She trailed off, looking as though she were struggling to find the words.
“Wonder if your faith views him in a brighter light than it should?” he finished helpfully.
Syrah’s eye went wide in surprise, and she looked at him.
“Yes,” she breathed, like he had managed to put words to some feeling or thought she hadn't yet been able to pinpoint. “Exactly. How can I not? After Carro? After your duel with Baoill…?”
Raz nodded in understanding. He had suspected as much. It had taken the Breaking of Carro al’Dor, the wisest and kindest man he’d ever met—other than perhaps Talo Brahnt himself—for Raz to fully understand the rigidness to which the Laorin held themselves by the cardinal rule of their faith: no death knowingly committed or allowed at the hands of a worshiper of Laor. Carro had thrown away his trust in that rule, thrown away his robes and steel and power and pride when he’d understood that the world existed in a much more complex state than the strict doctrine of his faith allowed for. He had permitted Raz to give Talo—the man he’d loved—mercy by the sword as the former High Priest lay suffering a slow and horrible death. He’d condoned the killing of a dozen men of the tribes in order to break through their siege of the Citadel and bring a glimmer of hope to the thousands of Priests and Priestesses trapped there upon the mountain, then again when he’d tasked Raz with seeking out and rescuing Syrah. He had thrown everything he’d ever known away to give the men and women of his home even a slight chance at avoiding a cold and brutal death at the hands of the Kayle, and in thanks the Laorin had stripped him of his rank and title, torn the magics from his body in an agonizing ritual, and banished him from their halls forever once summer came.
And then, when faced with the same choices he had been given, the faith had chosen to allow Carro to challenge Gûlraht Baoill to a duel to the death, and to nominate Raz as his champion.
In the end, it seemed even the Laorin as a whole had not been able to deny the wisdom of sacrificing one life so that thousands could live…
“Are you wondering where the line is drawn?” Raz asked her, watching Syrah carefully and letting Gale and Nymara amble along the grassy road.
Syrah’s face darkened. “Honestly… I’m more wondering if I’ve simply been a fool these last twenty years of my life.”
Raz smiled wryly. “No, not a fool, Syrah. Perhaps you were fooled, mystified by some notion of your god that you’d come to believe as an ironclad reality, but you’re far from anything I’d call a fool.”
“Then where is the line, Raz?” she demanded abruptly, sounding suddenly angry. “If I’m no fool, explain to me why I can’t see it, can’t find it. I had a rule, a law by which I could live. Then, I saw the line. Then, I understand that there was a boundary that couldn’t be crossed. Now…” She swallowed, her knuckles whitening as she gripped Nymara’s reins so tightly they shook. “Now, I can’t see it. Now, there is no line.”
“Exactly.”
Syrah blinked and looked around at him.
“What?” she asked in disbelief.
“Exactly,” Raz repeatedly darkly, watching a covered wagon roll by, the young couple at its front ogling him with terrified surprise. “There is no line, Syrah. There is no rule by which the world works. Do you think I stop to think every time I have to spill blood? Did you think I stopped to consider, stopped to calculate your value against his, when I killed that man last night?”
He frowned, pulling Gale over as the stallion strayed too close to Nymara, briefly knocking he and Syrah’s knees together. “You’re still attempting to see the world in black and white, just with the boundary skewed differently. You’re still trying to fit life into categories of ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable.’ But that’s not how it works, Syrah. That’s not how life is. There is no uniform color. There aren’t even shades of grey, as any clichéd poet will be tempted to tell you. Life is not a spectrum that can be measured and weighed. It’s a damn ocean, sometimes calm and pleasant, sometimes black and churning, but in either case at no point do we have any idea what lies more than a few feet beneath the surface.”
He lifted a hand, waving about at the settled hills of the Dehn. “It’s all right to have rules, guidelines. Laws are a necessary thing in a world that would otherwise be chaos, but to live a life like ours it’s important to come to terms with the fact that laws are not some celestial decree which holds men firm like a dog chained to a wall. They can be bent, broken, even ignored outright. And there are places which have no laws, have no rules. This road, for example—” he swept the hand before him now, indicating the path down which they traveled “—do you think Thera and her men were concerned with whether or not taking you fell in the black or white? Do you think they paused to value your freedom against what they were there to do? No.”
He paused, then brought his hand to his face, studying the steel of his claws. “Your god—or rather the teachings by which your faith has had you adhere to—does not allow for reality. They do not allow for chance, or mistakes, or situations in which there is simply no good option. Talo thought of it as ‘the lesser of evils,’ which is apt enough. The Laorin would have you believe that there is always another way, that one needs only consider all the options. But it doesn’t work like that. If I had ‘considered all the options’ last night—”
“I would be dead,” Syrah finished for him, nodding. “I know. I understand. But is it right for you to value my life against his?”
“You talk like you can quantify what one is worth. Like there’s an equation for it.”
Syrah shrugged. “Isn’t there?”
Raz sighed. “None that I know of.” Then he blinked. “And even if there was, you make my point for me.”
“How so?” Syrah asked, giving him a sharp look as Gale and Nymara started across a wide bridge of wood and timber, their iron shoes clomping hollowly over the timber slats beneath them.
“If you want me to try to reduce your existence to basic arithmetic, then I can’t,” Raz said with a shrug once they’d stepped off the bridge. “I can only give you the facts of what I know to be true. That man was a killer. They all were. You felt better, I’m sure, leaving half of them alive, but if you think for a moment Alana and the other two are off to pick up basket weaving or blacksmithing, you’ve got another thing coming. They’ll spend a day or two nursing their wounds, then they’ll be off to form or join another cohort and ply their trade somewhere else. By the logic of your faith, we let three murderers walk away unscathed, free to kill again. By sparing them, we have allowed for the death of others.”
“You don’t know that,” Syrah said quietly, but she didn’t sound as though she had much faith in her words.
“No,” Raz admitted with half-a-shrug, scratching at Gale’s mane as the horse shook his great head. “I don’t. But neither do you know that they won’t lift their swords against another, that they won’t spill blood within so much as the fortnight, much less the rest of their lives.”
Syrah said nothing, her head bowed as she listened.
“But you,” Raz said slowly, eyes back on the road. “You are something else, Syrah.” He gave her a sidelong look. “You’re a fighter. I would never argue otherwise. But you’re also a healer, a woman who cares genuinely about the betterment of the world. By killing that man, not only did I keep him from murder for the rest of his life, but I saved you. And in saving you, I saved the dozens of souls your smile and your magic might spare from death before their time.”
He paused, contemplating his next words carefully. “Essentially, by killing one man, by taking one life, I may have prevented the death of a hundred more.”
Beside him, Syrah was quiet. For several long minutes they rode in silence, the Priestess not taking her eye off the back of Nymara’s neck, lost to her thoughts. Raz let her be, allowing himself his own contemplations, wondering if he’d said too much.
Finally, Syrah’s head lifted. When Raz turned to look at her, the first thing he saw was that she was sm
iling.
The next was that she was crying.
“I think,” she began slowly, her voice uneven, like the words were hard to say, “that I serve a god of death, as much as I serve a god of life.”
In response, Raz gave her his own sad smile. Reaching out, he carefully wiped the tears from her cheek, then brought her head down to rest against his chest as they rode slowly along.
Pressing the end of his snout into her white hair, his voice was gentle when he spoke.
“You can’t have one without the other, Syrah. You can never have one without the other.”
It wasn’t more than an hour or two later that the hills of the Dehn Plains finally broke in truth, and the low walls of Ystréd came into view at last. They had been on the road for almost three weeks, and the sight of civilization was enough to make even Raz—who’d never been a fan of the crowds and noise of the cities—sigh in relief.
For Syrah, the excitement was much more visceral. She had brightened significantly since they’d finished their talk, seeming to come to terms with at least some of the confusion that must have been racking her since the previous evening. Now, though, the rest of the darkness lifted from her, like overcast clouds breaking in heed of the Sun.
“Thank Laor,” she practically groaned, leaning forward to rest her forehead on Nymara’s neck dramatically so that the rest of her words came muffled through the horse’s mane. “The minute we’re within the walls, I’m sending Atler a messenger spell asking to have water heated. I need a bath.”
“You and me both,” Raz said, grimacing and fighting the impulse to sniff at the dirty cotton of his shirt. “I don’t hate the idea of a proper meal, either.”
Syrah turned her head so that her mangled ear rested against the horse. “Glutton,” she teased.
“I’m shocked food wasn’t your first thought, too,” Raz said with a snort, clucking Gale forward. “I’ve had enough salted venison and dried potatoes to sate me for this life and anything after it.”
Together they took the last dip from the Plains, pushing the animals into a quick trot until they could make out the details of the city wall. From there, they guided Gale and Nymara in behind the short line of families and carts waiting to be allowed through the small northern gate, Raz lifting his hood as high over his face as he could and tucking his wings and tail away once more. For several minutes they were left in peace, the man in line before them doing nothing more than giving them an uninterested glance as he led an old mule and the weapon-stocked cart it was pulling a few steps forward. As they waited, Raz and Syrah talked quietly about whether Jofrey had ever managed to get a bird to Tana Atler, the High Priestess of Ystréd’s temple, to let her know they would be arriving, and whether or not Carro had left the Citadel yet. They were having a disagreement about how long they should stay in the city and where they should go from there when the man ahead of them was given leave to pass into Ystréd, and they were waved forward.
They had less trouble getting through the gate than Raz had expected. The last time he’d crossed paths with the Ystréd guard, he’d been forced to lay one of them flat on his ass to make a point, and he was worried the soldiers stationed around the north entrance would have heard the story and held a grudge. Instead, though, the three young men, dressed in simple uniforms bearing the city’s colors, only looked at him with the same horrified fascination as anyone else, then directed their questions at Syrah once they’d shaken themselves free of their shock. Where were they coming from? Where were they headed? How long would they be in the city? Syrah navigated each question pleasantly, smiling at the men as she did. Before long, the soldiers were only ever glancing at Raz, their attentions fixed most assertively on the Priestess as she spoke. None of them saw the tension of her shoulders, or the way she shied away from one of the men when he stepped forward and asked to look through her saddlebags. Raz allowed it to happen, trusting Syrah to let him know if she needed him to speak up. A minute or so later, though, they were waved on, and Syrah bid the men a pleasant day before leading Nymara through the gate.
“That’s a first,” Raz laughed once they were well out of earshot, weaving their way through the simple timber-and-stone buildings of the city proper.
Syrah looked back at him curiously. “What is?”
“Riding away from a group of armed guards, and only half of them are staring at me. I think you had them smitten.”
Syrah rolled her eyes. “I’m glad my charms amuse you,” she said dryly. “A simple ‘thank you for getting us through without half the town being alerted to our presence’ would have been fine.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Raz continued to tease her. “I’m pretty sure most of them would have gone to one knee if you’d given them half-a-chance. Sure the city life doesn’t suit you?”
Syrah grimaced, then gave him one of her special, tauntingly enticing smiles. “I’m sad you think I’d settle for a simple guardsman, gallant as they may be. You should know I have higher standards for myself, Raz i’Syul Arro.”
At that, Raz snorted, but said nothing more. They spent the better part of a half-hour negotiating the cobbled roads of the city, traveling deeper in as the buildings became grander and more elaborate around them. Raz thought he could have gotten them to the temple eventually, vaguely recalling the way from when he, Talo, and Carro had last left Ystréd, but he didn’t say as much. For one thing, he wasn’t in any hurry, enjoying—as he always did—the feel of the town rising up around him, all wood and stone lined one against the other, broken up only by the occasional towering tree, or fountain now flowing with water in the warmth of the summer day.
For another, though, it was definitely best to let Syrah have the lead, making it very clear that he was her guest on this venture, and not the other way around.
Ystréd’s roads had been crowded when last he’d visited the city, people milling about with families and horses and oxen as they’d sought to take advantage of the last week or so before the winter storms came in truth. Now, though, the streets were well and truly packed, writhing to the point of bursting with men and women and children out enjoying the rare months of warmth and sunlight. On one hand, it was pleasant to witness, to see the residents of the frigid lands of the North living life as any other people might have in more temperate climates, their voices raised in a rumble of sound, some shouting back and forth as they sought each other in the crowd.
On the other hand, it gave Raz an instant headache, and the irritated expression he must have been carrying across his face as they rode could have done nothing to help the sudden breadth of silence that followed him and Syrah like a ring of sickness while they pressed carefully through the city.
It had been a long time, Raz realized, since he remembered causing such unease among people. To the south, in the fringe cities, he was a known anomaly, a figure Southerners tended often to ignore or glower at, but rarely stare. In Azbar, his name had become synonymous with the thrill of the Arena, and after the first week or two of his arrival the residents of that city had been more likely to cheer him or ogle him excitedly than they’d been to gape at him in terrified silence. Even when he’d traveled through Ystréd last—along this very road, in fact—the people of the town had only been hesitant to approach, many of them overcoming their fear of the newly-dubbed “Scourge of the South” in order to receive benediction from a High Priest of Laor.
Now, though, despite a few of apparently greatest faith and courage reaching out to Syrah so that she might bless them with the sign of the new day, Raz found the otherwise still and silent crowd unnerving.
“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” he muttered under his breath to Syrah, urging Gale up so that they rode abreast again.
Syrah finished her prayer over a baby girl who’d been raised up to her in her father’s hands, then straightened in her saddle. “It’s all right,” she replied, smiling into the crowd of gawkers around them in a clear attempt to assuage their fear. “Maybe they’ve just heard what you
did to the Kayle. Thera and her band knew. There’s no reason these people wouldn’t.”
Raz nodded slowly, glancing about. “Hadn't thought of that,” he admitted. “Still, if they were grateful—or even just relieved—you’d think we’d see a few happier expressions among them.”
Syrah shrugged, still not looking around at him. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Raz,” she began, “but if anything, you may be more beast to them now than ever before. ‘The Dragon.’ If that’s the name they’ve heard on the wind, then there isn’t much reason for them to feel any more comfortable around you.”
“‘Comfortable?’” Raz repeated with a grunt. “Syrah, some of these people look like the only reason they haven’t run away screaming is because you’re with me.”
At that, it seemed Syrah couldn’t help but blush a little, glancing at him. “Well, I guess that means you’ll have to keep me around, then. For morale, of course.”
Raz, though, was not feeling in the mood to play her game. “Whose morale?” he asked. “Mine?” He indicated the throng around them with a tilt of his hooded head. “Or theirs?”
As Iron Falls (The Wings of War Book 4) Page 10