The Sanctuary Series: Volume 03 - Champion

by Robert J. Crane

  Cyrus followed in her wake, repeating the same message over and over. “Keep going, a day’s travel south. Sanctuary is not far from a fork in the road; they’ll give you food and help you however they can.”

  By sundown, Cyrus could feel the pain that came from sitting on a horse all day, and the fatigue of being awake for two days also wore on him. Windrider whinnied, moving at a walk. “I think we’re going to have to bed down for the night.”

  Vara gave no indication she had heard him. He urged Windrider alongside her. Her features were frozen in place, her eyelids shut, and she bobbed with the motion of the horse. “Vara,” he said, and reached over to nudge her.

  With a start she jerked awake, surprise in her eyes. Her gauntlets gripped the reins and she pulled back in a sudden, violent motion.

  He held his arms up, openhanded. “You fell asleep. I think it’s time to stop for the night.”

  She stared back, her wall of glacial reserve melting under the strain of fatigue. “Perhaps you’re right. But not here.” She pointed off the road toward a copse of trees a few hundred yards away. “Over there, out of sight. And no fire.” Without waiting for him to respond she urged her horse off the road in the direction she’d indicated.

  Cyrus followed, and caught her as she began to dismount. He cringed as he lifted himself off the saddle, feeling the sticky, painful prickle of skin peeling from his body. Vara busied herself unpacking her saddle bag and a bedroll from the side of the horse then spreading it on the ground. She pulled a small loaf of bread from the bag and began to nibble on it as she sat and stared into the trees.

  “You seem to be the most tired,” Cyrus said, breaking the silence. “I’ll take first watch and wake you after midnight.”

  “All right.” Her voice was hollow and far away. She turned to him. “The second assassin—you questioned him?”

  A cool unrelated to the air caused Cyrus to shiver. “Yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Not a thing,” Cyrus replied. “Fortin offered to torture him but Alaric refused.” He did not tell her the other thing he had noted from the interrogation; that the elf had the most soulless eyes Cyrus had ever seen.

  “Probably for the best.”

  “Terian threatened to transform him into a female with his axe, and he still wouldn’t talk—”

  Vara blinked. “Did he?” She ran a hand across her bedroll, smoothing it. “He would do it, too.”

  “He started to. Alaric had Fortin pull him from the room.” Cyrus frowned as he started to sit down but winced as the pain of his saddle soreness halted him.

  A quiet murmuring filled the air around him and Cyrus looked to see Vara with her head bowed, muttered words on her lips. Faint light radiated from the tips of her fingers as she pointed a hand toward him. A soothing feeling coursed over his aching body as the raw spots his skin had developed in the last hour healed, leaving behind only a ghost of the pain he had been experiencing. “Thank you,” he said.

  “Forgive me for not doing it sooner; I forget that you lack the ability to heal yourself.”

  “Biggest drawback to being possessed of no magical talent,” Cyrus remarked, a rueful smile on his lips. “If you get impaled, you can’t save yourself.”

  “Yes, well, do try and avoid that—as a paladin, my abilities are somewhat limited compared to a healer and I doubt I’d be able to save you from a wound so grievous as that.” She yawned. “In addition, I have no desire to clean up the significant mess that would leave on my boots.”

  Cyrus chuckled. “Yes, I imagine that with me bleeding from a gaping hole in the chest, your biggest concern would be keeping the shine on your boots.” He stared at her feet, covered in the same metal plating as the rest of her body, a healthy sheen obvious even with the dust of travel still on them.

  “Quite so,” she said with only a trace of irony, lying back onto her bedroll. “I can’t recall the last time I slept in my armor. Still, under the circumstances, I suppose it’s the wisest course.”

  “I used to sleep in my armor all the time,” Cyrus said. “Before I joined Sanctuary, the guild I led adventured in far off places and we were...uh...well, broke, so we didn’t have the money to stay in local inns. We spent a lot of nights under the stars.”

  “The stars.” Vara’s eyes sprung open. “I’ve grown so accustomed to spending my nights in the halls of Sanctuary, I’ve forgotten what it’s like to sleep under the stars.”

  “Did you do it a lot as a child?”

  Her eyes looked into the darkening sky as though she expected them to already be out. “No. I was raised in Termina and my mother and father rarely ventured outside the city.”

  “I suppose that made them difficult to see.” Cyrus stared up at the last rays of sunlight springing over the horizon. The sloping hills of the Plains of Perdamun made way for trees every so often, with farms and homesteads spread out over miles and miles of empty space. “I was raised in Reikonos and because of all the torches and fires I didn’t see a sky full of stars until I was seven, with the Society of Arms on a wilderness survival course.”

  “How old were you when you went to the Society?” Her voice was fading, the sleep beginning to turn it lyrical.

  “Six.” He watched her as she stared into the darkening sky. “You must have had a similar experience, since you went to...uh...” He racked his brain, trying to remember the name of the League that trained paladins.

  Her quiet words filled the distance between them. “The Holy Brethren. And no, I did not begin my training with them until I was fourteen; before that I had a steady stream of League-Certified private tutors, the best that were available in the Elven Kingdom.” She stated it matter-of-factly, though Cyrus still caught a hint of pretension.

  “Hm.” Cyrus pondered her upbringing. “We had a few people that joined the Society late, but they were all from families like yours; those that could afford to pay tutors to train their kids so they didn’t have to live in the barracks with us ‘uncivilized’ commoners, the orphans that were there from childhood.” He chuckled. “You probably didn’t have many of those in the Holy Brethren.”

  She sniffed and turned toward him with irritated intensity. “What are you implying? Magical talent is hardly restricted to those who are well to do.”

  “No, no!” He backpedaled. “I meant that because you don’t need magical talent, anyone can be trained to be a warrior, so they scoop orphans and truants off the streets of Reikonos and put them in the barracks at the Society or with the rangers at the Wanderers’ Brotherhood.”

  “Ah.” She shifted in her bedroll, returning to her back to stare up once more. “My experience was quite a bit different than yours.” She paused. “What was it like, growing up in the Society?”

  He thought about it before answering. “Tough. From day one, you learn that life as a warrior is about strength, and the whole Society reflects that. You start training with real weapons at eight or so and there are a lot of training accidents—”

  “That’s barbaric.” Vara rolled toward him, a look of disgust plastered on her face.

  Cyrus shrugged. “They kept a healer in the Society. Few of the injuries were permanent or maiming. Only the occasional death, followed by a resurrection spell. Maybe five to ten a year. Very few permanent deaths.”

  Vara’s grimace had become an openmouthed stare of horror. “That’s appalling. You were mere children!”

  “Well, none of the deaths were of the young children; most of them were from the family fights with the older—”

  “Family fights?” Outrage dripped from her words.

  Cyrus nodded. “When you join the Society, there’s a ritual in which you’re assigned a blood family. There are two defined blood families in the Society—the Able Axes and the Swift Swords.”

  “An alliterative nightmare. What’s the difference between the two?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing, really. It’s a way of creating competition and an esprit de corps. You’re trained t
o trust in circles—the blood family is the highest circle; then the Society; then the world. You eat together, you bunk together and you fight together. You learn to trust the person beside you in battle and you think in black and white terms about the enemies you kill.”

  “A narrow worldview.” Her fingers clutched her bedroll, her knuckles white. “No part of you finds it despicable to treat children in such a way?” Her voice softened. “You don’t...perhaps wish for a different childhood?”

  Another thought drifted through Cyrus’s mind, and though he tried to push it away it lingered; the remembrance of a home, the feeling of his mother’s arms around him—maybe more wishful thought than tangible memory. He brought back another thought, a confined room, angry faces surrounding him; like demons at the time, but just children upon reflection. A memory of blood and pain.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he answered, flint infusing his tone. “I didn’t have one.” He looked at her, glowing blue eyes still visible and shining in the last light of sundown. “What about you? What was your childhood like? You know, before you went to the Brethren.”

  “It feels as though it were a lifetime ago,” Vara said. “I have spent over half my life now away from home—first in the Brethren, then several years with Amarath’s Raiders before I joined Sanctuary.”

  “Isabelle—your sister, I mean—said you don’t go home much.” Cyrus looked at Vara, who was still. “Why not?” After a pause, he spoke again. “Vara?”

  She let out a sharp exhalation of breath. “Let me see if I can answer your question whilst dancing around a delicate subject. As you know, I am the shelas’akur and there are certain...expectations others have of me, expectations I have no desire to live up to. My mother is the foremost among those who feel I should be doing more to fulfill my supposed responsibilities. I prefer not to argue with her, and thus I avoid going home as much as I can get away with.”

  Cyrus pondered her words until she turned and cast a glance at him. “Tell me what you’re thinking, right now.”

  He froze. “I was wondering how strong-willed your mother would have to be to make you, one of the most stubborn and irascible people I’ve ever met, want to avoid her.”

  A light scoffing laugh filled the air in the clearing, almost as if Vara’s chuckle were coming from the trees around them. “Yes, well, that attribute did come from somewhere, and I assure you it was not from my father, who is as mild a man as you can imagine. I do miss my father. He was—is—exceptionally kind. What about your parents?”

  “Dead,” Cyrus replied with leaden words. “Father died in the war with the trolls; Mother...I don’t know, sometime after that. I don’t remember how, just being dropped off at the Society sometime afterward.”

  “I’m sorry.” Her voice quivered with an empathetic note.

  Is that because she’s been thinking of her own father or is it because she’s letting her guard down? “It was a long time ago.”

  She cleared her throat. “I should get some sleep since I’ll need to relieve you on watch in a few hours.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Cyrus agreed. “I’ll be shaking you awake before you know it; get it while you can.”

  “Yes. Well, goodnight.”

  “Sweet dreams, Vara.”

  He turned away from her and began to scan the horizon. Silence fell, broken only by the sounds of owls in the night. Cyrus put his back against a tree, watching the road a few hundred feet away, and looked to his side ever so often, just to be sure that the beautiful, golden-haired elf was, in fact, still there.

  Chapter 8

  She awoke as the first rays of sunlight broke through the trees. He watched her blink the bleariness from her eyes as she assessed the situation. “It’s morning,” she said, a look of puzzlement on her fine, chiseled features.

  “Yes.”

  “You were supposed to awaken me in the night.” She stood and he joined her, aided by support from the tree he had been leaning against. “Did you fall asleep?”

  “No.” He wore a tight smile.

  “You didn’t get any sleep?” Her face fell. “At all?” He shook his head. “You daft bastard. That was as ill-conceived an idea as any you’ve ever had.”

  “What?” He jerked from smiling to confused in the space of seconds. She looked at him with an irritation that sent unsettling feelings through him. “I was trying to be nice and give you a full night of sleep.”

  “You’ve jeopardized everything with your idiotic gallantry.” She rolled her bedroll into a tight wad and wrapped it with leather fastenings. “You’ll be tired all day and of less use watching for foes.” She threw the bedroll over her shoulder, then snatched up her knapsack and strode toward her horse. “If you fall asleep, I’m leaving you behind.”

  Cyrus’s hand reached under his helm and massaged at his scalp, fingers working through the locks of his hair. “Thank you, for reminding me what married life is like.”

  She paused, bristling, and rounded on him. “Excuse me?” Her voice contained more chill than the morning air.

  “You just caused me to remember why I got divorced,” he replied, anger beneath the surface of his words. “Leave it to a woman to take something nice that’s done for her and turn it into a life or death situation.”

  She glared at him, contemptuous. “In case you’ve quite forgotten, it is a life or death situation.”

  “I haven’t forgotten.” He shook his head. “I thought I was doing something nice for you, yet somehow you got mad at me for it.” He threw the saddlebags back over his horse. “Couldn’t you just have been grateful and trust me to figure out a way to stay awake? It’s hardly the end of all things.”

  “Perhaps I overreacted,” she said. “But should you ever compare me to a former wife of yours again, you will see quite a different reaction, something akin to the feeling you might have should Fortin step on you.” She turned away as she placed a foot in the stirrup and lifted herself onto the back of the horse. “Prehorta is still a few days’ ride, but we’ll start running into more and more villages as we get closer to human—well, what was human territory.”

  They rode on with few words exchanged. Cyrus spent most of his attention on the roads, keeping an eye on anyone who approached, interposing himself between them and Vara if they got closer than he deemed prudent.

  After the third time he had placed himself between her and a group of refugees she favored him with an amused smile. “Are you concerned that a band of broken down old women are plotting my demise?”

  “Someone is plotting your demise, and twice they’ve disguised themselves as refugees. I wouldn’t put it past them to have an old woman in their ranks; what better way to sneak up on a person unsuspecting?”

  “I suppose you’re right, but it feels a bit odd to let you protect me, feeble as those efforts might be.”

  He let the comment pass as they approached a village. No more than fifteen structures stood clustered on either side of the road. Huts with thatched roofs accounted for all but three of the buildings; two of the last three appeared to be houses of worship; shrines to the gods of Arkaria. The last was a small wooden building that had a signpost out front with the word “Inn” written in large letters across it. Below was another shingle, this one less crafted than the first. It read, “Beggars Begone.”

  Cyrus started to remark on the sign, but a grunt from Vara turned his attention to the nearest house. On the front door hung a sign with “No beggars!” spelled in bold script. Similar signs hung on every door in the village, even the houses of worship.

  “I’ve never seen the Goddess of Love turn anyone away,” Vara said after seeing one of the signs hanging from the door to the shrine to Levembre. “One of her virtues is charity—or so I thought.”

  “We all have our hypocrisies,” Cyrus said.

  “Speak for yourself.”

  After inquiring at the inn, Cyrus learned that there were no spell casters in the village, so they rode on, finding the same in the next town, though i
t was larger and had even more signs telling refugees to not to bother stopping. They settled later that night, hidden from the road in another copse of trees, and Vara forced him to sleep first this time.

  The days went quickly. It was on the fourth day and past the tenth village that it began to rain. It was a cold downpour, the deluge tapping against his helm and his armor, soaking him. For her part, Vara said little, but weathered the damp and cold with little reaction. They continued to pass refugees every hour or so, misbegotten souls with forsaken looks upon their faces. They cried out in hunger, for any help or assistance. The smell of smoke, blood, sweat and terror was heavy on them from the loss of their homes, their family members, their lives.

  The rain ceased after a few days and the Plains of Perdamun became more uneven the further north they went, turning from flat lands into rolling hills broken by small forests. Cyrus had traveled this road before; in spring and summer it was a green and verdant land, filled to the horizon with wheat, corn, potatoes and countless other crops. As it was, the grasses had turned brown and the fields were all fallow for the coming winter, which would bring cold but little or no snow.

  Vara remained stoic and silent for long periods of the journey. She initiated conversation only out of necessity, but would break her silence if Cyrus asked her an engaging question, which he spent a good portion of his time attempting to craft. It came to his great surprise when Vara broke the silence with a question of her own.

  “I have wondered,” she began as she pulled back on the reins of her horse, allowing him to come alongside her. The road stretched in a flat line in front of them with no one in sight. “What do you do in your spare time?”

  He thought about her question before replying. “What spare time?” He looked at her with a sly grin that he saw returned, even as she rolled her eyes. “We don’t have much, what with running the guild and planning expeditions.”