“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, about putting one foot before the other as you navigate the spare areas where nothing remains in a blighted heart. The only thing I can do for now is to keep going, to hold to my duty of fighting the battles placed before me, seeing to the tasks appointed me. You want me to believe? You want me to hope? This is hardly the first time in my life that I’ve been hollowed out, not the first by far that I’ve lost hope. In those moments, I’ve learned to keep walking, to keep going, to hold not to hope, but to whatever I can. I won’t be the same man I was before, but I won’t be like this forever, either, I doubt.” He let show the faintest, most rueful smile. “The thought that I would … doesn’t bear consideration.”
“When will we see this new Cyrus?” she asked as he resumed his course toward the river, the smell of the grasses carrying over him, the light whipping of the wind at his armor a pleasant distraction.
“Whenever I get to him,” Cyrus said, and he heard her footsteps cease. He did not look back, but he knew she was not following him any longer. “Whenever I meet him.”
Chapter 56
The river was not fast moving, nor was it much of a river at all. It was somewhere between a creek and a river, a halfway between thing, not deep enough for Cyrus to worry much about wading across if he so desired, but deep enough for him to stick to the riverbank. He undressed himself and then sat upon the bank and let go of his sword. There was no one around, though he could see Martaina in the distance, between him and the encampment. A split from the river was visible, something that wended much closer to the camp, indeed almost through it, and he wondered why she had suggested this place for him before the reason of privacy dawned upon him.
He sat upon the bank and let the sun crawl lower in the sky, unconcerned. His head no longer swam, and his breathing was deep and steady, taking in the plains air. The grasses here were different than those around Sanctuary, fuller-more oats, he thought, less tamed. The Plains of Perdamun were broken and dotted with farms; these grounds were spotted only occasionally with settlement. He dipped his feet in the water and felt the coolness run over his toes. He looked to the direction of the light current and realized it came from the north, from the mountains in the far distance, where the enemy lay.
He stood and slid into the water, wading in on his knees, as it covered him to the waist. His knees touched the thousand pebbles on the bottom of the stream, and he let the current run over him, let himself fall back, let his hair submerge, long black locks clinging to his head as they dampened. He kept his face above the water then dipped it under for a moment, felt it run into his nose and he broke the surface sputtering, snorting it out.