His Cure For Magic (Book 2) (2 page)

"I'm sorry," he said again. It wasn't his fault. The Liar was causing all of these people to turn against
him
and reject
his
laws, laws that had stood for over four hundred years.
 

The vines tightened and grew, covering the boy's face and smothering him.
 

A dark red tear rolled from Wilem's left eye.

CHAPTER TWO

Silas

"Again."

Silas Morningstar stood in the large, open field of grass, his hands on his hips and a smile on his face. Eryn was standing six feet in front of him, her knees bent, her shoulders back, a shining ircidium blade held above her head.
 

At her grandfather's command, she stepped forward, sweeping her arms to the side and around, then up and over and back again, transitioning from one form to the next in a dance that none would ever want to partner for. As she neared the end of the final position, Silas clucked.

"You were so close that time, my dear. So very close."

Eryn glared at him from the corner of her eye, and jabbed the blade into the ground. "Are you crazy, old man? My form was perfect."

Silas slid his own blade from his scabbard and shifted into the final move, his legs wide apart but balanced, his hands up in front of his head. He went through the position in slow motion, pausing at each of the main shifts in balance, drawing his hands to the side, sliding his feet, and even faking the throw of his long white hair.
 

"Here," he said, taking his sword and tapping himself on the left instep. "You balanced on the heel. You should have been on the toe. Enough force would knock you right over."

"I did not."

"You did."

"I'll do it again. You'll see."

"As you wish."

Silas watched her get back into the starting position, a large dose of pride swelling in his heart. It had been almost a year since the day the two of them had discovered his son Aren's writings. Almost a year since they had both learned they were related by blood. Eryn had gone from a strong and wiry child of fourteen, to a strong and lithe young woman of fifteen. Her body had turned more lean and shapely, and her hair had grown into a fine head of golden brown waves. Most importantly, she had gained the outward visage of the confidence and resolution that had brought them together in the first place. That she questioned his opinion of her form didn't bother him in the least. In fact, it was one of the traits that he admired most.

"Are you ready, Silas?" she asked, putting her hands up.

"Show me," he said.

Of course, the discovery of their relation had hardly been without conflict or pain. After all, he was directly responsible for the death of her father, his own son, which continued to be a deep well of pain and regret that had at times put a wide river of hurt between them. It wasn't even that Eryn was angry at him for it, for Aren had never truly been a father to her. It was his own guilt that had dug the channel, his own opinion that he had done such damage to her life. In the beginning, it had led him to be distant, to keep her at arm's length and not speak to her of their ties. It was the stubbornness again that had forced him to deal with that part of their past, and to realize that what was done was done. He had made a promise to her, and to all of the Cursed, to see that
his
tyranny over them was ended. In fighting for the lives of all of them, he would atone for the lives he had taken, and make peace with the ghosts of his past.

"I wish you were here," he whispered, thinking of his wife. The year had seen more and more of his memories returning, and those of his lost love were the most vivid of all. With each new moment he found to relive with her, his heart burned more and more.

Eryn started her dance again, moving gracefully through the forms he had taught her. They were a duplicate of his own style, a style that even after a year he had no memory of learning. He knew it step by step, and his muscles could repeat it and improvise on it without hesitation, yet it still seemed to him as though he had been born with the knowledge.

As she neared the end of the dance, Silas bent down and picked up a small stone from the grass. He held it lightly in his hand, and watched her footwork with intense concentration. Each motion lasted a fraction of a second at most, but he was sure she was balancing on her heel instead of her toe. At just the right moment, he threw the stone at her, missing his target but still hitting her in the leg. It was enough to distract, and since her weight was off the surprise exacerbated the mistake, and she stumbled forward.

"You cheated," she said, catching herself and whipping her head over to look at him.

"I proved my point," he replied.
 

She responded by laughing. "You win. Let's eat."

They retreated from the clearing, to their small camp beside a large stone that rested below an overhang of dirt and roots. A Giant's Ball, as the woodsman of Watertown, Master Llewyn, had called it; it certainly did look as though it had once been a plaything for a creature larger than the tallest Redwood.
 

"It is a difficult form, but you have nearly mastered it. I wish I could tell you how long it took me to reach your level of skill, but I'm afraid I still can't remember." Silas dug into a saddlebag and produced a long stick of salted oats and grains that had been bound together in sap and honey. It was a staple food to the common people of Varrow, the southern province they had entered only two days earlier. He broke it and handed half to Eryn.

"I'm thankful for everything you've taught me. I'd never have survived this long without you."

"That, I doubt." Silas bit into the stick, savoring its salty and sweet taste. They had been on the road for so long that anything with any kind of different flavor was a welcome change to the berries and game they would pick and hunt.

"Do you think we've lost them?" Eryn asked, taking a bite of her own.

Silas responded with an instinctive glance back over his shoulder. They had nearly ridden straight into a squad of
his
soldiers right before crossing into Varrow, and it had taken two days of circling well around the Empire Road to begin to feel somewhat safe.
 

"I think so."
 

It had also been a year since they had left Elling behind, departing the city in a state of rebellion that had seen
his
local armies routed and an influx of families entering the capital of the province with their Cursed children, desperate to escape
him
. They hadn't returned to the city since they had discovered Aren's laboratory, and they hadn't heard from Robar or his network of entertainers in weeks. It had been a hard decision for Silas to stay away for so long, but he knew the only way any of them would know true freedom was to find
him
, and to kill
him
.

First, they needed to find the cure.

"How are you feeling?" Silas asked, looking Eryn over. Since they had learned from Aren's journal and notes that to use the power of the Curse was to accelerate the course of the disease, Eryn had limited herself to practicing drawing the power in and letting it go, rather than using it.

"I'm fine, Silas. You ask me every day."

"Every time I remember that you're sick."

"You read the journal. It could take years to kill me, if I don't use the power." She took another large bite of her meal.

Silas had read the journal. Eryn was trying to coat it as sweetly as the bars they were eating. "It could also take weeks. There is no sense to it."

"I'm fine."

Silas watched her face, her eyes and the set of her jaw. There was something she wasn't telling him, but he didn't want to push her. What he wanted was to find out how
he
kept the Mediators alive; how
he
prevented them from suffering from the disease. There was a part of him that felt like maybe he had known once, but it was a memory long lost and forgotten.

Almost a year. They had traveled much of the western Empire, visiting libraries both large and small in search of anything that had yet to be burned under
his
orders. When Silas had finally had another chance to speak with Markus, he had said he would try to get word out to those he trusted to try to spare what precious volumes they could. When they had come upon the library in the capital of Portnis and found it razed to the ground, they discovered how
he
would deal with that situation.

It had left them as a ship without a compass, riding from one town to the next, and speaking to the leaders of countless villages in an effort to find even the thinnest thread of information, and to convince them not to surrender their children. At the same time, they pored over Aren's writings in hopes of discovering any small scrap that could be of use. Almost a year, and they knew little more than they had when they started. On top of that, they were becoming known in the Empire. Their benefactors called them hero,
his
soldiers and loyalists called them the Liar and the Whore. Their title for Eryn infuriated him, but she handled it with the same strength of character as she did everything else.

Either way, it was making travel more and more difficult, and more than once Silas had wished the sisters Canae and Lanae were with them, to dress them up in the makeups and wigs and clothes, to transform them into new people that none would recognize. Instead, they often settled for heavy cloaks and shadows to hide their appearance, perfecting a stone face that dared passerby to cross them. Few wanted to accuse them of their true identities for fear of being wrong.

Almost a year, and now they found themselves in the north of Varrow, prepared to do something they had never wished to have to do.
 

It had been their worst and only hope since they had happened upon a reference to the place in a book containing a map of the Empire. It had been a small, unimportant map; little more than a sketch to outline different agrarian resources and how they were divided amongst the villages that dotted the less populated landscape. At first, they had believed it to be a random accident, a splotch of dried blood on the parchment sitting in an empty expanse in the south of Varrow. They had almost forgotten about it altogether, until they visited the home of the Constable of Nevingworth a few months later, and had discovered that someone had labeled a similar map, giving name to the blank space.

They had called it 'Dark'.

The word had been one clue, and the blood had been another. Silas didn't know if the same person had tried to leave a message to those willing to follow, but he was certain by now that it was the only hint they were ever going to find. It didn't please him to admit it, because once they had learned of the place they had started to ask around for its meaning. There was no written history, but not all history was written.

According to the different stories told by those who had ever heard wind of it, the Dark was a place of nightmares, of death and decay and monsters, a valley perpetually shrouded in thick clouds where the souls of the evil sang choruses of malignancy and violence. It had been created by Heden to set never-ending suffering on the damned, and none who entered could ever leave.
 

It was also a story, a fiction, a legend that survived only in the mouths of common folk, the farmers and shepherds, the blacksmiths and shop owners. It was a place they threatened their children with when they were misbehaving, or wished their worst enemies to go. It wasn't a physical location, or anything that could be visited, and not a single soul they had spoken to had ever been there, or knew anyone who had ever been there. Some had even sworn they had been to the spot Silas pointed to on the map, and that there was nothing there but rocks and grass and trees, like so much of the rest of the land.
 

Silas wasn't convinced.

He believed the Dark was real.

It was the roads that had convinced him. The Empire Road snaked to the west around the space, a hundred miles or more. On the other side was the Seafarer Road, a route that began in Varrow City and ran all the way to the Southern Seas. By itself, it would hardly raise suspicion, but Silas had studied the rest of the trade routes through the Empire. This was the only example of two larger roads headed in the same direction for such a distance, a decision that would increase costs both in manpower and materials to both maintain and patrol, with little visible gain.
 

There was something in the blank expanse that was supposed to be nothing more than grass and trees, and they had run out of other ideas.

CHAPTER THREE

Eryn

Eryn glanced over at Silas as they crested the small hill that lay before the northern gates to Varrow City. The palace's high towers had been visible for miles, but now they could see the entirety of the expanse, and she was curious to see how he would react.
 

She wasn't surprised when he stopped his horse.

It had been the same with each town they had visited. It was the memories, she knew, returning in fits and starts and always jogged by familiar places. She had no idea when he had been to Varrow City before, or how many times, but the fact that he paused told her enough. She stopped her own mount and waited while he rediscovered some missing part of his past, hoping that he wouldn't be forced to struggle through another violent realization of the person he once was.

It had been a hard journey for both of them, from the day his soldiers had killed her family, to the day they had discovered the truth of his son's, and her birth father's death. She had often wondered if she should have been more upset at Amman for the seeming cruelness of their fates, but when she looked back to the family that she had, and the family that she had fallen into, she couldn't help but to offer him her thanks instead. She had learned very quickly that the world was a harsh and unfair place, and that there were monsters lurking everywhere. The measure of a person was in their actions, not in their regrets, and Silas had shown nothing but love, resolution, and strength in the face of such adversity. Talon Rast was a murderer, but he had buried him long ago.