The Weapons Master's Choice

Wrapped in her heavy cloak, she had the look of a shade. Everything but her face was covered, and the shadows cast by the folds of her hood had reduced her features to vague outlines. He watched her consider his question and took note of the sudden stillness that had settled over her.

“He bleeds them of their souls,” she said at last. “He feeds on them as a dracul does. It is the source of his power.”

“He nourishes his own life with theirs?”

Her eyes glittered. “He reduces them to husks. Then life fades and they are gone. I have watched it happen. I have witnessed the results of his invasion. He would have taken my life, as well, if he had found me. But I escaped his notice for a long time. And finally, at the urging of others, I fled the city and came looking for you.”

She paused. “But I am not a good and noble person, so do not try to make more of me than what I really am—a coward, fleeing what I fear to face. I am the representative of my people, but I do this as much for myself as for them. I do not pretend to any sort of elevated status, or to a courage I do not possess, or to anything but desperation.”

“I think you underrate yourself,” he said. “Coming to find me on your own, daring to risk capture and worse—that was brave.”

“You risk more than I do.”

“But I am better equipped to risk more. I have skills and experience.”

And I have less to lose, he almost added. But he chose not to say that, because it would have required an explanation he did not want to give. He did not want to tell her his life held so little value that he barely cared if he lived or died. If he told her that, he would have to tell her, too, that the men he had killed and the risks he had taken were all he had to persuade him that his life had any meaning at all. When you began walking the path he had walked since he was twelve years of age, you found out quickly enough that it did not offer convenient escape routes. When you were so good that fears and doubts were almost nonexistent and challenges that heightened both were your sole pleasure in life, you kept walking because turning aside was a failure you could not tolerate.

She moved over to sit beside him—an act that surprised and pleased him—and he suddenly felt a need for her that was almost overpowering. He wanted to love her; he wanted her to love him back. What would it hurt, out here in the middle of nowhere? What harm could come of it, the two of them sharing a few fleeting moments of even the most temporal form of love.

But when he reached out to take her hand in his, she drew back at once. “Don’t touch me,” she whispered. He watched her shrink visibly. “Please, just sit with me. Just be with me. I cannot give you more than that.”

So he settled for what she was willing to offer, and they sat together until the embers died and the night closed down.

But all the time he was thinking of what it would be like to share more.

*

They set out again at daybreak, the first light a slivery blush against the eastern horizon, creeping skyward above the mountains and trees of the Ravenshorn and the Anar. He had slept soundly after they had gone to bed, their brief closeness ended, and the feelings he had experienced the previous night now seemed a lifetime away. He could not recapture them, though he sought to do so as they rode. He was troubled by this, but even more troubled that he had wanted her so badly. It was not his way to desire the company of others. He lived alone, he traveled alone; he existed as a solitary man. It could never be any other way, and he knew this as surely as he knew that his skills set him apart in a dozen different ways from normal men and women. Yet her failure to respond to him had left him strangely despondent.

Why did he feel this way? Why was Lyriana different from every other woman he had ever encountered? Because it was undeniable that she made him feel something others didn’t; he could admit it if not embrace it. He was attracted to her—had been attracted to her from the first—in a way that was both visceral and emotional. It was a deep and painful longing, one that transcended anything he had ever felt.