Shadow's Edge (nat-2) (21 page)

T
hree days north of the Silver Bear Hills, Kylar came to the small town of Torras Bend. He’d been pushing hard for six days, barely stopping long enough to rest the horses, and his body ached everywhere from his stint in the saddle. Torras Bend was halfway to Cenaria, at the base of the Fasmeru Mountains and Forglin’s Pass. The horses needed the rest, and so did he. South of town, he’d even had to submit to a Lae’knaught checkpoint looking for magi. Apparently, Waeddryn’s queen didn’t have the will or the power to expel the Lae’knaught either.

He asked a farmer for directions to the town’s inn and soon found himself in a warm building filled with the smells of roasting meat pies and fresh ale. Most inns smelled of stale beer and sweat, but the people of northern Waeddryn were fastidious. Their gardens lacked weeds, their fences lacked rot, their children very nearly lacked dirt. They prided themselves on their industry, and the attention to detail of these simple folk was incredible. Even Durzo would have been impressed. All in all, it was a perfect place to rest.

Coming into the common room, Kylar ordered enough food to make the goodwife raise her eyebrows. He sat by himself. His legs were throbbing and his butt was sore. If he never saw another horse again, it would be too soon. He closed his eyes and sighed, only the heavenly odors coming from the kitchen keeping him from going to bed immediately.

In what was obviously a nightly ritual, probably half the men of the village pushed their way through the inn’s great oak door to share a pint with their friends before going home. Kylar ignored the men and their inquisitive glances. He only opened his eyes when a stout, homely woman in her fifties set two enormous meat pies in front of him, along with an impressive tankard of ale.

“I think you’ll find Mistress Zoralat’s ale is as good as her pies,” the woman said. “May I join you?”

Kylar yawned. “Ah, excuse me,” he said. “Sure. I’m Kylar Stern.”

“What do you do, Master Stern?” she said, sitting.

“I’m a, uh, soldier, as a matter of fact.” He yawned again. He was getting too old for this. He’d considered saying “I’m a wetboy” just to see what the old goat’s reaction would be.

“A soldier for whom?”

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Answer my question, and I’ll answer yours,” she said, as if he were a recalcitrant child.

Fair enough. “For Cenaria.”

“I was under the impression that country no longer existed,” she said.

“Were you?” he said.

“Khalidoran goons. Meisters. The Godking. Conquest. Rape. Pillage. Iron-fisted rule. Ring any bells?”

“I guess some people would be deterred by that,” Kylar said. He smiled and shook his head at himself.

“You frighten a lot of people, don’t you, Kylar Stern?”

“What was your name again?” he asked.

“Ariel Wyant Sa’fastae. You can call me Sister Ariel.”

Any vestige of fatigue vanished instantly. Kylar touched the ka’kari within him to be sure it was ready to call up in an instant.

Sister Ariel blinked. Was it because she’d seen something, or had he just let his muscles tense?

“I thought this was a dangerous part of the world for people like you,” Kylar said. He couldn’t remember the stories, but he remembered something linking Torras Bend with mages’ dying.

“Yes,” she said. “One of our young and foolhardy sisters disappeared here. I’ve come to look for her.”

“The Dark Hunter,” he said, finally remembering.

At tables around them, conversations ceased. Dour faces turned toward Kylar. From their expressions, he could see that the topic wasn’t so much taboo as it was gauche. “Sorry,” he mumbled, and began attacking a meat pie.

Sister Ariel watched in silence as he ate. He felt a twinge of suspicion, wondering what Durzo would have said if he knew Kylar was eating food served to him by a maja, but he’d died twice already—maybe three times—and lived again, so what the hell? Besides, the pies were good, and the ale was better.

Not for the first time, he wondered if it had been the same for Durzo. He’d lived for centuries, but had he been unkillable, too? He must have. But he had never risked his own life. Was that only because by the time Kylar knew him, the ka’kari had abandoned him? Kylar wondered sometimes if there were a downside to his power. He could live for hundreds of years. He couldn’t be killed. But he didn’t feel immortal. He didn’t even feel the sense of power that, when he was a boy, he thought he would feel once he became a wetboy. He was a wetboy now, more than a wetboy, and he felt like he was still just Kylar. Still Azoth, the clueless, scared child.

“Have you seen a beautiful woman come riding through here, sister?” he asked. Vi had seen where Kylar lived. She would tell the Godking and he would destroy everything and everyone Kylar loved. That was how he worked.

“No. Why?”

“If you do,” he said, “kill her.”

“Why? Is she your wife?” Sister Ariel asked, smirking.

He gave her a flat look. “The God doesn’t hate me that much. She’s an assassin.”

“So, you’re not a soldier, but an assassin hunter.”

“I’m not hunting her. I wish I had the time. But she may come through here.”

“What’s so important that you would abandon justice?”

“Nothing,” he said without thinking. “But justice has been too long denied elsewhere.”

“Where?” she asked.

“Suffice it to say that I’m on a mission for the king.”

“There is no king of Cenaria except the Godking.”

“Not yet.”

She raised an eyebrow. “There’s no man who can unite Cenaria, even against the Godking. Perhaps Terah Graesin can, but she’s scarcely a man, is she?”

He smiled. “You Sisters like to think you’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?”

“Do you know that you’re an infuriating young ignoramus?”

“Only as much as you’re a tired old bag.”

“Do you truly think I’d kill some young woman for you?”

“I don’t suppose you would. Forgive me, I’m tired. I forgot that the Seraph’s hand only reaches beyond its ivory halls to take things for itself.”

Her lips pressed into a thin line. “Young man, I don’t take well to impudence.”

“You’ve succumbed to the intoxication of power, Sister. You like watching people jump.” He raised an insolent eyebrow, bemused. “So color me scared.”

She was very still. “Another temptation of power,” she said, “is to strike down those who vex you. You, Kylar Stern, are tempting me.”

He picked that moment to yawn. It wasn’t feigned, but he couldn’t have found a better moment. She turned red. “They say the old age is a second childhood, Sister. Besides which, the moment you drew power, I’d kill you.”
By the gods, I can’t stop. Am I really going to get on the wrong side of half the world’s mages because one old lady irritates me?

Instead of getting angrier, Sister Ariel’s face grew thoughtful. “You can tell the moment I draw magic?”

He wasn’t going there. “One way to find out,” he said. “But it would be a bother to dispose of your corpse and cover my tracks. Especially with all these witnesses.”

“How would you cover your tracks?” she asked quietly.

“Come now. You’re in Torras Bend. How many of the mages who have been ‘killed by the Dark Hunter’ here do you think were really killed by the Dark Hunter? Don’t be naive. The thing probably doesn’t even exist.”

She scowled, and he could tell she’d never thought of it. Well, she was a mage. Of course she didn’t think like a wetboy. “Well,” she said. “You’re wrong about one thing. It exists.”

“If everyone who’s ever gone into the woods has died, how do you know?”

“You know, young man. There’s a way for you to prove that we’re all crazy.”

“Go into the woods?” he asked.

“You wouldn’t be the first to try.”

“I’d be the first to succeed.”

“You’re awfully full of braggadocio about the things you’d do if you only had the time.”

“Fair enough, Sister Ariel. I accept your correction—until the day Cenaria has a king. Now if you’ll excuse me?”

“One moment,” she said as he stood. “I’m going to draw the power, but I swear by the White Seraph that I won’t touch you with it. If you must kill me, I won’t try to stop you.”

She didn’t wait for him to respond. He saw a pale iridescent nimbus surround her. It shifted quickly through every color in the rainbow in deliberate succession, though some colors seemed somehow thicker than others. Was that an indication of her strength in the various disciplines of magic? He readied the ka’kari to devour whatever magic she threw at him—hoping he remembered what he had done before, and not sure that he did—but he didn’t strike.

The nimbus didn’t move. Sister Ariel Wyant merely inhaled deeply through her nose. The nimbus disappeared. She nodded her head, as if satisfied. “Dogs find you very odd, don’t they?”

“What?” he asked. It was true, but he’d never thought much of it.

“Maybe you can tell me,” she said, “why, after days of hard riding, don’t you smell of sweat and dirt and horse? Indeed, you have no scent whatsoever.”

“You’re imagining things,” he said, backing away. “Goodbye, Sister.”

“Until we meet again, Kylar Stern.”

M
omma K stood on a landing overlooking the warehouse floor. Agon’s Dogs, as they’d taken to calling themselves, were training under his watchful eye. The force had shrunk to a hundred men, and Momma K was sure that by now its existence was well-known. “Do you think they’re ready?” she asked as Agon labored up the stairs on a cane.

“More training would make them better. Battle will make them better faster. But it will cost lives,” he said.

“And your wytch hunters?”

“They’re no Ymmuri. Ymmuri can riddle a man with arrows from a hundred paces while galloping away from him. The best I can hope for is ten men who will get in range, stop, shoot, and move on before the fireballs get to them. My hunters aren’t worthy of the bows they carry—but they’re a damn sight better than anything else we have.”

Momma K smiled. He was underplaying his men’s capabilities. She’d seen those men shoot.

“What about your rent girls?” Agon asked. “This mission will cost lives. Are they ready for that?” He stood close beside her as they watched his men spar.

“You would have been amazed if you could have seen their faces, Brant. It was like I gave them their souls back. They’d been dying inside, and now they’ve come back to life, all at once.”

“No word yet from Jarl?” Agon’s voice was tense and Momma K could tell that, for all that he had clashed with the young man, Agon was worried for him.

“There wouldn’t be. Not yet.” She put her hands on the rail and accidentally brushed his fingers.

Brant looked at her hand and then in her eyes and quickly away.

She winced and pulled her hand away. Decades ago, Agon had been arrogant, not obnoxious with it but merely full of youthful confidence that he could do pretty much anything better than pretty much anyone else. That was gone now, replaced by a sober understanding of his own strengths and weaknesses. He was a man well tempered by the years. Gwinvere had known men ruined by their wives. Small women who felt so threatened they undercut their husbands for so many years that those men no longer trusted themselves. Such women had made Momma K wealthy. She knew men with perfectly good wives who were regulars, men addicted to the brothels as others were addicted to wine, but much of her business came from men desperate to be considered manly, strong, good lovers, noble.

It was one of the many ironies of the business that they came to a brothel for that.

Men, Momma K believed, were too simple to ever be truly safe from the temptations of a house of pleasure. It had been her business to make sure those temptations were multifaceted, and she’d been good at her business. Her establishments weren’t just whorehouses. She had meeting rooms, smoking rooms, dignified parlors, lecturers on all the topics men love. The food and drink were always finer than her competitors’ and priced lower. At her best establishments, she brought in chefs and wine masters from all over Midcyru. As a restaurateur, she would have been a dismal failure. The food side of her business operated at a loss every year. But at her houses, men who came for the food stayed to spend their coin other ways.

The few Brant Agons of the world didn’t bang her girls for two reasons: they were happy at home, and they didn’t walk through the doors in the first place. She was sure Agon had been derided for that. Men who didn’t frequent the houses of pleasure were always mocked by those who did.

Brant had conviction, integrity. He reminded her of Durzo.

The thought sent a lance through her stomach. Durzo had been dead three months. Gods, how she missed him! She’d been helplessly in love with Durzo. Durzo was the only man in her life who would ever understand her. She’d been too terrified of that to let love grow. She’d been a coward. She’d starved their relationship of honesty, and like a plant potted in a shallow bowl, the relationship had been stunted. Durzo was the father of her child. He’d only found out a few days before he died.

Momma K was fifty now, almost fifty-one. The years had been kind to her, at least most days they seemed so. She usually looked fifteen years younger than she was. Well, at least ten. If she tried, she thought she still had what it would take to seduce Brant.

Once a whore, always a whore, huh, Gwin?
She used to despise old women who clung to their lost youth by their lacquered fingernails. Now she was one. Part of her wanted to seduce Brant just to prove to herself that she still could. But she didn’t want to seduce Brant. It had been years since she’d taken a man to her bed. For all the thousands of times it had been work, there had been times she’d liked or admired her lover of the moment. And there had been Durzo. The night they conceived Uly, he’d been so blasted on mushrooms that he hadn’t been much of a lover, but to have the man she loved share her bed had filled her to overflowing. She was so shot through with love and grief that she’d wept during their lovemaking. Even in his drugged state, Durzo had stopped and asked if he was hurting her. After that, it had taken all her skill to bring him to completion. Durzo had been a tender man when it came to taking his pleasure.

Now their child was being raised by Kylar and Elene. It was the only deception she didn’t regret. With those two, Uly would do well.

But she was tired of deceit. Tired of taking and never giving. She didn’t want to seduce Brant. She knew he wanted her, and his wife was probably dead. Probably, but he couldn’t know. Wouldn’t know. Ever. How long would a man like Brant Agon wait for the woman he loved?

Forever. That’s the kind of man he is.

Thirty-some years ago, they’d met at a party, her first ever at a noble’s home. He’d fallen instantly in love with her and she’d allowed him to court her, never telling him what she did, what she was. He’d been gallant, confident, determined to make his mark on the world, and so sweetly careful in his courting that he hadn’t asked her for a kiss for a month.

She’d indulged in the fantasy. He would marry her, take her away from all the horrors she wanted so desperately to leave behind. She hadn’t had that many noble clients, yet. It was possible, wasn’t it?

The night of their first kiss, a noble had referred to her as the sweetest harlot he’d ever had. Brant overheard it, instantly challenged the man to a duel, and killed him. Gwinvere had fled. The next day, Brant had learned the truth. He enlisted and tried to get himself honorably killed fighting on the Ceuran border.

But Brant Agon had been too capable to die. Eventually, despite how he despised bootlicking and politicking, his merit had pulled him through the ranks. He married a plain woman from a merchant family. By all accounts, it was a happy marriage.

“How long will it take to get everything ready?” she asked. She would hope Brant’s infatuation had died. She would help him dodge the truth. She was good at that, at least.

“Gwin.”

She turned and looked him in the eye, her mask in place, eyes cool. “Yes?”

He blew out a great breath. “I loved you for years, Gwin, even after …”

“My betrayal?”

“Your indiscretion. You were what? Sixteen, seventeen? You deceived yourself first, and I think you suffered for it more than I did.”

She snorted.

“Regardless,” he said. “I bear you no ill will. You are a beautiful woman, Gwin. More beautiful than my Liza ever was. You are so brilliant that I feel I have to sprint just to keep up with you jogging. I felt quite the opposite with Liza. You …affect me profoundly.”

“But,” she said.

“Yes. But,” he said. “I love Liza, and she has loved me through a thousand trials, and she deserves all that I have to give. Whether or not you have tender feelings for me, while I have hope that my Liza lives, I would ask—beg—that you would help me remain true to her.”

“You’ve chosen a hard road,” she said.

“Not a road, a battle. Sometimes life is our battlefield. We must do what we know to do, not what we want to do.”

Gwinvere sighed, and yet somehow felt lighter. Dodging Brant’s attraction could have so easily turned into dodging his presence, and she needed to work closely with him now.
Is honesty so easy? Could I have just said, “Durzo, I love you, but I fear you’ll destroy me”?
Brant had just offered her his vulnerability, confessed her effect on him, and yet seemed not weaker but stronger for it.
How was that? Is truth so powerful?

She swore then, in her own heart, that she would not tempt this man for her own vanity. Not in her voice, not in accidental touches, not in her dress, she would lay down every weapon in her arsenal. The resolution made her feel oddly …decent. “Thank you,” she said. She smiled companionably. “How long till they’re ready?”

“Three days,” Brant said.

“Then let us make the night run red.”