Sorrow's Peak (Serpent of Time Book 2) (3 page)

“Sorry,” she shrugged, turning a sheepish gaze to the dark floor beneath her. “I heard someone out here and thought maybe it was Finn.”

Or Brendolowyn, she thought, still staring at the floor.

“Only me, I’m afraid,” he chuckled in a gruff whisper. “Did the two of you have a falling out?”

“No,” shaking her head, she finally brought her eyes up and let them adjust to the low light of the room. “Nothing like that. He just…” She wasn’t exactly sure what Finn was trying to accomplish, putting up a wall between them as he’d done. “I don’t know, he just didn’t think it was a good idea to sleep in the same room, things being as they are.”

“And how
are
things?” Logren cocked his brow, the left shooting slightly higher than the right and the skin above them both wrinkling with curiosity. “Between the two of you, I mean.”

“Complicated,” she shrugged.

“Aye,” he nodded agreement. “They always are, aren’t they?”

“I don’t know. I guess.” Her shoulders were still hitched close to her ears, a certain tightness building in the muscles as she held them there. “I don’t exactly have a lot of experience in that area, not really.”

“No,” he nodded. “I suppose you don’t.”

Turning back toward the counter behind him, he grabbed another mug and set them both on the table. Lifting his leg across the bench, he sat down and gestured for her to take the seat across from him.

“Have a seat and drink with me, little sister. We haven’t had much time. We can talk a while before it’s time to say our goodbyes.”

She had no idea what time it was, or how many hours were left before sunup, but tired as she was, she knew she wouldn’t sleep if she went back to her room and lay alone in the dark until someone told her it was time to go. She took tentative steps toward the table, edged onto the bench he’d gestured to and watched him pour pale amber liquid into two mugs. He pushed the one with less in it toward her and she reached for it, curling her fingers around the wooden drinking vessel to draw it closer.

“I had a dream about our father,” she said after a long silence, and then as if it would keep him from asking her to elaborate, she lifted her mug to her lips and took a slow sip of the bitter brew.

Logren didn’t ask for details, only stared at her from where he sat, his thick eyebrows knitted together in curiosity. The man in her dream looked so much like the one in front of her she thought maybe she hadn’t dreamed about their father at all; maybe it was only wishful thinking as she reached into the great unknown for some connection to the man who loved her mother once before he died.

“I don’t remember much about it, just that it was about him,” after a moment’s pause she added, “and my mother. He looked like you,” she added as an afterthought. “Only different.”

A soft breath of laughter escaped her half-brother and he relaxed the muscles of his face. Taking a drink, he swallowed loudly, gulping several mouthfuls down before lowering the cup to the tabletop and clunking it down upon the wood.

“A lot of people say that,” he told her, “that I look like him, only different. Hodon says I’m the spitting image, and sometimes I try to see it for myself when I look into the glass and study my own reflection there, but try as I might I can no longer remember what he looked like.” His amusement was replaced with lament, and he tilted the cup to his lips again. “Except now,” he went on after taking a drink. “Sometimes when I look at you I catch glimpses and I remember. It’s your eyes,” he decided. “They’re just the way his were.”

“You and I have the same eyes,” she pointed out.

“Do we?”

“I think we do.” In fact, she’d never known anyone with eyes quite like hers, except Rhiorna, but even the color of Rhiorna’s eyes was different, more citrine than amber.

“The same color, maybe,” he nodded, “but yours are shaped the way his were. I have my mother’s eyes. His nose though,” he chuckled and lifted a hand to draw it down the length. “Praise be to all the gods you weren’t cursed with this monstrosity.”

Lorelei reached self-consciously toward her nose, fingertip tracing its length before they dipped slightly upward at the tip and dropped off. She lowered her hand into her lap again and took another drink of the warm, sour-tasting ale in her cup.

“Are we all that’s left of him? I overheard Vilnjar say there are probably dozens like us out there. That our father had quite the uh… reputation.”

“Vilnjar thinks he knows everything there is to know about everything,” he harrumphed. “I can assure you it’s only you and me,” he said. “We are all Rognar left behind in this world, that and a lifetime of grief for all who ever loved him. If there were others, I’d have learned of them by now. Nearly all that remains of our people are here in Dunvarak. There are a handful of wanderers, the restless few who’ve no desire to come here, but none of those wanderers are Rognar’s children. You and me, we are his legacy.”

“I don’t know why, but I am relieved by that.”

“As am I,” he agreed, and they tilted cups together before taking a mutual drink.

“You named Roggi for him?”

“Aye, I did.”

“You loved him a great deal.” It wasn’t a question, not even an observation really. She didn’t know why she even said it, but she felt it with every part of herself so deeply it was almost painful.

“More than everything. You would have too,” he said with grave certainty. “It was impossible not to love him, and not just because he was my father, Lorelei. He was a good man, a strong wolf. The kind of leader men laid down to die for.”

“And the things he fought for?”

“He fought for you,” he told her, “for you and me, for our mothers, the men who stood beside him and their families. All he ever wanted was a place we could all call home.”

“Well,” she started, “I suppose in the end he got exactly what he wanted, just not the way he wanted it.”

He didn’t get to call the Edgelands home, or Dunvarak, and his family endured without him. How different might her life have been growing up with Rognar? Seeing her mother happy and alive? Knowing her brother long before he was old enough to start a family of his own? There would be no Mirien. The thought alone was devastating.

“I suppose he did,” but there was a bitter hint in his voice that made her feel bad for saying what she did. For a long time they were both silent, and she watched her brother fill his cup again and take long swallows of liquid that only served to add bitterness to his heart.

She couldn’t imagine his pain, didn’t want to even try. It was hard enough just knowing their father was a great warlord, loved and respected by nearly all who knew him. Even after the end of the War of Silence, there were men and women in Dunvarak who thought Rognar was a great hero.

Expectations for the children of such a hero would be high, perhaps higher than either of them would ever be able to live up to. Gods, the things the people of Dunvarak believed she was going to do were outrageous, and even though Yovenna saw them take place in that strange way seers are granted visions, Lorelei still didn’t know if she could live up to their expectations. Perhaps it might have been easier if he left behind other children; they could more fairly distribute the burden, but as it stood there was no one else. Not even her brother had a part to play in the grandest of her tasks. That made her sad.

Somewhere back the hallway she heard floorboards creak and groan and her head turned toward the dark passage in expectation. Surely their voices were heard and at any moment someone would come to invade that rare moment brother and sister grabbed together. It was the first time the two of them were really alone since he and his men came to their rescue in the Edgelands.

There was so much she wanted to say to him, so many things she wanted to ask, but several minutes passed before she found her voice again.

“The story you told,” she began, remembering in the silence that followed the details of a tale shared around the fire as they traveled to Dunvarak. He said she saved him, that somehow beyond all reason she reached out to him from the great beyond before she was even born and pulled him from the fires that took his mother’s life. “You said I reached out to you through the flames? How can you be sure it was me who saved you, Logren? I mean, I wasn’t even born yet… How could it have been me?”

The only explanation she had to make sense of the events, of the fact that the people of Dunvarak believed she’d somehow saved them all, came through the words of a seer who told her she was meant to battle some serpent the creator of all things set upon the world to keep time itself from moving forward. She wanted to believe the things Yovenna said to her; as outlandish as the words were, they made sense of events that seemed otherwise senseless. But try as she might to come to terms with the fact that she was meant to battle a time serpent, she just couldn’t.

Not yet, anyway.

While Logren chose his words with careful precision, Lorelei hid behind the rim of her mug, waiting, watching over the curve and breathing in the heady aroma of the ale sloshing at the bottom of the cup. It had a faint citrus smell and a bitter flavor she could still taste in her mouth even though she hadn’t actually taken another sip since she’d raised it to her lips.

“I didn’t know at the time it was you.” An uneasy laugh scuffed through his tight throat. “It wasn’t until much later I learned it was my own sister who saved my life.”

“But how?”

“How did I know it was you?” Shaking his head, the dark auburn waves of his hair whispered against the fabric of his shirt, the braids falling inward to dance along his cheek. “There were artists here who recaptured your image, for one thing. Some of those you saved saw you in greater detail than I, and others still say you spoke to them, you even told them your name.”

Lorelei still wasn’t convinced. The greatest part of her wanted to believe she’d saved the people of Dunvarak, that in some way she’d found the power to reach out from beyond the limits of time itself to pull them from death’s grip. She just couldn’t wrap her head around it, no matter how she tried.

“I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but alcohol loosens my tongue and dulls my wits,” he started after giving her a long pause to think his words through. “Bren’s experience with you was the most vivid of them all. Maybe you should ask him about the day the Light of Madra saved him.”

“Brendolowyn?”

“He was not even on this continent when you held your hand out to spirit him away from death.” Sloshing the ale in his mug, he slugged what remained in his cup in two loud swallows before lowering it with a thunk to the table and reaching for the bottle again. “It is not my place to tell you of his experience…”

“Then you should not have brought it up.” That fine line she walked with her half-brother since the day they met had been crossed again, and though she wanted to retreat and hide, it was too late. She cared for him too much, for his family and for the memories of the man they shared as father to back away now. “Why do you do that to me, Logren? Reel me in like a fisherman, hold me by the line then cast me back to sea without any answers at all?”

“I don’t mean to.” Lowering his head like a scolded child, he reminded her so much of Roggi it was impossible to stay angry with him. “I don’t like having to tiptoe around you, guarding everything I say, stifling my own words for fear of giving you something that isn’t mine to give. But his experience is not mine to share with you, little sister. I can only tell you it was his words, his time with the Light of Madra which convinced me of the outlandish claims our seer made over the years. If there was ever a doubt in my mind you were our saving grace, I only had to think of Bren to believe again.”

Without acknowledging the bitter taste or the dizziness that would follow if she drank too much too quickly, Lorelei tossed the contents of her cup into her mouth and swallowed hard. Its acidity burned in her throat, hit her stomach fast and hard, immediately spreading warmth to every part of her body in an uneven and disconcerting fashion. She pushed the cup back toward her brother and with a single forward nod of her head gestured for him to fill it again.

Logren hesitated, fingers curled around the bottle’s neck as if he wasn’t sure he wanted to part with the precious liquid within. Then he tilted it into her cup and filled it to just below the rim before emptying the rest of the bottle into his own mug.

Come morning she would hate herself for it. She didn’t have a lot of experience when it came to drinking, but the memory of a night in the wine stores with her sister, sneaking drinks and giggling until their heads swam and they could barely hold their bodies upright brought with it recollection of the morning after. Her head would ache and her stomach would feel sick. Her body would be so exhausted she wouldn’t remember how to move it, but how else was one supposed to go into a task so daunting, so senseless, inexplicable and terrifying, if not with a head distracted by the taint of alcohol.

Tipping her cup toward her brother once more, he didn’t hesitate, but touched his rim to hers in a toast that didn’t need to be spoken, and then they drank into the wee hours of the morning.  

CHAPTER TWO

Sleep eluded the mage. It never came when he willed it; it rarely, if ever, had, but Brendolowyn felt the exhaustion of its absence so deep in his bones it all but became a part of him.

Nigh on a month since he’d last gotten a proper night’s rest, and even then it was less than a full, uninterrupted five hours. Both his mind and body forgot what sleep could do for it, his desire for it decreasing exponentially as it became little more than a distant and distracting memory nagging at the back of his mind. As long as he could remember, sleep ran and he gave chase, but the ritual became increasingly worse as the days until her coming passed away.

Her actual presence in his life made it intolerable, and on the few rare occasions they were briefly alone together he hadn’t known how to behave without feeling like an absolute fool once she was gone again.