“You came here with Darraun?” Cart said from behind him, his surprise plain in his voice.
“And who’s this?” Rienne asked, keeping one hand on Gaven’s shoulder as she drew back to a respectable distance.
“Cart, Rienne.” The two nodded at each other. “And yes, Darraun rejoined us in Stormhome. I guess I’ve got a lot to tell you as well, Cart.”
“I left Darraun at the airship,” Rienne said, “at the north end of the plain. With Haldren and Senya.”
It was Gaven’s turn to be surprised. “With them?”
“Well, we knocked them out first. He said he’d get them bound.”
Cart grumbled, sort of an animalistic growl, but he didn’t say anything.
“Will the Eye still fly?” Gaven asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Let’s get there and see.” He stepped forward, and her hand trailed down his arm until it came to rest in his hand. Together, they started to run, and the wind picked up behind them. Cart shambled into a run as well, and soon the wind moved him far faster than he was evidently used to moving.
“The plain seems almost entirely clear,” Gaven noted as they ran. “Where did the hordes of the Soul Reaver go?”
“Dispersed into the woods to the east or the mountains to the west, I suppose,” Rienne said. “There were so many!”
The Eye of the Storm came into view, and Gaven slowed their pace.
“And they were just the vanguard of the host,” Gaven said as they came to a stop. “If I had not closed the chasm, they would still be pouring out.”
“There she is,” Rienne said, pointing at the airship. “But I don’t see Darraun.”
Cart walked heavily among the bodies that littered the edge of the Starcrag Plain. He stooped at one and rolled it over to see the face, but he stood quickly and continued looking.
“On the ship, maybe?” Gaven said.
Rienne hurried to the airship and scrambled up to the deck. “Darraun?” she called.
Gaven climbed the ropes behind her, and made his way to the ship’s highest point at the stern. There he turned in a slow circle, surveying what he could see of the battlefield and Bramblescar Gorge. The battlefield was all but deserted, and the gorge twisted away from him too quickly-he couldn’t see more than a bowshot away.
Rienne moved below decks, calling the changeling’s name. Rather, the name he had used with them. Gaven scowled. Had he been wrong to put his trust in Darraun?
He returned to the deck just as Rienne emerged from below. “I don’t know where he could be,” she said.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Gaven said.
“What part of it?”
“We trusted him, and he really proved that he deserved that trust. He didn’t interfere with me doing what I had to do-quite the contrary, in fact. He put himself at considerable risk to help me. We put our lives in each other’s hands.”
“You think he helped Haldren escape?”
“I don’t know why he would. But-”
“Gaven!” Cart called, thirty paces across the mouth of the gorge.
“Cart’s found something,” Rienne said. She tumbled off the deck to the ground and started sprinting toward Cart before Gaven had started climbing down. Gaven ran behind her, but he was in no real hurry to reach the warforged. Cart had been examining corpses. If he’d found something, Gaven wasn’t sure he wanted to know what.
His fears were confirmed when Rienne got to Cart’s side and fell on her knees. He found himself strangely touched by the depth of Rienne’s grief, written plain on her face. She had known Darraun such a short time, just a day, but clearly that act of putting their lives in each other’s hands had forged a bond that hurt in the breaking.
It wasn’t until he reached her side and saw the body that his own grief welled up in him, clenching his heart and stinging his eyes. His years in Dreadhold had left him with precious few people he could call a friend, and virtually no one he could trust. But he had warmed to Darraun almost instantly, enjoyed the parry and thrust of conversation with him, the dancing around secrets while revealing far more than was said. And in this last day-the day since he had learned of his father’s death-he too had come to count Darraun as a true friend, a friend he had trusted with his life.
And now that friend lay among the numberless dead on the Starcrag Plain, his chest foul with blood, his eyes staring blindly at the brooding sky.
Gaven dropped to his knees beside Rienne and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. She melted into his chest with a sob. Her tears seemed to unlock his own, opening the door to a fresh welling of grief for his father mixed with the loss of this new friend. The terror of the battle just ended, the weight of what he’d just done-he was overwhelmed. His body shook with sobs. And as his tears flowed, he realized with a sharp pang of regret that he didn’t know Darraun’s real name.
The only sound was the croaking of ravens squabbling over the bodies of the fallen. The battlefield was nearly deserted-only a few clumps of soldiers picked their way among the dead, beginning the long, slow task of building pyres or cairns for their comrades in arms. In time, more of the soldiers who had been routed would find their way back to the field. Another skirmish might even erupt, but without Haldren and his dragons there would be no full-scale invasion.
One group of Aundairian soldiers approached the fallen airship, perhaps looking for plunder or just for survivors of the crash. Gaven and Rienne stayed out of sight-the soldiers recognized Cart as part of Haldren’s command staff, and hastened to obey his order to search the battlefield for survivors. Aside from that sole interruption, Darraun’s funeral preparations proceeded in a solemn peace.
Cart did the bulk of the heavy work in building a little cairn for Darraun near the airship, at the edge of the battlefield where so many soldiers had fallen over so many centuries. The warforged showed no emotion on his face, of course, but every step he took revealed the weight of his sadness. Gaven wondered whether Cart knew that Darraun had been a changeling. It didn’t seem right to reveal that deepest of Darraun’s secrets if Cart didn’t already know, so Gaven didn’t mention it.
That thought led his mind down paths that seemed inappropriate, so he didn’t give voice to his thoughts out of respect for the grief of the others. But he realized that just as he didn’t know Darraun’s real name, he had never seen the changeling’s true face. Some part of him then began to wonder why the changeling hadn’t reverted to his natural state when he died. Shouldn’t Darraun’s corpse have worn his true face? It seemed to Gaven that death should be the end of all disguises.
None of them could think of anything to say once the cairn was built and Darraun was laid to rest, so they stood in silence for a long time. It was Rienne who finally broke the silence.
“He never made me dinner,” she said, laughing even as fresh tears sprang to her eyes.
“I was blind to entire facets of his personality,” Cart said.
Gaven laughed. “Well, I think we should have a meal in his honor. Cart, you can watch us eat, in his honor.”
“That does seem appropriate,” the warforged said.
They walked back to the airship and rummaged through the stores again. Gaven pulled together a terrible meal, with Rienne’s help, and they choked it down with laughter as Gaven and Cart shared memories of Darraun’s cooking. Cart’s tales involved what he considered strange ingredients-clams, potatoes, and mushrooms foremost among them-while Gaven had only a few excellent meals to remember him by.
When Gaven and Rienne couldn’t bring themselves to eat any more, Gaven sat back and put his hands behind his head. “What’s our next step?” he said.
Cart answered without hesitation. “My place is with the general. Darraun’s death means that he is probably free again, and I need to find him.”
Gaven’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Still the soul of loyalty,” he said. “Why did you help me, then?”
“I told you. Because we are alike, both of us made for a purpose. I helped you fulfill your purpose-I think. The Prophecy still makes my head spin.”