Crusader: The Sanctuary Series, Volume Four (4 page)

Cyrus stared back at Terian, and caught the glimmer of understanding there. Cyrus deflated, his shoulders slumping as the weight seemed to drag him down even as he remained on his feet. “What …” he began to speak, but his words came out in a low croak. “What do you do … when someone that you … when someone close to you … betrays you so thoroughly?” He felt the bitter taste of what he said and remembered the last words she had spoken to him.
We will not, cannot be. Not ever … I thank you for trying to comfort me in my hour of need, but I’ll have you take your leave now
. He slid his fist back into his gauntlet and felt it clench.

“What do you do when someone betrays you?” Terian’s voice was dull as he repeated the words. “That’s an excellent question.” It hung there between them as Cyrus watched his old friend. Terian ran his cloth down the flat facing of the sword, polishing the side, rubbing the metal.

After a moment of silence, Cyrus looked around, the waves still crashing, inevitably, on the shore around him. He waited, but Terian seemed frozen in thought, staring at the black, endless sea in the distance, listening to the lapping of the tides. The blue skin on his hand stood in contrast to the red metal of the blade and the white cloth. “Terian?” Cyrus asked. “Are you all right?”

The dark knight didn’t answer, his hand still moving in regular rhythm, up and down the blade. His fingers slipped, over the edge, and jerked. The dark knight stared down dully as though he couldn’t quite fathom what he was seeing. Liquid welled up, and the first drops fell to the sands. Cyrus stared at it, and remembered again of a time long, long ago, long before Sanctuary.

“Damn,” Terian said mildly. The dark elf stared at his wounded hand.

“I’ll get Curatio,” Cyrus said, starting to move.

“No,” Terian said, and Cyrus heard the dark knight’s armor rattle as he got to his feet. “I’ll go. I should have been paying attention.” He clenched his fist and Cyrus watched a thin stream of red run out of his palm and form a droplet on the base of Terian’s wrist. The dark knight’s expression was still formless, almost indifferent to his wound. “But about your question …”

Cyrus stared at him. Terian’s eyes seeming to fixate on a point beyond Cyrus, as though he were looking through the warrior, not at him. “Yes?”

Terian’s gaze came back to him, found his, and there was something in it that Cyrus couldn’t define, some depth that made Cyrus think of an open window, curtains stirred by a breeze only slightly to reveal furnishings inside. He caught a hint before the curtains blew back into place and hid the room within from view once more. “I don’t know. You got your vengeance, once upon a time, didn’t you? For your friend, after he died?”

“After we were betrayed?” Cyrus remembered, with a knot in his stomach, Narstron, his oldest friend.
Of how he died.
“Not revenge. Not really. Besides, this is … different.”

“Is it?” Terian took his hand and brought it to his lips, pursing them to catch the next drop before it fell to the ground. “Hurt is hurt, right? Pain is pain.”

Cyrus recalled the gut-punch pain, the agony of realizing later that people they had been allied with had betrayed him. Vara’s words came back to him again:
We will not be, cannot be. Not ever …

“No,” Cyrus said. “It’s not the same.” He weighed the sensations, the loss of his oldest friend, the anguish of it all, and found it … lacking.

“I suppose,” Terian said. “Death is a much more … permanent wound, and the vengeance so much more … deserving.”

Cyrus stared out again, across the dunes, without answering. The hundred fires left spots in his vision as he cast his gaze over them then turned his eyes again toward the sea. Endless, infinite, and deep beyond any measure he could fathom.
The sea goes down, perhaps forever.
The blackness it contained was akin to the darkness within him, the empty cold that threatened to swallow him in despair. He felt a hand clap him on the back as Terian turned and walked away. He did not watch the dark knight go, absorbed as he was in his own thoughts.

It’s warm enough; I shouldn’t feel a chill.
But it was there. The pain of losing Narstron had been bitter and hard, had laid him low for days, long days filled with a despair that choked out any happiness or possibility thereof in the future. It had been darker than the days when his wife had left him—
darker than any save for those at the Society of Arms …

Until now.
The little points of light that the fires had left in his vision seemed to coalesce, to flash in front of him, to give him an image, one that he wanted and yet wished he could blot from his memory. A face, her skin as pale as the northern snowfields, her hair as yellow as the gold he carried in his purse, eyes as blue as glacial ice. He felt the same pang, again, inside, the dagger wound that she’d left him with.

Cyrus tasted the bitterness on his tongue again, the sadness that clung to him like a cloak. He looked back to his bedroll and knew that his slumber was over for the night. The moon hung in the sky overhead, far above him, and he drew an uneasy breath. The morning was far, far off, many hours away, and yet it would come, inevitably, and he would marshal his armies and drive them across the bridge that he had seen by last light, the one that stretched over the infinite sea, over the unfathomable depths, one that he’d been told led to a new land and an uncertain future.

And perhaps, somewhere over there, I will forget about her
—the blond-haired elf with the pale skin, and her words, the ones that had cut him deeper than any pain that the warrior in black armor had ever felt in his life.

Sunrise found Cyrus staring out across the water, watching as the red disc rose over the horizon. The chatter of the young warriors and rangers had died down only a few hours earlier, and he had been left alone with his thoughts, staring across the Sea of Carmas as the first members of his army began to rise. Cyrus heard the sound of footsteps in the sand behind him and turned to see Curatio, his pointed elven ears catching the light and casting shadows on the side of his head.

“You’re up early,” Curatio said, making his way over to the fire next to Cyrus, a small loaf of bread in his hands. “Or perhaps late.” The elf broke the bread and offered Cyrus a half, which he took. “Terian said he was talking to you when he cut his hand last night.” Curatio wore the scarf of a healer, a long, rectangular cloth sash that remained untied, wrapped around his shoulders and hanging loose, the ends reaching to his waist. Runes were stitched into it in dark lettering, but the white color told all who saw that he was a healer, a spellcaster with the ability to mend wounds and restore life. “You haven’t been up since then, have you?”

Cyrus gnawed on the loaf, which was fresh, still warm. He looked up at the healer in surprise and drew a smile from Curatio. “Magically conjured bread. It’ll be down to the spellcasters to keep us in bread and water as we march onward, especially for the next few days as we traverse the bridge.”

Cyrus picked a large piece out of the doughy center and ate it, shifting it around in his mouth, enjoying the soft flour taste. He grasped a piece of the crusty exterior. It broke between his fingers and he popped it in his mouth, listening to the crunch between his teeth. He looked south and saw the Endless Bridge, something he had seen only once before. It was stone and sloped up to a hundred feet over the water, with enormous supports that reached above the span every few hundred feet, symmetrically placed pillars of stone lining its avenue. It extended into the distance, beyond the horizon, and the stone seemed to glitter in the light of the sunrise.

Cyrus smacked his lips, stopping before he took another bite. “Leaves me feeling a bit … empty inside.”

Curatio’s smile cooled. “The bread? Or something else?”

“Leaves me feeling weak,” Cyrus said, lowering the bread. “And the last thing I want to be when I’m marching into an unknown country is weak.” He turned and looked into the distance where the horses were tied to trees at the edge of the beach. “How are the horses?”

“They’ve been curried, their feet have been picked out, and Martaina is saddling them now,” Curatio said, his eyes following Cyrus’s. “She’s quite the wonder with animals, that one. She’s got a few others helping her, but she seems to be taking excellent care of them.”

“Good,” Cyrus said without emotion. “The more we have delegated to good people, the more we can focus on what’s coming.”

The elf’s face lost its smile gradually, fading as the lines slackened and Curatio turned serious. “And what might that be?”

Cyrus took another bite, a heavier one, and chewed, answering only after he’d swallowed about half of it. “Battle. Longwell says we’ll be passing through an unfriendly Kingdom on the other side of the bridge. Says they’ll have pickets out, riders, you know. They may throw trouble our way to keep us from passing.”

Curatio’s eyebrow rose, sending his ageless face into a very slight display of amusement. “Pickets? Outriders? A scouting party of what? A dozen men on horseback? Versus our fifty on horse and thousand afoot?” A light chuckle came from the healer. “I wish them the best of luck.”

Cyrus didn’t join the laughter. “They’ll present themselves, they’ll threaten, but Longwell says the outriders won’t make much fuss. This Kingdom, it’s the one by the sea—Actaluere, Longwell called it—it has holdfasts between the bridge and Longwell’s father’s lands. They may send armies out to halt us once they know we’re here.”

Curatio’s eyebrow twitched slightly higher. “Do you think they’ll succeed, General?”

The elf’s odd formality stirred Cyrus’s irritation. “Not if we’re careful, they won’t. But even a hundred men with no magic could wipe out an army ten times their size if they were to catch us sleeping.” Cyrus clutched the bread tighter. “We have a journey of several weeks across their territory. That’s a long while that they could cause us problems, and a very long time to maintain an all-hours watch, especially after a hard march every day.”

“Good practice,” Curatio said, taking a bite of the thick, hard crust of his bread. “After all, we are here to season our young and inexperienced recruits.”

“A march of several weeks, with the threat of attack hanging over us every hour of the day?” Cyrus looked at the bread in his hands and was suddenly no longer hungry. “That will season them, all right.” He stood, and looked over the stirring army. “I’d rather have peace from them, though, and stay at their inns, buy fresh food from their people, spread our gold around their realm on our march than seed their lands with sword and fire.” The sergeants of the army were shouting now, yelling their displeasure at the recruits, stirring them out of their stupors as the sound echoed down the shore.

“Aye,” Curatio said softly behind him as the the noise of the rousing army carried on, “always better to have peace than war. But in my experience, it’s not always a luxury we are afforded.”

It took another hour to get everyone fed and formed up to move. They reached the bridge after another hour’s walk, and took a break in the shade by the span. The stone bridge was wide enough to accommodate ten columns of their troops walking side by side. After the army was formed up again, Cyrus began the procession to lead them over. He kept his horse, Windrider, in front of the army, a few yards ahead of the rest of the mounted members of Sanctuary. The steady clip-clop of hooves against the stone of the bridge lulled him.

It will not work, Cyrus. It can never be, you and I. For I am elf, and my life is long and my duties are as great as my sorrow. We will not, cannot be. Not ever.
Vara’s words echoed over and over in his mind as the gentle wash of the water lapping against the supports of the bridge beat a steady rhythm in his consciousness. The sun shone down from overhead, but the salt air and sea breeze kept him cool, even in his black armor.
Not ever.

The sound of someone next to him jarred Cyrus, causing him to look up. As soon as he saw who it was, he relaxed. “You,” he said with a sigh.

“Me,” Aisling said. Her hair was white, flush against the navy skin it framed on her face and an exaggerated amount of cleavage was on display under her traveling cloak, which was open. Her usual leather armor was gone, replaced by a cloth garment of deepest red that hugged her belly and her upper body.

Cyrus stared at her, his expression in near-disbelief. “Are you wearing a bustier?”

Her eyebrows danced up and her lips pursed in a smile. “I’m surprised you know what that is.”

He looked away, shaking his head in annoyance. He hadn’t intended to give her any sort of encouragement. “My wife used to wear them.” He looked back, slightly uncomfortable. “From time to time.”

“Oh?” Her voice trilled in interest. “You were married?”

“A long time ago.” He turned his head to look at her, a little too much frost in his voice, even to him. “Try not to pretend you didn’t know.”

She shrugged expressively, exaggeratedly, and as though every bit of chill in his words had melted somewhere between the two of them. “I was just being polite. Of course I’ve heard the rumors about you being married. I’ve heard a great many rumors about you. But then, I’ve heard a few about myself as well and not always true, so I prefer to glean the fact of them directly from the source before I go believing something I hear in passing, no matter how good it sounds.”

Cyrus felt the breeze off the sea stir the hair under his helm and reached up to take the metal contraption off, securing it to a hook on his saddle. With that done, he ran his hand through his hair, felt the slight sweat that had developed on his forehead, and wiped it onto the sleeve that stuck out of his gauntlet. Once done, he looked back to Aisling, who still rode next to him, watching him, almost expectantly. “And what rumors would you have me dispel?”

“Just one,” she said, but the slyness and her smile were gone, replaced by something else: an almost primal hunger, as though she were thirsty and waiting for a single drop of water to fall upon her tongue.