Return of the Guardian-King (54 page)

Once on the road, Abramm eased their pace and was finally able to learn what had befallen his friends since last he’d seen them—a heart-dropping four and a half months ago by their reckoning. After the sandstorm, they had found their way out of the dunes to a small southern-edge settlement, where they’d run afoul of a friendly innkeeper who offered them food, drink, and beds, only to drug them and sell them back into slavery. Passing from master to master, they’d finally arrived in Aggosim, where the Esurhites bought them for galley slaves.

Of Abramm’s own journey, he said only that he had found an ancient ruin where he’d stayed for a much longer time than it had seemed. . . . At which point he’d changed the subject, still rattled by the realization that he’d been in Chena’ag Tor over four months.

Regarding Borlain, the one-eyed Chesedhan who’d led the attack on him after the sinking of the barge, his friends knew little, though all had noticed how intently he watched Abramm. He appeared to be the leader of the Chesedhans in their party, and from the way his men treated him, Abramm guessed they were captured soldiers.

That evening, after they’d made camp a little way off the road and the chickens had been cut up and were cooking in a big kettle, Abramm drew the Chesedhan leader away from his friends.

“Those men I killed were yours, I’m guessing,” he said, stopping at the edge of the ring of firelight.

The one-eyed man seemed surprised but didn’t deny it. “My best. Good fighters. Good friends.”

“I’m sorry.”
More sorry than you know
.

Borlain shrugged. “As you said, come at a man with a bared blade, you have to expect to meet some steel yourself.” He paused. “I underestimated you.”

“I’d take it back if I could.”

Again the Chesedhan shrugged. “It was their time. We all have one. It comes, and the world moves on.” His one eye came up to catch Abramm’s gaze. “I’ve never seen anyone wield a blade as well as you do.”

“I’ve had a lot of practice.”

Borlain’s eye drifted to the men laughing now where they sat and sprawled around the fire. “These others, though, your friends. They’re not soldiers.”

“No,” Abramm agreed, looking at them. “Not yet, anyway.” He glanced again at Borlain. “I really do wish I could take back what I did.”

“Ah. But then perhaps
you
would be the one dead.” The man flashed a gap-toothed grin. “And if I had acted less rashly, waited to learn more of what was going on, then maybe . . .” He trailed off and shook his head. “What’s done is done, and it serves no purpose to chase after ‘what if.’ I don’t hold it against you, Alaric, if that’s what you fear. We’re soldiers, you and I. That’s how it is.”

Abramm had nothing to say to that, and soon they returned to the fire, where the chicken stewed with rice and beans that had also come from the town was doled out into the men’s scavenged cups and bowls. Then, as they ate, Abramm asked Borlain how he and his companions had been enslaved. Thus they all learned of King Leyton’s ill-fated attempt to win back the island of Tornecki using the Kiriathan regalia his sister, former queen of Kiriath, had given him.

“She
gave
him the regalia?” Abramm exclaimed.

Borlain swore she had, but Abramm didn’t believe him. Having long suspected his Chesedhan brother-in-law of stealing his scepter, Abramm had no reason to think the man wouldn’t similarly violate Maddie—his own sister and subject—if it meant getting his hands on the rest of the regalia. That none of it had aided him and instead had only gotten him captured by his enemies was only just.

In any case, Borlain had seen the king in enemy hands himself—seen him mocked, beaten, spat upon, and humiliated before all the jeering Esurhite soldiers who had participated in his capture. Belthre’gar had personally taken the regalia from the king and secreted them away.

“That was just at the beginning of last summer.”

“They will have put him in the Games by now,” Abramm said, scooping more stew and a chicken leg into his wooden bowl.

“Aye. And now that we’ve been freed deep behind enemy lines, we’re thinking maybe we’re supposed to rescue him.”

“Awful big order for seven men,” Abramm said.

“We were thinking you and yours might want to help.”

“Help that lying, thieving Chesedhan?” Trinley erupted. “I knew Madeleine wasn’t to be trusted! First chance she gets, what does she do? Gives away our regalia.”

“Stow it, Oakes!” Abramm barked. “She’s the queen of Kiriath. She’d never have given them up freely.” He turned his attention back to Borlain. “I don’t think you’ll find us much interested in helping Leyton.”

“I do like the idea of trying to get the regalia back, though,” Cedric mused.

Trinley agreed. “They probably took them to Xorofin. If we went back to the river, we could follow it to the coast and then south.”

Abramm smiled to himself at the thought of these men trying to travel south through Esurh without being caught. He pulled the chicken leg out of his bowl and chewed off the soft meat as the others offered support for and elaboration of Trinley’s idea.

As they came to a lull in their plotting, he said, “Suppose they are in Xorofin. . . . And suppose somehow you were to rescue them. . . . And then further suppose you could escape. . . . All of which are highly doubtful—”

“Not if Eidon is with us!” Trinley protested. “And it’s so clear he is. It cannot be coincidence that we have been brought all this way only to be set free. And then to run into you here, as well? Our one real soldier? It is a clear sign.”

“Aye, it is that, indeed.” Abramm smiled slightly. “But humor me. Supposing all of what I said happened . . . and we got away free with them . . . what would you do with them? Bring them to Gillard?”

“No!” Trinley flashed him a disgusted look. “Bring’em t’ Simon, o’ course.”

“Simon.”
My uncle?
It made a certain amount of sense. “Is anyone sure Duke Simon still lives?”

“Simon Alaric,” Trinley corrected. “The crown prince. Borlain here was tellin’ us earlier he and his little brother were smuggled out by the nanny.”

Hearing his son’s name spoken by someone other than himself for the first time since he’d left Kiriath hit Abramm like a kick in the chest. His heart seemed to turn itself inside out, twisting with a pain he could not identify. It took all his self-control to keep his voice stable and audible. “So they both do live?”

“Didn’t I just say that?” Trinley asked witheringly.

Abramm hardly heard him.
So it wasn’t my imagination conjuring Simon
up that night in Caerna’tha. Oh, my Father . . . you did hold them. You knew
all the time. . . .
Emotion welled up so strongly he thought he might burst with it, and as tears stung his eyes he had to stand and walk away.

He heard the men’s puzzled voices in his wake but could not discern their words. It was as if his inner landscape was being shaken as violently as the outer landscape of the Temple of Aggos had been yesterday. Once alone, he fell to his knees in the darkness and wept in gratitude and longing and a tangle of other emotions too deep to be identified. He had come so far, lost so much, waited so long. The experiences in Chena’ag Tor had stretched and drained him to the limit of his endurance. But though it had ended in glorious assurance, now that he was back in the world, the memory of it had faded rapidly until it seemed as unreal as his encounter with little Simon in that dark hallway the night Maddie had come to him in Caerna’tha. Though he’d been sure of what he’d experienced with his wife, he’d never been totally convinced that Simon had been anything more than a figment of his imagination.

To hear the boy’s name spoken in the real world, to hear others affirming that his boys lived had unlocked a cascade of assurances that Eidon would deliver what he had promised. And that the deliverance was even now beginning.

The rustle of another’s approach roused him from his thoughts moments before Rolland spoke cautiously from behind. “Alaric? Are ye well?”

“Aye, Rolland. I’m fine.” He rolled his weight back squarely onto his feet and stood.

Rolland watched him in the light of a kelistar. “Trinley’s got ’em all talked into heading back t’ the river tomorrow. I thought ye’d want to know.”

“Heading back to the river?” Abramm struggled to put meaning in the words.

“He’s convinced them we should go after the regalia. That seeking them must be why Eidon brought us down here. I tried t’ argue him out of it, but . . . he always talks rings around me.”

“So you’re going with him, too, then?”

“I’m going with ye.”

Abramm said nothing for a moment as he considered. Then, “I don’t think I’ll be going after the regalia, Rollie.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Rolland was staring at him with a strange expression. “Ye look different without the beard and yer hair tied back like that.”

“So you’ve said.”

“Familiar somehow. Like maybe I did know ye before. From the palace, maybe.”

“Maybe.” He waited, wondering if the time had finally come. . . .

The other man looked almost pained. “But ye don’t remember me, do ye?”

“No, Rollie. I really don’t. I’m sorry.” Abramm sighed wearily and started back to the campfire before Rolland could ask him what he was doing out here, squirming to think the man had heard him weeping. He felt strangely detached from the others and had no interest in discussing their plans for the regalia. Maybe it was just more of the exhaustion left over from his time in the desert, or maybe it was something else he didn’t understand. All he knew was that he’d barely rolled himself up in his cloak and stretched out beside the fire before he was asleep.

In the morning the other Kiriathans were all afroth with their plans to rescue the regalia. Trinley, finally back in his element, gave orders freely about when they would leave, what they would do if they encountered anyone, who would carry what, and what order they would travel in. He had Abramm’s and Rolland’s loads all planned out for them—the heaviest of the lot, as usual—and the possibility they might not share his vision still hadn’t occurred to him.

Thus when Abramm finally told him that he and Rolland were not going south with the other Kiriathans, the former alderman was genuinely shocked. “But . . . but . . .” he stammered as all around them other conversations trickled to a halt.

“Did ye just say ye’re not goin’ with us?” Cedric asked, rucksack already slung over his one shoulder.

“That’s right,” Abramm said. “We’re not.”

“But ye were Abramm’s man,” Trinley protested. “I’d think you above all of us would want t’ see his regalia returned to his heir.”

Abramm let his gaze slide over the men around him, familiar faces many of them, men he’d grown attached to. “Actually, I wasn’t Abramm’s man,” he said. “And my destiny does not lie to the south.”

Their reactions to that were comical: amused indignation, consternation, a little bit of irritation at his hubris.

“Yer
destiny
?” Trinley sputtered. “Who the plague d’ ye think ye are, anyway, Alaric?”

Abramm shook his head. “You still have no idea, do you?”

They looked at him blankly.

“I will not seek the regalia. They will come to me.”

With that, he picked up his Esurhite armor and started northward on the road, Rolland at his side. The Chesedhans followed them wordlessly. As they climbed back onto the road, Rolland said, “That was awful strange talk, Alaric. What the plague did ye mean, the regalia will come to ye?”

But Abramm did not answer him. No one spoke to him for the entire morning, but when they stopped to rest around midday, Cedric and Galen and a couple others caught up with them. They said nothing to Abramm but favored him with puzzled looks and spoke among themselves of his strange words. “Sounded like someone else talking there for a time,” he overheard one of them say. The rest of the Kiriathans, including an obviously disgruntled Trinley, rejoined them by evening. But again no one said a word to him.

In the days that followed, the others continued to give him his space, as if they were afraid of him. Perhaps they thought he had lost his mind. Even Rolland, who didn’t exactly avoid him, kept his distance and his silence, though often Abramm caught the other man eyeing him thoughtfully.

Abramm had made the statement about the regalia seeking him without realizing he’d spoken it aloud. The thought had impressed itself upon him as if from another source, even as the words had fallen from his lips. Once they had, it had been too late to retract them, and he’d realized then that it was Eidon working through him, that the hour of revelation was coming.

More than two weeks later, with the mountains now towering ahead of them and the road winding through grassy foothills and copses of oaks turning yellow with the fall, they passed the estate noted on Abramm’s map. The whitewashed plaster of the wall running along the road was cracked and peeling, the fields beyond it long since gone to weeds, and the gateway arch at the estate’s entrance lay in ruin, collapsed upon the drive and half buried in dirt—silent testimony to how long it had been since anyone of any means had passed this way.

Which explained how they could have traveled so many days and met no one else. Not far up the road a small town also stood deserted, and he began to wonder why. Was the pass no longer crossable? Would they ascend the mountain only to discover the way was blocked?