Crusader

Chapter 23

“You’re not going to hurt her, are you?” Martaina broke the silence between them on the walk back to Cyrus’s quarters. The steady noise of his boots smacking against the marble with each step drummed a rhythm of fury, the walls seemed to blur as he passed. At Martaina’s words his head snapped around at her.

“What?” He nearly recoiled away from her. “No, I’m not going to hurt her. What kind of a question is that?”

“A valid one,” the ranger said, trying to keep pace with Cyrus’s long footsteps as they chewed up the ground between him and his quarters. The meeting had ended shortly after the King had made his revelation-Cyrus thought of it as twisting the dagger, the King had seemed to enjoy his pain so-and Cyrus had left the chamber, not hearing anything else that had been said save for that the royal convoy would begin the month-long journey to Enrant Monge on the morrow. “You’ve been told something that augers badly for a woman you were-dare I say-beginning to fall in-”

“I was not,” Cyrus snapped. “I trusted her, that’s all. I invited her into my bed. I … started to … barely allow myself … I had become comfortable with her,” he finally allowed. “But she has lied to me. Everything about her approach to me from the start to now has been based on that lie.”

“She never lied to you,” Martaina said, breaking into a jog to keep alongside him. “Can you blame her for not wanting you to know that she was the sister of the King of Actaluere, being as they were the ones whose envoy had captured and harmed our people?”

“Yes, I can blame her,” Cyrus said. “Very easily, in fact. If I wasn’t shaken from taking her along with us by the fact that her husband kidnapped and raped some of my people, I likely wouldn’t have been dissuaded had I known her brother was a royal prick who sold her into slavery to the baron. But she didn’t give me the opportunity. She lied.” He heard the words, and they sounded foreign to him, burned in his gullet.

“Be cautious, sir,” Martaina warned him. “Don’t do anything you’ll regret later-”

“I won’t regret a bit of it,” Cyrus said, the words stinging his lips with a fire of their own. “What’s with this sudden concern? Do you honestly think I’m going to … what? Slap her around? I don’t care how furious I am, I don’t hit women.” He paused. “When I’m not in combat. I mean, some lady brandishes a sword at me, my gentlemanly ways tend to go right out the window-”

“Just …” Martaina stopped, tugging on Cyrus’s arm. “You’re angry, sir. Understandable. But you may make of things differently later. You may want to go easy.”

“I don’t expect I’m going to be seeing this betrayal differently in the evening’s light,” Cyrus said. “Nor in the light of the moon, nor tomorrow’s, nor the next moon’s, nor any day from here going forward til the end of all days. She … lied to me. She betrayed me.” He felt the emotions play across his face, felt it contort, the rage coloring the inflection of his words. “You think I’m likely to forget that? She’s the sister of someone who’s a declared enemy of ours. Whose servant did things-”

“She’s the wife of said servant, and you got over that enough to pleasure yourself with her,” Martaina replied, unfazed. “You took your armor off with her, sir-and that’s not something you tend to do. You may be wearing it now, but she’s already through it. You’re stinging right now. Tread easy.” Martaina withdrew, seeming to fade as she began to step backward. “Lest you find out how much more it can hurt.”

Cyrus looked back at her, unflinching. “I’m a warrior. Taking pain is what I do. Gather the officers together, tell them I’ll met with them in the dining hall in fifteen minutes.” He straightened. “Truly fifteen minutes, this time. Let them know.” He turned away, trying to keep an even pace on his journey through the halls until he reached his room. His urge was to throw the door open and storm in, but he restrained it, shutting it near-silently. He heard something stir in the bedroom, and Cattrine’s head peeked around the doorframe, followed by the rest of her, shyly displaying her nude skin, the scars obvious and plentiful. She had done much the same for the last thirty days, and every time it enticed him, drew him in, the sight of her this way.

Now he saw only the scars, jagged, angry, marring the perfect skin, interrupting the smoothness of her flesh, things he barely noticed yesterday, but were now glaringly obvious, standing out, filling his vision. They were all he could see. “Get dressed,” he said. “Your brother threatens war on Galbadien.”

Cyrus watched her confidence crumple, the smooth, seductive look evaporating from her face like a mirage when one draws too close. One of her hands wrapped around her breasts while the other sank lower, as though she could cover herself with them. “He what? I’m sorry?”

“He threatens war. On Galbadien, for harboring the Sanctuary army.” Cyrus’s gaze was cold, unmerciful, and he could feel Cattrine wilt before it. “The King and his advisors seem to believe it’s his way of salving his wounded honor, because he’s embarrassed that a foreign army marched through his realm, slapped down one of his barons, and stole away his own flesh and blood without challenge.”

“That … does sound like him,” she said. “But it’s just the rattle of the sword, surely he can’t mean to-”

“They think he does,” Cyrus said. “They think he knows they’re weak on the border and that he won’t hesitate to exploit that to save himself some rich embarrassment.”

Her eyes flicked down, even as she stood away from the doorframe, exposed, in the middle of the room. Her hands hovered near uselessly around her body, and she seemed to shiver, though the room felt warm to Cyrus’s skin.

“I didn’t mean … I’m sorry,” she said, still not meeting his eyes, “for not telling you.”

“Yes,” Cyrus said. “I’m sorry, too. Would it really have been that bad? I already took you on knowing what your husband was. Did you think having an ass of a brother would have stopped me?”

“I was afraid,” she said, as her body jerked from an unseen chill, “that you might think something like this could happen, and you would change your mind. I thought that perhaps it would be dangerous to tell you, that you weren’t as honorable or decent as you appeared to be. I had reasons,” she said, finally looking up at him. “Very good ones, every single one, or at least they sounded so in my head.”

“I trusted you.” Cyrus stared at her, and she flinched away. “In a way I haven’t … with anyone … in a long time. I understand your reasons, but as of about thirty days ago … when you knew who I was and what I stood for … they should have been null and you should have told me the truth.”

“I’m sorry.” She still did not look up, focusing instead on the floor, the marble, anything but him. “I’m sorry, Cyrus …”

“Yeah.” He heard the scrape of his boots on the floor as he turned back to the door. “I have to go meet with my officers. King Longwell is leaving tomorrow; they’ve been summoned to Enrant Monge by Briyce Unger.”

“Will we be going as well?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Cyrus said.

He heard her move across the floor, taking tentative steps, her feet making a slight sucking noise as they pulled from the marble floor with each step. “Will you hand me back over to my brother? As though I were a piece of property?”

Cyrus felt the answer within him, steeped in the rage he felt inside at her betrayal. Yes! I’ll hand you over to him, let him have you, be done with you and your lies, your deceits, with your … He nearly choked at the memory of her fingers tracing lines down his skin. “You should get dressed,” he said simply, and walked out the door, careful to open it no more than was necessary to slip out, so as not to expose her to anyone who might be walking down the hall.

As he walked away from the closed door, he stopped, halted by some unseen feeling, something that ran through him, a ripple of strong emotion, and he tried to quiet it. She lied. She betrayed you. Just like Vara. Just like Imina. He felt his fist clench. Felt his mask of emotionlessness deteriorate, and he placed his hand on the stone wall of the hallway, as though he could draw some unseen strength from it. He imagined pebbles falling within him, into the giant void, the roiling maelstrom in his chest, the storm that threatened to break loose out of him and cause him to shed tears, something he had not done since … He remembered, and then pushed it down, back into the depths, along with the storm, along with everything else.

One foot in front of another. Keep walking. I need to meet with the officers. I need to decide what we’re going to do next. He took a breath, then another, slow, as though he could excise the venom within simply by breathing it out. He imagined the stones falling inside him again, rocks, boulders, dropping into his center, weighing down his heart, so that he couldn’t feel the emotion within. He imagined ice, cold, frigid blocks of it, stacked all around his pain, cooling him, building a wall that it couldn’t escape. He let it contain the emotion, bury it, push it far out of sight, behind the wall, where he could no longer taste the bitterness of it in his mouth, and the blood rushing through his ears subsided.

One foot in front of another, he told himself again, pulling his hand from the wall, letting his own strength hold him upright again. He stood up, trying to straighten his spine, as though standing as tall as possible could help somehow, disguise his weakness, put it to the back of him, where he wouldn’t feel it and no one would see it. He resisted the urge to let his knees buckle, fought it, let the ice hold his emotions in check. One foot in front of another. Keep walking.

He took a step, then another, and the pace became quicker and quicker as his feet carried him away from the door, away from the handle he wanted to turn, the words he wanted to say, away from the feel of her skin against his-and back to his duty.