CHAPTER

7

Kauth’s first conscious awareness was of motion—back and forth, bouncing up and down. Slowly the sensation resolved into the gentle lurch of the Orien coach, continuing along the rough road to Greenheart. The light began to register in his vision, and he opened his eyes. Zandar crouched over him, wearing his habitual sardonic smile. “He lives!” the warlock proclaimed.

Full awareness of where he was rushed into his mind, accompanied by a surge of panic. He put a hand to his face to check—yes, he was still Kauth. He tried to roll himself sideways and nearly fell off the bench he was lying on. With some effort, he managed to prop himself up on one elbow. His body still screamed with pain, and he grimaced at Zandar.

“You have my thanks, Zandar,” he said. “But you’re about the last person I’d think to call a healer.” He fumbled at his quiver, reaching for one of the wands he used most often, one that held healing magic. It wasn’t there.

“Looking for these?” Zandar said, holding three wands out to Kauth. “You can thank them, not me.”

Kauth snatched them away. He didn’t like the idea of anyone rummaging through his pouches—especially the warlock, he realized. Even if Zandar had just saved his life, he wasn’t quite ready to trust the man. Choosing one of the wands, he extended his mind to touch the weave of magic it held, and felt a fresh wave of healing magic wash over his body like cool water against fevered skin. He took a deep breath and sat up.

A murmur of approval arose in the seats around him—evidently several of the nearby passengers had been watching with interest. Sevren and Vor stood in the seat behind him, and even the orc was smiling. Zandar moved from his crouch and sat on the bench next to Kauth.

Zandar leaned close and murmured in his ear. “I’m afraid we’ve become celebrities on the coach,” he said. “Too much attention, if you ask me.”

“What happened?” Kauth asked, shaking his head. “It’s all a blur.”

“The Children of Winter attacked the coach, of course. And we killed them. That makes us heroes.” Zandar grinned again. “I’ve always wondered what that would feel like.”

“Who are the Children of Winter, and why did they attack us?”

“Sevren, you want to answer that?”

The shifter leaned over the bench. “They’re one of the—” He stopped suddenly, and Kauth turned to look at him. Sevren’s amber eyes were narrowed as he looked down at him.

“What’s wrong?” Kauth asked.

“What kind of agent of the Wardens doesn’t know who the Children of Winter are? Khyber’s blood, what Reacher doesn’t know them by reputation at least? Who are you really?”

Kauth glanced at Zandar, who sat between him and the aisle. The warlock scowled, and Kauth could almost see his eldritch power boiling in his eyes, churning shadow eager to burst forth and wreak destruction.

Damn Kelas, he thought, and damn the Royal Eyes of Aundair. They should have given me more information.

But they want me dead, he reminded himself.

“All right,” he said, looking back at Sevren. “I wasn’t completely honest with you back in Varna. I’m not a Reacher. I was born in Stormreach, and I’ve only been in Khorvaire for a few weeks. I came here looking for work—the kind of work that my experience in Xen’drik might help with. The Wardens hired me for this mission, so I’m a sword for hire, not one of their regular scouts or agents.”

“Much like us,” Vor observed.

“How much are they paying you?” Zandar asked.

Kauth did some quick math in his head. He had offered them payment of a thousand gold galifars each. It would be reasonable for him to keep two parts for himself. “Five thousand.”

Zandar looked to Sevren, and Kauth met the shifter’s gaze. Sevren stared at him for a long time. Finally he said, “That’s a pretty good story. It’ll do for now. Zandar, Vor, you agree?”

The others nodded. Zandar’s smile returned to his face. Kauth wasn’t sure what to make of that.

“So here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll take that five thousand and divide it in four parts instead of five. We’re all equal partners in this mission now. Twelve fifty each.”

Just the right amount of hesitation, Kauth reminded himself.

“Done.”

Sevren extended a hand over the back of the bench, and Kauth clasped it. “Equal partners,” the shifter said. “That means I give the orders now.”

Zandar laughed, and Kauth just shrugged. “Seems to me you’ll do a good job keeping us alive,” he said. “I have no problem with that.”

“Good. That’s settled. Now, back to your question, ignorant Stormreacher.”

Kauth laughed. The people of the Eldeen Reaches were used to scorn coming from the self-styled sophisticates of the Five Nations. They all looked down together on the provincials of Stormreach, situated at the tip of the mysterious southern continent of Xen’drik.

Sevren shared the laugh. “The Children of Winter are one of the crazier sects running around the Reaches,” he said. “Their leaders are druids, so they have sort of a respect for nature. But they tend to focus on a part of nature’s cycle that other sects prefer not to dwell on.”

“The dying part,” Kauth guessed.

“Exactly. They work with spiders, scorpions, wasps, and centipedes—that sort of thing. That seems to be a matter of personal preference rather than a part of their philosophy, but it certainly helps them terrify the peasants, which seems to be part of their goals.”

“So why did they attack the coach?”

Sevren shrugged. “That’s what they do. They believe that nature is going to cleanse the land, and they see themselves as agents of that cleansing.”

“Hastening the cycle of nature,” Zandar observed.

“Something like that.”

“I hope they were prepared to meet the end of their life cycles,” the warlock said.

Kauth laughed—it was easy to make himself laugh. But as he laughed, he wondered whether his companions were prepared for their own deaths.

Nothing is permanent, he reminded himself.

His next thought disturbed him: Perhaps I should join the Children of Winter.

Greenheart was a stark contrast to Varna and, indeed, to every capital city of Khorvaire. It would be a stretch to call it a city at all. At a guess, Kauth figured that fifty Greenhearts would fit inside Fairhaven’s walls, but he thought he might be guessing too low. There were precious few actual buildings—little more than stone huts that looked as though they’d been lifted out of the earth to serve as shelter. Other residents lived on strange platforms in the trees that seemed to be extended from the branches themselves. Nowhere in the town was the work of carpenters or masons readily apparent.

The Orien coach dropped them near the center of town, took on a few new passengers, and started quickly back the way it had come, along the only road into or out of the capital of the Eldeen Reaches. The town center itself was not a marketplace or business district, but a lush green grove ringed with ancient pines. Hard-looking warriors stood guard among the pines—humans and shifters armed with bows and knives, much like Sevren Thorn. Kauth shot a glance at Sevren. Had he once stood as a guardian of Greenheart’s sacred grove?

There could be no doubt that this grove was sacred to the Reachers. Even with his limited knowledge of the Eldeen Reaches and their druids, Kauth knew that Greenheart was a center of religion, not politics. The druids of Greenheart supervised the activities of the Wardens of the Wood throughout the Reaches, and that supervision extended to matters of governance as well as spirituality, but this was no many-tiered, rigid hierarchy like Thrane’s. The Wardens served as spiritual advisors to their communities and arbitrators of disputes, and the druids of Greenheart offered them support and advice more than supervision or discipline.

“Ah, Greenheart,” Zandar sighed. “The only capital city of Khorvaire without a tavern.”

“The druids will give us shelter,” Sevren said. His voice was hushed, almost reverent, heightening Kauth’s suspicion that the shifter had some connection to the guardians of the grove.

“What about the Great Crag?” Vor said. “Is there a tavern in the court of the three sisters?”

The capital of Droaam, a nation of monsters just to the south of the Eldeen Reaches, was little more than a collection of goblin camps and gnoll barracks. Harpies nested in the cliffs of the city, and three hags—the three sisters—governed the fractious nation from a court built among the ruins of the ancient hobgoblin empire of Dhakaan.

“Have you ever seen an ogre drink?” Zandar said. “There must be taverns there to feed those appetites.”

“House Tharashk has an outpost there,” Kauth added. “I’m sure they maintain something like civilized facilities.” House Tharashk, made up of orcs and half-orcs as well as humans, had made enormous profits during the Last War by recruiting mercenaries from among the monsters of Droaam.

“What about Ashtakala?” Zandar said, grinning wolfishly at Vor.

“The city of demons is not the capital of the Demon Wastes,” the orc growled.

“Isn’t it a legend?” Sevren said. “I’ve never heard of anyone who’s actually been there.”

“It’s real,” Vor said.

Zandar smirked. “Or as real as a million-year-old city populated with masters of illusion can be.” He was clearly trying to nettle Vor, and it was working. “Maybe we’ll find it on our expedition.”

Vor stepped close to the warlock and stooped to look straight in his face. “You had better pray to whatever creatures you serve that we do not,” he said. “Or we’ll all be damned.”

Zandar backed down after that, and Sevren led them to a druid he said would help them stock up for their journey. But Kauth couldn’t get Vor’s words out of his mind.

Sevren proved to have useful contacts in Greenheart, and soon their packs were loaded with everything they would need for their journey—food, tents, rope, even extra clothes and weapons. Considering that none of the town’s buildings were crafted unless by druidic magic, the town was well supplied with the gear used by rangers and druids in the wild.

That evening, they set up their new tents near the edge of town, where the trees started coming closer together and the stone huts farther apart. They had agreed on two tents, each one large enough to hold two of them. Zandar and Sevren shared one, which left Kauth and Vor in the other. Kauth was relieved to see that Vor removed his plate armor to sleep—he had visions of the orc’s large shoulderplate jabbing into him as he tried to sleep. Even so, the tent was going to be crowded with the two larger members of the group together.

Kauth stayed awake outside the tent when the others retired for the night. For a while he sat and listened to the sounds of the forest—the chirping of frogs and crickets, the hoots of owls, and the soft, mournful songs of parents lulling their children to sleep. He could grow to like Greenheart, he decided—it had a peace and harmony about it that was sorely lacking in the other parts of his many lives.

With that thought, he began preparing his mind for the night ahead. He would be in close quarters with Vor, and he could not allow his identity to slip as it had on the airship with Gaven and Rienne. He began by reviewing the shape and features of his body, from his unruly hair and steel eyes down to his thick, crooked toes with their ugly nails. Cementing every detail in his mind as he had learned so many years ago.

She was jolted out of sleep by Kelas’s voice: “Who are you?”

She sat bolt upright and shouted her answer: “I am Faura Arann.”

“Stand for inspection.”

Kelas examined every detail of her face and body, measured the length of her hair, checked that her mole had not drifted while she slept. He stood behind her and weighed her breasts with his hands.

“Excellent. Go back to sleep.”

Kelas never paid enough attention to the eyes, she thought. It’s the eyes that will give you away.

Kauth shook the unwelcome memory from his mind, scowling at himself. He ran a hand over his face to make sure he hadn’t slipped.

“Focus,” he told himself. He repeated the exercise, from the top of his head to the leathery soles of his feet. Fixed each detail in his memory.

Who are you? he asked himself.

Kauth Dennar, he answered. A mercenary during the war, now a drifter, a thug, an adventurer. Born and raised in Storm-reach. I’m working for the Wardens of the Wood.

And leading my friends to their deaths.

“Listen well,” Kelas said, leaning over him. “You have no friends. You love nothing, care about nothing. Nothing is permanent—everything changes, everyone will die. If you love, if you care about anything, you will suffer. You will fail!” He punctuated his last words by striking Haunderk’s face with the back of his hand.

And what about hate, Kelas? Haunderk thought. Isn’t hate a form of caring? You can’t hate someone who’s irrelevant to you.

“Focus,” he whispered through clenched teeth. Once more, from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. And again, reining in his wandering mind.

Nothing is permanent. Everyone will die. I will not fail.