“That doesn’t sound too bad.”
I came up with it during the war. I was needed elsewhere, but I discovered how to put the spell on a physical object. A rose. I thought it made a poetic symbol. I was young. I gave it to my lover.
“General Amris var Faina?”
The very same. I thought he’d died before he could use it, when Thyran was destroyed.
They’d talked about Amris a very little during their years together. Gerant had broached the subject rarely. Darya hadn’t pushed. She’d lost comrades and friends, but grief like Gerant’s was foreign to her, as it was to most of the Order, and she’d always known herself out of her depth in those conversations. She felt the same way now. “Should I—”
All we can do is go and see.
She climbed quickly until she could just see over the top of the rubble, then paused.
Beyond, a man stood with a red rose in one outstretched hand. He was tall, lean, but muscled like a warrior, and both the sword in his other hand and the plate mail he wore bore out that impression. An ornately old-fashioned helm, rich with gold and set with sapphires, hid his face, but Gerant didn’t need to see it.
Amris, he said, and his voice held more love and anguish than Darya had ever heard before.
Chapter 3
“What can I do?” The question felt foolish, and Darya didn’t know why. The spell was Gerant’s, so of course he’d know how to break it.
Indeed, his answer was quick and sure. You have to be unarmed. Then you must approach him, very closely, and speak his whole and true name. Gerant hesitated, though not from any mistrust of her, Darya knew. Amris ap Brannon var Faina.
It was only a description of the man’s lineage, but Gerant said it slowly, bringing it out from where he’d kept it close down all the years and putting it in front of her, who’d barely known him for ten—which usually seemed a long stretch.
She went over the wall and down the other side, feeling helpless in a new, foreign way. There was no monster whose death would stop Gerant’s pain, or avenge it. She might be able to bring Amris back, but the years that had passed wouldn’t come with him. And she couldn’t simply wish Gerant the best, take her payment, and ride off.
There was nothing for it but to fix what she could. Darya unbuckled her sword belt and laid it carefully on the floor. On top of it, she put the knives from each of her boots, the smaller venom-coated ones from each of her wrist sheaths, her short bow and her quiver.
“Let’s hope he doesn’t kill me before I can explain myself,” she said, but didn’t get an answer. It was harder to talk to Gerant when she didn’t have the sword on. “Or that something else doesn’t before I can get armed again.”
Glancing over her shoulder with every other step, she approached Amris. The burn marks grew fiercer in a circle around him: the wall behind was scorched black, and three broken arrows lay at his feet.
Up close, closer than Darya generally got to anyone she wasn’t trying to swive or kill, she started to notice details: the dents in Amris’s breastplate and gauntlet, for instance, accompanied by smears of blood from a battle four generations past, and the copper-colored leather wrapping the hilt of his sword. His face, under the helm, was strong, with dark bronze skin, a sharp, square jawline and chin, thin lips, and a nose like a hawk’s beak; his eyes were the dark, misty gray-green of pine and spruce, with surprisingly long dark lashes. They were narrow, made more so by the fact that he was glaring—had been glaring for a hundred years.
Darya inhaled, sounded out the words in her mind to make sure she had the name right, and then slowly spoke it: “Amris ap Brannon var Faina.”
* * *
The world was silent, and that itself told Amris the spell had worked—not that he’d ever doubted Gerant’s skill, whether at magic or anything else. It was a different matter, though, to be transported, in the space of two breaths and two words, from the screams and crashes of a pitched battle to utter quiet, save for a single voice.
Because the voice wasn’t Gerant’s, nor any that he recognized, Amris’s reflexes carried him backward several steps and brought his sword up in front of him. He realized that the person who’d woken him was human and not Thyran, and hastily readied himself to defend rather than striking out, but it was a close thing.
The woman hissed and darted backward herself, moving with more than human speed or grace.
She was more than human. That became apparent as soon as Amris saw her eyes, unnaturally bright green and glowing in the dim light. Her skin was paper-white, her braided hair dark around it, and those could be human enough, but the eyes were a different matter.
“Easy, there,” she said. Her accent stretched the vowels out more than Amris was used to, and the words came more quickly, but he could understand her rightly enough, particularly when she held up her hands, palms out. “I’m on your side.”
Anyone could say so. “What side is that, pray?” Speaking felt odd. Gerant’s magic had kept his muscles from degeneration through however much time had passed, so he felt no worse than a little stiff, but just as sound had taken a moment to become words, Amris had to think at first: move the tongue this way for w, the lips and throat so for i.
The woman shrugged. “The side that doesn’t love the Traitor. The Order of the Dawn, the Sentinels… I think we were starting when you—” She waved a hand.
When he trapped himself in time in a desperate bid to stop the murderous warlord. “Yes. Only just.”
Still Amris didn’t lower his sword: the woman aside, there was no virtue in dropping his guard before he knew the situation. He did let the rose fall from his gauntleted fingers, and used that hand to pull off his helmet, a necessary compromise between defense and intelligible conversation.
The state of the hall became clearer to him as he did so—the years’ worth of dust and cobwebs, as well as the silence. The woman’s clothing—plain dark leather pants, jerkin, and gloves over a shirt of brown cloth—was plainer than he was used to, without even the embroidery that most peasants wore. Practicality, given where she was, or asceticism?
“I should tell you two things right off,” said the woman. “You might want to sit down first.”
Amris shook his head. “Best to face it on my feet.”
“All right,” she said. “First, you’ve been…” Another vague wave of her hand. “Stuck. For a hundred years or so.”
She’d spoken wisely when she’d advised him to sit. The knowledge traveled up through his feet as well as in through his ears, making the room spin around Amris, and yet it seemed not to reach his head or his heart. The sweat of battle was still wet in his hair, he still felt his cuts and bruises, and the rose on the floor was as fresh as it had been when he’d plucked it for Gerant.