“You have not left yet. What would you have done if my father sent his army? When they would inevitably attack us, would you have fled?”
The elf sighed after a moment. “No, I don't think I would have. I am conflicted, Kai. I have followed you for five years. I care for you. But I do not care for our circumstances.”
My heart ached with sadness. I hated that my decisions had affected him in such a way. For the first time in awhile, Silas wasn't happy here with me, and I didn't know what the future held for him.
I left Silas to his tent, and turned toward the campfire. To my surprise, Cerin still sat beside it, though he'd turned toward the night sky, watching it in silence. I knew that by now, Theron and Nyx were probably asleep.
I walked over slowly to the seat beside his, and sat down. If he noticed, he didn't say anything. I wanted to talk to him, but it was hard to break the silence with a man who was partial to it. Thus, the two of us sat in silence until I was pretty sure even Silas was asleep. Then, I finally got the nerve to speak.
“It is my watch tonight,” I said. When Cerin didn't reply, I added, “You are free to sleep.”
“I am fine where I sit,” he responded, barely after the words left my lips.
“I understand you do not trust me, but you will not make it long or far without sleep.”
“I don't know how much of the battle you saw, but I absorbed the better portion of an entire ogre's lifeblood. I will not need sleep for a day or two.” He said this without looking over at me, and with no extra emotion to his voice. He must have been used to this.
“Forgive me. I should have figured, given the way necromancy works, but...I have yet to experience an abundance of energy reserves. I can only replenish.”
“As it should be,” he replied, simply. I allowed myself to look over at him, then. Cerin had pulled off his cloak once everyone had settled for the night, so his face and hair were free. The pale white moonlight gave his skin a slight glow, indicative of his mother's Icilic blood. His pitch black hair laid softly on his shoulders, which seemed slightly smaller now that his cloak was off.
I had thought often over the years since Cerin had vanished how my memories of him could have made him more beautiful than was reality. Now that I was with him again, I found that they hadn't been. He truly was the most unique and attractive man I had ever seen. It didn't hurt that he was also immensely talented and had an air of mystery to him, or that his voice seemed to scratch just the right itch every time he spoke.
“You can wield all six elements, can you not?” He asked me then, breaking my leer.
“Yes.” I was just happy he'd said something without first being spoken to. It was a step forward.
“How do you know, if Sera would not teach you death?”
“They did. Just one spell, and I was supposed to forget it. It was the plague.”
“And you were successful with it, just like any others.”
“Yes,” I said.
“You really are an anomaly,” he mused.
I swallowed. It meant a lot, coming from him. “As are you, wielding both life and death.”
“Yes, but there are few like me. There are none like you.”
“Would you teach me your spells?” I pleaded, since we were on the subject.
For the first time, Cerin looked over, surprised. “Knowing them would doom you to my fate,” he protested.
“Being here with you dooms me regardless,” I replied. “I might as well be equipped with as much knowledge as I can get.”
The necromancer blinked a few times, as if deep in thought. Then, he looked back toward the skies. “I may teach you when the time is right.” I supposed it was just another way for him to tell me he didn't trust me. As if to further prove it was about trust, he asked me, “Is your Alderi friend an assassin?”
“Ex-assassin, yes,” I admitted. “How did you know?”
“I have killed many like her,” he replied, bluntly.
I thought for a moment about his past, according to what I was told back in Thornwell. “The Icilic have worked with the Alderi to try to kill you?”
There was a short silence. “How much did you learn of me in Thornwell?”
“Everything they knew,” I replied, to be open with him.
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Cerin stiffened beside me. “Then I suppose I have nothing to add.”
“You can add to it whenever you'd like.” When he did not reply, I said, “I am so sorry for what has happened to you.”
He said nothing for a long while, so neither did I. I had nearly given up on the idea of continuing conversation with him when he spoke again. “How did the Alderi escape the underground?”
It reminded me that Cerin had yet to really learn about his new companions, so I decided now was as good of a time as any. “She was tasked to assassinate me, within the year that you left Sera. She decided not to do it, we got to talking, and I saved her life from my father's wrath.” I hesitated. “Her name is Nyx, by the way. And she is my best friend.”
“You must have a habit of befriending outcasts,” he mused.
“I don't try to on purpose. They just seem to be the most interesting people.” I paused for a moment. “Silas is the Celdic elf. My father arranged for him to be a bodyguard for me after the attempted assassination. He is an heir to the Galan family of Celendar.”
“And you two are together,” he added, as if I'd forgotten it.
“No,” I replied, surprised at his statement.
“Oh—forgive me. Perhaps I sensed something that was not there.” It was the first time in years that I'd seen Cerin embarrassed.
“We tried our hand at it for a time,” I admitted. “He couldn't get past the difference in our lifespans. I don't expect I'll live very long.” I laughed softly and awkwardly. “He will.” Cerin said nothing, so I continued, “And Theron is the human. He is a mercenary we hired back in Sera to take us to Whispermere, since the rest of us don't know the way outside of looking at a map. He's been immensely useful thus far, and I'm hoping he will stay with us past our destination.”
Cerin seemed to be thinking over this new information. At last, he said, “I will teach you the spells I know.”
“Is the time already right?” I asked, with a small laugh. His proclamation to teach me so quickly after not seeming to want to came as a surprise. I wondered what had caused the change.
“Necromancy is the only magic that expands your lifespan,” he argued. “The sooner you learn, the better.”
His reasoning made sense, of course. His offer was selfless, considering that he had no reason to trust me not to use the spells against him. There was only one thing that gave me pause.
“I will need to come to terms with stealing the life force of others first,” I murmured.
“I am surprised you asked me to join you if you are against that.”
“I don't know if I'm against it or not. It just seems...cannibalistic.”
“There is no moral difference between killing a man with a sword or killing a man with magic, even if it is death magic that is feeding you. As long as you are not leeching off of innocents you wouldn't otherwise be fighting, I do not see the problem.”
As usual, he made sense. He'd clearly thought this through many times. Perhaps there was still humility within that hard shell of his.
“Let me earn your trust, Cerin. Then teach me the spells.”
He exhaled slowly beside me. “You place a lot of value in trust.”
“Yes, and especially with you. You have little reason to trust anyone.” My words were met with silence. I decided to risk a question. “What happened at Sera?”
It took him so long to answer me that I started thinking he was ignoring the question. “I was a shy kid with no friends and many enemies, so I spent most of my time in the library. I ran across an old text that had been donated to the university, but not yet processed. The first and last one hundred pages were filled with generic nonsense. The middle section was a study of necromancy, and held a great many spells.”
“Clever way to hide it,” I mused.
“Clever enough to where I found it before the library could catch it,” he agreed. “I taught myself as many of the spells as I could before I had to leave that night, because I wasn't certain I'd ever see the book again. And I didn't, on subsequent visits. At one point, there was a rat that had died in my closet. So for the first time, I tried a spell on its corpse, and it worked. I was ecstatic, because I'd taught myself a spell and used it correctly before we'd even learned our elements at school.”
“You learned death magic before life?” I asked, surprised.
“Yes...which is why I was so, so relieved when I learned life as well.” Cerin hesitated. “As embarrassing as it is to admit, I was a lonely enough child that I kept that rat's corpse in my dorm to revive repeatedly. It was almost like having a pet. After learning life magic, I practiced shielding him, among other things. Before long, it had decomposed into a skeleton. Little did I know that two other kids were spying on me from through the keyhole. They went and fetched an adult, who burst my door in and caught me sitting there with an undead rat. I knew I might as well have signed my own death sentence, so I fled. Left most of my things and just fled. I didn't know how my parents would react, but Thornwell was the only place I could think of to go. I was a kid—kids always turn to their parents when they need help.”
He fell silent. I didn't speak for fear of interrupting his words or thoughts. I knew that considering where this story ended up, it would be hard for him to tell me. I felt grateful he was trusting me with this information as it was.
“Your father sent his men after me,” Cerin finally admitted. “A dozen or so mages, and three of the Twelve, later on.” An exhale blew through his lips. “I killed them all.”
A sharp, painful ripple waved through my body at that, and a dull ache throbbed at my temples. I remembered when my father had been distressed over their losses, particularly of the three Twelve veterans. I had attended their ceremonies, as royalty of Sera were expected to do. I had seen Bjorn in tears over losing men he'd once trained. Men that the necromancer sitting beside me had killed.
I think Cerin was waiting for me to say something, anything. He had to have known that I knew the severity of his crimes, that I'd known the men he had killed. But I couldn't say anything at all, for the moment.
“I pleaded with them not to attack me and to let me be, as I did with you,” he finally said, his voice having lost its energy. “I told them I wished to use necromancy for good, not for ill. They barely let me speak before they attacked.”
“It was self defense,” I said, weakly. I did fully believe that. In my opinion, neither side had been completely wrong, but one did attack before the other. I believed him when he said this, for it is what he had done with me. Still, it was of little wonder that my father and the rest of Sera had gone to such great lengths to find and kill him. Now that he was here with me, any would-be assassins would be coming after the rest of us, as well.
“It was. But I am glad to hear you say it.” After a lengthy exhale, Cerin continued, “Anyway, I did make it to Thornwell, feeling like a disappointment, a failure, and a murderer all in one. I found nothing but a gravestone and a village that wanted nothing to do with me.” He stood, and continued in an awkward ramble, “Forgive me if I don't wish to relive it at the moment.” He looked off toward the tent we'd prepared for him. “Perhaps I am tired, after all.”
“Oh...” His sudden departure caught me off guard, and my eyes followed his retreating form. It upset me that he was leaving. I felt we were slowly finding common ground as he opened up to me, but perhaps he'd just needed to get it off his chest. “Good night.”
Cerin glanced back toward me at the face of his tent, looking regretful. “Good night, Kai. Thank you for your company.”
Just like that, he was away from sight and in his tent, leaving me alone with just the night sky and plenty of time to question our conversation and its repercussions.
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