Once A Hero

  As we arrived in the grove, I realized the one huge mistake I had made. Having dived into the Dreel, I dived out at the other end of the trip. I landed on my left shoulder, sending pain through me, then I rolled and kept rolling. I rolled on out of the grove and in doing so saved my life.

  Tacorzi did not land in much better shape than I did, but I was much smaller than he was. As his body came into the grove, it bounced off the ground and slammed into trees on the other side of the grove. That collision sheered limbs from both trees and Tacorzi. Bits and pieces or bones pelted me as they flew out from between the trees. Those that hit me tumbled on after leaving my coat stained with white powder, and a blizzard of bone dust filled the grove itself.

  I let things settle for a minute and made certain I had not been hurt. Because I had no indication Tacorzi still lived, I got to my feet and walked back to the grove. A black puddle, looking like the corrupted yolk of a giant egg lay near the edge of the tree circle. Stulklirn walked around the perimeter, shaking white dust from his coat. His fur now bore a white cross on his chest, but he seemed not to have noticed the change.

  I shrugged off my coat and massaged my shoulder. "Are you hurt, Stulklirn?"

  The Dreel shook his head. "Hurt I am not."

  "Are you certain?" I rubbed my chest reflexively. "I know what that spell did to me a long time ago."

  "Dreel-friend you are, so know this you may." He pointed at what had once been Takrakor. "The gods made men to kill men. To the Dreel for prey Bok gave sorcerers." He exposed his teeth in a feral grin. "Magick they have, magick we are. This is why lifeblack has pooled."

  Chapter 37:

  The Hero As A Man

  Early Winter

  A.R. 499

  The Present

  ***

  MORE THAN THE stitch in her side and the throbbing pain on her cheek, Gena felt the cold as she slowly awakened. She found herself slumped in a corner between an ice wall and the cavern floor. The fire her spell had made out of a zombi still guttered a bit, holding the azure shadows at bay, but it produced little heat. She shoved her hands into her mittens again, then found her hat and made sure to tuck the numb tips of her ears beneath the woolen band when she pulled it on.

  Even though her toes and parts of her legs felt numb, she was able to move around. Her ribs ached on the right side, and her right eye had already begun to swell half-closed, but she resisted using a diagnostic spell on herself. She knew her injuries were not bad and that the greatest threat to her welfare came from the cold. Her magick could do something to ward off the cold, but if she used all her strength healing herself, she might freeze to death afterward.

  She staggered to her feet and felt surprised when the little cry of pain she uttered echoed back to her through the silence. Am I alone? Panic rippled through her, but she fought it down. "This is no time to be jumping to any sort of conclusions about anything."

  Gena looked first toward where the thing had been. She shivered, but less from the cold than from the memory of what Takrakor had become. She had always used the name Takrakor as something that defined evil in her mind, but Tacorzi superseded the worst. Takrakor, as she had heard in many stories, had been ambitious, and that she could understand. Tacorzi, on the other hand, remained alive while dead, maintained by a hatred for a Man he himself had slain five centuries previously. It was malignant and insane.

  She saw neither the creature nor Neal, and that worried her. The Dreel appeared to be gone as well, so she drifted off to her left toward a mound in the midst of a bone-strewn mire. The stink of rotted meat almost overwhelmed her as she approached, but the struggling gasp for breath that emanated from the twisted lump in the center drew her on.

  Berengar lay in the midst of what had once been a zombi or two. Viscous black fluids saturated his clothes. Deep down, where great rents had been opened in his clothes to his flesh and beyond, she saw his blood frozen bright red in his wounds. A bone-spear poked through the left leg of his thick leather trousers. One of his ears hung half bitten off, his right shoulder looked dislocated, and his left eye had more red than white in it.

  Without a second thought Gena cast a diagnostic spell on him and got some added information. Berengar's nose had been broken, ribs bruised, and one kidney lacerated. She dared not move him because where his blood had not yet clotted, it had frozen, which was likely the only reason he had not yet bled to death from some of the slashes inflicted by the zombies and the flaying whip of a bone tentacle.

  She eased herself down onto her knees and concentrated. She mentally listed his injuries and determined for herself which ones were more important and which were fleas so. Once she had things in a workable order, she set out casting the spells that would bring him as close to functioning as possible without jeopardizing her ability to help them survive in the cold.

  Her first spell gently lifted the body from the ground and sealed it in an evergreen cocoon. Brighter bits of green worked along the body, deep within the cocoon, slowly [tfaafting] along the cuts and gashes like inchworms. In short order, with a very low energy expenditure on her part, Gena's spell repaired all the holes in Berengar's flesh. She specifically did not have the glowworms leech blood from the bruises, because his body would do that naturally after a number of days. The spell could have done that, but it would have been more expensive in terms of her strength.

  The damage to his kidney concerned her the most after making sure he would not leak anymore. As nearly as she could tell, it had been a puncture wound from a zombi weapon. She did not worry so much about blood poisoning from it as she did about making certain that all the little blood vessels were repaired in the organ. The spell she selected for repairing it took more time than the glowworms and cost her far more in terms of energy, but really just employed smaller, smarter versions of the glowworms to do the job.

  Once that was taken care of, she used a spell to purge, purify and heighten production of blood. From there she repaired his leg so he could move, put his ear back together, and worked his arm back into the socket. That still left him his bruises, broken nose, ribs, and bloodshot eye, but she had no more strength to use and he had already started to come around.

  Berengar winced as he eased himself into a sitting position. "Gena, your face, you have a cut and a bruise."

  She nodded. "And your nose has a new bump, and your left eye will swell fully shut in no time."

  He tried to laugh, then held his ribs. "I have other injuries, I see."

  Gena smiled wearily. "I was able to fix many things, but ine will have to heal on their own."

  "Where is Neal?"

  "I don't know."

  "Did he abandon us?"

  The disgust in Berengar's voice surprised Gena. "I don't know if he did or not, but I have noticed that Tacorzi is no longer here."

  "And the dagger?"

  "Gone as well." Gena looked around in the gloom. "Neal's sword and the flashdrakes are on the ground, I cannot tell if the handcannons have been used or not."

  The count looked off toward the center of the cavern, then shook his head. "So that thing was a Reithrese?"

  She shrugged. "It may once have been. It certainly seemed to know Neal."

  "And now he's run off and it's chasing him." Berengar gingerly got to his feet.

  "I don't know that Neal ran from the thing." She pointed off toward where Tacorzi had sat. "The flashdrakes are nearer the center than they are the way out of here. Neal and Stulklirn and Tacorzi are just gone."

  "I suppose you're right. I think we should collect our things, leave this place, and get back to where we left our supplies. We need fire and food and shelter, none of which we have here." He groaned and wobbled a bit, but managed to stay upright. "Feeling as I do now, I do not believe I want to know what you had to fix."

  "Agreed."

  Working together, they managed to make the trek from Tacorzi's lair to the cavern in which they had spent the previous evening. Gena made a fire and started melting snow into water fo
r tea while Berengar shucked off his clothes and wrapped himself in blankets. His nose and ribs clearly hurt him, and the bruises on his body were as multicolored as they were oddly shaped, but he bore his wounds stoically. His insistence that she drink and eat before he did marked his concern for her, but he did not protest too much when she volunteered to take the first watch.

  "A couple of hours, then you will sleep. Promise me."

  Gena did and tossed some more wood onto the fire. She figured their meagre supply would last through the night and into the next day. By then they should be able to travel to more hospitable environs. She smiled and tried to think about more pleasant places to be, both to keep her awake and to keep her mind from wondering if Neal actually had abandoned them. Her efforts failed in both things, and exhausted, she succumbed to sleep before she had a chance to rouse Berengar.

  Gena woke with a start when she realized she was sweating. Coming awake, she remembered that she was supposed to be tending the fire. Afraid it had gone out while she dozed, she looked at it and found it burning []ly. That fact and her feeling very warm slowly came to her in her sleep-besotted brain. What welded them into a single, coherent thought was seeing Neal squatting across the fire from her.

  "How are you, Gena?"

  "Hot and sore." She looked from him to Berengar and over to where Stulklirn lay curled around a huge pile of wood. "Where did that come from?"

  "Outside Jarudin."

  She shook her head. "But it would take months to get there and back." She glanced at the unconscious Dreel.

  "We would have been back sooner, but Stulklirn had to catch a nap after the initial trip. Gave me time to gather the wood."

  "What happened? Where is Tacorzi?"

  Neal shrugged as he rubbed his hands together.

  "Tacorzi is dead."

  "How?"

  The Man frowned. "Actually, he always was dead, I just let him decay. Walking through the cold, I remembered Reithrese bodies I'd seen trapped in avalanches and in the mountains after a storm. Frozen, they didn't decay. From something Tacorzi said, I assumed he came up here to stop his body from falling apart."

  Gena laughed before a twinge in her side stopped her. His plan didn't work very well." Neal nodded and gave her a grin that helped ease her

  "Indeed, he did go to pieces. He built himself up [tier] body the way he did for his brother, but Takrakor only had bones and corpse-crumbs to work with. Anyway, Stulklirn and I dragged him south, and five hundred years of decay caught up with him fast."

  "The Dreel is unharmed?" Gena pointed to the white cross on his chest. "He was hit by a very powerful spell."

  "Tacorzi meant that spell for me. I guess it didn't affect the Dreel that much."

  Gena could tell Neal was being deceptive, but her brain felt too fuzzy to figure out why or where he was hiding something. That conclusion resonated against Berengar's earlier suspicion that they'd been abandoned. She wanted to dismiss her unease instantly—for Neal's return and his thoughtfulness at bringing the wood spoke to his loyalty to his companions—but something stopped her.

  Neal tossed another log on the fire, and a shower of sparks obscured him for a moment. "Go back to sleep, Gena. Tomorrow, when we are all set, we will go to Jarudin. I have Wasp, and with it Cleaveheart will once again be mine."

  Gena felt much better when she awoke again. Berengar had regained consciousness before she had, and between them, he and Neal had loaded all of their supplies on the horses. While Neal tied Gena's bedroll behind Spirit's saddle, Gena used magick to heal the last of Berengar's injuries, then gratefully partook in a breakfast of tea, traveler's bread, and some currants Neal had brought from the forest outside Jarudin.

  The journey through Stulklirn to Jarudin passed so quickly for her that she wondered if she had somehow fallen asleep. She decided she had not, but that her thoughts had moved slowly while her body moved so fast. That was just as well, because she had allowed herself to brood about Neal and the fear his absence had planted in her.

  Since before she could remember remembering, her grandfather and grandaunt had sung Neal's praises. She could recall when she became conscious of the fact that Neal was a Man, not an Elf, and that fact made him much more of an exotic and romantic figure in her mind. It made him unique and different and filled her with a desire to know all she could about him. For almost two hundred fifty years, when her studies and travels had allowed it, she had studied Neal and the trail of stories he had left in his wake.

  Truths about herself and Neal and their relationship began to dawn on her slowly. She saw that she had viewed him as a hero first and a Man second, which was not surprising, given how her kin had presented Neal to her. In seeing him as a hero, she filled in any gaps in his life, any details she could not learn, with things suitably heroic. His humanity, which lay at the core of everything he did, became lost behind the legend he had become.

  Besides not taking his humanity into account, she realized she had been expecting a lot more from him than he had delivered, and that caused some resentment on her part. She had spent centuries learning about him, dreaming about him, and drawing conclusions about him. In her mind she had played out fantasies and adventures in which they had been able to travel together. She had already decided how he would react to her, and her musings built one then another to fashion a whole relationship that Neal was presently not living up to.

  The fact that Neal knew nothing of her imagined relationship with him, and therefore could not react properly to it, had not occurred to her until now. In her fantasies Neal never would have abandoned her. He would have torn Tacorzi apart with his bare hands, then would have tended to her injuries with the same facility he had shown in killing the Reithrese monster. In truth Neal had not abandoned her, but had returned after destroying Tacorzi. But the fact that he had not done it in the way she would cave imagined him doing it left doubt in her mind and room for distrust.

  She felt uneasy in allowing herself even a touch of disgust about Neal, but she acknowledged that she had no idea what he was thinking. His initial anger with her made sense, but he calmed down and seemed to accept his place in their quest. At least that was how she saw it, but she wanted to know how he saw it. Was he just an adjunct to Berengar's quest, a companion who would facilitate the completion of their mission, or did he have his own agenda? And if he did, what sort of agenda would survive five centuries in the grave?

  Her musings ended when they arrived in the grove a day's ride from Jarudin. Her horse's hooves kicked up a lot of bone dust as she trotted on into the circle of trees. She briefly recalled Neal's explanation of what had happened to Tacorzi, which is why she reined her horse away from the black circle within which all the grass had died. She urged her mount on out of the circle, then swung from the saddle. She caught a stirrup with her hand and managed to stay on her feet even though her legs wanted to collapse.

  Berengar rode up beside her and looked down with surprise. "Come on, there are still a couple of hours of daylight. We can make headway on the journey to the capital."

  Neal came over on Scurra and stopped directly in Berengar's path. "We can leave tomorrow."

  "No, the sooner we get there, the sooner we can be in Aurdon with Cleaveheart and end all this. If we delay, more people might die."

  Neal hunched forward, resting both hands on the saddle pommel. "Son, if we push on today, I will die. I'm tired. I'm stopping." He pointed off to the west. "If you want to ride on to Jarudin, we'll meet you there."

  "Fine, give me the dagger."

  "I don't think so."

  "What?"

  Neal straightened back up again, and Gena got the impression he was not as tired as he had made himself out to be. "To you this dagger is nothing but an artifact that is the key to a puzzle you need to solve. To me it's a weapon I've used for years. It's mine, and I'm not giving it over to you just because you want to ride fast to the capital."

  Berengar dropped a hand to the hilt of his sword. "You might wish to ret
hink your decision."

  "Unlikely." Neal nodded once, and the Dreel swatted Berengar from his saddle. The count's horse bolted forward as Berengar crashed to the ground. He started to come up, but Stulklirn pressed him back down to the earth with a paw.

  "You foul coward!"

  Neal laughed. "You are fatigued, my lord Count, and not thinking clearly. Rest with us here and you will see things clearly in the morning."

  Gena was pleased to see that Berengar appeared to be in a better humor in the morning. He rose slowly and moved as if a bit achy, then straightened up and walked almost normally when he noticed the Dreel shadowing his every move. He bowed to Gena and Neal, then spoke to them in a solemn voice.

  "Please, I beg forgiveness for my actions last night. He hesitated as if finding words were not easy. "My family is in jeopardy. I realize now that I had always looked for a simple solution to all this business, but it has become very complex, from Durriken's death to your resurrection and our journey to the north. We started in the spring and here it is the winter. I want to be back with my family and let them know I have—we have—succeeded in saving them. All this is urgent to me, and I lack perspective"

  Neal nodded. "Apology accepted. I understand why you want this to be over soon. Believe me when I tell you that because I started the trouble, I want to see it through the finish as much as you do."

  They breakfasted in silence mostly, then saddled up and [hea]ded out. Gena knew she could still use another day of it, but Berengar's urgency infected her and left her impatient to be gone. Stulklirn led the way and Berengar followed him. Gena and Neal hung back a bit and occasionally lost sight of their companions.

  Neal studied the landscape and shook his head. "This looks so much as it was when I first rode here with your grandfather, yet the edges of this forest have been nibbled away. Back then the last half of the journey came within precincts of the forests." He pointed to the scattered [tree]s and the milling herds dotting the rolling meadows. "No humans in Ispar owned farms—they were all slaves on Reithrese plantations."