Heretic (The Sanctuary Series Book 7) Read Online Free

seemed unsure of what to say to that, and Cyrus watched him turn back to his party, and they spoke together for a moment before Zarnn turned back. “We looking for … home.”
    “Gren is that way—” Vaste started.
    “Vaste,” Cyrus said, putting his hand on the troll’s arm, pulling it down from where he’d been pointing to the northwest. “We don’t … we don’t turn away people who are looking for—”
    “If we’re smart, we damned sure do,” Vaste said, his eyes hard.
    “Weren’t you the one who once told me I didn’t know anything about trolls?” Cyrus asked.
    “And you still don’t, which is why I’m turning them away for you.”
    “I’m with Vaste,” Menlos said, arms still folded before him. “Send ’em back to the swamps. Better not to invite this kind of trouble into our walls.”
    “Stop making me rethink my hard line,” Vaste said, eye twitching in annoyance.
    “Turning them away isn’t what Alaric would have done,” Vara said quietly, her voice soft and regretful.
    Vaste shot Cyrus a scathing look. “Don’t you have some insecure reply to that?”
    “She’s right,” Cyrus said. “This isn’t … Sanctuary is supposed to be a haven for those seeking a path.”
    “Whoa, no,” Menlos shook his head. “We’re not talking about gnomes or goblins that can’t find work in Reikonos. We’re talking trolls here. Trolls. Slavers. Kidnappers. Twice the size of a normal person, and four times the threat of a strong warrior.”
    “Which makes them something on the order of fifty-two strong warriors we’d be taking on as applicants,” Cyrus said, looking down at the thirteen of them waiting. “When was the last time we had fifty-two of anyone apply to us in a single day? Or even thirteen?”
    “Oh, I hear the seeds of my defeat planted in your words, and they sound like … nuts,” Vaste said, taking a ragged breath. “As in, ‘You’ve gone—’”
    “I caught the implication,” Cyrus said. “Though I would have thought you’d say I’d gone soft, perhaps.”
    “And risk your rather brazen wife tossing out some suggestive witticism about your insatiable manliness my way? No. No. I’d rather insult your sanity, it’s safer.”
    Vara gave the healer a look half as mischievous as the one she’d favored Cyrus with before Menlos had interrupted them in the foyer. “If you’d like—”
    “Open the gates, then,” Vaste said, coming back from the edge of the wall, sounding utterly resigned, as though he’d lost a fight and received a hard shellacking in the bargain. “Mark this moment in your mind, though, if they go treacherous or dangerous or merely lecherous with the local farm animals—I warned you and you ignored it.”
    “Those poor animals,” Menlos said in a low whisper then whistled, drawing his wolves to him immediately.
    “Come on,” Cyrus said, already heading for the stairs. “Let’s go meet our new applicants.”
    He descended the stairs under the cloudy skies, the faint glow of daylight making its way through patches of the clouds above like lamps shining through mist. Vara fell in beside him. “You were right,” she said softly. “This is the proper course for Sanctuary. This is who we are.”
    “I haven’t forgotten,” Cyrus said. “I forget a lot of things, but this … I couldn’t forget this.”
    His boots hit the soft earth as the squeal of the gate hinges and chain of the portcullis being drawn open reached his ears. He stood in the middle of the dirt pathway, watching as the trolls made their way inside the walls and the wizard on the horse followed at a distance. He barely made it inside before the gates began to squeak shut again, pushed closed by the warriors manning them.
    The trolls strolled into the open grass-and-dirt space behind the wall, looking around in amazement at the distance to the guildhall. It was not a small area, the space between the walls and the keep; there was plenty of room for a small town to take root