The Blood Wars Trilogy Omnibus: Volumes 1 - 3

by T. A. Miles

  Gairel gave a tense nod, transferring the order given to him to others standing in his vicinity. Oshand did the same, as did Rahl. While the men and some few women at arms made their way from the office, those remaining continued to discuss the impending attack and what measures would be taken in the event of invasion.

  “If Morenne breaks through fully, I don’t know if there will be anything we can do,” Alledar said from a chair he’d taken at the central table. His meaty hands were folded together as he hunched somewhat wearily over the varnished surface before him.

  The past several days had taken its toll on all of them. These men were of comfortable stations within a city that had slept reasonably free of worry for quite some time. Their stamina was untested, but would surely be tested now. Vlas found himself less frustrated by that and marginally more sympathetic than he had been upon arrival to Indhovan.

  “We can’t let it come to that,” Deitir said of invasion.

  “No,” Lady Ilayna agreed. “Indhovan is the last strong city on the coast. Cenily is smaller and has been sending many of its resources out.”

  “She’s right,” said a man with a bandaged upper arm, whose name escaped Vlas in the moment. “What Cenily has in reserve would be no match for an army the size and strength of Morenne’s forces.”

  “Ti’ann is in a similar state and lies next in line when the enemy turns its attention inward from the sea,” Vlas inserted. “Its neighbor, Oleyn, is closer to Indhovan’s size and in a comparable state of preparedness militarily. To the north, Dremahs has been putting all of its effort into protecting the northern woods since Haddowyn’s fall. Thankfully, news of what happened there awakened them to the reality of the threat.”

  He went to the table and the large map unfurled across its surface. His gaze swept across the territory that still remained to Edrinor, growing smaller … closing in as if Morenne were the curling fist of a god. “In the west we have Lilende and Temstead, one the home of Edrinor’s barely recognized steward. Beneath them lays South Meadows, under constant assault for the past several decades. Should Morenne secure routes through the Meadows, through Lilende or Dremahs, and through the eastern shore, they’ll converge on Vassenleigh and the Old Capital. They will have managed total conquest.”

  “We’ll stop them,” someone assured.

  Vlas looked to Deitir, even though he knew the voice didn’t belong to the governor’s heir. Perhaps he wanted to see the affirmation in the young man’s dark eyes before giving his own gaze to the man who’d spoken. It was the man with the bandaged arm, who had been introduced before the meeting began—Vlas now recalled—as Firard Mortannis. He was old enough to have lost a great deal and young enough—though more in mind than in body—to yet maintain some fervor for the fight that remained. And that was the precise tone that they needed now.

  “Yes, we will stop them,” Vlas said to Firard. And then to all of them, “We have no other option.”

  Finding Sethaniel could only have been easier had Korsten been looking for himself. Memory readily served him the location of the library. The door was closed, but locking doors was not a family or household habit—or it hadn’t been. Korsten placed his hand upon the latch and felt some relief that it gave with the slightest pressure. He was able to open the solid partition relatively quietly. Was he hoping to sneak in or to not disturb his parent?

  He left the question unanswered in his mind while he slipped into a space he could not have forgotten had he tried. A shelf that was both thick and tall—though not as tall as childhood memories would have it—met him at once. The spines of many books spanned in either direction before him. The front-facing shelf reached across the center of the room, stopping before walls of evenly spaced shelving to either side. Korsten pushed the door closed behind him, feeling the weight of the wooden partition as it was taken into the frame’s embrace. He selected to go to his right, beneath beams of light and some floating dust which draped across the top of the shelves, extending from a series of high-set rectangular windows along the far wall. Apart from those, there were three other windows to the space. Korsten found himself looking upon those narrow arches of glass framed by iron and stone once he came around the corner of the first shelf. Articulated and sporadically colored panes allowed minimal light in at floor level, peering from between smaller sections of shelving. Strategically placed candles compensated for the lack of natural light and created a more enclosed—and really very comfortable space. Korsten had failed to recreate this hideaway in Haddowyn, though he had certainly tried.

  Taking soft steps further into the room, past two more rows of bookcases set equidistantly from one another in the center of the room—taking up the whole of the middle of it, actually—Korsten reached out randomly to caress the spines of the tomes occupying the shelves on the flanking walls. He felt comforted by the aged leather beneath his skin and considered the many places among the books that he might have curled up as a child and immersed himself in some text or another while trying to escape his father. Sethaniel had disapproved of him constantly, as he recalled it, wanting to know why he refused to be outside with the other boys, why he refused to practice with a blade other than to mock the others and their ‘playing at soldier’….

  Again, the spirit of his childhood dashed across his memory, heedless of the fact that he was neither half-awake nor dreaming this time. The apparition took the form of shadows on the other side of the library windows. The voices of children accompanied.

  “I’m not going to train, because I’m never going to be a soldier,” the most familiar of them said. It was too familiar, in fact, but his own voice had always been the most prominent in memory. “Neither are any of you. You’re all clumsy as legless frogs.”

  “You don’t know,” another boy said. “You wouldn’t know because you’re weak, like a girl.”

  “You’re stupid,” Korsten heard his childhood self say with astounding ease and surety. It had not been flung as a simple insult, but delivered as a legitimate critique of their character. In fact, his tone on the whole was entirely too confident for the dejected outcast of memory. “I’m not a girl. You’re jealous because I’m smarter than you.”

  “Come off it. If you weren’t a weak girl, you’d train with us. But you won’t because you don’t want to get bested.”

  “I don’t care what you say.” The words preceded a clear memory of Korsten in his early adolescence, walking directly to the other boy with his hand out for the training sword, as if he were in actuality reclaiming something that had belonged to him all along. He remembered well the ready and mocking look on his would be opponent’s face, as if he was finally going to get what he wanted; proof that Korsten was nothing more than a spoiled brat. He got his proof, when Korsten took the blade offered to him and promptly smacked the other boy on the upper leg in an entirely unfair advance. Unprepared for it, his opponent flinched, and in the moment it took him and the two others in audience to sort out what had happened, Korsten fled the scene with their practice weapon in hand. ‘Their silly wooden toy’, Korsten had dubbed it more than once along the ensuing chase that carried him over and around obstacles in the garden in a way that could only appear as if it were intended to humiliate his pursuers. Once he’d exhausted the other boys, Korsten climbed onto a wall out of their reach. At that point, they only wanted the weapon back. On the chance that they may also have wanted to strike him with it, Korsten slung it away then jumped off the wall and ran in the opposite direction.

  Korsten recalled more incidents having played out very similarly. He recalled also times when he’d retreated to the house into the safe company of his sisters in their sitting room, where he preceded to read, to sometimes get his hair absently played with while his sisters conversed, and to otherwise make obscene faces at the boys who would have liked to extract some revenge, but who didn’t dare impede disruptively on the space of ladies.

  Sethaniel sometimes not
iced these antics that Korsten had somehow hidden away from his adult memory. He scolded his only male child and … now Korsten could hear his sisters chiding their father for doing what was very clearly his duty as a father. At times they were humored and at times they were overridden by the master of the house. Korsten cried quickly over it regardless—that much remained true to memory—and over the years Sethaniel was not as quick to comfort him as he had been when Korsten was very small.

  And now Korsten felt embarrassed all over again, stood awkwardly before a once-sealed box in his mind that had somehow been unlocked, releasing the pressure of an overstuffed amount of clothes he evidently hoped to never see again … absurd and overdone articles that fit better than he liked. He had packed that chest to bursting, hidden it all away, only to take on a wardrobe that was really only darker costuming than what he knew previously. It was no better tailored, and certainly no more comfortable.

  Korsten came to the present, finding himself stopped at the corner of the final row of library shelves. Sethaniel was in view, seated at a thick-topped table with scrolled edges. His hair had gone so much lighter, catching the morning rays as they slipped over the top of his high-backed chair. His hands still looked strong, but his skin appeared looser, folded and cracked in places. They were not quite as steady as they once had been, creating a slight hitch in the turning of pages.

  In a flurry of escaped memories, Korsten saw himself yet again as a child outside of the library. He watched himself, even older, dancing around the other boys with a training blade, telling them they were silly for wanting to fight in wars, getting red in the face enough to match his hair when they retorted with comments about his undersized frame, then tagging them in inappropriate places before throwing the blade down and running inside. But his sisters weren’t always there the nearer Korsten came to adulthood. It startled Korsten to think that he may have preferred it that way as he grew into the antisocial young person that seemed more familiar. He recalled Sethaniel finding him—he always did manage it, no matter where Korsten tried to stash himself—and the scolding that would come. He was scolded … not for behaving like a girl, but for behaving like a dismal brat. Surely, girlish behavior was cited at some moment during the argument. Korsten was convinced, maybe erring on desperate to see some of his memory align more precisely to what he’d recalled since….

  Korsten stopped his mind in mid-tracking of the memories. He had indeed been very convinced about his childhood. As convinced as he once had been that Renmyr was innocent of conspiring with a demon? Korsten felt cold inside, and overheated simultaneously as sensations of guilt returned stronger than before. He didn’t want to finish out where his thoughts were going. He didn’t want to realize what was surfacing before him, for it felt like a corpse rising in the water, after years weighed down by chains he envisioned demons having put in place. One of those demons should have had red hair, he thought, and wondered not for the first time if it had all truly been so easy for Renmyr—for the demon using his lover?

  My gods … what have I allowed? When did I become so weak? Or was it that I’ve always been so selfish? My pride fed the demon, just as Renmyr’s may have. We were both taken … swallowed, but not lost altogether. Not yet.

  But time has been lost. Look at him.

  Korsten obeyed himself, settling his eyes on Sethaniel, who continued to give attention to the book propped on the table before him. It had been so long. His father was an old man, with years behind him that Korsten was entirely ignorant of. He recalled suddenly what Sethaniel had said in the sitting room and he realized that his father had grieved. He had assumed Korsten lost while Korsten remained living. His father had been worrying over … a lie. Korsten had wondered often if Sethaniel were dead in the years they’d been separated. What if he had died? What if Korsten had returned to this place absent of his father and felt the reality of home … felt the memories align themselves properly, realized that he was in actuality a spoiled tyrant of a child, who teased the other boys first—not the other way around—who refused more often than any child had a right to, who crafted an existence of spiting a father who could only have been beside himself …

  And he had done it all because….

  It was all because of Mother’s death.

  The realization struck him so harshly he felt as if it literally raked over his skin in that moment. It sent a spasm across his shoulders and forced him to blink suddenly, which sent tears he’d not been aware of down his cheeks. He looked over his shoulder involuntarily, half expecting to see some physical manifestation of the revelation, forgetting to actually cry over the sudden realization of the grief both he and Sethaniel had been mired in since his mother’s unexpected death. It had led them both to lashing out and to antisocial behavior, because they were too alike. They were both sensitive and they had both been disarmed and felt abandoned by his mother’s death. That was the driving force behind their clash … not anything else.

  Korsten blinked once more, to clear his eyes somewhat, then looked toward his father again.

  “How old was I?” he asked, ignoring the fact that Sethaniel was not privy to the conversation he’d just had with himself, in his mind. His father didn’t look at him, but he was still enough now that Korsten knew he had heard. He asked again, “How old was I when she died?”

  Still, Sethaniel remained silent. Korsten was beginning to panic internally when the elder finally said, “You don’t remember?”

  Korsten’s voice faltered on a helpless sob, which he managed to swallow. “I don’t feel as if I remember correctly.”

  Sethaniel looked at him now, and though there was the stern frown Korsten did, in fact, recall correctly, his father’s dark eyes were rimmed with red. “You were eight,” he said.

  Because his father’s voice wasn’t as steady as he tried to make it, Korsten smiled with decades of relief. At the same time, he felt fresh tears forming. “I’m sorry, Father.”

  Sethaniel looked at him as if he disapproved, but Korsten could see behind that now. He may have never seen anything so clearly in all of his years, and he smiled again when his father said, “So am I.”

  Sethaniel laid the book flat and sat back in his chair. He looked at the book now as if it were the culprit, a physical token to represent too many years gone by, experienced at a forced distance and askew.

  Korsten crossed the space between the bookcases and the table. He crouched down beside Sethaniel’s chair, hesitating to let his hand fall over the elder’s, though Sethaniel took hold of it immediately, and held it tightly. Korsten had a brief moment to look upon his father’s sharp profile before Sethaniel looked down at him directly, features softening while he carefully set his free hand to Korsten’s cheek and then over his hair. While false memories may have once had him shying away, Korsten held still, albeit somewhat rigidly. The contact was still foreign, made so by too many years of distance. Perhaps in his extreme age, Sethaniel resided closer to the past now. His next words seemed to confirm that notion.

  “You look too much like her,” Sethaniel said, barely above a whisper.

  Korsten had been all too easily convinced that his father despised him for that very reason, but now he knew yet again that he’d been a fool to a demon’s ploys. So very accurate in their aim, the Vadryn. So cuttingly on the mark. They were such dark souls and yet not as unlike people as Korsten would have preferred to believe. They knew how to manipulate the human spirit, too well. Renmyr and Serawe both had certainly showed him that.

  Thoughts of Indhovan’s demon reminded him … “I dreamed about her,” he said quietly. “I dreamed of her while I believed I was drowning.”

  Sethaniel’s hand moved away after a brief pause and a look came to his eyes that seemed both resigned and contemplative. “Drowning … is how your mother died.”

  Sethaniel had indeed become an ancient authority in Cenily—ancient, by the standards of ordinary people. He was
well into his eighth decade. In spite of familial stress, he was healthy as men of a more intellectual lifestyle tended to be along Edrinor’s eastern edge. His mind was still his own and his body had maintained its strength for the most part. Fand had not been so lucky, nor had he been so aged at the time of his passing. For Sethaniel’s brother, illness had claimed his mind first and his body followed swiftly. It had been the disease the Vadryn manifested among people just with their presence. And the beast torturing the Camirey family had been such a long time present. It might have gradually swallowed the minds and souls of all of Haddowyn’s inhabitants, if not for Merran’s arrival. Anyone who had survived beyond the day of the Camirey family’s slaughter had Merran to thank. And Korsten might have sent him away without a second thought, so enrapt had he been in a dream world created by a demon. He was grateful for Merran’s stubbornness, a better version of it than Renmyr’s had proven to be.

  And now Korsten stood in the same room as his father, each of them strained in their way, but neither of them overly taxed or incensed by the presence of the other. This was not a reunion Korsten would have hoped for—even had he realized the whole of the untruth behind his memories. He had been slowly at work over the last three decades coming to terms with the likeliness that Sethaniel would have died and that their differences—which were really not true differences after all—would remain forever unreconciled. Reconciliation had not been instantly or fully achieved, however; Korsten still felt intensely answerable for having made conditions so ideal for the demon to plant its seed of lies and Sethaniel, he suspected, was really too tired in this late hour of life to be overly distressed by what had gone by, maybe even to remember all of it clearly anymore. Korsten understood that he would be alone in that and was undecided on whether or not it was boon or punishment. Regardless, he took advantage of these moments while he had them, to speak to his father as the adult he had become—however arduous the journey getting there had been—and to otherwise be in the presence of his blood family.