Crusader

Chapter 100

Vara

Day 214 of the Siege of Sanctuary

She sat in the lounge, staring at the front window as the spring rain drizzled down outside, little speckling turning the glass into refractions, tilting the little bit of light that came down in different directions. The smell of home cooking was in the air, Larana’s finest efforts at turning pickled eggs, conjured bread and old mead into something palatable seemed to be working; in fact, Vara could not much tell the difference between the smell of what the druid was creating now from what she created with the freshest meats and vegetables. In the case of most, that would be a damning criticism indeed. In her case, it’s praise. Her mouth watered as she took a deep sniff of the air around.

The sound of a dozen practice swordfights being conducted in the foyer were like a steady clank of metal in her ears, deafening in their way, causing her to clutch the stuffed arms of the chair with all their padding. It was a soft touch against her hands; her gauntlets lay at the table to her side, along with her book, The Crusader and the Champion. Can’t seem to get into it at all. I haven’t been able to since … since he left.

There was a shout of triumph, and she turned her head to see Belkan with his blade at Thad’s neck. “You may be one of our best,” the old armorer said to the red-clad warrior, whose face was as scarlet as his armor, “but age and experience still beats youth and speed from time to time.”

She let her mind drift back. Her eyes drifted to the window, still spotted with the rain. Will he ever come back? It’s been a year and more, now. She chided herself for a fool. Even if he wanted to return, the portal is closed. He would have to go to Reikonos and wait there until the embargo was lifted. A glumness lay upon her, deep sadness draped over her shoulders like a shawl on a chill day. We are truly cut off from the outside world. That is the lasting legacy of what the Sovereign has wrought here, to place us under his thumb once and for all, without any way to come back and forth, to get supplies-she thought of Isabelle, and the briefest hint of sadness grew-to see family, friends. He means to drive us out, to kill us, or worse. How Alaric sees all this and still manages to believe so strongly in the mission, in the ideal of disrupting and holding against the Sovereign …

Then again, should we fall, we lose our home.

There was a stir behind her, a quiet that settled over the foyer, and she turned her head to see Alaric come out of the Great Hall, walking. He rarely walks these days, flitting from place to place in his ethereal mists-or whatever they are. She stood, grabbing her gauntlets and book, and marched toward the entry doors as Alaric headed toward them, nodding at those he passed and speaking to a few.

“Well done, Belkan,” Alaric said as he passed the space where the armorer was sparring with Thad. “You continue to prove that skill and ability are ageless things and that a heart and willingness are enough for a fight.”

“Let us hope we don’t have to prove your theory correct in an all-out battle,” Belkan said to Alaric. “I’d just as soon stay in the armory with a dead quiet than continue to have to sharpen these young ones for a battle I’d rather not fight.”

“Agreed,” Alaric said, passing between the two of them smoothly, clapping each on the shoulder with great assurance and with none of the darkness of the soul he’d exhibited when last he’d spoken with Vara privately. She had not seen much of the Ghost since then. There had been no Council meetings and no change, the wall continuing to be assailed in earnest every few days. “The purpose of this guild was never to sit here and defend our own keep, and that it has come to this is a measure of the depths that Arkaria finds itself in rather than a commentary on us, I think.” He gave a slight nod. “I think.”

He graced Thad and Belkan with a smile and then kept on, giving a ranger he passed a slap on the shoulder for good measure, causing the man, a dwarf, to smile and blush at the acknowledgment of his guild leader. He’s so good at this when he wants to be. They respect him, they love him, even though he maintains his air of mysteriousness and aloofness. They would follow him into the Realm of Death on a whim, just like-

She felt the stab of pain inside and ignored it, placing herself before the door and directly in Alaric’s path. He noted her but did not adjust his course and did not look up until he was nearly upon her. “Lass,” he said as he came to the doors.

“Alaric,” she said.

“I’m going to inspect the inner walls,” he said, gesturing toward the door she was blocking. “If there’s something on your mind, perhaps you’d care to accompany me as I go.”

She gave a very subtle half turn to look at the door before realizing how pointless it was to look at a closed door in indecision. “It’s raining.”

“A true deluge,” Alaric admitted. “And exactly why I am going now. The run of the water will apprise us of any breaches, any places where the drainage is poor, any areas of concern. The water shows us the truth of the wall, I think, and the strength of our barrier.”

“Yes, very well,” she said, and looked back to the table just inside the foyer. Laying her book upon it, she pulled her gauntlets on, one by one, and grasped the door handle, opening it for her Guildmaster. “Shall we?”

He eyed her curiously, dismissed the fact that she was holding the door open for him and walked through. She followed and the patter of the rain upon her helm began a moment later. Alaric paused outside the door on the first step as the rain fell upon him. He raised his face skyward, as though he were trying to expose himself to the drowning sky, and Vara watched, huddling closer to the door, trying to shelter herself using the slight indent of the main doors to protect her from the downpour. It was only minimally effective.

“Do you feel the liberation that the rains grant?” He turned to look at her, a solemnity and peace visible on the part of his face she could see. “It is spring, and the rains mean growth and the coming green of summer. All the vestiges of the hard winter will be washed away as though they were our past sins, and we will be left left with nothing but a new field, freshly tilled, ready to be planted with whatever we will.”

“My field appears ill-tilled and filled to the brimming with dark elves,” she said sourly. “But perhaps I’m seeing it wrong. Though I would consider myself very fortunate if the spring rains would wash them all away and leave me with an empty field once more.”

Alaric gave the slightest chuckle. “So would we all, but that is not always the point of the storm. When the real downpours begin, you cannot always control what is washed away. Sometimes you lose a part of your field, of your crop. It would certainly be easier if such things did not happen, but since we see it always in nature, I find it hard to believe it would not carry over into every other facet of life.”

She watched the steady stream of water come down, smelled the freshness of the rain, dissipating the last aromas of the dinner being prepared inside, as though she had taken a drink of water to cleanse her palate between courses of a sumptuous meal. “Yes, I have heard you talk of these philosophies before, of how we grow in storms, in times of trouble. I daresay we will be doing some considerable growing here.” He looked over his shoulder at her briefly, then settled back into his position, arms up, palms tilted skyward as though he could capture the rains for himself. “Alaric, I must tell you something.”

He did not move, still drawing strength from the waters coming down around him. “All right,” he said. “Go on.”

“What you talked about before,” she said. “About taking our purpose to its natural conclusion-to defending this place to the last. I wanted to tell you … I have believed in you as a leader and a friend since the days when I was so ground up inside that it felt as though there was nothing left within me but shattered glass. My sword has served you in noble cause all the days since the first, when I swore my allegiance to Sanctuary-and it shall not falter now.”

“I never doubted you for a moment,” he said, still not turning. “But I admit I am curious; why this profession to me now?”

“Because,” she said at a whisper, “I saw you. You doubted yourself, and that is not something I am accustomed to from you, Alaric. You have been ever the constant to me, since the day you carried me back here from the Realm of Purgatory. I am used to seeing all manner of breakage around here-from the days of Orion and … what the hells was that gnome’s name, the troublesome one? I have seen everyone go to pieces at one time or another, myself included. But not you, Alaric. Your title is Guildmaster, and you are affectionately known as the Master of Sanctuary, but it is better said that you are the Master of yourself. You do not fall apart, not ever. Not when the Dragonlord threatens to consume the entire north, not when every power in Arkaria rallies to destroy us, not when we stood before the God of Death himself and you bartered for our very lives. Yet now, in this time, you begin to show the signs of strain.” She watched him, saw the rain cascading off his pauldrons of battered steel in sheets as the tempo of the rains began to increase. “You … falter. You crack. I wanted you to realize that you have my support-and my affection-for all that you have done and do. That I have ever considered you a friend and a mentor, and that I will follow you in this crusade of being the stopgap against the fall of Arkaria until its conclusion, whatever that may be.”

There was no response at first, and then Alaric brought a hand to gesture her forward. “Come out to me.” He began to walk forward, down the steps, toward the lawn.

She let out an impatient hiss. “Alaric, it is a deluge out there.”

He turned back and stared at her with wry amusement. “You say you will follow me into death yet fear to tread in the rain. What am I to think of your level of conviction?” The corner of his mouth contained the barest hint of an upward creep, as though he were holding in a smile, rueful or otherwise.

She sighed and stepped out of the slight cover she was under. The rain began to patter upon her helm, and she took another step forward, reminded all at once of the sound of rain tapping on windows when she was a child in Termina. I do not see what sort of commitment can be tested by a mere walk in the rain. There’s not even any lightning to be wary of.

“Very good,” Alaric said as she reached the bottom of the steps where he waited. “There is a lesson in all this, you realize.” He looked to a tree to their right, a good ways off, a tall one, one that Vara had sat under more than once on summer days while reading. “In the winds of the storm, the boughs of a tree spring back and forth, they bend in the gale. Sometimes, when the wind is strong, they crack. If you are close, you might perceive the sound. If it were a good break, it may be obvious to the sight. If a small one, it could go unnoticed.” He raised an eyebrow. “If you are not particularly close to the source, then you may not see the strain, hear the crack, until the branch falls.” She saw the pulse of a spell leave his hand, a weak burst, and it jarred a branch near the top of the tree, which was considerably high. A small bough broke loose and tumbled, catching in the upper branches until it fell, finally, to the earth. “Yet it cracks nonetheless. You simply do not see it until it is too late.”

She tore her eyes from the branch on the ground to Alaric, straining to hear him over the disconcerting sound of the rain hammering at her head and body. “You keep everyone at a distance. You maintain the vague and mysterious allure of a man whom no one knows. I suppose no one would be close enough to hear you strain and crack, would they?”

He smiled slightly. “Perhaps.”

“What would you have me learn from this, teacher?” She tried to keep the sarcasm out of her reply but somewhat failed, she knew. “A gardening lesson, perhaps? Tend to every branch of the tree, keep watch on them lest they fall at an inopportune time?”

He glanced upward and nodded his head, a flat expression of surprise on his lower face. “That is … not bad, actually. I was aiming more for a visual representation of the idea that you never know what lies beneath the surface of a body of water until you’ve been in it, but I did not wish to walk all the way around to the pond.”

She let a small laugh escape. “So it was merely a lesson in being vague and mysterious and keeping people at a distance in order to keep them from seeing you bend and break.”

He nodded with a slight smile of his own. “Close enough. I have endeavored in the last years to get you to soften that edge you keep about you, the one that holds others at a distance. I told you before in your dealings with Cyrus that your protective instincts would drive him away. I have no desire to keep harping on what I perceive as your attempts to sabotage your own happiness, especially as you are aware of them. The lesson closest to what I want to tell you is this-” He stepped closer to her and placed both hands on her shoulders, looked her in the eyes with the cool grey of his, and took a deep breath. “If you allow no one to stand close to you, no one will know when you are straining, when you are close to breaking, or the reason why. While I thought once, perhaps, this was a fine posture for a leader to maintain, I now doubt its efficacy, both as a leadership method and as a fulfilling way to live one’s life.” He glanced past her to the tree. “Also, it seems somewhat dangerous in its illustrative purposes. That branch could have hit someone, after all.”

She chuckled again. “You jest. You couch your lessons in jests. Truly, this is rare indeed. You stumble between morbidity and a clarity of thought that I can scarcely fathom and then go right back to humor, all in the space of seconds.”

He smiled. “I only wish to convey to you the mistakes I have made.”

“You’ve been a very good Guildmaster,” she said.

“I have made errors,” he said gravely, and she felt the squeeze of his hands as they clinked on her pauldrons. “Grave ones. Foolish ones. Almost all preventable, almost all brought about by my failure to trust my guildmates with things I should have told them. I have believed in you as well, all of you, that you were better than me. I felt my role here was to be secret-keeper, to mete and dole the things I had learned and acquired in their own time, fearing these secrets might be too much for anyone else to bear, that they might break you all or cause you to be under the same duress as myself. All it has done is isolate me, to put me off to the side, and make me shoulder every ounce of the burden. Indeed, now I am left to wonder if any of the things I held back ever had any real purpose at all, if it would not have been better for me to say plainly everything I knew and let the officers at least react with their own best judgment.” He sagged. “But that is a discussion that is entirely esoteric at this point; we are too far down the road now for anything less.”

“If you have no one to speak to about these things,” she said, “I would listen, as you have for me all these years.”

“I have rarely done that for you, my friend,” Alaric said with a smile. “And I am not totally bereft of those with which to speak some of my mind.” The smile disappeared. “Though I do miss Curatio at moments such as this. His wisdom was as great as his discretion, and there were things I could talk about with him that I dare not with anyone else.” There was a slight twinkle in his eye at her. “Well, almost.”

They lapsed into quiet, and Alaric withdrew his hands from her shoulders. She thought on what he had said as the rain continued to fall around them. Isolated. Alone. Filled with regret. Yet still there is something he won’t say, things he won’t talk about. She cast a sidelong glance at him, wondering. “Alaric?” she asked. “For all these you have said, the things you have told us will come to us ‘in the fullness of time’? Will we ever actually hear the answers?”

His face darkened, and he stared at the tree as the rains washed over it. The air was clear now and fresh, the smell of all else washed away and replaced with the scent of good mud and earth. There was a flash of lightning on the horizon, and then a solid crack of thunder followed a few seconds later. She did not have to strain to hear him but only just. “Perhaps,” he said, his voice fading as he spoke. “Perhaps you will indeed. But the day may come when you do … that you wish you had not.” He was stoic, still, and looking at the wall before them and all that it held back, the army on the other side. “For not all secrets are prizes to be revealed, celebrated and reveled in. Some are dark, and dangerous, and when the door is open to them,” he pointed to the gate in the wall, sealed against the predations of the dark elves, “they wreak nothing but destruction on everyone-everyone-that they touch.”