David Farland - Wizardborn

Erin turned toward him. “So you’re thinking that we’re even? One deed erases another?”

Celinor nodded. Maybe he had accomplished all that he wanted just by getting her attention. Maybe he was just shy.

“The thing is,” Erin whispered, “there are so many ways to save a person’s life.” She couldn’t quite express all that she felt. Her dismay at the events of the day, her pain at the loss of her father. “I’m not doing this for you. I’m doing it for us.”

Celinor studied her thoughtfully. “You would marry me? Now, in the middle of this war?”

“Wars are just things that happen to you,” Erin said.

Celinor stroked her hair, bent to kiss her. Erin leaned into him. “If you don’t want me,” she said, “a fellow can always be slipping from the noose.”

“And what if I want to say yes with all my heart? How does a man marry a horsesister of Fleeds?”

She turned, took the lead rope, and guided him up to the loft where the straw was warm and dry.

“I’d like you to meet my father.” Borenson’s words reverberated in Myrrima’s mind, and she thought for a moment that he must be mad. “Roland. Roland is his name.”

In the guttering light of the little girl’s lantern, Myrrima peered at the corpse. Surely the dead man at their feet looked very much like Borenson, but he was younger by several years. The fellow lay on the ground, staring skyward. A gaping wound in his shoulder had been crudely bandaged, but blood blackened his tunic everywhere. The girl wiped tears off her face with her sleeve. A cool drizzle was falling.

“Your father?” Myrrima asked.

“He was a Dedicate,” Borenson said. “He gave his metabolism to House Orden. For more than twenty years he slept in the Blue Tower. He woke only a week ago. I...have never met him before.”

Myrrima nodded, too shocked to speak. Borenson had never met his own father until now?

Borenson’s voice was formal and strained, lacking inflection. “It is interesting that you can grieve the death of someone you never met. When I was a child, I knew that my mother hated me. I used to dream that my father would waken, and he’d discover that he had a son. I used to dream that he would save me from my mother. Now, it appears that he did indeed come to see me. But I could not save him. Ah, well...”

The knights of Mystarria were said to be harder than stone. They were taught to make light of pain and death. It was said that in battle, Borenson’s laugh unnerved even the strongest men. Now, though Borenson hardly acknowledged his torment, Myrrima knew it was ripping him apart.

Myrrima recalled her mother once telling her that when a strong person spoke honestly about his pain, it was often because he could not hold any more, and therefore sought to share the burden with others.

Every expression of consolation that came to Myrrima’s mind seemed trite, inappropriate. Borenson looked up.

She’d never seen such pain in a man’s eyes. They were bloodshot, and the lids were rimmed in red. The eyes themselves looked to be glazed with a yellow film. She realized that what she’d thought was rainwater on his face turned out to be beads of sweat standing out on his forehead. She remembered the words of an old rhyme that children in Heredon sometimes called out during games of hide—and-seek.

Let us go to Derra. Run away. Run away. Let us frolic in pools at Derra, Where the madmen play!

“Can I help?” Myrrima asked.

He turned away.

“You’re not an easy one to leave behind,” Borenson said. His voice was tight with emotion.

“No,” Myrrima agreed. “I won’t be left behind. I came for you too.”

Myrrima climbed down off her horse, stood over her husband. The air between them was so charged that she somehow dared not put an arm around him.

“It would be better if you go,” Borenson said as if to the ground, still trembling. “Go back to your home and your sisters and your mother.”

She knew how his deed this past week tormented him. He’d slain King Sylvarresta and two thousand Dedicates on the orders of Gaborn’s father. For the murder of a friend, his mind was filled with torment.

She couldn’t comprehend the anguish of someone who had been forced to slay idiots and children—people whose only crime was to love their lord so much that they were willing to share their finest attributes with him.

But now she saw something even darker in his eyes. There was a gulf of misery between them that words could not describe.

“What happened?” she asked as gently as she could.

“Ah, well,” he said solidly. “Nothing much. My father’s dead. I found Saffira, and now she’s dead. Reavers got them both.”

“I know,” Myrrima answered. “I saw her body.”

“You should have seen her,” Borenson offered, and his eyes suddenly blazed as if he beheld her glory in the distance. “She shone like sunlight, and her voice was so...beautiful. I thought that surely Raj Ahten would listen.”

For a moment, he fell quiet. Then Borenson looked up at her again and said sharply, “Go home! I’m not the man you married. Raj Ahten made sure of that.”

“What?” she asked. His eyes lowered, and Myrrima’s gaze went to the oozing and crusted blood on his surcoat, there by his thighs. She imagined that he’d been stabbed, had taken a gut wound and was slowly dying. “What?”

“I succeeded in the task Gaborn set for me,” Borenson explained. “I convinced Saffira to come here. I got her killed. I got us all killed.”

Borenson gripped the handle of his battle-ax and pulled himself to a standing position. He wavered for a moment, and Myrrima realized that he was on his last legs. Suddenly his complete dispassion made sense: she’d seen the wounded here in Carris, sometimes taking ill with gangrene from even the slightest scratch. The fell mage’s curses made sure of that. Borenson had been down in the thick of the battlefield where the curses were strongest.

And now he stood trembling, with sweat beaded upon his brow and eyes covered in film.

He turned his back, began to hobble painfully away from them in the night, still using his battle-ax as a crutch. The rain had begun to fall more earnestly, and the cool drops hissed into the dead leaves all around. The little girl with the lantern let out a gasping sob. Borenson stumbled and fell in the muck there among the dead. He lay unmoving.

The child let out a shriek, and Myrrima said, “Run and find a healer.”

The girl handed Myrrima a lamp, and Myrrima went to her husband, flipped his body over. With her endowments of brawn, it was easily done. Borenson’s eyes were open to slits, rolled back in a faint. She touched his forehead, and it felt as if he were on fire.

The child didn’t run for a healer. Instead, she watched as Myrrima pulled up Borenson’s surcoat and ring mail, looking for the source of the blood and pus that oozed down his legs.

When she discovered the wound, it was far more horrifying than any that she’d imagined. Truly, Borenson was not the man she had married.

Raj Ahten had made sure that he was a man no more.

In Mystarria a cold wind sang above the village of Padwalton near the Courts of Tide an hour before dawn, shoving clouds through the sky. It stripped the brown leaves from the chestnut trees and let them drop on the hillsides to lie among the bones of leaves left from the preceding fall.