He brushed the rest of that thought aside. He did not care to speculate about what would happen if he did not. At best, he would be haunted for the remainder of his life by the breaking of the promise he had given. Some promises you could break and live with yourself after doing so, but not this one.
He was brooding on the consequences of having made that promise when Logan suddenly said, “You asked me why I didn’t take the staff with me when I came to rescue you, Kirisin. Do you still want to know?”
It caught the boy off guard. He looked over at Logan, but the Knight of the Word had his eyes fixed on the road, maneuvering the AV through the obstacle course of debris and potholes.
“If you want to tell me,” he said.
Logan nodded. “When I was living with Michael, after he saved me from the compound, we used to go hunting. We would strip down, paint ourselves with camouflage, arm ourselves with nothing but K-Bar Classics, and go after the militias that were always hunting us. Hunting the hunters, we called it. A game we played to scare them off. We’d go out, find a patrol, kill a few, and then disappear. Leave no footprints behind, no trace of who we were. Just the dead men. It was a warning to them. But it was something more to us.”
He paused. “That all stopped a dozen years ago, when Michael stopped being Michael and became someone else.”
He glanced over at Kirisin, and the boy found himself wondering—not for the first time—who Michael was. But Logan pressed on with no explanation. “Last night I found myself wanting to do that again. To strip down and go after those skrails with nothing but a hunting knife. It was a dangerous impulse, a foolish idea, and I knew it. It risked everything if I failed. It was selfish, too. I had been lucky enough to find you, to catch up to your captors, and now I was thinking about throwing it all away on a whim. I knew this. I recognized it right away.”
He shook his head. “But I did it anyway.” He went silent, eyes on the road. “I did it,” he continued finally, “because I needed to do something to save myself.”
His gaze shifted momentarily to Kirisin and then back again to the road. “Michael said once that automatic weapons were our best defense against the militias and the rogue armies and all the rest, but that you shouldn’t let yourself rely on them too heavily. Sooner or later, one of them would fail. If that was all you had, you were dead. He said that we hunted to be sure we had more to work with than guns and armored vehicles. He said that sooner or later a time would come when you had only yourself, so you’d better be ready for when that time came around.”
He gave a quick, hard laugh. “Even that wasn’t enough to save him in the end. He thought it would be, but it wasn’t.”
“Michael was your teacher?” Kirisin asked, wanting now to know something more about Michael, unwilling to let it slide further.
Logan Tom nodded. “That, and much more. My surrogate father. My best friend. My only family.” He took a deep breath and exhaled sharply. “Everything, once.”
His hands tightened on the steering wheel. “When I went into the skrail camp to rescue you, I was doing something for myself, too. I was proving to myself that there was more to me than the staff’s magic, that I was more than a Knight of the Word. I had to reassure myself. Michael had warned about relying too heavily on automatic weapons. It’s the same with magic. It’s wrong to rely too much on anything.”
“Like you were telling me earlier,” Kirisin said. “The magic can be dangerous in more ways than you might think. It can undermine you in lots of unexpected ways.”
“The magic hasn’t been too reliable lately,” the other continued. “I thought it was time to make sure I could still get along without it. I needed to test myself. Going in after you in the old way, the way I used to with Michael, was what I thought I needed to do.”
“Well, if you thought it was important, then it probably was,” the boy offered, at the same time wondering if that was really so.
“Maybe. I’m still not sure. You make a choice and it works out and you think it was the right one. But maybe you just got lucky. If you made that choice a second time, you might end up dead.”
There was nothing Kirisin cared to say about that. He decided to leave the matter there, and he turned back to face down the road, looking off into space, seeing things that hadn’t happened yet, but that one day would.
Neither said anything further.