A/N: This was written for a prompt at a new Tamora Pierce site called Goldenlake, which -take it from me- is a thousand kinds of awesome! It's run by Treanz-Alyce and seori and ubiquitous girl and a bunch of other amazing people, so obviously it is. :) Link (take out the spaces, or it won't work) http:// www. fiefgoldenlake .proboards.

Disclaimer: TP owns Tortall.

Vania is twenty-six, tough, smart, pretty and young: she has everything she could ever want, including her own command. Sometimes poems are written to her, and extravagant compliments are paid to her, but their authors don’t know about the long scar across her back, or that she has soaked her uniform with blood and fought in close quarters, her ears full of screams and explosions, seen comrades die and killed in the name of mercy.

It is on nights like this, the still, cloudless ones, that Vania remembers everyone she has lost. Some of the Riders who knew her as a child. Family- her brother Liam, killed in battle, her father, dead from a heart attack, Great-Uncle Gareth from simple old age. Some of her own Rider Group, and some she barely knew but who died fighting beside her. Their ghosts surround her as she sits in the silent palace gardens, too far from the party to hear more than a dim, muffled clamour of music and chatter.

They don’t accuse, they don’t judge; mostly, they don’t say anything at all. Once, she thought her father kissed her cheek, and there was one time before a battle when she thought that Liam stood at her shoulder, a hand on the pommel of his sword- but mostly they are just there.

Vania does not know whether she is comforted or not.