“Could you be forced to do something that you don’t want to do?”

  Torian wanted to say no, but then again, he wasn’t sure that answer was accurate. Given some of the things that he had done since he had come to the university and the way that he had been asked to serve, he was no longer even confident about what he might do. And he wasn’t even sure that it made much of a difference, after all.

  “I suppose with the right pressure,” Torian said. “Sort of like how you pushed Astrid to help you.”

  “Is that what she told you, or is that what you assume?”

  “She told me that you claimed you could help her get her parents.”

  “If she learned enough, I wouldn’t have to get them,” he said, meeting Torian’s gaze. “If she learned enough, she could walk in and take them herself. That is what I told her.”

  “So you believe she could be valsahir.”

  “I know she can. I know she is.”

  “And you would teach her willingly?”

  What would Torian do and what could he become if he had somebody willing and able to teach him about the valsahir power inside of himself? What might that mean?

  Torian did not know, but at this point, he wasn’t even sure that it even mattered. He had been learning all that he could from the university, gained access to different sahir connections, and learned about runes that he would never have learned how to use, either. But would he learn more? Would he ever be a true valsahir?

  “I teach those who need to learn.”

  “I need to learn,” Torian said.

  “No. You want to learn. And I have given you what you need.”

  “You have not given me anything.”

  The Viper looked around him. “No? And yet the control that I see you displaying around here and the way that you have obscured everything with the dark valsahir strand suggests otherwise. Perhaps even a little bit of earth, which is surprising to me.” He snorted, meeting Torian’s gaze for a long moment. “So yes. I would teach her willingly.”

  Torian wasn’t even sure what to say at this point, and so for a moment, he hesitated. “You haven’t even given Navarin a reason to keep you alive.”

  “Haven’t I? I told them from the very beginning, from the very first moment that I let them take me, that if I die, the control I have will be destroyed—and that is when Navarin will suffer.”

  Chapter 42

  The Truth

  Torian stood at the edge of the city. He hadn’t known what to do after having his conversation with the Viper. It had not gone the way that he had thought that it would, nor the way that he had hoped that it might go, as he felt as if the Viper had been honest with him in a way that he had not been before. He was the key to keeping Rusav from whatever attack that they intended, and if he were to fall, and to fail, then there was a very real possibility that Rusav would gain control over the creatures. Even if they didn’t get that control, there was a very real possibility that those creatures would be able to attack, overrun Corsalt, and then spread beyond.

  Torian had seen the effect of those creatures and had dealt with the danger that they posed. Some of them were easier to handle than others, but all of them were violent and terrifying. And the Viper believed he could control them.

  Could he?

  Those were questions that Torian didn’t have the answer to, but from the way that the Viper had looked at him and the resolve in his eyes, Torian believed that he could.

  He wanted to go back to Astrid, but what would going to Astrid even do for him?

  She might not even have the answers that he wanted. Even if she did, Torian didn’t know if she would share anything more with him. Increasingly, Torian believed Astrid wanted nothing more than to get her brother and then rescue the Viper to continue learning to become a true valsahir to save her family.

  What did Torian want?

  That was the question that plagued him, as it was a question that he didn’t have much of an answer to. Did he want to continue to serve here at the university? There had been plenty of offhanded comments about what it might look like. If he were to stay, he would end up as a professor, teaching other students. But that would ultimately mean that Torian’s valsahir connection would end up fading over time, he suspected. And if it did, he had no idea what would happen to him or that ability, and he had no idea what that might mean for him and didn’t know if he would eventually lose the connections that he had to the point where he ended up as little more than a sahir. Maybe a powerful sahir, much like the headmaster, but nothing more than sahir nonetheless.

  Every so often, Torian felt a faint trembling. It was the same thunderous trembling that he had felt the night before during the attack, and though there was no evidence of additional Navarin and Rusav fighting, he suspected that it was only a matter of time before that all revealed itself, and the battle began to press deeper into the city.

  War was here.

  And unlike when it had come to Sarot, Torian felt as if he was fully capable of being a part of it. That is unless he had to deal with Tamish or the Mother. Either of them was going to be more than what Torian would be able to handle, he suspected. He didn’t want to have to risk himself against them, but who else could do so?

  Distantly, he sensed Lasant.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Torian said, sending it through the shadow and wondering if Lasant was even willing or able to answer him. At this point, Torian didn’t know if the shadow wolf was paying attention to him.

  There was a pause, and then Lasant’s shadow-connected voice came to him. “Run.”

  Torian smiled to himself. “You only want me to run because that means that the killing can be avoided. I don’t know that it can be. Not anymore. Not after what we have already seen and experienced. It might be too late for that.”

  “Run,” the shadow wolf said.

  Torian took a deep breath. Maybe he should run.

  But if he did, what would that look like?

  And where would he go?

  There had been a time when he had believed that he might be able to escape from Corsalt and might even head out of Navarin so that he could understand what it was for him to become valsahir. There was a time when Torian believed that the answer would come from some journey that he could take with Sylvia or Visthor and the others, but he no longer did. Given what they had said and what he had seen, he didn’t know if he could get to a place where he could learn enough to be free. He didn’t know if there was even a place like that. The only thing that Torian really knew was that he was trapped.

  Caught between two sides in a conflict where he wanted vengeance for what Rusav had done to his family, but at the same time, Torian also didn’t want to be drawn into a war and forced to keep killing.

  Maybe that wasn’t even his thoughts. Maybe some of that came from the shadow wolf, from the way that Lasant felt about the war, but if that was the case, then Torian couldn’t help but feel as if he agreed with the shadow wolf. He didn’t necessarily want to end up battling indefinitely. Why should he? And why should he need to?

  The only thing that Torian really wanted was to understand this power and what it meant for him to have this Saith connection.

  He needed answers.

  Especially now that he had learned from the Viper that the headmaster had known what knowledge he possessed.

  Torian had wondered why they had kept him alive. And more than that, he had been questioning why Rusav would spend so much effort to try to get to the Viper. Why was one man so valuable? Torian had thought that it was because of what he was.

  That had not been it at all.

  Not that Torian could blame the headmaster for her reasoning, though. If the Viper truly was the key to ensuring that the creatures did not attack and that Rusav did not gain control over them, then they had every reason to keep him alive. It was just that the reason should have been shared, shouldn’t it have been?

  “What will you do?” Lasant asked.

  And Torian had a distinct sense that the shadow wolf already knew what it was that Torian was going to do but wanted to have a better answer from Torian and didn’t want to have to rely upon the shadow connection and whatever emotion that he might uncover between them to share it.

  “I have people here that I care about.”

  “You can’t stop war.”

  “I know,” Torian said.

  One person couldn’t stop a war.

  But that didn’t mean that he couldn’t be a part of it. He already was.

  He had been a part of this from the very moment that his village had been destroyed.

  He made his way back through the city, and at one point, he paused to look along the street. He had continually passed additional Navarin soldiers, and he was reminded of the General. None of them would be able to stop Rusav.

  By the time he reached the university itself, he anticipated that there would be no further sign of any of the soldiers, but he continued to pass many of them.

  He paused for a moment. He could go out to the wagons and see if Sylvia and Visthor were there. If anybody would be honest with him, he thought it would be them. But then, when it came to the Viper, he understood Sylvia’s position, and he feared that if he were to share with her that he had his own questions about the Viper and what he intended, Sylvia might react poorly to it. Instead of doing so, he headed into the university and made his way to the headmaster’s office. He didn’t really expect her to answer.

  After knocking briefly on her door, he was surprised that she pulled it open, glancing out to see him.

  “Now is not a good time, Mr. Ranth,” the headmaster said, her dark gaze hardened.

  “It has to be now. I spoke with the Viper.”

  “So that was you.” Torian nodded. “I see. Well, you might as well come in.”

  He stepped into her office. It was a little bit better organized than it had been when he had been here the last time, and the carpet had been replaced. Torian wondered if she had finished the room that she had been making on the floor or if she simply had concealed it once again. He was tempted to try to push some of his valsahir connection down into that room to see if it had been modified in any way and, more than that, to try to identify if there was going to be anything that he could do to unsettle it, but he decided against it. He didn’t know if that would even make a difference, and he didn’t know if the headmaster would be angry if he attempted to do so. She might not even realize it, though.

  She motioned for him to take a seat. He rested his arms on the armrest of the hard, wooden chair and looked across the desk at her. The piles of paper that had been there had been neatly stacked. There were several different books, though Torian couldn’t see their spines from the angle that he was at. He had several different artifacts on the desk: metal sculptures, some with runes on them, and a wooden bowl that seemed to be prominently positioned in the center of the desk. The headmaster leaned forward and then moved the ball, twisting it for a moment before setting it down on the side of her desk.

  “I spoke with the Viper.”

  “Obviously, or I wouldn’t have allowed you in here. You must have done something to obscure my ability to listen.”

  “You can listen, but you can’t see?”

  “Tell me what rune that you might think of which would allow you to observe from a distance.”

  Torian frowned at that question, but he realized that she was asking something valid, as he could not think of anything that would make a difference like that. Maybe there was nothing. Or maybe she simply wanted him to think that there was nothing.

  “I don’t know. Maybe a combination of light and wind,” Torian said, frowning to himself. He could think of different ways of combining the runes, though there wasn’t anything that he had ever seen before that would look like that. “I’m not as familiar with it as some. I’m only barely getting to understand the basics of rune making.”

  “The basics,” she scoffed, waving her hand and leaning back in the chair. She grabbed one of the sculptures that she had on the desk and twisted it in her palm. It was something that looked like one of the animals that they had dealt with. “You know far more than the basics. You know as much as any student who graduates from the university.”

  “I do?”

  “Well, not about synthesizing runes, as that is a much more complicated technique and one that only comes with time and experience and practice, to be honest. But you know enough about the actual flow of the runes and the variant forms of them so that I would have a hard time telling you that you could not pass the university based on runes themselves.”

  Torian had known he had impressed Professor Noble, but he had thought that it was just because he had been able to find access and answers within the runes that he did not think that Torian, at his level, should have been able to find. Maybe it was more than that.

  “So there isn’t any way of observing somebody from a distance?”

  “Perhaps with line of sight,” the headmaster said, “but not the way that you are describing. You can use runes to listen, however. Wind is effective but also dark.”

  “And earth, I suspect,” Torian said.

  The headmaster looked up, and there was a hint of a smile curling her lips. “Very good. I wasn’t sure if you would have picked up on that.”

  “I’ve seen you using earth before. You must be strong in it.”

  “I have some talent,” the headmaster said, and she offered a bit of a shrug. “But not as much as some.”

  Torian had a hard time believing that. The headmaster was supposedly one of the most gifted in the university, and he suspected that she was also one of the most gifted throughout Navarin.

  “And you must have learned something about your valsahir connection from the Viper to have permitted you to have negated the observational devices that I have placed.”

  “Actually, not particularly,” he said.

  “He didn’t teach you that?”

  “He taught me about trying to connect to them, but he didn’t tell me anything more. And I don’t even know that he can, or will until he is free.”

  “Oh, he won’t be freed,” she said.

  That fit with Torian’s belief in what they intended to do with him, as well.

  “He told me you knew why Rusav was here.”

  The headmaster sat back, and she was quiet for a few moments. Torian believed that she was trying to decide what she wanted to tell him and how much she wanted to tell him before she let out a heavy breath and shook her head. “I had not expected him to have convinced you.”

  “Don’t,” Torian said.

  The headmaster frowned, and she paused for a moment. “Don’t you?”

  “Don’t try to play this out as the Viper managing to convince me of something that he should and could not have been able to do. He’s not told me anything that is false so far.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Well, he’s not told me anything verifiably false. He may speak in generalities, and he may have his own agenda, but what he has told me, at least so far, has been true. This means that you knew that if he were to die that Rusav would gain control over the creatures. Either that or those creatures will run wild. Why haven’t you shared that?”

  “Those who need to know do know,” the headmaster said softly.

  “Which means the Navarin military knows.”

  She shrugged slightly. “It knows. And there is very little that others can do about it. The fact that we have the Viper is forcing Corsalt to be a pivot point in the conflict with Rusav.”

  “Not a conflict,” Torian said. “A war.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Call it what you want, but the reason that we are now at the center of it is because of the Viper. Deal with Rusav here. Deal with the Viper, and we can take them on more traditionally.”

  “You think that you can convince him to work with you.”

  “I think that we need to. Yes. That is why I have been allowing your visits.”

  Torian had just been used, though he had also benefited. “And if he doesn’t help?”

  She shrugged. “Then we use what we know to destroy Rusav.”

  “What if we can’t? They have a valsahir, perhaps more, that are quite powerful.”

  “And do you think we have no way of dealing with valsahir, Mr. Ranth?”

  Torian took a deep breath, thinking about something else that the Viper had asked him. Why did he have a restriction? Torian had no idea why, and he had no idea what that meant for him, only that he had always known about that difficulty inside of himself. And yet, having learned about it left him thinking that perhaps it was something that he had done, or perhaps the Saith had done, to him.

  What if there had been an outside force that had placed that restriction on him?

  What if others throughout Navarin had that same restriction?

  And if so, the question became why.

  “I want you to learn as much as you can from him about his control over these creatures. Either him or the girl. She obviously knows something, as well. We need to turn back Rusav before the attack harms more Navarin citizens. Are you willing to do that, Mr. Ranth?”

  What was he willing to do?

  He wanted nothing more than to see Rusav destroyed. After what they had done to his family, slaughtering them along with the village, he couldn’t help but feel that way. But there was a part of him that didn’t want to be a part of a war, either.

  If he wasn’t, though, what would happen? How many would suffer?

  More than he cared to do.

  And if that were the case, then he would have to do something, and he would have to try to intervene, even if it meant convincing the Viper to work with him.

  Either that or Astrid.

  An idea came to him then.

  “If I’m going to convince Astrid, I’m going to need access to her brother.”

  The headmaster hesitated. “That, unfortunately, is going to be a problem.”

  Chapter 43

  A Death and a Dilemma

 

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