Yechvan lay in bed and stared at the torn shirt hanging on the far wall of his room, his mother’s family colors woven into the cloth. The scrap of fabric was the only relic he’d carried to the capital from his childhood home.

  He heaved a sigh and rolled onto his back, gazing into the near dark. He had tried to numb his thoughts with drink, to force himself to sleep, but he’d never learned the trick to finding Zadria’s Realm when the goddess of dreams was feeling belligerent.

  “A troubled mind is the surest way to an early grave,” Sekku said in his soft, soothing tenor.

  Yechvan turned to face his mentor. The old orc had lost a step or two in the seven years since they’d last seen each other. Perhaps death had that effect.

  “You’d be doing the neighboring nations a service by dying,” Sekku continued. “Less so for your fellow Banxians.”

  “Good to see you too, Yog,” Yechvan grumbled.

  “I’m glad you escaped the Five Nations alive. You are quite the fighter. When you were younglings, everyone so easily underestimated your grit with Zu a constant presence at your hip.”

  “They still do, I imagine. Next to him, everyone pales.”

  “Is that how you measure yourself beside your best friend?” Sekku asked. “You always did have trouble judging your own worth. I thought you would outgrow that terrible habit.”

  “I have, to some extent.” Yechvan propped himself on one elbow. “I gained too much confidence when I became general of the western flank, and look at the cost of my eagerness. I must never allow my hubris to endanger the lives of my people again.”

  “That is your burden to bear, I suppose. I taught you to have grace with your enemies, but I ran out of time before I could teach you to find grace for yourself.”

  His old mentor turned to stare at Hlenice shining in the night sky. His pale green skin, the pronounced bulge in his throat glistened in her glow. Small patches of dark hair muddied his cheeks and chin. Round, bright eyes beheld the goddess of the moon with wonderment. But as he moved to the window, Yechvan noticed that the back of his skull was crushed, and bits of bone and gore dusted his broad shoulders.

  “I take it you didn’t survive long after I ran?” Yechvan asked, instantly sobered.

  “Oh, no,” Sekku said, turning back to face him. “But you needn’t worry on my account. I was dead before you left my sight. I only feared that you would soon join me. How did you escape?”

  “I rode to the river, where I dismounted and sent the mare along the bank. Then I swam.”

  “Across the wide, roaring Keppa?”

  “I underestimated the current. By the time they caught the horse, the river had swallowed me up and spit me out almost a day’s ride away. I never actually made it across,” Yechvan said with a grim chuckle. “Do you remember those little islands of mud just before the waterfall?”

  “You ended up on one of those spits of land?” He laughed in amazement.

  “I was half dead and barely conscious when some villagers from a border town found me and fished me out.”

  “Lucky.”

  “Yes, lucky they were orcs. The humans most certainly would have left me for dead. That night, still spitting up water from my lungs and against the shaman’s wishes, I left for Banton. I had no desire to get my rescuers killed for helping me escape, but the Five had already sent soldiers to round up the orcish residents of the surrounding villages. They burned the settlements to the ground. In my haste to depart, I ended up saving my own neck while hundreds of innocents were enslaved and worked to death. Retribution from the gods for aiding a cursed soul.”

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  “What did I teach you about that sort of arrogance? The border towns were already burning. Troops from the Five were mobilizing along the northern border before our exodus from Hodu. The war didn’t start because of you or me or anyone. The northerners wanted retribution for Grusk’s foolhardy invasion of their lands after he came to the surface. They are a patient people with a long memory.”

  “Grusk attacked the Five?” Yechvan asked.

  “He did. Right around the time you were born, if memory serves. We were beaten back in a hurry.”

  “You taught me that the Five attacked us.”

  “Our qish doesn’t particularly like to laud his mistakes, and what the qish commands…”

  “We obey,” Yechvan finished, but his heart wasn’t in it. “You never thought to tell me? Not even when we were living there?”

  “You were so young, my boy. You never had the chance at a real childhood. It was only in the end that I understood what I was taking from you. But by then we were already mired in the thick of the shit and it was too late to turn back.”

  Yechvan furrowed his brow and thought back to the people of that border village who had saved him from the river, had taken him in and healed him just after his harrowing escape from Hodu. All this time he’d blamed himself for the sacking of the village when it had been the result of the qish’s lies and hubris all along. Either way, the villagers had paid the ultimate price, and Yechvan hadn’t even bothered to learn the name of their town.

  Sekku studied his pupil, always able to divine Yechvan’s thoughts. “All these years, you’ve carried the burden, the guilt of those lost souls. Perhaps it’s time to lay it down.”

  “I haven’t figured out how to do that just yet.”

  “I know you’ve had a hard time of it in your short visit on Ex’ala, but I do believe someone important is looking out for you. Perhaps even Koruzan herself. You are her Chosen’s best friend after all.”

  The old man turned once more to the window, exposing his back to Yechvan. His shirt and pants were torn to shreds by sword slashes. Thick, black blood congealed on his skin around the wounds, staining his clothes and dripping slowly onto the stones before disappearing in an ethereal sizzle.

  The fear and agony, the finality of their failed experiment in the Five rushed back to Yechvan, all the helplessness of being a scared youngling no older than Grask, fighting for survival, his life thrown into upheaval. He asked the question that had plagued him for years. “We went to the Five to establish a lasting peace. How did it go so wrong?”

  Serenity settled over the apparition’s tortured features. “I thought they were ready to treat with us in good faith, but it was a ruse. They were stalling for time to organize an attack. I had been onto them for a few turns, monitoring their movements along the border, listening, watching, waiting. Once I learned they suspected me, I felt certain our lives would be in danger if we remained, so I enlisted the aid of your Thrice teacher. Dorin secured a horse for us. He was the only person I trusted. I knew he would help, out of love for you. If only we had been a bit quicker.”

  “No one ever questioned him? They didn’t arrest him for his betrayal?”

  “Dorin’s punishment was to bring you in, but you made it back to Banx,” Sekku said with a sad smile. “And because he failed, he was banished to the unenviable western front during the conflict. Ironically, that decision may have saved us. Dorin was the Five’s most talented strategist. Had he faced off against anyone but you, he might have won them the war. But you knew his strategies intimately by then. You were able to predict his movements as if they were your own.”

  The barbed praise stung. Yechvan had faced an impossible choice: defeat his old teacher, a most beloved mentor, or lose the war and see his people enslaved. But Sekku was wrong about one thing. Yechvan never could have predicted that Dorin Sen would stand opposite Zu in single combat. Had he known, would he have followed a different path? He had asked himself that question every day for years and was no closer to finding an answer.

  “Why did the qish send you, one of his closest advisors, to serve as ambassador to the Five?”

  Sekku shook his head. “He didn’t ask me to go. In fact, he begged me not to. But I believed that in order to maintain peace, we needed to make an effort to learn about the northerners, to allow them to learn about us. I had to go to the Five to understand their customs, their language, their way of life. It was never supposed to end in conflict, but the qish was right after all. War was inevitable. They thirst for it like a drunk his mead. We were simply the next barrel to be tapped.”

  Yechvan’s brow furrowed. “Why did you take me instead of Zu? He was the better student. He could have saved you. He would have slain them all and led you from danger.” While I let you die and ran like a coward.

  “That is possible,” Sekku said. “But that was never the point. I’d seen my share of war and was eager for a different life, one where I didn’t have to look over my shoulder every day. If I couldn’t have a life of peace and tranquility, then I was ready to die for it. I chose you because Zu is a threat to anyone who sees him, anyone who gets in his way. You, my boy, are a threat of a far greater magnitude, one that goes unnoticed. Zu rouses men and women to stand by his side. But you, my boy, you lead them to victory.”