“It’s all right. I was planning to tell you anyway.” Liz looked over his shoulder. “And the other three too.”
“I appreciate that, but...” Garda trailed off and looked back, frowning. The noise behind him had gotten too loud to ignore.
“I knew I should have killed him when I had the chance!” Luka hissed.
A teary-eyed Huginn held her in an armlock, trying desperately to calm her down. “This is why you’re barred from the dungeon, Miss Luka! You can’t keep saying that or they’ll never let you near him!”
Muninn, the third member of the trio, lay groaning on the floor, rubbing a fist-shaped welt on his cheek.
For all Luka’s anger, she looked a little calmer than she had during the battle. Learning the truth of Hiro’s situation seemed to have neutralized some of her bile. She was still in a spitting rage, but there was an edge of sadness to it now.
Garda gave a long-suffering sigh. “At any rate, we heard what we heard. Although by the sounds of it, you called us here to tell us just that.”
Liz nodded. “That’s right. Seeing as the cat’s out of the bag, we might as well make sure we’re on the same page. Did Hiro tell you anything I should know?”
Garda started to have an inkling that Liz had orchestrated the whole thing, from barring him and his subordinates from visiting Hiro to calling them here just in time to overhear the truth. More to the point, she knew him well enough to realize he never left a debt unpaid. No doubt she was fully aware he would not refuse her request.
“As you wish. But on one condition.”
“And what’s that?”
“If you mean to save the One-Eyed Dragon, I would join you once I have divulged what I know.”
“All right. If it helps, I was going to ask you anyway.” Liz couldn’t resist a smile. Garda was loyal to a fault. He had good reason, of course—he owed Hiro more than he could ever repay. Hiro had saved his life, ensured Mille’s safety, and given his comrades a place to belong. Most of the Liberation Army owed Hiro the same debt, Huginn and Muninn included—even Luka, in a way, although she hailed from Six Kingdoms. The Crow Legion had given the abandoned and rejected somewhere to call home.
“Then we have a deal,” Garda said, still looking a little conflicted. When all was said and done, he was betraying his liege’s trust. Still, Hiro would have understood, and he would have respected Garda’s wishes.
“The One-Eyed Dragon told me he sought forgiveness.”
Liz frowned. “Forgiveness?”
“He blames himself for all that has transpired. Every calamity that has befallen the royal family for the past thousand years, he said, was his doing.”
“And why is that?” Liz leaned in, her eyes gleaming. At long last, she was close to learning just what was driving Hiro to such lengths.
“All began with the Spiritblade Sovereigns—”
Garda broke off, staggering on his feet. It was not just him. All of Fort Towen was shaking violently. The tremors did not last long. As they subsided, Liz sprang to her feet, her face pale.
Meteia narrowed her eyes. “My threads have broken, my lady!”
“Understood!”
Liz burst through the door and hurtled down the hallway, sprinting as fast as her legs would carry her. She bit her lip as she ran, unable to shake the feeling that she was already too late.
＊＊＊＊＊
As the shaking died down, Claudia stepped out of her quarters to find the hallway filled with panicked soldiers. She shut the door behind her and turned a dispassionate gaze toward the clamor. More imperial troops vanished into the dark as she watched, the zeal of their voices heating the air.
Seeing her fascinated, her chamber guards—both soldiers of Lebering—stepped forward protectively. “Are we under attack, Your Majesty?”
“I must assume so. By a sizable force, if that shaking was anything to go by. But if so, one would expect all the noise to be coming from outside, and yet...”
One voice fell silent, then another and another. Sparks flared in the gloom, and the shouting and the clatter of armor grew a little quieter with every burst of light. Soldiers groaned in the distance. The clashing of steel rang in her ears. Her guards moved forward to shield her, but she could see they were trembling.
“Your Majesty, you must run.”
They were by no means cowards. If anything, it was because they were seasoned warriors that they could sense they were outmatched. Some unknown creature lurked in the dark, a monster against which they stood no chance.
Eventually, Hiro appeared at the far end of the corridor, holding a blade blacker than night. The guards bellowed battle cries and charged. They gritted their teeth as they ran, gripping their swords for dear life.
Hiro raised a hand in a nonchalant wave. “Why, Claudia. Fancy meeting you here.”
He split one soldier’s helmet with the hilt of his sword, then planted his left leg on the floor, spun at the waist, and drove his heel into the other’s neck. The first man went down like a sack of dirt, knocked clean unconscious. The second crashed into the wall face-first and tumbled to the floor, where he lay motionless. He, too, was out like a light.
“Lord Surtr. How you love to make an entrance.” Claudia arched an eyebrow. “Did you show the same mercy to the others?”
“What do you take me for?” Hiro sounded almost amused. “They’ll all come to soon enough.”
Grunts of pain and the faint rustling of armor issued from the darkness. It sounded like he was telling the truth.
Seeing that many seasoned warriors had failed to stop him, a question took root in Claudia’s mind. When he charged alone into the Demiurgos’s horde, had he truly been fighting his hardest? Monsters were sturdier than humans, that much was true, but something still didn’t seem right. The more she thought about it, the more she became convinced his supposed defeat had been a planned performance.
She regarded him with a stony gaze. “Why did you let them live?”
Hiro gave an irreverent shrug. “Things being how they are, I figure the empire could use every soldier it can get.”
“What exactly are you planning?”
“To make all one.”
He spoke in cryptic words, took absurd actions, and followed unclear principles, making it impossible to understand what he was trying to achieve. That was a rare thing. Usually, determining where someone was going was as simple as looking at the path they walked. Most people’s paths were well-worn and led to predictable places. Every person who had ever been or would be walked in the footsteps of the past, along roads that had been paved long ago, preceded at every step by those who had come before. Yet Hiro no longer followed any path. He laid his own, stone by stone, untrodden by any other and leading to lands unknown.
Claudia could not see the road he walked, so she could not understand what he sought to achieve. She had more questions than she could have ever hoped to ask, even under less pressing circumstances. She paused, uncertain what to say. Hiro, for his part, seemed to judge she was not a threat. He strode past her and down the corridor, almost vanishing into the darkness before she hurried after him.
“And where do you think you’re going? Sometimes I’d swear you don’t even hear me.”
“If you have questions for me, I’d appreciate it if you’d make them quick.”
Even as he spoke, he knocked another guard unconscious. Everyone who stood in his way dropped like a rock. The show of prowess would have broken most mortal men’s spirits before they even drew their swords, but the hardened soldiers of the Grantzian Empire still tried to do their duty, flinging themselves at him in hopeless resistance. Claudia did not see their actions as foolhardy. The underdog always won in bedtime stories. Fortune favored the bold, and very rarely, it made them legends.
The noise of Hiro’s escape was attracting more and more attention. Anyone else would have started to hurry, but his pace remained unchanged as he methodically struck down the guards in his way. As long as he engaged only a handful of opponents at a time, they couldn’t even slow him down. Claudia’s suspicions intensified. Surely that held true for monsters as well as men. Why, then, had he charged straight for the Demiurgos, seemingly passing through every monster he could? If he had engaged them piecemeal as he was doing now, he could easily have emerged unscathed, at the cost of only a little time.
“So you can do this, but you could not take the Demiurgos’s head?” she asked. “How very curious.”
She pressed him a little, trying to divine his true intentions. If she was right, if he did seek a truly new horizon, it would be in her interests to beat him to the punch. She was a ruler herself, and rulers thrived on renown.