He found Mena and Dariel conversing over breakfast. They sat side by side, touching at the knee, both of them cupping their wooden bowls in one hand and spooning porridge with the other. Mena so petite, yet honed to a keen-edged strength her scant clothing did not hide, dangerous even though she presented to the world a kind, wise face, sword at her side within easy grasping range; Dariel with his ready smile and energy, a devious twinkle always close behind his eyes, his shirt open right down to his flat abdomen. They leaned in close together and spoke as they ate. They looked like…well, like two unlikely siblings at ease with each other. The years they had spent apart seemed to have faded into insignificance.
A seizure of emotion racked Aliver. He wanted to leap the space between them and tackle them both in an embrace. If he did so, he’d end up rolling on the ground with them. He’d pour tears all over them. He’d blubber and cry, and he was not sure that he’d be able to rise from such an embrace and do the things he had to do. He, or they, might die in the hours to come. He knew it. Part of him wanted to say a whole host of things to them in preparation. He should crack open whatever part of him was most fragile and share it with them, so that they would understand and remember him. He yearned to spend days and days with them, learning everything about the lives they had lived, probing them to help him understand the life he had lived, seeking in their memories a more complete picture of everything they’d each been through.
He had opened up some of his vision of the future to them. When they prevailed, he had said, he would not rule over them. He would not be a tyrant who left them no say in the running of the empire. They would share all decisions among the four of them. They would reach decisions by consensus, by compromise. They would find within long conversations with one another a wisdom greater than what they could come up with singly. They would take greater responsibility for the workings of the empire at the same time as they provided for increased representation from its diverse regions. Everyone would have more say in shaping the future.
All of this he meant and believed, but it was the prince, Aliver Akaran, speaking, not the brother. The brother still had a great many things he hungered to share with his siblings. As he proceeded to walk toward them he acknowledged that nothing in his life had ever fallen in line with his imaginings; whatever was to happen, that fact would stay a constant. The very fact of the day awaiting them made it impossible for him to launch that embrace or let flow those tears. Such emotion was for later, for quiet times when thousands of lives did not hang in the balance. Instead, he spoke wryly, as any older brother to his younger siblings.
“How is it that you two are always up before me?” he asked.
Mena rose, smiling, and squeezed his elbow.
Dariel said, “The question is how you manage to sleep at all.”
“Lightly, brother,” Aliver said, using an old Talayan saying. “I sleep lightly and tread to keep my head out of the sea of dreams.”
Within the hour the three of them were armed and dressed for their roles. Previously, they had each headed portions of the army. Mena and Dariel were new to massed warfare, but they were quick and seemed to see with far-reaching eyes. Mena had fought in the front lines of the battle, amazing everyone with her skills as a swordswoman and with her ability to kill without remorse and yet maintain a humble, human character. Dariel had a flair about him that inspired almost comical glee among the troops. The tales his raiders had spun about him had the masses believing he was impervious to injury, untouchable, blessed. They were symbols the people were keen to rally around. Aliver’s instructions-passed through them and voiced to the masses-had an uplifting effect that not even veteran generals like Leeka Alain could duplicate.
That was part of what the towers had been for. From them the three siblings sent messages to one another with mirrors and by raising different colored flags. They also allowed Aliver to communicate with the Santoth, the elevation making it easier for his consciousness to reach out to theirs. But after the last day of battle, when Maeander had focused his catapults on them systematically, the towers had to be abandoned. They had turned into deadly targets. The second day Mena had just escaped being trapped in one by chance. She had been held up as she approached the tower. Instead of being up in it, she watched it being destroyed from just outside the catapult’s explosive range.
Aliver himself had been in the last one hit on the third day. He had only just climbed to the top and opened his mind to the Santoth and felt the connection between them uncoil and snap fast. The next moment the soldiers about him all dove for the floor. And then it felt as if the sun had fallen to earth. The roof buckled and slammed down upon him. Flames hurtled in from each opening, buffeting him about like plumes of molten liquid. The world viewed through his eyes went from golden flame to charred blackness and past that to nothing. For a few elongated seconds he swam in the baffling pain of his flesh being scorched from his body. He remembered that he had had a dying thought, but as with something that happens in a dream, he could not recall what it had been. Perhaps he had not even completed the thought before the change happened.
It was quick, the recovery. One moment he was in an incinerator; the next the flames peeled back from his body and seemed to evaporate. The structure, which had been twisting to the ground beneath the weight of impact, found legs. The wood flexed like muscle just awakened. The whole tower groaned with exertion. A second later it was upright. The heat vanished. Aliver’s flesh was intact. The men and women all around him rose back to their feet, bewildered.
He had answered their silent questions with what he knew to be the truth. As surprised as he was himself, he projected his words with confidence, as if he was stating something any tutored child would know. Theirs was a blessed cause, he’d said. The Santoth, though they were unseen, protected them. He had already given a speech arguing that they were all part of a mythic present. He reminded them of this and asked them to imagine the song future generations would sing about this army. They been drawn from all the reaches of the Known World and were protected by ancient sorcerers who wanted nothing more than to return to the world of the living and right old wrongs. This was too magnificent an endeavor to fail, he said.
He did not mention that the sorcerers had likely protected him personally-saving others because of their proximity to the prince. Nor did he reveal that they had only managed to do it so dramatically because the connection between them was fresh and new, the moment fortuitously timed. But a partial truth, he had learned, sometimes reached farther than the whole of the thing. He knew that the entire army would know of what happened within a few hours of the event. They would spin another tale of magic and prophecy around him. To them he was the magician. It was all his doing, they believed. Though he knew this to be false, he saw that it emboldened them. That, at least, was a worthy thing.
With the towers abandoned, the three siblings walked toward the front ranks of the army. The troops were still forming up, tightening their ranks and marching over the rise and down onto the long slope that led to the field of battle. As they walked a messenger sent by Oubadal found the siblings and uttered a message that Aliver could make no sense of. It had to do with the enemy’s deployment, something about them not taking the field. They were close enough to a vantage point that Aliver just brushed past him and strode forward to see for himself. What he saw stunned him.