Movement is life, stasis is death. Cyrus came down in a landing and kept running, dodging behind a tree and doubling back, coming around the way he’d come. He heard motion on the other side of the tree and knew that one of them—almost certainly Levembre—was stalking him, and as he came around the enormous trunk, circling it like a mighty maypole, he saw her perched, waiting for him, looking in the wrong direction.
Little cuts. He ran past her without stopping, raking his blades across the small of her back and then dodging to his left as her back contracted in pain and she came to her feet with a scream.
Cyrus saw Terian come leaping over, slashing Noctus against Nessalima’s face, coring rock in a rough channel from her cheekbone, skin ripping loose like pebbles kicked from the ground. She shut her eye and tried to turn her face away to minimize the impact, but Terian’s blow sunk deep, ripping below her cheekbone as black, oily liquid oozed down her stony facade and covered her rocky chest.
Scuddar flashed past in a speedy run of his own, though not nearly as fast as Cyrus’s, tearing into Nessalima’s knee when she turned to deal with Terian. Her breath caught in surprise, clearly in pain. Two arrows spanged off the back of her head in quick succession and Cyrus caught a glimpse of Calene running through the underbrush before pausing long enough to loose another arrow toward the Goddess of Light’s eyes. Nessalima, for her part, was looking around so rapidly that she missed Cyrus as he ran up and drove the point of Praelior lightly into the back of the leg behind her knee. He didn’t bury it nearly as deeply as he could have; he struck and whirled away, not daring to give her a chance to strike back at him—at least, not yet.
The howls of the angry goddesses filled the forest, the attacks coming fast and frenzied from the damage Cyrus’s little war party was visiting upon them. He saw Aisling flit out from behind a root, run her blade across the tendon at the back of Lexirea’s slimy leg, then disappear again under a fallen branch, before the Goddess of Justice could even see what had struck her. Grinnd came out from behind one of the trees and drove both his blades into Levembre’s back and then ran off, disappearing behind another enormous trunk.
This won’t last, Cyrus thought, looking up to find his mother up there, waiting, with J’anda, her face in concentration as she maintained the cessation spell around them. Sooner or later, one of them is bound to get lucky and strike down one of ours …
And I can’t let that happen.
No more small moves.
Cyrus dodged behind another tree, taking stock of the scene of battle around him as he did so. Lexirea was on the ground, bleeding from a half dozen different injuries, that black ichor that seemed to be their blood staining the ferns on the forest floor. All three goddesses had started to shrink in size from where they’d begun the battle.
Just like Mortus. Just like Yartraak.
Just like Bellarum will, whenever I get my day with him.
Lexirea was now twice the size of a rock giant, and her eye was bleeding profusely. She wore a grimace of fury and pain, the uncertainty clouding her and filling her with obvious rage. She was looking around in a circle around her, trying to spy the next attack before it came.
She’ll not see this coming, then.
Cyrus ran at the nearest tree, using the speed granted him by both his blades. He reached the trunk and ran up it, feeling the push of gravity against him—but not nearly hard enough to dislodge him, not yet. He ran up a solid fifteen feet, straight up the trunk, and just when he’d started to feel his footing fail him, feel the earth start to pull him back to its bosom, he pushed as hard as he could on the next step and leapt backward in a great diving flip.
He stared up at the canopy above as he began to turn in the air. The world spun and he saw trees, so numerous that they filled the horizon. The ground appeared in his view, and then a great, grey back. Lexirea was below him, only a few feet, still staring at the ground, expecting the attack from below—
Cyrus landed and plunged his blades in Lexirea’s back, not holding back, not raking her, but throwing his strength into piercing her skin as deeply as he could. The effect was immediate; she twisted her shoulders just as he came down, her shoulder blades coming back in a hard jerk that threatened to dislodge him. She bucked beneath his feet, and even with the speed granted by his swords, Cyrus felt his sure footing disappear as Lexirea pulled upright, trying to rid herself of the menace on her back.
Cyrus clung tight to his swords; Praelior tore loose from her grey back. It wasn’t actually slimy, he realized at last, but it did glisten like lizard skin, smooth without the scales. Rodanthar clung stubbornly where he’d stuck it, and as Cyrus fell, he jerked the blade with him down her back and tore the skin wide.
Lexirea screamed and threw her head back. She hit him with the back of her skull, causing him to experience a flash of light and pain from the impact. Rodanthar broke loose and Cyrus was left with nothing to cling to. The ground came rushing up to him and he landed poorly, unable to manage anything other than a flush landing against a hard tree root that rang his armor from his boots to his ears.
Cyrus lay there for less than a second before the stunned feeling departed, but that was entirely too long. He was just springing to his feet when Levembre came rushing in, slamming a palm down on him, hard, pinning him to the earth. The strike hit him when he was almost a foot off the ground, arresting his momentum and driving him back into the root with godly force. Cyrus’s armor rattled again, and when his eyes sprang open he found himself looking into red ones, the Goddess of Love staring down at him with loathing, her expressionless face locked on him, and he knew that he was done.
22.
Alaric
“I came to congratulate you on your victory,” the blue girl, Jena, said, staring at me across the small room the two of us inhabited alone. I had been rousted from my bed in the middle of the night by a surly guardsman I didn’t recognize. With the sleepy eyes of my increasingly loyal men watching the guard with suspicion, I was marched from the barracks before I even had time to grab anything to drape over myself. Shirtless, I was led to a small, empty building on the back side of the camp that I’d never noticed before. When I’d come inside, I’d found her here, alone, waiting, wearing silken clothing that was … well, it showed quite a lot of flesh.
“Thank you,” I said, feeling somewhat anchored in place. My eyes flew around the room as the door clicked closed behind me. There was something truly strange about the setting, and I realized what it was when I found the empty bed, the candles burning low on either side of it. The mattress looked thick and full, and well made, such a contrast to the beds in the barracks. Or even those in Enrant Monge, for that matter. My gaze flitted back to her, suspicion of my own dawning about my purpose here.
“This is a room where the combatants service women, yes,” she said, looking warily around the place. “The women pay quite a price for it, too.” If she had misgivings about that particular type of exchange, why the hell was she here, I wondered. “I haven’t come to be serviced by you, though, so put that thought aside.” She held herself stiffly. “It was the only way I could speak to you alone.”
I stared hard at her. She had paid to see me, putatively under the guise of … my face reddened uncontrollably and I looked away from her. She laughed, a crystalline sound that tinkled in the air. “Ah, I’ve embarrassed the prince of Luukessia. This was worth the price in itself.”
“I hope you didn’t pay too much, since you’ve already admitted you’re not seeking service,” I said, honestly so randy after weeks of confinement that I was marginally disappointed that she hadn’t come for that reason. As the prince of Luukessia, I had had more than my fair share of dalliances, and quite a few considerably less fair than the blue-skinned lady before me. The skin tone was a bit strange, but I was growing more accustomed to the Protanians as the weeks went by.
“I found myself needing to speak with you,” she said, sounding a bit shy for a girl who had apparently taken the initiative to arrang
e a meeting under the guise of bedding me.
“I expect we could speak for at least a few minutes before they’ll assume we’re done?” I asked.
“You’re mine for the night, in fact,” she said, now brusque. “As you know, I arranged the lessons to save your life—”
“Thank you for that, by the way,” I said. “I owe you a bounty of gold, or jewels, or … whatever, really, when I return to my kingdom—”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” she said, and I caught a hint of worry. “Did Rin tell you … what is coming?”
“The Butcher,” I said. “An elven warrior. He says … there’s no hope.”
“Your little group fought so much better than anyone expected,” Jena said, looking a little haunted. “Normally with a group like yours, the losing start you experienced … you would have been fodder for losses for months, perhaps even a year or two, winning once or twice if you were lucky. Then you would have been retired to the mines to harvest minerals for the rest of your days—but you would have lived.”
“As a slave,” I said, and any gratitude I felt toward her for taking up my hopeless cause evaporated as quickly as that hint of lust from earlier. I’d pondered this in the last few weeks as I’d driven on, learning from Rin. While my immediate goal had been to fight and fight hard, I’d started to ponder the future as I built my army. Too exhausted to do much of anything else at the end of the days, I’d had dreams about finding a way to free us, my little barracks of men, and march us home. They were nothing more than dreams, but … they were also all I had.
“Yes,” she said. “Because a slave is what you are. And a slave is what you will be until you die.”
“At the hands of this Butcher,” I said.
“That’s not carved in stone yet,” she said. “He doesn’t kill everyone, but … it has been a while since his last slaughter, and I hear he is in a foul temper.”
“Is he a slave, too?” I asked, feeling a foul temper of my own.
“No,” she said. “He fights because he enjoys it. He likes the kill.”
“I’ve never met an elf before, but I can’t say I like the sound of them.”
“They’re a bitter and cloistered race, a squabbling collective of nation-states always at each other’s throats,” Jena said, looking away from me. “This elf, though, is the ambassador to us from their largest city.”
“They have cities?” I asked, still blithely ignorant of this new land and its geography and politics.
“Quite a few,” she said, “but their largest is a quaint little outpost in the middle of a forest of trees so grand that they stretch hundreds of feet into the air. Their trunks are nearly as wide around as the towers in the middle of Sennshann.”
I thought back to the night I’d come to this land, to those immense towers in the city proper. I knew they were easily wider than the tower in Enrant Monge, which was the largest of its kind I’d seen. “Impressive trees,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind seeing those at some point.”
She smiled sadly. “But you won’t. Because—”
“I’m a slave, yes,” I said, heading her off. I didn’t mention that I had grander designs in mind. “And I’m about to die to this elf, possibly.”
“He will use magic against you,” she said, and I read some hesitation in her that I could not quite place.
“So Rin said.” I straightened up, brushing hands against my bare chest, the warm air of the small building we were standing in a notable contrast to the night chill outside. Why didn’t the barracks have this peculiar warm air?
“And he told you what to expect?” Here she was more hesitant still, and I was left without doubt she was holding something back.
“He knocked me to my back with but a wave of the hand,” I said, peering at her. Her clothing was … well, it was cut more properly for seduction, and she did not blink away when she saw me looking. “So I suppose you could say he showed me.”
“But nothing more?” She dangled bait in front of me. “He didn’t … instruct you at all?”
“He told me I was an animal,” I said, “unable to counter or deal with magic. He seemed fairly certain that mine was a hopeless cause should I be put in front of this Butcher.”
“I see,” she said, and I caught a flicker in her eyes.
“Why are you helping me?” I asked, and at this she blinked, looking slightly startled.
“I suppose …” she said, pondering it, “… I feel sorry for you.”
“So do I,” I said, and my old irritable confidence flooded back from my days as an arrogant prince. The march, the defeat, and the early arena battles hadn’t erased the more arrogant portions of my personality, but they had certainly humbled me, at least temporarily. “Especially since I seem bound to die, according to you and Rin.”
“What if you didn’t have to?” she asked, suddenly a little more alive. Her eyes gleamed, but her mouth lay in a flat line. “What if … there was a way to fight back?”
“I would embrace it happily,” I said.
“Wherever it led you?” she asked.
“As my alternatives are slavery or death … yes.”
She stared at me, hard, right in the eyes, trying to peer into my soul. I let her, raising my chin, not too defiantly, but enough to show I was still a thinking, fighting human being with a will of my own. “There is—or might be—a way,” she said softly. “But it will not be easy. And it will require all your nights between now and the next battle.”
“The guards don’t care whether I sleep during the day or not,” I said, shrugging. “I have nothing else to be doing.”
She nodded once, and I could see the decision made in her eyes. It settled on her like a weighted shawl upon her shoulders, pressing them down unnaturally, bringing her head slightly lower in the process, determination infusing her blue features. “Very well, then.”
“Very well what?” I asked. “What are we going to be spending our nights on, since apparently you’re not looking for, uhm …”
She looked at me, smiling ever so faintly. “We’re going to see if my people are wrong about you. We’re going to see if you, a human, can learn … magic.”
23.
Cyrus
Levembre held him to the ground, her crushing weight upon Cyrus’s chest plate. He squirmed against her, but though the quartal mail held, there was no resisting her strength, not even with Praelior still in hand. The sword was pinned with his wrist, immovable and useless.
He could see the others moving about the perimeter of the battle, trying to follow-up on his attack on Lexirea but failing. Even with her back laid open, the goddess was still fighting, swiping at Aisling, Grinnd, and Terian, and keeping them at bay. Behind them, Nessalima was embroiled in a fight with Scuddar, Calene, and Longwell, and the other spellcasters were somewhere beyond, useless with the cessation in place.
She’s got me, Cyrus thought, looking up into Levembre’s red eyes as she raised a hand. Unless Mother drops the cessation, in which case we’re all finished, not just me—
A high-pitched roar caused Levembre’s head to snap around. The red eyes widened as she gleaned a threat coming at her. Cyrus could not see it until the last, when something sprang and hit her, something large and furious, something impossible—
Something like a rock giant riding a savanna cat.
A massive paw fitted with metallic claws slashed across Levembre’s chest, tearing her open. The egg-white skin was ripped wide and Levembre let out a fierce shriek that echoed over the savanna cat’s roar. Those must be quartal claws … he’s fitted his damned cat with quartal claws … how did he even afford …?
Levembre’s grasp on Cyrus loosened and he squirmed out from between her fingers as she twitched and moaned, black blood staining her front. He took a few steps back and raised Rodanthar, trying to get his wits back about him as the Goddess of Love reeled from the rock giant’s attack.
Fortin rode his cat to the ground and brought it around in an elegant, hundred-and-ei
ghty-degree turn that readied him for another charge. Levembre raised her baleful eyes and stared at him, flat line of a mouth open in a perfect circle. “Who—?”
“I am the Grand Knight of Sanctuary,” Fortin said, on the back of his beast, his own eyes as narrow as Cyrus had ever seen them. “I stand as the shield between you and the lands of mortals.” With a slap of reins, he charged his cat forward at her again.
Levembre blanched; she was still twice as tall as Fortin, though she appeared to have shrunk, and the dirt and ichor was staining her once-perfect white skin. Her mouth returned to its thin line and she came back to her feet as Fortin and his mount streaked in—
The Goddess of Love struck, ripping the Grand Knight of Sanctuary from his cat and sending the animal rolling away with a swift, perfectly timed kick. She clutched Fortin tightly around his chest. “Sanctuary is dead,” she said simply.
“Legends never die,” Fortin said, his voice tight with pain.
“Which is why I will live forever,” Levembre said, her voice as flat as if she were placing an order at the market, “and you will not.”
With her squeeze, Cyrus heard something crack, like rock splitting in a mine, and his voice broke as he screamed out, “NOOO!”
But it was too late. The goddess crushed Fortin’s chest within her fingers in a mere second, shattering him, splitting his arms and legs and head from his body with sheer force, breaking him into dusty pieces. They slipped through her fingers and fell to the ground, nothing but fragments far, far too small to resurrect.
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