up with the scourge coming.”
“So I would go for the people of the city?” Cyrus asked, watching her without emotion.
“No,” Martaina said, “you should go because if you don’t, you’ll regret it to the day you die.” Cyrus opened his mouth to speak and her gloved hand came up and a single finger lay across his lips. “You need not posture before me-the others, perhaps, but there is no fooling someone who has watched you so close as I have. You would have an easier time fooling yourself than me-and you have. You feel for her, even now.” She did not break away from staring him down. “In spite of all, just like Vara, it is there. You will regret it to your grave if you don’t save her.”
With that, Martaina turned loose his arm, and he felt as though a weight had been attached to it instead of lifted, as though she had given him strength and taken it all away at once. “Why?” he asked, in the hush of the night, with the battle still raging somewhere in front of them, and the campfires burning all around him. “I wanted so hard to be rid of her, to be rid of both of them-her and Vara, and yet they still torment me so. Why can’t it be …” he let his voice crack slightly, “simple.”
“I believe you have confused matters of the heart with something much different, like fletching, perhaps,” she said, drawing an arrow from her quiver. “Make an arrow, put a head on it, make them of uniform length and material for the same purpose, and be done with it. This is not an occupation. It is not a job, or something that you would do in your spare time. This is love, whether you admit it or not. She was there for you in a time of great sorrow, and allowed you to feel something that you had thought lost. Imagined slights and betrayals aside, you gave her your word.”
“She went back to him,” Cyrus said. “To save her homeland-”
“To save you,” Martaina said sharply. “It was for you that she gave herself back. It was for her home that she remained there under the most odious tortures I have ever seen.” Martaina took a step closer to him and seized his arm again, and he felt for a moment as though a parent were lecturing him. “Do you know the last time I saw her? We came upon her being whipped while tied to a pillar that your head was stuck upon. She was given your head and told to walk it back to Sanctuary. Aisling managed to rush it back in time, but J’anda and I carried her, bleeding, broken, back to our camp so she could be healed. And she went back to him willingly. Yes, she stayed with him for her homeland, but the bargain was struck to save you.” Her hand came loose of him again. “Don’t be a fool. However much you may be doubting everything else right now, believe this-she loved you.”
Martaina turned and began to walk away, back toward a fire that was not so far off, her feet making no sound on the snow as she went. “You were the first for her, I think.” The wind whistled through, but he heard her nonetheless, and shivered as she spoke. “And while you do not owe her your love, you do-in spite of all else-owe her your life.”
Chapter 89
The night was terribly cold, and when he lay down next to Aisling, he did what she wanted, perfunctorily, tired, with aching bones and pain in his heart, and he kept himself together through it only by focusing on the smells, the sweat, closing his eyes and remembering the bed in Vernadam. He ran his fingers over her skin, and imagined a back filled with the ripple of scars. Her hands came up to his face, and it was as though he were there again, and the window shone in over him, and a light flashed as he caught his breath, the cold air hitting his lungs, his skin almost as though it were going to burst into flames from overheating. He rolled to his back, off her, and lay there under the bedroll, breathing deep breaths into the air, watching as they fogged in front of him in the firelight.
“That was … more than I expected from a weary man,” Aisling said, pressing the bedroll over her chest but leaving her arms exposed to the night air.
“Yes,” Terian said from a few feet away, “it was very impressive. The rest of us are trying to sleep, though, so maybe save the pillow talk for another time?”
“Most of us are polite enough not to comment,” J’anda said, “recognizing that in a space like this, where there is no actual privacy, the least we can do is respect each other enough to pretend.”
“Gods, man, how much pretending can you do when she’s caterwauling like that?” Terian asked. “Ever since they got back from Galbadien, I’ve been afraid that someone set loose a ghoul from the Waking Woods in our camp. I wake up ready to draw my sword.”
“I thought it sounded lovely,” Martaina mumbled. “I’m left to be a bit envious over here-”
“Come on,” Cyrus said. “I like J’anda’s philosophy. We ignore it from the rank and file, you people can’t ignore it from me?”
“Usually, yes,” Terian said. “Tonight’s round of … I don’t even know how to describe that. I’m fair certain you tried to stuff an angry raccoon into your bedroll, not a full-blooded dark elven woman.”
Aisling froze next to Cyrus. “I doubt you’d know the difference at this point, as cavalier as you are.”
“Oh, I’d know the difference.” Cyrus could hear the grin in Terian’s voice. “More bite and scratch marks from the dark elf.”
There was a pause, and Cyrus looked at Aisling. “Thank you for not biting and scratching,” he said. “Much.”
She shrugged. “I try to be considerate.”
“But not of your neighbors in camp,” Terian mumbled.
“Would all of you shut up?” Curatio said. “Please. As mentioned, this is hardly the first time any of us have heard a couple being intimate in our midst. This isn’t anything new, I assure you-”
“I’m pretty sure I just heard something done that was new to me,” Martaina mumbled.
Curatio glared at her. “And we all have a long day ahead of us. Go to sleep.”
There was a murmured assent to the healer’s words, and Cyrus felt Aisling next to him but not leaning into him tonight. She was like that sometimes, preferring her space. He lay there, eyes open, staring up at the sky as the first flake of snow made its way down onto his forehead. He felt the next on his cheek, and the one that followed landed on his nose. The fire caught them as they descended, more and more of them now, and Cyrus shook out of the bedroll and quickly dressed, strapping his armor on. That done, he sat by the fire and stared into the flames as they licked at the logs in their midst. He paused and found the nearby pile, brushed the newly fallen snow off of it and threw one on the fire.
“I’m surprised you can’t sleep after all that.” Cyrus’s eyes jumped to the voice, sitting opposite him. It was Curatio, his fair hair highlighted by the dancing flames, watching the fire.
“Things on my mind,” Cyrus replied. “You?”
Curatio had his mace lying across his lap and flicked the button to cause the spikes to roll out. “A thing or two I’m thinking about, yes.”
“You could have saved the elves,” Cyrus said, a thought hitting him out of nowhere. “You and your fellow Old Ones. You could have had a mountain of kids with elven women, and the curse would be beaten out by your own efforts.”
Curatio looked at him and raised an eyebrow. “In spite of your obvious efforts at practice, I’m going to hazard a guess you’ve never had children of your own.” He waited for Cyrus’s shake of the head. “I couldn’t do that, just have a hundred or two hundred children and leave them to be raised by someone else. I had two, only seventy years ago. Two very fine daughters, and it was a chore for me to leave them when they had reached the age of human maturity.” He shook his head. “Besides, that wouldn’t have saved the elven people. Not really. Our Kingdom has slouched toward death, become stagnant. The people grow old in spirit but only slowly in body. They live long enough to become fearful for their mortality but not immortal enough to take some reckless chances. Their craving for security over all else makes them weak.”
“Weak?” Cyrus chuckled. “They aren’t that weak.”
“They are,” Curatio said. “The whole Kingdom totters from it. It’ll fall in another thousand years or less, even absent the curse. They need new blood. Having to have their women breed with humans will be good for them. It’ll water down that long life, perhaps force them to innovate and grow again instead of always moving too damned slowly to do anything differently. The world is changing around them and if they don’t change with it, they’ll be irrelevant anyway.”
“Pretty cavalier attitude for someone whose race is dying.”
Curatio snorted. “My race is already dead. We Old Ones were elves, true elves, if you want to get into an
