He cast her a meaningful glance, and she flushed and said hurriedly, “I mean—the One God restored your arm.” Call her by who she was,” said Galdar harshly. “Call her Takhisis.”
He looked involuntarily at the stump that was all that was left of his sword arm. When he had found out the true name of the One God, the god who had returned his lost arm to him, Galdar had prayed to his god Sargonnas to remove it again.
“I would not be her slave,” he muttered, but Mina didn’t hear him.
She was thinking about. pride, hubris and ambition. She was thinking about the desire for power and who had truly been responsible for the fall of the Dark Queen.
“My fault,” she said. “I can admit that now. I was the one who destroyed her. Not the gods. Not even that wretched god elf Valthonis, or whatever he calls himself. I destroyed her.
“I betrayed her.”
“Mina, no!” Galdar returned, shocked. “You were her slave just as much as any of us: she used you, manipulated you—:”
Mina raised her amber eyes to meet his. “So you believed. So they all believed. I alone knew the truth I knew it and so did my Queen. I raised an army of the dead. I fought and killed two mighty dragons. I tampered the elves and brought them under the heel of my boot. I conquered the Solamnics and saw them run from me like whipped dogs. I made the Dark Knights a power to be feared and respected.““All in the name of Takhisis,” said Galdar. The minotaur scratched the fur on his jowls and rubbed his muzzle. He looked uneasy.
“I wanted it to be in my name,” said Mina. “She knew. it. She saw into my heart and that was why she was going to destroy me.”
“And that was why you were going to let her,” said Galdar.
Mina sighed and bowed her head. She sat on the hard ground, her legs drawn up, her arms wrapped around her knees. She wore the clothes she had worn that fateful day when her Queen had died, the simple garments worn underneath the armor of a Dark Knight—shirt and breeches. They were ragged and worn now, bleached by the sun to a nondescript gray. The only color that was bright upon it was the red blood of the queen who had died in Mina’s arms.
Galdar shook his horned head and sat up straight on the boulder he was using for a seat, a boulder he’d rubbed smooth over the past several months.
“All that is over now, Mina. It is time you moved on. There is yet much to do in the world and a new world in which to do it. The Dark Knights are in disarray, unorganized. They need a strong leader to bring them together.”
“They would not follow me,” said Mina..
Galdar opened his mouth to remonstrate then shut it again.
Mina glanced up at him, saw that he knew the truth as well as she did. The Dark Knights would never again accept her as a commander. They had been wary of her from the beginning—a girl of seventeen, who barely knew one end of a sword from another, who had never seen a battle, much less led men into one.
The miracles she performed had won them over. As she had, once told that wretched elf prince, men loved the god they saw in her, not her, and when that god was overthrown and Mina lost her power to perform miracles, the knights went down to disastrous defeat. Not only that, but they believed that she deserted them at the end, left them so face death alone. They would never follow her again, and she could not blame them.
Nor did she want to be a leader of men. She did not want to go to back into the world again. She was too tired. She wanted only to. sleep. She leaned back against the bones of the mountain where her queen lay in her eternal slumber and dosed her eyes.
She must have drifted off, for she woke to find Galdar squatting beside her, pleading with her earnestly.
“—must leave this prison, Mina! You’ve punished yourself enough. You have to forgive yourself, Mina. What happened to Takhisis was her own fault. Not yours. You are not to blame. She was going to kill you! You know that. She was going to take over your body, devour your soul! That elf did you a favor by killing her.”
Mina raised her head. Her look stopped him, stopped the words on his lips and rocked the minotaur back on his heels as surely as if she’d struck him.
“I’m sorry, Mina. I didn’t mean that. Come with me,” Galdar urged.
Mina reached out her hand, patted him on the one arm that was left to him. “Go on, Galdar. I know your god has been hounding you, demanding that you join him in his conquest of Silvanesti.”
She smiled wanly at Galdar’s sudden discomfiture.
“I’ve eavesdropped on your prayers to Sargonnas, my friend,” she told him. “Go fight for your god. When you come back, you will tell me all that is happening in the world.”
“If I leave this accursed valley, I can never come back. You know that, Mina,” said Galdar. “The gods will see to that. They will see to it that no one ever—”
His words froze on his tongue. Even as he spoke them, they were being proven untrue. He stared out across the valley, rubbed his eyes, stared again.
“I must be seeing things.” He squinted into the sun. “What now?” Mina asked wearily. She did not look. “Someone is coming,” he reported, “walking across the floor of the valley. But that can’t be.”
“It can be, Galdar,” said Mina, her gaze now going to follow his own. “Someone is coming.”
A man strode purposefully across the windswept, bare-bones floor of the desert valley. He was tall and moved with commanding grace. Long, dark hair blew back behind him. His body shimmered in the waves of heat that rise up from the surface of the sand-covered rock.
“He is coming for me.”
2
The valley was a bowl-like depression scooped out of the same bedrock that had been lifted up to form the mountain. A fine layer of sand covered the rock, which was reddish yellow in color. A few sparse and scraggly bushes grew there, but no trees. No trees grew anywhere in this part of the land, except the strange trees that had sprung up in front of the tomb. A stream of water—cobalt blue against the red—zigzagged across the valley floor, cutting through the rock.
The mountain in which the Dark Queen was buried was honeycombed with caves, and in two of these Mina and Galdar had made their homes for the past year. Heat from the sun rose in shimmering waves off the floor of the valley in the daytime. The temperature dropped precipitously at night and rose again to unbearable levels during the day.
The valley was god-cursed. No mortal could find it. Galdar had found it only because he’d prayed day and night to Sargonnas to let him find it, and at last, the god relented. When Mina had carried the body of her goddess from the temple where Takhisis had died, Galdar had followed her. He alone knew the terrible grief she must be suffering. He hoped to be able to help her bury her queen forever. Galdar had followed Mina for a day and a night but could never seem to catch up to her, and then one morning, after waking from an exhausted sleep, he could not find her at all.
He guessed, of course, that the gods would not want any mortal to discover the burial place of Queen Takhisis and that they had hidden Mina from him for that reason. Galdar prayed to Sargonnas to be allowed to go to Mina and Sargonnas had granted his prayer—for a price. The god had transported Galdar to the secret burial site. Galdar and Mina had laid the Dark Queen to rest beneath the mountain, and then Galdar had spent the rest of his time trying to persuade Mina to return to the world. In this Galdar had failed, and now the god was putting pressure on Galdar to fulfill his end of the bargain. Minotaur ships were arriving in Silvanesti, bringing troops and colonists, making the former elf homeland the minotaurs’ own, and making the humans who lived in the other nations of Ansalon extremely nervous.
The Solamnic knights, the knights of the Legion of Steel, and the formidable barbaric warriors of the Plains of Dust—all of these humans were eying the minotaur encroachment onto their continent with growing ire. Sargonnas needed an ambassador to these races. He needed a minotaur who understood humans to go to them and placate them, convince them that the minotaurs had no plans for expansion. The minotaurs were content with conquering and seizing the lands of an ancient foe. Solamnia and the other realms were safe.