The dawn found him sleepless, in his tower room, with his armor already strapped on. He left as the first rays came over the horizon. The stableboy, a red-haired, freckled lad, yawned and handed over the reins to Windrider. Cyrus took them and mounted up, riding the long way around the castle, through the southern courtyard and the western one, until he reached the northern one and its gate, taking particular note of the southern gate as he passed it, the portcullis down and rusted, ominous in the silence pouring forth from beyond it.
Cyrus rode out the north gate of Enrant Monge, and found an assemblage waiting. Curatio and J’anda, Terian and Longwell, along with Aisling, who rode next to Mendicant. Not far from them waited another figure, smaller, and Cyrus called out when he saw him.
“What is he doing unbound?” Cyrus asked, pointing at Partus, who sat upon his horse, his warhammer slung behind him.
“It seemed the thing to do,” Curatio said, drawing Cyrus’s attention.
“The suicidal thing to do, you mean,” Cyrus said. “He killed me.”
“Now, now,” J’anda said, “you’ve died several times. What’s the harm in one more?”
“I don’t know,” Cyrus said, irritable. “What was your name again? I’m having trouble remembering.”
The enchanter shrugged and smiled, then loosed an illusion upon himself that made him look like Cyrus, armor and all. “Do you think you could remember my name now, you handsome devil?”
“That’s pretty damned disturbing,” Terian said, trying not to look at the two of them. “If the two of you touch each other, will you become one massive Cyrus, like, twelve feet tall?”
“No,” J’anda-Cyrus said, “we would simply touch, just as would happen with anyone else.”
“Are you sure?” Aisling said, staring at the two of them with undisguised amusement. “Try giving each other a hug and a kiss, just to be certain.”
“That’s revolting,” Terian said.
“I could stand to watch it a little while,” Aisling said with a coy smile. “And then maybe participate-”
“Ugh, ugh, ugh,” Terian said, shaking his head and speaking so loudly that it drowned out the rest of Aisling’s sentence.
“You know,” J’anda said with a raised eyebrow at Cyrus, “if you wanted to really disturb Terian-”
“No,” Cyrus said, and then looked his doppelganger up and down. “It’s not that you’re not pretty enough,” he said with more lightness than he actually felt, “but I find that this morning I’m simply not in the mood.”
“Hah,” J’anda-Cy said as Terian gagged in the background. “The way you say that would seem to indicate that later you would-”
“No.” Cyrus shook his head. “But you do look good like that.”
Cyrus looked over the space before them. They were on a dusty road, assembling with a few others. Cyrus saw Count Ranson and another man, clad in the surcoat Cyrus had seen on the men of Actaluere, speaking with Briyce Unger, who seemed to be watching them both with little interest. A guard posse of thirty or so was assembled near Unger, and Cyrus urged Windrider forward toward the King of Syloreas, catching Unger’s attention when he neared.
“We’ll be riding at a fair clip,” Briyce Unger said with a nod of acknowledgment to Cyrus. “Not so hard as to kill the horses, but we’ll be pushing them. Likely need some time to rest and care for them between rides, but I hope your animals are up to a hard pace, because we’ll be traveling north for at least the next month to get to Scylax.” The King looked at them soberly.
Without another word, Unger turned his horse around and yelled while spurring it, causing the horse to whinny and charge ahead at a gallop. Unger’s guard began to trot forward as well, following their King. Cyrus waited for Count Ranson and the Actaluere envoy to fall in and he waved a hand directing the Sanctuary force, numbering somewhere around twenty-five, he estimated, to fall in behind them.
They rode hard for the rest of the day, taking breaks every few hours to care for the horses and feed the men. Unger marveled when Cyrus had Mendicant conjure oats for the animals, shaking his massive, shaggy head. “You westerners and your magicians,” he said as his horse fed, “our ancestors had the right of it; your land is one in which our men do not belong.”
“I’m a man,” Cyrus said, raising his eyebrow at Unger. “And I have no magic. You saying I don’t belong?”
“Don’t know,” Unger said. “Can you fight those fellows that use it?”
“I’ve fought a few,” Cyrus said. “Killed a few, too.”
“All the better for you,” Unger said with a smirk. “Perhaps I’ll get the chance one of these days.” The King’s smirk faded. “Not anytime soon, though, I hope. We need all the help we can get now, magical and otherwise.”
“What’s it been like?” Cyrus asked as he ran a brush along Windrider’s side.
Briyce Unger didn’t answer for a moment. They stood under a tree that was ten times the height of a man, and Cyrus could see the sun shine through the boughs, casting leaf-shaped shadows on the King of Syloreas’s face which moved subtly as the leaves swayed in the wind. The shadows moved, the shifting patches of darkness giving Unger’s face the tint of a man uncertain, greyed out, cast in shadow. “They come in great numbers. One or two of them is no challenge; like fighting any man or perhaps a cunning bear or mountain lion.”
A very slight smile crept over his lips. “I rode back from Galbadien, from the war, when I got the message from one of my nobles in the mountains saying his hall and the villages around him had been overrun by beasts he could scarce describe-that it was like things out of our old mountain legends, the things that would bring about the end of all men. This man was brave and old and rode with my father in wars that could only be described as fearful. I went home, as fast as I could, and made it only in time to fight one battle with this scourge, this plague.
“I’ve fought battles,” Unger said, his face haunted. “You know, I can tell by your face you’ve been in a melee or twelve. You don’t fear the battle, you thrill to it. I do, anyway. But this battle was different. I’ve been overmatched before, no shame in that. Being outnumbered is a northman’s lot, it’s the way of Syloreas. We fight harder because we have fewer men, that’s the way of things.
“But these … creatures,” he pronounced with disgust, “they keep coming. We met them in a village in a pass. They came at us, and the battle was good at first; I was up to my knees in their dead by the end of the first hour, as it should be. The second hour, I was up to my chest in a pile of my own dead, and still they came. They do not bend with the chaos, they do not ebb with loss; they are implacable, unstoppable, insatiable in their desire to destroy all around them, and they gave me a taste of fear, I am not ashamed to say.” The King of Syloreas stopped, and looked at Cyrus, shaking his head. “My first taste in a long, long while. I have never, not in battles where my men were outnumbered ten to one, not even on the day I found myself alone in a pack of wolves, ever felt so afraid and surrounded by the odds arrayed against me.”
The King of Syloreas swallowed hard. “I confess I thought myself a coward after that. Retreat against poor odds is acceptable; sometimes a strategic retreat is the only way you can win a war later, or preserve a Kingdom to fight through another day. But when I ran from that village, I did not do it strategically or in the name of preserving anything but my own arse against a foe that seemed unstoppable, a scourge that looked to take everything, and fill the land from end to end with my dead and theirs until I could see no more ground.”
Cyrus listened and watched the King as he shook his head once more in amazement, or consternation at his own story, and walked away from Cyrus still shaking his head.
The next days were long and hard on the horses. Cyrus, for his part, had been riding on horseback so heavily for the last few months that it seemed almost as though he would live the rest of his life there. It was almost as if he had known no other life but this, save for a brief spell in the castle of Vernadam, when he slept in a bed and received all the blessings of civilization, and all the affections a woman could give.
By the time the second week of their ride had rolled around, the days were long again for riding, and Cyrus found his mind weary. Sleep did not come easily at night, and his restless slumber was punctuated by evenings when he thought of Cattrine, of their encounter at Enrant Monge, and he tossed and turned in his bedroll near the fire, unable to find any relief.
His eyes wandered frequently during the ride, as the fatigue conspired to wear him down. Aisling always seemed to be about, though she kept her distance from him. He found himself looking for her, especially when he rode near the back of the group. He watched her on her horse, his eyes drinking in the curves of her body, and he
