Crusader s-4

by Robert J. Crane

  Martaina raised an eyebrow at him. “You can barely stand without the aid of your sword. Are you certain that this is the proper moment to go searching for somewhere to wash yourself?”

  “It’s either that or I go out of my skull from the stink,” Cyrus said. “I’m rather amazed that the two of you can even tolerate being within a hundred feet of me; I know how well attuned elven senses are.”

  “You get used to it after a while,” Martaina said with a slight smile. “You haven’t descended to the depths I’ve come to expect from most dark elven men, so I wouldn’t worry about it yet.”

  “I’m not worried for your sake,” Cyrus said, “I can hardly stand it for mine. I’ve been in battles where I’ve been covered in blood and smell less offensive than now. All I want is a bath; where can I go to immerse myself in water?”

  Martaina exchanged a look with Curatio, who shrugged. “There’s a river a quarter of a mile away. I doubt you’ll be able to walk there under your own power.”

  “I can,” he said. “I will. I’ll be fine so long as I have my sword in hand.”

  “I do hope you’re talking about your blade and not-” Martaina gave him a crooked smile.

  “Thank you for that,” he said dryly. “Let me walk for a bit, get used to my legs beneath me again. If I’m not back by nightfall, I’m sure you’ll come looking for me.”

  “You were assassinated a mere three weeks ago,” Martaina said, “and that was hardly the first attempt. Are you certain you want to go about without guard?”

  Cyrus shrugged. “You can follow, I don’t care. Just let me test my strength.”

  “If you’ve got this quite under control,” Curatio said to Martaina, “I have things to attend to before this day is done.”

  “Yes, I suspect I can keep a dozen or two of Actaluere’s finest away from him if need be,” Martaina said, with a vague and dismissive wave. “He could probably take one or two more.”

  Cyrus did not argue with her, instead pulling his hand off his hilt for another brief spell; the vertigo had lessened but muscle fatigue had set in. She might not be far wrong.

  “Very well then,” Curatio said and produced the most infinitesimal nod of the head, which reminded Cyrus of a bow for some reason. “I’ll inform Briyce Unger and Milos Tiernan that you’ll be ready to join their strategy talks tomorrow, if you’d like?”

  “I’d like,” Cyrus said. “Very much so.”

  With a final nod, Curatio turned, the hems of his white robes trailing behind him as the healer threaded his way behind a tent and out of sight. “He’s a worrier, that one,” Martaina said as he disappeared. “With good cause, obviously, but still a worrier.” She turned to fix him with a gaze, after a cool survey of the area around them. They were at the edge of the encampment now, and Cyrus could see the open fields, unspoilt by men as far as the eye could see. “So what’s this really about, this desire to bathe yourself? Because I have my suspicions.”

  “Oh?” Cyrus asked. “And what are those?”

  “More than mere curiosities, less than full-blooded accusations.”

  “Yes, very clever,” he said, letting his legs carry him on. The river was obvious in the distance, a thin blue line cutting jagged strokes across the uneven, loping plain, the early fall grasses already turning a golden yellow. “Why don’t you go ahead and share your suspicions with me, so I’ll be better able to gauge the truth of them.”

  Martaina snorted. “When it comes to assessing yourself, I suspect you are no more able to see the truth of things now than a titan would be capable of discerning the individual toes on a gnome’s foot.”

  Cyrus didn’t pause, didn’t slow down, and in fact increased his stride. He felt a little stir of irritation to couple with the feeling already boiling inside him, that restless stir. “Oh? You think I’ve become myopic now?”

  “I think you have. I think you’ve run from one pain into another, and now you’re just going for the sake of going because the alternative is too much to bear.” She said it matter-of-factly, and he listened for some insult or harshness, but it wasn’t there.

  “What’s the alternative?” He kept his eyes on the river in the distance. If I can just make it there, get clean for a bit, feel better …

  “To stand your ground and face the pain, the fear that’s crept over you of late.” That held accusation, he heard, especially the note of her wording for fear.

  Cyrus turned, and his hand fell away from Praelior’s grip. There was no lightheadedness now, no spin to his thoughts, just a simple, knife-edged focus on Martaina, her brown hair spilling into the green hood of her cowl, banded behind her to keep it out of her face, as it always was. Her tanned skin was slightly more flushed than usual, though she did not appear indignant to his eyes. He saw one of her fists clenched shut, and he wondered if it meant she was angry or if she intended to hit him.

  “Throwing the word ‘fear’ at a warrior of Bellarum is not something to be done lightly,” Cyrus said, and he felt the cold edge creep into his words, frostier than the north winds by more than a matter of degrees.

  “Yet I have done it, just now.”

  “And I so recently apologized to you for my mistrust of your motives and actions,” Cyrus said, and his eyes narrowed of their own accord. “Is there some reason you throw this insult into my face on the eve of my return to the planning of this battle? A battle in which we’ll be facing this implacable foe, this ceaseless enemy? Is there some detail of my actions that you’ve witnessed that would lead you to believe me unfit to lead an army? When you accuse me of fear, do you suspect I’ll be cowering at the back of the fight, waiting for my soldiers to win the day for me?”

  “I suspect you’ll be at the fore, slinging your sword with the rest of them, and that you’ll fight to the death-again-even if it means losing your body and never being able to come back from it.” Her nostrils flared at this. “The fear came and went, as far as I’m concerned, came and went like a wildfire in the forests of old, gutting the underbrush and leaving no trees standing. That is you, near as I can tell-the fear of losing Vara, the pain of what she did, it covered you, burned out your insides, left you hollow. New growth started with the Baroness, but soon enough that was scorched through as well. I wish you still feared, feared to lose what you’ve already lost. Because now you’re so empty there’s nothing left for you to fear. The fear’s already had its way, no taking that back now.”

  “You make it sound like there’s nothing left of my own mind. I’m what? An empty vessel, waiting to be filled with whatever comes along?”

  “What of this cause you’ve latched yourself on to?” Martaina said. “Defending the Syloreans?”

  “You think I wouldn’t have done this if Vara had-” he stuttered, “if she hadn’t- hadn’t-”

  “If she were with you, your lover or your wife,” she said it plainly, but the words twisted like a knife all the same, “I think you would still be here to fight for Luukessia, but I think you would do it for a cause and for obligation, for the repayment of a debt or the cessation of a consequence we caused. I don’t think you’d be doing it half-hearted, empty-hearted, as though you have to drag yourself along to the next place we’re fighting-”

  “I did just recover from a fairly injurious wound-”

  “And that’s another thing,” she said, the full force of her rolling downhill now, the momentum behind her words. “You did just spend weeks on your back, surely enough, no doubt. If you want to go and have your way with Aisling in order to relieve your strain and empty some more of your soul, by all means, do so-”

  “Excuse me?” He asked her frostily, but it came out strained.

  “-without making elaborate excuses about why you need to bathe yourself. Do you think me a fool? Do you think Curatio some sort of idiot? We know what you are doing, it’s as plain as the head atop your neck, now.” She glared at him.

  “You think I need to hide my desires?” He glared back, and wondered why he’d felt so sorry
for sending her away before. “As though I have some secret shame to hide?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And it does you no favors, nor Aisling either. You keep running from pain to pain, and now there’s nothing left to feel, nothing left to fear, nothing left to lose. You’ve come to the point of bottom in your journey, and yet still you won’t admit it, perhaps even to yourself.”

  “Bottomed out, have I?” Cyrus asked with tart amusement. “Oh, good. Here I was worried I still had farther to fall.” He let his hand play across his forehead, felt the lines underneath his fingers. “Can I not … just … have some small solace?”

  “Not from what you’re intending, no.” He could hear her speaking behind his hand, though he had no desire to look upon her now. “You are empty. There is no hope for a future left in you, do you realize that? No belief, no heart, no real desire to live. How else can you explain your decision to come back to the camp at Enrant Monge without escort-”

  “A slip of the mind,” Cyrus said and let his hand fall away. He kept his face straight as he looked upon her. “I have much weighing on it, and I assure you, my first thought was not that Grand Duke Hoygraf would be waiting at the side of the road between our encampment and the keep to ambush me and take my head.”

  “At one point, I think you would have thought of it.” She kept her tone even, her expression flat but accusing.

  “Possibly. Surely you don’t think I went out on that ride thinking I’d be killed and decapitated? That I did it on purpose?”

  “No,” she said, “but my concern is that you’ve become reckless. That you’ve had your hope and belief burned out of you, and that uncaring is replacing all. Once upon a time, you strode for excellence in all things, you desired to be the best warrior in all Arkaria. I heard rumors you even desired to pursue the best equipment, the best of everything to help you do the task at hand better than anyone. That was tempered by the desire to hold fast to the bonds of loyalty in Sanctuary, but tell me now-what do you want, Cyrus Davidon?” She gestured to the river in the distance. “What do you want, beyond a bath and release?”

  “I don’t know,” he said after a pause. “Victory, of course. To vanquish this scourge.”

  “And then?” Quietly. Accusingly.

  “To go home, I suppose,” he said, but now his voice was hollow.

  “You suppose,” she said, with a quiet all her own. “You’ve lost hope of a future. You’ve lost belief in a better day ahead, belief in what drove you, once upon a time. You were the most certain of us, a warrior with a rock-hard conviction in what he did, what he said, in his abilities. Thad told me that you were forged in the hottest fires of the Society of Arms, that you were the man who walked out of their gates after the graduation with nothing to prove to anyone.” She threw a hand up to indicate him. “Where is that man now? What is left of him in front of me? You’ve let them strip it all away from you-”

  “I let nobody do anything,” Cyrus said in a low growl. “Some things happened, things I can’t undo.”

  “And do you believe you’ll return from that? That you’ll pass the eye of the storm and come back to your old self unchanged?”

  “I have no desire to return to my old self,” Cyrus said, turning away from her and resuming his walk, the river ahead in his sight.

  “Oh?” He heard her soft footsteps behind him; her distress with him was clear not only in her voice but in the fact that he could hear the ranger walk. “What is your ambition now? To slake the thirst of your desire with a dark elf whom you care not one whit for? To lose yourself in the pleasure moment over and over with a woman whom you have avoided for two years? To throw yourself into cataclysmic battle after battle until you no longer come back?”

  “My ambition right now lies in recovering from my injuries, bathing, and yes, perhaps exerting some excess energies with Aisling, who has shown no small energy of her own to dispense with. Would you prefer I simply sit about, silent as a stone, pondering the best course of action to get me to better weapons, or a more serviceable guild, or perhaps thrilling to thoughts of the journey home and how much I might like to be among the towers and stone of Sanctuary now rather than fighting a foe of my own making a world away?”

  “What I would prefer,” she said, and grasped at his shoulder, turning him about, “is that you show some sign of life beyond speaking, walking, consuming and dispensing your seed.” Her face was animated in a way that it never was. “Show me some sign of how you were before, before Termina, before Mortus’s realm, or at least some small sight of what you were like in the interlude at Vernadam after Harrow’s Crossing. Give me a sign that you still believe in something, that you hold some hope to your soul, that you have something to-” She expelled her breath, and her head went to the side, as if she were searching for something that she could not find in him. “That you have something to live for, for gods’ sakes.” Her eyes softened and the corners crinkled, and for a moment she was a thousand years old. “For our sakes.”

  The sun was not against the far horizon, not yet. It hung in the sky at an angle that told Cyrus it was one, perhaps two hours until sundown. He looked at it then back to the encampment, not so far distant, and then to the river. “Sometimes life is not about desire, or belief. Sometimes it’s about crossing the void between big moments, about putting one foot before the other as you navigate the spare areas where nothing remains in a blighted heart. The only thing I can do for now is to keep going, to hold to my duty of fighting the battles placed before me, seeing to the tasks appointed me. You want me to believe? You want me to hope? This is hardly the first time in my life that I’ve been hollowed out, not the first by far that I’ve lost hope. In those moments, I’ve learned to keep walking, to keep going, to hold not to hope, but to whatever I can. I won’t be the same man I was before, but I won’t be like this forever, either, I doubt.” He let show the faintest, most rueful smile. “The thought that I would … doesn’t bear consideration.”

  “When will we see this new Cyrus?” she asked as he resumed his course toward the river, the smell of the grasses carrying over him, the light whipping of the wind at his armor a pleasant distraction.

  “Whenever I get to him,” Cyrus said, and he heard her footsteps cease. He did not look back, but he knew she was not following him any longer. “Whenever I meet him.”

  Chapter 56

  The river was not fast moving, nor was it much of a river at all. It was somewhere between a creek and a river, a halfway between thing, not deep enough for Cyrus to worry much about wading across if he so desired, but deep enough for him to stick to the riverbank. He undressed himself and then sat upon the bank and let go of his sword. There was no one around, though he could see Martaina in the distance, between him and the encampment. A split from the river was visible, something that wended much closer to the camp, indeed almost through it, and he wondered why she had suggested this place for him before the reason of privacy dawned upon him.

  He sat upon the bank and let the sun crawl lower in the sky, unconcerned. His head no longer swam, and his breathing was deep and steady, taking in the plains air. The grasses here were different than those around Sanctuary, fuller-more oats, he thought, less tamed. The Plains of Perdamun were broken and dotted with farms; these grounds were spotted only occasionally with settlement. He dipped his feet in the water and felt the coolness run over his toes. He looked to the direction of the light current and realized it came from the north, from the mountains in the far distance, where the enemy lay.

  He stood and slid into the water, wading in on his knees, as it covered him to the waist. His knees touched the thousand pebbles on the bottom of the stream, and he let the current run over him, let himself fall back, let his hair submerge, long black locks clinging to his head as they dampened. He kept his face above the water then dipped it under for a moment, felt it run into his nose and he broke the surface sputtering, snorting it out.

  “Finally reached the point of trying to drown yourself?” There was
a quiet voice nearby, and he looked up to see her watching him, squatting near his armor.

  “No,” he said, ignoring the levity in her voice. “Just trying to remove the accumulation of weeks of sweat and sick smell.”

  “Not a bad plan, as such plans go.” Her clothing hung loose, no cloak or armor visible from where he sat. She was down to the barest essentials, the daggers on her hips staring at him like they had eyes of their own. Her curves were smooth, and the shirt she wore had enough of a gap at the top that he was left not needing to imagine the breasts he had seen so many times of late. “Did you have any reason for it besides just the feeling of uncleanliness?”

  “Yes.” He nodded slowly.

  “Must I inquire why?”

  He stared back at her, waiting, with her head cocked, her slightly pointed incisors hanging out of her deep blue lips. “Must I say it?”

  She squatted there, and he wondered if she was visible to Martaina, as low as her profile was, with the grass swaying and almost touching her cheeks. “Before, I’ve been content to let it pass. But now, yes. I want to hear you say it.”

  “Because I want you,” Cyrus said. “Because I crave you and the relief you bring.”

  “Relief?” She unknotted the strings at the front of her shirt and shrugged out of it there in front of him, let her dark blue skin show to the world. She stepped out of a boot with a half-step, not ever leaving the ground but coming to her hands and knees. The other boot came off with ease, as she crawled toward the bank of the stream on all fours, naked to the waist. Her cloth breeches came unlaced with only a minimal effort from her, and slid off just as her hand reached the rocky edge of the water.

  He waited for her, felt the rising tide within him, and when he felt her first kiss, it was as though the call within him were answered, the raging tide rising was dismissed. They were there for quite some time, the splashing of the water around them the evidence of a particularly noisy bath. Cyrus neither knew nor cared whether Martaina saw; she doubtless knew anyway. It matters not, he thought in the midst of it. But in truth, he knew otherwise.