Amber and Ashes - Margaret Weis [7]
“All in the name of Takhisis,” said Galdar. The minotaur scratched the fur on his jowls and rubbed his muzzle. He looked uneasy.
“I wanted it to be in my name,” said Mina. “She knew it. She saw into my heart and that was why she was going to destroy me.”
“And that was why you were going to let her,” said Galdar.
Mina sighed and bowed her head. She sat on the hard ground, her legs drawn up, her arms wrapped around her knees. She wore the clothes she had worn that fateful day when her Queen had died, the simple garments worn underneath the armor of a Dark Knight—shirt and breeches. They were ragged and worn now, bleached by the sun to a nondescript gray. The only color that was bright upon it was the red blood of the queen who had died in Mina’s arms.
Galdar shook his horned head and sat up straight on the boulder he was using for a seat, a boulder he’d rubbed smooth over the past several months.
“All that is over now, Mina. It is time you moved on. There is yet much to do in the world and a new world in which to do it. The Dark Knights are in disarray, unorganized. They need a strong leader to bring them together.”
“They would not follow me,” said Mina.
Galdar opened his mouth to remonstrate then shut it again.
Mina glanced up at him, saw that he knew the truth as well as she did. The Dark Knights would never again accept her as a commander. They had been wary of her from the beginning—a girl of seventeen, who barely knew one end of a sword from another, who had never seen a battle, much less led men into one.
The miracles she performed had won them over. As she had once told that wretched elf prince, men loved the god they saw in her, not her, and when that god was overthrown and Mina lost her power to perform miracles, the knights went down to disastrous defeat. Not only that, but they believed that she deserted them at the end, left them to face death alone. They would never follow her again, and she could not blame them.
Nor did she want to be a leader of men. She did not want to go to back into the world again. She was too tired. She wanted only to sleep. She leaned back against the bones of the mountain where her queen lay in her eternal slumber and closed her eyes.
She must have drifted off, for she woke to find Galdar squatting beside her, pleading with her earnestly.
“—must leave this prison, Mina! You’ve punished yourself enough. You have to forgive yourself, Mina. What happened to Takhisis was her own fault. Not yours. You are not to blame. She was going to kill you! You know that. She was going to take over your body, devour your soul! That elf did you a favor by killing her.”
Mina raised her head. Her look stopped him, stopped the words on his lips and rocked the minotaur back on his heels as surely as if she’d struck him.
“I’m sorry, Mina. I didn’t mean that. Come with me,” Galdar urged.
Mina reached out her hand, patted him on the one arm that was left to him. “Go on, Galdar. I know your god has been hounding you, demanding that you join him in his conquest of Silvanesti.”
She smiled wanly at Galdar’s sudden discomfiture.
“I’ve eavesdropped on your prayers to Sargonnas, my friend,” she told him. “Go fight for your god. When you come back, you will tell me all that is happening in the world.”
“If I leave this accursed valley, I can never come back. You know that, Mina,” said Galdar. “The gods will see to that. They will see to it that no one ever—”
His words froze on his tongue. Even as he spoke them, they were being proven untrue. He stared out across the valley, rubbed his eyes, stared again.
“I must be seeing things.” He squinted into the sun.
“What now?” Mina asked wearily. She did not look.
“Someone is coming,” he reported, “walking across the floor of the valley. But that can’t be.”
“It can be, Galdar,” said Mina, her gaze now going to follow his own. “Someone is coming.”
A man strode purposefully across the windswept, bare-bones floor of the desert valley. He was