The deathly chill of early morning had given way to such warmth near noon that all over the territory, commoners shed their heavy winter coats for the first time. It was not yet spring, of course; the lingering cold breeze still had too much of winter's bite for them to be fooled. It was, however, a sure sign of spring's iminent arrival.
For those unfortunate enough to live in the county of Tiutopiku, governed by one Viscount Aruman Carunirian, there was little to celebrate. The coming of spring generally meant that their lord would be abroad more frequently, looking over his holdings and collecting due tithe from his loyal subjects. Including the occasional lovely farmgirl or boy, since those who could not pay in coin could always pay in flesh.
But after the miserable, chilly grey of the long winter, even these sad folk found themselves looking up, and many of them felt something like pleasure stir in their hearts, at the sight of the sun and the bright blue sky.
Or perhaps they all had the same premonition.
Marron stood on the wide steps of Carunirian's palace, looking up at its graceful, confectionery spires. With a graceful gesture and a soft word in a language that was no longer spoken on the planet, he blotted out the sun. Then the clouds, then the whole of the sky; all of it disappeared beneath the spreading black dome of his conjuring. As it grew and reached toward the ground, completely engulfing the palace in a matte veil of darkness, day became night, and the slight warmth of not-quite-spring vanished.
He looked around at the small enclosed world he had created, and saw that it was good.
Silently, he proceeded up the steps.
"Come on, come on..."
The horse whickered and shook its head in response, nipping half-heartedly at the old dry grass at the edge of the road, scraping away the dusting of snow that had fallen overnight. It lifted its head to watch him balefully, probably because he was ruining even more perfectly good grass. He glanced at the animal and sighed.
"I'll get you some oats or something in the next town, okay?" The horse snorted. Carrot scowled. "Okay, okay, I know---I said that before the last one. Give me a break; I'm in a hurry, damn it." Snow steamed as it melted at his feet, and he growled down at his recalcitrant member in frustration. "Come on..."
"You shouldn't try to rush nature, Carrot-chan."
He started, whirling and reaching for his sword in the same moment, his hands tangling. "Nani---"
Mirufi waggled fingers at him and smiled. Then cocked his head to one side. One graceful pale eyebrow lifted; the amber eyes beneath gleamed.
Carrot followed his gaze and yelped, whirling to shake off and hastily arrange his clothing. "Mirufi! Gods, can't I see you even once without you pulling some hentai stunt?"
The other man laughed. "Not my fault you decided to flash me." Carrot sensed rather than saw his leer. "You're looking... well."
Carrot pulled his coat closed again and turned to glare. "So are you, for somebody I haven't seen in ages. Unfortunately, I don't have time to catch up on old times with you, Mirufi."
"Oh, I know. Neither do I, really." Pushing away from the tree he was leaning against, he regarded Carrot for a long moment, solemnly. "I'm here to take you to see Marron."
It took a moment for it to sink in. Then Carrot pushed his way roughly through the bushes to stand in front of him. "You'd better not be playing with me, Mirufi. I don't know what kind of game you're up to this time---"
Mirufi sighed. "No, Carrot. I know where he is, I know where he's been, I'll tell you everything, and I'll take you to him. But there's a catch." He lifted a hand and rested it on Carrot's shoulder.
"What---"
Abruptly they were somewhere else. There had been no movement, no transition; just a sudden, subtle change and then they were on a different road, one which ran along the side of a sloping mountain and above a well-farmed valley. The air was several degrees warmer and a good bit more humid. Carrot jerked away from Mirufi's hand and looked around in shock. "Mirufi---"
"Teleportation. Gomen ne; I know it's disorienting. There's no time to do this more easily." He abruptly looked away, up a mountain trail, and Carrot turned to follow his gaze. His confusion abruptly evaporated; in its place anger crystallized.
One of the men leading a horse down the tiered trail was a stranger to him: slender and young and androgynously handsome, with the look of an easterner. The other, however, was all too familiar. The stranger glanced up, spied Carrot and Mirufi, and stopped, eyes widening in alarm. Gateau looked up as well at his companion's gasp of surprise. His already-solemn expression hardened.
"Temee..." Carrot reached for his sword, never taking his eyes from Gateau. "I swore I'd kill you the next time I---"
"Kei." Gateau handed his horse's reins to the other man and turned to face Carrot, hands balling into fists. He braced himself for Carrot's attack.
They were both struck, in that moment, but a sudden, inexplicable concussion of soundless wind and unseen force, sharp enough that it made both men flinch and the horses sidestep, snorting nervously. When it passed, Carrot looked in surprise at Mirufi. Who stood beside him as before, but now clad in shining, elaborate armor, emblazoned with the sigils of the Stellar Church.
"Now is not the time, boys," Mirufi said, no amusement at all in his expression.
It surprised him that the doors closed almost silently behind him. He had expected an ominous hollow thud. It was a reminder that he should be prepared for anything. Carunirian had had nearly a month to prepare for his arrival.
So: he would forego a predictable approach and skip to the endgame. The hunt did not matter. Only its conclusion.
He scanned his environs. The main door of Carunirian's palace opened into a wide foyer, with a dramatically high ceiling and curved staircases leading to upper levels. Rich carpets lay along a beautifully-polished marble floor, and every border and cornerstice was gilt-edged. Tasteful elegance, meticulously and lavishly arranged.
Several of the servants whose task it was to keep the palace so beautiful stood around the foyer, staring at him in shock and unease. He examined them impassively, understanding their fear. He was a stranger to them who had not only entered unannounced, he had done so by teleporting away the guards on the main gate and causing the heavy metal doors to unbar and open themselves.
He ignored them for a moment and examined the ambient carefully, scanning the palace from sublevel to spire. Carunirian's distinctive aura was here, six floors up. Oparu was with him.
He looked into the faces of each of the servants for a long moment. The barrier he had created outside had not yet closed.
"Leave," he said quietly, his voice echoing faintly in the silent hall. Then he levitated himself into the air and phased through the ceiling.
The last thing he heard from the foyer, as he left it, was the frantic scrambling of the servants.
"When the hell did you become a Haz Knight?" Carrot demanded.
"I've been one since before your father was born. I'm not the person you need to be talking to right now, Carrot."
"Like hell. I don't want to talk to him. Is that why you brought me here? I don't have time for this, damn you---"
"---Carrot---"
"---and where's my horse? You didn't teleport my horse here, you son of a bitch? Do you know how much that horse cost---"
Gateau watched Mirufi and Carrot argue, frowning. A hand touched his and he glanced over into Kei's worried eyes.
"What is this?" Kei asked, leaning close to whisper. "Who are these people?"
Gateau looked at Mirufi and Carrot again and sighed. "Friends."
"Friends?"
"Sort of. It's a long story."
Kei glared at him, and he felt his shoulders hunch in guilty tension. It couldn't be helped, of course, but he still sighed. "Gomen nasai, Kei," he murmured finally, looking at his feet. "I thought it was over."
"You were going to give up that easily, Gateau?" Gateau frowned and looked up into Mirufi's frank gaze in surprise. Carrot fell silent beside him, looking from one to the other.
Gateau hunched even further. "Nothing I've done in this has been easy, Mirufi." He sighed and looked away. "The choice has been taken out of my hands, anyhow."
"And I'm putting it back into them," the Haz Knight replied curtly, then his expression softened a bit. "Come down here, and talk."
Gateau scowled and reached for his horse's reins again. "There's nothing to talk about." He stepped forward, leading the horse down to the foot of the trail, and stopped it there, reaching for the pommel of the saddle. Kei, following his lead, climbed into his own saddle and settled in, watching all of them solemnly. Gateau put his foot in the stirrup to test the saddle's tightness. He spoke gruffly. "He's gone and I'm not going to chase him anymore. Marron's made his choices."
"This morning you told him you'd love him forever," Mirufi's voice said harshly behind him, stopping him in mid-mount. He heard Carrot's swiftly-suppressed oath, Kei's soft sigh. "Did you mean that? Or was it just the afterglow talking?"
Oh, gods... Gateau groaned softly and leaned his forehead against the saddle, taking his foot out of the stirrup. "Damn you to hell, Mirufi."
"Been there, done that. Answer the question. Did you mean it? And you, Carrot---do you love your brother? Even though he engages in sexual practices you find offensive with men you don't like? Ready to stop blaming Gateau for the guilt you've carried around for the last three years?"
Silence behind him. Gateau frowned and turned to see that Carrot was staring at Mirufi, almost apoplectic with rage and consternation.
Mirufi nodded, satisfied by the silence. "Good. Now that that's out of the way, we can get down to business. Gateau, you know some of what I'm about to tell you. I'm sure it won't surprise you to learn that I haven't been entirely open with you about my motives or role in this matter. That's partly because the stakes have been so high. I don't expect forgiveness; that's unimportant right now..." He trailed off, looking beyond Gateau, and Gateau frowned, following his gaze to Kei.
Kei blinked. Mirufi's already-sober expression grew more solemn.
"I can send you home," he said suddenly, softly. Kei looked momentarily startled. "Right now, if you like. You don't have to go through this if you don't want to."
Gateau tensed, his hand tightening for a moment where it rested on the pommel. He focused his eyes on the stirrup. Kei said nothing immediately, and Gateau listened to the sound of his own breathing.
"No," Kei said. Firmly, with dignity. "I'll see this through."
Mirufi watched him a moment longer, then nodded, glancing at Gateau. Gateau turned and glanced over his shoulder, hesitantly. The calm regard in Kei's green eyes was cool, but unwavering.
Gateau turned back to Mirufi and Carrot and took a deep breath.
"All right. Tell us what you have to tell us, Mirufi." He glanced at Carrot and saw that the other man's anger had given way to sullen silence. Noticing Gateau's look, Carrot rolled his eyes, but then sighed and nodded in response to Gateau's unspoken query.
Gateau focused on Mirufi again. "Then take us to see Marron."
There had been a time, once, when it had been vitally important for Aruman Carunirian to be able to sense the approach of danger.
It had been years ago, when he and his father and his seven brothers had shared the vast ancestral palace, and Carunirian had been not its master but merely one of the scurrying creatures hiding away in its dark corners. Emerging only when hunger or need drove him into the open. Risking entrapment with every venture.
After the first few such incidents, he learned to vary his hiding places. To shield himself with legitimate duties. To defend himself, when he could, with his then-fledgling magical skills. Sometimes even these tricks failed. On those occasions, he was caught and drawn struggling from the darkness, to entertain his family in whatever way they saw fit.
Afterward, as he lay curled in his bed, shaking and crying and nauseated and aching, one part of himself would clinically review his strategy and analyze what he'd done wrong. He should have realized, for example, that the coming of the harvest ceremony meant that his father would be drunk on the best of the new wine for several days. He learned to gauge, with startling accuracy, when a loss against a rival in the Sorcerers' Arena would send his eldest brother prowling the halls of the palace, seeking an outlet for his rage.
In time, his ability to anticipate threats grew uncanny, almost preternatural. By the time he was fifteen, his brothers had learned that catching him in a vulnerable moment was nearly impossible, and his father soon turned his attention to younger and easier prey. It helped, of course, that a new, cruel light had begun to appear in young Aruman's eyes, and that his thin, chilly smile had begun to unnerve them.
Barely a year later, that smile became the last thing they saw as he killed each of them, shivering in pleasure with every scream he wrung from their throats. As they had shivered at his own cries of pain and humiliation in the past.
Although he had not needed his knack for sensing danger for many years, he had never lost the old skill. So as he stood over the map affixed to his conference room table, discussing supply-lines with Oparu, he found himself falling inexplicably silent, paying no attention to Oparu's questions for a moment as he stared unseeing at the map below him. Wondering at the odd, disturbingly familiar sensation that had suddenly come over him.
It was enough to prompt him to look to the window. For a moment he wondered how it could have gotten dark so quickly, so early in the day. Then, as surely as he'd once known what the slow turning of his door-latch meant in the stillness of the night, he knew what the darkness outside portended.
He had not been a frightened, scurrying child for many years. This time, he smiled.
"We are about to have company, my dear Oparu-san." He moved away from the table to gaze out at the dome of darkness enclosing his palace, and smiled. "And right on time. You remember what we discussed?"
Oparu turned to look at him, then at the window, then back at him, small eyes widening in alarm. "Y-yes. Are you su---" He stopped then, in mid-sentence, with a little scream.
Carunirian chuckled and turned to see what had terrified Oparu, knowing what he would see. And of course, he was right.
The Mage stood in the center of the room, watching them silently, expressionless. The sight of him made Carunirian's breath catch for a moment. He stepped away from the window for a better look and was rewarded by confirmation. The scrying glass hadn't done him justice.
"I don't believe it," he murmured, amazed, a completely unaffected smile spreading across his face. "You're so much more beautiful than I remember. I wish to all the gods I didn't have to kill you."
Carrot stood silently, hands thrust into his pockets, facing into the woods with his back to them. Mirufi watched them both with an air of impatience, waiting for their decision.
Kei was silent as well, a troubled look on his face, but then that was to be expected. He'd just learned, after all, that Carrot was the living embodiment of Destruction, that the strange cross-dressing man was actually a representative of the continent's supreme ruler, and that the end of civilization as they knew it might be at hand. It was a bit much to take, all at once.
Gateau sighed, looking up at the thin network of bare branches above him, and leaned his head against the tree's trunk. What Mirufi had told them explained so much. And yet in the end there were still the same questions, hovering ominously overhead, awaiting answers. Answers that would not exist until they created them.
When he closed his eyes, he could still feel Marron's lips on his skin.
He sighed again and straightened, looking bleakly at Mirufi. "You haven't left me much of a choice."
Mirufi regarded him evenly. "You always have a choice, Gateau. Onion's going. He alone might be enough. But we'll have a better chance if the both of you come along too, don't you think?"
Gateau chuckled bitterly, looking up again, at the heavens past the stark branches of the tree. "I think we have no chance at all."
"You would," Carrot said, softly. Gateau lowered his head to gaze at the other man, frowning. Carrot had said nothing so far, throughout Mirufi's explanation; he'd only stood at the edge of the road and looked out over the valley in silence. Now he turned, his brown eyes hard.
"I've hated you for the last three years," he said, flatly. "I blamed you for letting him die. That was wrong." He scowled. "I should have hated you for not being good enough for him."
Mirufi groaned. "Carrot---"
"No." Gateau shook his head. He pushed away from the tree and stood facing Carrot, watching him, his jaw tight. "I want to hear what else he has to say."
"There's nothing else to say." Carrot walked back onto the road and stood in front of Gateau, glaring up at him. "You love him?"
Gateau blinked. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Kei look away. "Yes, but--"
"But hell." Carrot jabbed a fingertip against his chest. "You love him, you help him. End of story. Doesn't matter if he loves somebody else. Doesn't matter if he's screwed in the head. You help him."
Rage and guilt shot through him, pain hot on their heels. He slapped Carrot's hand away. "Even if he'd rather die than be with me?" he asked bitterly. "He rejected me twice before all of this started and this morning was the third time. Even though he'd just spent the time before telling me that he loved me and fucking me half-blind to prove it." He said harshly, to hurt, and was rewarded by a flicker in the depths of Carrot's eyes. It gave him a half-second's pallid satisfaction. "I'm not stupid. I can take a hint. I'm through trying to change him. He wants to die, who am I to stop him?"
That Carrot took a swing at him then was no surprise. That it landed and actually hurt, was.
He took a step back, more out of shock than pain, and stared at Carrot, clapping a hand to the numbing spot on his jaw. "Kisama---"
He got no chance to deliver the threat that came to his lips. Carrot was in his face in the next instant, one hand catching the front of his shirt. "I just got my brother back, you son of a bitch," he snarled. "I'll be damned if I let you kill him again because you're getting your brain and your dick mixed up. You love him, you come and help him. Or we finally know you never deserved him in the first damn place."
Gateau stared down at him, too startled to speak.
"You should go," Kei said softly, into the ensuing silence.
All three of them turned to him.
Kei lifted a hand and pushed a loose lock of hair out of his face, then lifted his head to gaze down the road, away from all of them. "You should go," he repeated, more firmly. And then he shrugged. "He's right. You love something, you fight for it. Or you'll spend the rest of your life regretting that you didn't."
Gateau caught his breath. His chest tightened, painfully.
"For however long that life lasts," Mirufi added quietly. "If it's not already too late."
With a sharp, dismissive gesture, Carrot abruptly let go of Gateau. He spoke to Mirufi, although he kept his eyes on Gateau. "Aa. Then let's go." He walked over to stand beside Mirufi, then turned to watch Gateau grimly, folding his arms.
Gateau stared at the crumple in his shirt where Carrot had held him, his fists clenched, his guts in knots. He couldn't do this. It would hurt too much, if they failed. Yet another rejection, and this time he would not have the comparably comfortable cushion of ignorance to ease his pain.
He could still smell the fragrance of Marron's hair.
He put a hand over his mouth, closing his eyes against the pain.
Kei slid out of his saddle and walked over, his slippered feet nearly silent on the hard-packed earth. Gateau frowned as he approached, but he only took Gateau's hand, looking up into Gateau's eyes for a long moment. His own green ones were darker than usual, and full of sadness---and understanding.
"Come on," he said softly.
After a moment, Gateau felt himself relax. He nodded. The two of them walked over to stand in front of Mirufi and Carrot.
A moment later, Mirufi took them find to Marron.
It began to go wrong when Carunirian smiled at him.
What happened then lasted only an instant. The scent of campfire smoke wafted across his nostrils. Other scents followed, so fleetingly that they were gone before he could identify them, and it was only a moment later that he recognized them. Fragrant oils. Blood. Ozone and aether.
A flash of Carunirian's smile, and Zeii's rictus of agony.
And then the hallucination, if that it was, faded as swiftly as it had come. He managed to keep his face expressionless. With an effort.
He would have to do this quickly.
"I must say, I've been thrilled with your progress so far," Carunirian continued, as casually as if he were talking to anyone but his soon-to-be murderer. Marron scanned the room carefully, noting Oparu all but cowering behind the table, searching for anything that might give him some clue as to the nature of the Sorcerer's plans. Carunirian was too relaxed. Too confident.
"Torumarin could have stood to suffer a bit more, but on the whole I'd say you've done an exemplary job, for an amateur. If you weren't here to kill me, I'd offer to take you on as an apprentice. With, ah, suitable compensatory arrangements, of course." His eyes roved down Marron's body, blatantly covetous.
Marron focused on his face again. "Shut up." He raised a hand, palm facing Oparu. Oparu yelped and cringed, half-ducking behind the table.
Carunirian quickly raised a hand. "Don't be so hasty, my dear Lord Glaces! It is 'Lord,' now, isn't it? Have you taken Mizu's place as head of the school? It doesn't matter, I suppose, given that the school no longer exists."
He reached into his loose shirt and withdrew a neckace, from which dangled a small locket, incongrouously heart-shaped. Marron narrowed his eyes; engraved on the locket's surface was a complicated rune whose purpose he recognized immediately. A magical seal.
Carunirian smiled again. "You're obviously not interested in the usual cliched pre-battle banter. Let's skip to the good part, eh?"
He pressed a tiny, nearly-invisible spring, and the locket popped open.
**End Ch. 19