Guardian Last (Lords of Syon Saga Book 2) (55 page)

The first blood had been drawn in this war not long after
the last war ended.  She mulled that thought over for a time as she walked. 
Then, rather suddenly, she laughed, and for the first time since the end of the
last war, there was none of the darkness, none of the weariness or cynicism
which had colored her heart.  She had finally driven the responsibility for
this war and its attendant guilt from her mind at last.  As if a great fog
lifted from her mind, she found her senses sharper, her mind clearer.  Her
purpose more tightly focused.

As she passed near the horses, she felt Alandro’s warm
breath in her hair, and she patted his muzzle reassuringly.  The horse nickered
softly and nuzzled her neck, in his own way reassuring her.  He was the only
being who could.  A moment later, she felt him tense and move off, with a sense
of alarm that caused her to reach for the sword at her belt.

“Renda,” came a familiar voice from the misty darkness, a
voice she had heard so little in the last year that it took her a moment to
place it, and then she understood Alandro’s anxiety.  The young man’s seamless
gold robes reflected the tiny bit of light coming from Laniel’s fire, broken
only by the familiar orange rucksack he carried slung over one shoulder.  He
smiled, a bit uncertainly.  “Am I intruding?”

“Never, Dith,” she chuckled.  “Unless you ask Alandro.”  She
moved away from the horses and gestured for him to join her.  “I have the
watch.”

“Ah,” he replied, and fell in beside her.

They walked in silence for a time, both finding themselves
looking toward the east more than was quite proper for a patrol, looking toward
where Chul and Gikka had gone.  But the silence had an expectation about it. 
This was not the companionable silence she’d come to expect from Dith during
the war.

“You seem troubled,” she said at last.

“Renda, I…” he looked away into the darkness again, and she
was afraid he would not continue.  “You must have a thousand, thousand
questions.”

She did not speak right away.  “Only one, truly.”

“Only one,” he laughed, “but within it, no doubt layer upon
layer to answer.”

She shrugged.

“Your question is why.”

She nodded.  “I suppose it is, an we boil it down to the
bones.”

“Why Byrandia, why the landbridge,” he chuckled uneasily. 
“Why in the name of all the gods did I leave Graymonde Hall and go in search of
Galorin?”

“Any of these,” she replied.  “All of these…”

He nodded.  “At each decision, had you asked me why, my answer
would have been the same: I do not know.” 

“No, Dith, I know you,” she smiled.  “Your answer would have
been, ‘I have my reasons.’”

He grinned.  “You know me, indeed.”  He stopped and opened
the orange rucksack.  From it, he took out the ugly piece of stone and showed
it to her.  “Renda, do you recall when Gikka gave this to me?”

Renda nodded in surprise.  She hadn’t thought about that
stone since Gikka had first brought it back to the camp during the war.  She’d
always thought it strange that Gikka found the hideous thing so fetching.  “Yes,
of course.  But why do you carry it now? For sentimental reasons?”

He shook his head.  “I carry it now because I have no
choice.” 

No choice?  That sounded rather ominous to her.

“Because…” he trailed off, staring at the rock.

“Dith?”

“I could not read the writing on it when we were in Syon.” 
He pointed to the markings on it.  “But now I can.”

“Writing?”  She looked at the rock uncertainly.  She could
see only a few scratches, as if someone had tried to engrave it and found it
too hard.  “I do not see any writing.”

He nodded.  “I had not looked at it since I left Galorin’s
Keep, not until a few nights ago.  But now, at last, I see what it is.”  He
frowned down at it.  “The language, I’m told, is Brymandyan, and the last
strokes of it are in the threads…”  He glanced at her, seeing that she only
vaguely understood.  “That is why you cannot read it.  You cannot see the
threads.”

“Neither can I read Brymandyan,” she said evenly and
continued her patrol.  “But very well, you see writing there that I cannot. 
Someone told you it was Brymandyan?  Who?  And even an we assume it is, how is
it that you can read it?”

He laughed weakly.  “You would not believe me if I told
you.”

Ah, she thought to herself, Trocu must have translated it
for him.  She had seen him wander away from the camp with the duke a few nights
before to talk.  But if that was the case, he must have been taken very much
into Trocu’s confidence.

“Indeed.”  She nodded reluctantly.  “I was not sure you…knew.” 
She looked over toward her cousin’s lean-to.  “So Trocu translated it for you,
then.”

“What?  No, I…” 

“It’s all right, Dith.”  She smiled.  He looked confused.  “I
saw you speaking with him.  But never mind.  Come, what does it say?”

“Oh.”  He blinked at her a moment.  “Well, in fact,” he
said, turning the strange stone over, “it is a map, of sorts.”

“A map of Byrandia?  That could prove useful.”  She glanced
at it, but to her eye, it was still just an ugly, scratched, misshapen bit of
stone.

“No.”  He shook his head.  “Well…yes, but it is not a map
that you or the others could follow.  It is not a map of mountains and rivers
and roads, but of markers on the threads and strands of power.  Trees of
certainty.  Compulsions…”

“That sounds less of a map and more of a study of magic.”

“No, it is certainly a map.  It shows a place, with
landmarks and directions.  But by its nature, and by my nature, only I can use
it.  Not even other mages can use it.”

She raised a brow, dreading where this train of thought led. 
“Are you saying you must leave us again and go on your own to this place on
this map?”

He tucked the strange rock back into the rucksack.  “No, I
do not believe so.”  He smoothed his seamless robes carefully.  “I should say,
yes, I must go where the rock leads me, but nothing compels me to go alone.  If
we find that you must go another way, we may indeed need to part company
again.”

“I see.”

“I sincerely hope we do not.  I do not relish traversing the
Byrandian badlands alone.  But never mind that now.  None of that answers your
question, at least not directly.”  His voice took on a more formal tone, as if
he’d been rehearsing what he would say next.  “Renda, you have been my friend
and my commander for these last many years.  Gikka told me that you have had to
defend me and defend my actions even without knowing why I took them, which you
have done without question.  I owe you much gratitude for that, but for your
patience, I also owe you an explanation. You deserve to know that your defense
of my actions was not misplaced.”

She waited, not speaking, watching him falter in his
carefully rehearsed speech.  She had never seen Dith at a loss for words
before.

After a moment, he drew a deep breath.  “The answer to all
the whys in your mind––why I left Gikka a year ago to seek Galorin, why I had
to come to Byrandia, why I had no choice but to raise the landbridge, even why
I carry this ugly rock…it all comes down to this: this stone is a map to the
Citadel.  The Guardian Citadel.  It seems,” he said uncertainly “that I am to
become a Guardian.”

She stopped in surprise.  A Guardian?  He might as well have
told her he was to become a god.  Or a goblet.

Her instructors at the academy had considered the Guardians
the stuff of legend and treated them as characters more of literature than in
reality.  Then again, coming as she did from a family steeped in legend, she
was not quick to dismiss such stories.  She had heard little more of the
Guardians but that they were originally a group of five extremely powerful
mages who had taken responsibility for protecting reality from the excesses of
magic.  Galorin of legend had been a Guardian, as well.

Galorin.

Dith had been compelled to go in search of Galorin.

Had he actually made it to the Keep, then?

“Dith,” she breathed, “I…  This only creates more questions,
but the most important of these must be, are you certain?”

He chuckled.  “As certain as one can be about such things, I
suppose.”  He hefted the rock and smiled darkly.  “Let me just say that I have
strong reason to believe it to be true.”

Her heart raced.  Unbidden, part of the prophecy came to
her:

Four thousand years the Five are four,
The fifth is found and binds the shores.

Well, he had certainly bound the shores when he raised the
landbridge.  Another piece of the prophecy had fallen into place, the prophecy
which had cost her niece’s life and the prophecy of which her father had always
spoken with such dread.  That damnable prophecy.

He saw the anxiety in her expression.  “Renda,” he said
softly.  “I am still Dith.  It is important to me that you know this.  Even as
a Guardian, I will still be Dith, and I will still hold the same loyalties I’ve
always held.”

“I would never doubt it,” she smiled.  “Come, I have so many
more questions.”

He took off his seamless boots and slipped beneath the furs
in the low lean-to he shared with Gikka.  She was not there, of course, and
would not be for a few hours yet, so the lumpy pile of saddle blankets and furs
felt desolate and cold.  He found it odd that he missed her more now, knowing
he would see her again in only a matter of hours, than he had during the two
seasons he’d spent traveling the Hodrache Range, and he laughed to think how
quickly he’d settled into his old habit of leaving space for her even when she
wasn’t there.

He lay on his back listening to the near silence of the camp
around him, thinking about his conversation with Renda.  She had accepted his
strange news better than he had expected.  She had listened to what he said, no
matter how far-fetched it sounded even in his own ears, and she seemed to take
what he said without much doubt.  She had not even questioned particularly how
he had come to be able to read the stone.  Perhaps she was only patronizing
him.

“Or perhaps she draws her conclusions based on
information you do not have.  I believe she thinks Damerien translated for you.”

Dith considered.  He had wondered about that at the time.  But
after what the duke had told him, he supposed it was not that surprising.

“I am almost jealous.  For all that I was his boon
companion for decades, he never confided so much to me.”

To be fair, he hadn’t told Dith much, either, beyond what
he’d all but deduced for himself:  Trocu was not like other men of this world. 
He was the same Damerien who had liberated Syon, the same who had fought
through countless battles over the generations, the same who had freed
Durlindale, the same who had fought by his side as Brada and as Trocu.  He
recreated himself with each generation, living as a man, taking a bride,
bearing a single son who would become the Sheriff of Brannagh.  Then at the
Succession, through the arcane magics of his Keepers, he would be remade and
introduced as his own elder son, raised in secret for his protection.  So had
Brada emerged upon Vilmar’s death at Durlindale, and so Trocu had emerged as
Brada’s son upon his death. 

He remembered wondering at the time where Brada had found
time to marry and have a son during the war, but the story given out was that
Trocu’s mother had died long since, while Brada was still in hiding and before
he assumed the throne of Syon.  No one had ever thought to question it, just as
they never thought to question why for four thousand years, the Sheriffs of
Brannagh only sired daughters.  That fact certainly had made any questions of
succession to the Brannagh title simple.

“Ah, but what of this sheriff who bore a son and a
daughter?”

Dith shook his head.  Roquandor had died before any question
of succession at Brannagh had been raised, of course, but he must have lived
for a reason.  After all, his birth was part of the mysterious prophecy that
foretold the war’s end.  And of course it had been his daughter who had acted
as B’radik’s avatar in the glade.

He felt wry amusement from Galorin, but he was too tired to
get involved in one of his coy word games now.  He shrugged, feeling his
eyelids drooping.  He could worry about it in the morning.  Maybe, he thought
sleepily, he could ask Gikka about it when she got back.

“Did you think I would not be able to find you?”

He was surrounded by darkness with no ground, no sky.  He
had no way to orient himself, and he felt dizzy and off balance.  Below him,
impossibly, the strange ugly rock had come free of its rucksack prison and was
floating just out of his reach, the bright lines on it glowing, combining with
the threads. Along one of the threads came a gentle pulse of power that, like
the flex of a great cat’s paw, implied a sinuous deadly reserve of power just
below the surface.

“Guardian, why do you not answer me?  I saw you on the
landbridge.  The others were occupied with chasing Damerien, but I saw your signature
on the strands.”

Someone was chasing Damerien?  Dith tried to speak to the
voice he heard, but he could not.

From the empty shadows around him, he had a sudden sense of
a woman.  He could not see or smell her, but in this dream––for it had to be such––he
simply knew, as surely as if he smelled her perfume or felt the softness of her
skin.  As if bidden by this realization, the world around him took on substance
and light.  He was in a garden, still floating, suspended above the tall grass
and subtle flowers, and a shape solidified before him, filling the air with the
scent of jasmine.  Dark blond hair fell in soft curls to the woman’s waist, and
her body was rich and beautifully curved beneath the diaphanous gown of
seamless white.