A New Life, Farewell Pally

First there was the dark. A warm dark, cottony, dreamless.
Then something began to stir within that dark. Not light. Not yet. Just a sensation, vague, far-off, the feeling of a body remembering that it existed. A consciousness regaining its shape without yet knowing whom it belonged to.
Then sounds.
They came at first like water through cotton. Voices, perhaps. Or perhaps only the sound of the wind passing beneath a door. Impossible to tell. Pally, if it was indeed Pally drifting there, tried to grasp those sounds, to give them meaning, but they slipped away from him like fish in a river too muddy to see through.
A point of pain appeared. Dull, deep, lodged somewhere on the left side of his body, like an ember forgotten beneath the skin. The pain was his first true landmark. It reminded him that he had a shoulder. And that his shoulder, normally, did not burn like this.
The sounds slowly sharpened.
Voices. They really were voices. Several. They were speaking loudly, cutting each other off, and one of them was rising above the others, a child's voice, furious, on the verge of tears. It took him an interminable time to recognize that voice.
It was Merwinn's.
Merwinn.
The name rang in his skull like a bell, and with it the rest returned. The wolves. The witch. The cabin. The zombie. The flash of light. Elric's hand on his shoulder, his hot blood in the snow.
And then, a more distant memory, softer, more shattered. Hair black as a moonless night. A voice singing in English. My love will never die. A hand stroking his curls. A locket open on a bedside table. Then flames. Bodies. A prayer hall. A winged demon. His mother's eyes telling him go away, my heart.
Pally tried to open his eyes and did not manage it right away.
The memories were not clear. They were there, they existed, but they floated like leaves on the surface of a pond — he could catch one, not two, and the moment he tried to look at one more closely, the others sank. He knew he had lived through that night. He knew his mother had died. He knew he had been five years old. But his mother's face, he could not summon. Only her hair. Her voice. The incense and the orchid.

At last he opened his eyes.

The ceiling above him was not the one in the boys' orphanage. It was a lower ceiling, more carefully wrought, with dark beams and a simple iron chandelier. After a few seconds he recognized it: the headmistress's room on the ground floor, the one where children were brought when they were truly ill. He had been there once before, at six, for a fever he had caught after falling into the river in the dead of winter.
The fire crackled softly in a small hearth to his left. A smell of boiled herbs drifted in the air, mingled with that of burning wood. A steaming pot on a small table beside the bed. A candle set on the nightstand, nearly consumed.
He was alone in the room.
But the voices came from the other side of the door, and the door was not quite shut. A thin ray of light entered through the gap, casting a golden blade across the floorboards. And in that gap he saw a silhouette. A broad silhouette, motionless, turning its back to the room. A straight back, solid shoulders, shoulder-length chestnut hair falling onto a pale cape.
Elric.
He was blocking the door with his body.
Pally tried to move and the pain in his left shoulder exploded all at once, forcing him to exhale sharply through his teeth. He looked down at himself. He was bare-chested under a woolen blanket, and a thick bandage strapped across the top of his torso, rising diagonally over his left trapezius, tight, stained brown in places with dried blood. Someone had tended to him seriously. Not merely covered him, tended to him.
The voices rose suddenly from the other side of the door.
"No," Elric was saying. His voice was low, firm, without anger but without yielding either. "I am sorry. I know it is hard to hear. But this is how it is. There is no other way."
"There is ALWAYS another way!" Merwinn. His voice strangled, on the verge of breaking. "He hasn't turned yet! He's breathing! He's alive! How can you say... how can you even speak of that while he's there, right there, in the next room!"
"Merwinn, listen to me carefully..."
"NO!"
Another voice, softer, older. Titis.
"Mister Elric, I beg you... he is a child. He is my child. Do you understand? This orphanage is my home. These kids are my family. You cannot ask me to... to stand by while you..."
Her voice broke. Someone, probably Ellendia, stifled a sob.
A deep voice rose in turn, heavy, patient, yet bearing an authority that would brook no contradiction. Braum.
"Paladin Elric. As a former soldier I understand that you are doing your duty. But I beseech you, if you have the slightest chance of saving this boy by calling upon the Creator to come to our aid, I beg you, do so."
"Braum." Elric's voice grew graver, steadier, laden with a weight that came neither from anger nor impatience. "I am sorry this disaster has come to pass, and I have deep respect for you and for your role in this village."
His voice regained its strength.
"But as a Paladin in the service of my people and my kingdom, I must tell you this: every second we wait increases the danger of the spread of a pestilence that will turn each of us into a zombie capable, in turn, of spreading this evil. All of humanity would perish from it."
He turned his gaze for a moment toward the window, drew a deep breath, then came back to Braum.
"Consider Pally as condemned. We must now take the actions that will allow us to protect the rest of the living."
A silence stretched out.
"Do you not agree?"
Braum did not answer at once. There was nothing to answer that had not already been weighed, already been known, already been painful.
Daemon, whom Pally had not yet heard, spoke for the first time. A voice younger than Elric's, but not by much, grave, measured.
"Paladin Elric is right. Children, step back. You do not understand what is at stake."
"YES, I UNDERSTAND!" Merwinn shouted. "You want to KILL my best friend! I UNDERSTAND THAT!"
"You will not touch him," Ellendia said, and her voice trembled but she was not crying. "You will not enter this room. Not while we stand in front of it."
A little boy's voice, younger, joined the chorus. One of the other orphans, probably Tim, seven years old, who always followed Pally everywhere in the yard.
"You don't touch Pally!"
Then another child's voice. Then another still. The headmistress's room was filling with the voices of orphans all starting to speak at once, some in tears, some in anger, some simply pleading. Titis, in the middle of them, tried to calm them down, then gave up. She could tell them nothing they had not already understood.
Elric did not move from the door. He no longer answered. His silence did not come from coldness; it came from gravity. He was letting the children cry out because he knew their cries were legitimate. But he did not move.
Pally, in the bed, listened a moment longer. He looked at the ceiling. He thought of his mother, whose memory hovered somewhere on the surface of his skull. He thought of the witch who had said he would die by the hand of the one he cherished most, and not under the fangs of a zombie or the blade of a paladin. He thought of the crystal ball in the snow. He thought of the hand Elric had laid on his shoulder after the bite.
He drew a deep breath. It tore at his throat, it hurt, but he took it all the same. And he spoke. Loud enough to carry through the door.
"So I'm not even dead yet and already they want to bury me."
His voice was weak, cracked, but it carried far enough to reach the corridor.
There was a moment of absolute silence. As if everyone, on the other side, had suddenly stopped breathing.
Then:
"PALLY!"
Two voices at once. Merwinn. Ellendia.
The sound of a scuffle. Quick footsteps. The door flung wide open.
"WAIT!" Elric called out.
Too late.
They rushed into the room like two rivers long held back by the same dam.
Merwinn arrived first. He crossed the room in three strides and very nearly threw himself onto the bed, his knees striking the edge of the mattress, his hands gripping Pally's shoulders — not the left, not the one that bled, the other, the one he could touch without hurting him. His face was ravaged. Traces of dried tears on his cheeks, new ones coming down to replace them, his mouth twisted in a smile that was not quite a smile, his breath short.
"You're... you're here... you're here, Pally..."
He could find no other words. He repeated them as if he feared that if he let them go, reality would let him go too.
Ellendia arrived just behind. She said nothing, she did not. She laid a trembling hand on Pally's cheek, just that hand, and her eyes overflowed without her realizing it. She looked at his face the way one looks at someone presumed dead and rediscovered alive, inch by inch. She wanted to touch the bandage too, to be sure, but she did not dare.
"Easy," Pally breathed. His voice was hoarse, raw. "You're going to break me before my time."
Merwinn burst into a laugh that was half a sob. He let his head drop against Pally's, forehead to forehead, and stayed like that a long moment without saying a word.
Ellendia, for her part, slipped her hand into Pally's and into Merwinn's. And they held each other. Very tightly.

Behind them, the others entered in turn.
Titis was next. She came with her skirts, with her smell of bread and laundry, with that way she had of filling a room simply by entering it. Her eyes were red. When she saw Pally awake in the bed, her hands went to her mouth, then to her heart, then to her face. She no longer knew what to do with them.
"My little one," she said, and her voice cracked clean through. "My little one..."
She did not approach right away. She stood at the foot of the bed, her shoulders shaking, unable to go any further without breaking. Pally looked at her.
"Titis," he said, and he offered her his old smile, the one she knew, the one he wore every morning when she slipped him honey bread on the sly. "Don't worry. I'll just be needing your good massages."
She burst into tears. And she laughed at the same time. Exactly as Merwinn had a moment earlier. She crossed the last steps that separated her from the bed and she kissed his forehead — not once, three times, four, with a force she was not in the habit of letting out.

The other orphans entered in turn, in a small chaotic cluster, some still hiccupping with tears, others already in that raw, simple joy only children know how to feel when something they thought lost has been given back to them. Tim, seven years old, threw himself onto the bed as well and climbed right up to sit against Pally's thigh, despite Titis's protests telling him twenty times to get down without really wanting him to get down. The other children lined up around, touching the blanket, touching Pally's hand, staring at him with huge eyes, as though they wanted to make sure he would not vanish between two glances.
Braum came in after them. He said nothing. He stationed himself near the hearth, his arms crossed over his great frame, his face closed but his eyes softer than usual. Former soldier or not, he was not ashamed to let it show that he too, that night, had been afraid.
William entered last.
He stayed near the door.
He did not cross the room. He did not approach the bed. His arms were at his sides, his fists half-clenched, his gaze lowered to the floor. And when Pally turned his eyes toward him, when their gazes met across the room, William looked away almost at once, as if the mere fact of being seen by Pally burned him.

In the doorway, Elric and Daemon stood side by side, motionless. They watched the scene without intervening. They watched this child, bitten by an advanced-stage infected three hours earlier, joking with his cook, squeezing a little girl's hand, pressing his forehead to his best friend's. A child who ought to have been convulsing beneath a deadly fever. A child who ought to have been showing the first signs — the black sweat, the pupils dilating, the breathing changing.
A child who had none of that.
Daemon briefly met Elric's eye. He did not need to speak. The question was there, whole, in his gaze. Are you seeing what I'm seeing?
Elric did not answer. He only looked at Pally longer. And in his gaze, for the first time since he had entered that corridor, something other than the gravity of the oath appeared.
Something that resembled astonishment.
And perhaps, deep down, hope.

Time passed.
Not the way it usually passes. Not in a straight line, not in equal hours. In the headmistress's room, time became elastic, taut, watched. Every minute was weighed, examined, compared to the one before. Every flutter of Pally's eyelids, every breath, every bead of sweat on his brow was observed by at least two pairs of eyes that did not miss a thing.
Elric had moved. He had left his post at the door and settled into a wooden chair that he had pulled close to the hearth, set at an angle to the bed. From there, he saw everything. He did not speak. He did not move. He watched Pally the way a man watches a fire he does not understand, with that grave patience of guardians who know that what they watch over can tip over at any moment.
Daemon had stationed himself near the window. He too observed. But unlike Elric, he sometimes tapped the pommel of his short sword with a finger, a steady rhythm, almost unconscious. Whenever he noticed, he stopped. Then he would begin again without noticing.

Half an hour.
Pally was speaking with Merwinn in a low voice. Merwinn had dragged a little stool close to the bed and refused to leave it. They were talking about silly things. About the latest prank they had pulled on William, which no longer seemed funny now. About what Titis was going to cook up for them once Pally could get up. About how Cirilla was going to murder them when she found out what they had done.
"You think she's gonna hit us?" Merwinn asked.
"She won't hit us, she'll just look at us. You know, that look."
Merwinn grimaced. "Yeah. That look, it hurts more than slaps."
"That's the whole point."
They laughed. A tired laugh, but a real one.
Elric, in his corner, took note. A laugh. A child laughing three and a half hours after being bitten by an infected. He had not moved, but within him something had gone still in another way.

One hour.
Titis had gone to fetch soup from the kitchen. Not because she truly believed Pally would eat it. Because she needed to move. She came back with a steaming bowl and a spoon, and set them on the small table beside the bed without insisting.
Ellendia had sat on the floor, her back against the bed, her head resting against Pally's hand, which she would not let go. Tim, on the bed, had fallen asleep against Pally's thigh, his little head resting on his right thigh, his thumb in his mouth. Pally did not dare move for fear of waking him.
Braum had not left the hearth. He stared at the embers as if they could tell him what was going to happen next.
William, for his part, had sat down against the wall, far from the bed, his arms crossed over his knees, his head resting on his arms. He still had not spoken. Not once.

Two hours. Dawn was coming.
Pally still had not developed a fever.
He had even propped himself up slightly against the pillows, with Merwinn's help. He had drunk a little water. He had even accepted a spoonful of Titis's soup, more to please her than himself. His skin was pale but not gray. His eyes were clear. His breathing was slow, steady. He was in pain, obviously — with every movement of his left arm he clenched his teeth — but nothing in his body resembled what Elric had described.
Elric at last rose from his chair.
He walked slowly toward the bed. The children stepped aside without his needing to ask. He stopped two paces from the mattress, looked at Pally for a long moment, then lowered his eyes to the bandage on his left trapezius.
"How do you feel, Pally?"

His voice was not quite the same as an hour before. There was still gravity in it, but another layer had been added. Something that resembled a real question, not a rhetorical one. A question one asks when even oneself no longer knows what to expect.
Pally took his time answering. He took stock of his own body. He moved his shoulder a little and grimaced.
"Honestly," he said, "I've got nothing. Just an awful lot of pain in my left shoulder. Like someone bashed it with a white-hot hammer. But the rest..." He shrugged his right shoulder slightly. "The rest is fine."
Elric looked at him a long moment.
Then he turned his head toward Daemon. The two men exchanged a silent gaze — long, dense, containing an entire conversation. Daemon inclined his head ever so slightly. Elric closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, as though to thank something he would not name in front of them.
"Praise be to the Creator." He whispered it into his beard.
He turned back toward the gathering.

"Listen to me, all of you." His voice found again the grave footing it had held in the corridor. "What is happening here is not normal. And I need to tell you some things. Things that, normally, do not leave the circle of Paladins and those who serve the kingdom."
He looked at the orphans gathered around the bed, the children who were not yet ten, some barely five.
"But for that, I am going to ask that most of you leave this room."
Titis stepped forward at once and laid her hands on the shoulders of the youngest ones.
"Come on, my dears. Tim, come here, we're going to the great hall. I'll make you hot chocolate."
There were a few protests, quickly hushed. Titis had a way of saying "come on" that could not be argued with. The children let themselves be led toward the door, throwing worried glances back at Pally, to whom he gave each one a reassuring wink.
In the room, soon only they remained. Pally in the bed. Merwinn on his stool. Ellendia still on the floor. William against the wall near the door. Braum near the hearth. The headmistress of the orphanage. Elric. Daemon.
Elric waited a few more seconds. He pulled his chair from the hearth and drew it closer to the bed. He sat down. He joined his great hands between his knees.
And he began.

"What I am about to tell you is not told in taverns nor in marketplaces. Nor is it whispered, because whispers are seeds that grow fast. You will hear it once, and you will carry it. That is all."
He paused. Everyone had fallen silent.
"Beyond the northern sea lie lands that our maps call the Desolate Lands. Once, they bore another name. They were peopled. There were villages, roads, harvests. Today there is not a single living soul left. Not a plant. Not a bird. Nothing but snow, wind, and cold. A cold unlike any of the winters you have known. A cold that bites the bones, that snuffs out torches, that kills men in a few hours of walking."
Braum did not take his eyes off Elric.
"And in that cold, there is the pestilence. It was born there. No one knows how, nor by whose hand. It turns the dead into walkers. It turns the bitten living into walkers. And each walker, in turn, bites and turns. A single creature can lay waste to an entire village in a single night. A single one."
Merwinn swallowed.
"For a long time, those Desolate Lands were separated from us by the sea. The sea was our rampart. But the cold is spreading, slowly, methodically, and it is freezing the sea. Every winter, the ice gains ground. We send men to break it, but we break a mile while the cold gains two."
He raised his eyes toward the window, as though he could see that sea from Sleepinwood.
"The day will come when there will be no more sea. The day will come when the cold will have taken everything, and when what crawls upon the Desolate Lands will simply be able to walk all the way to us, on dry ground, without the slightest barrier. That day, if we are not ready, humanity on these lands will come to an end."
An absolute silence followed those words. Even the fire in the hearth seemed to have fallen silent.
"That is why we are building a wall."
William slowly raised his head.
"A great wall, on the northern coast, not yet finished. Paladins like me, and fire mages, are sent on expeditions to hold it. Fire and light are the only weaknesses of these creatures. That is all we know of them with certainty. It is with that that we hold."
He raised his eyes. This time they found Braum, then Pally, then settled somewhere between the two.
"And then tonight, hundreds of leagues from the wall, in a forest of Sleepinwood, an advanced-stage infected appeared."
No one breathed.
"Our investigators are trying to understand how this happened. A creature like the one that bit Pally does not cross such a distance on its own."
He marked a heavy pause.
"Someone or something brought it here."
Daemon, at the window, nodded slowly.
"We do not know who. We do not know why. We do not know how many zombies have already been moved in this way. We know only that our enemies are both outside our walls and within them. That is why Daemon and I have been dispatched to Sleepinwood. To purge this evil before it spreads. To understand how it reached this place. So that living beings are not unjustly killed by this pestilence."
He glanced at William out of the corner of his eye. He had noticed, too, the way the boy had lifted his head.

Pally, for his part, had lowered his eyes to his wound. To that left trapezius that was still burning. He thought of the creature that had stood over him, of its teeth closing on his flesh. Who could be mad and twisted enough to dare bring such a creature to Sleepinwood?
The headmistress of the orphanage had brought her hands to her mouth.
Braum, for his part, had bowed his head. His old soldier's frame seemed to have sagged a notch under the weight of what he had just learned.

Elric waited. He let the silence do its work.
Then he resumed. And his voice changed a little again. It lightened, almost imperceptibly, as if a part of the burden had detached itself to make room for something else.
"But now. Now, here is what stands before us."
He looked at Pally.
"A brave young boy," he said, and he weighed the word brave, because he said it with respect, not irony, "was bitten by an advanced-stage zombie. Nearly five hours ago. And he has not the slightest fever. He has not the slightest symptom. He laughs, he speaks, he drinks, he eats. And he even cracks jokes." Elric gave a small sideways smile while looking at Pally without turning his head.
He paused, and this pause was different from the others. It was heavy with another kind of weight.
"This has never happened. To my knowledge, and to that of my Order... never."
He let that resonate. Daemon did not move, but one could sense in his bearing that he was weighing each word Elric spoke, that he agreed, that he carried what Elric was saying with him.
"The hope of a cure," Elric continued in a lower, heavier voice, "that hope we have been seeking for so long, for so many years, through so many losses... that hope has perhaps never been as close as it is in this moment."
He turned toward Braum.
"Chief Braum. Madam Headmistress."
His voice became formal, like that of a man asking for a sacred door to be opened.
"I ask you, with all the respect I owe you, permission to propose to Pally that he come with us. Our best specialists must examine him. They must understand what is happening in his blood, in his flesh, in his will. What they discover could save thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives. I do not exaggerate my words. The survival of humanity on these lands may depend on what lies, tonight, in the body of this child."
He then turned toward Pally himself. And his gaze, which had carried such gravity from the start, softened slightly. Not much. Just enough.
"Pally. The decision is yours too. You are young, but you are not quite a child anymore after what you have been through tonight. Do you consent to accompany us to Faithstone?"

A silence followed.
All eyes had turned toward the bed.
Merwinn had laid his hand on Pally's arm, instinctively. Ellendia had not let go of his hand. Braum waited. William, against the wall, lifted his eyes with interest for the first time since this confrontation had begun.
Pally looked at Elric.
He took his time.
He thought of many things, in a single long breath. He thought of his mother without naming her. Of that helplessness he had lived through long ago, and relived tonight, paralyzed before the zombie while Merwinn was flung against the cabin wall, while Ellendia screamed his name, while they too could have died, through his fault, through his inertia. He thought of Elric, who had arrived in a flash of light and severed the creature in a single arc of his sword. A man who had not needed any more than that to do what he, Pally, had not been able to do for his mother, nor tonight for his friends.
He was sick of being helpless. He was sick of watching the people he loved die, or nearly die, without being able to reach out a hand in time.
He raised his eyes. His voice was calm.
"Yes."
Elric inclined his head slightly, marking his respect.
"But on one condition."
There was a faint shift in the room. Daemon straightened imperceptibly. Braum's brow furrowed. The headmistress blinked. A condition. This child was daring to set a condition to a Paladin of the kingdom in these circumstances.
Elric, for his part, did not flinch. There was something in his eyes that resembled a curious waiting.
"I'm listening," he said simply.
Pally drew in a breath. The pain shot through his left trapezius but he let it pass. His voice, when it came, did not tremble.
"Take me on as your disciple. I want to become a Paladin like you."

---

Sleepinwood lay, that morning, beneath a pale and hesitant light, as if the sky itself were searching for the right color for a scene it had no wish to paint. The village was the same as on any winter dawn. The slate roofs gleamed with frost. The smoke from the chimneys rose straight, without wind, into a sky of milky blue. Pierrot's shop, whose warm light could already be glimpsed behind its panes, filled the lanes with that round scent of warm bread. Further on, the tavern had already opened its doors, and one could make out the silhouette of Benz busy before his embers, preparing his famous honey-glazed rumpsteaks whose aroma perfumed the whole quarter from the earliest hours of the morning. The streets of earth hardened by frost, the banks of frosted grass, the gardens where the last cabbages were holding out beneath the whiteness. It was all there. Everything was in its place. Everything looked like Sleepinwood.

And yet, something was already missing.

That something which, without our noticing, warms a village from within the way a forgotten log warms a room long after it has been placed in the hearth.

Sleepinwood was about to lose one of its finest logs.

At the southern edge of the village, beneath the stone archway topped by two unlit lanterns, the villagers had gathered.

They had all come.
Not only the orphans. Not only Titis and Braum. All of Sleepinwood. Entire families. The old folk leaning on their canes. The craftsmen who had left their workshops open. The children who did not quite understand why they were there but sensed that they had to be. Even villagers who had never spoken much to Pally but had watched him grow up since the age of five had come, because one does not let a child one has watched grow up leave without saying goodbye.
The only one missing from the crowd was William. Seated on the roof of the orphanage, he watched the scene without moving.

Elric and Daemon stood a little apart, beneath the stone arch. They wore their traveling capes, their weapons at their hips, and two packs already harnessed to their shoulders. A third pack, smaller, lighter, hung from Daemon's free shoulder. It was Pally's.

Pally stood facing the crowd. He wore a thick cape that had been given to him, too large for him, dragging almost to the ground. His left arm was in a sling beneath the cape, and the bandage on his trapezius rose just above the collar of his shirt. His right arm, meanwhile, bore his sword in its sheath. His headband was freshly knotted on his head. His blond curls poked out in every direction as they always had, untamable. His face was still a little pale but his eyes were clear, very clear, a blue that seemed more grown-up than it had that morning.

Titis was the first. She stood in the front row, her hands joined on her apron as if to keep herself from opening them. When Pally stopped before her, she did not move at once. She had already held him in her arms in the headmistress's room. She knew she could not do it twice without collapsing. So she only took his cheek between her wrinkled fingers, the way one picks up something fragile.
"Come back to me soon, my little one."
Her eyes filled, a mixture of pride and sorrow.
Pally laid his hand over hers. His voice caught a little but he smiled, that old smile she loved so much.
"I'll come back. And when I come back, I'll take you with me, and I'll show you the wonders of this world! And you'll make me your delicious meat bread too, ha ha!"
She let out an unexpected laugh, and drops of water fell from her eyes, without sound, as she nodded, again and again.

The headmistress stood just behind. Upright, stern, her bun as tight as every other day, but her eyes were red. She did not step forward. She waited for Pally to come to her. And when he stood before her, she laid both hands on his right shoulder, and looked at him for a long moment.
"You have always been the most turbulent one in this orphanage, Pally." Her voice was softer than he had ever heard it. "Do not change out there. That is what will bring you back here."
Pally nodded.
"Yes, Madam Headmistress."
It was the first time he had ever called her by her title.

Further on, Rolf and Brat stood side by side, clinging to each other, two small silhouettes in a crowd too big for them. When Pally approached, their lips began to tremble at the same time.
"You... you're going to become a real hero, aren't you, Pally?" Rolf breathed, his voice wet.
Pally crouched down before them despite the pain that tugged at his shoulder. He ruffled both their heads of hair with one hand.
"I already am one, did you forget? And you two, you're going to become heroes as well. You train hard, and when I come back, we'll have a duel, you two against me!"
Brat sniffled, smiled, and puffed out his chest clumsily. Rolf tried to do the same but his lip was trembling too much. Pally rose slowly and gave them a wink.

Ellendia stood a few steps apart, her bow slung across her shoulder, her eyes bright but her posture straight. She stepped forward when Pally's gaze found hers. They looked at each other for a moment without saying anything.
It was Ellendia who had often scolded him for his foolishness when he was smaller. It was she who had combed his hair before festivals, who had mended his tunic in secret from Titis, who had chewed him out for dragging Merwinn into one of his stupid ideas. She had been his big sister since he had first set foot in this orphanage. And that night, she had drawn her bow against a walker for him.
She held him against her, tightly, without a word. Pally laid his forehead against her shoulder.
"Watch over him," he murmured in her ear. He did not need to say who.
"Always," she answered into his hair. "And you, come back to us stronger than ever, I believe in you."
When she let him go, she quickly wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand and stepped back, nodding toward the last person who remained.

Merwinn.
He had stayed back during the whole procession of farewells. As if by keeping his distance, he could keep the moment from arriving. His face was pallid, his eyes swollen, his hands clenched on the folds of his own cape. He watched Pally approach the way one watches something one cannot prevent.
Pally stopped before him.
For a long moment, neither of them said anything. They had never really needed words to understand each other. But this morning, silence no longer soothed them.
Merwinn was the first to speak. His voice came out in crumbs.
"You had no right."
Pally frowned slightly. "To what?"
"To leave." Merwinn swallowed. His lip was trembling. "You were there before me. You've always... you were always there when..."
He did not finish. He did not know how. What he wanted to say far exceeded what an eight-year-old boy can put into words. How to say that his first conscious memory at the orphanage was Pally holding out a hand to him in the yard? How to say that on every night when he had had nightmares in those first months, it was Pally's breathing beside him that had lulled him to sleep? How to say that he had never, never opened his eyes in that orphanage without knowing that Pally was somewhere in the same house, and that it had been enough, all those years, to give him the courage to get up?
He did not have the words. His tears were falling on their own now, without him even trying to hold them back.
Pally felt his own throat tighten. He slowly undid the strap that held his sword at his hip.
Merwinn lowered his eyes to the gesture. His breath stopped.
Pally held the sword flat, both hands resting on it, the pommel on one side, the point on the other. That sword. Their sword. The one they had recovered together by disobeying Cirilla, the one they had used against the Crimson Bandits to free the village, the one that had cut through the spider webs to free Marcel, the one that had burned beneath the lantern oil to save William, the one that had accompanied him through every battle of the adventure.
He held it out toward Merwinn.
"Take it."
Merwinn stepped back half a pace, his hands lifted as if he could not. "Pally, no, it's your..."
"Take it, Merwinn."
His voice was not an order. It was a plea held back. Merwinn raised his eyes to him. Pally met his gaze, and this time neither of them looked away.
"Where I'm going, they'll give me another one. A Paladin's. With stuff engraved on it, probably, and light inside, I suppose." He tried to smile. It only half worked. "But this one, I'm giving to you. Every time you use it, you'll think of me, and it will be as if I'm with you through every trial to come. This blade... is yours now."
Merwinn held out trembling hands. Pally laid the sword in them. Merwinn looked at it for a moment, then looked at Pally, and threw himself against his friend, hugging him with all his strength, his forehead buried in the hollow of his friend's right shoulder... He could no longer hold back his emotion.
Pally closed his good arm around him. He felt the warmth of his best friend sobbing soundlessly against his neck.
"I can't," Merwinn breathed into his cape. "I can't without you, Pally. You know I can't."
Pally closed his eyes. He felt his own tears rising and he let them rise for the first time since morning.
"Yes, you can." His voice was low, firm, steady as an oath. "And you know why? Because the one who gave me the strength to keep going was you."
Merwinn laughed through his tears. A laugh that came out in fits, that was barely a laugh, but that was there.
"Will you come back?"
"I'll come back."
"Really?"
"Really."
"Do you swear it?"
Pally drew back slightly so he could look him in the face. He took Merwinn's face between his weary fingers and planted his clear eyes into the hazel eyes of his friend.
"I swear it on what is most precious in my life. Which is you."
Merwinn burst into sobs and threw himself against him again.

Merwinn stopped breathing for an instant.
He slowly lifted his face from the hollow of Pally's shoulder. His red eyes searched his friend's, uncertain, as if he were not sure he had heard correctly.
"Me...?"
Pally nodded once. Just once. But with an adult's gravity.
"You."
Merwinn said nothing. He did not know what to do with that sentence. It was too big for him. All those years, he had seen Pally as the one who opened the way, the one who jumped first into the stream, the one who rushed into the forest without thinking. And he, Merwinn, had always followed. He had always thought he was the one being pulled along behind. The methodical one, the cautious one, the sensitive one, the little brother of the adventure.
And here was Pally, on the verge of leaving, telling him the opposite. Telling him that through all those years, it was he, Merwinn, who had been the thing Pally looked at to know why he got up in the morning. Him. The shy one. The blushing one.
He could not believe it. And at the same time, looking into Pally's eyes, he could not not believe it.
"But I... " his voice broke. "I never do anything. I've always followed you..."
"Merwinn, you're so much more than that, open your eyes, Calimero!" Pally laid his hand on the back of his friend's neck, firm, so that he would look him in the face. "You don't fall when people expect you to fall. You stay when others leave. You protect your friends to the point of exhaustion. You don't see all that I've seen for years."
Merwinn was crying now without trying to hide it, his head bowed. His shoulders were shaking. He wanted to say thank you and he wanted to say don't go and he wanted to say I don't deserve this sword and he wanted to say I'm afraid and he wanted to say a thousand things at once, and none of them came out.
Pally held him with his good arm, as tightly as he could, paying no heed to the pain it tore through his left shoulder. He felt Merwinn's wet cheek against his neck, the ragged breathing against his skin, the clenching of his friend's fingers in the cloth of his cape. He clenched his teeth to keep from cracking himself, but a tear slipped through all the same, and it went to lose itself in Merwinn's brown hair.
He leaned to his ear, and he murmured, so low that only Merwinn could hear it:
"We'll see each other again."
Merwinn nodded against his neck.
"Promise."
"Promise."
They stayed like that a moment longer. The whole village had fallen silent around them. One could hear only the breath of the cold through the branches and a few sobs coming from Titis, the headmistress, and Ellendia.
Then Pally loosened his embrace, slowly. Merwinn released him with difficulty, his fingers refusing to leave his friend's cape, as if every knuckle had to negotiate its departure separately. Pally took him gently by the wrist to help him finish.
He stepped back a pace.
Merwinn held the sword in both hands before him, point downward, like a soldier standing guard. His face was ravaged but straight. He did not take his eyes off Pally.
Pally gave him his old smile. The one from the shared bedroom, the one from the rooftops where they had poured water down on William, the one from the waterfall and the stream of the bees, the one he had given him a thousand times without knowing that this smile was the most reassuring thing Merwinn had ever known.
"Goodbye, everyone! I promise you I will come back and you will see that I will have become the strongest Paladin in the world!"
He offered them one last radiant smile that warmed the village's heart.
Pally was moving further and further away when Merwinn cried out, stepping forward:
"Pally! You'd better come back stronger! Because I'm going to become stronger than you!"
Pally burst into a small wet laugh, shook his head, and turned away.
He walked toward Elric and Daemon without looking back a single time, because he knew that if he looked back, he would not be able to take the next step.
Behind him, Merwinn held the sword tight against his chest, and he watched the silhouette of his best friend grow smaller, smaller still, until it disappeared among the pines of the northern road.