Terian held the healer’s weight against him as he let the flame on his axe die, smokeless, returning to a smooth, black polish of the metal. “Let him seek his revenge; we’ll be ready.” And he turned his head to look at Aisling, at J’anda, at Dahveed, Grinnd and Bowe. But as he turned to look at the scared army of guardsmen quailing at his back, he had to wonder if they truly would be.
92.
Aisling
She followed in their wake as Terian helped Curatio into Saekaj, leading him forward to the first house in front of them. The healer was barely able to walk, unable to stand without aid, and the silent procession was followed by the army of guardsmen, who seemed to have no idea what to do with themselves now that Shrawn was dead.
“You did well,” the third cloaked figure whispered in Aisling’s ear, and she glanced over to see Terrgenden beneath the hood, smiling at her. “Just enough chaos, just enough justice to get the thing done.”
“So this is what you were after all along?” she asked, muffling her words so only he could hear her. “Vidara renewed?” She caught a glimpse of the Goddess of Life trudging along behind Terian and Curatio, and the woman turned her head to look straight at Aisling in acknowledgment of her name being heard. “Saekaj and Sovar in … what? Shambles?”
“The tale’s hardly been told on that one yet, wouldn’t you say?” Terrgenden asked with that same smile as Terian threw open the door to the first building he came to, moved down a staircase and pushed through stone doors into an apartment in the basement.
“Where are we going?” J’anda asked, leaning heavily on his staff. The enchanter looked uncomfortably weary.
“Finding him a bed,” Terian said, looking around the small basement apartment. “Empty enough,” he said before dragging the healer into the bedroom and settling him upon the bed. “You going to be all right, Curatio?”
Curatio looked frailer than Aisling could ever recall seeing him. “I’m a bit … drawn, shall we say, but I shall manage in time.”
Aisling glanced back through the narrow stone doors to the basement, wondering why she’d followed along. The guardsmen seemed to have followed behind to the building like soldiers on the march, but unable to figure out what to do without an order. “Someone should probably lead these people.”
“Why not you?” J’anda asked, giving her a wan smile.
She smiled at him through thin lips. “I’m not exactly the type to lead an army of Saekaj. What about you? I saw some enchanters in their midst.”
“Not my specialty,” J’anda said, shaking his head, “commanding armies and such. I am but a lowly child of Sovar, already elevated far above my station—and I am not staying.”
“I’ll deal with it in a minute,” Terian said, leaning over Curatio on the bed and running a glowing hand over the healer.
“Look at the General,” Aisling said, more to poke Terian into reacting than because she opposed his sentiment in any way.
“I have a suspicion,” Curatio said, “he’s about to be more than that.”
“Hush,” Terian said. “Save your strength.”
“I meant to ask you three,” Curatio said from where he lay, “you do know you’re holding godly weapons, don’t you?”
J’anda held his silence and she could see by the look on his face that he wasn’t about to speak first. “Yes,” she answered for both of them. “And Terian obviously knew; who wouldn’t recognize Noctus?”
“Do you know what each of you holds?” Curatio asked, eyebrow raised in genuine amusement.
Aisling lifted the blade out of her belt where she’d hung it. She glanced at Genn—Terrgenden—and saw him nod slightly, perhaps some small note of approval. “I don’t know its name, no.”
“It is called ‘Epalette,’” Terrgenden said from beneath his hood, drawing the gaze of all of them, “The Point of Atonement.”
“Not justice?” Aisling asked, staring straight at him.
“I’m afraid that title belongs to J’anda’s weapon,” Curatio said, his voice a bit raspy as he looked at the staff with the glowing purple orb. “It is called Rasnareke, the Ward of Justice.” He glanced at Terrgenden. “I had wondered what happened to it.”
“Hmm,” J’anda said, staring at his weapon. “Justice.”
Aisling looked down at her own blade, wondering for the first time at its strangely white glow. “Atonement.” Her eyes found Terrgenden, and he smiled thinly.
“And here I am with the darkness,” Terian said, looking at his axe, which almost glowed with blackness, of the sort one might have seen emanating from the portal to Yartraak’s realm. “Apparently I can’t escape it, no matter how hard I try.”
“Now, now,” Curatio said, clucking his tongue, “you should know better than anyone that darkness is hardly a permanent or defining quality. Especially since not five minutes ago that axe shone brighter than even Nessalima’s own weapon. It is what you do with the weapon that defines it. The weapon does not define you.”
Aisling stared at the blade in her hand a little forlornly. Such a shame. I could have used a little … atonement.
“Don’t be that way,” Curatio said, catching her eye. “You’re hardly locked into the opposite course, no matter what anyone,” he looked pointedly at Terrgenden, who raised his hands with a look of feigned innocence, “might tell you. Your destiny is in your hands … Is that not right, Terian?”
Terian was staring at his axe and looked up, drawn out of what had clearly been a reverie filled with deep thought. “That’s the absolute truth,” he said quietly, looking straight at Aisling in a way that left her feeling strangely sure that he knew exactly what was on her mind. “Redemption is a path we must walk every day, after all … and there’s no better day than to today to start that walk.”
93.
J’anda
This was a most improbable meeting, J’anda thought as he stood in the throne room, wishing he were shrouded in the darkness of the days of old one last time. This is perhaps not a wall I wish to be a fly upon, he thought from his place in the middle of the room, the torches burning even brighter, driving back the old shadows that lingered in the room. It cast every figure in the place in stark relief, not only the trio of former Sanctuary members that he was part of, but also the three members of Terian’s old team—Dahveed, Grinnd and Bowe, as well as the new arrivals that stood across from them, looking extremely nervous to even be here. At the center of it all, between them both, stood Kahlee Ehrest, the broker for this particular arrangement. This is what she was doing while her husband battled for the survival of Saekaj and Sovar. Terian looked at her warily, as though he were not quite sure what to say to his own wife.
“You know what happens if anything happens to us, right?” the leader asked, a thin man in fine silks.
Terian sighed audibly. “Xemlinan, if I wanted you dead, you’d be dead. I didn’t agree to Kahlee’s request to meet you up here just to lop your damned head off.” Terian’s eye twitched, and J’anda could see he held something back akin to desire, perhaps to do the thing he had professed he would not. “No one is going to kill any of you, no matter how this turns out. At least not here.”
Aisling stood directly opposite J’anda, arms folded around her, but her hand not-so-subtly resting on the hilt of her dagger. She, too, scanned the faces of the visitors to the throne room, looking for threats that were not presently there, not even on the face of their leader.
“So you’ve invited us to Saekaj simply to talk,” Xemlinan said, nervousness obvious on his face. He squinted against the new light of the throne room. “How curious, since that has never happened before.”
“The Sovereign’s never been killed before,” Kahlee said.
“And Sovar has never risen so hard as to force an army up the tunnel between our cities,” Xemlinan said sharply, turning to look at her. “Is it coincidence that you offer an invitation to us after that happened?”
“Sovar would have been a mass grave if we hadn’t halted your l
ittle revolution before it had a chance to feed Malpravus even more dead bodies,” Aisling shot back at him. “You very nearly gave our enemies the tinder with which to burn us all.”
“The people are starving,” Xemlinan said, eyes flickering. “They have been trod on by you lot—”
“Not all of us,” J’anda added.
“Not any of us, actually,” Terian said. “I’ve been gone for years, in case you forgot.”
Xemlinan blew air out through faded blue lips. “You sit in the seat of he who oppressed us for millennia—”
“I’m not sitting in his seat,” Terian said, chucking a thumb over his shoulder at the empty space where the mammoth throne used to rest. “I mean, even before Shrawn had it hauled off in pieces, that sucker was way too big for my ass—”
“I should have known I’d get nothing but jokes from you,” Xemlinan said, a man whose patience seemed exhausted along with the rest of him.
“You don’t know what you’re going to get from me, Xem,” Terian said, “just as I don’t know what I’m going to get from you. Will it be another betrayal that results in the deaths of women and children?” Xemlinan flinched slightly at the strength of the accusation as the man’s allies on either side gave him the eye. “Or will we be able to work together to prevent a pointless war between Saekaj and Sovar that will only result in more starvation, more rage, more anger, more hate—in a giant wall of bodies marking the tunnel between the two cities—”
“That wall has been built over more years than either of us can remember,” Xemlinan said.
“Then let’s tear it down together, dammit!” Terian said, letting the words spill out with a passion unusual for the former dark knight. “Let’s give Sovar what they’ve been wanting—equality.”
“You can’t eat words,” one of Xemlinan’s allies, a man in ragged clothing, said.
“We’ll give you bread, too,” Terian said. “Conjured to start with, but bread. It’s about what we’ve got in Saekaj at the moment, too, frankly.” The war has not been kind to any, J’anda thought.
“How can we trust you?” Xemlinan asked with narrowed eyes.
“How can I trust you?” Terian asked. “The answer is … I try it, and if you don’t turn on me, I assume it works. You try trusting me as I start bringing in food to Sovar, and some self-determination for its people, and we see how it goes.”
“I—” Xemlinan started.
“He saved our lives, you know,” another one of Xemlinan’s allies said. “In Sovar, a few years ago.” The young man looked around at those surrounding him. “Came into the house when some of our number rebelled. We were women and children, waiting up the stairs at the top of the place, hiding under an invisibility spell. He looked right at us and told us to keep hiding, then led his allies away and left us there, alive.” The man glanced around. “You know insurrection is death, and he let us live. I say we throw in with him, at least for now.”
“A familiar tale,” Kahlee said, giving Terian a look that J’anda couldn’t quite decipher.
A low mutter ran through the small crowd of representatives for Sovar as J’anda looked sidelong at Terian, who appeared flushed with surprise. It would appear that our knight had a few surprises in him even before he shed the dark … “I will do everything I can to see that the people of Sovar are fed and given a fair shot,” Terian said. “I think we all know it’s not going to be easy to overturn thousands of years of mistrust between the two cities—”
“But you’re the one to do it?” Xemlinan asked, looking wary. “It wasn’t that long ago that you were a good for nothing drunk, Terian. You’ve wobbled your way in more directions than I can count, and now this is your route? Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” Terian said, taking a step forward, his paladin armor clinking with the movement. “Look at me, Xem. I’m not the man I was when last we met. I have no interest in doing what the Sovereign or Shrawn did; you know I’ve hated these people and that attitude as much as you did. I left and went back to Sanctuary, where things aren’t like they are here. I came back because I had nowhere else to go, but I’m here now because there’s nowhere else that I want to be. Give me a chance, and help make things right in this place.” He lowered his voice. “Please. Anyone else stands where I’m standing, and they’re going to try and push back to business as usual. If your lot had your full way, you’d burn Saekaj to the ground and destroy Sovar in the process. Meet me in the middle here. Let’s govern.”
Xemlinan did not lose his wariness but looked to either side of him, where he saw reluctant nods, shrugs—and not one blatant refusal. J’anda watched, waiting for it, wondering if there would be one sticky wicket to hold them back, but there was none. “All right,” Xemlinan said. “Fair enough. You’re right. Any Saekaj blighter standing where you are would pledge to wipe us out or stomp us down, and we were coming to burn you out before.” He pushed his lips together. “We’ll try it your way and see if peace can be made.”
“That’s all I ask,” Terian said with a faint smile. “Now … let’s get your people fed.”
“A wise choice,” Kahlee said, and J’anda could feel the relief seep into the room like a cool breeze after a hot day. “On all your parts.”
Is this really how it goes? J’anda wondered, watching hands being shaken, heads being nodded, conversations being had. After all these years, after all the bad blood … is it really that simple? He sensed the unease, the lingering tension beneath the surface. No, perhaps not.
But it’s a start.
94.
Aisling
She packed her things, the very few she had brought with her when she’d begun sleeping in the Grand Palace just a couple months earlier after the battle in the tunnels, putting them all into a bag she could easily carry with her. Things had changed over the last months, both slowly and rapidly, and she could no longer ignore them.
Time to go, she thought, the voice in her head carrying an almost mournful quality.
A knock sounded at the door as she was lifting the pack onto her back. It was enough in the way of supplies to keep her fed for a few days and not much more, sadly. Food was easier to come by now than it had been a few months earlier, but still not exactly in abundant supply. They can thank the Emerald Fields for that, now that they’ve had their first harvest of the season and sold the excess to us for quite a pretty pile of gold …
“Come in,” she said as the knock sounded once more. Her hand fell to the weapon in her scabbard by habit, even though she had not had to draw it in months. She felt uncomfortable on her feet and wanted to sit, but did not wish to project the aura of weakness that it might give.
The door creaked as it opened, bright torchlight falling in from outside in the palace corridor. All the lights were brighter now, oil being the one thing in abundant supply in Saekaj and Sovar. She recognized the armor of the new Sovereign silhouetted in the door’s frame and sighed as he stepped in slowly, looking almost exactly like the last wearer of that armor in his careful, pensive motions. “I heard you were packing,” Terian said.
“Figured it was time I moved on,” Aisling said, drawing the string on her bag closed. “Congratulations, you’ve done what no one ever thought you could do—united Saekaj and Sovar and made peace between them.”
“With your help,” Terian said softly, his hands behind his back. The handle of his axe stuck out above his head, far from where he kept his hands. “I couldn’t have done it without you, Aisling … err, Yalina. Whatever you prefer.”
“I have no preference anymore,” she said heavily. She gave up and sat down on the soft bed, sinking in. She ached all over. “I’m just glad to see it done, though I don’t feel as though I’ve done that much to aid you in this matter.”
“You and J’anda have both been invaluable,” Terian said. “Your counsel, your advice, your efforts on our behalf. Sovar trusted me not just because of Kahlee’s mediations or my part in saving rebel lives, but because you are my advisor, and you have liv
ed and breathed in Sovar for years.”
“I haven’t been living or breathing in Sovar for a while now,” she said, feeling a little out of breath. “And I don’t think I can go back, not now.”
“Where would you go?” Terian asked, his eyes carefully poised on hers.
“I don’t know,” Aisling said, looking down. “I’m not really welcome anywhere, I just …”
“You’re welcome here,” he said softly, and the abyss threatened to well up within her.
“I have secrets,” she whispered. “Secrets to keep. If I stay here much longer … I’m afraid they’re all going to come out.”
“You have nothing to fear in this place,” Terian said, sounding so much like Alaric she looked up to check for blue skin in the square place above his chin-strap. “This is a … haven,” he said, smiling at his careful choice of words, “for you … and whoever else.”
Aisling looked back down at the grey stone floor. “I let Shrawn push me along for so long with the threat of Norenn hanging over my head. I was so sure that Norenn was it for me, my home—that which I wanted more than anything. Except the place Shrawn sent me … it was the place that could have been it, and I betrayed everyone there.” She blinked her eyes clear. “For years I thought I was trying to save the man I loved from the man who held us both prisoner in different ways. But in the end I freed one and killed the other, and I don’t know if I even know which was which. I only know what I feel like I lost in the doing.” She took a breath. “I wonder what’s left, if there’s any part of the original me, if there’s anything left of the girl that started this … because so help me, Terian, I think I enjoyed so much of the journey … and it doesn’t scare me that I was willing to do the things I did.”
Sanctuary 5.5 - Fated in Darkness Page 40