Cyrus blinked, looking up. “You knew Thad since …?”
“Since when he was a child,” she said succinctly, “and I was most definitely not.”
Cyrus let the quiet hang between them as he digested that. “Where … would you go?”
“Amti,” she said simply. “Gareth is there for a reason. Amti is the place in Arkaria most like where we were raised.” She drew her arms up across her chest, cradling her own elbows. “I see in that jungle the seeds of olden days, the days of my childhood long gone. I see people in need of hunters—”
“We need you here,” Cyrus said.
“I have nothing more to give to Sanctuary,” Martaina said simply, “and if I stay, I will be hollowed out and left as empty as I heard Terian once accuse you of being.” She met his gaze with something akin to guilt. “I will be on hand to help as I can between now and the end of this present crisis with the titans, because it benefits my new home, but after that …” Her voice faded, and she made her retreat, pausing at the top of the steps, “seek me no more, for you will not find me willing to return to this place.”
Cyrus tried to find some words to say, some small comfort, even something so little as I know how you feel, but he found it rang false in his mind. He faltered, and she lingered only a moment longer, then retreated as silently as ever, shutting the door so expertly he was not even sure she was gone until he walked up to the edge of the dark of the stairs and checked for himself.
76.
The Council Chambers were once more marked with quiet on the following morning, an air of mourning still hanging over them. Cyrus wondered if it would ever lift again, but seeing only a few days separated them from the event itself, he did not dare to call into question the finite nature of grief, instead tending toward more prosaic matters—even the ones that were not at all pleasant to contemplate.
“Martaina, too?” Erith’s shocked whisper penetrated the silence. Dark clouds were gathered outside the windows behind Cyrus, and the torches and hearth burned with quiet warmth that he found himself deeply grateful for. “Gods, we’re losing the old guard quickly now.”
“Yes,” Vara said, “with the exception of Curatio, I am the longest-serving member of the Council now.” She shook her head. “Next in line stand Cyrus, Vaste and J’anda.”
“I’m olllllllllld!” Vaste cried, leaning his head back. “Why, I’m practically the Elder at this point.”
“You’ve been an officer for five years,” J’anda said, a little nonplussed.
“The same could be said of our esteemed Guildmaster,” Vaste said, pointing at Cyrus, “and just look how it’s aged him!”
Cyrus suddenly longed for a mirror. “I … uh …” He looked at Vara and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Am I really that aged?”
“Like a good cheese, dear,” she said, “better with time and all that.”
“Or possibly just rank like one,” Ryin muttered with a wry smile that was the first bit of good humor that Cyrus could recall in the chamber in days.
The laughter echoed over the empty seats between them. “Shall we discuss the business at hand?” Longwell asked once it had faded.
“How are the Emerald Fields doing?” Cyrus asked.
“The recovery proceeds,” Longwell said, now a little stiffer. “We’re almost two months on from the attack now, and with our troops matched by Terian’s, I think our survivors are sleeping rather soundly at the moment. The crop is in, and it was bountiful, so I believe the mourning period after the attack is … more or less over for those not directly affected, of course.” He lowered his head. “The threat, is, however, still present, somewhere beyond those mountains to the south.”
“I should visit soon,” Cyrus said, feeling a bit stiff about it. “I owe Administrator Tiernan my thanks for giving Terian leave to make the move that saved our lives.” He nodded to Mendicant and Vara. “And I should inspect the troops, seeing how anyone stationed down there is in the most immediate harm from both elf and titan.”
“The elves aren’t going to do a damned thing,” Vaste said.
Cyrus raised an eyebrow. “I was very certain of that as well, until recently, but then a thousand arrows pointed at my head reduced that quaint notion to vapor.”
“Yes, but that was before Terian humiliated Danay in his own throne room,” Vaste said. “Now I have to believe that the dark elves have attained their place firmly at the top of his hierarchy of anger.”
“He did somewhat give his word that he was going to let us slip on this,” Vara said, showing a little anger of her own, “though I would not suspect he will be forgiving or forgetting any of this anytime soon.”
“As well he shouldn’t,” Cyrus said, leaning back in his chair, all his energy for matters at hand nearly gone. “For I certainly won’t be doing either anytime soon, and I expect if an opportunity presents itself for him to strike back at us without causing himself undue inconvenience—or an invasion of dark elves—he’ll do it in a second.”
“But for the moment,” Vaste said, “we have peace! Lovely, lovely peace! Except for the titans. And possibly the dragons.” he ticked them off on his fingers. “And are the humans still mad at us? I can never tell, it changes so quickly …”
“At least the trolls like us now,” Cyrus said with a smirk.
“Some of them, perhaps,” Vaste said, giving him a sidelong look. “Some of us are still not so keen on you, Lord of Perdamun.”
“What do we do next?” J’anda asked, tapping his staff against the table. “It seems ill-advised to simply wait and see if the dragons take some form of action.”
“Short of a full-scale invasion of the south over the mountains,” Cyrus said, shaking his head, “I’m not sure there’s much else we can do at the moment.” He glanced at Curatio’s empty chair. “And while that’s certainly an option, I’d rather wait and see if the solution we paid so heavy a price to effect has any … well, effect.” That settled the room into a quiet, and Cyrus nodded at the empty seat to his right. “Has anyone seen Curatio since the shrine?”
“Since the fiery, icy, rock-flinging slaughter, you mean?” Vaste asked, letting the sarcasm drip. “Why, no, no I haven’t. I can’t imagine what he’d be doing other than perhaps mourning and recovering some of that eternal life that he spent to save all of the rest of us.”
“I feel like I should check on him,” Cyrus said, waving a hand to silence the troll. “Meeting adjourned, provided there’s nothing else—”
“I was thinking of having a memorial marker carved for the recent dead,” Erith said. “Just something we could place in the corner outside the cemetery.”
Cyrus paused, hands flat on the table, prepared to scoop his helm off the wooden surface to leave. “That sounds … like a wonderful idea,” he said, guilt suddenly ripping through him unexpectedly. It started a churning in his stomach, a weak sense of inadequacy, like he was far, far too small for the chair he was seated in, a child in the middle of it, really.
Cyrus forced himself to rise quickly, thumping the table with fumbling hands as he gathered his helm to him. “All right, that’s it for today, then.” He smiled weakly and made for the door, reaching it before anyone else did. He heard the footsteps behind him and did not close it, instead hurrying on and up the steps to the level of the officer quarters.
He had made it nearly down the hall to Curatio’s quarters when Vara came out of the staircase behind him. “What the hell are you doing?” she asked, hissing into the empty hallway.
Cyrus turned and held a finger to his lips. “I’m checking on Curatio,” he lied, just a little. He was checking on the healer, though that was hardly all.
“What happened back there?” she asked, lowering her voice as she approached.
Vaste emerged from the stairwell behind her. “Don’t mind me,” he said, steering around Vara, “I’m just going to go back to my quarters. Feel free to have a loud argument about your feelings just outside my door, I won’t judge. Much.”
“Hey, you’re in my hallway,” Vaste said.
“My quarters are right over there,” Vara said, pointing at her door.
“No, yours are one floor up,” Vaste said, pointing at the ceiling. “I haven’t seen you down here for anything other than the purposes of getting some of your festive shoes in months.”
Cyrus frowned. “Festive … shoes?”
“Oh, is this where the argument is being held?” J’anda asked, thumping along with his staff in hand as he emerged from the stairwell. “Try to keep it down; I need a nap.”
“I’m just here to check on Curatio,” Cyrus said, more than a little annoyed.
“Well, after that, do try to make it upstairs before the fight begins, eh?” J’anda asked, yawning as he passed by a torch, causing the flame to flutter.
“There’s not going to be a fight,” Cyrus said.
“Oh, I beg to differ,” Vaste said, easing past him. “And it’ll probably be loud and filled with screaming—”
“I say we turn our combined irritation on this lump,” Vara said, locking eyes with Cyrus and tilting her head toward Vaste.
“I have to check on Curatio,” Cyrus said, the irritation bleeding out of his voice as he walked the last steps to the healer’s door. He knocked his knuckles solidly against the wood, holding back just a little on the first rap. He waited, and so did the others, listening, and when he heard no movement, he raised his hand to knock again.
“Put some effort into it this time, will you?” Vaste asked, moving over. “Like this—”
He and Cyrus slammed the door at once, Cyrus’s hand open and flat, Vaste’s enormous knuckles bigger than a small melon. Their combined strength pushed hard enough against the door that it opened, squeaking as it did so, to reveal—
“Goddess,” Vara breathed as she looked inside.
Absolutely nothing.
There was a chair, and a desk, and a bed, and a hearth with no sign of a recent fire. The torches snapped to life as Cyrus crossed the threshold, but there was nary a sign of clothing, nor books, for the shelves and armoire were utterly bare. There was not even a hint that the quarters were lived in, not for days, and as the four of them quietly searched for some sign of life, and the silence stretched into the minutes until they were done, Cyrus’s heart sank lower and lower, until the inescapable conclusion was reached by all, but given voice by J’anda.
“He’s gone,” the enchanter said, and the mournful tone in the empty quarters settled upon them as surely as the complete lack of life had settled on this place, where the oldest among them had once lived.
77.
In the wake of Curatio’s departure, the days settled in a hard pattern of council meetings and silence, the slow pull of time dragging them unerringly forward. Cyrus felt each day’s passage most acutely. The long days passed into months, and autumn turned to winter, and the year they were in departed to be replaced by another, and then spring settled on the Plains of Perdamun. The time he spent with Vara was the easiest, but she busied herself with her duties, taking up some of the considerable responsibilities left by the loss of so many officers.
Cyrus himself found, if anything, less responsibility on his shoulders. Sanctuary was at alert, but not actively at war. The army was on guard but not in the midst of any expeditions which required planning nor deployments other than to the Emerald Fields and the occasional march through the Plains of Perdamun as a show of force for the locals; no threats presented themselves, not even bandits, and thus Cyrus left the business of marching with the armies to Longwell, his newly appointed General.
He had a made a few such appointments with the approval of the Council—Calene Raverle had taken over as informal leader of the rangers, much to her surprise. She had shown some reservations, her tentativeness plain and fears of the sort of job she might do as obvious as the blond hair on Vara’s head. Since taking over, though, Calene had done fine work, carrying on Martaina’s training program with an enthusiastic eye toward aim improvement among the archers.
Scuddar In’shara had reluctantly taken up the post of Castellan and had seen to the defense of Sanctuary itself with an uncompromising eye toward the security of the place. He was quiet as ever, but his orders were crisp and clear when given, and there was no mistaking his ever-present watch on the walls and the foyer, when the portal was open. He stood up front of any guard group he headed, his robes billowing about him, his scimitar always at the ready.
The other appointment taken up by one of the council had been met with nearly as much enthusiasm as the other three; Vaste had been forced into the position of the keeper of the Halls of Healing, something he bitterly complained about on every occasion Cyrus encountered him.
“Is there something about me that would indicate that I might enjoy sitting inside every single day, waiting for idiots who have sprained their ankles whilst walking the grounds, so incompetent that they cannot even manage their footing on flat plains, to come in so that I might heal them?” His belligerence might have met with a more sympathetic audience in that Council meeting had he not stood up and tripped over his chair while exiting the room not five minutes later. There were many guffaws as Erith healed him back into consciousness, but Cyrus could not help but feel that the troll had missed the lesson entirely.
And so Cyrus’s days were spent in the Tower of the Guildmaster or in the Council Chambers, largely alone, reading when he could find it in himself to concentrate and brooding quietly when he could not. Vara was out on some detail, he recalled, taking up the tasks that Curatio had handled as Elder. He had it in his mind to appoint her to the post, and felt the Council would approve as soon as a little more time had elapsed. For his part, Cyrus did not believe that Curatio would return; the healer’s disagreement with the attack on the shrine stuck in Cyrus’s mind like a chicken bone in the throat. If the healer’s quarters only had been cleaned out of all possessions, he might have believed that a return could be in order. However, Curatio’s office in the Halls of Healing, with its thick volumes of journals that the elf had amassed over his long lifetime of experience, had also been emptied. To Cyrus’s mind an endeavor of the scale required to move those books suggested that Curatio would not be returning soon, if ever.
And so Cyrus sat in the Council Chambers on this day, some six months removed from the Elder’s departure, this one like so many other unremarkable ones that had passed in that interval, in his chair, helm on the table at his side, taking his breaths slowly and watching the light slowly fade from the day as he awaited Vara’s eventual return … Or dinner, perhaps. Whichever comes first.
The smoky aroma of the hearth burning to keep the light spring touch of the plains at bay seeped into his very pores. After a long day spent in the Council Chambers, Cyrus would often find the smell of that faint smoke on his skin. He had never noticed until Vara had pointed it out to him after one of their trysts—the only thing he could seem to find energy for at present. Since then he had scarcely been able to avoid noting it on all occasions, though it did not remind him of home as much as it might once have.
Cyrus took a breath, the taste of his luncheon from hours earlier still on the back of his tongue, the sourdough bread hot from the ovens coupled with sliced beef and fresh vegetables. His eyes traced their way over the deserted chamber until he heard footsteps outside, straightening up just slightly in anticipation, hoping they would come his way rather than fade up the stairs to the officer quarters.
He was not disappointed when the door slid open a moment later and Mendicant scampered in, robes trailing against the stone floor with a quiet swish. The goblin shut the door behind him and paused as he caught a glimpse of Cyrus in darkness and shadowed by the light beyond the balcony windows. Mendicant gasped slightly, causing Cyrus to stare at him in curiosity until the wizard let out a sigh of relief. “Oh. Sorry. It’s just you.”
“You were expecting someone else?” Cyrus asked.
“Sitting in the Guildmaster’s chair, wearing my armor?”
“I didn’t know it was your armor without the helm,” Mendicant said, taking a couple steps forward, claws dragging the floor. “You looked like, uh … well …”
“You thought I was Alaric?” Cyrus asked with a faint smile.
“For just a second,” Mendicant said hastily. “No insult intended—”
“On the contrary,” Cyrus said, “I take it as a compliment. What brings you into these deathly quiet chambers in the absence of a meeting, Mendicant? Looking to commune with … ghosts?” A trace of sadness leaked out as Cyrus spoke.
“No,” Mendicant said, shaking his head, “I was bound for the archives.” He pointed with a thin, clawed finger to the door on Cyrus’s right, tucked away next to the hearth.
Cyrus frowned at the door; he had seldom been inside, and indeed, often forgot about the room entirely. “Huh. What are you looking for in there?”
“I go in there from time to time to read old passages about the formation of the guild,” Mendicant said. “To seek the wisdom of the past in reading about the trials they went through in those days.”
“There were less than two hundred people in Sanctuary when I joined,” Cyrus said, looking at the goblin with a sense of amusement, “and now we have more than twenty thousand, even with the recent losses. I’m not sure what wisdom you’d find there about running a guild of this size.”
“Oh, there is much to be found in there,” Mendicant said, his voice filled with quiet awe. “The notes that were kept on the Council meetings of old were extensive, and I find it interesting to go back and read about the great debates of the day. The names of the founders stick with me, and it’s almost as though I can hear their voices in these walls as I read. Cora, Pradhar, Erkhardt—” Cyrus felt a strange tingle at this name, a prickling at the back of his neck that he did not entirely know the origin of, “Alaric and Raifa. They founded something that exists to this day, and stronger than when each of them left it.” Mendicant rubbed his palms together. “They were the origin of a tradition that has stepped forth to protect Arkaria from so many threats over the years, threats that no one else would have, or could have dealt with.”
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