Warlord

by Robert J. Crane

  42.

  The Council Chamber was still and silent, the quiet hanging oppressively in the air above them. Cyrus sat in his seat and dared to move only his eyes in surveying all those around him. It was the full complement of officers, along with Cattrine once more. She still looked tired, though perhaps less so than she had when he’d seen her before.

  The one who looked most tired was Curatio. Since the arena, the healer had shut himself up in his quarters for long stretches of time, and even when he emerged he seemed changed, wearier, his complexion faded and his posture stooped.

  “I liked killing the titans,” Longwell said, rattling his lance slightly as he adjusted it where it leaned. “I make no bones about it. I wouldn’t mind killing more.” The resentment practically dripped off his features, and Cyrus made a mental note to speak with the dragoon later about his gradually darkening demeanor. “I only wish we could have hung in the fight longer before we had to run.”

  “That was a very near thing,” Odellan said, his winged helm catching the sunlight on the table and causing Cyrus to blink away. It seemed perfectly positioned to hit his eyes, and he moved just an inch to his left to find relief, the green spots in his vision fading. “I wouldn’t care to have to run that particular expedition again, personally, for I would fear that a repeat engagement would not find the luck on our side as it was last time.”

  “Luck nothing,” Erith snorted. “I heard about what happened in the arena.” She nodded at Curatio across the table. “If you hadn’t had a badass heretic on our side, you’d have been trapped with no hope of escape.”

  “Yes, well,” Curatio said, waving a hand lightly in dismissal, “let us not tread too heavily on said heretic, for these sorts of things are very taxing.”

  “I wouldn’t care to be caught behind again, that’s sure,” Andren said, nodding. His short hair stuck out in a few different directions, and Cyrus wondered if perhaps he simply didn’t know quite what to do with hair that short. “And Fortin may have come out of it all right in the end, but I’ll tell you right now that joining him back together and resurrecting him? Nasty work. He almost killed me—”

  “I, for one,” J’anda said, his staff in hand, “didn’t find the fight too taxing.”

  “You were riding on a titan’s shoulder the entire time,” Ryin said.

  “But I was in several minds, charming my pets,” J’anda said, “and it was all terribly easy for the most part. I could do it again. The titan minds, though,” he shook his head, “terribly simple. You can probably imagine.”

  “I don’t think I’d care to,” Mendicant said, shuddering from where he sat, face barely visible above the table edge. “I was outside when their army started stomping through. It was not …” He breathed a rattling breath. “We lost—”

  “I know,” Cyrus said, nodding slowly. “We’re not going back to Kortran.” He caught a look from Vara out of the corner of his eye. “Not yet, anyway.”

  “Oh, good,” Vaste said, much more mildly than usual.

  Cyrus waited, as did the rest of them, for further comment, but it did not come. “Uh … Vaste?”

  The troll looked up from where he was staring at the table. “Yes?”

  “Where’s the ill-timed barb?” Ryin asked, staring across at him. “Where’s the jibe? The jape?” The troll stared back at him blankly. “The—”

  “I know what all those words mean, you cockeyed dunce,” Vaste snapped. “If I had anything particularly humorous to say, don’t you think I’d say it?”

  A shocked silence persisted for a moment afterward, broken by Cattrine. “This is serious, then,” she said, her long, thin fingers laid out on the table in front of her.

  “Why do you think they’re guarding all the savanna portals?” Vaste asked sullenly. “It’s not because they’re looking to have a massive harvest of long grass, I can tell you that much.”

  “They’re afraid of attack, obviously,” Ryin said.

  “No, they’re not,” Vaste said with a shake of his head. “Not really. Not against Kortran, not again. They’re afraid of sorties. Of raids.”

  “How do you know this?” Cyrus asked, frowning.

  “They’re afraid we’ll hit their supply line again,” Vaste said simply, sagging back in his chair. “Because what we did to the fortress and the storehouse? That was the real pain we inflicted. I mean, other than killing their Emperor. That certainly pissed them off, and I say brava to Vara for her part in angering our already angry enemy.” He clapped his hands together once. “Also, before you ask, that was not a joke, a jape or any other j-word of the same rough meaning.”

  “They’re coming to the pass, then,” Cyrus said, staring at Vaste. “If you’re sure that’s why—”

  “That’s why,” Vaste said quietly, not an ounce of humor in him. “They’re rallying for it, and they don’t want any more … interruptions.”

  The silence sank in once more, and Nyad was the one to speak this time. “What … what do we do?” Her voice was small and terrified.

  “You might want to ask your father for permission to move our army through his lands,” Cyrus said, with a heavy air of resignation. He caught every eye in the room. “Because without Sanctuary at the fore … the elven army really doesn’t stand a chance of holding them out of the north.”

  43.

  Who are you?

  Eyes of red haunted Cyrus, pursued him, snapping him awake in sweat-sodden sheets, wrapped around him like they were entrapping him, smothering, holding him down and strangling him to death. He gasped for breath as though they had choked him, and when the first torch sprang to life in front of him it was a shock to his eyes as much as the vision of the pale elf lying next to him, her hand delicately touching his shoulder. “Cyrus,” Vara murmured, more than a little sleep in her own voice. The silken slip she wore to bed hung off her shoulder, and her hair was loose around her face.

  Cyrus breathed in the sweet torch smell as the hearth on the far end of the room sprang to life, the fire bursting into it and lighting the room. The balcony doors were all shuttered, making the Tower of the Guildmaster feel smaller than it did when they were open to the plains below, moonlight shining on the green grass. Cyrus’s breathing was still ragged and rasping. He rolled to let his feet touch the cold stone floor, sheets sloughing off his naked body.

  “Are you all right?” Vara asked, rolling over to place a hand on his back. He didn’t quail away from her touch, but the vision in the nightmare had been so vivid, so irrationally frightening … and now he couldn’t even recall what it was.

  “I’m …” Cyrus took another deep, calming breath, letting it all flow in. “… I have no idea.”

  “If you’re all right?” Vara moved to sit next to him, her creamy thighs sliding off the bed to hang next to his over the edge. Her feet were so small, so delicate, compared to his. She placed a light arm around his shoulder and brushed his other with her hand, leaning her soft cheek against him. “I think, physically, it is fairly obvious you are all right.”

  The panic of the nightmare had receded enough to allow Cyrus to see the humor in what she spied. “Huh. I, uh … guess so, in that regard.”

  “However, don’t count on me being quite awake enough to go in for that, seeing as we already rutted once tonight,” she said, pressing her warm skin close against him. “Did you have the nightmare again?”

  “I did,” Cyrus said, nodding sharply. “I think.”

  “Which one? Leaugarden or …”

  “The other,” Cyrus said, shaking his head, turning it enough to see her gazing at him through sleepy blue eyes. “The—I don’t even remember what happened other than awaking to a—just a feeling of …”

  “Of what?” she asked, running soothing fingers across his shoulders and back. It tickled just a bit, but in a wholly good way.

  “Like I don’t even know who I am,” Cyrus said, rubbing at his eyes.

  “Oh,” she said. “Well. That seems to be coming up quite a bit latel
y. Not quite as often as—”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  She held herself tight against him. “I know who you are, even if you don’t.”

  His shoulders straightened at her words, and he looked her in the eyes. “Who am I?”

  She looked right back at him, the faintest smile on her lips before she spoke. “You are … my little moppet.”

  Cyrus closed his eyes. “Please … don’t ever say that where anyone else might hear it.”

  She chuckled lightly. “I’ll keep it entirely between us, I assure you.” She ran fingers through his hair, and he caught the scent of the soap she used, sweet and slightly fragrant. “From whence does this desperation to know yourself spring?”

  “I don’t even know,” Cyrus said, shaking his head as she threaded her fingers through his hand and placed it upon her thigh. When he looked down, almost expectantly, she sighed and moved the hand into the air, as if to disabuse him of any possible notion of things going in that direction. “I mean, there are obviously things on my mind, conversations I’m having with others, with you, with myself about the changes going on, but I wouldn’t think it would come out this way in some sort of deep, frightening …” He groped for words.

  “Crisis of identity?” she asked, tightening her grip on his fingers and bringing his knuckles to her lips with a kiss. “You’ve had two nightmares about it now. It would seem your mind is trying to tell you something.”

  “Tell me what?” Cyrus asked, tensing his shoulders, afraid of the answer he might get.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Something about what you’re doing, perhaps.” She hesitated. “Something about what you’re willing to do, maybe.”

  He looked away. “You’re talking about the conversation I had with Ehrgraz.”

  “Assassination is not something I ever recall us discussing,” she said quietly.

  “We still haven’t,” Cyrus said, hiding his eyes from her. “It was just … me thinking out loud to Ehrgraz—”

  “Yet you sent scouting parties into the savanna,” she said, no accusation to her words. “You planned the long-ranging strike, a knockout punch past their defenses?” She uncoiled her fingers from his. “What were you thinking in terms of an endgame? Not another fair fight with the titans and all their armies, I assume, and yet you said very plainly to me that this would not end because Talikartin was still alive. That leaves—”

  “Killing him however we have to, yes,” Cyrus said, feeling caught. He expected her arms to sweep away from him in revulsion, her warm skin and cool silken slip to push against his side as she made her getaway. He dared to look, just a glance, really, at her.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I’m surprised the noble paladin isn’t retreating from me.”

  “Even if the crusader in me wanted to,” Vara said with a sigh, “the woman in me is taking precedence at the moment. I feel as if she’s usurping my will and my very limbs. It’s quite exhausting, being this divided. I can only assume my paladin self is still asleep.” She smiled lightly.

  “You’re joking about it,” Cyrus said, now looking at her with a little less shame, “but you know Alaric would never have sanctioned this. He would never have dreamed—”

  “You might be surprised what Alaric would do if pushed into the corner we find ourselves in,” Vara said evenly. “I watched him kill Partus with a single spell, unseen, for merely insulting and threatening me. With what we are against, even Alaric might consider desperate measures.”

  “I have a hard time believing that,” Cyrus said, and now he hung his head low for a different reason. “I think of him as this looming shadow that hangs over every decision I make, judging me silently for my failures, which are growing too innumerable to count.”

  “What is this self-pitying drivel?” she asked, and now she did pull away.

  “We lost people in the attack, Vara—”

  “We were an army on the march,” she said stiffly, like he’d insulted her. “Death is a possible consequence, especially when the foes are as dangerous as the titans are. Anybody not aware of that danger and willing to face it would not have joined our army or the armies of Saekaj or Amti. Certainly not the latter two, given the scarcity of healers with the resurrection spell.” She brushed hair back over her ear, giving her blond locks a lopsided appearance. “If you want to bludgeon yourself into senselessness for every death that happens in this particular war—which you did not start, by the way, much as you might want to take responsibility for everything under our sun—this will be a heavy toll on you. Responsibilities of leadership, I didn’t think I needed to tell you, include the death of your soldiers, your guildmates. It has happened in the past. It will happen again.”

  “But when I think of Alaric,” Cyrus said, the fire burning inside him, trying to get out in his words, “I wonder if he ever felt the desperate pain of it like—”

  “Of course he did,” she snapped. “Do you have any idea how—” She cut herself off. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t have, it was after you went to Luukessia.” She focused her eyes on his. “While you were gone, after I had regained some of my composure following … all that happened in Termina and the Realm of Death and afterward, I offered to go with Alaric to pay a call to Niamh’s family … to tell them she was dead.” She straightened. “He informed me he had already gone, while you and I were off to escape the assassins. He did it himself, and the look he gave me when I asked about it … told me everything I needed to know about what happened and how he felt about it.” She ran a hand, once more, across his face. “Alaric faced it, too. He felt it, too. You are not alone in this responsibility, and the only way to ensure you never have to face it again is to break all ties with Sanctuary, renounce your position of leadership, and hide away in some dark corner of the world where no one will find you.” She paused, then a ripple of amusement made its way out. “Though I wouldn’t expect that to work, because wherever you go, I will find you, and if you run, warrior, I will administer the most shockingly painful kicking of your arse you will ever experience.”

  “That sounds … borderline exciting.”

  She slapped him on the chest. “There will be nothing titillating about it, I assure you—”

  A knock at the door interrupted them, and both their heads swiveled at the sound like it was the herald of an approaching attack. “Yes?” Cyrus called without thinking, and the door at the base of the stairs opened before he could so much as gather the sheets around him. Vara rolled back over the bed and snatched them out of his grasp, covering herself and leaving him quite exposed.

  Calene Raverle emerged from the stairs a moment later, a purpose in her walk. “Sir, our scouts in the Heia Pass report approaching titans, and—” She seemed to realize he was naked partway through the delivery of her message. “Oh, gods!” she said and threw a hand up as she averted her eyes.

  “Sorry,” Cyrus said, rolling to try and grab the tangle of sheets away from Vara, who had them clutched against her tightly. “Give them to me!”

  “No,” Vara said, looking quite outraged. “I’ll be left exposed!”

  “What do you think I am? Aren’t you elves supposed to be more—you know—worldly and sensual and open to—”

  “I am not open to displaying my body like some Priestess of Life—”

  “You showed me your naked backside when you still loathed me—”

  “I’m rapidly doubling back toward that feeling just now—”

  “And you’re at least wearing something under those sheets, unlike me—”

  “Whose fault is that? No one told you to come to bed as naked as a plains dog, and with much the same look in your eye—”

  “Uhm, excuse me,” Calene said, head still tilted away. “The, um, titans are approaching the Heia Pass, and it’s a two-day ride to reinforce them since the portal at the savanna end is—”

  “Yes, thank you,” Vara said, sitting up and letting the sheet drop, her slip still fully covering her more effectivel
y than many dresses Cyrus had seen worn in Reikonos. “We’re both fully aware of the strategic and tactical planning considerations involved here.” She paused, looking a little indignant. “And I assure you, we will both be down momentarily, so if you could go and sound the alarm …” She held out a hand to shoo off Calene, but the ranger was not looking at her, nor Cyrus.

  “Okay,” Calene said, easing blindly back toward the staircase. She used her foot to feel for it without sight. “I will, just … uhm … get … going, then …”

  “Why don’t you just turn around and go,” Vara suggested irritably.

  “Right,” Calene said, and fled down the staircase with all haste. She paused at the bottom and hesitated, her hand on the doorknob. “You know, I really respected you before, but even more now.”

  “Don’t swell his head,” Vara said, “it’s already quite oversized.”

  “I wasn’t talking to him,” Calene said, darting a look at them and then snapping her head back as if she’d been burned. “I meant you. I mean—” she waved a hand in their direction, “with … with that, and all … I mean … goodness … I don’t even know how you can manage to walk normally after, let alone keep up on the march—” She stumbled through the door and closed it with a slam behind her.

  “What a nice compliment to you,” Cyrus said as the noise of the door shutting faded, and the sound of Calene’s shouts of “ALARUM!” rang out below them.

  “That’s not going to help the ego at all,” Vara said with a sigh as they both fumbled to escape the bed, rushing to their respective armors.

  44.

  The ride south through the Heia Pass was long and arduous, though harder on the horses than their riders, in Cyrus’s estimation. They did not stop for sleep, only water and the occasional break, and kept at it, at a canter, almost the entire way. By the time nightfall came at the end of the first day, Cyrus had grown weary of the rocky outcrops that had hung over him for the entirety of the trip. They reminded him of the gargoyles on some of the newer, grander structures in Reikonos, lurking overhead like ill omens.