Crusader

Chapter 88

Cyrus’s walk back to the fire that he shared with the others was long and stumbling. The cold bit at him in a way that felt foreign, as though he hadn’t been exposed to it for weeks now. His eyes even felt cold, the air freezing the moisture within them. He cracked his knuckles and moved his tongue around in his dry mouth, as though the bread he’d eaten had formed a coating of yeast around it. The smell of the cold air and the dead around him was overwhelming, and he felt himself stagger from the weariness.

She’s his problem now. She’s the one who went willingly back to him-for whatever reason. He mentally kicked himself for even thinking it. She went back for Luukessia. To save her land, to turn her brother loose for war. She went back for-

“Are you lost?” An arm snugged into the crook of his elbow, giving him strength. He smelled the surprising scent of sweat and-faintly-greenery.

“Martaina,” Cyrus said, recovering from a near-stumble. “Watching out for me again?”

“Someone has to.”

He took a few steps with her. “You heard?”

She had her cowl up, but he could see her lips present themselves in a pursing motion. “I did.”

“You have an opinion.”

She smiled, and at this she was almost impish. “Have you ever met a woman who didn’t?”

He chuckled in spite of the fatigue. “You think I should go to Caenalys.”

She waited before answering and came to a halt, their boots crunching against the packed snow, which still gave a little at every step as Cyrus put his weight onto it. “I think that if Milos Tiernan goes to retake his capital in order to save the hundred thousand people that live within the walls, if he doesn’t have some form of magical assistance, then Cattrine Hoygraf will be quite dead by the end of the endeavor.”

“I see,” Cyrus said, and nodded. “And that raises the likelihood that Hoygraf’s army will cause even more damage in Caenalys before he is defeated.”

“Tiernan will have to pull more away from this battle in order to break open the city walls and save those people from Hoygraf’s delusions,” Martaina said. “The man will make Caenalys a mass grave site, bottling himself up with the scourge coming.”

“So I would go for the people of the city?” Cyrus asked, watching her without emotion.

“No,” Martaina said, “you should go because if you don’t, you’ll regret it to the day you die.” Cyrus opened his mouth to speak and her gloved hand came up and a single finger lay across his lips. “You need not posture before me-the others, perhaps, but there is no fooling someone who has watched you so close as I have. You would have an easier time fooling yourself than me-and you have. You feel for her, even now.” She did not break away from staring him down. “In spite of all, just like Vara, it is there. You will regret it to your grave if you don’t save her.”

With that, Martaina turned loose his arm, and he felt as though a weight had been attached to it instead of lifted, as though she had given him strength and taken it all away at once. “Why?” he asked, in the hush of the night, with the battle still raging somewhere in front of them, and the campfires burning all around him. “I wanted so hard to be rid of her, to be rid of both of them-her and Vara, and yet they still torment me so. Why can’t it be …” he let his voice crack slightly, “simple.”

“I believe you have confused matters of the heart with something much different, like fletching, perhaps,” she said, drawing an arrow from her quiver. “Make an arrow, put a head on it, make them of uniform length and material for the same purpose, and be done with it. This is not an occupation. It is not a job, or something that you would do in your spare time. This is love, whether you admit it or not. She was there for you in a time of great sorrow, and allowed you to feel something that you had thought lost. Imagined slights and betrayals aside, you gave her your word.”

“She went back to him,” Cyrus said. “To save her homeland-”

“To save you,” Martaina said sharply. “It was for you that she gave herself back. It was for her home that she remained there under the most odious tortures I have ever seen.” Martaina took a step closer to him and seized his arm again, and he felt for a moment as though a parent were lecturing him. “Do you know the last time I saw her? We came upon her being whipped while tied to a pillar that your head was stuck upon. She was given your head and told to walk it back to Sanctuary. Aisling managed to rush it back in time, but J’anda and I carried her, bleeding, broken, back to our camp so she could be healed. And she went back to him willingly. Yes, she stayed with him for her homeland, but the bargain was struck to save you.” Her hand came loose of him again. “Don’t be a fool. However much you may be doubting everything else right now, believe this-she loved you.”

Martaina turned and began to walk away, back toward a fire that was not so far off, her feet making no sound on the snow as she went. “You were the first for her, I think.” The wind whistled through, but he heard her nonetheless, and shivered as she spoke. “And while you do not owe her your love, you do-in spite of all else-owe her your life.”

Chapter 89

The night was terribly cold, and when he lay down next to Aisling, he did what she wanted, perfunctorily, tired, with aching bones and pain in his heart, and he kept himself together through it only by focusing on the smells, the sweat, closing his eyes and remembering the bed in Vernadam. He ran his fingers over her skin, and imagined a back filled with the ripple of scars. Her hands came up to his face, and it was as though he were there again, and the window shone in over him, and a light flashed as he caught his breath, the cold air hitting his lungs, his skin almost as though it were going to burst into flames from overheating. He rolled to his back, off her, and lay there under the bedroll, breathing deep breaths into the air, watching as they fogged in front of him in the firelight.

“That was … more than I expected from a weary man,” Aisling said, pressing the bedroll over her chest but leaving her arms exposed to the night air.

“Yes,” Terian said from a few feet away, “it was very impressive. The rest of us are trying to sleep, though, so maybe save the pillow talk for another time?”

“Most of us are polite enough not to comment,” J’anda said, “recognizing that in a space like this, where there is no actual privacy, the least we can do is respect each other enough to pretend.”

“Gods, man, how much pretending can you do when she’s caterwauling like that?” Terian asked. “Ever since they got back from Galbadien, I’ve been afraid that someone set loose a ghoul from the Waking Woods in our camp. I wake up ready to draw my sword.”

“I thought it sounded lovely,” Martaina mumbled. “I’m left to be a bit envious over here-”

“Come on,” Cyrus said. “I like J’anda’s philosophy. We ignore it from the rank and file, you people can’t ignore it from me?”

“Usually, yes,” Terian said. “Tonight’s round of … I don’t even know how to describe that. I’m fair certain you tried to stuff an angry raccoon into your bedroll, not a full-blooded dark elven woman.”

Aisling froze next to Cyrus. “I doubt you’d know the difference at this point, as cavalier as you are.”

“Oh, I’d know the difference.” Cyrus could hear the grin in Terian’s voice. “More bite and scratch marks from the dark elf.”

There was a pause, and Cyrus looked at Aisling. “Thank you for not biting and scratching,” he said. “Much.”

She shrugged. “I try to be considerate.”

“But not of your neighbors in camp,” Terian mumbled.

“Would all of you shut up?” Curatio said. “Please. As mentioned, this is hardly the first time any of us have heard a couple being intimate in our midst. This isn’t anything new, I assure you-”

“I’m pretty sure I just heard something done that was new to me,” Martaina mumbled.

Curatio glared at her. “And we all have a long day ahead of us. Go to sleep.”

There was a murmured assent to the healer’s words, and Cyrus felt Aisling next to him but not leaning into him tonight. She was like that sometimes, preferring her space. He lay there, eyes open, staring up at the sky as the first flake of snow made its way down onto his forehead. He felt the next on his cheek, and the one that followed landed on his nose. The fire caught them as they descended, more and more of them now, and Cyrus shook out of the bedroll and quickly dressed, strapping his armor on. That done, he sat by the fire and stared into the flames as they licked at the logs in their midst. He paused and found the nearby pile, brushed the newly fallen snow off of it and threw one on the fire.

“I’m surprised you can’t sleep after all that.” Cyrus’s eyes jumped to the voice, sitting opposite him. It was Curatio, his fair hair highlighted by the dancing flames, watching the fire.

“Things on my mind,” Cyrus replied. “You?”

Curatio had his mace lying across his lap and flicked the button to cause the spikes to roll out. “A thing or two I’m thinking about, yes.”

“You could have saved the elves,” Cyrus said, a thought hitting him out of nowhere. “You and your fellow Old Ones. You could have had a mountain of kids with elven women, and the curse would be beaten out by your own efforts.”

Curatio looked at him and raised an eyebrow. “In spite of your obvious efforts at practice, I’m going to hazard a guess you’ve never had children of your own.” He waited for Cyrus’s shake of the head. “I couldn’t do that, just have a hundred or two hundred children and leave them to be raised by someone else. I had two, only seventy years ago. Two very fine daughters, and it was a chore for me to leave them when they had reached the age of human maturity.” He shook his head. “Besides, that wouldn’t have saved the elven people. Not really. Our Kingdom has slouched toward death, become stagnant. The people grow old in spirit but only slowly in body. They live long enough to become fearful for their mortality but not immortal enough to take some reckless chances. Their craving for security over all else makes them weak.”

“Weak?” Cyrus chuckled. “They aren’t that weak.”

“They are,” Curatio said. “The whole Kingdom totters from it. It’ll fall in another thousand years or less, even absent the curse. They need new blood. Having to have their women breed with humans will be good for them. It’ll water down that long life, perhaps force them to innovate and grow again instead of always moving too damned slowly to do anything differently. The world is changing around them and if they don’t change with it, they’ll be irrelevant anyway.”

“Pretty cavalier attitude for someone whose race is dying.”

Curatio snorted. “My race is already dead. We Old Ones were elves, true elves, if you want to get into an argument of blood purity. The elves that live now are almost as much human as they are elf, when you compare them to me. I am the last of the purebloods, remember? I don’t consider this change a bad thing, and it’s certainly not as dire of a watering-down as those in Pharesia make it out to be.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t see it as a problem.”

“But you wanted to cure the curse,” Cyrus said. “You-”

“I did,” Curatio said. “But I’ve had a year to think about it. Now I wish we’d never gone to the Realm of Death. It was a foolish, fruitless endeavor, and greater than the curse visited upon the elven race is the ill luck that Mortus returned to his realm when he did.”

Cyrus let that rest for a moment as he smelled the smoke, felt the curious sensation of the heat on his front from the fire and the cold at his back from the lack. “Curatio …” The healer’s eyes found him in the dark. “I think about that day all the time. If I had …” Cyrus heard his voice crack. “If I had let her die … none of this would have happened. These people wouldn’t be losing their country. These people wouldn’t have died.” The smoke was heavy now, for some reason, and Cyrus felt his words choke off in the back of his throat.

“I was rather hoping you wouldn’t see it that way,” Curatio said quietly, and the healer looked up. Cyrus saw sparkles on Curatio’s cheeks in the light of the campfire, twin streams down toward his chin. “Because all I’ve been able to think about since we found out what they are is that if Vara had simply let me die … if I’d been more fearless, stepped up to Mortus and shoved her aside … none of this would have happened.” He stared into the fire. “I would not wish that guilt on anyone. Certainly not you.”

“We’re going to lose, aren’t we?” There was no doubt in Cyrus’s voice, but he kept it low, as though he could prevent the very thought from reaching any ears but his and the ones they were intended for.

“You were at the moot,” Curatio said, moving his face behind the fire. “I presume you all came to that conclusion.”

“Aye,” Cyrus said and felt a stir within. “We’ll fight to the end, but the aura of defeat is … it’s upon us. We cannot push this foe back, can’t seem to stagger them at all. All we do is lose ground, and so the Kings are resolved to give every man, woman and child as much time as possible by fighting a slow retreat to the Endless Bridge.” Cyrus swallowed heavily. “We’ll bottleneck them there, or try to outrun them, hope they won’t cross the water. But Curatio, if they do-”

“You think of Arkaria,” Curatio said. “Of them scourging across it as they have this land.”

“How can I not?” Cyrus asked, his voice hushed. “How can I not look at what I have wrought-or you, if you prefer to argue it that way, but regardless, the culpability is here at this fire-and not think about how this falls upon us? We may very well have caused the destruction of not only this land but also our own if these things follow across the Sea of Carmas.”

Curatio was quiet, the air of a lecturer upon him. “You asked if we are going lose … I have been in many battles, some more hopeless than this, if you can believe it. I was there at the end of the War of the Gods, when the city of the ancients was destroyed, everything but the Citadel. It was held by the Guildmaster of Requiem, a most stubborn fellow, as a place where the humans of the city-slaves at the time, most of them, stayed to avoid the devastation.” Curatio’s head came up, and he looked out into the darkness. “That was an impossible fight, if ever there was one. In no way should we have won that. Yet we did; the long night passed and the Citadel still stood where little else remained.” He looked back at Cyrus. “You ask me if we’re going to lose? I don’t think so. The odds are steep, but sometimes all it takes to win is to continue fighting until the odds change for some reason. There is temptation to call it a miracle when that happens. It is not, not always. Something changes, something little, something unexpected in many cases. But when it does change, victory goes to those who endure. We have not lost this fight yet, and we might not. I would tell you the same thing that I told the Guildmaster of Requiem that night in the Citadel when he wavered-‘Do not be afraid.’“

Cyrus blinked and stared at the fire for a spell. “I didn’t feel fear for the longest time, you know? They carved it out of me at the Society of Arms, made it so that I didn’t feel it anymore. They taught me how to vanquish it, to make myself the master of it and turn it against others.”

“No, they didn’t,” Curatio said quietly. “They taught you how to not care about anything, how to cut yourself off from thoughts of a future, of the idea of people you loved, of having things to believe in beyond the God of War and the path of chaos.”

Cyrus stiffened and gave it a moment’s thought. “So what if they did? Fearlessness is the most prized attribute of a warrior; it allows you to throw yourself into battles you know you can’t win, to give a full commitment to the fight of a sort that an undecided, fearful person won’t.”

Curatio cleared his throat. “Forgive me for contradicting your years of training, but you’re quite wrong. I’ve seen your Society of Arms at work, and they certainly produce some impressive warriors. But I haven’t seen any of them fight half as hard as I saw that Guildmaster fight for his people. No one has the indomitable spirit of a man with a cause in his heart. I’ve watched Society-trained mercenaries go up against half their number of men defending their homeland and seen the lesser win. You think fearlessness is some strength? It is a lie; it is deception at its most base. A man who has nothing to live for can be fearless because he has nothing to lose. But a man who fears and throws himself into the battle regardless …” He shrugged lightly. “That is a man I wouldn’t care to face in a fight. And I’ve faced more than my share.”

Cyrus ran a hand along his beard. How can that be right? “That doesn’t make any sense, Curatio. A man filled with fear would be paralyzed, halted in his tracks, hesitant-”

“No,” Curatio said. “A man filled with fear who surrenders to it would be all that you describe. But that is the great lie-you see a man charge into battle without hesitation, with great strength, against impossible odds, and you label him fearless. But if you talk to him afterwards, many a man of those would tell you he felt fear the entire time-but greater than his fear of what would happen to him was another-that he would not be there for his brethren in a battle, that he would let them down, that his homeland would be destroyed if he failed to act.” He waved his hand around. “These men of Luukessia? Most of them have no hope of one of our healers bringing them back from death, yet they fight to the death and most of them in a manner you might call fearless, yes?”

Cyrus nodded. “Close enough. Some hesitation, not much. But a few, yes.”

“You think them fearless?” Curatio smiled grimly. “They are driven by the greatest fear of all-the loss of their homes, their families. They fight hard, harder than our own in many cases. A man fights harder for what he believes in, that’s a simple fact. It drives him to overcome that fear, to not let it paralyze him. No, Cyrus, I tell you right now that being fearless is never what would make you a great warrior. Being fearless could make you a great mercenary, perhaps. Believing in something so deeply that you’d not only fight and die for it but that you’d see yourself thrown down for it a hundred times, and get back up a hundred and one-that’s what would make you a great warrior.” He blinked. “That’s what made him great.”

Cyrus let the quiet wash over him. The smell of the fire and its crackle was all that consumed him; he felt as though his bones were roasting over it. Cattrine. He imagined her in Caenalys, tied to a stake. I’ve been a fool. He rose unexpectedly.

“Going somewhere?” Curatio asked, watching him shrewdly.

“Can our army continue to hold the center without me?” Cyrus asked.

“It could.” Curatio looked around the flames.

“I have to go to Caenalys,” Cyrus said. “I have to …” He felt his cheeks flush. “I have stop Hoygraf from killing Cattrine.”

“Hmmm,” Curatio said, nodding slowly. “Caenalys is a long ride from here. A far distance.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Cyrus said. He hesitated. “How far would you go to fix a mistake, Curatio?”

The elf raised an eyebrow, but his seriousness never wavered. “All the way to the end, of course.”

Cyrus frowned. “The end of what?”

“The end of the world,” Curatio said, “or the end of me, whichever came first. When the cost is high enough, could you pledge any less?”

“No,” Cyrus said, shaking his head. “Take over command for me, will you? I have to leave.”

“Right now?” Curatio asked. “Tonight?”

“Yes,” Cyrus said. “Tiernan rode hours ago, with a good portion of his army. I’ll need to catch him.”

Curatio frowned. “With much of Actaluere’s army gone, we will give ground faster. But you already know that, don’t you?”

“I do.” Cyrus said, feeling for Praelior’s hilt. “I’ll rejoin you as quickly as I can, and perhaps I’ll be able to send back the rest of Actaluere’s army when I do.”

“That would be good,” Curatio said. “As I suspect we’ll need them before the end.”

“The end of what?” Cyrus said with dry amusement. “The end of you or the end of the world?”

Curatio’s smile was there but it was thin. “I’m beginning to think that they may just be one and the same.”