Page 67 of Storm to Victory
Fieran shook his head. “Still getting used to that.”
Pretty Face grinned. “I’d better see to my duties. It’s going to take a lot to get all of us out of here in less than an hour.”
Fieran slapped his back. “I knew you’d become quite the leader if given the chance. You did well here.”
Pretty Face swallowed and nodded before he turned away, heading toward the others.
Since Fieran had slept the entire hour he’d been given to rest, he’d better find the bathhouse and take a quick shower. This would likely be his last chance for one for the next week. Then he would track down his dacha and see what he wanted him to do before their departure.
A line of ogres waited outside the larger bathhouse for the enlisted men, so Fieran stepped back inside the long quarters for the officers, winding through it until he found the bathhouse attached to the end of the building.
He pushed the door open, then froze.
Dacha stood before one of the sinks, facing the mirror. He gripped a knife in one hand, strands of his silver-blond hair in the other.
Fieran eased forward a step, his tone hesitant. He almost felt like he should take the knife from his dacha’s hands before he did something drastic. “Dacha? What are you doing?”
Dacha’s shoulders rose and fell in a deep, bracing breath, but his gaze never wavered from his own reflection in the mirror. “You cannot use your magic. Thus we will need to avoid attention and blend in as we travel across Mongavaria. I cannot risk that my elven hair will give us away and force you to use your magic to help defend us.”
With that, Dacha sliced the knife through his hair. No hesitation. Not a blink or a flinch.
Fieran lunged forward a step, an inarticulate, horrified noise rising in his throat. But he halted with his hands stretched into the air between him and Dacha, rooted in place.
Dacha dropped the shorn ends of his hair into the sink, grabbed another section of hair, and just as ruthlessly sliced it off.
Fieran lowered his hands to his sides, blinking rapidly at the sight of his dacha cutting off his elven hair, the symbol of his warrior honor, in order to keep Fieran safe.
He’d thought he’d understood the depth of his dacha’s love when he’d seen his dacha striding through the fog, having taken on an army for Fieran.
But this…this was the depth of his dacha’s love for him. He’d give up this very integral part of himself for Fieran.
Fieran couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t do anything but blink at the wetness gathering at the corners of his eyes.
Once the hair had been shortened, Dacha set the knife down and picked up a small set of shears, the kind used for sewing, and trimmed the ends. “How does it look in the back?”
Fieran swallowed and cleared his throat. “There is…the middle needs a trim.”
He probably should offer to help with the final trim, since it would be easier for him than for his dacha to do on himself. But Fieran couldn’t bring himself to offer to cut his dacha’s hair. Itfelt too wrong, too sacrilegious, despite the fact that Fieran had no problem keeping his own hair short.
Finally, Dacha dropped the last of the trimmed ends in the sink, called on his magic, and incinerated his shorn hair, as if he wasn’t going to leave it there for anyone to desecrate. He turned around and faced Fieran, the look in his eyes almost too steady for what he’d just done.
His dacha…looked like him. Or, rather, Fieran looked like his dacha. With their hair cut short in nearly the same style, the similar shape to their jaws, their identical pointed ears, the set of their eyes, grew all the more pronounced. They looked like they could be brothers, given how young his dacha appeared.
He’d been told all his life how much he looked like his dacha. But looking at him now, Fieran felt it in a way he never had before.
Fieran’s chestwas tight and aching again, but this time it wasn’t due to the dislocation of his magic.
He held one of the power cells with stolen elven magic. Before him, the ogres and Alliance soldiers gathered around the churned earth of the mass graves, many of them also holding magical power cells filled with stolen magic.
The elderly female ogre was speaking in their language. Some kind of funeral rites, if Fieran were to guess. After another few minutes, she moved forward, laid the magical power cell on the ground, and opened the valve to release the magic held within. Since the power cell wasn’t hooked up to a machine, the magic surged outward and dissipated into the air and the earth. Because the ogre magic was invisible, Fieran couldn’t see it, but he could sense it deep within his chest.
The other ogres stepped forward and did the same, placing the magical power cells on the ground and releasing the stolen magic. Fieran could only guess at how much of that magic belonged to family members and friends who now lay in those mass graves before them.
Once the ogres had finished, Dacha, Fieran, Pretty Face, and many of the Alliance soldiers stepped forward, set the power cells they held on the ground, and released all the non-ogre magic, including elven magic, human magic, and troll magic. The elf and troll magic was likely from pilots or warriors captured in the recent invasion into Mongavaria. But there was no way to tell if the human magic was from Escarlish magicians or possibly Mongavarians. Fieran wouldn’t put it past them to have experimented on their own people.
Unless the names of those killed were somewhere in the records that Pretty Face carried in a bag, there were some buried in those graves who might never be known.
Once the last stolen magic was released back to the earth, Dacha knelt and pressed his hand to the ground. Blue magic burst from him, traveling through the ground in a rush, before it wrapped around the empty magical power cells. Within heartbeats, it had melted the glass and consumed the rest of the parts, reducing the magical power cells to nothing.
