Waiting and Worrying

Chapter 14 is all Pavek, and it is the slow, quiet kind of chapter that somehow hits harder than any battle scene.

Akashia is gone. Pavek doesn’t know what’s happening in Urik. So he does the only thing he can do. He builds a routine. Druid lessons with Telhami every other day. Hoeing in the fields on the days between. They carefully avoid talking about zarneeka, Urik, Laq, or Akashia. Just druidry and dirt.

He can wring water out of the air on demand now. No headache. His magic is growing. But as the empty days of Akashia’s absence start to outnumber his fingers, his mood darkens. He hoes alone. Sleeps alone. Drags his blankets out of the bachelor’s hut and lies under the stars in the fields. For a man who couldn’t imagine life beyond walls at the start of this story, that is a huge shift. He has changed and he barely notices.

Teaching Ruari to Fight

Only one person refuses to leave him alone. Ruari.

The kid shows up at the end of a field row and announces he wants to learn how to fight. Not for glory. Because he’s tired of losing. “Maybe if I won once in a while, I wouldn’t have so many,” he says about his constant fights. Pavek has to physically clamp a hand over his own mouth to stop from laughing out loud.

Ruari swings at him. Pavek blocks it with his forearm, reaches through Ruari’s guard, grabs shirt and skin, and lifts the half-elf off the ground with one hand. “You’ve got two arms, scum. Keep one of ’em at home for yourself.” Which is, apparently, what Yohan always says too.

Then something nice happens. Pavek realizes Ruari will never be a brawler. He’s too skinny, too quick, too all-over-the-place with his fists. So he tosses him a hoe and starts teaching weapon work instead. He assesses Ruari the cold templar way. And what he finds is actually encouraging. The kid’s technique isn’t bad. His problems are all personality. Yohan trained him well. Pavek tries to fix the gaps instead of exploiting them.

They go at it through a whole afternoon. And Lynn Abbey drops this line about what happens when two men spar together. Either somebody gets angry and a real fight starts, or they find a common rhythm and friendship takes root.

The friendship moment almost gets ruined when Pavek sweeps Ruari’s legs out from under him with a move he learned at the orphanage. He expects the half-elf to know the counter. Ruari doesn’t. He crashes hard. But instead of rage, the kid looks up pale-faced and says: “Now you tell me. You’re supposed to be my teacher.”

Pavek offers his hand. Ruari takes it and holds on an extra moment while he tests his bruised ankles.

That is friendship happening in real time.

Yohan Comes Back Alone

Then Telhami appears. “Men. Never too old for child’s play.”

She didn’t come to joke. “Yohan’s coming back. He’s on the Sun’s Fist.”

Pavek wraps an arm around Ruari before she answers the obvious question. “Alone?”

“Alone.”

They meet Yohan in the wastes. The dwarf is a wreck. Red-rimmed eyes in dark hollows. Muscles withered. Riding a stolen kank that looks as shaky as him. He’s been going day and night without food, living on willpower alone.

The story comes out in broken pieces. Escrissar. The elven market. A mind-bending attack that killed farmers in the street. Akashia told Yohan to run. She turned her mind inside-out, unleashing every nightmare she had locked up, and gave him the chance to escape. The elves honored an old debt and got him through the walls.

He ran. He ran because she told him to and because Escrissar made him believe his own heart was being torn from his chest. You can feel the shame radiating off him. This proud, powerful dwarf who has never failed at anything that mattered.

Now he wants to go back. Not to rescue anyone. To die as a banshee haunting Escrissar forever. Because Akashia was his focus, his dwarven life’s purpose, and he failed her.

Three Fools and a Fourth Kank

Pavek says he’s going too. He knows the templar quarter. He can get them into Escrissar’s house.

Ruari says “Me, too.” Because of course he does.

They take it to Telhami. She calls it typical male foolishness. Kashi’s dead, she insists. The girl would have killed herself before betraying Quraite. Let it lie.

Pavek does not let it lie. The guardian’s power flows into him and he roars at Telhami. Look inside my mind. Look at what I know about Escrissar and tell me there’s nothing left to do. She cuts him off from the guardian without even meeting his eyes.

“Hamanu’s infinitesimal mercy is far greater than yours,” he whispers on his way out.

By morning, three kanks, food, and obsidian weapons are waiting by the well. Telhami left them. She fought all night with herself and lost. Ruari says she grieved and wailed and tore her clothes before dawn. He’d been spying.

They ride out. Before they hit the salt, Telhami meets them one last time. She uses mind-bending and druidry to lock away their knowledge of Quraite’s location. If Escrissar catches them, he can’t pry it loose. Pavek is left with a gray fog where home should be. Names floating without context. Faces without a place attached.

Ruari brings a fourth kank. “In case we find her. In case we get very lucky.”

The villagers press luck-signs and white flowers into their hands. Nobody says much.

What can you say to three men riding to certain death?

Nothing.

That fourth kank is the detail that wrecks me. In the middle of a suicide mission, one stubborn half-elf kid packs an extra ride just in case they actually pull this off. That tiny act of hope in the face of everything is the most Ruari thing possible. And honestly, it is the most human thing in the whole book.

The Brazen Gambit by Lynn Abbey. Dark Sun, Chronicles of Athas, Book One. ISBN 1-56076-872-X.

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