“The clouds. They move in front of the sun. They cast shadows. Then they are gone. Am I like that, Rowena? Will I leave nothing behind me?”
“What would you wish to leave?”
“I don’t know,” he answered, looking away.
“You would have liked a son,” she said, softly. “As would I. But it was not to be. Do you blame me for it?”
“No! No! Never.” His arms swept around her, drawing her to him. “I love you. I always have. I always will. You are my wife!”
“I would have liked to have given you a son,” she whispered.
“I does not matter.”.
They sat in silence until the clouds darkened and the first drops of rain began to fall.
Druss stood, lifting Rowena into his arms, and began the long walk to the stone house. “Put me down,” she commanded. “You’ll hurt your back.”
“Nonsense. You are as light as a sparrow wing. And am I not the strongest man in the world?”
A fire was blazing in the hearth, and their Ventrian servant, Pudri, was preparing mulled wine for them. Druss lowered Rowena into a broad-backed leather armchair.
“Your face is red with the effort,” she chided him.
He smiled and did not argue. His shoulder was hurting, his lower back aching like the devil. The slender Pudri grinned at them both.
“Such children you are,” he said, and shuffled away into the kitchen.
“He’s right,” said Druss. “With you I am still the boy from the farm, standing below the Great Oak with the most beautiful woman in the Drenai lands.”
“I was never beautiful,” Rowena told him, “but it pleased me to hear you say it.”
“You were - and are,” he assured her.
The firelight sent dancing shadows on to the walls of the room as the light outside began to fail. Rowena fell asleep and Druss sat silently watching her. Four times in the last three years she had collapsed, the surgeons warning Druss of a weakness in her heart. The old warrior had listened to them without comment, his ice-blue eyes showing no expression. But within him a terrible fear had begun to grow. He had forsaken his battles and settled down to life in the mountains, believing that his presence nearby would hold Rowena to life.
But he watched her always, never allowing her to become too tired, fussing over her meals, waking in the night to feel her pulse, then being unable to sleep.
“Without her I am nothing,” he confided to his friend Sieben the Poet, whose house had been built less than a mile from the stone house. “If she dies, part of me will die with her.”
“I know, old horse,” said Sieben. “But I am sure the princess will be fine.”
Druss smiled. “Why did you make her a princess? Are you poets incapable of the truth?”
Sieben spread his hands and chuckled. “One must cater to one’s audience. The saga of Druss the Legend had need of a princess. Who would want to listen to the tale of a man who fought his way across continents to rescue a farm girl?”
“Druss the Legend? Pah! There are no real heroes any more. The likes of Egel, Karnak and Waylander are long gone. Now they were heroes, mighty men with eyes of fire.”
Sieben laughed aloud. “You say that only because you have heard the songs. In years to come men will talk of you in the same way. You and that cursed axe.”
The cursed axe.
Druss glanced up to where the weapon hung on the wall, its twin silver steel blades glinting in the firelight. Snaga the Sender, the blades of no return. He stood and moved silently across the room, lifting the axe from the brackets supporting it. The black haft was warm to the touch, and he felt, as always, the thrill of battle ripple through him as he hefted the weapon. Reluctantly he returned the axe to its resting place.
“They are calling you,” said Rowena. He swung and saw that she was awake and watching him.
“Who is calling me?”
“The hounds of war. I can hear them baying.” Druss shivered and forced a smile.
“No one is calling me,” he told her, but there was no conviction in his voice. Rowena had always been a mystic.
“Gorben is coming, Druss. His ships are already at sea.”
“It is not my war. My loyalties would be divided.”
For a moment she said nothing. Then: “You liked him, didn’t you?”
“He is a good Emperor - or he was. Young, proud, and terribly brave.”
“You set too much store by bravery. There was a madness in him you could never see. I hope you never do.”
“I told you, it is not my war. I’m forty-five years old, my beard is going grey and my joints are stiff. The young men of the Drenai will have to tackle him without me.”
“But the Immortals will be with him,” she persisted. “You said once there were no finer warriors in the world.”
