"You're missing the point!" Shantar muttered darkly.
"Why you waste time talking to them," Gershul added. "Is beyond me. Look at them, Skandra. See everything I ever told you of. He understands the point, but twists it deliberately, because even if he can see that you're grieving for a friend he has only one thing in mind."
He supposed it made sense, in a way. Skandra had never wanted to revenge his parents. But anyone else, he would have waded through a sea of blood to do it and had before. He didn't remember ever thinking of Leironuoth as a madman before. Not if he had a concern or a complaint or... they'd gone places together that no two creatures had ever gone before. Skandra could see those ties crumbling away into nothing. Could feel all of it turning to ash. Shantar was right. He should have... just been honest, but they didn't have any ears for him.
"Their kind doesn't, Skandra," Gershul told him gravely. "They never do."
"You should have been honest. Just said what you felt. They do have a lot to consider," Shantar argued.
Let's leave.
Ithacles would want to talk to him again. But there was something in the back of his mind, a thought he had, Distant at first but stronger all the time. It was a longshot, but his other option was waiting to die in a city full of these kinds of people, who would hear that he'd rescued a woman and lost his friend in the doing, and reassure each other that their single-minded search for revenge did not make them monsters if they swatted all else aside.
Yeah, the choice was clear, there.
It was definitely time to leave.
"You're expected, you wretched beasts," Skandra laughed as he started up the stairs. "Wretch-ed-beasts! Wretch-ed-beasts!"
The laughter only grew louder as he took the stairs three at a time; light danced in the darkness but he didn't see it. When you considered it there was nothing awfully unexpected in it. Maybe he should have been preparing himself before now. Maybe it was always going to be this way. Maybe it was always meant to be this way. When he emerged into the rain Skandra flung that torch into a pool of standing water.
The entrance to their prison was little more than a crumbling shack of wood and stone, a door and enough space to enter. It was surrounded by half-shattered stone walls, overgrown with moss and trees. Skandra wished he was wearing a hat. Rain battered him in waves, as it battered the dead bodies strewn across the muddle courtyard of this onetime castle. Some of the water ran red with the blood he'd spilled. Why had he killed them? So Leironuoth could call him a megalomaniac? There was no chance Leironuoth even knew what that word meant. So they could remind him that he was dying, throw it in his face as though it was a decision that he made? There was no right answer, but if Skandra was expressing things the same way he always had, what had changed? Leironuoth's tolerance for it? Maybe. There was a wagon coming toward them, a driver shrouded in white, and Skandra could barely make them out.
Staring through the mist and rain, Skandra finally knew why Gershul hated the world.