As she had been since the day following the battle, Ariana was clothed in the sentinel uniform that Sian had stolen before slipping from the palace and joining her assemblage, trying to blend in when he should’ve known that he was the type of man who would never be able to accomplish that task. There were a few farmhouses between here, and the road which would lead her to Keelia, as well as a small village—if it remained untouched by Ciro and his army. She could probably find a dress of some sort there, and buy or borrow it. She certainly did not have time to sew herself another suitable outfit which included the trousers Sian insisted were better for her current task. Perhaps she could purchase a boy’s trousers and shirt, as those of a fully grown man would fit no better than what she now wore.
She had become accustomed to the trousers and the loose shirt which allowed her freedom of movement, and the journey to come would be an arduous one. Sian’s discarded uniform was worn and did not fit, but her vanity would have to be put aside in the name of practicality for a while longer.
It was time to move on. The men were miraculously healed, and Ciro had certainly not stalled in his quest. This war was not over. It had just begun.
Ariana called the soldiers together soon after a breakfast of hard bread and dried meat. Selfishly, she thought of the meals Keelia would serve in her palace when she reached The City. If she reached The City. Maybe once she was there, she’d have a night or two to sleep in a real bed, and take at least one long, hot bath. The small comforts she had once taken for granted now seemed like the greatest of luxuries.
Ariana hesitated as she looked at the suspicious and curious and awed faces around her. Without Diella, could she lead? Could she accomplish even this?
She stepped upon a fallen tree trunk, which had been taken down in a recent storm. The extra height she gained wasn’t significant, but it did raise her up so that she could look across to the faces of her soldiers instead of looking up.
“The first battle in this war to come... this war which has already come... is done,” she began, “and while we did not kill Ciro, we accomplished much. We killed many of his soulless soldiers.” She swallowed. Her heart swelled. Heavens above, she would not hide who or what she was from these men who called themselves brothers. “We hurt the demon itself by taking back a few of those souls. We weakened it,” she added in a softer voice.
From the back of the group, a leery voice offered, “And you came back from the dead.”
Ariana did not know who said the words, but the time for denying what had happened was long gone. “Yes, I did.” She studied the expressions of the men. “I visited the Land of the Dead, and saw my ancestors waiting for me.” She had told no one about the words she’d shared with Emperor Sebestyen, and now was not the time. What panic there would be if it was known that Emperor Sebestyen had left behind not one heir, but two. Was the information truthful or was it a departed spirit’s mischievous trick? She wasn’t sure exactly how to approach the knowledge he had given her. Keelia would know what to do. Maybe she could even discern where the heirs could be found, if they were indeed real.
She planted her feet solidly and securely on the tree trunk. The uniform she wore was misshapen and too large, with a rough length of rope serving as a belt and the hem of both the shirt sleeves and the pants’ legs rolled up. Her hair had not seen a proper combing in so long she could not remember when she’d enjoyed the luxury. Her always curling locks had become entirely unmanageable. Instead of pretty slippers on her feet, she wore muddy boots that might never be completely cleaned of dried blood. Thank the heavens Sian had not burned that necessary part of her uniform.
What sort of picture did she present to these men? Did they still think her a sister, or did they see her now as simply mad?
“I came back from the dead because this war isn’t over and I have a part to play. You all have a part to play, each and every one of you. We are destined for this fight, and you have proven yourselves worthy of being called.”
“As have you, sister,” someone called. She thought it might be Merin, but she wasn’t sure. A few soldiers added their agreement to the statement.
Ariana smiled wanly. “Thank you,” she said softly. “I am not so sure that I am worthy, but I plan to do my best.”
“Where do we go from here?” Merin asked.
This is where things could get tricky. What if she was wrong? What if the decisions she made led them all to their graves? Or worse. She had planned to take this army all the way to Keelia’s City, where they would join with the Anwyn army. But Diella knew all the plans Ariana had made, so was it safe? Would Ciro and his army be waiting for them along the trail?
“The time has come for us to part company.”
A few of the sentinels protested, but most remained silent and heedful.
“There are not enough of us to fight Ciro’s army. We need more men. In addition, all the villages along the mountainside and on the path to Arthes must be warned. They must not be taken by surprise, as Lilia’s village was. They need to arm themselves, form organized militias, and keep a constant watch for invaders. Lilia’s village didn’t have the opportunity to fight back. That can’t happen anywhere else.” She caught and held Merin’s eyes. “Arik must be warned. He cannot under any circumstance allow Ciro access to the palace, or to himself.” She had begun this meeting with trepidation, but she was filled with the knowledge that this was right. They could stop the man who had once been nothing more than an ineffectual prince and was now vessel to a demon. “Explain to him that the thing wearing Ciro’s face is not his son, and hasn’t been for a long time.” According to Sian, the emperor had already been told that Ciro was beyond saving, but Ariana wasn’t sure that single warning was good enough. What man could look into his son’s face and see the monster instead of the child?
“What of the journey to the Anwyn Queen?” Merin asked.
“I will continue on alone,” she said. The soft curse she heard was most definitely Sian’s. He stood to the side and behind her, where she could hear but could not see him. “An army is hard to hide,” she explained, “but one woman can slip past anyone if she’s cautious.”
Sian’s sigh of disgust was unmistakable.
“I would love to be beside each of you when you fight again, but I am just one woman, and I can only pray that I will be guided to those I need to heal when the time comes. I love you all. You have become my brothers, and I wish you the blessed guidance of your ancestors and an abundance of good fortune.
“We will meet here, at the site of our first victory, two full moons from today.” That would give them about six weeks to accomplish their goals, if she was correct in her figures.
The murmurings from the sentinels seemed less cautious than they had been before she’d begun to speak, and more than one of them wished her good fortune as well.
She wasn’t finished. “While this army is separated, while you speak to others of the war we can no longer hide, remember this. Share this bit of truth with all those you meet. We cannot fear so fiercely what might come that we forget to enjoy the beauty of life. This war goes beyond one soldier meeting another, it goes well beyond sword to sword. This is a war of souls, brothers. It reaches every man and woman who treads upon this earth, no matter where they might be. With every scream of terror, Ciro wins another battle. Every time a good person hides, every time hope is lost, every time a soul shrinks and surrenders, Ciro wins. We must fight, yes, but we must also love, and laugh, and trust. Most of all, we must hope, and we must share that hope with all those we meet.”
That statement was met with a round of war cries. It was a good enough place to end the speech. She’d said what she came here to say.
As the men turned to Merin for their assignments, Ariana caught the eye of one of the younger sentinels and nodded her head crisply. Taran looked as if he was not much older than twenty years, but he fought well, and she liked him. His long hair was almost as fair as hers but was much more manageable, and he had pale
blue eyes.
Taran saw her signal and all but ran to her, and Ariana smiled at him as she hopped from her perch. He blushed prettily. “I have a special assignment for you,” she said.
He bowed in a courtly manner, sweepingly and with a manly elegance, as if she were a palace lady in a fine gown, not a grubby witch who had not seen a proper bath in much too long.
“Such formalities are not necessary,” she said gently, offering him her hand. He took her hand and held on easily, as if he were afraid she would break. She led him away from the others. Sian made as if to follow, but Ariana shooed him back with her free hand. If he was going to all but ignore her, as he had in the past couple of days, she would not allow him to inject himself where he was not wanted. Indignant eyebrows arched, but Sian did cease following her and Taran. Her shooing did nothing to ease his glare.
“Your assignment is a very special one,” Ariana said in a lowered voice. “It requires a most ardent discretion.”
“Of course, sister,” Taran said, a touch of excitement in his voice.
“Are you familiar with the Southern Province?” From his accent, she had deduced that he hailed from there, as she had.
“Yes.” His eyes lit up. “I come from a small town near the coast.”
“Are you familiar with Shandley?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I know where it is, but I have never visited.”
Good enough. “North of Shandley there sits a small mountain. It is not like these mountains before us, but is a very large, green hill. It is called Fyne Mountain.”
Taran simply nodded.
“I want you to find my mother on that mountain. There is only one house, and it is my family home.”
“You wish me to warn your family,” Taran said, believing he understood his mission.
Ariana sighed. “No. Well, yes, since you will be there, you should tell them what’s happened, but that is not the purpose of this task.” She suspected danger to the Southern Province would not come for some time in any case, and if Ciro could be defeated violence might not reach Shandley at all. Was he able to reach that far for his Own? She hoped not, but in truth she still knew next to nothing about the Isen Demon. She did know it was those who had the misfortune to live between the Mountains of the North and Arthes who would be the first in the path of danger.
Taran waited impatiently, and finally asked, “What is my task?”
Ariana steeled her spine. “Do you have a good memory, Taran?”
“Yes, sister.”
“Good. This message is for my mother, and my mother alone. Repeat after me.” Ariana took a deep breath. The question had to be worded just so, so that if Sebestyen’s claim was true, Sophie Fyne would know what her eldest daughter asked, and why, but no one else would. “Ariana inquires as to the location of her father’s sister and that sister’s two children. It is of the greatest importance that she locates her...” The words caught in her throat, but she forced herself to continue. “Her cousins. There is a task ahead that only they can accomplish. A task they were born to.”
Taran blinked. “That’s it?”
“Yes. Repeat it, if you please.”
He did so, very neatly.
“Again,” Ariana ordered.
Without so much as a pause to take a breath, Taran repeated the message. After he had done so four times, Ariana was satisfied.
“When you get your answer, do not write it down. Memorize it as you have memorized this inquiry, and when we meet here, you will give me and only me the answer.”
“I don’t understand,” Taran said. “This is a family matter. Would I not be better utilized in informing the nearby villages of the dangers to come or in protecting the emperor?”
Ariana laid her hands on Taran’s arms. “You do not see the import now, but trust me, brother, this is no family matter.”
A light shone in his eyes. “It’s a secret code, isn’t it?” he whispered.
Ariana sighed and dropped her hands. “Near enough, brother. Near enough.”
***
Sian packed his few belongings in his saddle bag, as the sentinels did the same. They were energized, and no longer afraid of their sister who had come back from the dead. They smiled and joked, and they wished one another well if their assignments took them in different directions. One would think they were riding off to a tea party instead of rushing into what would be certain death for some of them.
Perhaps Ariana was right and Ciro could be defeated, but that victory would not come without a high price. That price would surely include the lives of some of these soldiers... or all of them.
Ariana readied her horse, as the sentinels did. Sian muttered vile words beneath his breath. If she thought she was going to travel alone, without him, she was sorely mistaken. He understood why she had chosen to do so, and the tasks she had given her men were necessary ones. Still, to travel alone was not only unnecessary, it was foolish.
He had been avoiding her for two days, since she’d slept naked in his arms. Since she’d told him that she loved him and hinted very broadly that if their liaison led to a child it would not be a disaster. Two days since he’d stroked his hands down her naked back and kissed her. If there was a medal for restraint, he had certainly earned one. As he stalked toward her, he could not help but wonder if her words this morning had been directed at him. Did she believe that he gave Ciro’s darkness a hold when he abandoned hope? Did she think he fed the demon when he refused to take the chance that he might lose the woman he loved again?
When he was close enough for her to hear, he said, “I’m going with you.”
She did not seem surprised. “If you’d like. I thought you might want to return to Arthes with Merin and his men, or take up residence in a nearby village to assist in making preparations for fighting Ciro’s men, or... or go home.” She continued to ready her horse, and did not so much as look at him. “Isn’t that what you always said you’d do when I marched off to fight? Go home and wait it out?”
“You’re a maddening woman,” he said in a low voice.
“Me?” She spun and glared at him, completely unaware that her transformation made her even more beautiful than she’d been when she had the attentions of palace seamstresses and personal maids. He loved her hair down this way, wild and free. Even the too large uniform was fetching on her body, and the flush on her cheeks and the fire of determination in her eyes made his heart clench. “You love me when you think I’m dead, but when love means dealing with a live, flesh-and-blood woman, you turn tail and run. That’s maddening.”
“I did not turn tail and run,” he insisted calmly. “I’m right here.”
The flush of her cheeks deepened. “You didn’t run from Ciro or duty or the unpleasantness to come, but from me, Sian. From me.”
He had explained his reasoning to her as best he could, and did not wish to discuss it again.
“I told you, I feel it is my duty to protect you.”
Her face became impassive. “I release you from that obligation.”
His jaw clenched. “I do not release you.”
Even without his impossible feelings for this maddening woman, turning away from her now was... unimaginable. There were still portions of the prophesy to be deciphered, and if he was able to discover something new, Ariana would need to know immediately. He doubted that there was anything he could teach her, magically speaking, since she had returned from the dead with heightened senses and healing abilities. Still, his strengths were different from hers. She might have need of his parlor tricks, as she called them, before she reached the Anwyn Queen.
He also wanted to speak about another matter, once they were well away from the sentinels. Most of the men seemed to have forgotten that Ciro had invited Sian to join his court. Why? Had it been a taunt or a serious offer? He did not want to consider the possibility that his soul was so badly damaged that he was fit to become one of Ciro’s Own.
Those were the things that mattered. The war. The proph
esy. The possibility that he might end up on the wrong side of this conflict. He could not conceive of joining forces with something so evil as the Isen Demon, but he imagined the sad and soulless man who’d died longing for a bloody kitchen knife had never thought of himself as a fiend either.
No, he would not stand by and allow innocents to be harmed, as those in Lilia’s village had been, much less join in the violence. He would not allow anyone or anything to harm Ariana either. He was as much a soldier as any sentinel in this camp, but his strengths were different from theirs.
With all that on his mind, with the world on the brink of taking a dark turn, what did love matter? What difference did his feelings or hers make? What Ariana wanted, what he wanted, didn’t matter at all.
“I’ll escort you to your cousin, the queen,” he said, turning away from Ariana. “Once you’re there and she has been informed of the prophesy and her part in it, her soldiers can escort you back to this place and your men, if there are any of them left by the rise of the second full moon.”
“Don’t say that,” she whispered. “Don’t stand there and tell me that everything I’m working for is going to come to nothing.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Didn’t you?”
Sian took a deep, stilling breath. “No. If we face them before Ciro grows too strong, I believe his army can be defeated. Those we fought were merely human, after all. Soulless, violent men and women who can die, just as your soldiers and the people of Lilia’s village can and did die. Anwyn soldiers will be a great asset, as will your cousin Lyr’s Circle of Bacwyr. The war can be won, but it won’t be bloodless. You musn’t forget that, Ariana.”
“Believe me, I can’t forget”
“I’m staying with you, whether you like it or not. I will protect you as best I can until this part of your journey is done.”
Children of the Sun Page 24