Crusader

Chapter 49

Vara

The Council Chamber had emptied quickly after the meeting, as though everyone had other things to deal with, other urgencies to be handled. Erith and Vaste, she knew, were both balancing the responsibilities of the Halls of Healing, keeping it running while Curatio was away. She wondered if Ryin had even set foot in his own quarters since returning to Sanctuary to find it under attack. Alaric, however, remained in his seat, as though carved out of the same material as the chair, not a Ghost at all but a mountain lain down in the middle of the room, growing out of the stone floor. His head was bowed and his helm lay upon the table, as it always did. A kind of darkness enshrouded him, like the clouds that hang over a peak at midday, hiding it from the view of the world, and she could tell naught about his mood or intentions save that they were present and as hidden as the man’s face usually was.

“You have something on your mind,” Alaric said, breaking the silence between them, his eyes not finding hers but remaining fixed on the edge of the table.

“Always,” Vara said, not sure where she found it within her to be even slightly smartass. “It’s the peril of thinking, you know.”

Alaric did not smile, did not return hers because she did not have one to return. “What is on your mind, lass?”

“You’ve proven to have an uncanny knack at guessing what sort of things might be on the minds of others.” She shifted her hands to her lap, letting the steel gauntlets clink against the metal of her greaves. They were like a second skin by now, she had worn them for so long, but in moments such as this, they found ways to remind her, subtly, that she was different than even many of the women of Sanctuary. “So why don’t you tell me … what is on my mind?”

Alaric let a long sigh, his head settling back down to look at the edge of the table rather than her. “Your mind is on Cyrus, in Luukessia-”

“My mind is on our guildmates,” she said hotly, “facing the consequences of our mistakes, in a foreign land-”

“One of whom is our General,” Alaric said calmly, “a man with whom you are developing a somewhat tangled history, even if you don’t wish to admit to it.” She didn’t bother to interrupt him again, but she felt the burn all the way up to the tops of her ears, which was enough to tell her that her pale face was, by necessity, flushed. “You needn’t bother denying it, and nor do I care. I did not allow Cyrus to casually disentwine himself from admitting his feelings for you, even when he didn’t want to, and if you want me to speak your mind for you, don’t pretend to be offended when I speak to you what is truly on it. Yes, you worry about our troops, and our guildhall, and Sanctuary, but your emotions sweep you, old friend, and your emotions-the ones you don’t care to admit-are so loudly proclaiming your thoughts for the man in black that I cannot ignore them in favor of anything you might say.”

“It is my fault, Alaric.” She heard the echo of the words in the silence, even though they were no more than a whisper. “We went to the Realm of Death for my people-to save my people, to find out why Mortus wanted me dead. And he killed the God of Death-”

“I killed the God of Death,” Alaric said, and there was menace in his voice, “lest you forget.”

“But Cyrus threw himself in the path of Mortus.” Vara’s head was up now, and she stared down the Ghost. “I should have died there, and none of this would have happened. But he threw himself in front of Mortus and cut the hand, and we fell upon the God of Death like crows upon a piece of carrion. If he were still alive, Luukessia would be … I don’t know, not being overrun by these creatures. We’re responsible … I’m responsible, Alaric! It’s my fault.” She felt the strong emotion, and it caused her to shut her eyes, to cover her face with her hand. “It’s all my fault.”

“Because you made him love you?” Alaric’s voice was oddly distant, and Vara looked through her fingers to see him on his feet, back to her now, facing the window and looking out across the plains. “Because you forced him to defend you in your time of need, follow you when Mortus’s assassins pursued you, and try to save you when you had lost all hope?” Alaric still did not look at her. “Yes, I can see how this is entirely your fault.”

“I know it sounds absurd.” She rose from her place at the table but did not move closer to him, merely stood, as though she were a child in the Holy Brethren again, answering an instructor’s question. “But it is so, that his …” she struggled with the word, “… feelings for me, they caused him to act, to set things in motion, and what I did afterward sent him over there, where our people face … whatever those things are.”

“A scourge, I believe they call them. And a scourge I believe they are.”

“How do you reconcile a thought like that?” She let the words hang before asking her next question. “You said you killed Mortus, and I suppose you did, struck the final blow. But we all killed him together, all of us, and you may have struck the last, but Cyrus struck the first, and he did it in my name, for me, binding us all together in some grand pact that has unleashed untold hell upon people who I had never even heard of until this last year. How do you … handle that? How do you not let it weigh upon your thoughts every waking moment of the day? How do you live with the idea that someone so dear and frustrating and annoying and noble and fearless is facing the consequences of what you’ve wrought, that they could die so far from home, and never return to …” She almost coughed, overcome with annoying emotion. “How do manage that, Alaric? How do you bury that and get on with things?”

The Ghost was quiet, his broad shoulders almost unmoving beneath his armor, his silhouette against the shadows of the evening sun outside. “I don’t know that you can, lass. What I would advise … is that you recognize that what is past is past, and that no amount of agonizing or wishing will change the outcome of that day in Death’s Realm, and that no excess of cogitation will change what happened that night in your quarters. No matter how much you think and dwell and wonder, no other outcome will make itself known but what has happened.” Alaric’s hand reached out to the window and he touched it, the fingers of his metal gauntlets clicking against the glass, as though he were trying to touch the orange sky beyond. “You can scarce change the past or what has gone before. All you can do is dwell in the moment, and work to change the course of things from here on.” He turned his head to look at her. “That is what I would advise.”

“Is it?” Vara asked, and she let her fingers clench inside her gauntlets. “Then why is there a pall over you, Lord Garaunt? Why does it seem that darkness has settled on the Ghost of Sanctuary, and that the ephemeral Guildmaster seems weighted down even more than he has ever been before? If dwelling in the past does not change the course of things then why are you still there, every day, every night, and letting it own you, become you?”

Alaric made no reply at first. “It would seem that I am not the only one for whom an uncanny knack for guessing the minds of others has become a standard. I said that the advice I gave you is what I would advise. I did not suggest that it was in any way what I, myself, was doing.”

“You think about it, too, don’t you?” She left the table behind carefully, walking toward him, halting a few paces away. “It is on your mind, always, what has happened, what we allowed to happen, by our actions and inaction-”

“Yes,” Alaric said, and his head went back to the window, which his hand had never left, still touching the glass. “It is a … difficult thing to lose guildmates. When we lost Niamh, I was once again torn with indecision. We have lost several in the last few years, and that is to be expected, normal attrition for a guild of our size and the way that we run things. But Niamh … was precious. She had been here almost since the beginning of Sanctuary, twenty-odd years ago. To see her lost, not to some raid but to a deliberate attack by an assassin, was wrenching. I questioned myself in ways that I had not in years. Not since …” he shook his head, “… Raifa. For everything that followed, that led you and Cyrus into peril at Termina, that took you into war-every single thing that happened-I questioned my choices, my thoughts, the distance that I had allowed you to operate at. And even though there was not a single thing I would have done differently than either of you, from the moments before Niamh died to the night on the bridge when you held off an empire, I still questioned. Even in Death’s Realm, when I tried to bargain with Mortus, I wondered in the moment if sacrificing one guildmate in order to save the rest was the right choice.” He bowed his head and his hand came free of the window.

“The truth is … I was relieved when Cyrus jumped in front of Mortus’s hand. I wished I had had the courage to do it myself, to die so that none of the rest of you would have to. I was relieved because his courage spared me from the cowardice of consigning one of you to death, to making the impossible decision of entering battle with a god or letting one person die as a sacrifice. Cyrus made the choice I couldn’t find it in myself to disagree with. He spared your life, and …” Alaric’s eyes found her then, “… and I was glad, glad that the God of Death died that day, because the alternative would be to lose you, and that would be …” He did not finish.

“So it weighs on you, too,” Vara said, though she did not touch him, did not so much as place a hand on his shoulder. It would be unseemly, somehow, between the two of them. There was always much unsaid, and Alaric was no more profligate with his touch than she was; two distant people, so bizarrely different than someone such as … say, Niamh.

“It weighs on me,” he said. “But it need not weigh on you if you should follow the advice I give you-”

“Rather than the example you set for me?” Vara felt the taste of the irony on her tongue, and it was not to her liking. “That should be the first time, I would think.”

“I rather suspected you would not listen, preferring instead in your infinite stubbornness to do things your own way,” Alaric said with a note of melancholy. “Or my own way, if you prefer.”

“Stubbornness is hardly a quality reserved for the officers of Sanctuary,” Vara said, “but if I may boast, I think we bring it to such a level that few could ever hope to master it in the way we have.”

“True enough. But my counsel is sound; if you would heed it, you would agonize less.”

“And you would agonize just the same,” she said. “And I would still …” She shook her head as though the mere action could cleanse the bitterness from her palate, “… worry. About-”

“Him.” The Ghost’s crisp use of the word sounded like a shock in the quiet. “As do I. I worry for all of them, but should the General fall, Curatio will surely evacuate the rest. He is reasonable in that way. Cyrus, on the other hand … does stubbornness with a skill and effort that even I can admire.” He looked back at her, sidelong, with a hint of a smile. “You truly do know how to pick them. You and he are matched horses, unbroken animals that are unlikely to ever be cut loose of your maddening habits of pride and-”

“Yes, that will do, thank you.” She eased closer, and took up her place next to him, on the other side of the double doors to the balcony, at the window opposite. She looked out across the sunlit plains, the grasses set to fire by the sunset, the horizon showing the first sign of purple. “So we wait. And dwell on our every previous bad move.”

“We wait,” Alaric said. “Because we all have a duty-he to his part, us to ours.” He let the quiet infuse the air, the stillness of the coming dusk settled over the Council Chambers, and the sun dropped a few degrees in the sky before he broke the silence again. “They’ll be coming, you know.”

“I know,” she said. “When?”

“Soon,” Alaric promised. “The Sovereign will not wait. And for all my bravado in Council, you should know-they may yet break us. He will send … almost everything at us, here, because the future of his war depends on it.”

“Then I suppose we’ll have to break him. His army. His war.” She said it more certainly than she thought it, as though Alaric’s confidence had made its way to her, and they had reversed their roles in the minutes since the meeting ended.

“I suppose we shall,” he said, and lapsed into a silence that carried them well past the time when the sun sank below the horizon, and the room’s torches and hearths lit themselves, and they could no longer see anything out the windows but darkness and the reflections of themselves in the glass.