Heretic (The Sanctuary Series Book 7) (17 page)

Larana stiffened and her eyes came slowly up, wide with worry. “Did you … do you know anything about her?” Her face was lined with worry, but under the dirt he could see that she looked younger even than he.

“I know she’s Quinneria,” Cyrus said, carefully watching Larana’s reaction. She flinched as though she’d been smacked in the arm. “Did he tell you that?”

“Yes,” she said after a moment in which she composed herself and cast her eyes downward again. “He did.”

“I find myself in the curious position of wishing like hell I’d asked Belkan more about my parents when I had a chance,” Cyrus said, pursing his lips. “Now I’m left with more questions than answers, and few people to ask. If Cora was within easy reach, you can bet I’d be happy to interrogate the hell out of her at this point. Same goes for Alaric, and Curatio.” He looked at Larana, who stayed very still. “Alaric killed my mother, did you know that?” She nodded. “And Belkan delivered me, an orphan, from Cora—one of the founders of Sanctuary—to the Society of Arms.” Cyrus watched her carefully, and she nodded again. “Do you know why he did that? Handed me over to people who tried to kill me?”

“Because there was no way around it, he said.” Her voice was soft and worried. “They knew about you.”

“Who?” Cyrus asked, focusing in on her, stunned.
I should have asked her this months ago, but I just assumed, that, as with my father’s sword, she knew nothing.

“Urides,” Larana said. “The Council of Twelve? I … I don’t know. Whoever controlled things in Reikonos. They knew you existed, that you were somewhere in the city. Alaric—he feared what they would do if they caught you out of the public eye, that they would kill you for certain, no chance of intervention.”

“Gods,” Cyrus gasped. “No one ever told me any of this.”

“Because they would have killed you if you’d known, if you’d shown any inkling of remembering,” Larana said quietly. “Belkan … my father … told me that Alaric struck the deal that saw you handed over. That he sent someone to watch over you for a time in the Society—”

“Erkhardt,” Cyrus said numbly. “He sent Erkhardt. I remember him now. And when I …” There was a tingle of loss, and Cyrus’s voice cracked. “When I ran away from the Society on induction day, I think Alaric brought me back.”

“It was the only safe place for you,” Larana said, her eyes big and mournful. “Quinneria … your mother … she knew there was no escaping what was after her.” Her head drooped again. “What’s after you, now. They all came for her too, all the armies of Arkaria. Hounded her into the Plains of Perdamun, chased her until she ran across Sanctuary … and into Alaric.” She bowed her head. “He … he ended her flight. Brought her down at last. As she lay dying, she made him promise … Belkan said she died after making Alaric swear that he would ensure your safety.”

“I don’t really remember her,” Cyrus said, voice rough, heart strangely numb. He looked into Larana’s face, streaked with ash from either the cooking fires or her own blacksmithing efforts. “I didn’t even know she was the Sorceress until someone told me a few months ago.” He cracked a grim, mirthless smile. “My mother is the most famous person in Arkaria, outside perhaps my wife, and I barely remember a thing about her.”

“It’s probably for the better,” Larana said, eyeing him, her head still down. “If you’d remembered—anything—of who she truly was, Belkan said they would have killed you. Alaric convinced them to take the chance because you were just a child. They were scared of what you might become. He suggested the Society, played on your father’s name … and Belkan said they went for it, hoping desperately for another Rusyl Davidon … and frightened of what would happen if you ever discovered what you were capable of … What she was teaching you to be.”

Cyrus flicked his fingers as he repeated a spell in his mind, and a small fire sprang from the tips of his gauntlets, the size of a torch’s flame only. It was a fraction of what he was capable of at this point; he’d been practicing. “I know what I’m capable of now, but still I hesitate. My power is becoming clearer to me, but the targets … the places I’d direct it … I fear to turn loose against them, in spite of knowing they mean to kill me, to skin me away from my fellows, my friends, and end me in the dark of night with nary a witness, if they could.” He looked at Larana. “You must think it strange, this … reticence on my part.”

“You’re a good man,” Larana said quietly. “You don’t want to hurt anyone.”

“Oh, but I do,” Cyrus said sadly. “I just know that afterwards I’ll regret it. When I came to Sanctuary, I could kill anyone. I thought. But Alaric changed me. He made me consider things beyond myself, beyond those who had attached themselves to me. And yet, the more these … outsiders … come for me, the more I’m reminded of where my home is, where I belong, and who I should be fighting for. The trust, the bonds of closeness between me and my army, of those who are still standing with me as the world turns against me …” He shook his head. “It’s as though I never even knew Alaric at all. As though all our talk of purpose has slipped away in the night, replaced by grinning, leering, angry faces of my enemies.”

Larana hesitated. “I was … with Sanctuary before you were.” She licked her lips, seemingly afraid to speak her mind.

“Go on,” Cyrus said.

“I knew Alaric before you did—” Larana said.

“I doubt it,” Cyrus said with a knowing smile.

Larana swallowed heavily. “Well, I’ve known him for a long time. I grew up in Sanctuary. You … you remember the talk, the ideals. But … I saw more. I saw it all. You forget … when Mortus hit you … Alaric was the first to strike back. When your friend died in Enterra … Alaric went there and ravaged them, killing hundreds to save us from permanent death. And when Partus barely even threatened Vara, Alaric killed him in an instant.” Her head was the farthest up Cyrus could recall seeing it, and her voice was stronger than he ever remembered hearing it. “Alaric may have only had one eye, but he … he had two hands. One was the hand of friendship … and the other was the fist of merciless vengeance, and he used them both. He just didn’t do it selfishly.” She bowed her head again. “He didn’t start a personal vendetta after the titans killed Raifa, but when someone went after his … his family … there was nothing he would not do to see it righted.” She lowered her voice. “It’s why he came for you on the Endless Bridge.”

“The way you say it,” Cyrus spoke quietly into the wind of the savanna, “he wouldn’t hesitate to make war if he were in my position now.”

“You didn’t start the war,” she said, “and neither would he. But he would finish it.” Her eyes glinted. “However he had to. Sanctuary … it was everything to him. Anyone threatening Sanctuary—they’d get the vengeance, not the friendship.”

“Thank you,” Cyrus said, looking down at her. She nodded once. “For … all of this.”

She curtsied, a peculiar sight in her dull robes. “I am at your service, m’lord.” And she smiled ever so faintly through the streaked dirt on her face.

“That was longer than ten minutes,” Vara said as Cyrus reappeared in the light of his return spell, the Tower of the Guildmaster forming around him. Her tone was somewhere between worried and playful; Cyrus couldn’t quite tell which it leaned toward.

“Well, she didn’t try and kill me,” he said, taking a deep breath of the still air within the shut tower before moving toward the wooden dummy and beginning to remove his armor.

“Always an excellent sign,” Vara said with a nod. She moved to stand next to him and pulled her gauntlet off. “What did you talk about?”

“I asked her about my mother,” Cyrus said, and watched Vara’s frown deepen, “and she offered some insight on how Alaric might have handled our current situation.”

“I shudder to think what perspective she might have gained from within the bounds of the kitchens,” Vara said, removing her other glove, a sheen of perspiration obvious on her palms. “I trust her recommendation was not something along the lines of ‘Burn them all to death within the confines of a good stew pot’?”

“It was not,” Cyrus said, frowning at his wife. “She suggested, having grown up in Sanctuary, that Alaric might in fact have been a less kindly figure than I recalled him being. That behind his moralizing, his purpose, was a man who wouldn’t hesitate to strike viciously at anyone who came after those he cared about.”

“There is truth to that,” Vara conceded, though she sounded reluctant. “Though he certainly preached the moral high road, I myself saw him do occasionally terrible, wrathful things when our members were threatened. Such is the life of a knight of any sort, I suppose, any protector.”

“Yeah.” Cyrus kicked off his boots one by one, cloth foot covers pressing against the hard stone floor. “Still … that apparent divide between what Alaric preached and what he did … I can’t decide whether to find it troubling and ignore it as an area where his grasp fell short of his reach or admire and emulate it as necessary measures in the situation we find ourselves trapped in.”

“It troubles me as well,” Vara said, “but I find myself less divided about this than you are.” Her eyes flashed. “Archenous wronged me terribly, and I parted ways with him quite content to never so much as look in his direction again. But now his goal brings him back my way again, and I find myself regretting not having taken the very un-paladin-like step of removing his head years ago so he would never have been able to ambush you in that market.” Her mouth twisted in anger. “He has revived our hostility, not me, and the same goes for Danay, Urides, and Goliath. This is not petty vengeance, and these are not virtuous men. So long as we direct our attacks against them, no matter how subtly or surreptitiously, I find myself morally untroubled.”

“I don’t argue with any of that,” Cyrus said, shaking his head. “It’s always the consequences, though.” She looked at him curiously. “Killing Mortus, for example. He was a cruel, ruthless, horrible creature,” he took a breath. “And yet, the events that sprang from killing the God of Death led to Luukessia, to the Scourge. And although killing Yartraak brought Terian to the throne, it could just as easily have brought someone terrible. I worry what could happen if we charge headlong into killing Urides or Danay.” He made a clicking noise with his tongue. “We may not pay that piper alone. The Kingdom, the Confederation … we don’t know how things would go in those places, even if we did manage to orchestrate the removal of our enemies. We don’t know what it will cost in terms of alliances.”

“That’s a fair concern,” Vara said, unstrapping her breastplate. With it gone, Cyrus could see the clinging cloth shirt she wore beneath, tightly hugging her curves. “And something I think we should discuss in great detail before settling on a final plan. If putting ourselves in alliance with Iraid and the others he named somehow ties us into darker action …” She sighed. “Well, I don’t want to cross certain lines any more than you do. Assassinating kings and oligarchs of dubious character is all well and good, but …”

“But if it leads to the deaths of countless more innocents in a civil war,” Cyrus finished as she nodded, “or puts one of those powers under the heel of some governor who wants to be dictator … I start to have a problem with it.”

“Agreed,” she said. “None of that.” She slipped into his arms, the sweat of the day pungent in his nose. He pulled off the chain mail that wrapped his body and let it drop to the floor next to the long mystical ball and chain he’d draped around himself. She kissed him softly upon the lips and then looked into his eyes. “But if we can destroy Amarath’s Raiders at the end of this, my conscience will not be troubled.”

“I know you hate to ask for help,” Cyrus said, curling her up in his arms, “but I think we both know someone who has more recent familiarity with the Big Three, including Amarath’s Raiders, and who would probably be willing to help.”

Vara slumped in his arms, her head thumping against his chest. “Urk. As though Iraid’s request was not vexing enough.”

Cyrus smiled faintly. “Would it really be so bad asking Isabelle for help? I mean, she’s your sister, after all.”

Vara took a deep breath and sighed, her warm breath sighing through his undershirt and tickling his chest hairs beneath. “No. And yes.”

“Both?”

“She will help, surely,” Vara said, moving her head around to lean the opposite direction on his chest as they stood there, her body soft against him. “But you know I don’t like asking for help, and suddenly I am forced to seek out much of it, and from many quarters.”

“Apparently I’m not the only one with pride,” Cyrus said with a light smile.

“Ego and pride are not exactly the same thing,” Vara said sharply. She paused a moment then said, considerably more softly, “But they are not so different, either. You and I are well matched for many reasons, and this is one of them, I think.” She looked up at him, her eyes weary. The low winter sun had already faded beneath the windows outside the western balcony and the room was growing dark. “Shall we go to bed?” She ran a hand lightly over his chest playfully.

Cyrus suppressed a smile. “So long as you promise to start asking for that help on the morrow—”

“Yes, yes,” she said, pressing herself tightly against him. He could feel the lingering hesitation in her grip, though, the desire not to let go, and as she looked up to kiss him once more, he happily let himself forget all that was weighing on him, at least for the night, in the comfort of his wife’s arms.

Cyrus was awakened by a pounding at the door in the middle of the night, the urgent hammering enough to snap him out of a dreamlike state. He sat up as Vara did the same beside him, her hand upon her sword, already drawn from its scabbard. He was slower to react, fumbling for his blade and calling out, “Yes? Who is it?”

“It’s Calene,” came a soft voice from outside. “We’ve got trouble at the wall, best hurry down.” The sound of retreating footsteps echoed in Cyrus’s ears as the ranger left without further explanation.

Cyrus met Vara’s gaze for only a second before they both slipped naked out of their bed and dressed in silence, hurrying to make ready for whatever was waiting below.

Cyrus took longer to finish. The process of wrapping the chain and spiked ball carefully around himself so that the ball did not hit him in any unarmored places took some considerable care and left Vara sighing with impatience at the top of the staircase down to the door, clearly eager to descend.