Sunset of Lantonne (106 page)

“Could you and your prophecies have stopped what happened last night?” he asked, but On’esquin did not even look up. “Could you have saved anyone we lost?”

Ignoring Raeln, On’esquin said instead, “A beautiful day. This will make travel much easier. I had not looked forward to marching in the rain or snow.”

“When do we leave?” Raeln asked after a long silence. He was not entirely sure On’esquin even knew he was standing there. For all he could tell, the man had been speaking to himself.

“We leave when you say it is time to go into the mountains.”

“The military will decide that, and I didn’t mean the survivors. When do we—you and I—leave?”

“What makes you think we are going anywhere?”

“I know the look you gave the Turessian last night. The calm of one who wants to lose control and kill, but knows the time is not right and starting now could cost you your chance when you need it. Now’s that time…take me with you.”

On’esquin turned slightly to peek at Raeln over his shoulder, then went back to watching the sun’s colors in the morning sky. A rainbow had begun to show northeast of town. “You will follow these people to the foothills before we part from them,” the orc insisted. “There is nothing left here for them, and every trained soldier that accompanies them will increase their chances of survival. They will need some hope to cling to when they abandon their homes for the wilderness in winter, and I believe having a strong force at their side for a time will give them that hope. Many of them will die before the spring thaws, regardless. Give them a week, Raeln. A week will not mellow your desire for revenge, but it may save some of them.”

Raeln came over and sat down on the top step alongside On’esquin. “I intend to send them to the dwarven city southwest of here. They can bring their dead and hope they arrive before their fallen friends’ spirits are too weak to use the healing circles there. Lantonne was not the only city with circles of magic.”

“You waste your time,” said On’esquin sadly, pointing to another part of the camp where a huge bonfire had been built and was beginning to smoke. “I had them burn the dead. There was no point in bringing them.”

“Are you insane? The circles—”

“The circles are gone, along with much of the magic in the world,” On’esquin said sharply. “Your sister saw to it. Look to the north, Raeln, and tell me what you see.”

Squinting toward Lantonne, Raeln could faintly make out a plume of smoke beyond the city, out near the quarry. At first, he thought it to be the dark cloud that had hung over that place for months, but he soon realized it was almost mushroom-shaped and rising slowly into the sky. The black cloud he had expected was gone, replaced by this.

“Your sister and the dragon have done the impossible. They closed the tear between our world and that of magic. The repercussions will be dire and doing this has cost us greatly. It may still tear Eldvar apart, but it bought us the time to deal with the problems that remain. I can say from experience they have bought us no less than a year. If we are very lucky, they have turned the tide of these wars.”

A faint glow near the cloud seemed to elude Raeln’s attempts to make it into shapes or colors. The longer he stared, the more it seemed to flicker. “What does that have to do with the healing circles?”

“We lost much of the magic that bled through naturally. The circles fed on the ambient magic of Eldvar, but with that gone, I do not know if they will ever exist again,” On’esquin explained as he unrolled the leather cover on the parchment. Touching the stack of paper to his forehead reverently, he placed it on Raeln’s lap. “Without the circles, the Turessians are greatly weakened and will depend more on Dorralt than before. For his own part, Dorralt has felt the change and is likely running for Turessi to get as far as he can from the mists.”

“Mists?”

“The dark cloud of magic that came through that tear is not the only one in the world, thanks to the war. People did many foolish things to try and stop the Turessians. When Ilarra closed the door, some of what had slipped through was cut off. Now, it is searching for magic to sustain itself, blindly consuming everything in its path. Before, it sought to gorge itself…now it will travel, seeking to find anything to keep itself whole.

“My people saw those mists once before, but they were contained to one place, where we foolishly experimented. Turess went to Nenophar to find ways of preventing them from ever forming again, but that has been a lost cause. The mists are now bleeding into Eldvar all over, trying to collect enough power to punch holes back through to the place they come from. The one formed here today mirrors one in Corraith…the very one I will step into to come here in a year or so.”

Raeln looked sharply at On’esquin, but the man’s devious smile told him he had no intention of explaining. Instead, Raeln picked up the leather-bound parchments and opened the cover, hoping to find his own answers.

Inside, the weathered old parchments were covered with black rune symbols resembling the ones tattooed on On’esquin’s face. Raeln could make no sense of them and finally closed the bundle and tossed it back onto the orc’s lap. “I can’t read any of that,” he said, though he knew it was probably obvious and might have been the orc’s intent from the start. “What does it say about all of this?”

Flipping open the parchments, On’esquin touched a spot partway down the first page and read, “Betrayer and abandoned will join to collect those touched by myself—Turess, that is—and prepare to die for what they hold dearest. Two of those already dead in the eyes of fate will change the fates of those who still live.”

“Abandoned?”

“In hindsight, I believe that refers to your sister choosing to leave in order to save us all,” answered On’esquin, tapping another set of runes. “He was right…the old god died to save mortals. I never believed it would happen. That statement I must have read a hundred times, trying to find a hidden meaning.”

Raeln eyed the parchments, then stood up and moved to stand directly in front of On’esquin. With him standing on the ground and On’esquin sitting at the top of the steps, Raeln still had a head’s height on him.

“Did you know?” he demanded, motioning at the papers.

“Know what, Raeln? That descendants of my people would turn on the world and march to conquer the cities across Eldvar? Prophecy is certainly not that clear.”

“Did you know he would die?”

“I had a hunch,” the man admitted, turning back a page in the stack. “The six are to be bound by loss of what they cherish, and through that loss, become alike despite all differences, Turess said. He saw our pain, though likely not the details of what would happen.”

Raeln struck at On’esquin swiftly and without thinking, his fist connecting with On’esquin’s cheekbone and knocking him off the porch and onto his side on the muddy ground. Raeln’s hand went numb, feeling as though he had punched a tree trunk.

“I deserve that,” On’esquin said, chuckling as he touched his face. “You have more strength with anger than you did when calm. I am impressed. I had expected your calm was what gave you strength, but I misjudged.”

“You could have saved him!”

“I could not have. If Greth lived, you would have died and he would have taken your place. That is the way of prophecy, Raeln. When it is meant to come true, it will, regardless of what is done. The details will change to fit the prophecy. In this case, I doubt I could have saved him anyway. We could have surrounded him with an army, and he would have died to something, whether it be a stray arrow, disease, infection, or starvation. You were the one marked to come with me and he was to be the cherished one lost to you.”

Raeln opened his mouth to demand more answers, but then instead stared down at the silver bracelet he still wore. When he looked up, On’esquin was smiling, looking straight at the bracelet. With a snarl, Raeln tore at the jewelry, trying to pry it away. His claws ripped at the fur and skin there, covering his arm and the silver with blood, but the metal itself would not move and did not suffer the slightest scratch. It felt as firmly attached to his arm as the bones under his skin.

“That is Turess’s wedding band,” On’esquin told him as he stood up, brushing mud and water from his armor. “I would know, as I placed it on his wrist and a matching one on his wife’s wrist during the ceremony. It was lost for twenty centuries and now is worn by a wildling. Dorralt would have burned nations to keep you or I away from it, given his dislike of our races and fear of the prophecies. Even if the bracelet means nothing on its own, having it here is a symbol of certain events beginning.”

Raeln gave the bracelet one last frustrated tug and let his arms drop to his sides as he sat down hard on the porch. “Why me?” he asked softly, sitting down hard. “What is so special about you or I?”

Smiling in what Raeln could only think of as a fatherly way, On’esquin sat down beside him. “Had Dorralt not spent two thousand years devising a way to lay claim to Turessi and turn it against wildlings and orcs, I doubt we would have mattered in the slightest. By villianizing us, Dorralt forced us into the roles we now must play. By opposing the prophecy, he caused it to come true. Thankfully, it is not for you and I to do this alone.”

They sat in silence a long time, until the smoke from the funeral pyres had begun to die down and the survivors started coming into sight all around the building. More than a hundred strong, they looked at Raeln and On’esquin as though they might have the answers Raeln knew he did not possess. Soon, the military forces remaining joined them in waiting.

“Do you need to say any words to him before you are ready to go?” On’esquin asked gently, nodding toward the open door. “I do not know your people’s customs on these matters when there is a body left behind.”

Raeln shrugged and kept his eyes on the ground. “My people would mourn for days and have somber speeches about those who are gone in hopes the living might remember them.”

“We do not have days, Raeln.”

“Too many people are dead to stop and grieve,” Raeln countered, getting up. He turned to face the quiet building and its dark interior with its still darker memories he knew would haunt him for years. “He died a warrior. Nothing more needs to be said. I will honor him the way his people would, by living…and tearing the ones who did this apart.”

Before On’esquin could say anything more, Raeln walked just inside the door of the building. He picked up the lantern that had blown out during the brief scuffle with Varra and shook it to be sure it was still full of oil. Tilting the lantern, he poured oil across the dry old boards inside the doorway where the night’s rains had not reached.

“Light it up,” he ordered the nearest man as he descended the steps and began walking away from the building. “Burn everything to the ground and leave only memories. I want nothing left for the enemy.”

Raeln never looked back as he marched west, but he could smell the smoke from the burning building for hours after he should have escaped it. Every determined step he took was followed by the memory of Greth’s battered and bloodied body.

As Raeln forced himself to keep going, he reached into one of his pouches and clasped his hand around a tuft of Greth’s fur. He had promised to take Greth back to the mountains and at least that much of him would be returned to his homeland. There was little more he could do, but it was a promise he had no intention of allowing any power on Eldvar to stop him from carrying out.

After that, he would kill Dorralt at any cost, even if he had to fight through a thousand Turessians to get his claws on the man. Someday, he would feel that man’s life ebb under his hands. Until then, he would hunt the enemy like the savage animal Dorralt believed the wildlings to be.

Sharp winter winds tore across the man’s exposed face despite his best efforts to keep his hood as far forward as he could. With his companions, he waited at the entrance to a massive cave that had been torn open in the side of the remote mountain by something far larger than themselves. Warm, damp air from the cave blew back against them, making the outside air seem all the more bitter and creating long sheets of ice between the snow-covered slope and the dark maw of the cave.

He had traveled for weeks to arrive here at the edge of the realm, in an area barely mapped in all the years the region had been held by vast armies. It had been those armies who had told him of the cave, begging for permission to march in and secure it in his name. They had reported losses greater than any he had seen in battles all across the known world during their last attempts.