“Good enough,” Cyrus said, and meant it. “Just fetch me some bread or a chicken leg or something, right before we go.” He rubbed his eyes. “Let me sleep as long as possible, I’ll eat on the run.”
And he did so, as the boy returned to him an hour later with a mutton leg, and Cyrus ate it on his way out of the keep. His horse was saddled, cleaned, and waiting for him when he arrived, Briyce Unger himself holding the reins.
“Hello, Windrider,” Cyrus said with a burp, running a hand along the horse’s flank as he approached.
“Windrider?” Unger asked. “What kind of name is that for a horse? A bit girly, wouldn’t you say?”
“I don’t know,” Cyrus said, uncaring. “I didn’t name him.”
“Let’s be off, then, shall we?” Unger said, starting his horse toward the gate. “I trust you rested well.”
“I have a hangover,” Cyrus said, “but the sleep was fine.”
“No complaints with the hospitality?”
“I wish your servants had brought me less mead and ale,” Cyrus said, feeling a vein pulsing in his temple. “But that’s less a hospitality complaint and more one related to your servants helping me to curb my own bad instincts.”
Unger laughed, a deep bellowing one that grew deeper as they went out of the gate and found Terian working his way gingerly up the slope, looking incredibly uncomfortable in the saddle. “You look like you’re going to have a long day of riding ahead of you, lad.”
Terian grimaced, shifting himself awkwardly. “What happened to you?” Cyrus asked, drawing a pained expression from the dark knight.
“Let me tell you something about Sylorean women,” Terian said, bringing his horse into line next to Briyce Unger’s. “You may think this looks like a small town, and that perhaps their whores would be ignorant mountain wenches, unsure of which direction to ride a man. And you’d be wrong.” He shifted again in his saddle. “I have never in my life met a woman who did to me what that woman did to me last night. I hurt in places I didn’t know could hurt, was bent into positions I didn’t know I could be contorted into, like a braid of hair.” He shook his head. “And I’d love to go back, but I’m not sure I’d survive the experience.”
Unger let out another bellow of laughter. “You met Muna, did you?”
“Was that her name?” the dark knight asked mildly. “I didn’t hear it over the sound of my own screaming.”
Unger laughed again, and reached over to slap Terian on the back. “If you think she’s rough,” Unger said, “you should avoid Ashini. Muna takes it gentle on you folk from out of town as a rule.”
“The word gentle is not in her vocabulary,” Terian said with a cringe, “and not because she’s some ignorant mountain wench, but because she actually used a riding crop on me.”
“I’ve heard enough,” Cyrus said, blanching. “Keep your experiences to yourself.”
“Why?” Terian wore a nasty grin. “You starting to regret not coming with me?”
“I regret a lot of things in my life,” Cyrus said, “but not going with you last night doesn’t look to be one of them. I mean, it looks like you’re going to be walking bow-legged for a few days, which … maybe I’m old fashioned, but I thought it was supposed to be the woman who walks like that afterward, not the man.”
They rode down the mountain and out another gate, this one on the opposite end of town from the one that they entered the day before. Cyrus rode next to Briyce Unger, and they traveled in a companionable silence for almost an hour before Unger broke it. “You’ve come a long way to get here.”
Cyrus shook himself out of the daze of thought he had been in. “Aye. This is … five months? I think five months since we left home.”
“That’s not only what I meant,” Unger said. “You came here for your own reasons, but it was a long trek. At least I understood Partus’s motives. He wanted coin, and it was easy enough to part with gold for the sake of his use. But you? You come all this way for your friend,” he gestured to Longwell. “You help his Kingdom out-yeah, I know it’s his father’s, but that old buzzard will die some day and your friend will take the throne-but then you stick around and come north with us?” Unger shrugged. “Bit strange, you ask me.”
“I caused another problem for Aron Longwell,” Cyrus said. “I stayed to sort it out, came to Enrant Monge to help fix it. But when this …” he thought about it, and was unable to come up with a suitable word of his own to describe the creatures they were riding to find, “… scourge, came up, I suppose I …” He thought about it. “I don’t know, I felt obligated to come for some reason.”
“Are you a crusader of some sort?” Unger asked him, reserved. “Did you come here to spread the message of your gods? Because we’ve had that kind come through here before, trying to evangelize, get us to worship your western deities, and it doesn’t hold much interest for us in Luukessia. Our ancestors didn’t buy into it, and we don’t buy it either.”
“No,” Cyrus said. “I follow the God of War, but I don’t tend to do much evangelizing.”
“God of War?” Unger said, thoughtful. “Bellarum. That was his name, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Cyrus said with a nod. “That is his name.”
“That one I could understand,” Unger said. “God of War makes sense to me. But the others? Goddess of Love? Mischief? Earth, Air, Water and Fire? Feh!” He made a motion with his hand as though he were brushing them all away. “Don’t need gods for those things. I’ve got my father, and his father, and the line of their fathers all the way back to the beginning. They watch over us, keep the stars in the night sky, and the sun up in the day. Who needs your cold, uncaring gods when you’ve got your ancestors, people who strained in their lives along a line so far back it’s impossible to see to the end of it. All of them looking out for you, because you’re the one who’ll carry their legacy forward. No, I’ll take my ancestors to your gods any day. Gods don’t give a damn for you; with ancestors, you’re what they’ve left to the world.”
“What if they’ve got more than just you to worry about?” Cyrus asked, with wry amusement. “What if your father has several kids? Wouldn’t he be limited on how much time he can spend helping you?”
“No,” Unger said with a broad grin, giving Cyrus the feeling he was part of an inside joke by the King’s grace. “He’s dead, stupid. He’s got all the time he needs, it’s not like when you’re living.” He let out a barking laugh. “This is why I don’t discuss religion with westerners. Someone always comes out looking the arse.” Unger straightened up, turned serious. “So you didn’t come here to be a crusader for your gods. Did you come for the glory, then, to further the greatness of your name?”
“No,” Cyrus said. “There’s a war going on back home. If that interested me, I could make a hell of a name for myself in Arkaria about now.”
“Ah,” Unger said, nodding sagely. “It’s the other thing, then.”
“What?”
“When a man leaves his home behind to travel a world away-as far as yours is from Luukessia-he’s either running to something or running from something. For you, it’d be the latter, it seems.”
“Where I come from,” Cyrus said, feeling the shame creep across his cheeks, “a man doesn’t run from anything. Not a warrior, at least.”
“Where I come from,” Unger said, “it doesn’t matter if you run away for a bit, retreat, you know? Stay in every fight and lose, and what does it get you if you get ground under and lose the war? But a strategic retreat,” Unger’s eyes lit up, “that’s saved an army or two. But that’s not you, I’d wager. Not coming at the head of an army. So what are you running from?”
There was a pause, a long one, before Cyrus answered. “A woman.”
“Couldn’t have been anything else, I suppose,” Unger said with a chuckle. “Only thing that can make a man run this far.”
“I don’t like to run,” Cyrus said. “I’d rather not have.”
“I’d rather not have an army of beasts ripping apart my Kingdom and its peoples,” Unger said darkly. “So if it’s all the same to you, I’m rather glad you ran and ran here. It may end up doing me more good in the long run than that army you wiped out at Harrow’s Crossing would have in your stead.”