Sword (41 page)

"Spies," he sighed, and Annan flashed half a grin, one that vanished almost before Devin could see it.

Devin flipped a page delicately. The feeling of it was almost like the feeling of the harp in his hands: a weight beyond the object itself, a faint, hidden spark flaring through the fingertips. Distant pulling in the belly.

"You honestly
believe
they were real?" he asked, though he knew the answer. Kinsey could jest, was actually quite funny when he wanted to be—but he wouldn't ever jest about research.

"I
know
they were," Kinsey said simply. "You do too, if you think about it. There are tales of them in every province of Lardan, of Cassdall, of Allaida and Madrassia and every other kingdom nearby. If you haven't read them, I assure you, I have. And the old histories always spoke of a people before us. It just never occurred to me the faery tales and the histories were talking about the same thing."

"I can see why," Devin grumbled.

"I'm sure it's a little unsettling, learning you've the blood of faeries in your veins," Kinsey said with false sympathy, a hint of wicked humor hiding in his gaze. He yawned, rubbing an eye, and then ran a hand through his hair. It always looked like a barley field after a hard wind: now it looked like a barley field after a hard wind had knocked a few trees onto it. Devin coughed to hide a laugh and saw, out of the corner of his eye, Annan cast a long-suffering look up at the ceiling.

"Oh, it's not such a surprise," Devin sighed. "I grew up with Kyali, remember. Fire-haired, spark-eyed, even-tempered as a bear in spring, always batting at things with that damned sword. You should have seen her when she was ten. She
looked
like a faery. Just not the nice kind."

Annan and Kinsey had the strangest expressions on their faces, like they were trying to picture Captain Corwynall of the Exile's Army as a knobby-kneed ten-year-old carrying a grown man's sword, and finding it impossible. It almost made him smile. It also put the lump back in his throat. 

Getting shot with an arrow had made him stupidly sentimental.

It had also, apparently, knocked some disturbing new magic loose in him. There was a constant sense of darkness hovering at the edges of everything now, a feeling like walls pressing around him—cold, high walls that hid something important, something he both needed and dreaded. He had dreamed of them every night for five days, dreamed of following the smooth icy shape of them blindly with his hands, of searching for a door he was certain existed but that he never found. Ever since he'd woken in his own bed with a blurred memory of pain and gold light, and Taireasa sitting beside him.

It meant
something
, he just didn't know what. And it made for very poor sleep.

"What brings you to the library?" Kinsey asked, eyeing his captain. "You didn't come here just to scare the daylights out of me and mock Devin."

"Either one would have been worth the trip, my lord," Annan said smoothly, and Kinsey hurled a crumpled knot of paper at him, grinning. "I came to find the Lord Corwynall, however. Your cousins are no longer under suspicion, my lord."

Devin sagged in his chair. "Thank the gods," he murmured. And then straightened. "Wait. How did we discover this?"

Annan's look was wary. "Her Majesty… asked them."

Asked
them? What was that supposed to mean, that Taireasa had brought them in for tea and a polite discussion of…

Oh.
Oh
, dear gods.

He must have blanched. Kinsey stood abruptly, poured tea into another mug, and set it before him with a firm look. "Drink," he said.

"Are they all right? Is
she
?"

Taireasa?

No answer but a sense of great weariness and sadness—and then, as she became aware of him, of walls of warm stone rising between them, shielding her mind from his. It didn't feel like a rejection, more like the self-protective effort of an exhausted heart.

"Her Majesty complained of headache, but is otherwise well," Annan was saying. "Your cousins are sleeping, I believe. They came through it with no injury."

Devin was only half-listening now, probing the shuttered sense of Taireasa, the guard she held against not just him, but everything. It was a trick he hadn't learned yet. It felt strangely familiar, and then he understood why.

Walls of warm stone.

Walls of dark ice.

Hearts bound to his own behind each of them.

He might have fallen out of the chair. The world seemed to have moved under him, showing him something from a new angle, undoing and remaking itself around his bewildered gaze.

Was it Kyali he was dreaming of? Was
that
what she had become, that cold darkness shut in on itself? Oh gods, what had done
that
to her?

That wasn't his sister. That
couldn't
be his sister. She could indeed be cold, practical in a way that let her move men around like chess pieces, let her risk and lose their lives for a greater goal and still find a way to sleep afterwards. She had a temper that, when loosed, sent seasoned soldiers running for cover, and her will was hard enough to break stone—but past that was a heart irrevocably loyal, vast and stubborn and silently, boundlessly generous.
That
was the sister he knew, who trusted seldom but without reservation, who never sang but knew the words to every song he'd written, who preferred little notice of her cleverness and none at all of her compassion. Who would give her life without a second's hesitation for him or for Taireasa.

That sister would
never
desert her best friend, her brother, her House. That sister would have torn herself apart before letting that happen. And yet she had. And did. Assuming the rest was still true, which he had to believe—that Kyali was somewhere under that immense and awful cold—what would make her
choose
such a thing?

Taireasa, who never slept. Who curled around a guilt so great it was a wound.

Kyali, with shadows just as heavy under her eyes, and fury in them. Who was, under all that,
sad
.

Warm stone, dark ice.

"Annan," Devin said faintly. He became aware that both Annan and Kinsey were watching him with more than a little concern. He didn't know how long he'd sat there thinking. He took a sip of the tea, mostly to take that look of growing alarm out of Kinsey's eyes, and found it was already cooling.

"Lord Corwynall?"

"Gods—don't call me that. I
hate
that. And it's not even true: I can't be Head of House. I'm a Bard. We'll just have to find someone else once we've taken the kingdom back." Never mind that he was wearing his father's ring, or that he was the only Corwynall now wearing a dragon locket.

Two lockets, actually, because he hadn't been able to make himself let go of Kyali's.

"You must have asked anyone who would talk about that night what happened in Faestan castle during the Western uprising," Devin said, and received a cautious, considering nod.

Of course Annan had. He was a spy, an information collector, and since Kinsey had chosen to ally himself with Taireasa, he had a new enemy. He would want to know everything about that enemy.

"What happened?" he asked.

Kinsey shifted in his chair, frowning. "Devin—what are you chasing?

"I don't know yet. Humor me."

"It's a piecemeal story, my lord," Annan said, settling himself gingerly in a chair, evidently wary of the damage his armor might do to the wood. "I've reports from servants, soldiers, throne room guards, cooks, and townsfolk. The Western force that accompanied the barons into Faestan was camped outside the town walls: late that night, someone let them in the town gate and then into the castle. It was not, by all accounts, one of the barons themselves."

"Yes," Devin said, waving impatiently. That much was obvious. "And?"

Annan shrugged, eyes lighting with the challenge. "And I'd bet my blade the person or persons who let the Western force in is the same one passing messages to Tuan now."

Kinsey's head snapped around. "Ah," he said, an admiring sound. "Now
that's
a thought. And it would rule out the Corwynall cousins, except that Taire—that Her Majesty has already done so. Anyone not in the castle at the time would be cleared of suspicion."

"
Was
it the same person?" Devin said, momentarily distracted from his aim. "Who let them into the town, and into the castle. The same, or more than one?"

Annan's face showed a flash of surprise, then intense thought. "Good question," he said.

A disturbing question, actually.

"What about Taireasa? What do they say of her? Where she was, how she escaped?"

She'd hidden, he knew that. Hidden in the same passages she had once pulled him into to save him from his old magic tutor's wrath; hidden and waited until a large enough force had gathered, then taken the stables and the northern gate and fled to the mountains. But she never spoke of it.
Wouldn't
speak of it, and since she'd lost both her parents that night, along with her throne, Devin had never wanted to press her. He knew too well how grief could cut.

Annan worried his lip, slid Kinsey's abandoned mug of tea over and sipped it, then made a face, presumably at the temperature. "Her Majesty was in her rooms at the moment the attack began. She escaped through some servants' passage in the walls, I am told, and remained hidden under the fortress for three days, gathering refugees and supplies before leaving for the Fraonir lands."

"Where was my sister?" Devin asked, and Annan met his eyes uneasily.

"My lord…"

"She killed the Western barons, Captain. You've no need to spare my feelings. I've heard enough from servants to know what my sister did, and that it was what allowed them to escape. But where was she
before
that?"

"In Her Majesty's rooms. They had dinner brought there, anyway."

Annan had pieced the night together just as thoroughly as Devin had hoped. "But she was not with Taireasa in the chambers under the castle," he said.

"No, lord. She appeared just before they left for the mountains."

"Then she didn't take the servants' passageway with Taireasa."

It came clear, then: so brutally, appallingly clear he could see it happening.

Two girls in a royal bedroom, listening to fighting outside the door. One the heir to the throne, one just returned from two years of sword study. Both loyal to the last breath to one another. Kyali had grown up under a general's tutelage. Kyali knew the Western barons would never stop looking for Taireasa if they met the mystery of a locked and empty room. They would have found the hidden doorway soon enough. Kyali had renounced the throne just that day, to keep Taireasa safe from the West's machinations.

Kyali wouldn't have hesitated.

"She stayed," Devin murmured, horror making his skin prickle. "She stayed behind."

Dread was weighing his bones down into the chair, blooming into a sick knot in his stomach. Taireasa's Gift, which had woken that night. Her terrible, silent guilt. And Kyali, who was twisted around herself, burning up with anger, pulling away, always away from the closeness he and Taireasa shared, the space in their hearts where there could be no secrets. Who had learned that she could heal from wounds that might otherwise be mortal.

Oh yes, the edges of this secret were sharp. They were going to carve him in two.

Devin drew a burning breath as Kinsey's hand closed over his. He realized only then that he was weeping. Kinsey's eyes held dawning comprehension, and more compassion than he could stand to see right now. Annan sat back, gone wooden and unreadable, but his hand on the stolen mug of tea had closed into a hard fist.

Devin shut his eyes, retrieved his hand, wiped at his cheeks. Stood, needing to lean on the table to find his feet. The whole world was changing into something else around him. The sick dread in his belly had a direction.

Oh, Kyali, gods.

"I think I need some air," he said, which wasn't much of an excuse, but he was barely able to think, let alone speak.

He didn't make it more than a few steps before a terrible pressure filled his head. Pain and fear spilled through him, pain and fear and a sense of betrayal.
HELP,
he heard—and then she was gone, gone as completely as though she had never been there at all.

"
Taireasa
," he gasped, and flung himself at the library doors, fear greater than he had ever known roaring over him. Annan and Kinsey were right behind him.

* * *

There were too many damned doors into the castle.

Kyali had set guards on them all, had men walking the halls in pairs, but the sense that it wasn't enough, that she was missing something that would cost her everything, followed her everywhere. It hovered over her meetings with her officers, it soured her tea, it swallowed her thoughts and stole the little sleep she got, until she was wandering the halls in a haze of exhaustion and worry.

They still hadn't found the traitor, and Taireasa had paid such a terrible price.

Bryce and Bran were asleep now. She had made herself meet with them after—
after
. Had told them of her mad idea to send three hundred men down the Maurynim river on rafts, because at least there were two men, now, that she knew beyond a doubt she could trust.

Had asked, nearly choking on her own hypocrisy, if they'd be willing to lead such a force.

It was days away, maybe weeks. Which was good, because her cousins were not at all recovered from the ordeal she and Taireasa had put them through.

They had accepted—sounding, gods help her,
grateful
for the chance.

Kyali shoved her way through the hidden door in her office and leaned on the wall, breathing, only breathing. The sandwich she'd eaten gods only knew when was trying to come back up. Her heart was fluttering in her chest.
Ice
was no longer a wall stretching up to the skies, it was slick and treacherous under her feet. She didn't know anymore what to do, how to keep moving forward, how to save Taireasa, how to avoid Devin, how to go on living the way she had. How to stop sensing them both just outside that thin, failing barrier.