Crusader: The Sanctuary Series, Volume Four (42 page)

“As tempting as that would be, discarding you back to the tender hands of the Grand Duke Hoygraf,” he said spitefully, watching her stiffen as he said it, “I am not so cruel as you and would not use that bastard merely to hurt you as you have hurt me.” He shook his head. “Even after all else, I’ll honor my pledge.” He looked away from her. “I suppose it’s the least I can do, as payment for what you’ve done to—and for—me.”

Her eyes flared. “You think me a doxy, now?” He watched, waiting to see if she would strike at him. “You consider me a whore because I gave myself to you? More the fool you are, Cyrus Davidon.” She tied the neck of her shirt together, but he could still see the redness at her collarbones. “Have it your own way, then. I’ll take your safe passage from this land as payment. And I’ll thank you, once it’s all over, for teaching me once again a lesson I should have learned before.”

“Oh?” Cyrus asked, as she turned from him, grabbing her boots and starting up the stairs. “What’s that?”

“That no man can be trusted,” she said, looking back at him, eyes flashing in the light of the torch next to her. “Not even the one who appears as a hero—a knight, shining—who says he will save you. All men are the same, with their own barbs, and swords, and their own ways of inflicting scars.” Her flush carried all the way to her face this time, and she left, her bare feet slapping on the stone up the steps, and when she reached the flat ground at the top he heard her stride turn to a run until she was gone.

The dawn found him sleepless, in his tower room, with his armor already strapped on. He left as the first rays came over the horizon. The stableboy, a red-haired, freckled lad, yawned and handed over the reins to Windrider. Cyrus took them and mounted up, riding the long way around the castle, through the southern courtyard and the western one, until he reached the northern one and its gate, taking particular note of the southern gate as he passed it, the portcullis down and rusted, ominous in the silence pouring forth from beyond it.

Cyrus rode out the north gate of Enrant Monge, and found an assemblage waiting. Curatio and J’anda, Terian and Longwell, along with Aisling, who rode next to Mendicant. Not far from them waited another figure, smaller, and Cyrus called out when he saw him.

“What is he doing unbound?” Cyrus asked, pointing at Partus, who sat upon his horse, his warhammer slung behind him.

“It seemed the thing to do,” Curatio said, drawing Cyrus’s attention.

“The suicidal thing to do, you mean,” Cyrus said. “He killed me.”

“Now, now,” J’anda said, “you’ve died several times. What’s the harm in one more?”

“I don’t know,” Cyrus said, irritable. “What was your name again? I’m having trouble remembering.”

The enchanter shrugged and smiled, then loosed an illusion upon himself that made him look like Cyrus, armor and all. “Do you think you could remember my name now, you handsome devil?”

“That’s pretty damned disturbing,” Terian said, trying not to look at the two of them. “If the two of you touch each other, will you become one massive Cyrus, like, twelve feet tall?”

“No,” J’anda-Cyrus said, “we would simply touch, just as would happen with anyone else.”

“Are you sure?” Aisling said, staring at the two of them with undisguised amusement. “Try giving each other a hug and a kiss, just to be certain.”

“That’s revolting,” Terian said.

“I could stand to watch it a little while,” Aisling said with a coy smile. “And then maybe participate—”

“Ugh, ugh, ugh,” Terian said, shaking his head and speaking so loudly that it drowned out the rest of Aisling’s sentence.

“You know,” J’anda said with a raised eyebrow at Cyrus, “if you wanted to really disturb Terian—”

“No,” Cyrus said, and then looked his doppelganger up and down. “It’s not that you’re not pretty enough,” he said with more lightness than he actually felt, “but I find that this morning I’m simply not in the mood.”

“Hah,” J’anda-Cy said as Terian gagged in the background. “The way you say that would seem to indicate that later you would—”

“No.” Cyrus shook his head. “But you do look good like that.”

Cyrus looked over the space before them. They were on a dusty road, assembling with a few others. Cyrus saw Count Ranson and another man, clad in the surcoat Cyrus had seen on the men of Actaluere, speaking with Briyce Unger, who seemed to be watching them both with little interest. A guard posse of thirty or so was assembled near Unger, and Cyrus urged Windrider forward toward the King of Syloreas, catching Unger’s attention when he neared.

“We’ll be riding at a fair clip,” Briyce Unger said with a nod of acknowledgment to Cyrus. “Not so hard as to kill the horses, but we’ll be pushing them. Likely need some time to rest and care for them between rides, but I hope your animals are up to a hard pace, because we’ll be traveling north for at least the next month to get to Scylax.” The King looked at them soberly.

Without another word, Unger turned his horse around and yelled while spurring it, causing the horse to whinny and charge ahead at a gallop. Unger’s guard began to trot forward as well, following their King. Cyrus waited for Count Ranson and the Actaluere envoy to fall in and he waved a hand directing the Sanctuary force, numbering somewhere around twenty-five, he estimated, to fall in behind them.

They rode hard for the rest of the day, taking breaks every few hours to care for the horses and feed the men. Unger marveled when Cyrus had Mendicant conjure oats for the animals, shaking his massive, shaggy head. “You westerners and your magicians,” he said as his horse fed, “our ancestors had the right of it; your land is one in which our men do not belong.”

“I’m a man,” Cyrus said, raising his eyebrow at Unger. “And I have no magic. You saying I don’t belong?”

“Don’t know,” Unger said. “Can you fight those fellows that use it?”

“I’ve fought a few,” Cyrus said. “Killed a few, too.”

“All the better for you,” Unger said with a smirk. “Perhaps I’ll get the chance one of these days.” The King’s smirk faded. “Not anytime soon, though, I hope. We need all the help we can get now, magical and otherwise.”

“What’s it been like?” Cyrus asked as he ran a brush along Windrider’s side.

Briyce Unger didn’t answer for a moment. They stood under a tree that was ten times the height of a man, and Cyrus could see the sun shine through the boughs, casting leaf-shaped shadows on the King of Syloreas’s face which moved subtly as the leaves swayed in the wind. The shadows moved, the shifting patches of darkness giving Unger’s face the tint of a man uncertain, greyed out, cast in shadow. “They come in great numbers. One or two of them is no challenge; like fighting any man or perhaps a cunning bear or mountain lion.”

A very slight smile crept over his lips. “I rode back from Galbadien, from the war, when I got the message from one of my nobles in the mountains saying his hall and the villages around him had been overrun by beasts he could scarce describe—that it was like things out of our old mountain legends, the things that would bring about the end of all men. This man was brave and old and rode with my father in wars that could only be described as fearful. I went home, as fast as I could, and made it only in time to fight one battle with this scourge, this plague.

“I’ve fought battles,” Unger said, his face haunted. “You know, I can tell by your face you’ve been in a melee or twelve. You don’t fear the battle, you thrill to it. I do, anyway. But this battle was different. I’ve been overmatched before, no shame in that. Being outnumbered is a northman’s lot, it’s the way of Syloreas. We fight harder because we have fewer men, that’s the way of things.

“But these … creatures,” he pronounced with disgust, “they keep coming. We met them in a village in a pass. They came at us, and the battle was good at first; I was up to my knees in their dead by the end of the first hour, as it should be. The second hour, I was up to my chest in a pile of my own dead, and still they came. They do not bend with the chaos, they do not ebb with loss; they are implacable, unstoppable, insatiable in their desire to destroy all around them, and they gave me a taste of fear, I am not ashamed to say.” The King of Syloreas stopped, and looked at Cyrus, shaking his head. “My first taste in a long, long while. I have never, not in battles where my men were outnumbered ten to one, not even on the day I found myself alone in a pack of wolves, ever felt so afraid and surrounded by the odds arrayed against me.”

The King of Syloreas swallowed hard. “I confess I thought myself a coward after that. Retreat against poor odds is acceptable; sometimes a strategic retreat is the only way you can win a war later, or preserve a Kingdom to fight through another day. But when I ran from that village, I did not do it strategically or in the name of preserving anything but my own arse against a foe that seemed unstoppable, a scourge that looked to take everything, and fill the land from end to end with my dead and theirs until I could see no more ground.”

Cyrus listened and watched the King as he shook his head once more in amazement, or consternation at his own story, and walked away from Cyrus still shaking his head.

The next days were long and hard on the horses. Cyrus, for his part, had been riding on horseback so heavily for the last few months that it seemed almost as though he would live the rest of his life there. It was almost as if he had known no other life but this, save for a brief spell in the castle of Vernadam, when he slept in a bed and received all the blessings of civilization, and all the affections a woman could give.

By the time the second week of their ride had rolled around, the days were long again for riding, and Cyrus found his mind weary. Sleep did not come easily at night, and his restless slumber was punctuated by evenings when he thought of Cattrine, of their encounter at Enrant Monge, and he tossed and turned in his bedroll near the fire, unable to find any relief.

His eyes wandered frequently during the ride, as the fatigue conspired to wear him down. Aisling always seemed to be about, though she kept her distance from him. He found himself looking for her, especially when he rode near the back of the group. He watched her on her horse, his eyes drinking in the curves of her body, and he let his mind drift, thinking of her and Cattrine and Vara, interchanging the three of them in his mind and memory, imagining himself in bed in his quarters at Vernadam with Aisling, her blue skin pressed against him. Then it was Vara, her blond hair glistening in the light cast by the fire in the hearth, scars on her back and legs reminding him that it was in fact Cattrine that had been there with him, satiating his hunger, not Vara or Aisling.

He tried to shake the thoughts out of his mind, but neither the water he splashed on his face nor the rest he tried to take at night could keep them at bay for long. He spent long days thinking, not of what waited for him ahead nor of his companion travelers (save for when they spoke to him, which was more than they had in the last few months when he had a constant black cloud around him) but of Vara and her betrayal, and of Cattrine and her betrayal, and of Aisling, and the three of them, and all the things that he and Cattrine had done, all the little pleasures, of how he wanted to feel them again.

They journeyed across flat lands, plains, through forests that grew more lush and leafy as they went north. Summer was beginning to set in hard upon them, the sun beating down and warming the land. A week of vicious heat after leaving Enrant Monge became milder as they went on, easing into beautiful traveling weather.

Cyrus could see mountains in the distance after three weeks, foothills just ahead that made him remember Fertiss and the halls of the dwarven capital back in Arkaria. He could see snow-capped peaks, something that looked singularly out of place after the heat they had experienced only scant weeks earlier. The plains became greener as they went, nursed by flowing streams that came from the mountains. The land was verdant, reminding Cyrus of everything that Vernadam had been when they arrived, and even, vaguely, of the Plains of Perdamun, where he was certain it was now hot, hotter than what they had experienced at Enrant Monge or after it as they headed north.

The foothills became steeper as the mountains drew closer. Women remained the only thing on Cyrus’s mind, and in rapid succession they came and went in his head, Aisling, Vara, Cattrine. He wondered why Aisling would fit into his thoughts, and realized that she was one of the only women on the expedition with him, and the only one he truly knew other than in passing. At last he realized with a shock one night while staring at her as she sat at another fire, her back to him, that she was the only woman with them that he found remotely attractive. She had made suggestions to him in the past, things that made him warm in the night when he recalled the words. Now she said nothing to him, as though he were not even there.

I feel like a teenage boy,
he admitted to himself one night by the fire, long after the others had gone to sleep, and he had tossed in his bedroll for hours.
Just as confused and alone as I did back at the Society, unsure of anything, and even more conflicted.
He shook his head, as though he could somehow jar loose contemplations of either Vara or Cattrine, both of whom dominated his thoughts.
I am a warrior. I need battle, I need the clarity of it. To go this long without combat is a drain, and I obsess over these … lustful, useless thoughts.

“You may be setting some sort of record for sleeplessness.” The dry voice of Terian came from behind him and he turned to see the dark elf, sitting once more with his sword across his lap, a rag polishing the edge of the blade. “I remain amazed that you don’t fall unconscious on your horse each day as we ride.”

“And you?” Cyrus asked. “Do you linger, sleepless each night as I do? You must, if you see how little rest I get.”

“Aye,” Terian said. “I suspect I get a bit more sleep than you do, but perhaps not by much.”

“And what’s on your mind that keeps you from rest?” Cyrus asked, trying to turn aside the dark knight’s inevitable inquiry before it was made. “What halts the repose of the great Terian Lepos, isolates him from the nocturnal peace he craves?”