All I can say is that Nadar was a loose end. He was a whiny, annoying loose end. So he had to go.
Thanks for the support, and I'm glad that so many people still like the story even after the vacation.
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And now, I bid you adieu.
I will sacrifice
I will sacrifice
All I have in life
To clear my conscience
I will sacrifice
I will sacrifice
All I have in life
Sacrifice, sacrifice
tATu's Sacrifice
Chapter 30: Clear My Conscience
How could he go through with it? Julian thought as he sat isolated in a corner of the Library where he knew no one ever went. His hands trembled as they swept over the lines of Braille. It was a special language that had only just been introduced a few years ago from Rikaban, a country far, far to the west. But Julian was far, far too distressed to read it.
How could he do it? How could She accept it? The kal'enedral are celibate. They can love, but only platonically. We are lifebonded. How could it have happened?
While he slouched further and further in his chair, despondently, someone opened the door to the unlit room. He hadn't needed a light. There was the draw of a match against a rough surface, and then the acrid scent of smoke drifted towards Julian's nose.
Heavy footsteps made their way towards where Julian sat, hands brushing over the abnormally thick pages of a peculiar book. They stopped just behind Julian's chair, but he didn't move.
"I'm sorry," he said, "Can I help you?
The man clapped a slight hand onto Julian's shoulder.
"Heyla, Juju."
"R-Rojer," Julian said. Why would Rojer--
"Little brother," the man said. "You haven't come to see me since you got back."
"I--I didn't think--" Julian stuttered. He didn't think that Rojer would have wanted to see him. Rojer would have never accepted the shay'a'chern part of him, so he had always pushed Rojer away, not wanting to see the disgust in his eyes. He'd gotten enough of it from their father, after all. Who needed it from the rest of their family?
"Of course you didn't think," Rojer said. "You never think."
"I--how have you been?" Julian asked, desperate to avoid the awkward silence he knew was coming.
"Good. I got married." It was a flat confession. No happiness, no burst of eagerness to share. Just the words themselves.
What! "Um, congratulations!" Julian said. He felt like reeling out of his chair. He'd never heard anything of his brother even courting anyone, let alone getting married.
"But you wouldn't have known about it, would you?" Rojer continued, voice turning bitter. "Always out of Haven and all, wandering all over Valdemar."
"I've been busy," Julian said vaguely, wondering why Rojer would be bothering him at a time like this.
"Always busy. You always pushed me away, and now you're doing it again. Sweet Kernos, Julian, can't you see that this is bad?"
"I really don't need this right now, Rojer," Julian said.
"You don't need anything. Didn't need my help when you left home when you were sixteen, didn't need anyone's help when you got your eyes slashed open, didn't need to ever come back to Haven, didn't need to come back for your own brother's wedding."
"Rojer, please," Julian pleaded. If there was any more of this, he was going to scream.
"Please what? Please what, Julian? You say please now, but you never said it before. What is so damn different about this time that you actually need help?"
"Please." Please stop bothering me. Everything about you is bringing out the worst in me, and if this keeps going on I'm going to try to destroy something.
"Please what?"
"Please stop!" Julian said, dropping his shields and throwing everything he had in his Empathic power at Rojer, which honestly wasn't much. He was exhausted and emotionally drained from Rowen's Oaths. What he hit the Healer with wasn't a wave so much as it was a halfassed attempt to knock him down.
"Ju--oh my dear sweet gods," he heard Rojer say, and he curled into a ball in the seat of the chair.
"Just go away," Julian said, voice muffled by the loose cloth of the sleeves of his tunic.
"What the bloody hell has been going on in your life?"
"Too much," he mumbled, and Rojer pulled up a chair.
"Maybe I can help."
A quarter of a candlemark later, Julian was sobbing himself dry in the chair, and Rojer was mulling it over across the table.
A few minutes later he opened his mouth. "I can't tell you anything much because I don't have much experience with lifebonds," Rojer said. "The only thing you can do is try to pick up the pieces. Lifebonds are tricky things. Can you still feel him at all?"
Julian uncurled himself stiffly. The room was cold--it always was, and the thinly padded chair wasn't giving him any warmth. He shook-nodded his head at Rojer.
He hadn't even tried to touch it since the middle of the Oath. It had been bitingly cold and then so hot that it had seemed as though that part of Julian's mind would just char off.
Reluctantly, he relaxed and pushed through the mental fence he had erected around the lifebond.
He felt--warm, at first. Then curiously tired. Tired, warm, and utterly devastated. It was Rowen. Julian almost cried out in joy before he realized that the sorrow he was feeling was coming from two sources. One was obviously from loss--Nadar, of course, but what was the other?
Shock hit Julian. Rowen's shock. Julian sent love and worry at it, and only got more distress. What was Rowen upset at?
He got up from his chair, intending to go to his--what was Rowen to him? when the door opened softly before he reached it.
"Come find me later," Rojer said. "I'll be in Healer's Wing."
Julian nodded and strode through the door.
§
Kelseth watched the Changechild pace back and forth over the stone tiles in his floor, muttering darkly.
He'd been doing enough work for the Shin'a'in to know his name--Rowen--but that was it as far as it came to familiarity.
The Changechild had been coming to him since Midspring for armor repairs and customized weapons. Kelseth had had to call in his brother--an armorer for the Companions and steeds for the horse half of Rowen, but the results had been more than amenable.
Now the Shin'a'in had come to have his armor repaired and remade to top-notch specifications, and halfway through explaining to Kelseth exactly what he wanted he'd stopped suddenly, stared at the wall, and cursed. That alone had bothered Kelseth since he knew that the Changechild wasn't bonded to a Companion, but when the forge had started flaring and he'd had to pull the Guard-commissioned axes out, he had become singularly worried.
It flared again and he jumped. The shadows on the walls were becoming more and more threatening, and he started eyeing the Changechild. Was he causing it?
A few minutes passed, and when the door slammed open the smith gasped and jumped. Rowen paid him no mind and seemed to be in a staring contest with the man who had walked through the door. The slight man. As Kelseth looked the man over, he realized three things; one--the man was a Bard. Two--he was blind, so they obviously couldn't be staring at each other. And three, the fire in the forge had gotten--if possible--hotter and brighter.
Kelseth started making for the back door.
Unfortunately the blind man started speaking, and if there was one thing that Kelseth loved more than forging, it was gossip. Especially if it involved a certain Changechild who half the Court was afraid of and who the other half of were drooling for gossip over.
Neither of them seemed to notice them--either that or they just didn't care--and Kelseth edged within hearing distance just as the Bard said something about a blood-oath. Rowen replied tersely, and then suddenly the two were arguing. The blonde Bard kept mentioning a lifebond, and the Changechild kept insisting that he had to kill them all even if they hadn't killed someone called Nadar.
"It's a suicide mission!" the blind man cried.
"What else do I have to live for?" Rowen shouted.
The other man looked first dumbstruck, and then heartbroken. Without another word he reached up and pulled Rowen's head down and kissed him. Then he mumbled something too soft for Kelseth to hear, and the two men left.
The fire in the forge died suddenly, and Kelseth yelped as he remembered that the Guardsmen's axes were due tomorrow.
§
Dumisai had, now, for a while been hearing tell and tale of strange circles of land far to the North.
He had also been in the habit of having his court secretaries research anything that seemed out of place.
And they had found that these patterns of circles seemed to emanate from somewhere far, far to the North. And that they had apparently happened before--a thousand years and more ago. The circles seemed to have stopped three years ago, but he was still wary.
The Haighlei King was not a suspicious man--no, of course not. But he was a cautious man with a good nose for trouble, which had served his reign well these past fifteen years.
Now the city-country of White Gryphon was sending warnings that the Empire--the Eastern Empire that had long ago expanded south until they had encountered the Southern Sea and the Haighlei--was moving in the south as well as the north. Moving towards the two countries with no set pattern or intention, but White Gryphon was alarmed. Apparently they had agents in the North--in the only vaguely known countries north of Ceejay. The agents had sent messages that the Empire had entered under the new rule of an insane and ruthless leader called Malles or some such.
It had been enough to alarm White Gryphon. The country was fairly small and had only grown to be the size of the smallest of the Haighlei Kingdoms through various treaties and trades with the Empire as a whole since it's birth at around the same time as the original magic circles. And they had been fairly busy compiling reports to send to the Haighlei Emperor concerning the Eastern Empire and it's growing hunger.
Dumisai was personally of the opinion that there was nothing to worry about. After all, once the Empire had reached the Haighlei, they had stopped and had seemed content to remain with the land they had defeated from the old countries that had formerly been to the West of the Haighlei.
And the Haighlei could not enter into a war with the Eastern Empire. Oh, they had come far from the times when change could only occur at the Eclipse Ceremonies, but a war with anyone would have to be approved by at least half of the lesser Haighlei Kings as well as the kweyu kaya--the White City.
And the lesser Haighlei Kings were not likely to want to go to war. The Haighlei had numbers, of course. Numbers and the tactical advantage of ships that could attack the Empire from the sea.
But the Empire had gotten its magic back. And while magic wasn't unknown to the Haighlei, the only wielders were Priests and the mages of White Gryphon. Even so, they didn't know how much of their magic the Empire had gotten back--only that they were managing to transport huge numbers of men to the western borders and major cities of the Empire. And that they seemed to be back up to at least partial strength, even though the most magic that White Gryphon's far-seers had been able to see was involved in food transportation and Gates.
That was enough for the kewyu kaya, which had already sent more agents to Valdemar in preparation for the war they assumed was coming.
As one of his secretaries brought him another on of those reports of odd-looking people to the south, he frowned and began to contemplate how to convince the other Kings that the matter of the Empire should be looked into.