“Either way,” the Voice said with a wrinkled and weary smile, “His Majesty would be honored to accept the sword of the legendary Tevek Dracian. You can stand beside us during the battle if you like.”
“Then I shall be there,” Tevek said as he smiled and shook the other man’s hand. “Just like always.”
***
“Why can’t you direct the battle from here?” Krystia asked. “Surely you can find a few priests to relay your orders to the front lines.”
Darius smiled and pulled her tighter against him. “Garos is one of the most fortified places in the Alliance, and I’ll be protected behind two Aetheric barriers and several feet of stone. I think you might be overreacting.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
He grunted. Normally, Krystia was quite rational as far as strategy and tactics were concerned—far more than he would have expected from a young woman with virtually zero battlefield experience—but today she seemed downright terrified of him taking the portal back to Garos and conducting the war effort in person.
“The Legion Generals have a proud tradition of standing alongside their troops during defensive sieges,” he told her. “Once we’ve turned away their initial attack, I’ll be commanding our forces from the safety of one of our outposts, don’t worry.”
“You and I both know ‘tradition’ is a stupid reason to do anything,” Krystia reminded him tartly. “I really think you should stay here.”
He sighed and squeezed her leg slung across his lap. “What’s really bothering you?”
She looked away furtively. “I told you Jason and the others were heading to Garos hoping to join up. I didn’t tell you why.”
“You said they wanted to fight. They’re good people; they can see how important this is—”
“No,” Krystia interrupted. “That might be enough for Elade, but not the others. They’re going because Jason had a vision—he saw the battle going horribly wrong, and he believes he needs to be there to stop it.”
Darius cocked an eyebrow. “And you believe this premonition?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “But I’ve touched his mind, Darius; I’ve felt the spirit of the Immortal inside him. She has an unbridled power unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. Who knows if she might be right?”
“Even if she is, it doesn’t change anything. I need to be at Garos, too—and not just for tradition. A lot of these men and women haven’t faced real combat before, and certainly nothing like siege warfare. They need to see me there with them; they need to understand how much confidence I have in them. After this battle, things will be different.”
Krystia glanced down and closed her eyes, and he put his arm around her. She was actually trembling—he wouldn’t have believed it if he weren’t touching her. Apparently she was putting an awful lot of faith in a random vision…or maybe he had just underestimated how much he meant to her.
“I’ll be fine,” Darius promised. “And maybe when it’s over we can talk about…the future.”
She looked back up to him, her eyes rimmed with tears. “What do you mean?”
He smiled sheepishly. He spent his days talking to the most important people in the country where a verbal slip-up could have serious political consequences and even jeopardize his career, and yet only now did he feel nervous twinges in his stomach. “I love you, Krystia. I want to spend my life with you.”
The light in her eyes dried the tears in an instant. He had never been as paralyzed by a smile as the one that warmed her face in that moment.
“If things settle down,” he continued, “we could get ma—”
She placed a finger on his lips and swung herself around on top of him. She kissed him hungrily, and everything else seemed to fade into the background. His mind flickered to the lustful fantasies of Elade, and a wave of guilt washed over him. What had he been thinking? He had the perfect woman here, and he was going to do the right thing and marry her. He buried the dissonant thoughts and vowed to himself to keep them there, locked away in a place he would never return to.
Eventually Krystia pulled away softly, her breath tickling his lips, and she looked as beautiful as he had ever seen her. His perfect lover.
“I want you to ask Highlord Alric to divert more of his knights to Garos,” she whispered. “Just in case.”
Darius frowned and rubbed a hand through her hair. “We’ve already finalized their deployment. I sent most of the extra knights with General Wystan at the Kurdean Pass. He’s going to need them more than we will.”
“Send more knights to Garos,” Krystia repeated, her blue eyes boring into his.
Darius started to protest, but he found he couldn’t look away. She seemed to be looking into his very soul…
“You might be right,” he managed, blinking and nodding. He felt an odd pressure in the back of his skull, which probably meant he had a headache coming on. Apparently the stress was getting to him after all. “Wystan should be fine with a few less knights, and Brackengarde is even more fortified than Garos. We could use the extra help, assuming Lord Alric agrees.”
“I’m sure you can convince him. You can be very persuasive when you want to be.”
Darius nodded and looked back into her eyes. She was so lovely, so perfect, and he didn’t understand how he could have ever doubted her.
“I’ll do what I can,” he told her, rubbing a hand across her cheek. “You have nothing to worry about.”
Krystia smiled. “Do what you can to keep Jason and the others safe, too. I don’t want to see them hurt.”
“They’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine—I promise.”
He kissed her again. Krystia was so mature and confident that he occasionally forgot how inexperienced and vulnerable she really was. But that was all right. He liked the idea of her worrying about him. He liked the idea of returning to her loving embrace after each and every battle. She was just an innocent young woman, after all, and sometimes their minds were so very fragile indeed.
***
“You have to visualize exactly where you want to direct the energy from start to finish,” Selvhara whispered into Jason’s ear. “Channeling isn’t like pointing a crossbow and pulling the trigger.”
“But I’m not channeling,” he told her. “Not really.”
Her violet eyes narrowed at him. “Were you this aggravating when you were a university student?”
“Probably. I can’t help it.”
“If you want me to teach you anything, you’ll try.”
Jason grunted. It was the middle of the night, but the moon was nearly full and he could see everything reasonably clearly. The others sat nearby at the fire, watching in mild amusement as he tried to fire lightning from his hands. So far he hadn’t managed to conjure a single spark.
“Let’s try this again,” he said, extending his arm towards a rock thirty feet away. He couldn’t feel the Aether coursing through him, not like a normal channeler, but he knew he shouldn’t need to. Malacross had shown him how to summon the energy within himself, and Krystia had taught him to control it. Actually doing something with it, unfortunately, was proving to be far more difficult.
“So if I’m not really aiming,” he whispered, “what does pointing my arm accomplish?”
“Nothing,” Selvhara said, shrugging. A crackle of electricity abruptly rippled up and down her body as she glared at the target, and an instant later a bolt of lightning flashed from her eyes and scorched the stone black. “The gestures are mental tools that help your mind focus, but they’re hardly necessary.”
“Like how I always get sweaty anytime I’m flinging fireballs,” Tam put in. “It’s all for dramatic effect. I wouldn’t want our grunts on the front lines to feel like they’re the only ones working hard.”
“You get sweaty because you panic at the first sign of trouble,” Gor grumbled as he jabbed the fire with a poker. “Or because you nearly burn yourself half the time.”
Tam snorted. “Not half.
A third, at most.”
Jason took a deep breath and tried his best to ignore them. He could feel the energy coursing through his body, and he knew he could shape it into many different forms—fire, electricity, or even just a simple beam of light. He had even seen other channelers harness raw Aether and create a beam of coruscating energy capable of disintegrating virtually any substance.
But first things first. Selvhara had always excelled with lightning, and it seemed like as good a starting point as any. He stared down the length of his arm as if it were a sword pointed at his target, and he felt the hairs along his skin prickling as the energy swelled up inside him. A heartbeat later a sudden surge of power rippled through his body, and a bolt of lightning flashed from his fingertips—
And missed the rock completely. The blast fired off wildly into the forest, and he was lucky he didn’t split a tree in half and start a fire.
“Nice shot,” Tam commented. “Just don’t try that at Garos unless you’re firing wildly into a squad of enemy soldiers.”
“Perhaps you should go and sit on the rock, then,” Elade suggested with a wry grin. “I have a sneaking suspicion his aim would improve.”
Gor chortled as he shoved a hunk of meat into his mouth, and Jason lowered his arm and sighed. “It was probably a bit much to expect to become a master channeler in a few days,” he murmured.”
“Perhaps,” Selvhara said, placing a reassuring hand on his arm. “Still, you successfully conjured a spark. Now you just need to learn to control it.”
“I have a feeling that’s the hard part.”
“For most of us, yes. But you aren’t playing by the normal rules.”
Jason grunted and glanced down to his arm. His skin still tingled from the blast, and he felt almost…antsy. But it was late, and they needed to be up and moving as early as possible if they wanted to get to Garos in time.
“I’ll pick it up again in the morning,” he said. “Thanks for the help.”
As everyone else curled up in their bedrolls near the fire, Jason pulled out his canteen and walked off towards the nearby stream to fill it back up. As usual, his mind wandered as he drank, and he had just filled up the bottle for the second time when a warning tingle abruptly shot down his spine.
Spinning about, he stretched out his telepathy to the surrounding area. He felt a sudden surge of emotion, and he tried to trace it back to its source. But the stray thoughts vanished into the night wind as quickly as they’d appeared, and all he could sense were the primal emotions of the nearby wildlife. Perhaps he was more tired than he though.
He had just decided to give up and return to the camp when he heard rustling in the leaves of a nearby tree, and a split-second later a figure leapt out of the branches towards him. Dropping the container, he lifted up his hands to defend himself—
Too late. A swift punch to his stomach knocked the wind from his lungs, and a foot to the back of his knee knocked him down to the ground. He started to cry out for the others but a taut forearm pressed into his neck as the assailant climbed on top of him.
Jason glanced up into a very familiar pair of green eyes. Strands of auburn hair dangled in his face, and the flicker of emotion he had sensed earlier returned. Sarina held him pinned helplessly for what seemed like minutes before eventually releasing her arm.
“I could have killed you if I’d wanted to,” she whispered.
“Congratulations,” he muttered. “You want a prize?”
“What I want is for you to be more careful. You shouldn’t stray so far from the others. You’re not invincible just because you have some spirit living inside you.”
“I never claimed otherwise.”
“Then why the hell are you going to Garos?”
Jason sighed. He wondered how closely she had been shadowing them since they left the city. He had no trouble believing she could manage it—she was a proud Asgardian huntress, after all, and even Selvhara wasn’t nearly as skilled in the wild. What surprised him was that his telepathy hadn’t sensed her at all. Over the past few days he had gotten quite good at detecting the basic presence or absence of thoughts and tracking people with them. Apparently the technique was far from infallible.
He belatedly remembered that she had somehow managed to track a Shadow back in Taig, and they were ostensibly the masters of the telepathic trickery. Perhaps she simply fell into a trance while tracking that he couldn’t detect; Asgardians tended to rely more upon their instincts than most other people.
“Sarina,” Jason said eventually, “I told you why I need to go. Something important is going to happen, and I need to be there.”
“Because you think you can stop it?”
“I don’t know,” he conceded. “It just feels…right.”
“Fighting off an army of Crell all by yourself?” she asked. “It definitely sounds like you believe you’re invincible.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Then what is it like? Explain it to me.”
Jason frowned. “I think the better question is why this bothers you so much. You’ve been acting strange ever since I woke up in Lyebel.”
Sarina stayed silent for a long moment before finally leaning backwards away from him. Her thighs remained clamped around his waist. “I’ve seen what this power does to people.”
“You mean channeling?”
“Magic,” she replied. “Call it whatever you want, but it isn’t natural. It twists and corrupts people; it transforms them in ways you can’t predict.”
“You’re speaking about someone specific, aren’t you?” Jason asked. “Tell me.”
She grunted. “Can’t you just pluck it from my mind?”
“No. I won’t do that to you.”
“Since when?”
“Since…since I realized what I was doing,” he managed. “It was wrong even when I used it on Adar in Lyebel. I understand that now. A person’s mind should be their own.”
Sarina seemed to consider for a moment before chewing at her bottom lip. “When I was born, our family had nothing. We were hunters and soldiers, but never shaman. That privilege was reserved for families with much greater honor than ours. But when my cousin, Doyd, challenged the king and killed him, everything changed. Asgardia isn’t like Solaria—kings don’t choose their shaman based on the whims of some Council or house of nobles. They pick family and loyal friends.”
“He offered you the chance to become Bound?” Jason asked.
“Of course he did, but I didn’t want anything to do with Aether. Everyone I knew was suddenly changing around me. They didn’t care about the hunt anymore, or even the family. The more their powers grew, the more reclusive they became. They thought they were spending all day talking to the spirits, and that took precedence over everything else. I swear some of them would have forgotten to eat if I wasn’t there to remind them.”
“Is that why you left? You never told me.”
“After a while, they didn’t want anything to do with me,” Sarina said bitterly. “Imagine being the only one in your family who can’t channel. Imagine being the only one who can‘t see and talk to the spirit. I just wanted everything to return to the way it used to be.”
She glanced away and closed her eyes. A wave of emotion poured off of her, but it wasn’t sadness—it was something else he had never expected to feel from the savage Sarina Zharrs.
Fear.
Fear of being alone. Fear of being abandoned by people she cared about. Never once had Jason believed she could feel that way about anything. It was so…normal.
“I want you to be with us,” he told her. “We need you, now more than ever.”
“Why?” she whispered. “I can’t do anything the others can’t. Gor is stronger, Elade is faster, and Selvhara and Tam can channel.”
“And I’d still bet on you in a fight any day of the week,” Jason said, and meant it. “Besides, there’s more to being a team than being the best fighter. And let’s face it: you’re way scarier than Gor when you wan
t to be.”
The faintest smile touched her lips, and her thighs clamped a little more tightly around his waist. “You’re scared of me?”
“Terrified,” he said. “And I think it’s a little weird how much you seem to like that.”
“You act less stupid when you’re afraid. It’s for your own good.”
“Well, I’m still stupid enough to go to Garos. And I want you there with me.” He smiled sheepishly and placed his hands on the outside of her legs. “I missed you.”
“Galivar’s blood,” she grumbled, rolling her eyes. “If you start getting sappy, I’m going to hit you again.”
“I have a feeling you’re going to hit me anyway.”
“I thought about it. It’s not like you could stop me.”
Jason relaxed his guard for a moment, then abruptly grabbed onto her waist and wrestled her off him. Her right hand came up to slap him, but he got a firm hold on her wrist and held it in place. An instant later he caught her left wrist as well, and with a surprisingly deft move he pinned her arms behind her back before crawling on top of her. Her eyes flashed with a primal challenge as she struggled against his grip. It took every ounce of strength he could muster to hold her in place, though deep down he knew she wasn’t really trying to escape. After a brief struggle she bit at his chin and squeezed him tightly enough with her legs he could hardly breathe.
Pressing his full body weight down on top of her, he finally brought their lips together. He had kissed her many times, but never like this. The warmth of her breath, the taste of her skin, all of those he could remember. But he had never felt her like this before, the lust and raw animalism seeping from her mind to his. She wrenched her arms from his grip and brought them behind his back to pull him even closer.
When they finally parted, mouths only the thinnest breath away, her lips stretched into a smile he hadn’t seen in far too long. The way her eyes lit up, the way her cheeks pinched—the entire world seemed to fade into the background.
The Godswar Saga (Omnibus) Page 76
