heard, especially the note of her wording for fear.
Cyrus turned, and his hand fell away from Praelior’s grip. There was no lightheadedness now, no spin to his thoughts, just a simple, knife-edged focus on Martaina, her brown hair spilling into the green hood of her cowl, banded behind her to keep it out of her face, as it always was. Her tanned skin was slightly more flushed than usual, though she did not appear indignant to his eyes. He saw one of her fists clenched shut, and he wondered if it meant she was angry or if she intended to hit him.
“Throwing the word ‘fear’ at a warrior of Bellarum is not something to be done lightly,” Cyrus said, and he felt the cold edge creep into his words, frostier than the north winds by more than a matter of degrees.
“Yet I have done it, just now.”
“And I so recently apologized to you for my mistrust of your motives and actions,” Cyrus said, and his eyes narrowed of their own accord. “Is there some reason you throw this insult into my face on the eve of my return to the planning of this battle? A battle in which we’ll be facing this implacable foe, this ceaseless enemy? Is there some detail of my actions that you’ve witnessed that would lead you to believe me unfit to lead an army? When you accuse me of fear, do you suspect I’ll be cowering at the back of the fight, waiting for my soldiers to win the day for me?”
“I suspect you’ll be at the fore, slinging your sword with the rest of them, and that you’ll fight to the death- again-even if it means losing your body and never being able to come back from it.” Her nostrils flared at this. “The fear came and went, as far as I’m concerned, came and went like a wildfire in the forests of old, gutting the underbrush and leaving no trees standing. That is you, near as I can tell-the fear of losing Vara, the pain of what she did, it covered you, burned out your insides, left you hollow. New growth started with the Baroness, but soon enough that was scorched through as well. I wish you still feared, feared to lose what you’ve already lost. Because now you’re so empty there’s nothing left for you to fear. The fear’s already had its way, no taking that back now.”
“You make it sound like there’s nothing left of my own mind. I’m what? An empty vessel, waiting to be filled with whatever comes along?”
“What of this cause you’ve latched yourself on to?” Martaina said. “Defending the Syloreans?”
“You think I wouldn’t have done this if Vara had-” he stuttered, “if she hadn’t- hadn’t-”
“If she were with you, your lover or your wife,” she said it plainly, but the words twisted like a knife all the same, “I think you would still be here to fight for Luukessia, but I think you would do it for a cause and for obligation, for the repayment of a debt or the cessation of a consequence we caused. I don’t think you’d be doing it half-hearted, empty-hearted, as though you have to drag yourself along to the next place we’re fighting-”
“I did just recover from a fairly injurious wound-”
“And that’s another thing,” she said, the full force of her rolling downhill now, the momentum behind her words. “You did just spend weeks on your back, surely enough, no doubt. If you want to go and have your way with Aisling in order to relieve your strain and empty some more of your soul, by all means, do so-”
“Excuse me?” He asked her frostily, but it came out strained.
“-without making elaborate excuses about why you need to bathe yourself. Do you think me a fool? Do you think Curatio some sort of idiot? We know what you are doing, it’s as plain as the head atop your neck, now.” She glared at him.
“You think I need to hide my desires?” He glared back, and wondered why he’d felt so sorry for sending her away before. “As though I have some secret shame to hide?”
“Yes,” she said. “And it does you no favors, nor Aisling either. You keep running from pain to pain, and now there’s nothing left to feel, nothing left to fear, nothing left to lose. You’ve come to the point of bottom in your journey, and yet still you won’t admit it, perhaps even to yourself.”
“Bottomed out, have I?” Cyrus asked with tart amusement. “Oh, good. Here I was worried I still had farther to fall.” He let his hand play across his forehead, felt the lines underneath his fingers. “Can I not … just … have some small solace?”
“Not from what you’re intending, no.” He could hear her speaking behind his hand, though he had no desire to look upon her now. “You are empty. There is no hope for a future left in you, do you realize that? No belief, no heart, no real desire to live. How else can you explain your decision to come back to the camp at Enrant Monge without escort-”
“A slip of the mind,” Cyrus said and let his hand fall away. He kept his face straight as he looked upon her. “I have much weighing on it, and I assure you, my first thought was not that Grand Duke Hoygraf would be waiting at the side of the road between our encampment and the keep to ambush me and take my head.”
“At one point, I think you would have thought of it.” She kept her tone even, her expression flat but accusing.
“Possibly. Surely you don’t think I went out on that ride thinking I’d be killed and decapitated? That I did it on purpose?”
“No,” she said, “but my concern is that you’ve become reckless. That you’ve had your hope and belief burned out of you, and that uncaring is replacing all. Once upon a time, you strode for excellence in all things, you desired to be the best warrior in all Arkaria. I heard rumors you even desired to pursue the best equipment, the best of everything to help you do the task at hand better than anyone. That was tempered by the desire to hold fast to the bonds of loyalty in Sanctuary, but tell me now-what do you want, Cyrus Davidon?” She gestured to the river in the distance. “What do you want, beyond a bath and release?”
“I don’t know,” he said after a pause. “Victory, of course. To vanquish this scourge.”
“And then?” Quietly. Accusingly.
“To go home, I suppose,” he said, but now his voice was hollow.
“You suppose,” she said, with a quiet all her own. “You’ve lost hope of a future. You’ve lost belief in a better day ahead, belief in what drove you, once upon a time. You were the most certain of us, a warrior with a rock- hard conviction in what he did, what he said, in his abilities. Thad told me that you were forged in the hottest fires of the Society of Arms, that you were the man who walked out of their gates after the graduation with nothing to prove to anyone.” She threw a hand up to indicate him. “Where is that man now? What is left of him in front of me? You’ve let them strip it all away from you-”
“I let nobody do anything,” Cyrus said in a low growl. “Some things happened, things I can’t undo.”
“And do you believe you’ll return from that? That you’ll pass the eye of the storm and come back to your old self unchanged?”
“I have no desire to return to my old self,” Cyrus said, turning away from her and resuming his walk, the river ahead in his sight.
“Oh?” He heard her soft footsteps behind him; her distress with him was clear not only in her voice but in the fact that he could hear the ranger walk. “What is your ambition now? To slake the thirst of your desire with a dark elf whom you care not one whit for? To lose yourself in the pleasure moment over and over with a woman whom you have avoided for two years? To throw yourself into cataclysmic battle after battle until you no longer come back?”
“My ambition right now lies in recovering from my injuries, bathing, and yes, perhaps exerting some excess energies with Aisling, who has shown no small energy of her own to dispense with. Would you prefer I simply sit about, silent as a stone, pondering the best course of action to get me to better weapons, or a more serviceable guild, or perhaps thrilling to thoughts of the journey home and how much I might like to be among the towers and stone of Sanctuary now rather than fighting a foe of my own making a world away?”
“What I would prefer,” she said, and grasped at his shoulder, turning him about, “is that you show some sign of life beyond speaking, walking, consuming and dispensing your seed.” Her face was animated in a way that it never was. “Show me some sign of how you were before, before Termina, before Mortus’s realm, or at least some small sight of what you were like in the interlude at Vernadam after Harrow’s Crossing. Give me a sign that you still believe in something, that you hold some hope to your soul, that you have something to-” She expelled her breath, and her head went to the side, as if she were searching for something that she could not find in him. “That you have something to live for, for gods’ sakes.” Her eyes softened and the corners crinkled, and for a moment she was a thousand years old. “For our sakes.”
The sun was not against the far horizon, not yet. It hung in the sky at an angle that told Cyrus it was one, perhaps two hours until sundown. He looked at it then back to the encampment, not so far distant, and then to the river. “Sometimes life is not about desire, or belief. Sometimes it’s about crossing the void between big moments,
