Sentinelspire - Mark Sehestedt [48]
"Really?" Lewan heard the ice in Talieth's voice, but when he looked up there was fire in her eyes. "Was it I who killed your master? No. Or was it the half-orc and his men? No again. According to every man there, including the 'cursed half-orc,' the earth rose up and swallowed your master. You dispute this?"
Lewan scrubbed the back of his sleeve across his eyes before the tears could fall. "Well?"
"No," he said, and the petulance in his voice only made him angrier.
Talieth wiped her own tears, then stood and paced the floor before the cold fireplace. "Believe me or not," she said, "I do miss him. But you saw it yourself. It was not me or anyone I sent who killed your master. Sauk and his men are hunters, the fiercest and most cunning in thousands of miles, and there was nothing they could do to save him. You saw it yourself."
Lewan's head felt thick with unshed tears. He reached for the pitcher of water, but his hand shook so badly that he simply grabbed the handle and squeezed. "My master would not have been there were it not for you. Do you dispute that? "
"And he would not have been there had he not tried to escape," she said. "Had he come as I asked. As I begged. Lewan. If we are going to go through all the what-ifs and what-might-have-beens, this will take a very, very long time. Time, I'm afraid, we do not have. You know why we needed your master?"
"He… he never had the chance to tell me." Lewan released his grip on the pitcher and put both hands in his lap. They curled into fists, and he fixed his eyes on them as he struggled to keep his voice from breaking. "He and Sauk talked in camp. Quite a lot. But I was kept apart. I-"
Talieth stopped her pacing and looked at him. "Yes? You what?"
"I don't think I was supposed to be there," said Lewan. "I think Sauk was surprised to find me with Berun, and he… had to improvise. He kept us apart, I think, to try to control my master."
Talieth said nothing at first, and when the silence grew uncomfortable, Lewan dared to look up. Talieth was standing before the darkened hearth, one arm cradling the other while she tapped her lips with one finger. She was watching him, and with most of the light coming from the open balcony behind her, her eyes seemed twin wells of shadow.
"Do you pray to the gods, Lewan?" she asked.
Lewan frowned, surprised at such an odd question. "I, uh… I serve the Oak Father, as Master Berun taught me."
"I am no priestess," said Talieth, "but even I can recognize a gift from the gods when I see it."
"What?"
"Think about it, Lewan," she said, and she stepped forward again until she stood at the foot of his bed. "We are in desperate, dire need. I had hoped that your master and the relic he carried could save us, could save all of Faerыn. But your master has been taken from us. Were it not for one thing, I would despair."
"What thing?"
Talieth came closer. She placed a hand on his shoulder and said, "You."
Chapter Sixteen
Fault's quarters-he didn't consider it a home so much as a place to store his meager possessions; his home was the wild-were in the smallest of the Fortress's many towers, a squat stone cylinder that overlooked the gardens and pools round the western falls. This meant he had to walk through most of the Fortress from the main gate, and the most direct path took him past the Tower of the Sun, which dominated the center of the Fortress.
His hunter's nature-the part of him in tune with the pulse of the wild-did not like the Tower. He'd never liked it. Even before the Old Man's madness, it had been little more than a crumbling relic of the long-dead Imaskari Empire. Now, covered in vines, flowers, and foliage of every sort, it ought to have appealed to him. It was, after all, the wild taken root and flourishing in the midst of a citadel of stone. Still, there was something… wrong about it, something that made Sauk's skin crawl and made him want to grind his teeth and look away.
Still, it was that very wrongness that brought him by the Tower whenever he was about. He would often go far out of his way to pass the Tower's main