Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2)

by Jordan MacLean

  She looked up at him, and for a moment, he was afraid she might be angry. But to his amazement, she smiled back, a beautiful smile that was worth the entire journey. “Simply be. Mark, I go without you using your power to hide me, not for lack of trusting you,” she said, rubbing dirt and horse dung into the cloth, “but for needing control of the ins and outs of it myself. I’d have you know that to your heart and not take it hard. This,” she said, holding up the grassy blanket, “this, I can shed and take up again at my will. Your light bending, I cannot, not without you stand right at my side and take my commands, and done that way, we hide neither of us. Cripples us both, you see, and puts us both at risk.”

  “Shed and take up again…?”

  “It’s not my way to watch and report.” She laughed quietly, wrapping the makeshift cloak about herself. “Sure you don’t think I’m just playing at sneak in sneak out, do you? I mean to see this threat done in entirely.”

  “By yourself?” He looked out over the camp.

  “For your part, save your power in case I fail.” She slipped down from the boulder. “But I won’t fail.” She smiled that smile again, her dark eyes flashing, locking on the bright blue of his.

  Then she kissed him.

  “Watch me work, such as you can,” she whispered, wrapping the nasty grass cloak about herself, “and let me prove my worth to you.”

  Stealth was not his friend, not natively, not the way it clung about Gikka, and certainly not here in the Lacework, but then, this was a different sort of army. Stealth meant something completely different here.

  This is not a situation a mage can survive.

  No, not a mage. Now he understood what Galorin meant. He squinted up at the great coral towers surrounding him and considered.

  * * *

  “Thirsty work, it is, minding that lean-to.”

  Renda looked up to see Kerrick offering her one of two tankards he’d brought over. He nodded toward the line of the knights’ furs and mantles stretched across the hollow in the reef where they’d secured the injured mage Gikka had brought back. “The duke has been with him for an hour and more.”

  “Indeed he has.” She took the cup gratefully, more to warm her hands than to drink. She looked toward the makeshift lean-to. “I wonder that he took no one else in with him.”

  Kerrick shrugged. “The space within is cramped. Little room for the ducal entourage, I suppose.”

  “But he took no one. Not my father, not myself. I’faith, he did directly refuse when I offered and instead bade me see to my armor instead––armor, look you, which has not seen more than dust since Brannford. Sent me off, as I said, the way one might send a pesky child off, busy with chores.” She hated the note of petulance in her voice, but at every point since they’d joined with the duke, she’d been sent off to mind the camp or see to her weapons. She felt nearly as useless as she had at Brannagh.

  “He knows you, Renda.” Kerrick smiled. “I suspect that he knows full well that you watch since here you are, no more than fifty feet away, within easy earshot and sword at your side, having already dusted your armor per his orders.”

  She nodded, chuckling at herself. He could always seem to put things in the best light.

  “There, you see?” Kerrick smiled. “So he is not unprotected, despite his best efforts.”

  She rubbed her shoulders and looked out over their little band, watching the knights take advantage of the unexpected stop to stretch their legs, to spar with each other or even to sleep. They’d been riding hard for days with only a few hours of rest each night before they’d set out again, and this respite was welcome, even if the reason was a bit worrisome.

  “If we stay much longer, we should probably count on making camp here for the night.” She sniffed at the mug. “What is this, tea?”

  “So it is.” He grinned and sat beside her. “I was much amused to see that the duke’s man, Nestor, had thought to buy tea leaves in Pyran right along with the other necessities. I confess, at the time, I’d assumed it to be one of the duke’s civilized eccentricities, or perhaps Nestor’s own, but now, after many frozen days on the landbridge, I am most grateful for it. It certainly helps to make the brackish water more bearable.” He raised his mug. “A manly drink, it is, my Lady. Maybe too strong for the likes of you.”

  “Do you think so?” she grinned up at him. “I always thought it a drink suited…how did you once put it? ‘Suited only to grandmothers at their embroidery.’”

  “No, indeed!” he answered with gravity. “I have it on good authority that this will put hair on your chest. You’ve but to spy Grayson as he bathes to see the effect.” He raised a brow at her. “When he bathes. Cheers.”

  “Well then,” she chuckled softly. “Here’s to hair on my chest, I suppose.” She took a grateful sip.

  “Sure I thank you, my Lord. Most kind.”

  “My pleasure.” He smiled and watched her for a time, and she had a sense that he wanted to say something.

  “Lord Kerrick,” she said at last, “is something the matter?”

  “This many a month while I was at Windale,” he sighed, “I’ve thought softly on you even while my attention should have been on my father and on Windale. Pure thoughts, virtuous thoughts.” He looked down and smiled. “Mostly. But these reveries were taken up with your grace and delicate beauty at Brannagh.”

  She looked away. Surely she was no such prize now.

  “My Lady, you’re filthy. You smell of sweat and horse dung. And now that you are back in your element, armored and armed, with your mind focused so keenly on tactics and battle, I confess…” He smiled. “I find you even more entrancing.”

  She had not expected him to speak to her of this again so soon, and once again, she found herself feeling awkward and uncertain. And flattered. But these were dangerous feelings for a battlefield when her thoughts needed to on more important matters. He had to appreciate how little she needed to distract herself with this just now.

  “But,” he added, as if following her thoughts, “if your thoughts did not turn my way in the laziness of peace at Castle Brannagh, it is certain that they cannot now. Nor would I seek to distract you with my suit.” He cleared his throat and drank deeply from his cup. “So my purpose is in telling you that while my feelings have not changed, I will not pester you about this. Not until we are at our leisure to consider and decide. Only know that I remain your faithful servant and await the day when you might give me your answer.”

  She smiled with relief. “You flatter me with your attention, Lord Kerrick, and with your understanding. Thank you.” She brushed dirt off her armor and looked toward where the duke was still with the prisoner.

  “As to the duke, I should not worry overmuch,” he said, nodding toward the crude tent, “Laniel is with him, and he is quite formidable for a priest.”

  “Alas, not so,” she said, her somber sense of duty returning to her features. “Laniel came out almost as the duke entered, no doubt at his bidding. His Grace is quite alone with the prisoner.”

  She supposed she could understand why, if Trocu would interrogate this mage, he might dismiss Laniel. Not that Laniel would understand a word spoken between the duke and this mage, and not that it should much matter if he did, of course. If any person in this camp could be trusted with the duke’s confidence, it was the priest of Bilkar. But she supposed Damerien had quite enough to consider without having to explain his ability to speak Brymandyan to anyone, even Laniel, though Laniel would never raise the question. Very well, that explained why he did not want any of the others along, but not herself, and certainly not Lord Daerwin––Lord Daerwin who knew all of Trocu’s secrets.

  All his secrets, indeed. Perhaps that was the flaw in her thinking.

  Then again, Lord Daerwin had lost so much to these mages. She wondered if Damerien would spare his uncle––his son, she thought quite deliberately, stripping away the ingrained artifice that lived even in her thoughts. Damerien could not bear to put his beloved son
through the ordeal of having to exercise his almost legendary restraint while interrogating one of those responsible for the destruction of Brannagh, responsible for the death of the last of the knights, the family servants, his wife…

  His wife…. Her mother. Ah. Tears brimmed in her eyes, tears she’d fought down and refused since that day not so long ago when she’d watched Brannagh erupt in white light. Now she understood. It was not only Daerwin’s sensibilities he would spare but her own as well. She sipped at her tea and sighed.

  “Tears? And a sigh.” Kerrick looked down. “For love of your dear cousin.”

  “For love of Syon,” she snapped, a bit more harshly than she intended, and wiped the tears away. “Trocu Damerien is my dear cousin, yes, but he is dearer to me still as Syon’s ruler. I am a Knight of Brannagh, and it is my station to serve the duke, as it is yours.”

  “I meant no disrespect, my Lady. I just know that your cousin the duke is…” He shrugged the end of the thought away, unable or unwilling to give it voice.

  “Vexing?” She chuckled gently. “It’s all right. That, he is. Believe me, I do understand.”

  Renda brushed a stray bit of hair from her eyes and smiled a bit ruefully. “In all love and loyalty to him, I confess, my frustration with His Grace comes when my duty to protect him and my duty to obey him come afoul of each other. It was much easier when the duke was older and more inclined toward obeying protocols.”

  “Brada?”

  She nodded. “When he and my father led their armies, Kadak’s demons trembled.”

  “I met him only twice,” smiled Kerrick. “What an inspiration! As fine a sword arm as any on the field and such a brilliant strategist! We could not have had a better leader during the war than he. I was deeply grieved to hear that he did not survive his wounds after the war. We will not see his like again.” He jumped, realizing what he’d just said. “That’s not to say Trocu is not a fine leader! As he gets older, I see more and more of his father in him, and I rejoice. But I do miss the old duke. For the reasons you said. Before.”

  Renda smiled. “I understand. Trocu has everything in common with his father, for all that he has not been seen to lead men in war. But I have faith in him, as do we all. It is no failing of his, after all, that he should be born to lead men in time of peace rather than war. Leadership in time of peace is a different sort of challenge, and one whose success is not sung as loudly in the taverns.”

  “Peace?” Kerrick raised a brow at her. “Plagues and bound gods, armies of mages wreaking havoc, allies turning on each other and entire coastlines laid waste? My Lady, if this is the face of peace, I think I should prefer war.”

  Gikka cleared her throat discreetly behind them. “Is he yet in there?” She crouched down between the two knights and took Renda’s mug. “Been at it an hour and more, he has. Sure an he’s not come by it by now, there’s no blood in that turnip.”

  Renda shrugged. “The prisoner’s Byrandian, and he’s one of the enemy. Anything he can tell us is more than we knew before.”

  “Aye, mistress, but what he knows could fit on the point of a pin, I wager. He’s at best a common foot soldier, and not one of power, or I’d not be here to tell the tale.” Gikka drank from Renda’s mug and made a face. “What is that, tea?”

  One of the cloaks covering the lean-to slipped aside, and Damerien stepped out, settling the cloth carefully back in place. “Cousin,” he said wearily, approaching Renda and the others.

  “My Lord,” Kerrick rose and greeted the duke with a bow. “What news?”

  “Nothing of note.” Trocu nodded to Kerrick, then turned his attention to Gikka. “Next time, my lovely,” the duke chuckled, “I would charge you, be ambushed by one at once higher in the chain of command and more observant. Do that for me, won’t you?” He handed her the dagger she’d left in the mage’s chest. “I thought it best we not leave that with him, now that Laniel has him all stitched up. Not that I think he’d be able to tell one end from the other, as heavily as Laniel has him dosed.”

  Beyond them, Renda watched the Bilkarian pick up something from the ground and stare at it. She saw the look that passed between Laniel and Damerien.

  “Cousin?” she said worriedly.

  “Kerrick, I leave you to watch the prisoner.” Trocu offered his hand to Renda and nodded to Gikka. “Come, ladies. I believe I shall have need of your counsel, as well as that of my uncle and yon priest.”

  “Concealment,” Dith murmured quietly from where he sat on a lumpy ledge in the coral reef above the roadway.

  Below him on the stone path, Glasada nibbled gratefully at the shoots of marsh grass sprouting in the silt along the edges of the stone, the same marsh grasses that had sprouted all over the landbridge at once.

  “Brilliant. That should blind them sufficiently. All of them. And of course by the time it’s any burden to you, we should be well into Byrandia.”

  By the time it could be any burden to me, he smiled to himself, the grasses will be well established and will be able to sustain themselves without me. Why, there might even be trees.

  “You’re rather proud of yourself for this, aren’t you? Growing grass in briny soil, in the dead cold of the Feast of Bilkar besides…. Simple fire would have sufficed to cover our escape.”

  Dith had thought of that. But, of course, Glasada could not eat fire, and neither could he hope to take actual physical cover in it, not as well as in waist high grasses. He smiled to think that Gikka would approve of his version of her grass cloak.

  “Ah, indeed. All right, then, I will say it. Well done. In any case, now we go straight on to Byrandia, yes?”

  Dith jumped down from the ledge and smoothed out his seamless gold robes. “Not…just yet,” he breathed. The grass cloak was not the only tactic he had taken from his beloved Gikka.

  “Grass, it is.” Laniel held a handful of it out. He gestured over the haze of green that stretched out in all directions, steadily deepening between the withering piles of kelp and seaweed. “As you can see, it has come up around the camp and as far as the eye can see. I cannot say how it survives the cold and the salty ground.”

  Gikka sniffed at it suspiciously. “The same way it came sprouting out of ice and salt the first place: magic.”

  Not far away, Damerien and the sheriff were crouched looking at the grass as it came up, pointing along the horizon, gesturing, speaking very earnestly between themselves.

  Renda nodded, watching them. “His Grace and my father would seem to have come to the same conclusion.”

  “Magic?” Laniel smiled, a bit embarrassed. “Of course.” He tossed the blades of grass away and brushed the dirt off his hands. “Apologies. I am too old to be this naïve.”

  “Laniel,” Renda chided gently, “when fire sudden rains from the sky, one might be called naïve not to recognize it as magic. Even one of your abbey. But this, this is subtle and strange, for all that it lacks panache.”

  Gikka smiled up at her. “Does it, aye?”

  Renda ignored her. “All that marks it as magic is that for grass to grow here, all at once, is unlikely––unlikely, but not so much so that I should say it could not happen without magic. So do not be so hard on yourself. Sure yon sheriff and the duke still debate whether it be magic or no, for I doubt even they are certain.”

  “It is. It must be.” He scowled. “And this naiveté of mine is a weakness.”

  “An it please you to call it so,” Gikka snorted, “it’s one you’ll put right with time and study, not with harshness. Mark, the landbridge is coming all of brush and grasses now.” She crouched down and studied the plants growing at her feet, which by now were ankle height. “The how of it is less important than the why.”

  Damerien and the sheriff approached, talking quietly.

  “What had he to say for himself, this prisoner?” the sheriff was asking.

  The duke looked around him to be sure he would not be overheard. “Of Byrandia,” he said quietly, “he knows only what any child wo
uld know––his home, the streets, the name of his sovereign. Not surprising, and of only marginal use except to verify that he is incapable of deceit. Alas he is too dull of wit for that. Of his army, he knows only the barest goal, which was, of all things, to destroy Galorin.”

  Renda blinked at him in surprise. She had expected almost any goal but that.

  “Galorin the mage?” Gikka looked between the others. “Galorin, whose keep Dith set out to find?”

  “The same Galorin that Kadak’s demons spent half a millennium hunting and never found?” Renda crossed her arms skeptically. “These mages thought they would find such a one and destroy him?”

  “The same, aye. Worse yet, as impossible as it seems,” he breathed, “they succeeded.” Trocu looked away, but in that moment, Renda could see a terrible loss in his eyes. “Needless to say,” the duke added with forced determination, “We could use such a one as Galorin now.”

  “This is right heady news,” murmured Gikka, “to hear at once that Galorin did indeed exist, and to hear in the same breath that he was destroyed.”

  “But then why would they attack Brannagh?” she asked. “They had to know he was not there.”

  Damerien squeezed Renda’s hand. “Brannagh was only an afterthought, cousin. It was an opportunistic attack to try to weaken our defenses and weaken me, from the sound of it. Kill me, if possible.” He sighed heavily.

  Laniel cocked his head. “They’d just destroyed the most powerful mage in all Syon. Having done so, defeating a noble house or two, even Damerien itself, especially in light of the destruction of all the Brannagh knights, would seem almost trivial. With all respect.”

  “Trivial, perhaps, but perhaps necessary to their ultimate purpose, whatever that might be.” Damerien smiled grimly. “Imagine, if you will, what might lead someone, particularly as it seems someone from Byrandia, to kill Galorin and then to destroy B’radik’s temple, Castle Brannagh and for all we know Castle Damerien, as well. Why those targets?”