Soldier Scarred Read online

  “Can you utilize positively charged teralin?” Endric asked. They were not the questions he had thought he would be asking Urik, but the other man spoke almost dispassionately about what he had done. There might be remorse, but if there was, it was distant and not something that he felt clearly.

  “Positively charged teralin doesn’t have the same benefit to me. At least, it didn’t. Perhaps now it might.”

  “Have you tried?”

  Urik shook his head. “When I was back in Vasha, surrounded by teralin, I felt conflicted. There was a part of me that wanted nothing more than to reclaim teralin, change the polarity so that it would be negatively charged, and I could use it to free myself, but there was another part that remembered my time with the Denraen. Your father had always been good to me. That matters more than you realize.”

  “You weren’t treated well before?”

  Urik shrugged. “It’s not so much that I was treated poorly, but I wasn’t welcomed. I wasn’t given a sense of purpose. Your father gave that to me. It made what I had to do that much harder.”

  For the first time, Endric heard a sense of anguish within Urik’s words. Could he really have struggled the way he described?

  He glanced toward the shore. They were much closer. A rocky shoreline loomed before them and Endric could see the harsh, bleak shores of Salvat. Why had the captain brought them here, rather than to one of the larger city ports? This wasn’t the easiest way to reach the island. It might be the most direct, crossing the sea from Gomald, making their way toward the island, but he risked crashing and sinking.

  “My father has a way of making everyone feel…”

  Endric shook his head. His father had a way of making most men feel important, but not all. Endric had gone years not thinking himself important to his father. Even now, he wasn’t entirely sure that his father viewed him as a necessary piece of the Denraen. Perhaps he saw him as a part of the Conclave, and because of that, he wanted him as part of the Denraen, but if so, that was not clear.

  “You don’t give your father enough credit. Few sons do. I think you should be thankful he remains invested in you.”

  Endric pulled his gaze away from the shoreline and frowned at Urik. “What happened with your family? What did you go through?”

  Urik looked away, putting his back to the shores of Salvat and staring out toward the sea. Did he think that he would find answers there that he couldn’t find along the shores? “I experienced what no father should ever have to experience. I experienced loss and had my family torn from me before they ever had a chance to live and become the people the gods meant for them to be.”

  “I know that you lost your family, and I know that must be incredibly painful to talk about, but sometimes talking about it makes it easier.”

  “Is it easier for you to talk about losing Andril?”

  The dark edge returned to Urik’s voice with the question, and Endric tried to ignore the fact that Urik was responsible for the loss of his brother, but it was not an easy task. “He would not want me to focus on his loss, but on who he had been. He would have wanted me to have moved on, not wanted me to dwell on what had been.”

  “Because he had a chance to live, and he had a chance to make choices for himself. My family was not given that same opportunity. I think that makes it harder.”

  “What would your children have wanted for you?” Endric asked. “Would they have wanted you to do everything that you have done?”

  “My children were too young to make those choices. As I said, they were never given that opportunity. They were never allowed the chance to grow, to decide for themselves whether they wanted to be craftsmen like their father, or perhaps historians, or even soldiers. Instead, their lives were taken from them—and from me—before they had an opportunity to grow and choose for themselves.”

  Urik sighed, and Endric realized that it was sadness that created the darkness within Urik and not the residual effect of teralin. How could there not be sadness with everything that Urik had been through? How could he not have an edge after having lost all that he had? Wouldn’t Endric have a similar one?

  He knew that he would. Just as he knew that he had to move past it, knowing that his brother would not have wanted him to hold onto that anger. His brother would’ve wanted him to have found peace, in whatever way that he could.

  “How do you deal with it? How is it that you live knowing what happened to them?”

  Urik shook his head, staring at the sea. “I live as I have every day since they were lost.” He turned his head, his eyes haunted. “I take it a day at a time. It’s the only way that I can. Every day, I struggle with their absence. I feel it constantly. You think it is hard that you lost your brother. Let me tell you that it is a hundred times—maybe a thousand times—worse losing a child. Were it possible, I would sacrifice myself a thousand times over to have saved them.” His voice had faded toward the end, barely more than a whisper.

  Endric swallowed. Urik had been through too much. There was pain, and there was pain. When he had been captured, Endric had known the first kind of pain. Even his time with the Antrilii, searching for the groeliin brood, had only really taught him about the first kind of pain. Could he even know the sort that Urik had experienced?

  They fell into an uneasy silence, which Endric chose not to disrupt. If he did, what would he say? What was there for him to share with Urik? He had blamed the man for many awful things, but had never stopped to consider what awful things Urik had experienced.

  Was that a lesson that Tresten still attempted to teach? Endric had little doubt that the Mage—or whatever he was, considering he might not be dead—had intended lessons for him, much like his father often had. Most were lessons that Endric did not know—could not know—until much later. Those were the most important lessons, he suspected.

  The land gradually became closer and activity on the ship increased as the crew readied for their landing, but they never touched ground. Instead, they tacked around, turning to position the bow of the ship back toward the sea.

  “What are we doing?” Endric asked, making his way toward the captain.

  The captain was a large man with thick arms and deep red tattoos all along them that reminded him somewhat of the Deshmahne. There was nothing else about the captain that could be considered like the Deshmahne, though. He had an easy smile and a thick accent that reminded Endric of men from the far northern coast, and he commanded his men with ease.

  “Can’t reach the shore in a ship like this,” the captain said.

  “How do we intend to reach the shore?”

  The captain nodded to the crew working the stern. A small rowing vessel was being lowered, and the men were working quickly. Endric realize they intended to leave them here.

  “You’re not staying?”

  The captain shook his head. “We’re staying, but we can’t stay, if you catch my drift.”

  “Why not?”

  “We stay in these waters too long, we tend to drift. Anchors don’t seem to hold quite as well as they should, and more than one ship has crashed into rocks they didn’t see, or that didn’t seem to be there before.”

  Endric started to smile. “You think the rocks here are somehow alive?”

  The captain shrugged. “Not alive, but each time we come through here, it’s different. The rocks have shifted, the land has moved, not too many sailors are willing to make this journey. You’re lucky you’re paying what you are, otherwise…”

  “I’ll make sure you’re paid for your time,” Endric said.

  The captain shot him a hard look. It reminded him of Dendril and his occasional glares. This was a man used to getting what he wanted from people. “Dendril already made certain that we were paid.”

  “Were you paid to wait?” Urik asked.

  Endric saw concern etched in Urik’s eyes. He didn’t know the man well—not yet, and perhaps not ever—but he had grown to know him enough during their time in Vasha to recognize that express
ion. What would make Urik worry?

  “Aye. Dendril paid enough to ensure that I would wait. Were it any other man, I might not, but I don’t have any intention of getting on the wrong side of the Denraen general.”

  The captain left them and hurried to the stern of the ship, directing the crew loading items into the dinghy. Endric glanced at Urik. “If he doesn’t wait, how hard you think it would be for us to arrange alternative transportation?”

  “From here? Pretty hard. We’re in the center of Salvat.”

  “There have to be other ships that come through here.”

  Urik tipped his head in a nod. “There would be. The problem is few of those ships would ever stop here. There’s no port. Most would sail on for Elaniin or back north toward Chrysia. There is no way for them to stop here.”

  “Which is why you asked whether my father paid them to wait.”

  “I’ve dealt with sailors before. When I was arranging transport after…” He shook his head. “Anyway, when I was working with various captains, I learned that they would often quote you a price, but it was usually one way. If you wanted to return, that was extra.”

  “Dendril paid them twice what they should have been paid,” Senda said.

  Endric turned. She was studying the rocks.

  “If you really intend to bring Tresten here, you should gather him from below.”

  Endric looked at her, wishing that she wouldn’t be so angry with them, but her features didn’t soften.

  “I’ll help,” Urik said.

  They made their way below deck, where there was much less commotion. Urik’s body had been kept covered in the quarters Endric and Urik had shared, and they gathered the nearly deceased Magi’s body and carried him back above deck, holding him carefully as they reached the dinghy.

  “Seems a lot of effort for a burial,” the captain said. “This man must’ve been pretty well regarded for the Denraen general to have gone through all of this for him.”

  Endric glanced over at the captain and nodded. “He was.”

  They gently lowered Tresten into the boat, and he and Urik crawled in. Senda approached more cautiously, and when she reached the dinghy, she glanced at the ship once, a debate waging in her eyes, before stepping in with them. The captain and his crew quickly lowered them into the water.

  “We’ll keep an eye out for you. Light a fire and let it smoke for an hour before you intend to row yourself back out.”

  “You’ll see the smoke from here?” Endric asked. The shore was still quite a ways away and the sea was choppy, but there was a haze to the air and he worried the captain wouldn’t be able to see through it.

  The captain pulled a slender looking glass from a pocket and held it to his eyes for a moment before passing it to Endric. Endric peered through it. The shore suddenly leapt closer.

  When Endric handed it back, the captain chuckled. “I’ll keep an eye out for you. Just try not to take too long. I don’t mind sailing beyond the rocks, but if I wait too long, storms are bound to come. Make sure that you row yourself across before the storms come. Waters are treacherous even when calm, so you can imagine what they must be like when it storms.”

  Endric studied the captain for a moment, seeing the seriousness in his gaze, before nodding.

  They splashed into the water. He and Urik both grabbed oars and started paddling, cutting through the rolling waves. The sea was close and splashed over the railings of the boat, soaking him immediately.

  They put their backs into rowing, and as they did, the shore loomed ever closer. They bounced off an unseen rock and Endric winced. If they damaged the dinghy, they would have no way of rowing back to the captain and the ship. They would be stranded on Salvat. Perhaps not stranded—he could imagine a way of crossing to one of the port cities—but they would spend significant time making the passing.

  Then they reached the shore.

  As they pulled the boat onto the land, Endric noted something strange, and he glanced at Urik, wondering if the other man noticed it as well. The rock was warm—warmer than it should be, even for the temperate climate found within Salvat.

  “Is this—” he started.

  “Teralin,” Urik said, staring at the ground with an intensity that Endric hadn’t seen from him in a while. “The entire island is made of teralin.”

  4

  Endric took a deep breath, inhaling the air along the shore. If this was teralin, it should have a distinct odor to it. He had wandered the mines in Vasha often enough that he had more than a passing familiarity with the stench from the metal. Then there was the time spent in the Antrilii lands. When he had been there, hunting groeliin, he had grown even more familiar with the smell of teralin.

  There was a hint of that scent here, but nothing more than that. It was only a hint.

  He arched a brow at Urik. “Are you sure? This doesn’t smell quite like teralin.”

  “Smell?” Senda asked. “What sort of smell does teralin have?”

  “There’s a hot bitterness to it,” Endric said, easily thinking back to when he had first wandered the mines beneath Vasha. That had been a time when he had thought he might not ever make it back out. They had wandered for what seemed an eternity, and when they finally had managed to reach the end of the mineshaft, he had thought the heat would overwhelm him.

  “Bitterness? I would describe it as something almost sour, and slick, as if oily,” Urik said.

  Senda glanced from Urik to Endric. “You can smell it too?” she asked Urik.

  Endric would never have described it as oily, but that was what he felt negatively charged teralin was like. There was an oiliness to it, almost a slipperiness to the metal itself. He’d never been able to smell it, but was it possible that the difference between himself and Urik and the way they could change the polarity of the metal came down to how they perceived it? Or was it only that the way they perceived it somehow influenced their ability with it?

  “I can smell it. Sometimes I dream of it and think back to when I first became aware of the properties of it, back when I started to understand the power that could be accessed from it.” Urik squeezed his eyes shut and breathed out a heavy sigh. “In Vasha, it was… difficult… to ignore it. It is less difficult away from it, but…”

  “Will you be okay here?” Endric asked. He didn’t need the temptation from teralin to somehow change Urik and put them at odds with each other once more. He had dealt with Urik too many times to want to go through that again.

  “I think so.”

  “You have to fight it,” Endric said.

  “I tried to fight it in Vasha. When I returned, and when I was treated, I managed to ignore the effect of teralin for weeks, almost months. Eventually, it wore on me.”

  “If you’ve withstood it before, then you should be able to do so again,” Senda said.

  “It’s different here,” Urik said.

  Endric realized that it was different. He wasn’t able to see quite why, only that he had a strange sense of the metal that felt… more.

  “Will you let us know if it becomes too much?” Endric asked.

  Urik glanced at the motionless and wrapped form of Tresten. They had lain the Mage on the shore and Urik looked at him, as if thinking of the promise Tresten had made.

  “I will warn you,” he said.

  Endric nodded.

  “Endric?” Senda said.

  She made her way along the shore, guiding Endric away from Tresten and Urik. When they were a sufficient distance, she glanced at him before looking over her shoulder, back at Urik. “I don’t care for this,” she said.

  “You don’t care for what?”

  “Him. We have no reason to trust him, and if teralin is what had tainted him before, what makes you think that it won’t affect him the same way now?”

  “I think it’s possible it will,” Endric said.

  “Then why should we trust him?”

  “Because he warned us.”

  Senda frowned. “I think you’re
taking too much of a risk. If he turns on us again…”

  “If he turns on us, then we deal with him. There are two of us, and I’ve already defeated him once and managed to overcome him a second time. I think that if anything, we have to be more concerned about him escaping.”

  “You’re awfully glib about that.”

  “Where would he go?” Endric asked, looking around. The rocks were barren and there was no sign of life anywhere around them. There was no greenery, no grasses even growing on the rock. It appeared almost as if the mountain turned itself inside out, leaving the teralin exposed, vomited forth.

  Was that what had happened? Did the volcano erupt with teralin?

  “What’s your plan for him when this is all over?” Senda asked.

  “I thought you had the ear of my father. Doesn’t he have some plan for Urik?”

  “He did, but then…”

  Endric sighed. But then Tresten had died. That had been his father’s plan. “We need to see what we can do for Tresten—if anything—and then we can figure out what we need to do about Urik.”

  “You should know that I’m prepared to kill him if it’s needed,” she said.

  Endric smiled. “I would expect nothing less from you, Senda.”

  They headed back to Urik, and Endric helped lift Tresten’s body. They started across the rocky shore line of Salvat. They made steady time, hurrying away from the coast and inland as Novan had instructed. After they had been walking for nearly an hour, Senda motioned for them to stop. It hadn’t taken her long to assert control, taking command quite naturally. Endric had been pleased to note that she had taken command. She was Raen and did outrank him, but she had always been deferential with him in the past. That wouldn’t serve her as a commander, and he had known the year he had spent away with the Antrilii had given her a chance to serve as commander, but it was one thing to know it and quite another to see it himself.