Crusader: The Sanctuary Series, Volume Four (62 page)

The smell in the tent was horrible, blood overwhelming, more of it possibly than even at the scene of the attack, though it wasn’t as confined a space. There was a lamp burning, too, and the oil helped cover it only a bit. The tent was long, at least twenty feet, and ten wide. There were three healers all huddled in the corner, and Martaina could see Curatio on his knees, between the others, who stood with their backs to the flap.

“We have another who needs help here,” Odellan announced, and one of the healers, a human, sprang toward him immediately, leading the elf to the corner where he laid the Baroness down upon a flat bedroll covered in a thin white sheet. Martaina watched for just a moment and knew that however the sheet had started, it was no longer white.

“Did you manage in time?” J’anda asked, stealing Martaina’s question before she could ask it. She held her tongue out of habit, realizing only now that she was the only non-officer, non-healer in the room save for those being healed. Ignoring the pain in her shoulder from carrying Cattrine at the distance she had, she was in fine condition—
especially compared to the man who lost his head only an hour ago. Oh, Vidara, let it have been less than an hour ago.

Curatio’s face was lined by the shadow of the tent, lit by the faint orange glow of the lamp. “It was in time.” He ran a hand along his forehead, one drenched in blood that left markings in the lines of his brow. “Only just, I think, and because his head has been separated for some time, our healing efforts have been unable to fully repair the damage. Still,” he took a breath and blew it out through his lips, which seemed to have lost all their color in the darkness of the tent, “he is alive, and well enough for now, though unconscious. I would not be surprised if he developed a fever over this, though.”

“But he’ll live?” Martaina let her breath hang in her lungs, as though she dare not chance to believe she had heard it correctly.

“He’ll live,” Curatio said, “but with a scar across his neck, I’d expect. A thin one but there, from what we weren’t able to heal. It appears minimal, almost superficial, as I can heal somewhat more powerfully than most, but … it is there. He’ll need to travel in the wagon as we begin our journey north.”

I saved him, Thad,
Martaina thought.
I was faithful to my word … in this way.
“Why are we moving the army north?” Martaina’s surprise at the question coming from her was genuine; she had not realized she asked it until it was out. A feeling of giddiness had flooded her, blotting out the pain of her arm.

“The scourge is sweeping through these lands,” J’anda said in answer. “It is … a problem we must deal with for several reasons. Especially since Sanctuary and Syloreas will be the only ones to stand between it and the balance of Luukessia.”

“You are wrong,” came a voice from the corner. It was faint, but stronger than when last Martaina had heard it. She turned, and Cattrine was sitting up on the bedroll, Odellan and the human healer at her side. “Actaluere will send its army north to aid you. I have seen to it.” Her face was still pale, white, and her eyes were sunken, as though she were already dead.
I have not seen a more haunted and beleaguered look on a face since the night Termina fell.

“You were under the protection of Sanctuary, m’lady,” Curatio said, standing from where he had been at Cyrus’s bedroll. Martaina caught her first glimpse of the warrior; he looked almost normal, though his chest was bare and there was an accumulation of congealed blood about his throat. His chest rose and fell in a normal rhythm, though, and she felt her breathing return to normal and her focus shift back to Curatio.

“I no longer require it,” Cattrine said and, clutching the fabric of the robes closer to her figure, she stood tentatively, reminding Martaina of a foal get to its feet for the first time.
Phantom pain, the searing agony that stays even after the flesh is knitted together. She is no doubt feeling it harshly now.
“I’ll be making my way back to the Actaluere camp to rejoin my husband. Because of that, Actaluere will not go to war with Galbadien and my brother will be freed to send his troops north with Briyce Unger.”

“What a complicated little web we find ourselves in,” J’anda said.

“M’lady,” Curatio said, with a faint, almost patriarchial smile, “there will be no healer for you next time, you realize this, yes?” His hand swept the length of her. “No one will be able to save you from your husband when next he puts the whip to you, and none of us will be close at hand to soothe the damage afterward.”

Cattrine stared at him dully, then turned her back to him and let the robe slip to just above the small of her back. The other healers, humans, young—gasped at the scars, but Curatio managed to hold any reaction to himself. “I have never before had the luxury of protection from my husband, sir.” She paused, and Martaina could read the regret and fear in equal measure hidden underneath the bravery on the Baroness’s face. “And for the benefit of my people, that is a burden I will have to accept again.”

Cyrus

The world swirled about him, to and fro, and he caught glimpses of darkness and light in twain, lamps and the sun. Everything hurt from the neck down, and other times everything hurt from the neck up, but the divide was there, at the neck, and consciousness was a fleeting thing.

His mouth was dry, appallingly so, like someone had opened it and poured sand in until it ran over his lips and out, down his face and off his chest, leaving everything scratchy and dusty. He could smell old, dried blood, that more than anything, but oil was in the air, too, and fire, and other smells, familiar ones, like plants or an ointment, and moldering flesh. Faces blurred in front of him, forcing him to thrash about. He felt pressure on his arms, saw Martaina before him, and Aisling, Curatio at least once, but they were gone again a moment later.

“He has a fever,” Curatio’s disembodied head told him. The words echoed through the dark space he was in, like booming words lit out of the clouds and born on thunder.

“Searing hot to the touch,” Aisling said, but she was not disembodied at all, he could see her plainly, see her naked, her dark blue curves hidden in the shadows around him, suggestive, and he took a deep, gasping breath as he looked at her.

“Is he awake?” That was Martaina, and he saw her as well, but she was headless, just the green cloak and attire of the ranger was visible, only a flash or two of a head being where it was—
where it SHOULD be, dammit.
“His eyes are open.”

Cyrus could feel his eyes, too, and they were crusty, like someone had dropped stones in the corners of them, and no matter how much he blinked or rolled them, he couldn’t get them out. “… pebbles …” There was no answer from any of the three of them to that, even though it made perfect sense to him somehow, just that one word. Wasn’t it a perfect way to describe everything that was happening?

It felt like a day passed, or possibly an age, or maybe only a few minutes. It was brighter now, a lamp overhead shining. The sand was everywhere, the dust, encroaching, filling his eyes and face. It was just like the last time, exactly like it, and Cyrus was suddenly six again, and very, very far from home, if ever there had been such a thing ….

“The Arena is where you will learn to fight,” the Society of Arms Guildmaster told him, him and a half a hundred other strays and orphans, all his own age. Most were smaller than him, he thought as he looked over the crowd. A few roughly the same size. None bigger. “Where you will face your fears and put them to death. Where you will learn to serve Bellarum and the needs of war.” He was a big man, the Guildmaster, and he spoke from the far entrance. The entire thing was sand, sand around the feet, all the way to the edges. One might have expected something like the coliseum, a place he had been once with Mother, but it wasn’t; no stands around the edges for spectators, just a single, boxed enclosure where the Guildmaster stood with the other adults—a man in a white robe, and two others in armor.

“Fear is weakness,” the Guildmaster said, his face knit with scars on each cheek and rough skin on his forehead. He looked older than Mother, older than the man who had brought him to the Society, but beyond that, Cyrus couldn’t tell his age. “Weakness is the sum total of all your flaws, all your faults, all the things that can get you killed in battle. We purge weakness here; we don’t coddle it. If you fear something, face it down. Run it to the ground. Beat it out of you.” The Guildmaster looked them all over, and there was nary a flinch from him, though Cyrus heard the sobs from some of the others. “If you fear to be hit, then you’ll need to face it. Many of you wish to go back to your comfortable places, even if those places are the streets. You won’t find comfort here, because comfort is weakness.”

With that, the Guildmaster left the enclosure and walked into the arena; some of the crying subsided, and Cyrus could hear the soft crunch of the sand against the Guildmaster’s metal boots, his steel armor scuffed with age. Cyrus wanted to cry, could feel it, but his tears were already gone. More than half when Father died, all the rest when Mother went. He was as dry in the eyes as the arena floor, dusty but wracked with emptiness. He’d gone along when the big man—Belkan was his name—had led him here; after all, with Mother gone, what else was there?

Cyrus looked to the boy next to him, who wore rags, browned and barely covering him. It was winter now, and cold outside. How could one not be cold out on the streets, wearing something such as that? The boy’s eyes flashed at him; he was one of the ones that was Cyrus’s size, one of the very few, and his brown hair was over his eyes, long, unlike Cyrus’s short cropped bangs that barely touched his forehead where his mother kissed him every night—or had, before—

“Fear is weakness,” the Guildmaster said again. “It is in your nature to be weak. We will make you men—or women, as the case may be,” he said with a nod toward two girls who were in the front of the crowd of children. They weren’t crying, Cyrus thought, oddly, though he heard other girls crying among all the boys sobbing around him. “Breaking fear is nothing more than looking it in the eye and spitting in its face, finding your courage, and daring it over and over again. Pain is nothing to fear. Pain only hurts. Battle is nothing to fear, because it brings only pain. Commitment to your cause will draw out your fear, excise it, take it away. You must subsume yourself in the cause of war in the light of battle, and learn to love the draw of combat. The crack of bone and hand, the slash of sword and steel, the rending of flesh with axe, these will be your daily prayers, the things that you commit yourself to, to draw out the fear. I can make you fearless.”

The crying didn’t stop at that, it seemed to get worse, but Cyrus felt the little flecks of dust fall out of his eyes and he realized for the first time that
that
was what he wanted, what the Guildmaster had offered. He had cried when he had learned that Father died, cried hard, and even worse after Mother, though for a shorter time. He had stayed with the neighbors, though not for long, until Belkan had come for him. All that time he had felt the gnaw of fear, felt it chip at his bones, awaken him in the night when the tears had come, felt it eat him at him like it would someday come and take him whole, drag him off into the night where he would never be seen again.

“Who among you,” the Guildmaster said, “wants to be fearless?” The words echoed in the arena, over the sand pit, and there was silence apart from the sobs, a quiet that settled among the crying children, all so far from home, wherever that was to them.

Cyrus felt his hand go up, as though it were out of his control. It went up above the others, the first, a silent flag to mark his surrender—and his desire to be free of the fear—once and for all.

Vara

The Council Chamber had emptied quickly after the meeting, as though everyone had other things to deal with, other urgencies to be handled. Erith and Vaste, she knew, were both balancing the responsibilities of the Halls of Healing, keeping it running while Curatio was away. She wondered if Ryin had even set foot in his own quarters since returning to Sanctuary to find it under attack. Alaric, however, remained in his seat, as though carved out of the same material as the chair, not a Ghost at all but a mountain lain down in the middle of the room, growing out of the stone floor. His head was bowed and his helm lay upon the table, as it always did. A kind of darkness enshrouded him, like the clouds that hang over a peak at midday, hiding it from the view of the world, and she could tell naught about his mood or intentions save that they were present and as hidden as the man’s face usually was.

“You have something on your mind,” Alaric said, breaking the silence between them, his eyes not finding hers but remaining fixed on the edge of the table.

“Always,” Vara said, not sure where she found it within her to be even slightly smartass. “It’s the peril of thinking, you know.”

Alaric did not smile, did not return hers because she did not have one to return. “What is on your mind, lass?”

“You’ve proven to have an uncanny knack at guessing what sort of things might be on the minds of others.” She shifted her hands to her lap, letting the steel gauntlets clink against the metal of her greaves. They were like a second skin by now, she had worn them for so long, but in moments such as this, they found ways to remind her, subtly, that she was different than even many of the women of Sanctuary. “So why don’t you tell me … what is on my mind?”

Alaric let a long sigh, his head settling back down to look at the edge of the table rather than her. “Your mind is on Cyrus, in Luukessia—”

“My mind is on our guildmates,” she said hotly, “facing the consequences of our mistakes, in a foreign land—”

“One of whom is our General,” Alaric said calmly, “a man with whom you are developing a somewhat tangled history, even if you don’t wish to admit to it.” She didn’t bother to interrupt him again, but she felt the burn all the way up to the tops of her ears, which was enough to tell her that her pale face was, by necessity, flushed. “You needn’t bother denying it, and nor do I care. I did not allow Cyrus to casually disentwine himself from admitting his feelings for you, even when he didn’t want to, and if you want me to speak your mind for you, don’t pretend to be offended when I speak to you what is truly on it. Yes, you worry about our troops, and our guildhall, and Sanctuary, but your emotions sweep you, old friend, and your emotions—the ones you don’t care to admit—are so loudly proclaiming your thoughts for the man in black that I cannot ignore them in favor of anything you might say.”