She watched the steady stream of water come down, smelled the freshness of the rain, dissipating the last aromas of the dinner being prepared inside, as though she had taken a drink of water to cleanse her palate between courses of a sumptuous meal. “Yes, I have heard you talk of these philosophies before, of how we grow in storms, in times of trouble. I daresay we will be doing some considerable growing here.” He looked over his shoulder at her briefly, then settled back into his position, arms up, palms tilted skyward as though he could capture the rains for himself. “Alaric, I must tell you something.”
He did not move, still drawing strength from the waters coming down around him. “All right,” he said. “Go on.”
“What you talked about before,” she said. “About taking our purpose to its natural conclusion-to defending this place to the last. I wanted to tell you … I have believed in you as a leader and a friend since the days when I was so ground up inside that it felt as though there was nothing left within me but shattered glass. My sword has served you in noble cause all the days since the first, when I swore my allegiance to Sanctuary-and it shall not falter now.”
“I never doubted you for a moment,” he said, still not turning. “But I admit I am curious; why this profession to me now?”
“Because,” she said at a whisper, “I saw you. You doubted yourself, and that is not something I am accustomed to from you, Alaric. You have been ever the constant to me, since the day you carried me back here from the Realm of Purgatory. I am used to seeing all manner of breakage around here-from the days of Orion and … what the hells was that gnome’s name, the troublesome one? I have seen everyone go to pieces at one time or another, myself included. But not you, Alaric. Your title is Guildmaster, and you are affectionately known as the Master of Sanctuary, but it is better said that you are the Master of yourself. You do not fall apart, not ever. Not when the Dragonlord threatens to consume the entire north, not when every power in Arkaria rallies to destroy us, not when we stood before the God of Death himself and you bartered for our very lives. Yet now, in this time, you begin to show the signs of strain.” She watched him, saw the rain cascading off his pauldrons of battered steel in sheets as the tempo of the rains began to increase. “You … falter. You crack. I wanted you to realize that you have my support-and my affection-for all that you have done and do. That I have ever considered you a friend and a mentor, and that I will follow you in this crusade of being the stopgap against the fall of Arkaria until its conclusion, whatever that may be.”
There was no response at first, and then Alaric brought a hand to gesture her forward. “Come out to me.” He began to walk forward, down the steps, toward the lawn.
She let out an impatient hiss. “Alaric, it is a deluge out there.”
He turned back and stared at her with wry amusement. “You say you will follow me into death yet fear to tread in the rain. What am I to think of your level of conviction?” The corner of his mouth contained the barest hint of an upward creep, as though he were holding in a smile, rueful or otherwise.
She sighed and stepped out of the slight cover she was under. The rain began to patter upon her helm, and she took another step forward, reminded all at once of the sound of rain tapping on windows when she was a child in Termina.
“Very good,” Alaric said as she reached the bottom of the steps where he waited. “There is a lesson in all this, you realize.” He looked to a tree to their right, a good ways off, a tall one, one that Vara had sat under more than once on summer days while reading. “In the winds of the storm, the boughs of a tree spring back and forth, they bend in the gale. Sometimes, when the wind is strong, they crack. If you are close, you might perceive the sound. If it were a good break, it may be obvious to the sight. If a small one, it could go unnoticed.” He raised an eyebrow. “If you are not particularly close to the source, then you may not see the strain, hear the crack, until the branch falls.” She saw the pulse of a spell leave his hand, a weak burst, and it jarred a branch near the top of the tree, which was considerably high. A small bough broke loose and tumbled, catching in the upper branches until it fell, finally, to the earth. “Yet it cracks nonetheless. You simply do not see it until it is too late.”
She tore her eyes from the branch on the ground to Alaric, straining to hear him over the disconcerting sound of the rain hammering at her head and body. “You keep everyone at a distance. You maintain the vague and mysterious allure of a man whom no one knows. I suppose no one would be close enough to hear you strain and crack, would they?”
He smiled slightly. “Perhaps.”
“What would you have me learn from this, teacher?” She tried to keep the sarcasm out of her reply but somewhat failed, she knew. “A gardening lesson, perhaps? Tend to every branch of the tree, keep watch on them lest they fall at an inopportune time?”
He glanced upward and nodded his head, a flat expression of surprise on his lower face. “That is … not bad, actually. I was aiming more for a visual representation of the idea that you never know what lies beneath the surface of a body of water until you’ve been in it, but I did not wish to walk all the way around to the pond.”
She let a small laugh escape. “So it was merely a lesson in being vague and mysterious and keeping people at a distance in order to keep them from seeing you bend and break.”
He nodded with a slight smile of his own. “Close enough. I have endeavored in the last years to get you to soften that edge you keep about you, the one that holds others at a distance. I told you before in your dealings with Cyrus that your protective instincts would drive him away. I have no desire to keep harping on what I perceive as your attempts to sabotage your own happiness, especially as you are aware of them. The lesson closest to what I want to tell you is this-” He stepped closer to her and placed both hands on her shoulders, looked her in the eyes with the cool grey of his, and took a deep breath. “If you allow no one to stand close to you, no one will know when you are straining, when you are close to breaking, or the reason why. While I thought once, perhaps, this was a fine posture for a leader to maintain, I now doubt its efficacy, both as a leadership method and as a fulfilling way to live one’s life.” He glanced past her to the tree. “Also, it seems somewhat dangerous in its illustrative purposes. That branch could have hit someone, after all.”
She chuckled again. “You jest. You couch your lessons in jests. Truly, this is rare indeed. You stumble between morbidity and a clarity of thought that I can scarcely fathom and then go right back to humor, all in the space of seconds.”
He smiled. “I only wish to convey to you the mistakes I have made.”
“You’ve been a very good Guildmaster,” she said.
“I have made errors,” he said gravely, and she felt the squeeze of his hands as they clinked on her pauldrons. “Grave ones. Foolish ones. Almost all preventable, almost all brought about by my failure to trust my guildmates with things I should have told them. I have believed in you as well, all of you, that you were better than me. I felt my role here was to be secret-keeper, to mete and dole the things I had learned and acquired in their own time, fearing these secrets might be too much for anyone else to bear, that they might break you all or cause you to be under the same duress as myself. All it has done is isolate me, to put me off to the side, and make me shoulder every ounce of the burden. Indeed, now I am left to wonder if any of the things I held back ever had any real purpose at all, if it would not have been better for me to say plainly everything I knew and let the officers at least react with their own best judgment.” He sagged. “But that is a discussion that is entirely esoteric at this point; we are too far down the road now for anything less.”
“If you have no one to speak to about these things,” she said, “I would listen, as you have for me all these years.”
“I have rarely done that for you, my friend,” Alaric said with a smile. “And I am not totally bereft of those with which to speak some of my mind.” The smile disappeared. “Though I do miss Curatio at moments such as this. His wisdom was as great as his discretion, and there were things I could talk about with him that I dare not with anyone else.” There was a slight twinkle in his eye at her. “Well, almost.”
They lapsed into quiet, and Alaric withdrew his hands from her shoulders. She thought on what he had said as the rain continued to fall around them.
His face darkened, and he stared at the tree as the rains washed over it. The air was clear now and fresh, the smell of all else washed away and replaced with the scent of good mud and earth. There was a flash of lightning on the horizon, and then a solid crack of thunder followed a few seconds later. She did not have to strain
