by K.M. Weiland
Chapter Forty-Nine
The silence that met Tireus’s imprisonment splintered into a buzz of voices. Chris’s life for Tireus’s, it was fair. It was right. Tireus was the leader Lael needed. Both Tireus and Chris had proven that. Sweat rose on Chris’s spine, and he started forward, running, headed for Denegar.
“Are you mad?” Denegar shouted at Mactalde. “You already have our king. Do you think we’d also put into your hands the Gifted?”
Mactalde’s body straightened into taut lines. “I’ve never been inclined to haggle, Lord Heindon. But I’ll give you this. If you deliver me the Gifted, everyone on this hill goes free—the king, the Searcher, everyone, down to the lowest jack among you.”
The voices rose to a clamor, and Chris shoved through the crowd. “Move! Make way! Get out of the way!”
A few heard him. A few moved. Most were too busy staring down the hill.
Denegar shot a glance down to where Allara’s face stood out against the shadows. She shook her head—a tiny, frenzied shake, a demand for more time and more options.
“Well?” Mactalde’s voice cut across the distance.
“We cannot surrender the Gifted,” Denegar said.
“As I said, I do not haggle. This is your only opportunity to regain your king in one piece. Trade me the Gifted. He’s worth nothing to you!”
Denegar planted both hands on his wide girth. “If he’s worth something to you, I guarantee he’s worth at least that much to us.”
Mactalde held perfectly still for a long moment. Then he inclined his head, the movement stiff. “As you wish then.”
Chris slammed through a barrier of bodies. “No, wait!”
One of the soldiers flanking Tireus kicked his knees from under him. Mactalde drew his sword. He touched the blade to his forehead in a salute to those on the hill. Then he turned to face the king of Lael.
Tireus knelt with his shoulders back and his head erect. “Stand fast!” His words pierced the cold evening. “We are not conqu—”
Mactalde’s blade carved through air and flesh and blood and bone.
“No!” Chris shouted.
Allara shrieked.
Tireus’s head fell to the mossy earth, and his body tilted to follow it.
Chris broke free of the mob and leapt onto the cairn. This couldn’t be happening. Mactalde was truly out of his mind. What did Tireus’s death buy him that wouldn’t have been worth more as a bartering chip? He could never hope to gain the support of the rest of the surrounding countries like this.
Mactalde bent to retrieve Tireus’s head and mounted. With his gory treasure held aloft, he rode away without a second glance at the body of the enemy he had waited a lifetime to kill. From the Cairns, gunfire chattered, smacking Koraudians from their saddles.
Chris stepped forward. Everything in him wanted to follow Mactalde. He wanted vengeance. He wanted atonement.
Quinnon grabbed his coat sleeve and pulled him back to the ground. “You go out there now and the crossfire will shred you.”
Chris yanked his sleeve free. Could Quinnon possibly think he cared about the crossfire?
A muscle in the old warrior’s cheek bulged, and he shifted his head so his bad eye was only a glare of white.
Behind him, Allara’s hands had fallen from the stone wall to hang at her sides. She took one step back, then another, then just stood there. She was drawing in her air so fast she was choking.
Chris pushed past Quinnon and went to her.
“Allara.” His hand touched her shoulder.
She flinched away. “Don’t. Not now, not now.” She stared at the top of the cairn. Tears, like liquid glass, fell in straight lines down her face. But she wasn’t crying. She stood there, staring, panting.
Denegar approached, his face a mosaic of a thousand fractured pieces. He reached out to her, but she backed away. He turned to Chris. “We can’t defend these cairns for even a day. We haven’t the forces.”
Chris made himself nod.
“As soon as it’s dark, we should pull out. The deeper we can get into these hills tonight, the better.” Denegar took a breath. “With Mactalde holding the skycar lines, we haven’t a chance of getting through to Réon Couteau before him.”
“It doesn’t matter now.” Tireus was gone. Gone. The word sounded like a pebble cast into the yawning eternity of a never-ending well.
Councilmen, nobility, and high-ranking Guardsmen swarmed Allara. Her skin shivered with every touch. She bowed her head, and strands of hair fallen from her chignon curtained her face. Her breaths still came in gasps, but she was regulating them. She was shoving away her grief and forcing her body back to the responsibilities at hand. She was summoning up that icy core and freezing her pain.
He pressed toward her, and the people opened a path for him. Her eyes were darker than he’d ever seen them, her pupils huge.
“I’m fine.” Her voice sounded like sandpaper.
“Allara—Allara, I’m sorry.” The words cut his throat so deeply he could almost taste the blood.
_________
Late in the night, the destitute, vagrant horde collapsed, and Chris went looking for Orias. When he finally came upon him at the edge of the camp, the snow was beginning to fall like wet lace. The Rievers slept on either side of a tiny fire. Orias stared into the flames, one hand on his dirk, the other stroking Dougal’s head on his leg.
Chris kicked snow at the fire. “What makes you think I want a bodyguard?” Even as he spat the words, he knew they were profoundly unfair. What had happened out there today wasn’t Orias’s fault. Orias would never have faltered in the midst of a battle. And if he had decided to go after Mactalde, however stupidly, he would not likely have failed to reach his enemy.
Still, the words poured out, and in their place the grief and the anger filled up his chest. “You think you can go from trying to stab me in the back one day to swaddling me in protective padding the next?”
Orias looked up. No doubt he had heard Chris’s approach long before he had appeared. “You’re no good to any of us dead.”
“And what good have I done alive?”
Orias’s hand stopped moving across the lion’s head. “Lael sold their king’s life for you today. I would think you’d want to live long enough to make it worth their while.”
The wind swirled his exhales into cobwebs. “Lael didn’t sell him. I did.” He smacked himself in the chest. “Me!”
“If I hadn’t stopped you, you would have landed in Koraudian hands. You wouldn’t have accomplished anything.”
“I could have tried.”
Orias eased the lion aside. The firelight glittered in his eyes. “Some people say to try when there is no hope of success is faith. Others say it is madness.”
“You’re talking to me about faith? You’re the one who abandoned everything your people believed in.”
Orias looked away. “I abandoned faith because I thought I had no other choice. I have faith in you now because now there is no other choice.”
“That’s not faith. That’s desperation.”
“Makes little difference now.” Orias rose and dusted the snow off his knees. “Sometimes a Gifted is worth more than a king. Tireus knew that.”
Chris shook his head. “I don’t accept that.” He couldn’t accept it. He turned away, hands on his hips and paced in front of the fire. He had to tell someone the truth. He had to just say it. Maybe that was why he had really come seeking Orias, not to accuse, but to confess.
He looked back. “The one thing I always swore I wouldn’t do was walk away.” He clenched his hands so hard his arms ached. “But that’s what I did today. I walked away back there. I did the one thing I swore I wouldn’t.”
Orias’s face might have been carved from white marble. The snow swirled between them, silent. He breathed in. “Sometimes,” his voice was the lowest of rumbles, “we do the one thing we swear we won’t. Sometimes we have to spend the rest of our lives trying to make it right.” He held
Chris’s gaze a moment longer, then he turned away. He snapped his fingers at Dougal and disappeared into the trees.
Chris didn’t follow him.
_________
Chris wandered back through the knots of people crowding their fires. They had come away from Glen Arden with hardly anything more than the clothes on their backs. Most of them didn’t even have a blanket to separate them from the snow.
Next to his own campfire, he found Eroll rolled onto his side, watching something halfway across the camp. The duke glanced at him when he crouched beside the fire.
“You all right?” Chris asked.
The firelight cast a deceitful color onto Eroll’s wan face. He wore a heavy coat and a fur hat. Unlike so many, he had a blanket as well.
He tried to smile, but the effect was somehow more painful than if he hadn’t bothered. “My country has been shorn of her king. Can’t say as I feel like a jig, even if I could.”
Chris bowed his head and ran a hand over the back of his hair. “He died for me. I know that.”
The shadow-flames flickered in the hollows of Eroll’s face. “Now what are you going to do?”
There it was again: the challenge to take charge. Every muscle in his body was pleading for rest. The worlds were cracking apart above his very head. And he was suddenly the de facto leader of a ragged group of people on the verge of annihilation. He wasn’t the best man for the job. There was no question of that. But who else was there? He was the Gifted. He was here. And he had to do something.
He looked up. “In the other world, my mother and my sister died when I was twelve. I couldn’t protect them, I couldn’t save them. And I couldn’t save my dad from the bottle.” The snow stung his face wherever it melted. “And maybe I can’t save Lael. But I’m going to try. Somehow.”
With a groan, Eroll rolled over onto his side, so he was facing Chris. “I’m not a great man myself, as you’ve probably figured out.” His sad little smile almost reached his eyes. “But I’m not such a bad judge of men. And I’ll tell you this. You’ve got off to a bally bad start around here.”
Chris could only nod.
“But unlike most of us, you can become a great man. What you need to remember is you’re only a piece in the puzzle. Nothing more. The best and only thing you can do for us is to slow down and apply a little patience and wisdom to figuring out that all you have to do is hold up your place in that puzzle. You’re so caught up in reacting, in trying to fix every tiny leak you run afoul of, that you’re being swallowed in the flood.”
Chris stood. “I can fight the leaks. I can’t fight the flood.”
“Stop reacting and start believing. Start surrendering.”
“Start surrendering to what? Destiny?” His hands twitched at his sides. “I don’t believe in destiny.”
“Maybe you should start believing.” Eroll looked back into the distance. “If for no other reason than so you’ll have some kind of strength to give Allara.”
Chris looked up through the spackling of snow. Twenty feet away, Esta stood next to Allara’s bedroll.
He stepped toward her, then stopped and looked down at Eroll. “You’ve been a better friend to me than I deserve.”
Eroll gave a little nod and lowered his head to the ground. “Go on with you.”
Esta saw Chris approach and lurched toward him. Her face was red from the cold and splotched with tears. “I don’t know what to do, what to say—”
At her feet, the mound of blankets trembled.
“Nobody ever does.” He sank to his knees.
“She won’t stop crying—”
“Would you?”
Esta backed away, into the falling snow, and left him with Allara.
He laid his hand on the blanket. “Alla.”
Throughout the night, he had caught glimpses of her riding in the darkness. The wind had swirled her coat and her dress, but inside the folds of her garments, her body had been unmovable. Her face could have been carved in stone, in ice. She had clung to her pain, hiding it deep down where it could not touch her or interfere with what had to be done. But she couldn’t hold it forever.
Now she breathed in moans, deep and furious. Her body writhed with the sobs. She didn’t respond to him, didn’t even catch her breath. He pushed the blanket back from her face and pulled her up into his arms. She crushed her face against his chest, and her fingers clenched in the front of his coat.
He rocked her. “I’m sorry.” His throat caved in around the words. “I’m sorry I didn’t take his place.”
Her grip tightened. Her arms slid around him and her fists clamped in the leather at his back.
“I couldn’t get there in time.” He laid his cheek against her head, and his own tears wet her hair.
Ghosts of snow swirled around them, dancing a silent waltz, bowing and sweeping to the hiss of the wind. Cold fingers scraped a rhythm against bare skin, beating, pounding, demanding they join their dirge dance.
He sat with her until his legs cramped beneath him, and her sobs finally slackened into shudders.
She rested her cheek against his chest. “What happens to us now?”
“We’ll deal with tomorrow when it comes.” He glanced across the camp. The snow fell through the trees and padded the world in silence.
Her breath trembled. “Tomorrow.”
“It will be better than today.” He stroked her snow-damp hair. “Has to be.”
“There’s a lullaby,” she said. “The Cherazii sing a lullaby about tomorrow.”
For a moment, he thought it was merely a comment, something that had flitted in and out of the weary night. But then the words lifted from her mouth. The notes were the simple, tragic flood of a folk song. Her voice was the color of a broken rose, husky and bruised.
“Don’t cry tonight. There are tears enough, and tomorrow brings its own pain. So we laugh tonight, we sing tonight, for tomorrow we weep again.”
The notes scattered on the wind, and the snow ghosts danced a little faster. She slid down into her bedroll, and he held her hand in his until she fell asleep.