“Storm coming,” Belkynn said, glancing at the dark banks of cloud overhead.

“We made it past one,” Damar said softly. He kissed her deeply again, and they parted to rise and dress. He did not don the armor this time, putting his ragged ochre robe on instead.

“What are you doing?”

“Chain me back to the altar,” he said.

“What?” She gaped at him.

“It is needful that I should be chained here for the Empress,” he told her, eyes full of such love and compassion Belkynn seemed to bathe in it. “It is also needful that you not press me into it.”

“What difference does it make?” Her heart lurched and ached. She had known it must be this way, but still she had harbored a single flame of hope that they would be together facing the naxhtok.

“All the difference, Belkynn Kallon,” he smiled bravely. “You go now to face one enemy. Had you betrayed me, your focus would be split between guilt and necessity. And it is a universal fact that sentients create their best results when acting of their own will.”

“You will die,” Belkynn told him. “I have seen it in Kreathania’s dreams.”

“It’s a possibility,” Damar admitted, holding out his hands for her to shackle.

“Is there no other way?” Her voice was pleading, but she found that her heart was at peace now. She replaced the shackles, kissing the wrists and ankles as though in apology or honor.

“Foresight is never that keen,” Damar assured her. “Most of the time we see only enough to jump to some conclusion and then act on that.”

“Then what makes you so certain this is the right thing?”

“I’m not certain,” Damar smiled wanly. “But you and Kreathania are. And we need you both to retain faith in yourselves and in Dreydillon’s future. So, I’ll play along until a better alternative presents itself.”

“Come fight beside me,” she offered.

“I would love to,” he said, a savage smile lighting his face for a moment. But then shadows gathered again in his eyes and he seemed to bend to some ancient guilt. “But it is both needless and reckless.”

“Why?”

“We’ll be distracted trying to keep each other safe,” he said. “You need to focus everything on one outcome: killing enough naxhtok to bring peace.”

“All of them,” she asserted.

“No, Belkynn Kallon!” Damar captured her in his sapphire gaze again, intense and irrefutable. “Slay only to the extent you are forced. If they flee, permit it. I am certain of this. Kreathania desires their extinction, but the time for that is still far in the future.

“Besides, it is reprehensible to slay an entire species simply because we fail to understand them.”

“Is that why you spared the troll?” Belkynn flinched as Damar’s eyes flashed, but then relaxed as he hung his head and his look became one of abject embarrassment.

“I wanted to study him,” Damar confessed. “It came to my attention that trolls are sentient, and not altogether malevolent.”

“Are you insane?” She gaped at him. It is common knowledge that trolls are simply and thoroughly evil. That is why the gods inflicted them with such stench.

“Don’t change the subject,” Damar smiled ironically. “Trolls can appreciate beauty. They seem to loathe most of it, but they at least appreciate it.”

“What makes you think that?” She asked.

“Reach into the inside pocket of my robe here,” he pointed with his short beard, which he cropped close since the troll had torn one of its braids out.

Belkynn reached into an inside pocket, but found only a handful of small hide packets. From the smell of them, the packets each held some kind of herb or flower or mineral.

“Two pockets down,” Damar smiled.

“You’re enjoying this,” she teased, pulling out a handful of hair and trinkets from the pocket. It turned out to be the braid torn away by the troll. She inspected it with some disgust, wondering why he carried such a grisly reminder of that encounter.

“That charm there,” he told her when she gazed down at a charm shaped like a white lily. “What does it remind you of?”

“White lily,” she shrugged, looking closer. The bloom seemed to be made of something like bandishells. Its stem and leaves were emerald green with hints of crimson. The stem was coiled at the end to form a loop, which is where Damar had braided his beard through it.

“Where was it we met?” He asked. She glared up at him for a moment, offended at his suggestion that she might forget such a significant detail.

“Oh! The field of white lilies! This is one of those.”

“Actually,” Damar blushed furiously. “It’s rendered to look like one . . . for the same reason that field is dominated by the white lilies . . .”

“So tell me already,” she demanded.

“A few years, not sure how long really . . .” Damar took a deep breath and explained quickly.

He had been hunting mulegoat below that torturous climb. Giving up on the slopes there, he scaled the cliff to find a gorgeous plain filled with a lily new to him in as many colors as he could imagine. Most were shades of blue and red. Sprinkled among these were a few golden ones. He fell in love with the place immediately and went to the same depression as Belkynn to lie down for a much needed rest.

The scent of the flowers was intoxicating. He felt lethargic, dreamy. But then the sharp stench of troll pushed all the beauty away. Damar rose up in fury, determined to purify his floral paradise. He tucked one flint gwegtvark and one of forged and hammered iron with a bear bone handle into his broad sash, armed himself with his mulegoat bow, and headed eastward into the wind.

At the edge of the meadow, the troll bellowed its hatred of him. Still forty strides away, twenty for the troll, Damar loosed three arrows in rapid succession as the troll charged him. It was enormous even for a troll. The first arrow sank to its fletching into the troll’s throat. The second hit its chin and snapped. The third sank halfway to the fletching up the troll’s left nostril.

Dropping his bow, Damar pulled his gwegtvark out and raced to meet the troll. It wielded an ironwood sapling with stones woven into its roots—an extraordinary level of sophistication for a troll. Damar dove and rolled into a somersault once he got close enough. The vicious bludgeon whistled past him, a single small stone slamming into the bottom rib of his left side.

Cursing with every motion, Damar danced his way around the beast’s hideous legs. Time and again he lashed out with the axehead of his flint weapon and the hammerhead of the other. The sharp edge cut mercilessly through tendons and knee and ankle; the blunt weapon shattered the troll’s kneecap on the second blow. As the troll pitched forward, Damar slammed the pick ends of each weapon into the arteries above and behind each knee. He let the beast’s weight tear the weapons from his fists while tearing lethal gashes in the troll’s legs at the same time.

Damar launched himself away from the troll to avoid being kicked or smashed in the convulsions of its death throes. Safely away, he reached to the small of his back and pulled twin flint daggers from sheaths. He advanced cautiously toward the beast’s head, glancing now and again at the dwindling pulses of rancid blood from the furrows in its thighs.

“Not my first dance with your kind,” he told the troll, coming into sight of its misshapen face. Pustules and boils ruined the countenance, no matter what the bone structure might have intended. But its tremendous underbite and swinish nose added to the effect. As well as the low, slanted brow and porcine eyes.

But these eyes were like no other troll’s he had encountered. They were curious as well as hate-filled. Damar was caught up by them. Without intending to, he shot his percipience into the tortured brain behind the eyes. It was a maelstrom of bloodlust and loathing. Every imaginable ugliness roiled in that brain. Every impulse man finds reprehensible surged there with undeniable allure.

And yet, Damar ignored all this. It was merely the storm; there is more to the sea than storms. Almost without warning, the madness subsided. Damar had to withdraw himself so forcefully and quickly from the troll’s mind that he found himself sitting stunned at the verge of the field of lilies.

 

“His dying thought was . . .” Damar’s eyes seemed to look through the world, streaming tears as he recalled the tale. “Devotion. He wanted to become the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. All around him were lilies of magnificent hues, and yet he saw only a single white lily. He worshiped its beauty with the last of his being.”

“But the meadow is all white lilies,” Belkynn said.

“It was my homage to him—my penance,” Damar sniffed, eyes still running freely with tears. “In that moment, Belkynn Kallon, Gordrashit the troll was a greater man than I. And so I built him a living shrine.”

“That must have been difficult,” she said.

“The hardest part was making that charm,” he told her, nodding to the forgotten braid in her hand.

“How did you do it?”

“It was before Helion,” Damar said sadly. “I learned to do a great many things by experimenting. Flowers are rather easy to convince into whatever color you want. You just have to start with one generation and mold them through pollination, nurse them through winter, and then coax them up the next spring.”

“I meant this.” She held up the charm.

“I . . .” he sobbed once, face contorted with old grief. “I tore his heart out and melded it with his xiphoid process—the spearpoint bone that comes down off your breastbone.”

“You what?” She gaped in awe at the charm, holding it away from her instinctively and letting it dangle from the braid.

“It’s easier than shaping stone, but still takes a lot of concentration,” his tone suggested a shrug of nonchalance. “It’s like working clay, only you use your sorcery through your hands. I had to work some stone and sand into it to get the green right.”

“It looks bloody,” she said, half disgusted.

“It is,” Damar coughed sharply and collected himself. “You wouldn’t believe how much blood is on my hands. That’s why I’m content here . . . only . . . I hope you—

“Kill only for true purpose, Belkynn Kallon. Any other way is no better than murder.”

“I will,” she said, moved now beyond her revulsion of the troll charm and into overwhelming compassion for both the troll and Damar.

“Will you wear it?” Damar asked. “I want you to take it with you. To remember that you kill as a means to an end, not an end unto itself.”

She considered hurling the hideous thing away. But his compassion swayed her to reconsider. She gazed at the charm. About the size of Damar’s thumb, it was incredibly detailed. Beyond her revulsion over the idea of it being the remains of a troll, she could feel admiration for the handiwork. That admiration opened the door for her to comprehend Damar’s sentiment.

“You loved him for proving you wrong,” she said slowly, her own eyes misting. “You did this to earn forgiveness, but he’s not around to forgive you.

“Oh, Damar,” she kissed him gently on the cheek. “You continue to surprise me.”

“Surprise you?” Damar calmed himself and gazed at the darkening sky.

“You’re hard as flint, yet delicate as a lily petal,” she said. “You have so much power, and yet you refuse to use it. You don’t even need me for this . . .”

“Dreydillon needs you, Belkynn Kallon,” Damar asserted.

“And you need me, Damar,” she smiled into his consternation. “You need me.”

“So?”

“Everyone in Dreydillon either fears you or holds you in awe,” she told him. “Legends of you warm as many hovels as fires in winter. You’re spoken of in awe and wonder as though you were one of the gods come to walk among us. Even the Vurhk and the fair folk hold you in awe . . .”

“They hold their own imaginings of me in awe,” Damar said scornfully.

“Nevertheless,” Belkynn caressed his cheek with her hand. “One of the three greatest powers in Dreydillon, held to be his own man above all else, actually needs me.”

“Everyone needs someone,” Damar told her. “I just didn’t expect to find you so . . . remarkable. It’s no mystery to me why any man would want to be with you. But why in all the impossible universe did you decide I might be any kind of companion?”

“You’re like the Worldteeth,” she said, grinning. “Full of storms and sharp stones. Full of dangerous ferocities and unforeseeable danger. And yet you grow meadows full of lilies.”

“Go,” he ordered, his voice a harsh bark. It hit her with a force of command she could only resist because of their intimacy.

“One last thing,” she said. She unlocked his left hand and handed him the braid and its grisly charm; he had to weave his own beard hairs with her hair to get a braid long enough to weave the lily over her left ear.