"How did you find this place?" Zia asked the King, speaking for the first time since entering the tent.
"I've been searching for the location of your Headquarters for months- years, really." Donathan admitted. "We only found it when we got wind that...
"Alright there?" Jay asked, looking at Ike shifting his weight nervously from foot to foot out of the corner of his eye.
They stood in a large field that, in spring would be green and lush, but now was yellow and dead and covered in patches of snow. The cold wind moaned as it passed, giving the already tense atmosphere a sense of foreboding of the dark things that were sure to come. Ike and Jay stood among the men that they had been able to gather for battle. There were about three hundred of them, but it didn't feel like enough- especially when they saw the number of tents at the Skilaen army base.
Ike nodded. "Just a bit tense."
"You have no reason to be," Jay said. "You're a great fighter."
"Pa always says you can work harder than anyone else, but that doesn't mean you're the best, and it certainly doesn't guarantee you anything, not even your life."
A wise saying, Jay thought. "Even so, having great skill can assist in keeping you alive a bit longer."
"Pa says that too," Ike said with a tight smile, but it quickly fell from his face. "I wonder where he is. It makes me anxious not knowing."
"Wherever he is," Jay said, placing a comforting hand on Ike's shoulder, "I'm sure he'll be fine." He smiled mischievously. "After all, if he survived raising you, a little army of a thousand is no threat to him."
Ike snorted. "If you think I was a problem child, you should have seen Zia and Heath."
"They were troublemakers?" Jay asked, surprised.
"No, but they sure were a handful." Ike smiled at the memory. "They spent most of their teenage years at each other's throats."
Jay raised his eyebrows in surprise. He opened his mouth to reply, but he was cut short by the sound of a trump, and the Skilaen army appeared in formation before them.
The two armies fell silent, watching each other warily, each waiting for the other to make the first move. The only sound was the wind through the naked trees, moaning like a ghost through the field.
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The drugs had started to work on Zia quickly. Her brain felt fuzzy, as though someone had stuffed her ears full of cotton. Her movements were slow and, though she had no one to talk to, she knew that if she tried to speak her words would be slurred. The one thing that was clear to her was her hatred for taking the tonic. The only reason she had agreed to come to this room was to be of help, however skeptical she was of her ability to do so, and now her mind was so muddled she could barely form an intelligent thought. She wondered how Daxtor could possible find this appealing. How he could live like this on a day-to-day basis. She added that to the things she didn't understand about him. She noticed with a sigh that the list was longer than she would have liked it to be.
The one thing she kept her mind on, the one thought that kept clear through the haze, was that Heath had left her door open- that he had given her a way to escape, to truly help. She clung desperately to this thought, repeating it to herself over and over again so that she did not forget it as she lost all sense of reason and direction. If things were to get desperate, Zia would be more help out of this room than sitting in a bed waiting for a power she didn't even believe in to manifest itself.
