Edge-
His good hand reached out, scraping against the stone surface, and he caught himself just as he started to fall over. The jarring ran down his whole arm, all the way up to the shoulder where he felt the scream of pain, agonizing, ligaments tearing and protesting as he held his own weight and all that of his armor with one hand. He hung there, fingers tight against the stone, as he fought to get the other up to grip the edge. A blast of foul, rotting breath hit him in the face like a physical blow and he recoiled. His eyes danced toward the shore, miles and miles off. Not in this armor. Not on a day when I was fully rested, let alone one where I’ve fought without sleep nor a good meal in over a day …
The face of Drettanden appeared over him, at the edge, looking down. The red eyes twitched, and Cyrus could hear pain being inflicted on the creature by the Sanctuary army behind him. It doesn’t care. It stared at him, two red abysses looking deep into his own eyes, and Cyrus watched the dead god raise his foot, five claws hanging off the grey flesh-raised it and brought it down-
Chapter 110
He remembered the arena in a flash, like the rumored last memory that came before certain death. It was more than a feeling, more than words; it was everything about the experience, all summed up in something that lasted a mere second of time but encompassed so much else beyond that.
Six. I was six.
The man’s name was Erkhardt, and Cyrus knew him only in passing. A dwarf he was, the one who had waited outside the Society the night that Cyrus had been brought back as a child. The dwarf smelled of old leather and wafts of something else, a strong, fermented scent. He stood before young Cyrus, in the arena, the quiet all around them. Cyrus shuddered, the chill in the air from winter. His eyes caught the glint of the still-burning candles off the axe slung over the dwarf’s shoulder, a battle axe with a blade wider than Cyrus’s entire body. He shivered again, rubbing his hands against his bare arms; since being assigned no blood family, the clothing that was fought over once per month when new skins and cloth came in had been too difficult for him to secure. Blood Families stick together for everything. Cyrus was small, too small to fight them all. Put me against the ones my own age and I’d-but I can’t, the others are too big, they’re just too big, and the Guildmaster will-
“Listen,” the dwarf said.
Cyrus did. He was not allowed to address any of the trainers unless they asked him for a response. None of the others even addressed him individually, let alone found him where he hid in the night and bade him to follow them to the arena.
“Do you hear that?” Erkhardt asked.
“No,” Cyrus said, his voice unusually small even to him.
“That’s silence, lad,” the dwarf said with a slight smile, one finger held in the air. “The silence of rest. You’ve learned to hide yourself; that’s good. It’ll be necessary until you get bigger, big enough to fight them. You’ll be a big lad too, no doubt. Until then … you need to learn something.”
Cyrus waited, patiently. I will not speak until spoken to, I will not speak until spoken to, ran through his head over and over. He felt a weak memory of pain radiating from his lip until that lesson had sunk in. There was a question, though, one that he wanted, needed to ask, couldn’t contain anymore. “Can you take my fear away?”
The dwarf blinked at him. “Sorry, what?”
Cyrus swallowed, hard. “What the Guildmaster said on the first day. He said he could teach us to be without fear. I don’t … I don’t want to be afraid anymore.”
Erkhardt surveyed him with a solemn eye. “What are you afraid of?”
Cyrus swallowed, hard. “Everything.”
The dwarf gave him a subtle nod. “You need not fear everything. And I don’t know that there’s any man who is truly fearless.”
“But the Guildmaster said-”
“The Guildmaster,” Erkhardt says, “fears many things. Bellarum, for one. The Leagues and the Council of Twelve, for others. Listen,” he knelt down, just slightly, to put his hand on Cyrus’s shoulder. Cyrus stared at the subtle pressure in surprise; no one had touched him since the night he’d returned to the Society for any purpose other than striking him. “The only way a man can be truly fearless is to care for absolutely nothing, including his own life. That’s a dark road, and few enough men can become soulless enough to pull it off.” He gave Cyrus a reassuring smile. “If you want courage-which is the virtue of being able to look fear in the face in spite of all the daunting it would give you, well, that’s something I can tell you about.”
Cyrus felt his lips crack open and the words desperately wanted to come out in a plea, begging for the how. Instead he remained silent.
“To put aside fear,” Erkhardt said, “you must confront it. Courage is standing up to it, facing it. Pain, suffering,” he put a hand on Cyrus’s jaw and a slight twinge radiated out from it from where he had been hit a week earlier. “These are normal things to fear. If you want to master fear, stare it in the eyes.” Erkhardt stood. “And if you want to be able to face it harder than any other man you know, then find something … something you truly can believe in, put your faith in, your trust in … and you fight for that thing. Or that person.” Erkhardt looked out the sidelong path up the arena steps. “They won’t tell you that here. They’ll tell you about the God of War, they’ll tell you to believe in him. I carry my doubts that that’s the best way to proceed. But I’ll tell you this, a man who’s fighting for something he believes in will fight ten times as hard and look worlds more fearless than a man who cares for nothing, believes in nothing. An empty soul means when times become hardest, it doesn’t matter that you’re fearless, because you’re not going to fight for anything but yourself anyway.”
Cyrus looked into those dark eyes, saw the warmth in them-the last warmth I saw for some time after that, the adult Cyrus remembered-and listened. “Now,” Erkhardt says, “there’s something you need to learn before I leave this place. Something more important than believing …”
Cyrus blinked and the memory, the feeling, was no more than that. His fingers strained at the edge of the bridge, the sun beat down overhead on the face of Drettanden, and those red eyes stared back at him. The smell of salt air from the sea wafted under his nose, his knuckles ached and longed to be set loose, and he wondered in that moment if there was, in fact, anything left to believe in.
Chapter 111
Vara
Day 223 of the Siege of Sanctuary
It was broken loose now, all manner of hell, and she knew it from her place on the wall. The smell of something new was in the air, acrid, sharp, oddly chemical, like something from an alchemist’s shop but worse. It wafted in the smoke that came from where the wall had exploded, and even now the crater where the gates had stood only moments earlier was filled from the surge of dark elves, clambering across the dead space of the battlefield. The smell of the dead was overwhelming.
She jumped from the top of the wall without thought, hitting at the bottom of the thirty-foot fall and already whispering a healing spell as she heard her leg break. There was a push as the bone realigned itself and thrust her back to her feet, her joint pain subsiding as she ran, charging toward the place where the enemy was coming through into the yard, picking through the debris with shouts and screams of imminent victory. They smell the blood of their foe. They know it comes soon, the end. But I will show them their end, not ours. Coming through that wall is the worst mistake they have made yet, because now they face the teeth of this tigress. She didn’t smile, but it was close, a white-hot rage at the violation of her home. And this tigress is bloody hungry.