by Hazel Hunter
“Come with me and see,” Kieran said over his shoulder. “I wish you would leave this place, wake up and find your own way. If you want to be with me, you will want to see what comes next. After that, you will leave, though with fewer good memories of me than bad ones.”
Hailey fell into step behind Kieran. There was no question of her doing anything else. She knew that whatever came next, she would have to see it. She could feel her nervous energy shake her. Carefully, she reached up to stroke Ferret’s head.
“What do you think he’s going to show me?” she asked softly.
“Something to do with death,” Ferret murmured. “It is only a loss of some kind or another that wears his shoulders down like this. Whatever he has lost will not be returned to him in this life or the next. Read his despair, lass, and you will see it.”
Hailey shook her head.
“I believe in redemption,” she said firmly. “Kieran is a good man.”
Ferret’s laugh was tinny. It was strangely unpleasant coming out of such a soft creature.
“Good men do many bad things. That is something that you best learn now. The goodness of a person does not tell you how many they’ve killed or how much innocent blood lies on their hands.”
To that, Hailey could make no reply. She knew how terrible Kieran could be when he was roused. She knew exactly how deadly he was with his swords and the blades of ice that he commanded. There was a brief flash behind her eyes, strange and foreign, of Kieran bearing down on her, his hands full of ice-cold knives and every point directed at her face.
She shook the image away, focusing instead on Kieran’s back. If he was going to follow the dead, she was going to follow him.
As he walked, she could see his form filling in. He already had his height, but now step by step, she could see his shoulders broaden, see his limbs thicken. He was becoming a man right before her eyes. In another place, she would have loved to see this happening. She loved Kieran with all her heart. She wanted to see every part of him. There were no photographs when he was born. He was a poor little smith’s apprentice. No one would have painted a picture of him. She was seeing something that she could never have hoped to see.
She walked behind him, on and on. The ground changed again, becoming something forested and dark. There was a dampness to the air. She could smell smoke, and beneath that, there was something strange and unpleasant to it.
Kieran paused, looking at a pile of armor that lay by the side of their path. With a breath that bordered on being a sob, he picked it up, piece by piece and started to put it on. Clad in armor and in his full adult frame, there was no mistaking Kieran for anything but what he was. He was a machine made for war. The only human thing about him was his blue eyes.
“Are you ready?” Hailey asked softly.
Kieran laughed, his voice thready and sad.
“I never will be. But I am not such a fool to think that what happens next is under my control. Come along, Hailey. You deserve to see this.”
He led her through the forest. His job done, the wraith disappeared, leaving a smell of bitter sulfur behind him. There were fires, small and shy, dotted through the trees. Hailey could make out men moving around them. She could tell it was meant to be night, but if she looked above, she could still make out openings in the foliage which told her the sky was that same demonic bruise.
Stepping into the scene as if he were an actor born to play a part, Kieran walked out of the dark and into a clearing that was well-lit by a larger fire. There was a man with silver hair sitting beside the fire, writing at a small traveling desk and pursing his lips over what he had inscribed.
“Commandant.”
The man looked up briefly, waving a hand at Kieran.
“At ease, Captain. Or better yet, get out. There is no way that you are going to change my mind, and it is a waste of time to even try.”
“Sir, I cannot do that.”
The commandant returned to his writing, barely seeming to give Kieran another thought.
“And why is that, Captain?” he asked casually. “Do you have a lover in that village that you are so afraid for? Do you have a child down there?”
Kieran made a sharp motion with his hand.
“I don’t, but that makes no difference. Those people are kin to someone. They are our kin in many ways. They deserve to be protected.”
“And that is exactly what we are doing, Captain, or did you think we brought twenty Magus Corps members here for show?”
“All they are good for is show if you refuse to let them do anything.”
In the blink of an eye, the commandant was up and backhanded Kieran. Kieran was a big man, but his commandant was hellishly fast. The blow struck so hard that Hailey flinched, shivering at the brutality.
“That is insubordination, Captain,” said the commandant. “Another word, and I will have you flogged.”
Rage and fury rose up in Kieran’s face. For a moment, she thought he was going to murder the commandant. She almost wanted him to. Instead, he nodded curtly, licking the blood away from his split lip. He turned and walked back to where Hailey waited in the shadows. The rage was gone from his face, but the despair behind it was even worse.
“That was not a bad thing you did,” she started, but he cut her off.
“No. Come with me. There is still another part to see.”
He took her hand in his. Despite the terrible conditions that they were in, she found herself craving his warm touch. He was real, even if everything around them wasn’t. He was solid. He was alive. No one had succeeded in taking him from her yet.
They climbed for what felt like hours. They emerged on a rise that looked down over a deep valley. The drop to the valley floor was sheer, but Kieran sat on the edge as if it were a bench, letting his feet dangle over the drop.
“Come sit with me?”
“I dislike the height,” she said, but she came to sit with him gingerly anyway.
“Says the girl who can fly in her own form and that of an eagle.”
There was a bit of teasing in his voice. Gratified to hear it, she snuggled up close to his solid side. Whatever happened, she resolved to herself that they were going to get through it. If there had been stars above, it would have been a perfect night. Instead, there was only that demon sky. She kept her eyes shut, instead relishing the feel of his warm body.
“Hailey, little fox, it is time to see.”
She didn’t want to. She did as he asked, however. Below them, she saw what she numbly first assumed was a flower opening. It was quite beautiful, a bloom of orange and red that opened up as prettily as a rose. Then a second one opened up next to it. She realized that they were not flowers, but instead were flames.
One after another, flames lifted up. The wind changed, allowing her to hear screams.
“What is this?” she asked, her voice soft and afraid.
“So falls Costain, and all afterward was silence,” said Kieran, his voice heavy with grief. “The figures varied, but more than two hundred people died that night. Some guess that there were closer to three hundred people in town, that the Templars took the rest off to torture for information.”
“It was Templars who did this?” she asked timidly.
“None other. They came toward this valley. We, that is, my unit and I, were meant to be ready for them. We were supposed to stop them. Our intelligence told us that they were still a week away, and so we held in readiness. The place where we were camped would have bottle-necked them if we were positioned correctly.”
“Kieran, it was poor information and a poorer commander that cost those people their lives, not you.”
He shook his head.
“It didn’t have to be this way. There was a moment where Commandant McIntyre challenged me. In that moment, I could have mutinied. I could have walked away and turned at least half of the unit to walk with me. We could have gone into town. Trained fighters, experienced and deadly as we were, could have made all the difference.”
Hailey’s words stuck in her throat. She knew the question he needed to answer, but she didn’t want to ask him. They sat in silence for a long moment until she got up the courage.
“Why didn’t you?” she asked.
“Because I loved my rank. Because I had found something with the Magus Corps that I had never found anywhere else. That was a brotherhood that held me to exacting standards, who showed me how to excel, praised me when I did right and punished me when I did wrong.”
He took a deep breath. Below them, the fires were flourishing brightly. There were people dying down there, but Hailey reminded herself that they had died a long time ago. She hadn’t traveled through the years. This was nothing more than an illusion, an image projected on a flat white wall that was meant to pull her and Kieran in deeper and deeper.
“I am no good on my own,” he said softly. “I have lived a long time. Most of that time was with the Magus Corps, but some of it was not. I am lost on my own. I am only as good as the master I follow. Once I followed a bad one, and many people died.”
Hailey shook her head, pushing herself hard against his body. She needed to make him understand.
“You were not the one who put those people to fire and sword,” she said desperately. “The sin here is that of the Templars. It is not yours. You acted as you saw fit…”
“I did not. I failed to act because I loved my master better than I loved the idea of people living.”
Hailey shook her head.
“That is the darkest way to see your actions. Those people are dead, but Kieran, I swear that you are not. You are better than this, you have grown and changed.”
“Less than you think, less than I need.”
He stood up, taking one last look at the valley on fire. All of the life had gone out of him. In that moment, he looked no more alive than the specter that had led him to this place.
“I want you to leave me now, Hailey.”
Hailey’s temper flared up bright and hot.
“If you think I came all this way to be sent home like a dog with my tail between my legs–”
“Don’t you see how ashamed I am?” he asked her. His voice had a tone she had never heard before. There was grief there, but there was despair too. There was nothing left of him, and all he could do was ask her for mercy.
“I am ashamed. I have been for every day of my life since this happened. I have lived with the knowledge that I caused the deaths down there, and I will never be free of it. Leave me, Hailey. I can’t stand your eyes on me anymore.”
For a moment, Hailey was almost pulled down with his despair. Then a thought occurred. It was like a light in a dark room. Slowly, she shook her head.
“I don’t think so. No, I really don’t. You don’t believe that.”
Kieran glared down at her.
“What are you talking about?”
“You weren’t thinking of Costain when we met in Italy. You weren’t thinking of it when we fought demons in the Alps. You surely weren’t thinking of it when you made love to me.”
“Do you think that I had forgotten all of this? Do you actually believe that it was you that made me forget?”
There was a shade of contempt to his tone that could have made Hailey shrivel up and wither away. However, she knew she was right. She would forgive his caustic tone because she knew that she had the right of it.
“Frankly, I think you did.”
“Hailey–”
“You were a whole man when we met. There were shadows in your past, just like there are shadows in mine. No one is pure, and no one goes through life blameless. The thing that keeps us going is the fact that we are human at the heart of it, no matter what our powers are. Even if we want to cling to the past versions of ourselves, time erases it slowly but surely.”
“I will never forget these people.”
“No. I’ll never forget the foster home where they locked me outside on a winter night with no coat, either. Those things happened to us, but they do not define us, Kieran. You are not the same man who caved in to a superior officer. You would not do that again.”
“You sound very sure of that.”
“I am certain of that,” she said, her tone firm and strong. “You don’t need forgiveness here because in some ways you have already forgiven yourself. No, this is a fear that you have projected large and given the weight of an elephant. You are already beyond this–”
Hailey broke off with a startled gasp when a handful of ice splinters flew her way. They whizzed harmlessly by her head, but it was enough to distract her while Kieran took to his heels.
“Kieran, no!”
She tried to chase him through the forest, but this time, it was as if the land itself were working against her. Her feet seemed to find every tree root. Every other moment, she had to tear the end of her braid away from the grasping branches of a twig. Finally, she had to admit it to herself. Kieran was gone.
Breathing hard, she stumbled to her knees, leaning against a stump. All around her, she could hear the noise of the forest. The calls of the night birds, the howl of a lonely wolf, the bark of a fox, they all sounded like they were mocking her.
“That was a right chase,” commented Ferret.
“You can say that again,” said Hailey. “I don’t know what to do next.”
“Well, you find the man, if you want him.”
“Of course I want him, why wouldn’t I?” Hailey asked, indignant.
“You weren’t wrong when you said that what he felt for those poor dead folks was made larger than life. That’s true. On the other paw, he was right too when he said that that would always be something that lived with him. That man who caved to his commandant like a card house is who you are in love with as well.”
Hailey thought about what Ferret said. He was right, after a fashion. There would always be a part of Kieran that needed structure and commands. However, she realized that was not so much of a bad thing as might be supposed.
“I don’t mind giving orders from time to time,” she said finally. “And if I can find him, I know someone who loves giving them more. I am going to find Kieran, and I will love him forever.”
Ferret chuckled, twitching his whiskers so that they unpleasantly tickled her ear.
“That’s a lovely idea.”
Hailey was about to respond when she realized that there was something on the ground that hadn’t been there before. It was too straight and regular to be a stick. When she looked at it, she realized to her shock it was a riding crop. Moreover, it was pointed towards a path that seemed to have opened up while she wasn’t looking.
“This place has its own logic, doesn’t it?”
“This place has its own traps is what you mean, lass,” grumbled Ferret. “If you’re not careful, you’ll find out what I mean.”
CHAPTER THREE
THE WAY WAS still tough. It wasn’t much lighter than it had been before. Even though there was a path, it was mostly overgrown with roots and grass. Still, she managed to walk it without much trouble. She felt carefully ahead of herself with her hand, carrying the riding crop in the other.
The riding crop was a strange thing itself. It was made of old leather, supple and stiff at once. It had a peculiar weight to it, but it balanced well in her hand. She wasn’t sure what it was for, but something in her prevented her from putting it down.
Finally, the woods thinned. She found herself in a little clearing. The only thing in it was a stone house that looked cheerful enough until she realized that the windows were small and barred.
“Do you think we should knock?” Ferret wondered.
“I’m not going to, but you’re going to stay out here,” Hailey said firmly. “I don’t know exactly what is going to come next, but I think it is something that is absolutely not for weasel eyes.”
“Ferret!” the animal replied angrily, but he leaped from her shoulder to begin nosing his way through the grass. When he pounced on something and began devouring it, licking h
is jaws all the while, she turned away.
The door was closed, but it swung open under her hand. Inside, the little stone cottage was dim except for a single candle that stood by the door.
“Hailey? I thought I told you to leave.”
“Well, I’m sure I would have listened if I thought that you were actually in charge.”
There was a box of matches, a box of candles and a stack of candle holders by the first lit one, so she started lighting each one. She placed each lit candle on a different surface, expanding the amount she could see and bringing the place into sharper focus.
It was a barren little room. The walls were bare stone. There was a rickety table, where the candles were kept, a single chair, and a straw bed pushed against one wall. Kieran sat on the bed, his hands dangling between his knees. As she lit the candles, he squinted at her.
“Leave me be,” he said, his voice dull. “This is where I am meant to be.”
“This looks like a jail cell with an unlocked door,” Hailey said, lighting another candle. “This is a place where the only person holding you is you, Kieran. You do not need to be here. This is not your place. The only reason you are here is because you think you must be.”
“There must be punishment for what I did,” he protested.
She wondered if there was a bit of weakness to that protest. Instead of sounding like he really believed what he was saying, he sounded like a man reading a part from a book. Hailey decided that it was an improvement of sorts.
“All right. If you believe there is a punishment, then there will be a punishment.”
“What are you doing?”
The room was bright now, with candles set on the table and on the windowsills. It was enough light for what she had in mind, she reckoned.
“Here’s the thing about punishment,” she said pleasantly. “What does it mean if you decide it yourself?”
“I chose nothing…”
“I know that’s not true. What I’ve learned about demons is that for the most part, they lack a certain creativity. They are masters of feeding us what we think we want and what frightens us, but they will never create something new on their own. The bars on the windows, the limited number of candles on the table? This place all came from you. This is your punishment, and you have smugly decided that you know what’s fair.”
