CHAPTER 913: LIAM DUNN’S CONFLICTED HEART (PART ONE)

Beneath the rock outcropping, Liam Dunn sat on a small boulder, his brow furrowed in thought as his gaze wandered between the glowing pair of figures on the outcropping and the strange collection of people beneath it.

On one side, the young lord had almost become accustomed to the presence of the diminutive ’squire’ named Emmie who Lady Heila had assigned as a caretaker for both Liam and Hugo Hanrahan. Despite the horns on her head and the strange, clipped accent that clung to her speech in the king’s common tongue, her manner and bearing were so similar to the other squires Liam had known that he could almost forget that she wasn’t just another human servant, tending to the needs of the gathered lords.

Of course, he couldn’t think of a single woman who would have put up with the abuse that most knights heaped on their squires in the name of ’character building,’ nor would he have wanted to see a human woman dragged through the wilderness to the edge of battlefields the way a squire was, but Emmie seemed just as devoted and willing to face the hardships of her station as any young man Liam had seen struggling under a knight’s unforgiving tutelage.

Liam had even become accustomed enough to the short, horned warrior that accompanied the young squire that he could almost pretend that the man was just another guard rather than his personal jailer among the ’Eldritch.’

Of course, the man’s armor and equipment, an eclectic mix of the Vale of Mists’ new harlequin patterned gambeson and intricately detailed plate armor covering his arms and torso made it clear that Kurtz was anything but an ordinary guard, but at the moment, the man didn’t even feel like a soldier as much as he felt like a doting parent watching over his excited daughter.

"Father, do you think that I’ll be able to control the weather like young lord Hauke one day?" Emmie asked excitedly as she watched the Frost Walker with the iridescent horn and the glowing Runic Blade stretching his sorcery across the sky as far as the eye can see and beyond.

"Lady Heila says he isn’t even a witch yet and he can do all this with sorcery alone," she gushed excitedly.

"That depends on you, Emmie," Kurtz said as he tapped one of her horns affectionately. "Have you been practicing your sorcery when you aren’t tending to your charges?"

"I have, I have, look," she said with a smile on her face that was as bright as the setting sun before she carefully schooled her expression into one of intense focus. "Light. Golden. Gather to my hand," she intoned, holding out one hand and imagining the warmth that she felt within her chest flowing toward her fingertips to draw in the last fading light of the day until a small golden light, no brighter than a candle flame, appeared on the tip of each of her fingers.

"See, see? I have been practicing," she cried excitedly before she lost her concentration on the energy she’d collected and the sorcery unraveled before her eyes, snuffing out the lights like candle flames in the wind.

"Well done, Emmie," Kurtz praised as he reached out to ruffle his daughter’s hair. "But I think you’re going to need to put in a lot more practice than that if you want to match up to young lord Hauke someday," he said in a stern, fatherly tone that reminded Liam of his own father when he was much younger.

"I don’t think I’ll ever get used to seeing things like that," Liam said quietly to the young lord sitting next to him. "Can you imagine what would happen if that little girl did that at the temple in Lothian City?"

"A ’demon’ summoning light to her hand like the chosen miracle workers of the Holy Lord of Light?" Hugo said with a chuckle that contained equal parts of mirth and horror. "She’d be declared a heretic and burned at the stake if she wasn’t executed on the spot, and anyone who ever spoke of seeing it would share her fate or worse," he said as he shook his head.

"Even if she could bathe the temple in golden light, heal the sick and call down Holy Flames, it wouldn’t change anything," Hugo added as he met Liam’s gaze directly. "The Church would sooner destroy a girl like her than admit that they’ve been wrong about the Eldritch for hundreds of years."

"Do you really think they’ve been wrong about the Eldritch?" Liam asked. The things he’d seen since his capture had certainly shaken the foundations of what he knew about the ’demons’ he’d fought against since he was old enough to carry a sword into battle, but he still wasn’t convinced that he had been on the wrong side of the centuries long conflict.

"We’re about to raid your home town," Liam pointed out. "No, not raid. Conquer. Hundreds of men who have pledged their lives to your father’s service are about to die for a grudge that has nothing to do with them and their families are already suffering from this fiendish storm. Are you still convinced that the Church was wrong to teach us to fear the Eldritch?"

While his words were as sharp as knives, Liam’s question was genuine. Lady Ashlynn’s offer of a greater position for the Dunn family in the new kingdom she intended to build was something he hadn’t forgotten and part of him was eager to seize it before it was too late to prove his worth to the powerful witch.

Another part of him, however, couldn’t let go of everything he had known and experienced in his years living on the frontier. He had fought the Eldritch, he’d been wounded by them, lost good friends to them and avenged those friends by spilling Eldritch blood on the battlefield and burning their villages to the ground in order to expand the borders of Dunn Barony.

The Eldritch were his enemy and they always had been, yet ever since his capture, he’d found it harder and harder to think of them in the same black and white way he’d thought of them before.

"No, I don’t think the Church was wrong to teach us to fear the power of the Eldritch," Hugo said as his dark brows wrinkled in thought and he chose his words with exceptional care. "But I do think that the Church was wrong to teach us to hate them. And I think they were wrong to teach us that we could never live together peacefully."

"Even if we never invited them into our cities or our homes," Hugo said as he looked at the looming figure of the giant Tuscan captain, Ipiktok who followed Lady Heila wherever she went in the army camp. "We could at least have become good neighbors and traded with them instead of trying to plunder everything they have."

"Coexistence, even an uneasy truce would be much better than provoking a war with an enemy we can never hope to defeat," Hugo said solemnly as he raised a questioning eyebrow at Liam. "Don’t you think so too? Or do you still think that Marquis Bors has a chance of winning this war against Lady Ashlynn?"