Michael Stackpole - When Dragons Rage

“Magistrate, you are only meant to know that which the king wishes you to know. Are you smarter than he is? The king’s answer to that question would differ from yours, I am certain.” Sephi shook her head. “I reveal this knowledge to prevent you from doing something stupid, like parading a Prince of Okrannel through Oriosa naked. I will not have you embarrassing our nation.”

The magistrate slumped in his saddle. “This is not right. There was no ring on his finger.”

“That’s because the princess is lying.”

“Shut up!” Mably’s shout silenced Crow, but clearly cost him mightily. He breathed hard for several seconds, then glared down at Alexia. “This is trickery, I know it. I will not be made a fool.”

The princess stepped back and opened her hands. “If you choose to call me a liar, I will demand satisfaction of you. You may choose between that and believing the king’s spy here and letting me accompany my husband to Meredo.”

“Just you, Princess.”

“Of course, just me. And my bodyguards.”

Mably groaned.

Alyx smiled. “You know they will be there regardless, Magistrate. Do not fight a battle you cannot win.”

“This is a skirmish, Princess, and one you have won.” Mably drew himself up in the saddle again. “In Meredo the battle shall be decided, and it shall not be in your favor.”

The group rode from Tolsin at noon and Alyx was pleased at how well the morning’s events had worked out; though she did acknowledge that her feelings might not be shared by all. Call Mably clearly was not happy; she could feel his hot stare burning into her back. Mably rode at the head of the rear guard, having been chased there by Resolute. The Tolsin magistrate had left the town at the head of the procession but as some of the guardsmen moved out to scout along the route, Mably found himself in the middle of her group and beat a hasty retreat.

It did not help Mably at all that the guardsmen had seen him faced down by Sephi. This left him weak enough that the guards seemed to tolerate him instead of look to him for direction. The further from Tolsin he got, the less power he wielded and Resolute stepped forward to fill that void.

Resolute’s de facto assumption of leadership further discomfited Mably. The Vorquelf, with Dranae as his lieutenant, dispatched scouts and otherwise organized the guardsmen’s rotations. Only one of the Tolsin guardsmen offered resistance to Resolute’s orders—until Will quipped that defying Resolute was stupid, and that stupid people often break their legs in horrible accidents. The guardsman quickly acquiesced and found that Resolute actually knew what he was about.

Alexia would have been quite happy about events had Crow not worn so dour an expression. “Crow, you cannot actually think I was going to allow them to haul you off, can you? Do you think you would have made it all the way to Meredo?”

Crow frowned heavily. “Chances are I’d have made it a mile closer to the capital than Mably, but that’s not important. I didn’t want you caught up in what will happen to me. I asked you not to do this.“

He held up his left hand and thumbed the gold ring on his finger. “Kerrigan fashioned the rings, I take it, the way he was able to fashion the duplicate of the fragment?”

“He had to borrow the rings from the innkeeper and his wife to get the right sense of them, but yes.”

The white-haired man shook his head. “And then Will stole into the tavern and slipped it on my finger.”

Alyx nodded. “I was not there. I was serving to distract Mably and a few others. It all went off very easily.”

“Unless you had your leg broken.”

“I understand he was kicking you.”

Crow shrugged. “It didn’t hurt. He kicked like a girl.”

Her violet eyes opened wide. “If I kicked you, you’d not say that.”

“Like as not.” He glanced over at her, the flesh surrounding his left eye a sickly yellow with purple streaks. “But the fact is, you have kicked me. By doing this.”

“Crow, you’re not saying that being rescued has hurt your vanity!” Alyx threw her head back and laughed. “If that’s what you’re saying, you’ve been beaten more soundly in the head than I imagined.”

Crow raised himself, straightening his spine proudly. It was not easy for him to do, but the only hint of the difficulty came as the flesh around his eyes tightened. “You do know me better than that, Princess. I wanted you to walk away. I wanted to keep you safe from what will happen to me. I’ve been prepared for years for this, but you were taken by surprise. My doom is of my own making, and you shouldn’t be caught up in it.”

“You wanted to keep me safe. Why is that?”

“Because you are important. The world is depending upon you.”

She leaned forward, resting both hands on the saddlehorn. “If that were it, you’d have insisted I never go into combat.”

Crow sighed. “Combat is different. What will come is not something you’ve trained for. And there is more. You are a friend. I also told Resolute to walk away when this happened.”

Alyx narrowed her eyes. “How is it, Crow, that you can be loyal to your friends—that you can ride into combat with them and save their lives, that you can endure decades of shame searching for the one person who will rescue a world that has condemned you—and yet fail to understand why your friends would stand beside you? Do we seem that shallow to you?”

He raised a hand and the sleeve of his leather jerkin fell enough that she could see the bruises the manacles had left. “No, no, it’s not that at all. I just…” He swallowed hard and glanced away, catching his lower lip between his teeth. He started to speak again, then blew the words from his tongue in a huff of air.

She reached out and laid a gentle hand on his left shoulder. “Crow, it’s okay.”

“No, it’s not, Princess.” He drew in a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I’ve known, from the moment they stripped my mask from me, that I was doing the right thing. Even so, when they took my mask—when they had my father strip my mask from me, it crushed me. I felt as if my face had been clawed bare of flesh. I had always sought to be worthy of wearing a mask, and here I had been stripped of it. Tarrant Hawkins was dead.

“After that, for the next few months anyway, I don’t remember much. I drank to oblivion, but always woke barefaced . I would have lost myself in the pleasures of the flesh, but no one would have me. I was turned out of inns. I was battered and beaten, spat upon, tossed into cesspits and sewers. Had I been on fire, people would have pissed on me, but only so I could suffer with the burns.”

His voice came barely above a whisper. A shiver ran through him as he spoke. Alexia felt it through her hand and thought her touch an invasion, but she could not bear to take her hand away. She really wanted to rub her hand over his shoulder, along his back, but refrained by reminding herself of his bruises.

The desire to comfort him confused her. Anyone else she’d have clapped on the shoulder and told to bear up. Among the Gyrkyme confession of this sort was unknown. There were so few of them, and they all lived in a small area, that everyone simply knew all there was to know. While the Gyrkyme held confidences sacred, secrets became news and spread swiftly. Sins were not hidden and were easily forgiven. Since coming into the wider world she had, on occasion, had comrades who felt the need to unburden themselves, and she listened for as long as seemed polite before escaping.

This was different, however. The pain in his voice slowly slid into her, tightening her stomach. His words defined a burden he had carried for as long as she had been alive, and she wished she could do something to help lift it from him.