The Reluctant Champion

Endings

The rain was falling in earnest now, sweeping in with the clouds from the northeast. It fell hissing into the two bonfires—the larger and the smaller—and plastered the hair of the few remaining mourners to their heads, dripping down their faces, seeping under their collars and down their necks.

Lidah had no need of the rain's help with her mourning now. She stood at the side of the larger pyre and wept openly, wept for her father and for her friend.

Galen stood to one side of her, Madoc behind them. A few of the townspeople and Dagon's court were still with them; but Lidah had sent most back to the town that she might be private with her grief.

The little bonfire had fewer mourners beside it—in fact it had only one, but in cruel parody that one was a little mourner. Jaspar stood solemn, staring into the flames, not tracing the lines of the bones that could still be made out but the line of the wood that was even now falling to embers. You could not tell from the stillness of his face whether he wept, but his whole body spoke for him, forlorn and alone by the side of the fire.

Eventually Madoc came over to him and put an arm around his shoulder. Jaspar braced himself rigid against it for a moment, then relaxed and leaned against him.

"Don't take it too hard, son," Madoc said. "She never wanted anything more than this."

"I know," whispered the boy. "She never really belonged with us, did she?"

"No, lad. Her way just ran with ours awhile, that's all."

"I miss her. Do you think she cared for us at all?"

There's a time to tell the truth, but there's also a time to lie as convincingly as you can. "I'm sure of it," Madoc said.

"I think so."

They were silent for a time, and then the boy spoke again.

"What now?"

"I guess I'll be moving on, looking for work like before. Lidah will find you a good home here—"

The boy's hand gripped his painfully. "No!"

" . . . I was about to say, if you don't care to go with me."

"Can I?"

"Yes. Will you?"

The face that grinned up at him, squinting in the rain, was answer enough.

#

A low table was laid for breakfast on an upper balcony. Galen sat on a cushion at one end toying with some grapes; there was an empty place at his side. He had been sitting there since the first gray light of dawn, the time Lidah had set for their meeting. Now the sun was a hand's-span above the horizon and there was still no sign of her.

It had been a difficult week since Dagon's funeral and Bashanadar's death. Galen had known in theory that Lidah was a princess and her father's only surviving child. It was still a shock to realize that her father's death made her ruler of her country. Shortly there would be a coronation and then she would be Queen of Napesh and the Sunset Isles, mistress of the whole land from the mountains to the sea and beyond.

And a good thing too. What did you think, fool, that she would leave her country to come play farmer's wife with you?

Galen tore a grape apart and flicked the seeds at an iridescent parrot that hopped along a railing. He had barely seen Lidah at all in the last week. She had spent it pulling her country back together—reorganizing the army, meeting with town councils, spending hours in conference with that fellow Hassan and her other ministers.