprints trailing up and away from where she stands, until she can no longer hear them. The wind continues to blow.
She falls to her knees, hunches over as if with a wound, ungloved hands pressed tightly against her face, to silence her dry sobs, to press them back against her lips. Every hollow place within her aches, trembles.
Each day, she is unstringed and laid out against the earth, until she can pick herself up again, stuff herself back into her own skin. Little pieces of herself go into the graves of each soldier who perishes.
Casca peels her fingers away from her face, dark hair blowing all around her head, snowflakes in her eyelashes. Part of her wants to curl into the whiteness around her, let the cold into her bones, permeate her lungs, but she cannot, cannot. There is still a flame inside, a glint of steel that allows her to stand again, to bid the dead farewell and rejoin those who remain, with faces like the graveyards they make.
She mounts her horse, and they move out again, across the heavy snow.
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She does not find him that day. Or the day after that.
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Still. She searches, even in beneath the waves of her dreams.