The Warlord and the Bard by Eric Alan Westfall

Author:Eric Alan Westfall [Westfall, Eric Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eric Alan Westfall
Published: 2015-07-08T22:00:00+00:00

I spent the next month racked with a bout of jirka that no one could explain, since the disease had been eradicated from Kythil fifty years earlier. It also stubbornly resisted every Healer’s efforts to drive it out of me, and they could do nothing but keep me warm when the body-shaking chills hit, and cool me when the fever sent my temperature soaring into sun-like levels, and simply let it run its natural course. A natural course for jirka either kills you or leaves you weakened for life. The Goddess gives...and the Goddess takes. She had mercy, though, and let me recover fully.

I received Her message. Loudly. Clearly. Summed up in two words.

Never. Again.

So my two words are only words, with no compulsion backed by music and magic.

I hold them out to him, a verbal hand he can take or reject, verbal arms to hold and comfort or stay still and away. Two words that have only me behind them, words that quietly ask him to trust me, when all my requests for trust before...this room...had been really requests to trust in Her. Or had they?

He pauses in the reconstruction of his walls. No, not merely reconstruction of what was originally there. He is building walls that will be thicker, higher, stronger, more warded than ever before, and I know that if he goes on, if he finishes them, then all that he and I might have will never be. He’ll never let anyone in again.

He looks at my hands. Looks at me.

“Please.” My word is not quite begging, but nearly so. I want so desperately to babble, to come up with some clever words, even without the aid of the Gift, to convince him. But I keep my mouth firmly shut now.

He has all that he needs to make a decision, to make the right decision.

She gave him free will, as She has always given Hers both free will and the will to be free, and She will let him choose with nothing to tip the scales either way.

I will let him choose.

There is no trumpet. The partly rebuilt walls do not come tumbling down. But the building stops.

He takes my left hand in his right, Warlord and bard, DarkFire and Jerril. He looks even more lost for a moment and I tug his hand. We walk to the bed, though with only an intent to sit in more closeness than the chairs would allow. I lower myself to the edge. For some reason, he folds himself to the floor, cross-legged in front of me. He takes both my hands in his.

And then he tells me of the horror when he was fourteen.

DarkFire

I have no reason to trust this man I have only met tonight. But I do. So I throw open the door to my cavern of memory crystals, step inside, and squint in the blinding light. There is something nearly frantic about the crystals, as if they have acquired voices, each calling to me the way the Voices of the Sword do.

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