“I hate to say it,” Terian eyed her and Cyrus with muted pity, “but it may come to giving them an opportunity and hoping you can spring free of any trap they may attempt. Whatever we want to accomplish among the humans, we’re not going to get it done without these people. Even if we killed Pretnam Urides somehow right now, we have little reason to believe anything would change in the Confederation’s stance toward you.”
“Little is changing regardless,” Cyrus said quietly, feeling a little self-pity of his own. He had not left Sanctuary since the ambush in the Mountains of Nartanis, and the grounds behind the walls were starting to feel restrictive.
Imina lingered guiltily in the back of Cyrus’s mind. Sometimes he would wake in the night, cold, in fear of what Malpravus might have done to her. Vara, for her part, remained reassuring in these moments, but none of the corpses that ringed the Sanctuary wall had approached to deliver any further messages regarding her fate.
Nearly two hundred more members left in the months following the arrival of the New Year. They left in a trickle, in ones and twos and threes, and Cyrus felt each departure keenly, for there was little else to focus on, trapped as they were.
“We’re going to slowly bleed to death,” Ryin had said mournfully at a Council meeting two months after the ambush in the Mountains of Nartanis. “This is our fate. We will draw down slowly over the next year, until we do not have sufficient numbers to even defend the wall, and then the armies of our enemies will come in and crush us.”
“They could have done that by now if they truly wanted to,” Mendicant said. “So why do they not?”
“Because we promised them an army of heretics in opposition to their every attempt,” Vara said sharply. “And thus far, we are delivering on that promise. We may only have fifty spellcasters left, but they are fifty who know how to cast spells across almost every discipline.”
And that much was true; Cyrus had learned the destructive magic of the wizard and the druid, throwing fire and ice, the illusions of an enchanter, though he struggled with mesmerization and charming (“If it were easy, every enchanter would be as good as I,” J’anda had said with a smile), and teleportation. Particularly easy to him, though, had been the ones that Vara had taught him.
“You must visualize the power flowing forth from your hand,” she had said as they stood upon the archery range, a half dozen scarecrows standing out down the line. “Imagine the power blossoming forth, exploding, driving forth your foes like sand in a typhoon.”
When he had released his spell, it had not hit as hard as what he’d seen done by his wife, but it had knocked down three of the scarecrows, and he had only improved since.
Their missives to the elven contacts went unanswered. Lady Voryn of the Emerald Coast appeared to be gone, according to the messenger sent by Cattrine, and the first communiqué to Lord Merrish went unanswered, as did a second. Cyrus felt a small tinge of desperation grow ever larger as spring cemented its hold on the Plains of Perdamun with drenching rains that finally began to turn the grass green, and as the sun came back out one day he finally felt ready to send a message to Odellan’s father, Morianza Yemer.
“Cattrine says he’s still at his northern estate near Javeritem,” Vaste said as Cyrus scrawled words upon parchment in his own hand. “Why do you have to write this letter again?”
“Because Cattrine doesn’t know him,” Cyrus said stiffly, looking down at the yellowed paper. It looked like aged skin to him.
“I didn’t realize you did,” Vaste said, loitering in the tower as Cyrus sat hunched over his desk. The balcony doors were all opened, and blue skies were visible outside for what felt like the first time in months.
“You know damned well I’ve never met the man,” Cyrus said, signing his name with impatience. He considered adding “Heretic” in bold letters underneath as a title, but signed it “Lord of Perdamun, Guildmaster of Sanctuary” instead, even though he knew that the former title had likely been revoked by both Reikonos and Pharesia by now.
“Yes, you should have sent him personal correspondence after his son died in glorious battle,” Vaste said, thumping a sandaled foot against the wooden chest Cyrus kept in the corner. “Might have been a more appropriate time to open ties.”
“I would have, but the King of the Elves overreacted a bit when I had to deliver the news of his daughter,” Cyrus said, neatly sealing the parchment in an envelope with a blob of wax that he stamped with the Sanctuary seal. “It didn’t leave me feeling free to send even a messenger to Pharesia to deliver any such missive.”
“Always an excuse with you,” Vaste said, sounding more like he was jesting, but weakly, as though the energy had left him over the last few months. “What do you expect to get out of this contact if he does agree to a meeting? Because it seems to me if you come to him suggesting some sort of revolt against his King … I mean, assuming he’s a loyal subject, it’s going to go poorly for you.”
Cyrus stared straight ahead at the stone wall. “Vara has a plan to stir some loyalty in the kingdom, but … it requires some help we haven’t been able to get just yet.”
“Oh, right,” Vaste said, nodding. “These travel embargoes, they’re really hell on us. No one can come to our gates without Malpravus’s little watchers seeing, and who knows who’s watching within the walls?” He paused to think it over. “Why, if it’s as Ryin suggested, and we’re doomed to watch our numbers sink to two hundred, or a hundred before they move in, I think I’d find it ironic if it turned out that ninety of them were spies for Goliath waiting to turn on us at an opportune moment.”
Cyrus froze, the envelope cradled in his bare hands. “I don’t think that ‘irony’ is what I’d be feeling at that moment.”
“Well, you wouldn’t have time for much else with a betrayal of that scope,” Vaste said. “Irony and then a flurry of blades piercing you, that’s about all.”
“You’re so damned cheerful,” Cyrus said, pushing his chair back. “Why don’t you go torment someone else?”
“Because there’s really no one left,” Vaste said seriously. “It might as well be you and me here.”
“We have seven hundred and twenty-one members remaining—” Cyrus began.
“Siewart George left last night,” Vaste said. When Cyrus did not react but to frown, the troll went on. “He was a ranger. Gnome. He came after Enterra, one of that lot—”
“Oh, yes,” Cyrus said with a nod. “Short fellow—” He stopped. “Obviously.”
Vaste gave him that pitying look again. “Yes, obviously. Anyhow, near as I could tell, he was one of the few gnomes your fetching bride did not despise. She even told him that he was ‘quite skilled’ at one point.”
“So he was a very good ranger, then,” Cyrus said, staring a little forlornly out the open balcony.
“My understanding is that his small size made him one of the greatest sneaks in our entire guild,” Vaste said, a note of mournfulness in his tone. “He was apparently an impressive scout and hunter. Calene told me that, while he was not indispensable, he was one of our best.”
“How many of our best have we lost?” Cyrus mused.
“Nine thousand or so,” Vaste said with a little more energy. “More if you count Leaugarden, but my memory doesn’t stretch back that far, and let’s face it, those were mainly Luukessians, who, technically, are still part of our army.”
“True,” Cyrus said with a nod. “Though it’s hard to feel that way when they’re encamped in Emerald Fields.” He paused. “You know they built permanent barracks before the winter to quarter those troops?”
“Hard to miss buildings that size,” Vaste said with an arched eyebrow. “It’s like walking into Council and not seeing me standing next to my chair.”
“I often don’t see you in Council,” Cyrus said, “but it could be that I’m ignoring you.”
“See, that’s the Cyrus we need again,” Vaste said, clapping his massive hands together. “I know you can’t lead as well as you might want
to, since so many of our plans are secret, but walking around dour and down is not helping anyone. Even if you can’t share what we’re doing with others, you should at least act like you’re confident in the direction we’re going.”
Cyrus stared at him blankly. “The direction we’re going is down.” He held up the envelope in his hand. “I’m sending a letter to a man whose son died under my command, hoping that he’ll decide to betray his own king and help us murder him.”
“So we’ve nowhere to go but up!” Vaste said.
Cyrus cocked his head at the healer. “Well … our enemies haven’t encircled us to squeeze us to death, so … no, we could sink farther.”
“Ungh,” Vaste said, putting his face in his massive, paw-like hands. He peeked out from between immense green fingers. “You know why these people are leaving, right?”
“Because all Arkaria is against us and they don’t like the thought of being invaded and killed?”
Vaste let his hands drop, and his face turned serious. “Because without leadership and hope,” he said, “why would you stay? If you don’t believe in the chance that we’ll come out of this, why remain and fight? You could go get yourself killed much easier elsewhere.”
Cyrus started to open his mouth to reply but stopped. “That’s true,” he conceded after a moment’s thought.
“We need to give these people a direction,” Vaste said. “We need to find hope for them. We need them to believe we’re doing something, even if the Council doesn’t believe it, even if they don’t see anything but us walking tall, sure of ourselves.”
“Gods, Vaste,” Cyrus said, sitting back down. “I don’t know how we even … how do you do something like that? Find certainty in yourself at a moment like this?”
Vaste stared straight at him and there was a not a trace of humor when he spoke. “If I die at the hands of Goliath and their allies, but I do so with my remaining friends here in Sanctuary at my side … I would consider that a better death than if I lived to be a thousand and croaked in my bed with a fine, intelligent, beautiful trollish woman beside me.”
“Well, the former is certainly more likely to happen than you finding ‘a fine, intelligent, beautiful trollish woman’ or living to a thousand—” Cyrus said with the glimmer of a smile.
“Stop stealing my dreams.”
“You make a fair point, as you do in your times of sober reflection,” Cyrus said. “All right. I will try to walk tall again.”
“Walk like you’ve got a purpose,” Vaste said. “Like you’re always going somewhere, and with a hint of a smile on your face. People will see it, and they’ll take heart. Life without hope is just death.”
“Fair enough,” Cyrus said with a nod, and he stood, pushing a smile onto his face. “Better?”
Vaste cocked his head and studied him. “You still look hideous to me, but perhaps your fellow repulsive humans will derive some comfort from it.”
“Mmhm—”
The door at the base of the stairs clicked open and Cyrus froze, listening. Metal boots tapped their way up, and he could tell by the sound that it was Vara, and she was in a hurry. When her head emerged from the stairway in the floor, she was wearing a smile of her own.
“See, that’s the look, right there,” Vaste said. “Purpose, optimism, mischief—”
“We’ve just gotten a letter from Lord Merrish of Traegon,” Vara said, raising a parchment of her own in triumph. “He wants to meet—immediately.”
29.
Cyrus, Vara, Vaste, J’anda, and Larana appeared in the whirlwind of the teleport spell at the portal outside the city of Traegon, the northernmost city of the Elven Kingdom. There were towns to the north that Cyrus knew, such as Nalikh’akur, which was nominally still Vara’s holdfast, but Traegon was a massive city, probably one of the largest in the Kingdom. Even outside its walls Cyrus could see the minarets extending into the deep blue sky. The air was colder here than at Sanctuary, and Cyrus drew his cloak tightly around him.
They wore the illusions of elven travelers. A lone elven woman waiting for them scanned them carefully before nodding once and beckoning them follow. She was ahorse, as were they, and they all rode together south in her wake.
They followed the road for almost an hour in silence, Cyrus afraid to make conversation with his companions. He felt reassured because Windrider was beneath him and they were under the influence of J’anda’s strong, persistent illusion rather than his own somewhat limited versions of the spell. He was getting better, but the duration of his spellcraft was considerably less than the more practiced master enchanter, and he was quite content to leave this particular deception to the expert.
The wind blew intermittently out of the west, the nip of the air causing Cyrus’s flesh to pucker beneath his armor. He watched the trees carefully as they rode, fearing ambush from all sides, from any side. His small party were all dressed as highborns, and the lowborn laborers they passed along the way did not dare gaze their way for long.
Finally the woman guiding them left the road at a small path, her horse at a canter. Ahead, Cyrus could see a mighty plantation house, a sprawling estate behind low walls that would not have stopped a goblin from scaling them. They were ornate and beautiful and entirely for show, he decided, like much of the rest of the Kingdom.
The horses whickered and whinnied as they came to a halt just before a massive field. Workers were out there in it, plowing and breaking the ground with horses and hoes. Most of the workers were using animals, but one was breaking the stubborn clumps of earth with just a tool. He was shirtless and standing in the middle of the field, far from any others, and he worked the earth as though he were expert at it, moving swiftly in a row.
Their guide pointed at the man. He was bronzed, and his long dark hair flowed over his shoulders, untamed. He looked young from what Cyrus could see, even by the standards of the long-lived and barely-aging elves. His muscles bulged, straining from his labor.
Cyrus glanced at the guide, who nodded, and started to make his way across the plowed field, his boots sinking into the loose earth with every step. It looked as though they’d turned up frost within the ground and were breaking it up. He frowned at the labor, thinking, Won’t it just melt on its own?
Vara followed a pace behind Cyrus, and he could hear Vaste and J’anda after her, the troll grunting with particular effort as his weight sank him into the dirt with each heavy step.
“Hail,” the young, shirtless man said as he paused in his labors. He was sweating and dirty, traces of black earth dusted along his chest and caught in the runnels of perspiration that gleamed on his chest. Cyrus caught Vara looking for a moment too long and frowned more deeply.
“Lord Merrish?” Vara asked tentatively, slowing her advance.
“’Tis I, Shelas’akur,” Merrish said, leaning against his hoe and flashing a ready grin at them. “Though you would not know it to look at me, any more than I would know it simply by looking at you.”
“You’ve got a sight spell on you, then?” Cyrus asked, staring at the young man.
“I’m a wizard, yes,” he said, and the gleam of magic lit his hand as a skin of water was conjured out of thin air. Lord Merrish pressed it to his lips and drank deeply, then poured it out over his muscled chest, washing off the perspiration and dirt.
“Thank you for inviting us out here,” Cyrus said, looking around the plantation fields. The other elves laboring were stopping for a break of their own, wandering away in all directions, far from the conversation going on at the center of the field. He glanced back; J’anda and Vaste were keeping their distance, apparently content to let Cyrus and Vara do the talking.
“Do you always work your own fields?” Vara asked with undisguised curiosity.
“Frequently, yes,” Merrish said, still grinning. “I’m quite the abnormality, I’m aware.”
“May I ask why?” Vara stared at him, at least now keeping her eyes on his face. Cyrus still felt a rush of annoyance that he could not quite pin
down.
“You were born and raised in our Kingdom,” Merrish said, still cradling the conjured skin of water. “Still, perhaps you didn’t see it, given your birth …” He frowned, mouth turning down. “Our Kingdom … is at a ripe moment, one waiting to be plucked by the appropriate hand.”
Cyrus felt a blanket of cynicism fall over him, an old suspicion that had long served him well. “Your hand, I suppose?”
Merrish grinned. “Doubtful.” He worked the hoe left and right in the dirt, nervously, to little effect. “I spoke to Oliaryn Iraid a few days past when I was visiting Termina. You’ve been there, of course.” He looked at Cyrus. “Marvelous city, isn’t it?”
“Less so than it used to be,” Cyrus said, drawing a sharp look of rebuke from Vara.
“It’s the jewel of our Kingdom,” Merrish said, and if he was insulted by Cyrus’s remark, he did not show it. “A place where one can go and be unworried with the constant demands of caste. Lowborn, highborn, those between … it matters not in Termina. Some in my station see that city as infection, a pustule of the spreading contagion of the humans.” His eyes gazed into the distance; Cyrus thought he was being exceedingly dramatic. “I have been to the Confederation many times. Reikonos, Santir, Asaliere, Isselhelm, Montis, Taymor, Wardemos—I have traveled those lands and found them … very admirable, in their way. The distinction of caste, of birth, swept away? The ability for someone born in a stable to poverty-stricken parents to rise, to ascend to heights in the capital, as did Pretnam Urides?” Merrish’s eyes gleamed. “I can hardly imagine the same tale being told anywhere in the Kingdom.”
“And not just because you people aren’t having babies anymore,” Cyrus said, feeling a little like he was channeling Vaste. This caused Vara to roll her eyes once more then glare at him subtly.
“It’s true,” Merrish said with a nod. “No point disguising it or flowering over it—we aren’t. But even if we were, they would be born into a system where they would never rise on their own merit or fall because of their own failures. They would be locked firmly into the path of their ancestors.” He glanced at Vara and smiled. “You are the only one to ascend beyond her class of birth anywhere outside of Termina, in this Kingdom—”
Heretic (The Sanctuary Series Book 7) Page 17