Janik opened his mouth several times, but no words came out.
“As Dania was telling me when you arrived,” Mathas said, “apparently our last visit to Mel-Aqat caused more harm than dropping the Ramethene Sword into Krael’s hands.”
“What harm?” Janik said.
“As far as we have determined,” Dania said, “there was an evil spirit imprisoned in the ruins of Mel-Aqat. Without knowing it, we released it. That’s why you’re here, Janik, as you would know if you had listened to the Keeper of the Flame. We need to go back and find some way to imprison it again or destroy it.”
“An evil spirit,” Janik said. “What kind of evil spirit?”
“We don’t know. Actually, we were hoping you might. You know more about Mel-Aqat than anyone in the world. We thought you might have some insight—”
Janik cut her off. “We? You mean you and the Keeper of the Flame? You and a little girl have decided that I should risk my neck to go back to the place where my life fell apart? Oh, but that doesn’t matter, it’s in the past.”
Dania rose to her feet. “What?” Her calm slipped away. “I cannot believe that you would take the forgiveness I offered you and twist it like that. What happened to you, Janik?”
“You know perfectly well what happened to me. You were there.”
“Janik, Maija hurt all of us. We were all her friends, we were all wounded by what she did. But we haven’t filled our hearts with bile and anger, Janik. You need to—”
“Don’t tell me what I need to do.” Janik interrupted her again. “You’ve filled your heart with Silver Flame hypocrisy. Don’t try to push it on me.”
For a moment, a hint of holy anger flared in Dania’s eyes—an almost visible fire of wrath. “Do not presume to judge what is in my heart, Janik! Has Maija poisoned you against everything? She was a cleric, so everything divine is hypocrisy—is that it?”
“No. It has more to do with what I’ve seen of your Church—especially in Sharn.” Janik was almost smiling. “It didn’t take Maija to convince me that the Silver Flame clerics in Sharn were hypocrites. And practically the first words out of your precious Keeper’s mouth yesterday were bribes.”
“Bribes? Perhaps you heard her wrong, Janik.”
“‘It will be worth your while to return there,’ she said. I said I didn’t want to go, and she said she’d make it worth my while.”
“She wasn’t talking about money.” Dania’s wrath had settled down to simple anger.
“Sure she wasn’t.” Janik scoffed.
Dania threw up her hands. “Forget it, Janik. Just forget it. It’s like arguing with a dragon. Just come to see her again tomorrow. If she doesn’t convince you then, fine. Go back to Sharn and your teaching and your comfortable retirement from dangerous adventures. Twiddle away your days until Krael’s fangs finally close on your throat. I don’t care.” She stalked to the door and opened it, then turned back. “Just come tomorrow. Mathas, it was wonderful to see you again.” She smiled warmly at the elf, cast one final glare in Janik’s direction, and stormed out, closing the door firmly behind her.
Janik threw himself down in the chair Dania had vacated, holding his head in his hands. Mathas hadn’t moved from his seat, and he slowly stroked his chin as he gazed at his friend. Silence settled over the room for several moments.
“Well,” Mathas said at last, “wasn’t it nice of her to stop by? It was so pleasant to have the three of us together again.”
“Oh, shut up,” Janik said, still staring at the floor.
“She always was a hotheaded girl.”
“Sea of Fire, yes!” Janik sat back, draping his arms over the sides of his chair. “And now she’s got holy fire to back it up!” He returned Mathas’s smile.
“She has a wisdom beyond her years, too.”
“Shut up again, Mathas.” Janik’s smile didn’t waver.
“Hmm.” Mathas stared over Janik’s shoulder at the door.
“Yeah, ‘hmm.’ Plenty of ‘hmm.’” Janik rubbed his forehead.
They sat in silence for a long time.
Servants delivered a fine dinner to their room, which Janik and Mathas ate together without much conversation. Mathas settled into bed early for his elven rest, despite his long meditation in the morning. Janik sat awake for hours, not bothering to light a lamp when the sun faded from the sky, going over his conversation with Dania in his mind over and over again.
Countless times he had imagined seeing her again and planned what he might say to her, but the encounter never played out in his mind the way it had earlier that day. He had planned to apologize and he’d never gotten the chance. He had started to, but she interrupted him to say it didn’t matter. Of course, he had started the conversation off on a bitter note, flushed with anger after being attacked in the city.
The last thing he’d expected was to find that Dania had become a paladin of the Silver Flame. That, more than anything, had thrown him off. Dania had never been a religious person. She had been a soldier—initially, a willing participant in the Last War, not because she believed in Breland’s cause or King Boranel’s claim to the throne of the shattered empire, but because the war got her away from the expectations placed on the daughter of a noble family. The war had made her hard—at least on the outside, though Janik had always suspected that the horrors of the battlefield had scarred her soul more deeply than she ever revealed.
Now that he thought about it, maybe her new place as a paladin wasn’t that surprising after all. He had always sensed that her greatest difficulty with the war was that she didn’t see any right or wrong in it. She didn’t believe in Boranel’s cause, and if Breland wasn’t fighting for what was right, then it followed that the other nations weren’t in the wrong. That, in her mind, made the whole war meaningless, a futile exercise of human arrogance and stupidity. And that made the whole thing feel wrong, including her participation in it.
So perhaps it made sense that with the war over and her adventuring career with Janik cut short, she had found a way to fight for something she thought was right. Better the Church of the Silver Flame than the Order of the Emerald Claw, Janik supposed—though on the other hand, perhaps it was better to be evil without pretense than to cover a corrupt heart with a veneer of holiness.
And now she was trying to draw Janik into her holy crusade. Why? If she had found meaning and purpose in her life without him, why drag him back into it? She knew he had no love for the Silver Flame, not after growing up in Sharn. But certainly what she had said was true: no one knew more about Mel-Aqat than Janik Martell. Maybe she genuinely needed his help.
So what about this evil spirit? Janik turned his thoughts to his years of research into the history of Mel-Aqat. He himself had argued that a passing mention in the Serpentes Fragments to a “place of imprisonment” referred to Mel-Aqat, and that one of the great princes of the ancient demons was imprisoned deep beneath the ruins. But if they had released something like that when they were in Mel-Aqat, Janik was sure he would have noticed—and the world would have felt the impact by now.
Thinking this through felt like entering ruins that had lain abandoned for years. Janik had been writing, publishing articles about Mel-Aqat, but he realized now that he’d been coasting, letting the momentum of his discovery carry him through article after article, that all of them really argued little of substance. He had not thought this deeply in years, and he was a little surprised at how good it felt.
I need my books, he thought. I don’t remember half of what matters.
With that thought, he got up from his chair and stumbled in to bed.
It was not Tierese but the other knight from the previous day who came after breakfast to escort Janik to the Cathedral.