I don’t want to get out. I don’t want an end. Unsettling realization, and Dag wasn’t sure where to put it. Blight it, he hadn’t even begun…anything. This argument was moving too fast for him, no doubt Mari’s intent. “All the great plans I ever made for my life ended in horrible surprises, Mari. I swore off plans sometime back.”

She shook her head in scorn. “I halfway wish you were some lout I could just thump. Well…no, I don’t. But you’re you. If she’s cut up at the end—and I don’t see how this can be anything other than a real short ride—so will you be. Double disaster. I can see it coming, and so can you. So what are you going to do?”

Dag said tightly, “What do you suggest, seeress?”

“That there’s no way you can end this well. So don’t start.”

I haven’t started, Dag wanted to point out. A truth on his lips and a lie in his ground, perhaps? Endurance had been his last remaining virtue for a long, long time, now; he hugged his patience to him and stood, just stood.

In the face of his stubborn silence, Mari shifted her stance and her attack once more. “There are two great duties given to those born of our blood. The first is to carry on the long war, with resolute fortitude, in living and in dying, in hope or out of it. In that duty you have not ever failed.”

“Once.”

“Not ever,” she contradicted this. “Overwhelming defeat is not failure; it’s just defeat. It happens sometimes. I never heard that you ran from that ridge, Dag.”

“No,” he admitted. “I didn’t have the chance. Surrounded makes running away a bit of a puzzle, which I did not get time to solve.”

“Aye, well. But then there’s the other great duty, the second duty, without which the first is futile, dross and delusion. The duty you have so far failed altogether.”

His head came up, stung and wary. “I’ve given blood and sweat and all the years of my life so far. I still owe my bones and my heart’s death, which I mean to give, which I will give in their due time if chance permits, but suicide is a self-indulgence and a desertion of duty no one will ever accuse me of, I decided that years ago, so I don’t know what else you want.”

Her lips compressed; her gaze went intent with conviction. “The other duty is to create the next generation to hand on the war to. Because all we do, the miles and years we walk, all that we bleed and sweat and sacrifice, will come to nothing if we do not also pass on our bodies’ legacy. And that’s a task on which you have turned your back for the past twenty years.”