The Stormbringer

by Isabel Cooper

  “Great minds. Or sweaty people.” Darya laughed breathlessly. Her gaze dropped to the open neck of Amris’s robe, and though she quickly brought it back to the level of his shoulder, Amris couldn’t resist his own look in return.

  The robes didn’t conceal much—modesty wasn’t valued nearly as highly as fabric in a military outpost—and Darya’s showed everything from the curve of her long neck into her square shoulders down to the sides of her breasts, shining with the heat and moisture of the baths. The hem fell only as far as was essential, exposing most of her sleek thighs, and when she shifted her weight, it only revealed more. It was like the stream all over again, but without cold water close at hand, and Amris’s own robe did very little to conceal the way he was responding.

  Keeping a clear head in the face of danger had always come easily to him and was second nature by now. Doing so when the danger was so damnably pleasant was new, and far more difficult.

  “I…” he said hoarsely, and then had to remember what he’d been going to say. “I shouldn’t detain you from food, or rest.”

  “I do need both,” Darya said, and still it was a moment before she started to move past him, or he started to get out of her way.

  The hallway was narrow, and each of them went the wrong direction at first. Darya’s shoulder bumped lightly into Amris’s chest, and reflexively he put a hand out to steady her. It fell low on her waist, and for only a second he gave in, spreading his fingers and letting himself feel all the yielding firmness below his palm. She gasped, not in shock—the woman, as far as Amris could tell, was unshockable—but in obvious desire.

  Another few breaths and he’d forget their weariness, forget how public the hallway was, forget that he and Gerant still needed to have a long and awkward conversation. He’d have her up against the wall, legs locked around his waist, nails digging into his spine. Amris could almost feel them.

  He dropped his hand to his side and lunged for the door.

  Chapter 27

  Sleep ebbed away slowly. First Darya knew that she was conscious again, not drifting in the murk of dreams that had been just short enough of nightmares not to wake her. Normally, remembering the frog-creature’s dead eyes as it dropped down in front of her, and seeing what might have happened differently, would have at least brought her awake enough to realize she’d dreamed, curse, and turn over. She’d been too tired for that.

  She’d been too tired to do anything. When she woke, the light from the window was the deeper gold of early afternoon. A tray by her bed held bread, cheese, and fruit. She vaguely remembered that from the night before. I’ll eat in a minute, she’d muttered into the room, just want to lie down first.

  Then, dreams.

  Now, the room, after at least fourteen hours of sleep, with untouched food and a glass of wine nearby, and the quiet flick of someone turning pages. Darya pushed herself upright and saw Branwyn sitting cross-legged on another bed, bent over a small book.

  We both pushed ourselves considerably harder than usual, didn’t we?

  Gerant’s voice in her head sounded like it usually did. It had never been absent for so long, though. As confidently as she’d told Amris that he was fine, Darya felt an instant and consuming relief—the spiritual equivalent of unknotting a muscle in the back of her neck—as she looked over by the side of her bed and saw the emerald in her sword glowing.

  “Damn straight,” she said quietly. “But we’re here. How are you?”

  Branwyn nodded a greeting, but didn’t ask questions. That was one of the reasons Sentinels roomed together when they could manage it; they were all used to what sounded like their comrades talking to themselves.

  Well, now. And intrigued. If I’m not wrong, spreading the connection to Amris gave me a wider power base to work from. That’s why I could target both of those creatures at once. I’d give a good deal to research further, if we have time.

  “Pretty useful, in the circumstances,” Darya agreed. She took a sip of the wine. Neither warmth nor exposure had made it worse. It was wet, and better than the lignath, which was all she needed. “Time… I’ll figure that out.”

  “Three hours past noon,” Branwyn said, not closing the book, “more or less. Hallis wants to see all of us at five. I was going to wake you beforehand, if you hadn’t managed it on your own.”

  “Hope it hasn’t been an inconvenience.”

  “No.” Branwyn glanced down. “I wanted the chance to read this again, anyhow. It’ll be a good memory.”

  “Hallis made the announcements, then?”

  “Both of them. If I hadn’t known the hunt myself, I’d be surprised you managed to sleep through”—she raised her hands, fingers splayed slightly outwards, and then let them fall—“everything that followed.”

  The fort wasn’t, as far as Darya could tell, on fire. That was a start. “Sorry I couldn’t tell you before.”

  “You had orders.”

  She wanted to apologize for more, as though bringing the news back had made it happen, but that wouldn’t have helped. She washed and dressed instead, pulling on her remaining clean clothes—her best on the road, since Sentinels rarely got invited to state dinners. “Desertions? Suicides?”

  “I haven’t heard of any,” said Branwyn, “not that I necessarily would. All the pages are being sent off with the other civilians today, but that was Hallis’s call, not theirs.”

  More likely than not, it was Amris’s suggestion, said Gerant. We tried to send the young away from the front lines, when we knew where they’d be. He won’t yet be used to the way things are now.

  “You could go your entire life not getting used to that,” Darya muttered. Because of Gerant, she didn’t say a word about how short the rest of that life could be, given the circumstances.

  He is well, isn’t he? I assumed you’d have told me otherwise.

  “I would’ve. He was fine when I saw him last night, so unless we’ve been ambushed and Branwyn’s not saying anything about it”—Branwyn smiled and shook her head—“or he choked on a lump of cheese, I’d say he’s fine, if tired. Got a nasty cut on his leg when we took out the twistedmen, but nothing that won’t heal.”

  “If he died from cheese,” Branwyn put in, “it would have been within the last few hours. He was there this morning when Hallis broke the news to the town.”

  “Now I just feel lazy.”

  Not inappropriately.

  Darya stuck her tongue out at her sword, getting a knowing laugh from Branwyn, but added, “We can go find him. He was worried about you, too, when you went quiet.”

  “They knew each other?” Branwyn asked, gesturing to Darya’s hilt and then toward the door to stand for Amris. “Or simply got along very well on the journey?”

  “Both, really,” said Darya. “It’s a long story. I’ll need more wine to tell it, and you’ll need more to hear it, I’m fairly sure.”

  * * *

  Secrecy isn’t important to me, Gerant said out in the hall. And I doubt it will be to Amris, though you can ask him yourself.

  “No,” said Darya, and waited for a pair of men to pass by before she spoke again. Both looked gray, stunned. They walked silently. When they’d gone into one of the other rooms, she added quietly, “But ‘he went to sleep a hundred years ago and didn’t age until I woke him’ isn’t a simple conversation.”

  You’re likely correct.

  Hallis’s office was a hive of people. Darya glanced into the doorway, saw no trace of Amris, and decided not to add to the man’s problems. She passed onward, footsteps soft and regular on the stone floor.

  We didn’t deliberately choose to keep you in the dark, Gerant said. Or I didn’t. Not you personally, or even—He stopped, and Darya got the feeling of a sigh. I suppose we didn’t want to think about it any more than we had to.

  Darya stopped on the landing going down, turned right, and paced slowly ove
r to the window. It wasn’t much more than a slit in the stonework, but it gave her a reason to face away from the hallway and spectators, and the journey let her delay answering. “Don’t worry about it,” she said, trying to sound normal around a large knot of guilt. “Honestly, now that I’ve slept—and now that I’ve talked to Hallis—” She broke off and shrugged. “You might have been right. Or not. But I know you thought it was the best call at the time. We should all do that well.”

  You’re generous. Not to mention troubled.

  The window glass was thick and greenish, bubbled in places. Through it, Darya could make out figures in the courtyard, distant and dreamlike. Wagons unloaded barrels of grain, fruit, wine, and water. Soldiers stacked wood in the corners and inspected the walls for weak points. Five youths passed through the gate and spoke to the sergeant on duty; they wore the plain clothes of peasants, and Darya could see, even through distance and cloudy glass, the way duty warred with fear in their bodies.

  “There’s a lot to be troubled about, wouldn’t you say?”

  I wish I could argue.

  * * *

  At the outer gates of the palisade, the old, the young, and the incurably unfit for combat fled Oakford. Merchants’ wagons, full of families and what belongings they’d been able to pack in a few hours, rumbled out. Others followed on horses, mules, or their own feet. Amris watched as a young woman kissed a towheaded child and set him on horseback in front of an old man. All three were weeping; the adults only did so quietly. The woman kissed the man on the cheek, smacked the solid draft horse gently on the rear, and then turned away and walked over to Amris.

  “Where do I go to train, sir?” she asked, her voice still choked.

  “Make your way to the fortress. When last I saw Corporal Valerin, he was…making his presence hard to miss, but if you need further guidance, he’s roughly my height but rounder. He has long black hair, and he wears a brown sash.”

  Over the course of the morning, he’d repeated the same instructions nearly a score of times. Although he was a stranger and wore no sash to indicate rank, the folk of Oakford chose Amris to answer their questions. He wasn’t entirely surprised, and that wasn’t entirely vanity: of all the armed people in the town, he looked steadiest on his feet. Many of the soldiers were positively green. Even Olvir and Katrine, making themselves useful as he was, had a lost air about them; they moved as though they weren’t quite sure the world around them was real.

  For them, of course, this duty was new. For Amris, it was sadly familiar—but as he watched the young woman jog off toward the fortress, he doubted that was all the explanation.

  He’d watched that morning when Hallis had broken the news. The faces in the crowd might have been from his own time, his own commands, in their fear and confusion, but there was an element of disbelief that Amris didn’t recognize from so far back. He’d seen it on Hallis’s face, though. It had been less present on Darya’s—because she’d discovered the situation piece by piece, because she’d seen him locked outside of time, or simply because the Sentinels lived intimately with magic and threats—but present nonetheless.

  In Amris’s day, Thyran and his army had been bad foes, and their reputation had grown over the course of the war, but that had been all. Now Thyran was the architect of a hundred years of ruin, of death and privation that had driven people to the most desperate acts: a name to conjure with. Known to bad children and old wives everywhere, Darya had said.

  The folk of Oakford faced not just a threat, and a bad one, but the upending of the world they’d known—of time itself, in a manner, for Thyran had been safely dust and legend before Darya and Amris had come in and dragged the past bloody-handed behind them.

  Thus, Amris answered questions, gave directions, broke up the occasional argument, and helped to get runaway stock or children into the care of those fleeing the city. He wouldn’t normally have known either the land or the people as well as the rest of the soldiers, but just then, he knew everything better than they did.

  He turned from pushing a barrel back upright on a wagon and caught sight of Darya headed toward him through the crowd. Even in the chaos, many drew back from her.

  “You’re making me feel lazy” were her first words when she reached his side.

  Like him, she was clean and cleanly dressed, itself a dramatic change. While Oakford had done the best it could by Amris in the way of one man’s second-best tunic and another’s spare pair of breeches, Darya clearly wore her own clothing, and wore it well. Sea-green wool served her for hose and for the laced doublet that cinched tightly over a light-brown shirt with wide sleeves and a low neckline.

  Many of those avoiding her touch were staring surreptitiously all the same. Amris would have been among them, had he not seen the glowing emerald in her sword hilt and heard the cheerful voice in his head as Darya got closer. She’s only halfway lying, love. I wouldn’t have expected to find you on your feet so soon, much less out here—except that I know you.

  “You’re awake,” he said, drawing close enough that—hopefully—nobody would notice the warmth in his voice, or think it strange for apparently addressing a woman he’d known all of three days. “And you’re well?”

  Very well, considering the circumstances—and very interested in what I managed to do, now that I had the link to both of you. It was as much instinct as logic just then, you understand, but—Gerant broke off and laughed at himself—I am so glad it worked, and that the creature didn’t harm you seriously.

  “Not seriously, no.” Amris touched the bruises on his throat gently. Necklines were lower in this time, and his did nothing to conceal the marks of the previous day; that might well be working to his advantage as a figure of authority. “And we made short enough work of the others.”

  I would’ve expected nothing less from the pair of you.

  “I’ve more or less filled him in on what happened,” Darya said, with a sidelong glance that meant she hadn’t been forthcoming with all the details. “I’m meeting with Hallis soon. He’s moving quickly, I see.”

  “Not him alone,” said Amris, gesturing to the refugees, “but yes. Already he’s gathering what supplies are in reach. More will be coming soon, and soldiers to go with them—with any luck.”

  “And you’re the voice of reason in the middle of it all?” Darya took in the fleeing townsfolk and the soldiers struggling to do their duty. “I don’t think I could help—somehow, I’m not the sort people ask for directions—but damn me, you don’t get a minute of rest, do you?”

  He hasn’t in years.

  “Life hasn’t allowed it,” Amris replied. “Though some might say I had a hundred years of rest.”

  Yet it hadn’t felt like rest. He’d been in the midst of battle one moment and facing Darya the next, with a strange sensation between that had been more similar to a long blink than sleep. When Darya responded with a dismissive laugh, he didn’t argue the point.

  “I should go and hear my fate,” she said, and bit her lip before going on. “I’ll find you afterward, all right? Grab a spare sword from the armory, give you two an hour or so to talk. I’d do it now, but there’d be questions.”

  And I should be at the meeting as well, said Gerant. Afterward, though—I’d be glad of the chance. Thank you.

  “That’s most generous of you,” Amris added with a slight bow, and hopefully no sign in his voice of anything but gratitude. He was grateful, and he’d take Gerant’s presence with a joyful heart—but he realized, in that moment, that being close to Gerant now meant being close to Darya, with all the temptation that implied.

  He thought she had come to the same conclusion. The way she’d caught her lip between her teeth before making the offer, and the uneasy shift of her weight while they spoke, implied as much. They each loved Gerant, in their own manner, and as much as that kept them from acting on their urges, it would also keep them from maintaining the distan
ce that would make such restraint comfortable.

  “I’ll see if I can find some decent liquor,” said Darya. Her voice implied that she’d need it. Amris silently agreed with the sentiment.

  Chapter 28

  Darya brought no drink later when she met Amris in the spacious, many-windowed room that was now the dining hall for the fortress. She carried her soulsword sheathed in her hands, while a plain sword of the same make hung from her waist. Emeth came with her, the hilt of her own sword glowing with dark-red light. Both were in dark clothing and had donned armor again; Hallis had found Darya a whole, unstained doublet, evidently.

  “Sorry,” said Darya, “but duty calls. Hallis wants Emeth to establish scouts.”

  “And his conscience would trouble him if he sent me alone to do it,” Emeth said with a roll of her eyes.

  Darya shook her head. “I don’t think any of us should go out alone until this business is done,” she said, “even the Sentinels. And this is me talking.”

  “Sobering,” said Emeth, eyeing Amris’s mostly empty plate, “more so given that you could eat fresh pork and new bread if you stayed.”

  “Likely there’ll be plenty left for you,” said Amris. “Best, they thought, to get the stock killed and salted before the siege.”

  Sausage is easier to stack than pigs, Gerant added in his head. It smells a good deal better, too, and is far less noisy.

  Not being a Sentinel, Amris didn’t want to speak aloud in response while they were still in the main room, but he smiled as he’d always done when his city-bred lover had made such comments. Gerant wasn’t wrong, but he always had preferred animals as meat.

  Darya, who had more freedom, laughed. “If only we could breed ’em straight to meat, huh? And you don’t even eat these days.” She passed the sword to Amris, carefully and hilt first, though it was still in its polished leather scabbard.

  “Will you be all right?” Amris asked, setting the blade across his lap. “With an ordinary weapon—”