Warlord (7 page)

“Oh, you’re not back to that again, are you?” She eyed him. “Because we can, but I’d rather either wait until the fall of night and douse the lamps, or else close these doors and draw the curtains, because last time Vaste made the rudest comment after apparently overhearing us—”

“Not that,” Cyrus said, waving her off in frustration. He paused. “Well … maybe later,” he conceded. “But I meant …” He lowered his voice, ashamed, “… revenge.”

“Ah, the prickly path,” Vara said, eyebrows arching even as her face fell a notch. “I had assumed you would bring it up before now.”

“I assumed you’d assume it before now,” Cyrus said, turning to look back over the plains. The figure on the horse was gone, in the shadow of the tower by this time. “In the past, you’ve never hesitated to think me certain to snap straight to vengeance.”

“In the past, I was not sharing your bed,” Vara said with enough crispness to remind him of a fall day, “and I had not seen you pass on nearly so many opportunities as you have in the past few years.” Her voice softened. “Besides, I assumed you would consult the Council and perhaps myself before launching a full-scale invasion of Kortran.”

“You knew I’d want to, though, didn’t you?” He bowed his head slightly.

“You wouldn’t be Cyrus Davidon if you didn’t want to strike back at those who did harm to your own,” she said quietly. She looked around, as though she were afraid someone were watching. “You wouldn’t be the man I've come to care for if you didn’t possess that finely honed protective instinct, as though all Arkaria were under your wing.”

“It’s not all Arkaria,” he said. “But it is a people I feel a great obligation to.” He strained as hot anger bubbled up. “They’d just become independent, just gotten their feet underneath them, and now—” He pulled his hand out of his gauntlet and wiped a sweaty palm over his upper lip, freshly shaven. “Gods, the timing. Why now?”

“Because this was the moment the titans chose to be enormous jackasses, presumably.”

“Who taught them magic?” Cyrus asked, turning to face her. “Something is amiss here. The titans are not a civilized people, they don’t have Leagues, and they’ve never had magic instruction until now—”

“Something is amiss, I agree,” Vara said, nodding. “But to assume some nefarious evil at the heart of this is … well, it’s a bit much, as such things go.” She cracked the faintest smile. “I know it won’t stop you from blaming yourself, but long before you came into the picture, the titans were more than happy to strike through the pass. In fact, if you recall—”

“Alaric lost his wife to Talikartin,” Cyrus said, memory jarred loose by Vara’s mere suggestion.

“Yes,” Vara said, her voice suddenly ghostly in its reduction to near-whisper. “He did.”

Cyrus stared down at her, their difference in height somehow all the more striking in this moment. “I fear it, you know.”

“You don’t have a wife,” she said, playfully, an impish smile returning to her features, but still somehow less cheerful than it might have been a few moments before.

“Yet,” he said, and smiled back at her. “I—” A knock sounded at the door, causing him to frown. “Yes?” he called.

The door at the base of the stairs clicked open a crack to reveal a ranger, a human, thin and wiry with dark hair. “There’s an envoy to see you, sir,” she said, breathless from the ascent.

“From where?” Cyrus asked, frowning. He glanced at Vara, but she maintained her distance.

“Amti, sir.”

“I’ll be down in a few minutes,” Cyrus said, pondering that one, “assemble the—”

“Orders already went out, sir,” the ranger said. “The envoy asked to meet with all of you.”

Cyrus felt his eyebrow rise. “Did they? How … presumptuous of them.”
Giving orders already? I can’t imagine what sort of arrogant prig this elf must be—

“The order to assemble came from Lord Curatio, sir,” the ranger said. “He and Larana are speaking to the envoy even now.” The ranger lowered her voice, like she was passing on some form of forbidden knowledge. “They seem to know this lady envoy quite well, if I may say so.”

“What?” Cyrus blinked and looked at Vara, who held a look of undisguised curiosity of her own. “And yes, you may say so, along with anything else you know that might shed light on this mysterious envoy before I meet them face to face. What’s your name, young lady?”

The lady ranger paused for a moment, slipping just a little further inside the door. “Carisse Sevoux, m’lord. Of the Riverlands.”

Cyrus watched her, could see the bubbling excitement beneath her youthful facade. It was not well hidden. “Spill it, Carisse Sevoux. Who am I dealing with?”

“Only caught her name, sir,” Sevoux said with a hint of pride. “Said it was Cora.”

It took Cyrus a moment more to get there than it did Vara, who stiffened immediately. He started to reach out for her, but the elven paladin was already in motion, sprinting toward the stairs. Carisse Sevoux scarcely had time to dodge out of the way, flattening against the wall of the stairway trench before Vara shot past, her armored boots clanging hard with every step.

“It would appear Lady Vara knows this envoy as well,” Sevoux said as she pulled herself off the wall, lithe figure balancing on the tips of her toes, silent.

“She should,” Cyrus said, taking a breath as he moved toward the stairs himself. “I feel like I know her as well, though we’ve never met.”

Sevoux looked up at him, tanned face perplexed. “Sir?”

“Cora is the last surviving founder of Sanctuary,” Cyrus said, making his way down the stairs and opening the door for Carisse Sevoux, whose mouth opened just a hint in surprise.
Can’t say I’m not surprised either
, Cyrus thought as he let the ranger walk through the door first before stepping through and pulling it shut behind him. “And as far as I know, this is the first time she’s set foot in this place in … years.”

Cyrus decided he liked Cora immediately, though it would have been hard not to. She was an elf, of course, but with hair that was a lustrous auburn, an unusual shade for elves in Cyrus’s experience. It reminded him of autumn foliage in the north for some reason, and her handshake was firm, her eyes clear and hazel when he looked into them. There was also a hint of familiarity about her in that regal bearing, the august presence he’d come to expect from elves. The dark blue cloak that she wore drawn about her shoulders hid spell caster vestments from his sight, hinting only that they were there by the small bit that stuck out of the collar.

“It is good to be back in this place,” Cora said in a light voice, less serious than many of the elves he’d met. They stood in the Council Chamber, around the table, with an extra chair pulled up to accommodate their guest. “Though it has changed considerably since last I was here.” She looked around the room with an appraising eye. “The table was smaller then, I think.”

“Same table,” Cyrus said, settling back in his enormously high-backed chair. Suddenly he felt the pressure of the Guildmaster medallion strung round his neck, and felt self-conscious about the chair he was inhabiting.
When she was an officer of this guild, I was not even a member. Now I am the Master of Sanctuary and she is not even a member. Sometimes I forget the history of this place predates me by some considerable margin.
“We haven’t replaced it.”

“Indeed?” Cora looked it over again. “Memory is a most malleable thing, I suppose, making days that were a struggle seem like halcyon stuff after a sufficient distance of years. Merely shrinking a Council Chamber seems an easy task compared to that.” She forced a smile. “I am sad to say that I recognize few enough of the faces around me.”

“But a few of us recognize yours,” J’anda said with a smile of his own, warm, sincere and genuine.

“Oh, J’anda,” Cora said with a tinge of regret. “It does my heart ill to see you this way.”

“You would have outlived me in any case,” J’anda said, but now his smile was tinged with sadness. “Such is the fate of you elder elves.”

Curatio cleared his throat. “Who are you calling elder, exactly?”

Cora glanced over at him. “Did that finally come out, then, oh, ageless healer?”

Curatio looked chastened for a moment. “Indeed. It was quite dramatic in the way it did.”

Cyrus watched the interplay between the two of them and felt a faint aura of suspicion.
She knew he was one of the Old Ones?
That was a closely guarded secret until just three years ago.
Cora’s eyes met his, cool, composed, and he wondered not for the first time what exactly he faced in this elven woman.
How many secrets did the founding members of this guild know that even I am not aware of?

And how many did—does—Alaric keep still, wherever he may be?

“I apologize for coming to you in this manner, and at this hour,” Cora said. She dropped her gaze to the table and ran her fingers over the smooth grains of the wood.

“The dinner hour is always a poor time for a meeting,” Vaste agreed. “Second only to the breakfast hour and just behind the lunching one, or on the afternoon occasions when Larana decides to bake fresh fruit pies—”

“Vaste,” Cyrus said, taking up the Guildmaster’s sworn duty to rope the troll back on topic.

“The smell of tart apples, sugar and pastry crust fill the air in the foyer, like magic wafting off the fingers of an expert caster—”

“Vaste,” Curatio said, somewhat more sternly.

“I’m hungry,” the troll said, more than a little plaintively. He sulked for a few seconds then looked to Cora. “Oh, fine, then, proceed. I’ll just sit here, starving. Ignore my stomach’s rumblings.”

“Just as easily as I ignore the rumblings of the rest of you,” Cora said a bit playfully, poking at the troll. “As I was saying … the timing is poor for my approach, and yet necessary. Word of what happened in your protectorate of Emerald Fields has reached our ears in Amti—”

“I’m sorry,” Samwen Longwell said, and Cyrus detected a hint of danger lurking behind the dragoon’s eyes, “but I can’t recall hearing of this ‘Amti’ place that you represent. It’s not on the maps of Arkaria that I’ve studied.”

“Amti is a colony of elves in the southern lands, beyond the Heia Pass,” Odellan said, leaning forward, his winged helm gleaming upon the table and his blond hair in perfect order this day. “They were founded roughly a century ago to exploit some of the resources discovered in the Jungle of Vidara—”

“What sort of resources?” Longwell asked.

“I’d be curious to know that, myself,” Ryin added, casting a look around the table. “Especially as they’re not terribly far from Kortran, and I’d imagine the titans give them some considerable amount of trouble.”

“Considerable is understating it,” Cora said, leaning back in her seat, her cloak spilling open to reveal robes of the deepest blue, more cerulean than her dark cloak. “What resources we harvest are sent back to the Heia Pass in convoys that only made it roughly one out of five times, until recently.”

“Good gods,” J’anda murmured.

“Why keep sending them, then?” Vaste asked.

“Because they have to pay their taxes,” Nyad said, drawing every eye in the room. “They’re a protectorate of the Elven Kingdom. It is required.”

“They don’t sound terribly protected,” Vaste said.

“We’re not,” Cora agreed, looking quite comfortable where she sat. “We live under constant threat. The only reason the titans have not destroyed us utterly is that the town of Amti remains safely hidden.” She drew a sharp breath then let it out in a hiss. “But I do not believe it will remain so for much longer.”

“You have traitors,” Cyrus said, and she snapped around to look at him.

Cora watched him carefully, as though she could read his thoughts. “Know that, do you?”

“The last time I was in Kortran,” Cyrus said, “we caught an elf named Erart there. He claimed to be a prisoner.”

“Good memory, remembering his name like that,” Vaste said. “I confess I’m surprised; as many times as you’ve died and been resurrected, I’m surprised you didn’t lose that trivial bit of knowledge.”

Cyrus felt a sudden tightness in his chest. “It doesn’t seem to be the trivial bits of knowledge that are lost in resurrection.” He shifted his gaze back to Cora. “Have there been others?”

“Probably,” she said. “Captives from the caravans we send that are ambushed, desperately seeking to survive in any way they can. Frustrated outcasts searching out favor they will never find from the titans.”

“How have they not betrayed you yet?” Cyrus asked. “Being in Kortran, as prisoners or traitors—it would seem they’d have to give away your secret.”

“No,” she said, looking just a bit proud, though it was mixed with a coyness that Cyrus found strangely compelling. “They can’t.”

“Why’s that?” Longwell asked, sounding thoroughly irritated.

“Because they don’t know exactly where Amti is,” Cora said, matching Longwell’s fire with her own ice. Cyrus watched as the dragoon sat back, seemingly halted in his advance.

“Why have you come to us now?” Cyrus asked. A pop in the fire to his side punctuated his question.

Cora let a poignant silence linger a moment longer than necessary before speaking. “When I left this guild, it was scarcely more than a hundred people on a good day.” She swept her gaze around the Council Chambers once more. “Now I hear you have over twenty thousand at your command.” The number prickled at Cyrus.
It would have been more if not for Leaugarden.
“Before, Sanctuary was hardly a bulwark against anything, let alone an army capable of rendering the sort of aid that Alaric promised in our purpose when we founded this guild.” She pursed her lips carefully, and glanced at Vara, who remained silent but flushed just slightly enough that Cyrus detected the quiet something that passed between them. “Now you’ve become the fulfillment of that promise, and Alaric is no longer here to see it. A great regret, I am sure.”

“You seek our aid in your cause,” Cyrus said, and she met his eyes with her own, and her meaning was made plain.

“I would seek any aid I could find at this point,” Cora said, unsmiling, “but the rest of Arkaria is painfully thin on help. The King of the Elves would draw a line at the Heia Mountains, the River Perda, and the swamps of the north, and desire to pay attention to none of what goes on beyond those boundaries, even though he supposedly rules us in Amti. She looked pointedly at Nyad, who flushed and turned away from her gaze. “Here I come to a place I left, most reluctantly, with my … pride in hand, as it were.” Her tanned skin showed no embarrassment, but her expression spoke of that reluctance in the tilt of her chin, her inability to look up as she spoke, and the slow way in which her words made their way out. “If you defend the Emerald Fields, then we have a common enemy, you and I.” Now she looked up. “The titans are a relentless foe, and a threat to all who have opposed them. Vengeance is more than a simple word with them; it is a way of life that they embrace with a fervor that Vaste reserves for pie.”