Crusader: The Sanctuary Series, Volume Four (68 page)

“At one point, I think you would have thought of it.” She kept her tone even, her expression flat but accusing.

“Possibly. Surely you don’t think I went out on that ride thinking I’d be killed and decapitated? That I did it on purpose?”

“No,” she said, “but my concern is that you’ve become reckless. That you’ve had your hope and belief burned out of you, and that uncaring is replacing all. Once upon a time, you strode for excellence in all things, you desired to be the best warrior in all Arkaria. I heard rumors you even desired to pursue the best equipment, the best of everything to help you do the task at hand better than anyone. That was tempered by the desire to hold fast to the bonds of loyalty in Sanctuary, but tell me now—what do you want, Cyrus Davidon?” She gestured to the river in the distance. “What do you want, beyond a bath and release?”

“I don’t know,” he said after a pause. “Victory, of course. To vanquish this scourge.”

“And then?” Quietly. Accusingly.

“To go home, I suppose,” he said, but now his voice was hollow.

“You suppose,” she said, with a quiet all her own. “You’ve lost hope of a future. You’ve lost belief in a better day ahead, belief in what drove you, once upon a time. You were the most certain of us, a warrior with a rock-hard conviction in what he did, what he said, in his abilities. Thad told me that you were forged in the hottest fires of the Society of Arms, that you were the man who walked out of their gates after the graduation with nothing to prove to anyone.” She threw a hand up to indicate him. “Where is that man now? What is left of him in front of me? You’ve let them strip it all away from you—”

“I let nobody do anything,” Cyrus said in a low growl. “Some things happened, things I can’t undo.”

“And do you believe you’ll return from that? That you’ll pass the eye of the storm and come back to your old self unchanged?”

“I have no desire to return to my old self,” Cyrus said, turning away from her and resuming his walk, the river ahead in his sight.

“Oh?” He heard her soft footsteps behind him; her distress with him was clear not only in her voice but in the fact that he could hear the ranger walk. “What is your ambition now? To slake the thirst of your desire with a dark elf whom you care not one whit for? To lose yourself in the pleasure moment over and over with a woman whom you have avoided for two years? To throw yourself into cataclysmic battle after battle until you no longer come back?”

“My ambition right now lies in recovering from my injuries, bathing, and yes, perhaps exerting some excess energies with Aisling, who has shown no small energy of her own to dispense with. Would you prefer I simply sit about, silent as a stone, pondering the best course of action to get me to better weapons, or a more serviceable guild, or perhaps thrilling to thoughts of the journey home and how much I might like to be among the towers and stone of Sanctuary now rather than fighting a foe of my own making a world away?”

“What I would prefer,” she said, and grasped at his shoulder, turning him about, “is that you show some sign of life beyond speaking, walking, consuming and dispensing your seed.” Her face was animated in a way that it never was. “Show me some sign of how you were before, before Termina, before Mortus’s realm, or at least some small sight of what you were like in the interlude at Vernadam after Harrow’s Crossing. Give me a sign that you still believe in something, that you hold some hope to your soul, that you have something to—” She expelled her breath, and her head went to the side, as if she were searching for something that she could not find in him. “That you have something to live for, for gods’ sakes.” Her eyes softened and the corners crinkled, and for a moment she was a thousand years old. “For our sakes.”

The sun was not against the far horizon, not yet. It hung in the sky at an angle that told Cyrus it was one, perhaps two hours until sundown. He looked at it then back to the encampment, not so far distant, and then to the river. “Sometimes life is not about desire, or belief. Sometimes it’s about crossing the void between big moments, about putting one foot before the other as you navigate the spare areas where nothing remains in a blighted heart. The only thing I can do for now is to keep going, to hold to my duty of fighting the battles placed before me, seeing to the tasks appointed me. You want me to believe? You want me to hope? This is hardly the first time in my life that I’ve been hollowed out, not the first by far that I’ve lost hope. In those moments, I’ve learned to keep walking, to keep going, to hold not to hope, but to whatever I can. I won’t be the same man I was before, but I won’t be like this forever, either, I doubt.” He let show the faintest, most rueful smile. “The thought that I would … doesn’t bear consideration.”

“When will we see this new Cyrus?” she asked as he resumed his course toward the river, the smell of the grasses carrying over him, the light whipping of the wind at his armor a pleasant distraction.

“Whenever I get to him,” Cyrus said, and he heard her footsteps cease. He did not look back, but he knew she was not following him any longer. “Whenever I meet him.”

The river was not fast moving, nor was it much of a river at all. It was somewhere between a creek and a river, a halfway between thing, not deep enough for Cyrus to worry much about wading across if he so desired, but deep enough for him to stick to the riverbank. He undressed himself and then sat upon the bank and let go of his sword. There was no one around, though he could see Martaina in the distance, between him and the encampment. A split from the river was visible, something that wended much closer to the camp, indeed almost through it, and he wondered why she had suggested this place for him before the reason of privacy dawned upon him.

He sat upon the bank and let the sun crawl lower in the sky, unconcerned. His head no longer swam, and his breathing was deep and steady, taking in the plains air. The grasses here were different than those around Sanctuary, fuller—more oats, he thought, less tamed. The Plains of Perdamun were broken and dotted with farms; these grounds were spotted only occasionally with settlement. He dipped his feet in the water and felt the coolness run over his toes. He looked to the direction of the light current and realized it came from the north, from the mountains in the far distance, where the enemy lay.

He stood and slid into the water, wading in on his knees, as it covered him to the waist. His knees touched the thousand pebbles on the bottom of the stream, and he let the current run over him, let himself fall back, let his hair submerge, long black locks clinging to his head as they dampened. He kept his face above the water then dipped it under for a moment, felt it run into his nose and he broke the surface sputtering, snorting it out.

“Finally reached the point of trying to drown yourself?” There was a quiet voice nearby, and he looked up to see her watching him, squatting near his armor.

“No,” he said, ignoring the levity in her voice. “Just trying to remove the accumulation of weeks of sweat and sick smell.”

“Not a bad plan, as such plans go.” Her clothing hung loose, no cloak or armor visible from where he sat. She was down to the barest essentials, the daggers on her hips staring at him like they had eyes of their own. Her curves were smooth, and the shirt she wore had enough of a gap at the top that he was left not needing to imagine the breasts he had seen so many times of late. “Did you have any reason for it besides just the feeling of uncleanliness?”

“Yes.” He nodded slowly.

“Must I inquire why?”

He stared back at her, waiting, with her head cocked, her slightly pointed incisors hanging out of her deep blue lips. “Must I say it?”

She squatted there, and he wondered if she was visible to Martaina, as low as her profile was, with the grass swaying and almost touching her cheeks. “Before, I’ve been content to let it pass. But now, yes. I want to hear you say it.”

“Because I want you,” Cyrus said. “Because I crave you and the relief you bring.”

“Relief?” She unknotted the strings at the front of her shirt and shrugged out of it there in front of him, let her dark blue skin show to the world. She stepped out of a boot with a half-step, not ever leaving the ground but coming to her hands and knees. The other boot came off with ease, as she crawled toward the bank of the stream on all fours, naked to the waist. Her cloth breeches came unlaced with only a minimal effort from her, and slid off just as her hand reached the rocky edge of the water.

He waited for her, felt the rising tide within him, and when he felt her first kiss, it was as though the call within him were answered, the raging tide rising was dismissed. They were there for quite some time, the splashing of the water around them the evidence of a particularly noisy bath. Cyrus neither knew nor cared whether Martaina saw; she doubtless knew anyway.
It matters not,
he thought in the midst of it. But in truth, he knew otherwise.

They lay on the grassy bank for a while afterward, her head on his shoulder, not speaking. “Why?” Cyrus asked, into the silence of the setting sun.

“Why what?” Aisling’s voice came back to him, jaded, wary.

“Why do you think I’m doing this?” he asked, spent, not even close to sure about what answer he would get. “Do you think it’s because I—”

“I try not to look a gift horse in the mouth,” Aisling said, and she rolled over, grasping at her shirt and pulling it on. “Though, I do occasionally put a gift
in
my—”

“There’s the Aisling of old,” Cyrus said, not moving, feeling the hard dirt against his back. “I had thought that perhaps finally getting what you wanted would rid you of your desire to be crass.”

He saw the subtle shrug of her shoulders as she knotted the strings that knit up her shirt. “Have I gotten what I wanted?” She didn’t look back at him. “I did get you, I suppose, and I did always say I wanted this, so I suppose in that way I got what I wanted.”

“You were perhaps expecting me to be more … enthusiastic?” He rolled onto his side to watch her as she dressed, still squatting low and keeping her body down, out of sight of camp.

“I could hardly ask for a more enthusiastic partner, at least on a purely physical level.” Her legs folded around in front of her like a gymnast and she slid into her pants, taking care to knot them back up. “Especially so soon after being an invalid.”

“I’m not the same, am I?” He didn’t watch her now, he let himself lean back to the ground, felt his wet hair slop into the dirt.

“No,” she said, but her voice seemed cavalier and uncaring about the whole thing. “But who of us stays the same for our whole lives?”

“What would you have of me, then?” Cyrus looked up at the sky, the deepening shades of evening coming out now.

“Nothing that I think you would be capable of giving at present,” she said, and he watched her put her boots on, one at a time, her white hair bound over her shoulder and leaving water marks on her tan shirt. “Which is why I don’t ask.”

“Do you think me fragile?” He couldn’t seem to muster any umbrage for his question.

“I think you’re already broken,” she said, and stood, looking down at him. “But that’s all right. We all break some time; and I’m here, willing to take what you’re willing to give and willing to give what you need right now. Your spirals don’t concern me; you’re a big boy, and you’ll work it out in time.”

“Will I now?” He let a faint amusement creep into his voice, and he saw a whirl of white clouds tinged orange by the coming sunset. “That’s reassuring.”

“Be reassured, then,” she straddled him, her cloth pants against his abdomen, and she leaned over to kiss him, deep and full on the mouth. He felt her passion behind it, the force, but he had none of his own to match it with, just the slight stir of something detached, and far away, a physical reaction that told him that if she stayed where she was, her clothing would need to be removed again …

As if she could sense his line of thought, she broke from him. “See?” She gave him a faint smile, and the long incisors poked out of her lips again. Time was he would have thought them predatory, but now he saw the hurt, the edge behind her eyes, the strain that she didn’t intend to loose. She stood, and with a whirring of the grass, she took the first steps away.

He lay there by the stream, trying to gather enough energy to bring himself back to the water the clean off the grit accumulated during his and Aisling’s lovemaking. He couldn’t find it, though, and remained there, staring at the sky, until the first body came drifting down the current only a few minutes later.

Vara

Day 1 of the Siege of Sanctuary

There were no catapults hurling rock through the air, no siege towers making their way over the plains, no arrows filling the skies above the wall. There was nothing but the sound of an army outside, the raucous cheers, the battle hymns, the shouts and glee of the invaders poised less than a mile from the Sanctuary walls, waiting, as though they would come across the open distance and split the walls wide.

“They sit, they wait,” Thad said, addressing the officers, who were gathered around the Council Chambers. “Of course they stop the flow of convoys along the major roads nearby, but that’s to be expected. We can’t see them, of course, but you know they’ll have taken all the grain that’s being shipped through the crossroad north of here.”

Alaric watched Thad from behind templed hands, as always. This time was different, Vara thought, in that the Ghost’s brow was stitched together like storm clouds on the horizon, as though thunderheads were bound to streak down his face and unleash fury on the first poor bastard to cross before him. “Every day they hold the crossroads is another day they hold the Plains of Perdamun in their grip, another day closer to the harvest, another day closer to the eventual starving of Reikonos.”

“Are we actively rooting for Reikonos now?” Erith said, causing everyone to turn and look at her. “I mean, I know we’re sympathetic to the humans, but the Confederation and the Council of Twelve? Bumbling idiots. They did want this war, after all.”