by Ron Collins
That was all because of Ellesadil, of course.
The lord had a calmness about him, a sense of control that gave people reason to follow. Despite fears and doubts, they trusted Ellesadil. They believed in him. If the lord said it was important that they place their lives at risk, then it was important.
Garrick arrived at Ellesadil’s platform.
The lord stood under the observation canopy, before a large chair. He wore a blue tunic edged with silver thread. A riding cape, its fabric dyed goldenrod yellow, hung from the back of his seat. Fine lines at the corners of his eyes said he was older than the rest of his appearance suggested. Those eyes were brown and his gaze steady. His curly dark hair had a few strands of gray running through it.
Lady Ellesadil remained seated in the shade, resplendent in her green dress with golden trim. Rings gleamed from her fingers, and a jeweled necklace clung to the hollow of her throat.
The fineness of the royal couple’s wardrobe seemed out of place in the middle of the glade.
The lord came to stand before Garrick.
“Go with fortune,” he said.
“Thank you, Lord.”
“I have met often with my new captain,” Ellesadil motioned across the field to Darien, “yet, you and I have not had the opportunity to speak. I wanted to provide you my blessings and also make certain you understood the arrangements.”
“I understand the arrangement. Darien leads your army.”
“Do you truly understand?” Ellesadil replied. “Do you feel how the people of my realm are uncertain whether a magewar is something our warriors should die for?”
“Yes,” he replied. “I do feel that. And I understand how unpopular your decision will be if this plan does not succeed. But I also know you understand the true dangers the orders pose, and that you would never have participated if that wasn’t so.”
Ellesadil’s gaze was sharp. “Still, I wouldn’t be throwing my lot with your order if I did not retain full control of the effort.”
“It’s not my order.”
“Not yet.”
Suddenly, Garrick understood the real purpose of this discussion.
“You've chosen well, Lord Ellesadil. Darien and I have traveled together for some time. He is a fine man. And Sunathri is the right choice to lead the Freeborn. To put this as boldly as I can, I have no aspirations toward displacing either of them, even if you asked me to.”
Ellesadil smiled warmly.
“Then you are a wiser man than I am,” Ellesadil said with a smile that felt forced.
Garrick laughed, but felt awkward at the same time. “Thank you, I think.” He glanced over the field that was filled with soldiers. “It appears we are nearing the point where we are ready to leave,” he said.
“Go with my blessing, then,” Ellesadil said, extending his hand.
Garrick took it.
Chapter 8
Will was still grooming his horse when Garrick returned. The boy’s face was dark with forced concentration. It was an expression that hurt Garrick. This was going to be a hard conversation. Will had, after all, saved his life when Elman had attacked in the woods outside Arianna’s home. He would not be happy.
A battlefield was no place for a boy, though.
Garrick knew what he needed to do.
Darien drew close on his mount, his father riding alongside him. In addition to the black garb of the Freeborn, Darien wore a silver helm with a crest of red feathers that ran from front to back. His shoulder plates and thigh buckles carried the seal of the city and his shield was painted with two golden slashes that marked him as field commander.
“Are you ready to start?” Darien asked.
“Nearly,” Garrick replied. “Commander J’ravi, I need your help.”
“How can I serve?” Darien’s father responded.
“I need you to take care of the boy until I return.”
“No!” Will cried, wrapping his arms around Garrick’s waist. “I’m coming with you.”
Garrick bent to look Will in the eye. “It’s too dangerous, Will.”
“I want to come.”
“You’re too young for this.”
“No, I’m not! I look out for you! If it weren’t for me, you would already be dead by now.”
Garrick pursed his lips.
“A battlefield is different. You’re a smart boy. You know this is true.”
Tears came to Will’s eyes, but the boy fought them back. “You’ll come back, won’t you?”
Garrick nodded.
“Promise?”
Will’s gaze was intense. He was no more than twelve, but he knew things about life that a boy his age shouldn’t know. He knew adults lied sometimes, but he also knew Garrick had kept his promises before.
“I’ll never lie to you, Will. That means I’ll only promise what I can. And because I don’t know what will happen at God’s Tower, I’ll only promise to return if I’m able.” And he would, too. He liked Will. The boy made him feel good. Will seemed somehow important, and Garrick wanted to make Will’s life better than his had been.
Will embraced him with a hug. “Be careful,” he whispered.
The commander gave a wide smile.
“I think we can manage to keep young Will occupied. I’ve missed having a boy around.”
“Thank you,” Garrick said.
He mounted his horse and straightened himself. Sunathri was already prepared. Her horse blew an anxious snort.
“Trumpeter,” Darien said. “Blow the march!”
The trumpeter raised his instrument then and blew a clear signal to the men. Voices rose in a throaty cheer. Chains rattled, leather creaked, and the march to God’s Tower began.
Chapter 9
Traveling with an army was different from traveling alone.
Rather than being concerned with predators or thieves, the days were filled with problems of simple logistics and gargantuan tempers. There were rumors about the Lectodinian army, and more tales of the Koradictine. Each day brought some perceived contact with one of their spies or scouts, generally in the form of a days-old camp with its cold fire-pit. Nothing of substance.
The triviality of it wore Garrick down. These things were meaningless when compared to the truth of what was to come. He found himself whiling time by mindlessly setting gates and running pinches of life force through them. He drew patterns in his horse’s coat and dripped magic into those patterns, changing the fur’s color, texture, and length before returning it to its natural state. It was a waste of energy, but he couldn’t help it.
As an experiment, he pushed life force up through his arm and into his hand.
His index finger grew a new knuckle, and he was so astonished he nearly fell off his horse.
“Are you okay, Lord?” a man asked.
“Yes,” he said as he hid his hand. “I’m fine.”
It took him the better part of the afternoon to fix his error.
The plan was this:
He would use his hunger.
He would starve himself, and he would enter God’s Tower prepared to use Braxidane’s curse to his favor.
The idea weighed hard on him. It felt … wrong. Using his hunger as a weapon made him feel like he was a blade himself, like he was nothing more than a piece of steel to be smelted and fired and honed and made to carry an edge that would bite indiscriminately. It made him feel cold. It made him feel hollow, and it made him feel ugly.
But that was the plan, empty his vessel as far as he could, and use himself to literally eat the souls of the Lectodinian and Koradictine mages.
Would that work against other god-touched mages?
He didn’t know.
But his only alternative was to arrive at God’s Tower bloated and ready to cast stronger magic than he had ever before attempted—and he could not accept the idea of sacrificing an entire village to reap the life force he would need to support that plan. Even if he could manage the burden of that idea, Garrick wasn’t sure he could actua
lly defeat the orders’ god-touched mages in a battle of pure sorcery, anyway.
But what did it say about him that he was willing to set himself up to trigger his own rampage?
He didn’t want to think about it.
But he couldn’t help it. He had to think about it.
He had to manage himself carefully if this whole thing was going to work. He had to stay strong enough to make it to the tower without bowing to his hunger’s desire to feed, and still arrive there weak enough to steal the other god-touched mages’ energy. It was a difficult equation to balance.
He went to his bedroll each night more drained than he had been the night before. Each morning he found it more difficult to rise, and each day he felt his hunger growing stronger as the sun moved across the sky. He fought it constantly, keeping its tendrils from drifting out among the men and women of the Torean army. He breathed it down, feeling its aroma and its pull growing stronger with time.
As his reservoir faded, he stopped his mindless practicing and merely sat quietly in his saddle. In the evenings, he squatted in meditation, trying to conserve as much of himself as he could. The ranks watched him intently as they traveled, whispering more and more about the sense of isolation he was emoting. They understood all too well his part of their effort, and they were growing worried.
Not that he blamed them.
A few days later, the Torean army drew near enough that they could see God’s Tower in the distance, its peak gleaming white. Their arrival served to make Garrick even more irritable.
The morning before they were to make their final camp, Sunathri came to Garrick’s tent. He stirred but did not rise. He could see God’s Tower in the distance through the open flap, its peak blazing white in the early sun.
He rose to sit as Sunathri came to the edge of his cot and put her hand above his knee. The heat of her fingers stirred his hunger through the thin fabric of the sheet. She tasted of confidence and passion. He felt her heartbeat, and wanted to be closer to it, but he had learned more about fighting this desire of his and he was able to dispel it far enough to concentrate on her.
“You are weak,” she said.
“I’m just waking up.”
“You know what I mean. Your life force wanes.”
“Then the plan is working,” he joked.
“Stop it,” Sunathri replied. “You need something. Everyone can see it. You can’t make it all the way up the mountainside like this.”
Garrick nodded, surprised to have to fight hunger again. Suni was right. He would feed soon regardless of his efforts. He shrugged. “Maybe so. All I can say for sure is that Braxidane’s curse does not much appreciate its cage.”
“Take me,” she said.
“What?” He grimaced.
“Use my life force to defeat the orders.”
He felt the horror of her idea etch its way up his face. “I’m not going to kill you, Sunathri.”
“It will be worth it. If you don’t feed soon, our entire quest is doomed. You need this, Garrick. Why not take one who fully chooses to go?”
Her grip grew firmer on his knee, and he felt each of her fingers. Did he love her? How could he know? What was love? All he could say for sure was that she was beautiful, that he did not want her to leave, and that suddenly his words would not flow.
“I can’t,” he said.
She moved even closer. He felt her nearness as a painful, glorious pressure.
“No!” He pushed her so hard she fell off his cot.
She hesitated, then stood and walked to the opening of his tent. “Then we are lost,” she said.
She left the flap free to flutter in the morning breeze.
Chapter 10
God’s Tower rose like a sentry above them, a massive peak of white, brown, and green that seemed to be chiseled into the sky. As planned, they arrived days prior to the confrontation.
The guard set about immediately to prepare the land, digging trenches and setting pike traps. They built platforms for their archers, and bunkers for their foot soldiers.
Darien commanded nearly five thousand of them, and Sunathri claimed over a hundred wizards. But these numbers would pale against the numbers the orders would bring. Their scouts had spotted spies from the Koradictine and Lectodinian camps throughout their march, so Darien and Sunathri assumed the orders were aware of their numbers—in fact, their deception relied upon it.
Suni split her sorcerers into three groups.
Under cover of darkness, two smaller teams of twenty-five mages looped around the mountain to position themselves in locations where they could hide away, the goal being that each would slip behind the orders’ armies and attack to create disarray. To support this maneuver, Darien asked for warriors to volunteer to be outfitted in black—one for each of the mages that left the main force. It was a dangerous duty because the Torean mages would be the orders’ obvious first targets, but volunteers were found.
Garrick had little to do but appear confident for the benefit of the army, and dwell upon his upcoming battle. He was tired, so drained he could barely move, so exhausted from fighting his hunger he was beginning to lose track of events. He still had no plan for his confrontation beyond forcing the two orders to work together. So Garrick spent his days hiding away and fighting anxiety that built with each passing moment.
He was ready to have this over with.
The sky was overcast, the clouds darkening as the evening faded toward nighttime. Garrick, Darien, and Sunathri sat before a warm fire that cast orange fingers across the clearing.
It would all begin tomorrow.
Garrick sat stoically, bracing himself against the need to rip energy from everything that moved, and listening to the echoes of Braxidane’s amused laughter clutter his mind. He was so close, he thought—so close to losing everything. No one else knew the depths of this pain. How could they? He was more alone than anyone could know. He was a solitary island of corruption in a sea of humanity.
“It’s time to put our plans into action,” Darien said.
Sunathri nodded. She looked tired, her gaze oddly indifferent, mesmerized by the flame of their fire. It had been a long and stressful trip. Preparations had taken much from her.
“Our mages should be in place behind the orders’ lines by morning,” she finally said.
Garrick smiled with the corner of one lip. He and Sunathri had not been alone since she offered herself to him. She had been distant and aloof since then. The flavor of her rejection was sharp and bitter.
“I’ve assigned roles and we’ve run our practices,” Darien added. “Tomorrow we’ll have fifty warriors cloaked in Torean black. They know what is expected of them.”
“Everything sounds good,” Garrick replied.
An awkward silence ensued. The fire crackled.
Sunathri chewed a piece of dried meat.
Darien’s gaze flitted to Sunathri and back again, the unspoken communication between them clear.
“I am concerned for you, Garrick,” Darien finally said.
“Why is that?”
“You need to be agile and quick-witted to face the orders’ god-touched mages. But I’ve seen you like this before. You are too weak. I think it bodes poorly.”
“I’ll be fine,” Garrick said.
“Perhaps. But, as a commander of this army, it worries me that one of my weapons is unreliable.”
“Is that what I am to you, Darien? A weapon?”
Darien glared at him.
“Be reasonable, Garrick. You do realize that everything depends on you being at your best tomorrow, right?”
“I said I’ll be fine.”
The curtness of his response created more silence during which the intensity of Darien’s gaze was like an anvil pressing down on him.
“What do you want me to say, Darien? That the hunger is intense now. Is that it? That it eats at my soul. Is that what you want to hear? Because if so, then let me tell you all of that is true. Let me say that it burns and aches
, let me tell you that if I let this hunger free this very moment, I could reach out and destroy you all.”
The fire crackled.
“Is that what you wanted to hear?”
Darien sighed and rubbed his eyes. The past weeks had been hard on him, too.
“I’m sorry Garrick. I truly am. If anyone understands your plight, it’s me. But you asked for this. And I command an army of people who have put their lives at stake for you. What I want to hear—what they want to hear—is that you are capable of doing your part. And to be abundantly clear, I don’t see how you will make it up the hill tomorrow when you can barely manage to roll out of bed as it is.”
“I’ll manage.”
“How?”
Garrick felt Sunathri’s stare, but ignored her.
“There is no other choice.”
Darien nodded. Sunathri said nothing. The fire still crackled, and Garrick felt the eyes of the world falling on his shoulders like a hard, pelting rain. He took a deep breath to clear his ache, and he rolled his neck around on his shoulders.
“All right,” Darien said, standing up. “I trust you. I’m going to see to my army, then retire for the night. Sentries are set. Preparations will start in earnest before the sun rises.”
“Good night, Darien,” Sunathri said.
Darien glanced at her as he left. If Garrick hadn’t been paying attention, he might have missed her returning his expression with a nod that was so subtle he wondered if he imagined it. But he felt it in his hunger, too. It was a nod that carried a sense of finality.
t took all of his conscious thought to maintain his composure.
Were his friends conspiring against him?
A breeze blew strands of Sunathri’s black hair into her face. She reached up and brushed them away, then used a stick to prod the fire. The sound of the camp echoed dimly in the distance.