“Do you know who the Godking keeps as his concubines? Young girls from noble families. Prefers virgins. He guesses how much humiliation and debasement each girl can take. Puts them in tower rooms with balconies where all the railings have been torn off so the jump beckons every day. It’s a game for him.”
Kylar kept his voice hard. “Get to the point.”
“He took Serah and Mags Drake. Serah killed herself in the first week. Mags is still there.”
Serah and Mags were practically Kylar’s sisters. Mags had always been his pal. Always quick with a laugh, always smiling. He’d been so self-absorbed since the coup that he’d barely thought of them.
Jarl said, “I want you to rescue Logan, and then I want you to assassinate the Godking.”
“Is that all?” Coldly amused. It was a tone Kylar had heard Durzo use a hundred times. “Let me guess, Logan first because my odds with the Godking aren’t so great?”
“That’s right,” Jarl said angrily. “That’s how I have to think, Kylar. I’m fighting a war, and people better than us are dying in it every day. And you’re sitting around because of what some girl thinks?”
“Don’t you talk about Elene.”
“Or what? You’ll breathe heavily on me? You’re the dumbass who swore off violence. Yes, I know about that. Let me tell you something. Roth made a lot of people miserable. I’m glad you killed him, all right? He fucked me up bad. But he doesn’t hold a candle to his father.” Jarl swore. “Look at yourself! I know this hit is impossible. I’m sending you after a god. But if anyone in the world can do it, it’s you. You were made for this, Kylar. Do you think you made it through all the shit you made it through so you can sell hangover potions? Some things are bigger than your happiness, Kylar. You can give hope to an entire nation.”
“It’ll only cost me everything,” Kylar whispered. His face was gray.
“You’re an immortal. There’ll be other girls.”
Kylar gave him a disgusted look.
Jarl’s expression changed instantly. “I’m sorry. I guess there will be other Godkings and other Shingas too. I just… we need you. Logan will die if you don’t come. So will Mags, and so will a lot of other people you’ll never know.”
It would have been easier if he disagreed with anything Jarl said. Kylar had asked Momma K, “Can a man change?” Here was his answer, and it sucked the life right out of him. “All right,” Kylar said. “I’ll take the contract.”
Jarl smiled. “It’s good to have you back, my friend.”
“It’s bad to be back.”
“I didn’t want to say it before, but have you done something to piss off the local Shinga?” Jarl asked. He took Kylar’s expression to be an admission. “Because one of my sources told me the Shinga put out a contract on a Cenarian wetboy. He didn’t know any details, but uh, I don’t figure there’s all that many Cenarians wetboys hanging around. The longer you’re here, the more you put Elene and Uly in danger.”
Durzo had taught Kylar that the best way to cancel a contract was to cancel the contract-giver. For Elene and Uly and Aunt Mea and even Braen to be safe, Barush Sniggle had to die.
Kylar stood woodenly and went upstairs. He returned a minute later with a visage as dark as the wetboy grays he wore once again.
Vi looked at the bow in her hands, trying to convince herself to pull back the red-and-black arrow. She was on a rooftop looking into the midwife’s home. She’d been there for an hour. Her back was to a chimney, and she’d wrapped herself in shadows. She wasn’t invisible by any means, but crouched low in the dying light, with the sun behind her, she was close enough.
She’d come to Caernarvon to escape this. She’d thought the only way to not kill Jarl and still escape the Godking’s wrath was to kill Kylar. In the time she was away, Jarl would flee or be killed by another wetboy.
How could he have come here?
She wanted to shoot past him, shoot Kylar and pretend that Jarl wasn’t here, pretend that she’d never gotten the note. But she didn’t have the shot to take Kylar down, and lies would go nowhere with the Godking. Jarl sat right in front of the window. The window was even open. Vi was using a Talent-tension bow, a bow so powerful that only a person with the Talent could draw it, so the red-and-black traitor’s arrow could have punched right through a window, through shutters for that matter. But she didn’t even need it.
Jarl sat there, utterly exposed. He never would have made such a mistake in Cenaria, but here he felt safe. He’d fled straight into Death’s arms.
Yet she waited. Damn Jarl for his stupidity. If Vi didn’t kill him, the Godking would know. He would find her. Damn you, Jarl. Damn you for your kindness.
Finish the job. Hu Gibbet liked to torture his deaders first, but he only did it when he was sure he wouldn’t be interrupted. Hu Gibbet always finished the job. The perfect shot never comes. Take any shot that kills.
Cursing under her breath to activate her Talent, Vi stood and drew the arrow to her cheek. It moved her out of the silhouette of the small chimney into the dying light. She was shaking, but it was barely thirty paces. “Damn you, Jarl, move!” she said.
She could run away. In Gandu or Ymmur the Godking would never find her. Would he? She couldn’t believe it. She had told no one she was coming here, left no sign, and yet he knew. If she fled, the Godking would send her master after her, and Hu Gibbet never failed. For everything that Vi’s beauty accomplished for her, the one thing it made nearly impossible was hiding. She’d never worried about disguises. She’d never thought of it as a weakness. Until now.
“Come on, Kylar,” she whispered. “Just walk in front of the window. Just once.” She was shaking violently now, and not just from the Talent burning in her, not just from the tension of holding the bow drawn for so long. Why did she want Kylar dead so badly?
She saw a leg, a leg dressed in wetboy grays, but no more appeared. Dammit. If Kylar was going out, she was in serious trouble. She’d heard that he could make himself invisible, but that was just the typical wetboy lies. They all bragged about their abilities so they could drive prices up. Everyone wanted to be another Durzo Blint.
But this was Durzo’s apprentice, the man who’d killed Durzo. Fear gripped her.
Jarl’s face was drawn with compassion, sorrow. At that look—that look she’d seen before when Jarl had taken care of her after Hu Gibbet came in to test the new skills Momma K had been teaching her and found her lacking and beat her senseless and violated her in every way he could imagine—at that look, Vi’s vision went blurry. She blinked and blinked, refusing to believe it was tears. She hadn’t cried since that night, since Jarl had held her, rocking her, helping her put the fractured pieces of herself back together.
Jarl stood and walked to the window. He lifted his eyes and saw Vi, her dark silhouette limned with sunlight. Surprise lit his eyes, and as it was followed by recognition—what other wetboy had a woman’s silhouette?—she could swear she saw her name on his lips. Her fingers went limp and the bowstring slipped.
The red-and-black traitor’s arrow leapt across that narrowest of chasms: the distance between a wetboy and her deader. It cut a red path through the air as if the night itself were bleeding.
26
Elene, I’m sorry,” Kylar wrote in a shaky hand. “I tried. I swear I tried. Some things are worth more than my happiness. Some things only I can do. Sell these to Master Bourary and move the family to a better part of town. I will always love you.” Taking the ring box from his pocket, he placed it on top of the scrap of parchment.
“What’s in the box?” Jarl asked.
Kylar couldn’t look back at his friend. “My heart,” he whispered and slowly uncurled his fingers from the box. “Just some earrings,” he said, louder. He turned.
Jarl saw right through him. “You were going to marry her,” he said.
A lump rose in Kylar’s throat. There were no words. He had to look away from Jarl’s eyes. “Have you ever heard of cruxing?” he asked finally.
>
Jarl shook his head.
“It’s how Alitaerans execute rebels. They stretch them on a wood frame and pound nails through their wrists and feet. To breathe, the criminal has to lift his weight on the nails. It sometimes takes a man a day to die, asphyxiated by his own weight.” He couldn’t complete the metaphor, though he could feel himself being stretched out, a rebel against fate in a malevolent universe bent on crushing all things good, stretched between Logan and Elene, nailed to each with loyalty owed and gasping under the crushing weight of his own character. But it wasn’t just Elene and Logan that stretched him here. It was two lives, two paths. The way of the shadows and the way of the light. The wolf and the wolfhound. Or was it wolfhound and lapdog?
Kylar had thought he could change. He’d thought he could have everything. He’d run headfirst into either/or and chosen both. That was what had driven him to the crux—not the machinations of a trickster god or the implacable roll of Fortune’s wheel. Kylar’s options had spread further and further apart, and he’d held on until he couldn’t breathe. Only one question mattered now: What kind of man am I?
“Let’s go,” Kylar said, all wolfhound.
Jarl was standing at the window, pensive. “I was in love once,” Jarl said. “Or something like it. With a beautiful girl nearly as fucked up as I am.”
“Who was she?” Kylar asked.
“Her name was Viridiana, Vi. Beautiful, beautiful—” Jarl looked up and stiffened. “Vi?”
He went down in a spray of blood, an arrow passing fully through the center of his neck. His body dropped to the wood floor like a sack of flour. He blinked once. His eyes were neither afraid nor angry. His expression was wry.
Can you believe that? his eyes asked as Kylar drew him into his lap.
And then Jarl’s eyes said nothing at all.
“Can I show Kylar?” Uly asked. She was clutching the very doll that Kylar had picked up a few days before. Elene smiled; Kylar was doing better at being a father than he knew.
“Yes,” Elene said, “but you run right home. Promise?”
“Promise,” Uly said, and ran.
Elene watched her go, feeling anxious, but she always felt anxious about little things. Caernarvon wasn’t like the Warrens. Besides, the house was only two blocks away.
“We need to talk, don’t we?” Aunt Mea said.
It was getting late. The sun’s rays slanted down on merchants who were packing up their goods and heading home. Elene swallowed. “I promised Kylar. We agreed that we’d never tell anyone, but—”
“Then don’t say another word.” Aunt Mea smiled and took Elene’s arm to guide her back to the house.
“I can’t,” Elene said, stopping her. “I can’t do this anymore.”
So she told Aunt Mea everything, from the lie of their marriage to their fights about sex to Kylar’s being a wetboy and trying to leave it behind. Aunt Mea didn’t even look surprised.
“Elene,” she said, taking her hands. “Do you love Kylar or are you with him because Uly needs a mother?”
Elene paused to fully humble herself in the face of the question, to make sure what she would say was true. “I love him,” Elene said. “Uly is a part of it, but I really love him.”
“Then why are you protecting yourself?”
Elene looked up. “I’m not protecting—”
“You can’t be honest with me until you’re honest with yourself.”
Elene looked at her hands. A farmer’s cart loaded with the day’s unsold produce rattled past them. The light was fading and the street was beginning to get dark. “We have to get back,” Elene said. “Dinner must be getting cold.”
“Child,” Aunt Mea said. Elene stopped.
“He’s a killer,” Elene said. “I mean, he’s killed people.”
“No, you were right. He’s a killer.”
“No, he’s a good man. He can change. I know it.”
“Child, do you know why you’re talking to me even though you promised Kylar you wouldn’t? Because you agreed to something that isn’t in your nature. You make a terrible liar, but you tried because you promised. Isn’t that what he’s done?”
“What do you mean?” Elene asked.
“If you can’t love Kylar for the man he is—if you only love him for the man you think he could be—you’ll cripple him.”
Kylar had been so unhappy. When he’d started going out at night, she hadn’t asked, hadn’t wanted to know what he did. “What am I supposed to do?” she asked.
“Do you think you’re the first woman who’s been afraid to love?” Aunt Mea asked.
The words cut deep. It cast a different light on their nightly making out and fighting. She’d thought she was being holy by not making love with Kylar, but she was just terrified. She felt so far out of control already that surrender in the bedroom would have left her powerless. “Can I love him if I can’t understand him? Can I love him if I hate what he does?”
“Child,” Aunt Mea said. She gently laid a thick hand on Elene’s shoulder. “Loving is an act of faith as much as believing in the God is.”
“He isn’t a believer. An ox and a wolf can’t be yoked together,” Elene said, knowing she was grasping at straws.
“You think a yoke only refers to wedding rings or love-making? You don’t need to understand him, Elene, you need to love him until you do.” Aunt Mea took Elene’s arm. “Come on, let’s go eat our dinner.”
They walked back to the house together, Elene feeling lighter than she had in months—even if she was going to have to have a big talk with Kylar. She felt a new sense of hope.
Elene threw the door open, but the house was silent, empty. “Kylar?” she said. “Uly?”
There was no answer. The food was cold on the counter, the jelly Kylar had been making congealed and cracked. Her heart clogged her throat. Every breath was an effort. Aunt Mea looked horrified. Elene ran upstairs and clawed at the box of Kylar’s wetboy clothes and his big sword. It was empty. There was no sign of anything.
She walked back downstairs, the truth coming to her as slowly as the setting sun.
“Are we going to be all right?” she had asked him.
“After tonight we are,” he’d said, unsmiling.
Kylar’s wedding ring sat next to the stove. There was no note, nothing else. Even Uly was gone. Kylar had finally given up on her. He was gone.
* * *
Vi slung the wiggling child off her shoulder as they came into the stable of the seedy inn where she’d put up her horse. The stable boy lay unconscious and bleeding by the door. He’d probably live. It didn’t matter; he hadn’t seen Vi before she’d clubbed him with the pommel of her short sword.
The girl squeaked through the rag Vi had tied over her mouth. Vi knelt and grabbed the girl’s throat in one hand. She pulled out the gag.
“What’s your name?” Vi asked.
“Go to hell!” The girl’s eyes flashed, defiant. She couldn’t be more than twelve.
Vi slapped her, hard. Then she slapped her again, and again, and again, impassively, the way Hu used to slap her when he was bored. When the girl tried to get away, she clamped her hand down on her throat, the threat explicit: the more you wiggle, the more you choke.
“Fine, Go To Hell, you want me to call you that, or something else?”
The little girl cursed her again. Vi spun her in to her body and clamped a hand over her mouth. With the other hand, she found a pain point in one of the girl’s elbows and ground her fingers in.
The girl screamed into her hand.
Why haven’t I killed her yet?
The job had gone flawlessly. Kylar had taken Jarl’s body after arming himself for hunting. Vi had only seen brief glimpses of blades being sheathed and disappearing—surely it was a trick of the light and the distance, Kylar couldn’t really be invisible. Regardless, after a while he’d taken Jarl’s body and Vi had gone into the house.
She intended to set a few traps. There was a perfect contact poison that she
could smear on the door latch of his bedroom and a needle trap that would fit perfectly in the little box he kept under the bed. But she couldn’t do it. Still reeling from Jarl’s murder, she walked around the house like a common prowler.
Vi found a note and a pair of earrings that looked expensive—the note said as much—even though they were oddly mismatched, one larger than the other. She pocketed both but didn’t touch the thin gold wedding band by the stove. Let the happy little family keep its heir-looms. She wasn’t sure what the note meant. Kylar had tried? Tried to protect Jarl?
The door opened, surprising Vi, and the little girl had walked in. Vi bound and gagged her, then stood looking at the mess she’d got herself into.
She was finished. She couldn’t kill this child. She couldn’t even kill Kylar. No, that wasn’t true, she was sure she could still kill Kylar. The only way she could escape the Godking with her life was to please him. He would be more pleased if she delivered Kylar alive. If she delivered Kylar alive, the Godking would never know her weakness. She’d buy herself time to recover whatever it was that had cracked in her as she’d watched Jarl die in a spray of blood.
Galvanized, Vi went back to Kylar’s bedroom. She carved the Cenarian Sa’kagé’s glyph into the bedside table in a fine, light hand. Beneath it she traced, “I’ve got the girl.” When Kylar came back, he’d find his daughter gone and he’d scour the entire house. He’d find it, and he’d follow Vi straight to the Godking.
So now all Vi had to do was figure out how to smuggle a wailing child out of the city.
“Let’s try again,” Vi said. “What’s your name?”
“Uly,” the little girl said, tears making her face blotchy.
“All right, Ugly, we’re leaving. You can come with me alive or dead. It doesn’t matter. You’ve served your purpose. I’m going to tie your hands to the saddle, so you can jump off the horse if you want, but you’ll just get kicked and dragged to death. Your choice. Open your mouth.”