Demons of the Hunter (War of the Magi Book 2)

by Stephen Allan

  Yeva and Tetra returned with cooked boar about ten minutes later and divided the portions accordingly, using a knife that Garo had in his pocket. Zelda feasted with great delight on the boar, happy to indulge in an environment that didn’t threaten to kill her from every angle. It was decided that with the added space, they would spend the rest of the day and evening recovering, waiting until the following day to continue their trek to Dabira. They spent the day trading light stories, resting, and observing distant dragons and birds in the far reaches of the sky.

  When they awoke the next day, Zelda did not yet have all her strength back. She had underestimated the effects the teleportation spell would have on her body, but Garo, Yeva, and Tetra had little concern. They happily walked at the young girl’s pace, hunted for her, and took turns watching for soldiers in place of Zelda. Days passed, and Zelda knew they were not going at the rate they needed to.

  “I wish I had Epona,” she said that evening. “We’d be in Dabira by now.”

  “Who is Epona?” Garo asked.

  “She was a horse I… I borrowed,” Zelda said.

  A few feet away, Tetra couldn’t help but laugh. Garo gave her a scowl, but Tetra hadn’t seemed to care about what Garo did for far too long.

  “You took a horse from the empire?” Tetra said. “Wouldn’t exactly call that borrowing.”

  Begrudgingly, Zelda recounted the tale of freezing a soldier, taking their horse, and riding it all the way to the base of the mountains. Tetra listened with surprising attention given she had opened by mocking Zelda’s careful choice of words.

  “That horse must have sensed something in you,” Tetra said, curiosity in her eyes. “Most horses we steal just go wild and create unnecessary attention. I can’t remember the last time we stole horses from the empire.”

  Zelda smiled, wanting to explain what had happened to just pure luck. Any other horse in any other spot, and their reaction might have differed.

  “I do wish we had horses too,” Tetra said. “But my bigger wish was safety from the empire, and we have that for the time being. Let us continue to march.”

  March they did for the next two weeks, a pace far slower than what Zelda had encountered, but one necessitated by her recovering state, lack of other transportation options, and a casualness encouraged by the lack of pursuing imperial forces. Tetra always had a watch going, but when Zelda got well enough to carry her burden of the shift, she never so much as suspected a soldier’s arrival, let alone witnessed one.

  One night, though, when there was still enough light in the sky to make out facial expressions, Zelda saw Garo with his legs crossed and his eyes closed, facing toward Caia. Was he asleep? He had seemed a bit tired on the walk. She rose and approached.

  “Garo?”

  He opened his eyes and smiled gently at the young girl.

  “Were you asleep?”

  Garo appeared to ponder the question far longer than Zelda assumed a man would need to.

  “Not in the sense that my wife and your friend are,” he said. “No, I was simply meditating.”

  “For what?”

  “To draw closer to Chrystos,” Garo said. “To better understand our world.”

  The stumped look on Zelda’s face drew a laugh from Garo.

  “I see no one has taught you the faith of our kind,” he said. “A tragedy.”

  “I know some of it, but…”

  “You know of it, but you do not know it.”

  Zelda bit her lip and nodded, feeling shame that she was missing something important to the magi.

  “In time, you will learn. Meditation is not something that you can read about, nor can I even teach you. Believe it or not, I only became adept at meditating within the last couple of decades. I learned things that contradicted what I thought I knew. But in any case, you will have to find your own way to learning these things. Silence, calming the senses, and opening yourself up will put you in touch with the god of the magi. Once you learn to do this, many more things than you ever thought possible will become reality. You will heal faster. You will see the way. And you will learn more about the world than any library of books can tell you.”

  He paused, looked up to the stars, and gave a chuckle.

  “Well, when I was going through it, that was the case. I wrote down much of what I meditated on, but we will need some extraordinarily clever disguises to find those writings again.”

  He coughed. His hacking, despite his body seeming to age years in a matter of days, did not sound fatal or even sick.

  “In any case, those writings are not that practical at this moment. The important thing for you, dear child, is to get some sleep. Even when I am meditating, I am alert.”

  “Understood,” Zelda said before quickly adding, “Sorry.”

  “It is fine, dear child,” Garo said. “You did what you thought was best for all of us. That is a greater good than anything meditation can produce.”

  Zelda eventually did fall asleep, and she didn’t bother Garo again. She tried to meditate herself on her watches, but she just found herself getting sleepy. When life wouldn’t throw so many dangers her way, she decided that she would try and meditate.

  The four magi took turns hunting game during the day, with Zelda developing an affinity for Tetra’s rounds of hunting. She’d obviously had practice over the years and knew just how to use her magic to cook food. Yeva, on the other hand… well, she needed practice, as Zelda felt sure she did herself.

  They never faced a danger greater than fatigue, and even that they could easily defeat by cutting short their day.

  All went well up to the night they got to the base of the mountains.

  Once the sun set, Zelda remembered what troubles she had come across on her first journey across the plains and mountains of Hydor. Perhaps this land wasn’t as safe as she had thought. Perhaps Hydor wasn’t all beauty and majestic creatures.

  “We should be careful,” Zelda said. “There are animals in the area that would have our flesh. And other animals that would have their flesh.”

  As if on cue, a howling came from the distant mountains. It sounded far too distant for it to be an immediate threat, but the way the wolves—and dragons, as Zelda saw a black one flying in the sky—moved, it wouldn’t take them long to close the gap if they chose to attack.

  “Agreed,” Tetra said. “We will take shifts keeping an eye. All of us are capable of using magic without a weapon except for Garo, but if he channels his magic properly, we will be safe. Zelda, I know you are weary, but would you take the first shift? This will allow you uninterrupted sleep after you finish.”

  “I—yes,” she said immediately. She didn’t think much would happen on her shift and decided Tetra had granted her a favor.

  It was her hope that she would get the chance to ask Garo about her questions from earlier, but when Garo and Tetra descended the hill just a bit, taking a seat about two dozen feet away, Zelda saw she would be stuck with duty, not conversation. Her inquiries would have to wait.

  But she got something of what she wished for when Garo and Tetra began speaking. She couldn’t tell if they didn’t know the two girls could hear them or didn’t care, but Zelda saw no harm in eavesdropping all the same.

  “Were you serious?” Tetra began.

  Garo shifted his legs, grunting a bit, before speaking.

  “About what?”

  If Tetra sounded agitated and concerned, Garo sounded surprisingly nonchalant. It wasn’t that he was happy, but he sure seemed like a man who had lived through centuries of fighting and war. What was one more lost battle when one had seen all of history? But remember how upset he was, too.

  “About losing the will to fight, what else would I be talking about? What else do you think has tore at my heart these past two weeks?”

  She was definitely anxious. But more than that, Zelda knew she was fearful. Fearful of her husband’s death.

  Their love hadn’t died. It might not be active, but certainly the events of th
e past few days had caused a shift in Tetra’s behavior toward him.

  “Yes, I am serious,” Garo said, his voice even-keeled and calm. “Very much so. Tetra—”

  “Please don’t say my name like that, it’s Kara now, and you know better than to call me that name.”

  A pause came. Zelda tried not to shift and make too much noise—which would make it obvious she was eavesdropping—but this was one of the saddest things she had ever witnessed. That Tetra could not even accept her own name because it caused so much grief was the kind of thing that made Zelda want to cry. How much violence and grief and pain does it take for a person to get to that point? How much turmoil does Tetra feel to refuse her real name?

  “You know that the woman I see before me I can never truly see as Kara.”

  Another long pause came. A long sigh came from someone—it was probably Tetra—before Garo continued.

  “I believed that the slaughter of a legendary dragon might change some minds. But I can see I was wrong. I can see that a man with as much hatred ingrained in him as the emperor will never see the light. And if he does, it will never come because of an external event, but some internal shift that we have never been able to see. We will never know when it is coming, and for that reason, we cannot rely on it to make an appearance. I am simply afraid that the work that I can do is too limited. I am coming around to the fact that my time in Hydor is drawing to an end and that my judgment before Chrystos will come. I have given the world of Hydor as much of my body and soul as possible. I believe, even with us on the run, that the future of the magi has great hope.”

  “Garo…”

  “You can call me by my name?”

  It was a light moment of levity that brought a louder than expected laugh from Tetra. It was also clearly an exaggerated laugh designed to push back some strong emotions. Zelda smiled as her own way of coping with the feelings that came to her.

  “In any case, Tetra, I have come to realize that while I may be able to change the world, I cannot change a man. Only a man can change himself. No legend, no hunter, no emperor, no law, no force of nature, no historical moment, not even any god can compel a man to change. Even if a man is not the captain of his own ship, he is the only one who can lift the sails to change course.”

  A long pause came once more. Zelda had to imagine this was the heaviest conversation the two of them had had in years. How many years, Zelda did not want to guess. Decades, for sure. Centuries?

  “So what are you going to do then, Garo?” Tetra said, her voice suddenly becoming angry. “Are you just going to leave me? Are you going to wake up and die tomorrow? You’d have me fight the empire by myself?”

  “Heavens, no,” Garo said with a weirdly reassuring laugh. “Just because I cannot change the world and do not have the will to fight does not mean I do not have the will to live. I still have you. I still love—”

  “Garo, please.”

  Tetra’s words forcefully cut off Garo, who swallowed before resuming his speech.

  “Tetra, let us stop acting like this. Please. We have lived for, what, close to eighty years under these names, the first twenty of those spent in near anonymity before we ever thought to build the Shadows? How long has it been since we expressed our true feelings to each other? How long, Tetra?”

  To Zelda’s surprise, once more, Tetra began sniffling up.

  “How long, Tetra?” Garo said.

  “Too long. Far, far too long.”

  “Precisely. You were once my wife in your eyes. You are still my wife in my eyes. We never stopped loving each other. We may deny it, but we know it to be true. So Tetra, you ask me what I live for. I live because I love you.”

  Tetra suddenly stood up and walked away to the darkening fields opposite the mountains. Zelda’s eyes went wide but she didn’t dare make a move. Tetra could defend herself if need be. Garo simply stood, mumbled something, and then approached Zelda.

  “I didn’t hear—”

  “It’s quite all right, Zelda, I don’t mind,” he said. “When you reach my age, you stop caring if people see your displays of affection.”

  Zelda smiled, still blushing as Garo gave a good hearted laugh. She was surprised to see Garo in such good spirits. Or, perhaps, he was just masking his dying one.

  “I just hope I have something like what you have,” she said. “I don’t know if I will, the way my life goes, but…”

  “Our lives were full of danger,” Garo said. “When we met. Full. And it still is. I pray, too, that you have a life like ours, at least when it comes to the love we shared. But I pray that it does not last too long. I fear our greatest mistake was outliving our usefulness.”

  That it coincided nearly exactly with what Tetra had said was not lost on her.

  “Is she coming back?”

  “Of course she’s coming back,” Garo said with such a laugh that Zelda felt slightly dumb for even asking the question. “The emotions are too raw and strong at the moment. As we said, it’s been over multiple decades of us living as Gaius and Kara. An old man and a young girl, secretly the same age, secretly former lovers. Current, if you ignore the lack of physical intimacy. You can’t just go from living like that to saying I love you and not expect there to be some blowback. In some ways, our relationship isn’t just starting from the beginning. We have to work our way just to say we’re at the starting point. If we want to get there. If we have the time to get there.”

  Zelda nodded.

  “Will she be back tonight?”

  “A better question. I suspect so,” Garo said. “She is very serious about fighting the empire, but she will not leave my side as long as I am here. Nor will I, her.”

  “It’s so weird, honestly. Seeing you as an older person, and her—”

  “Yes, you never suspected, did you?” Garo said with a victorious smile. “That is by design. There was a time when she aged as I did. Though you will never hear her admit it, she looked as beautiful as the rising sun over a ice-peaked mountain in her old age. But when we decided to take on these separate roles, she longed for her younger looks. I believe it was her way of going back to the days when times were simpler.”

  “You mean just the two of you in Dabira?”

  “Before then, even. In Mathos, believe it or not. In those days, I had hair that would have made any man jealous. We were scarcely a few years older than you are now. Alas. Time changes all of us, and almost all of us change in ways that we cannot predict.”

  Zelda nodded. She wondered what that would mean for her future. How would she change in the years ahead? She’d been through so much already at fourteen, she couldn’t imagine changing much more. But she barely qualified as a woman. Her body was changing, so who was to say that her mind wouldn’t as well? What horrors—or joys—could she have coming that would fundamentally change her?

  But then her mind zipped back to the question that had plagued her as they walked down the road, and seeing an opportunity, she pounced on it.

  “Garo, if I can ask, do you know why the empire hates us so?”

  Garo snorted and shook his head.

  “I have many theories. But it is rare that hatred and love have such clear answers. If you asked me why I love Tetra, I could say many things. Her charm. Her assertiveness. Her beauty. When I fell in love with her, our passion for each other was so great… well, you are a bit young to hear of the tales on our boat. But it was an incredibly passionate and deep relationship. Her friendship. Her love. All of those are part of why I loved her. But if you asked me how it all fit together? How those characteristics added up to love? I could not say.

  “The same is true for the emperor’s hate of our kind. There are likewise several factors. The narcissism the poor man suffers from. You know, the first emperor I fought, one of his ancestors, told me that it was not the winners who wrote history. It was those who wrote the fastest and spoke about it the loudest. I suspect that the emperor took this message to heart. His narcissism insists that he has complete cont
rol over all and that any threats, whether real or potential, are squashed immediately. He sees the magi as a potential threat, existentially and physically, and thus eliminates them as best as he can.

  “Which is similar to the point of fear. I think the emperor does fear what he does not understand. A man who has power fears losing his power more than anything else, especially when his identity is tied to his power. So it is with the emperor.

  “I can remember, too, escaping the emperor upon pushing back Bahamut.”

  This suddenly got Zelda’s attention. It was the part in Tetra’s story she wished she’d expounded upon more. Zelda sat up more, her eyes widened, and she leaned forward.

  “I had held off Bahamut long enough to see it lay dying in its own blood. Of course, as I got word later, I learned they never found the body of the great dragon, so I know it is not dead now. At the time, however, I returned home. I made my way back to the imperial palace so that I could have my dearest Tetra back. Wouldn’t you know it, though, he had taken Tetra on a boat and tried to take her for his own. I reached his boat and reclaimed my wife. But the emperor warned me I could not claim credit for my victory. I had nothing against not having credit, but I knew this was not a case of distrust of me but distrust of my people. So I froze the emperor, much as you do with your powers. I escaped with Tetra and we found the city of Dabira. Suffice to say, I can’t imagine that had a positive impact on magi relations with the empire.”

  A guilty grin spread over Garo’s face as Zelda tried to imagine the heroic actions of the man.

  “So… how do we stop it? How do we end the hatred?” Zelda asked innocently.

  The grin immediately dropped from Garo’s face and he sighed.

  “That’s the very question that drove my wife and I apart until, I pray, this night,” he said. “I thought we could build trust and a relationship with the emperor over time, even with our contentious history. She felt that way, but you suffer enough lies and attacks, and eventually, you give up. You become a person who seeks to destroy. That is where Tetra is. I cannot blame her. Often times, I am aware that I am indulging in naive, possibly dangerous, beliefs. But it is sometimes a defense mechanism as much as it is a hope. As she said, eighty years ago, I thought I’d had that hope realized. Turns out the empire had just laid out a well-designed, long-term trap.”