He patted Saul’s shoulder and walked right past him. Andelusia trailed in his wake. He knew exactly how Saul would react.
“Wait…” he heard Saul sputter. “Goodness, is that—?”
“Yes, Saul. Me,” she said.
“How? What in…? You’re the ghost? You’re the one who pulled me from the cave? Impossible…”
“If I remember right, you saved me once,” she said. “Where was it? Home? Some other place? We are even now, the way I see it.”
“I suppose...” Saul limped after her. “But how? Of all the people to be here…it’s not possible. What happened to your hair? And what’s this gown you wear? Ande, come back here!”
“I have no answers.” She kept walking. “I forgot them all. Garrett says you will help me remember. He says we have a long trip ahead, and will have plenty of time.”
Garrett slowed enough to let the two of them catch up. Still incredulous, Saul marched to his right side, while Andelusia walked peacefully at his left. He glanced once more upon the obsidian citadel, whose million windows were dark and whose halls he imagined still contained things better left unfound. He looked down and saw Lorsmir’s sword lying in the puddle he had dropped it in, but made no move to fetch it. He set his gaze southward. A long road laid ahead, the snaking path from Malog to Illyoc, with flooded lakes on both sides and no friends to be had.
It will be treacherous, he knew. The Furies might capture us. We may starve. Another rain might come and drown us. But we will not complain. Others made the journey and died. We should be so lucky to live another day.
That night, a few hours march south of Malog, he and Andelusia sat and talked beneath the branches of a dying tree. The stars wheeled overhead, bright as candles painted on midnight’s canvas. The road was barren, swallowed on both sides by black water, without a Furyon dwelling visible in any direction. Fast asleep, Saul lay on the tree’s opposite side. No matter Garrett’s wounds or lack of food, it was as calm a night as he could hope for.
Hours deep into the conversation, Andelusia stretched her arms and gazed into the stars. He had spent the night helping her regain some small amount of her memory, and yet he felt uneasy each time she looked skyward, for in those moments she still seemed lost. “How is it you are not angry with me?” she asked him while staring into the night. “I would be, were our roles reversed.”
“You say you helped the Furies,” he recalled her admission of betrayal. “You say the whispers compelled you to leave Verod and bend before the enemy’s questions. A year ago, I would have thought you were mad, but no longer. I have seen magic. I have learned things beyond what I thought possible. That some darkness possessed your mind is not so hard to believe. What matters now is that the voices are gone.”
She looked at him. Her eyes were dark pools, the greens still absent. Her hair remained black, the waves tumbling down her shoulders as though the night were melting over her. “The voices…I keep waiting to hear them,” she said. “I want to believe they died when you destroyed the Object.”
“You are afraid they might return.”
“Yes.”
“I hope you will tell me if they do.”
“I swear it. Though you may be the only one I tell.”
“Good.” He looked to the stars, wandering among the pale lights the same as she. He wondered what she saw in them, or between them, for all that she loses herself. “If we should survive this, there will be questions,” he said. “They will ask how you came to be in Furyon, how you lived when so many others died, and why your appearance changed. I cannot say whether they will mistrust you, but I believe fewer words might be best. Some will assume the worst, and the truth will be better kept between you, me, and Saul.”
“And Rellen?”
“Rellen…” He knew that memory would be hardest for her. “It will not be easy. You will have to decide what to tell him, and what not to. No matter what you choose, I will support you.”
Worry flashed through her eyes. “So you believe me? You trust I am not a traitor, and not a witch who worked for the enemy?”
“I know what I saw.” He touched her hand. “And what Saul told me. If you were a witch, I would know it. And even if you were, I would have to think hard about whether it mattered. I have journeyed with warlocks worse than you, and still I survive.”
He sensed the relief spreading through her body. He could hardly see her face, and yet he swore he saw a shadow lift from her eyes. “Nothing will be the same.” Her wisdom sounded beyond her years. “If by some stroke of luck we find ourselves home, all will be different than what it was. You know that, right?”
“It is the way of war.”
She shook her head. “Not the war. Us. You and I and Saul. You say I love Rellen, and I believe you. I feel his absence inside me. But I wonder if he will know me. And you. You are different, same as I. This place has changed us. The Object…it is gone. And yet there it is, lurking in the back of my mind. Tell me you know what I’m talking about.”
He knew, though it was not so easy to say. There were no voices in his head, only a thrum in the lowest strata of his mind, a subtle sensation he had paid no mind to until now. “I know,” he told her. “The warlock Dank, the one the darkling slew on the stairs; he said there were five Objects. Five, not one.”
She swallowed hard. “They told me the same. ‘The Eye,’ they said. ‘The Tower, the Needle, the Pages, and the Orb.’ We are rid of one, but what about the other four?”
“We might never know.”
A long quiet followed, the dozenth of the night. There were no noises in the entire world, for the flood waters were still, the wind at peace, and the sounds of Saul’s breathing blocked by the tree. He waited for Andelusia to ask more, but it seemed she had remembered enough for the night. When finally she spoke again, her words were but whispers. “Garrett…” she breathed. “If we make it, I want to go to Grandwood. I remember the trees. Seeing them might help everything else come back.”
“Grandwood. So be it.” He looked to the stars. “It will be winter soon. Mountains, rivers, and seas stand before us. We will need clothes, food, and weapons. There will be rain, snow, and swords. You and I once made it from Gryphon to Mormist in a matter of weeks. This may take months, even longer.”
“You say this to dissuade me?” she asked.
“No.” He smiled for her sake. “I tell you these things because I know you can weather them. If Malog could not kill us, if the storm, the dead, and the darklings were not enough, nothing else shall be. It may be summer before we get home, maybe winter all over again, but we will make it. I made an oath. I mean to keep it.”
Those were his last words of the night. He lay against the tree, and she curled beside him. The last thing he remembered before sleep sucked him down was Malog. Even so far away, he saw it, a black blotch against the northern horizon. It blocked out the stars and swallowed the moonlight, lording against the night like the tallest thorn in a great Furyon crown. He gazed at it, and it gazed back.
Sleep well, he said to it beneath his breath.
And never trouble this world again.
Ghost of Mormist
On a crisp autumn eve in Mormist, Rellen walked a narrow dirt road somewhere in Velum Forest.
The leaves shimmered silver above his head, glittering like coins turning in the trees’ fingers. The sky smoldered with reds and oranges, waifish clouds burning bright stripes of against a pale blue background. He plodded along beneath it all, his horse moseying sleepily at his side. If ever a living soul had been as tired as he was, he could not imagine it. The wind whipped past his ears and the music from the next village echoed hauntingly through the trees, but he heard none of it. He began to wonder if a man could be so tired his eyes might fall from their sockets, and he reckoned if the earth were softer, he would find a clearing to lie in and sleep a week away.
Though far from Gryphon, he did not travel alone. Nicolaen, trotting beside a grey destrier huge enough for two men, thumpe
d along on the same road. “Slogging a bit, are we?” The big knight noticed him slowing. “You look like a wagon with three broken wheels.”
“Aye.” he grunted. “Thanks for noticing.”
Nicolaen shrugged. “Judging by the music, the next village is near. We’ll buy us some rooms and put some good drink in you. Maybe you won’t dream tonight. Maybe you’ll sleep.”
One can always hope, he thought with a grim glance into the trees.
He supposed he should be in better spirits, considering how far Nicolaen had journeyed to help him. No matter that Ardenn was a month’s march away and the rest of Nicolaen’s troops had departed Gryphon a week after the destruction of the Furyons, the big knight remained at his side. Even now, a week removed from Verod and too many nights spent sleeping beneath the open sky, Nico was full of jests and more than happy to offer advice. “A fine night, this.” The big man caught up to him. “Though if we don’t head back to Gryphon soon, they’ll start to wonder. Your mother’ll have my head for letting you wander all this way. Your people’ll think you really did die in Mooreye, and that your return was just a ghost.”
“Mother will be fine,” he yawned as he rounded a curve in the road. “And they’re not my people, not yet anyhow.”
“So you’ve said.” Nico shook his head. “Ever wonder if you should’ve taken Jacob up on his offer? Councilors have servants for sorties like this, you know. You could be sitting in your hall, splitting a roast with your father’s fork while loyal men comb these woods. You could be tenderin’ some time for that lass from the woods. What was her name again? She was a pretty thing.”
“Abertham’s daughter. Erelei.” He rolled his eyes. “And I’ve no time for her or anyone else. I did my part. The war’s over. Gryphon will have to manage a season or two without me.”
“If you say so.” Nico seemed amused to be a pest. “But where I come from, we don’t refuse our King, and we sure as bloody night don’t chase after one pretty little tart when our stable is full of dozens more.”
The way Nicolaen referred to Andelusia struck a nerve in him, and not for the first time. He was glad for the evening’s shadows, else the big knight might have seen him steaming. “This isn’t just about her,” he grumbled. “And even if it were, it’d hardly stop me. If you’d ever met her, you’d understand.”
“No doubt.” Nicolaen sensed his irritation. “No matter the girl, winter’s coming. I don’t know much about the seasons in Mormist, but I know what they’re like in Yrul. You’d best finish this up and get back home before the snows come, else you’ll spend months here.”
“I’ll make for Verod if I have to. I can wait out the winter and start again in spring.”
“They’re not likely to want you as a guest, if you take my meaning,” Nico said sternly. “Besides, they’ve hardly room for you. There’s no castle left to speak of. You’d have to share a shack with some old crone in the woods. You really want her crabby old claws up your breeches?”
Nicolaen’s endless stream of jests made him smile, even at a time when he knew he should not. The world outside the prison of his mind seemed an ugly place anymore. The Furyons had fled Graehelm, but the destruction left in their wake was unparalleled. A hero’s welcome had greeted him back to Gryphon, and yet none of it much mattered. He remembered only the war. As he trotted along, images of Therian and the rest of the dead in Mooreye City crept into his mind, the bodies hewn and hacked and lying limply on the streets. He remembered the Dales, where every hamlet lay in ruin and shallow graves outnumbered the living twice over. In the last two Mormist villages he and Nico had passed through, he recalled seeing no smiles, only the blank faces of women and children whose sadness might never pass. I should be less sullen, he scolded himself. Most of my family still lives.
Grim and tired, he and Nicolaen meandered into the little forest village of Glemp. The tiny city’s narrow dwellings were stacked shoulder to shoulder like swords between the sentinel trees. In the evening’s pale light, the houses blended almost seamlessly into the forest, their windows shining like owls’ bright eyes. He and Nico found the source of the music soon enough. Pouring from every crevice of the village’s only inn, the sounds of a flute, lyre, and a woman’s sweet voice were the merriest noises he had heard since before the war. Like Briar, he remembered. How long ago was that?
“Is this the place?” Nico slowed before the path to the inn.
“Indeed.” He nodded. “Hopefully they have beds. And something to drink.”
A stable boy took his horse and a sallow-faced old man opened the inn’s creaky doors. Inside the crowded room, his night began the same as too many of late. He supped lightly at a small table in the corner, barely able to keep his chin from falling onto his bowl. Afterward, while Nicolaen regaled a trio of ladies with tales of the Furyons’ grisly deaths, and how the storm had shrank in the instant he had speared the Furyon Emperor with his lance, Rellen trudged from patron to patron, a dozen questions burning on the tip of his tongue. He approached the people one by one, a glimmer of hope in his heart at first, but gloom falling over him as soon as their answers tumbled out.
“Excuse me,” he began each approach. “But have you seen a red-haired woman? Young and willowy. Usually smiling, sometimes not. Always radiant. Likes to go shoeless, rarely stays indoors. Anyone like her ever pass through here?”
“No,” they would always answer, sometimes with one word, sometimes with a hundred.
“Are you sure? Not in the last few seasons or so? Not one woman who looked likewise?”
“Yes. We’re sure. Not many red-haired lasses in these parts. And if she’s half as pretty as you boast, the Furies would’ve hauled her off.”
His mood plummeted with each rejection, but he persisted. “What about a tall fellow? Clad in a black hauberk with a flaming sword, usually not smiling. You might’ve seen him with a shorter fellow wearing a cloak. They might’ve come through here, looking for men to join their quest to Furyon. What about them? Seen anyone like that?”
“No. Tall fellows are common in Mormist, and there’s no such thing as fire swords. Who’d want to go to Furyon anyhow? Especially during the war?”
“Alright. So be it. What about a man with an iron-banded staff? Or a dour captain from Graehelm? What about Dennov, steward of Verod? Surely someone’s seen or heard of him?”
“No, no, and no,” they would always say. “None of those. Besides, Trebidal’s gone and Triaxe too far south.”
Again and again, he tasted defeat. No one had seen Andelusia, Garrett, or Marlos. No one knew who they were. Most of the patrons were friendly enough, but he turned bitter from their answers nonetheless, shivering even as he tried to warm his fingers beside the hearth. He knew what he would dream that night: Same as always. A dark forest. A pool of cold water. Andelusia weeping at its edge, Garrett floating face-up in the pool, and me without a tongue to say a word.
Later that night, when most of the patrons were gone and the innkeeper dimmed all but of few lanterns, he plopped miserably into a chair opposite Nicolaen. He was accustomed to disappointment by now, and yet he felt like death all this same. As his body sank into the rickety bench, he absently counted six empty tankards sat on the table, though if Nico was drunk, he saw no sign.
“I don’t even need to ask,” said Nico sympathetically. “There’s no word of her or your friends.”
“She’s a ghost, dead and gone.”
“And yet she’s still alive, or so you hope. Deep down, you want to believe it.”
“Exactly.”
“Sorry for that.” Nicolaen wove his calloused fingers together. “Makes it all the worse to tell you more ill news. I’ve heard whispers tonight; none of them kindly. Since it got out you’re Rellen Gryphon, we had to pay triple for our rooms. Seems plenty of folk in these parts know about what happened at Verod. The innkeeper had a cousin or some such there. Poor sod never made it back. There’s a bit of blame in it for you.”
The Mormist folks’ ire h
ardly surprised him. He glanced to the innkeeper, a beardless, plump old man lurking in the shadows behind the bar. The man shot him a smarmy stare, and he began to wonder if everyone knew all about Andelusia, but had said nothing out of spite. “I guess I should be glad they’ve yet to kill me.” He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. “If not for you, they might.”
“You mean if not for your money,” Nico countered. “They love that well enough. So long as your pockets are full, you’re safe.”
He might have slept then. He wanted nothing more than to climb the inn’s creaking stairs and tumble into hibernation. If they want to kill me while I sleep, so be it, he thought. Better to be dead than dead tired.
“Rellen.” The sound of Nicolaen’s voice snapped him out of his stupor.
“Aye,” he murmured.
“This’ll be my last night.”
“I wondered when you’d say that.”
“I have to get back home.” A shadow fell over Nicolaen’s face. “You know I’d go with you ‘til the ends of the world, but I’ve other tasks need doing. Seems we’ve run out of Furies to kill. But there’ll always be plenty of Yrul, always gnawing at the border.”
His chin sank deeper into his palm. “I know.”
“Ardenn’s a few thousand men short from the battle,” Nicolaen signed. “Well worth the price, I’ll tell my father. But you know him. He’s like to see otherwise. It’s not that he doesn’t love Graehelm. He does. But considering how many lives the Furies took, there’re crops that won’t get harvested, and children who’ll go hungry. The brunt will fall on me and mine.”
“I know.”
“So you’re not angry?”
“How could I be angry?”
“Well…” Nicolaen drew back in his chair. “The old you would’ve been. You’d have hurled a beer in my face and told me off.”
“I suppose I’ve changed.”
“I suppose so.”
Down the Dark Path (Tyrants of the Dead Book 1) Page 80