by Dale Lucas
And yet . . . Wallenbrand was right. Rem could be anywhere. Finding him in these woods—even if he was alive and mobile—could take a very long time. Shouldn’t saving an innocent girl, now held prisoner by robbers and thieves, matter more? Wasn’t that what Rem and Torval did, every single day, on the streets of Yenara?
The dwarf hung his head. Sighed. He wanted Osma’s good counsel. He wanted his children’s hugs and kisses. He wanted his partner here, to talk sense to him. To convince him.
But Rem was gone, and Torval would have to convince himself.
“Forgive me,” he muttered under his breath.
“What’s that?” Tuvera asked.
“Fine. You have me,” Torval said with a sigh. “What’s the plan?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“So,” Tzimena asked, tired of the silence between them for the past few hours, “what was your plan, precisely?”
It was well after dark now, the passage they occupied once more swathed in darkness. The silhouettes of two guards haunted the open mouth of the passage, sharp against the dim, flickering light of torches and candles emanating from the larger cavern chamber beyond. That distant, secondhand light from outside allowed Tzimena to just make out the narrow vertical stripes of Korin’s cage bars. She imagined Korin’s view of her cage was no better.
“What does it matter now?” Korin asked. His voice was hoarse, soft. The voice of despair. The voice of defeat.
“It matters because, if one or both of us are to die, I’d like to share something true with you. Just once. Just so we both know exactly what we believed might happen.”
Perhaps it’s a foolish hope, she thought. But it feels appropriate somehow, like the last gold we can mine from the tapped vein of our love for one another. It was a childish love, of course, a love built on dreams and infatuation, not reality, but maybe, just maybe, truth could now redeem it, could make the memory of it not so bitter.
Korin sighed. “I honestly don’t know,” he said. “I swear, my intentions were honorable.”
“I doubt that,” Tzimena said quietly.
“Earnest, then,” Korin said. “When we ambushed the honor guard from Erald and I found that dispatch indicating that you and Verin were to be married, it stirred something in me. I know you don’t believe me, Tzimena—and I suppose I don’t blame you for doubting—but I really did think of you every day while I was making a life out here. They were idle thoughts, true—where is she now, what’s she doing now, who’s she loving now—but my memory of you, and my desire for you, never left me.”
Damn him, he sounded as if he meant it. There was a weariness in his voice, a sense of capitulation, that suggested he was too tired to lie, too beaten. Then again, she’d begun to suspect that Korin, for all his passion and single-mindedness, was also quite adept at fooling himself. If there had ever been a man who could have talked himself into believing he carried a torch for someone through the years, when in fact they’d never been more than a tiny adjunct to his everyday idylls, it was Korin Lyr. The man loved a good story, the more doomed and romantic the better.
“All right, then,” she said. “I never left your thoughts. Something stirred in you when you found out I was betrothed to your brother. Then what? It would’ve taken you a week or more to get to Yenara once you set out. What on earth did you think would happen once you got there, if you were able to fool my keepers and get close to me?”
Korin was silent for a time. She imagined him shrugging in the dark, but of course she could see nothing. He was only a voice buried deep in a well of shadow.
“I really don’t know. I think, in my mind, I told myself that you would never want to marry Verin—not unless your mother forced you into it. Maybe, I thought, once you knew that I was alive, you’d decide you wanted to be a part of the life I built here, if only to escape the one waiting for you.”
“The Red Raven and his errant bride,” Tzimena said, half to him and half to herself. “Would I get a colorful nickname, too?”
“The Ladyhawk,” Korin said. She heard a smile in his voice. “Or maybe the Bloody Robin?”
“Clearly you hadn’t thought it through,” Tzimena said. She, too, was smiling now. She rather fancied the Raven Queen.
“Was I wrong? Was that wholly impossible?”
Tzimena paused. Searched herself, desperate to give him an honest answer. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “There’s a part of me that might have wanted that . . . might have liked that. In truth, when you came into my chambers and I saw you, I was too shocked to think of anything. You were speaking, Captain Tuvera was speaking, all sorts of words swirled around me, but I couldn’t focus. All I could do was try to reason out why the captain of the honor guard sent to fetch me looked so much like you.”
“Then you sent Tuvera away,” Korin said. “Had you realized what was happening by that time?”
“I think so,” she said. “But we didn’t have long, did we?”
“No,” Korin said, regret putting a sharp edge on his voice. “No, we didn’t.”
“I don’t know what I might have done, had you managed to paint a better picture of what might be for me,” Tzimena said. “But once you fled, once I had time to think and reflect, I knew which way I was leaning. And my answer would have been no.”
Korin said nothing. She could actually hear him breathing in the dark. Aemon, was that answer so unexpected for him? So shocking?
“Why?” Korin finally managed. “How? How could you just . . . stay?”
“Because it’s my life, Korin,” she said. “I was raised to rule. I was raised to lead. I was raised to give something to the world. I have my days when I hate that responsibility and wish I could flee from it, but it will not leave me be. And so I think I would have said no.”
“But the words we shared on the road. Stolen, in the darkness—”
“I was still wrestling with myself,” Tzimena said. “I knew I wanted to see you freed and away . . . but I was never entirely certain I would go with you.”
Again silence. He was fuming, she could tell. She could almost imagine his face, frowning in the dark, his eyes downcast, his brow knit angrily.
“Why did you come with me when I fled, then?” he asked.
“I didn’t,” Tzimena countered, feeling anger rising in her now. Was he really this blind? This foolish? “You threatened our companions and forced me to go with you.”
Korin said, “I just assumed—”
“Well, you assumed wrongly,” Tzimena countered. “I did everything I could short of grabbing a weapon and wounding you, Korin, but you used me as a human shield and dragged me off anyway. Besides, when I saw you’d cut down anyone who followed, and that that boy, Rem, wouldn’t leave off, I was forced to decide: Would I let him die saving me, or would I relent and maybe save him? I chose the latter.”
“Who is he to you?” Korin said.
“He was innocent,” Tzimena said. “Caught in the middle of all this. Unlike you, Korin Lyr, I won’t have innocent people suffering on my behalf, or dying for my lost causes.”
Perhaps that was a low blow, but she didn’t care anymore. She was determined now to make him see. If some terrible fate awaited him, she wanted him to die with clarity, with the truth lodged at the center of his heart and mind like arrow points that were impossible to extract.
His love for her did not justify hazard to innocent lives.
His love for her did not obligate her to abjure her responsibilities simply to feed his desires, his ego.
And her love for him, no matter how pure once upon a time, could not save him from the reckoning that his actions demanded. He had to be punished for his wrongs. Perhaps she would have to be, as well.
Maybe that was the difference between them. She was ready to suffer for her sins. He’d spent five years in the wilderness running from his own.
“So,” Korin finally said, “our love is a lost cause? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I suppose so,” Tzimen
a answered. “Or rather . . . I do love you, Korin. When I realized that it was you in that Eraldic livery—that you were alive, that you hadn’t died under a brigand’s knife in these woods—it lifted a weight from me. It gave me hope for all sorts of things. Maybe not our love—because that was something from the past, something young and hopeful, no longer even real—but if you could be alive, so miraculously, then, maybe, all sorts of miracles were possible. Maybe marrying your brother wouldn’t make me miserable. Maybe ruling by his side in Erald wouldn’t be the end of something but a beginning. Maybe the road ahead was actually just as bright—just as full of possibility—as I thought all the untraveled roads behind me were.”
“And what of me?” Korin asked, and she could hear the anguish and bitterness in his voice—the self-centered sort borne only in the hearts of religious zealots and love-struck young men, a bitterness fueled by a monstrous sense of entitlement, suddenly denied all that it had claimed as its own by right. “What of the love I felt? The hopes I held, that were thrown down and trampled?”
Tzimena weighed her response carefully. She wasn’t trying to hurt him now, but to help him. To awaken him. To make him see something, clearly, for the first time in his moonstruck, daydreamy life.
“I never wanted to hurt you, Korin,” she said. “But I couldn’t lie to you, either. If you would not hear my words and know that I spoke truly, I’d have to break away from you and let you figure it out in time . . . apart from me.”
He fell silent again. Outside, far away, an owl screeched.
“You’re cruel,” he said with a sigh.
She wanted to respond that she was not—that it was only his frustrated need, the denial of his satisfaction, that made it seem so. But what was the point?
Perhaps some people couldn’t be helped.
Perhaps some people would never listen, no matter how clearly and directly you spoke to them.
Tzimena decided to change the subject. “What do you think will happen now? Honestly. No lies, no bravado.”
Korin didn’t answer for a long, long time. “They’ll kill me and sell you,” he said finally.
Tzimena felt the sting of tears. She wished she could see him. Look into his eyes, so that he knew that cruel was the last thing she wanted to be right now.
“I wish it could be otherwise,” she finally said, having nothing else to offer.
“Why should you?” Korin asked, and she heard that bitterness again. “Clearly you don’t care what happens to me . . . or who you’re sold to, for that matter.”
It was her first instinct to respond with rancor. To hurl a few insults of her own at him and put him in his place. How dare he judge her! How dare he accuse her of being so coldhearted? So mercenary?
But could she really have expected anything else? Had he given her any cause to hope for more?
The man who Korin Lyr might have been died in these woods, she thought sadly. The thing left in his place is the boy, frozen forever despite age and experience, a young soul expecting all the world to bend to his will, to feed his desires, to spare his feelings and the stirrings of his heart.
I’d like to hate him . . . but I only pity him.
“I’m sorry you think so,” were the only words she could find. He offered no response to them.
After a while the darkness and silence proved too delicious to resist. Tzimena Baya let sleep take her, and she didn’t open her eyes again until morning.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
It was strange, Rem thought, how far the passage of a single day could take one from one’s imagined place or destination in the world to a wholly different one. How quickly comfort could turn to desperation, how suddenly failure could be spun around and transmogrify into victory.
This morning, he’d awakened on the ground, in the woods, lost and alone, separated from his companions.
By midday he’d been hanging upside down in the cabin of a clan of wilderness cannibals, praying to find some way out of his predicament, hoping against hope that, at the very least, he would not breathe his last breath in that fetid cabin and end up in someone’s stew pot, to be consumed and shat out at a later date.
Now here it was, well after dark, and he was no longer alone, and no longer being threatened with murder and consumption.
He was, however, taking his evening meal with an orcish war band, wholly unsure if he was their guest or their prisoner. He wondered if Torval could ever believe such a thing possible, let alone forgive him for such a lapse in etiquette.
Inbred and backward those Bloody Boskers might have been, but from the instant the orcs tore into the cabin and charged, Rem’s captors had fought like rabid wolves to protect their home ground. Old great-mother herself—so bent and frail, a victim of hard living, too many years, and poisoned, consanguineous lineage—had snatched up a meat cleaver from a nearby butcher’s block and gone to work, charging the big troll that had torn the cabin’s front door off its hinges before removing a broad portion of the cabin’s rear wall. Great-mother hacked at the big beast with abandon. Watching her bloody attack on a much larger opponent, Rem was reminded of Torval’s brave fight with an angry albino orc almost a year earlier.
Siebel and Swifty, meanwhile, had done their level best to hold off the orc band that charged through the cabin’s front door. The little goblin archer in the company had studded the pair with a bevy of arrows, but that hadn’t stopped them. Like the dumb beasts they were, lumbering, twisted Siebel and flesh-dressed Swifty had been cut and bloodied and pierced but had fought on. Siebel had been neutralized only when one of the orcs—a fierce-looking, mottle-skinned buck wielding a rather nasty-looking long-bladed spear—had run him through and pinned him to the cabin’s wall. Only then could another of the orcs—a fearsome female wielding a deadly, curved saber that looked to be of eastern make—move in for the kill and finish the monstrous thing. Swifty, meanwhile, had gotten close enough to the goblin archer to snatch his bow from his hand and try to throttle him. He’d only gone down when a stocky, potbellied orc with a battle-ax chopped one leg out from under him. It had been the spear wielder who then stepped in, drew a strange knife with a forward-curving blade, and hacked off Swifty’s head to still his murderous, grasping hands.
In the midst of the chaos and carnage, Rem’s pendulous, upside-down position was suddenly compromised. As great-mother fought the big troll, the hulk had stumbled into the center of the cabin, its long arms flailing all about to both defend it and seek a weapon to use against the bloody-minded matriarch. Unintentionally, the troll’s big, waving arms had struck the overhead beam that Rem was tied to, cracking the lumber in an instant. When the beam dipped and shattered, the ropes holding Rem to it slid from it and down he went, his head smacking hard on the plank floor of the cabin before the rest of him followed in a bound-up heap.
Rem refused to lose the moment, however. Even as his head ached and his vision swam, he started wriggling and grasping, trying to pull the ropes loose and free himself. His vision had only begun to clear by the time his legs were free. Rem searched around him for some sign of imminent danger, and saw it already looming.
Brown Bon, the stooped male who’d been helping young Fopsy by the cookpot, was roaring down upon him, a big, rusted old knife in his hands, stinking, near-toothless mouth open and shouting incoherently as he charged. Rem, desperate and enraged, scrambled to his feet and charged right at the ugly bastard, just managing to stop his falling knife hand before driving Brown Bon backward. Up close, he could smell the terrible stench of the man’s breath and sweat, the unwashed, oily hair, the vague undertone of shit and filthy skin. Just being this close to the vile bugger made Rem want to flee and retch, but Brown Bon wasn’t giving an inch. He’d gone blood-wild and kept trying, with all the considerable strength in him, to plunge that dull, rusty knife he held into Rem’s face or chest.
They hit the cook pot. The huge cauldron jostled under their weight and sloshed scalding stew onto Rem’s right arm. It hurt like the sundry hell
s, but Rem refused to give in to the pain. He was in a fight for his life now, and there was no time for niceties or licking wounds. A moment later, their feet scrambled together on the floor and Rem suddenly felt something burning creeping up his leg. He dared a glance and saw that, having ventured too close to the cookfire, his right leg was aflame.
That slew Rem’s desire to keep grappling with Bon. He threw all his weight against his opponent, pressing Brown Bon hard against the stew pot and launching himself backward. Rem lost his balance instantly and hit the floor, but he was astonished when he blinked and raised his eyes and saw that Brown Bon himself was now on fire. Not just his trouser leg or boots, either; he’d been shoved so far into the fire beneath the cauldron that the flames had licked up his legs and torso instantly. The cannibal screamed and wheeled round, trying to douse the flames as they began their hungry gnawing at him. As the fire engulfed his head and shoulders, his hair smoking, the whiskers on his face in flames, his screams screwed higher and higher, toward an almost birdlike pitch.
Fopsy, who’d been lurking at the periphery of their duel, screamed, the sight of her onetime cooking companion going up in flames clearly a painful one.
Brown Bon lurched forward, his eyes glaring out of his blackening face and fixed on Rem, eager for one last deadly blow. He took one step, another, raised the knife.
Then the troll intervened. The big, galumphing brute picked up the still-attacking great-mother by her bent legs and swung her sideward like a club. Great-mother slammed hard into the now-blazing Brown Bon, and the two fell silent in the same instant. Their broken bodies were cast aside. The troll gave an audible sigh of relief.
Fopsy was still screaming, arms flailing, mad with fright and grief and who knew what other primitive emotions. Something in Rem suggested—even through his desperation—that he should try to comfort the girl, to silence her. But that was not to be. Just as Rem moved to approach her, the orc female swept in from the side and cut down the screaming woman with her saber. Fopsy gave a last rasp, a rattle, and died.
