Soldier Saved

by D. K. Holmberg

  “What sort of obligation were you asked to fulfill?”

  Could he not know?

  That seemed difficult for Endric to believe, especially as connected as Dendril must have been. Dendril had been the one to summon Dentoun, and his uncle had saved him following his foolish challenge. There must have been some communication that remained, but perhaps not nearly as much as what Endric believed.

  “The kind of obligation that required I travel the mountains alone, naked.” He met his father’s eyes unblinkingly. He could feel Pendin watching him and suspected that whatever else he might keep from his friends, there would be questions he would need to answer about this. That would be for later. For now, he would focus on Dendril’s reaction and see what he might say about this.

  Endric had anticipated Dendril being appreciative of what he’d been willing to do, the sacrifice that he had made. Because of that sacrifice, Dendril would be welcomed back to the Antrilii as something other than an oathbreaker. Could he not see that?

  “You have no obligation that would require such a task,” Dendril said.

  “I am the son of Dendril, descendent of the Antrilii. That gave me an obligation.”

  Dendril grunted. “That gives you the right to learn, and the possibility of leaving. Nothing else. That should not be mistaken for an obligation to the Antrilii.”

  “You would have had me do otherwise?”

  “I would have had you return sooner.”

  “I thought you accepted that I needed to understand the Antrilii.”

  “Understand, yes. What you did…”

  “Made me Antrilii.”

  Dendril took a deep breath before letting it out in a long sigh. “I suppose it did.”

  Endric frowned again. Why would his father be so opposed to his being gone so long as he had? Endric had been only newly raised to his role, and there would have been many others within the Denraen who could serve in his stead. Listain’s death would have been difficult, but not insurmountable, especially not with Senda having returned to the city.

  “What happened while I was away?”

  “It’s not so much as to what happened as about what remained.”

  Endric frowned. His father made no sense.

  “You prove that you can charge the teralin. There aren’t many who can do that.”

  “Tresten can charge teralin,” Endric said.

  “Tresten has been away from the city for a while as well,” Dendril said.

  “What is this about?”

  Dendril flicked his gaze to Pendin for a moment and then back to Endric. He stepped forward, grabbing the handle of his door, and pushed it open. “Step inside, Endric. We have much to talk about.”

  Endric glanced at Pendin, who nodded at him, encouraging Endric to follow.

  What was it that Pendin knew that Endric did not? What was it that his father wasn’t sharing with them?

  Not only was it strange, but it was frustrating as well. Why did there have to be such mystery upon his return?

  As he stepped inside the room, he realized that someone had been there before them.

  And then he understood the reason for the mystery.

  Urik stood near the far wall. He was dressed simply in all gray—not a Denraen uniform but close enough—and looked well. Certainly better than he deserved.

  Endric’s hand went to the hilt of his sword almost instinctively, ready to unsheathe it. The last time he’d faced this man, he had barely won. Endric had improved since then—the time with the Antrilii had taught him much—and he didn’t intend for there to be a challenge.

  Endric’s mind began racing, trying to work through what he’d seen and what he’d heard. Pendin and his father had talked about what had changed, and his father had mentioned teralin, something the man standing in front of him had much experience with.

  Endric forced his hand away from the hilt of his sword.

  There was more taking place here than he understood. Urik was not a prisoner—or at least did not appear to be. This in spite of the fact that he had betrayed the Denraen and attempted to usurp his father’s rule.

  Urik smiled at him, one that seemed flat and devoid of emotion. “Endric. It’s good that you return home.”

  2

  The pint of ale sitting in front of Endric did nothing to improve his mood. The ale tasted flat and bland, two traits that made for a miserable mug. The only thing that made it better was the fact that he sat across from Senda and Pendin as he drank it.

  “It’s better in the officers’ hall,” Endric muttered.

  Pendin grunted before chugging his mug and setting it down with more force than necessary. “Aye, better, but you needed to be away from there. I feared that you might do something—”

  Senda watched him, saying nothing. Every so often, her gaze would drift to Pendin and she would purse her lips together as if she wanted to say something but never did. Her hair had grown longer in the time that he’d been away, and she tied it back with a leather thong. She wore tight-fitting green pants with a shirt that showed far more cleavage than he would’ve expected from her. Not that he minded. Though, from the leering glances she got from others in the tavern, he suspected few men minded.

  “Might?” Senda asked. “More likely would do.”

  “The man deserves to die,” Endric said.

  “The man has information,” she told him.

  He looked over and she met his gaze unflinchingly. He breathed out heavily, realizing that perhaps Pendin was right and he should have sought out Senda before searching for his father. They might have better prepared him so that he wasn’t so surprised.

  “After everything that he did, after what happened to Listain, you would allow him to live?”

  “It’s not my choice. My commander has decided that he can serve the Denraen.”

  Dendril had been quite vague about what Urik could do to serve, and Endric wasn’t sure that he even wanted to know. If he did, what would it change?

  “What happened while I was gone?” Endric asked.

  Pendin grabbed Endric’s mug of ale and tipped it back, taking a long drink. He glanced around the tavern, a place called the Climbing Trellis, a tavern that he should have known better than to have agreed to come to. Not only was the ale terrible, but the waitress was a woman Endric once had known far better than Senda would like.

  “He asks us about what happened while he was gone, and he’s the one who was sent away from the Antrilii and into the mountains naked.”

  Senda grinned and looked over. “Naked?”

  “It’s not quite like you think.”

  “I think it means that you were naked.”

  Pendin motioned over a waitress, who set another mug in front of him. “The way Endric prefers to enter every battle,” he said.

  Endric shot him a hot glare, but Pendin either ignored him or managed to withstand the heat of it as he focused on the ale.

  “It’s not something I did by choice.”

  “So the Antrilii got you naked against your will?” Senda asked.

  “I was hoping you would be willing to share a little bit about this,” Pendin said. He took a drink and leaned forward on his elbows, watching Endric. It hadn’t taken very long for them to fall back into the playful pattern they once had. Endric was appreciative of it. If nothing else, it meant that not all things had changed during his time away.

  “It was about my father,” he said.

  “You had to get naked because of your father?” Senda asked. “I know the Antrilii have different customs, but that…”

  Endric shook his head. “They view him as an oathbreaker.”

  He could share that much with them, even if he couldn’t share what oath his father was believed to have broken. What did it matter that the Antrilii hunted groeliin? What mattered was that there was an oath, and his father—and by association, him—was felt to have violated it. He had needed to satisfy that oath and do what he could to reclaim their place within the Antr
ilii.

  “They felt that he did not meet an obligation that he had committed to. Because of that, I was required to serve in his place.”

  The smile faded slightly from Senda’s face. “Why did you have to go naked into the mountains?”

  “Presumably to die.”

  “How would you die?”

  Endric shrugged. “There are dangerous creatures that roam the mountains in the far north. They sent me without weapons and without clothing and expected me to either die or kill a pack of them.” He hoped that was vague enough, but at the same time would provide detail that would allow Pendin to not think Endric was holding back. He didn’t want his friend to know. As he looked at Senda, he suspected he would have to tell her more. There was a question in her eyes, one that would not be satisfied by vague answers.

  “Since you’re here, it seems that you managed to kill as many of these creatures as you were supposed to?” Pendin asked.

  Endric shrugged again. “I made a club out of a tree branch and used that to kill a laca, and then used its fur to keep me warm. After that, it was easy.”

  Pendin watched him and seemed to be waiting for more—as if Endric were telling him a joke, and when he didn’t, he laughed anyway. “That’s it?”

  “Isn’t that enough?” Endric asked.

  “Probably enough, but I still don’t understand why you decided you were willing to risk yourself like that,” Pendin said. “You went for answers and you were put to a test.”

  Endric stared at the now-empty mug sitting in front of him. After being gone as long as he had been, he should have wanted to drink it, but he wanted nothing more than to rest. He’d come back to Vasha to continue his role as en’raen—promotion to Raen would be unlikely considering how little time he’d actually spent leading—but he’d found only more questions.

  “I went for answers, and I found them. They weren’t the answers I thought I wanted—or needed—but they were answers anyway.” The waitress returned and set another mug in front of him. He took a drink and when he set it down, he noted Senda watching him.

  She had a sad expression on her face and he forced a smile, knowing there was nothing he could say that would change the time they’d spent apart. Maybe it had been too long apart. When they’d last been together, there had been the promise of something more—the promise that they would begin to grow the closeness between them. His choice had been to leave her, knowing that it risked what they were developing, but knowing as well that it was something he needed to do. He had to know more about the part of himself that was Antrilii. Without knowing that side of himself, he would never know what more he could be, if anything.

  And his father intended for him to be general. Endric didn’t know if that would happen, but understood that he could never be the Denraen general without knowing all that he could about his past and what it meant for his future.

  “We don’t have to talk about this now,” Senda said softly.

  “If not now, then when will we talk about it?” Endric asked.

  “I can see that you’re in no condition to do this. You’ve barely returned to the city—”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m not prepared to do what’s necessary to understand Urik’s betrayal—and my father’s sudden willingness to work with him.”

  “Your father had no choice.”

  “None? I think there are plenty of choices. We’ve seen how many there are, and what happens when the wrong one is made.”

  “You don’t understand, Endric. Your father didn’t have any choice.”

  Endric fixed Senda with an intense stare. In the time that he’d been away, she had changed. She still had the playfulness to her that had always drawn him, but there was a serious edge there as well. That hadn’t been there before. She carried tension around the corners of her eyes, and her mouth was pinched in a bit of a frown, as if she disliked the fact that he sat across from her.

  Endric hadn’t given much thought to what Senda had been doing over the last year. Without Listain, she likely had been placed in a greater role, one with more responsibility to the Denraen, one where her particular talents—the developing of assets much as Listain once had done—would have been essential. How much of Listain’s network had been destroyed with his death? Would Senda have known enough about his network to have been able to maintain it, or had the Denraen lost even more than he had realized with the spymaster’s death?

  Senda seemed as if she wanted to tell him something, though whatever it was never escaped her lips. There were many secrets that she kept to herself, and he’d never been upset by it in the past, but he’d never had an opportunity to feel as if he were deserving of more information. When he’d been little more than a simple soldier, it wasn’t his role to know more about the Denraen. When he’d been raised to the level of en’raen, he’d been kept separate from Listain’s knowledge as well, though that was more about the fact that he wasn’t ready for what the spymaster knew, and his father had wanted to prevent him from endangering the Denraen.

  Now, Endric felt as if he needed to know what they were keeping from him, and he needed to understand details.

  “What is it that I don’t understand? I thought I was coming back so that I could help guide the Denraen. I hadn’t realized that I would be coming back to face the traitor who had betrayed us.”

  “If your father had any other choice, I don’t think he would have allowed this,” Senda said.

  “You keep saying that. Why wouldn’t he have any other choice? There are others who could help with the teralin. I’ve seen it myself. What about Novan?” Brohmin had been in the north with Endric before disappearing somewhere to the east, but the historian should have been available. He wasn’t entirely certain what role the historian played in everything that had occurred, but there was no doubting the fact that he had significant skill, and likely a connection to the teralin, even though he’d been tainted by the dark teralin the same way that Brohmin had been.

  “Because he needs to charge the teralin. He recognizes the need so that the Deshmahne can’t acquire any more of the teralin found within the mountain.”

  “Why not Tresten?” The Mage had been responsible for charging most of the teralin when Endric had last been here. If anyone were to continue working with it, it would be him. Maybe that was why Tresten had sent the summons.

  Senda and Pendin shared a glance. “You don’t know?” Senda asked.

  “Know what? I haven’t been back in the city long enough to know anything.”

  “Tresten.”

  “What about Tresten?”

  “He’s gone, Endric.”

  “When will he return?” He hadn’t heard of too many of the Magi leaving Vasha, but if any would, he wasn’t surprised to learn that Tresten would be among them. There was something unusual about Tresten, a uniqueness that few of the Magi possessed. He was thankful that he could consider Tresten something of a friend. Could his departure be the reason that he’d sent a request for Endric to return?

  “He’s not returning,” Senda said.

  “Not returning?”

  As he looked at Senda, and saw the way her eyes had taken on something of a haunted expression, he realized what it was that he was missing. It wasn’t only that Tresten wasn’t returning. Tresten was gone. And likely for good.

  “What happened?”

  She shook her head. “We don’t know.”

  “You don’t know, or you won’t tell me?”

  She blinked, and he couldn’t tell whether that meant that she was keeping something from him or whether it meant that she didn’t know anything. With Listain’s absence, it was possible that she didn’t know anything. The spymaster had been the one to maintain most of the assets outside of the city, though Senda had once been one of those assets. She also had cultivated her own assets.

  “I don’t know,” Senda said, lowering her voice.

  “Was it natural?” Tresten had been old when Endric had known him, and even the Magi even
tually succumbed to time and age. It wouldn’t be altogether unsurprising for him to have passed simply by nature of his advanced age. Something told him that wasn’t exactly the case.

  “He… he fell,” Senda said. She hesitated before answering, and he couldn’t tell whether the hesitation implied uncertainty about what she told him, or whether it represented concern about sharing at all.

  “Fell? The Magi don’t simply fall.”

  She shrugged. “Tresten did.” She held her hands up and met his gaze. “I can’t get clean answers. He was in the palace and something happened to him, though word does not make it outside of the palace very easily. It never has. The Magi are tightlipped, more so since the Deshmahne attack, and even more since Listain has been gone.”

  “Listain still had connections within the palace?” That actually surprised Endric. Listain was well-connected, but he would not have expected the man to have maintained that network among the Magi.

  “He had his sources. Not all within the palace are Magi.”

  Endric grunted. Leave it to Listain to utilize the servants even within the palace. It required a special skill to think in that manner, and Senda certainly shared it.

  “You don’t think it was entirely natural.”

  She took a deep breath, and if he hadn’t have known her as well as he did, he wouldn’t have realized how carefully she chose her words. “I have no reason to believe it was anything but a natural occurrence. People fall all the time.” She held his gaze and did not blink.

  Endric glanced over at Pendin, but his friend remained buried in his ale.

  He was missing something, and he hated that. If nothing else, Listain—and for that matter, Urik—had taught him to think through things so that he could be better prepared. He felt unprepared now. Tresten had summoned him. That was why he was here.

  Senda wouldn’t share with him what she knew. Either she had been told not to, or she didn’t view him as high-ranking enough to share. Which meant that he had only one option.

  After as long as he had been gone, would his father tell him anything further?