The Misbegotten (An Assassin's Blade Book 1) (33 page)

I counted the number of Rots silently. And again. Two were missing. “Where’s Flint and Treddle?”

Kale pointed his thumb toward the ceiling. “Bled out. Royal guards
are
tough bastards, you weren’t lying. Got me on the shoulder and I think Ervin is missin’ some skin from his back.”

“Whoever’s not holding a prisoner,” I said, “go retrieve them. They may have died here, but they will not rest here.”

I twisted Amielle’s head around. “You on the other hand, dear…”

She shook her head, as if out of pity, and said, “You can kill me. But you cannot kill an idea.”

We’d see about that.

W
e emerged
onto the balcony under a sad sky, but the sight on the battlefield was one of joy and victory. Stray battlements of conjurer reinforcements were fleeing the field, and the small number of bannermen who had taken to Vileoux’s side sat in a heap of snow as prisoners in the face of Patrick Verdan and his mighty army, which had a few curious colorings mingled within.

Pastel green colorings, those made famous by various shaman sects of Hoarvous. Interesting.

The plume of dust and snow had finally settled back into the earth. Swords from the field aimed toward me, and then a small contingent of horses trotted toward what used to be the gate of Edenvaile. Dercy Daniser, Patrick Verdan and my commander were among them.

I turned to the Rots. “Escort the captured downstairs, into the throne room. And open the doors for our friends. I’ll be down there shortly — a former queen and I have a few things to discuss.” Once the Rots departed, I inhaled nature’s glacier breath deep into my nostrils. “Colder here than you imagined?”

Amielle watched the contingent trot inside the walls her conjurers had evulsed. Her shoulders slumped, and her head hung. She said nothing. Had her head not been a little bloody, and had the exhaustion of this battle not beaten her down, I might've been wary of a one-on-one confrontation, given our last meeting hadn't ended in my favor. But she was too weak now. Too feeble.

“You don’t particularly seem dressed for the occasion,” I said, noting the thin linens her cloak was pinned to. Her hands were clenched into fists inside the sleeves of her shirt.

“Are you attempting to woo me?” she asked. “If you are, I would suggest starting off with a bang, not mindless chatter.”

“I’m afraid not. I’ve always been of the mind that you shouldn’t romance a woman who won’t be around to see the sun rise tomorrow.” After some time, I added, “How’s that for a bang?”

“Better,” she said blankly, moving to the edge of the balcony. “Shall I lean my head over?” Catching the queer look on my face, she added, “For the clean cut, of course. Or do you intend to make a mess of me?”

I unsheathed my blade. “Eager to die, are we?”

She watched the contingent move closer. Or perhaps she was dredging the depths of her ruined dreams, as people who look mindlessly into the horizon are wont to do.

“This isn’t about me, shepherd of assassins.” She turned. “You’re the one who’s eager for death, always.”

I chuckled.

“Did I miss a joke?” she asked.

“It’s just that… look at us. You’re dressed all prim and proper, and I’m a mangy mutt with a beard that needed trimming six months ago. You have your fancy spells, and I swing a sword like a dumb-fuck ogre. You’re a bloody queen! And me? I shepherd a bunch of misfits and outcasts. Isn’t it funny, then, that we’re driven by an identical passion?”

“What drives me,” she said, “is—”

“Absolute power,” I said.

Her eyes narrowed. “My people—”

I interrupted her with a dismissive wave of my hand. “Oh, fuck off with all the savior shit. Maybe a little part of you wanted to save your people. Rescue them from the droughts and whatever else plagues your world. That’s not what drove you to this, though. You got a whiff of power, and you loved it. You’d do anything to keep it, right?”

“I’d do anything to keep my people alive.”

“Of course you would. Because if you didn’t, you’d have a revolt on your hands.”

Amielle shunned me, offering me the view of her cloak as she paced down the balcony.

“Look,” I said empathetically, “I understand.”

“I was eight when I learned the ways. By fifteen, I could conjure phoenixes. I snuck away from the domiciles at night to ride them and visit my friends hundreds of miles away.” Her chin rolled across her shoulder as she peered back at me with a grim smile that faded like a good memory long lost. “By eighteen, most of my friends were dead. Famine and drought hit the northern provinces first. I decided then I would use everything power would grant me never to let another girl or boy go through the hardships I did.”

Three horses walked abreast beneath the balcony. My commander glanced at me for a moment before proceeding into the keep with the others.

“You made some hard choices to get to where you are, didn’t you?” I asked. “Did some things that maybe the ten-year-old you wouldn’t be proud of?”

“I don’t think you understand,” she said.

I traced my nail up the snaking rivulets of steely blue that adorned my sword. The markings had been with me since the beginning, one of the few constant reminders of my past — a place where I do not like to go, but one where I often visit to remind myself.

“I have my own lust for power,” I said. “It masquerades as a lust for freedom. I committed unspeakable acts of terror when I was a young man. Killed, maimed, tortured, kidnapped, brutalized, pillaged — all of my own accord, mind you. I set my own contracts in those days.

“I would tell anyone that I did it in the name of freedom, to create a reputation and a band of assassins no one would dare fuck with. Fat lords would swallow hard when we came by, and laws didn’t much apply to us, because goddammit, we were fearsome! We could do anything we pleased!
That
, I would say, was freedom.”

A ghastly wind blew through and strung wisps of auburn hair across Amielle’s eyes. She brushed them out of the way and leaned on the banister, listening attentively.

“Of course, that’s not freedom,” I said. “Freedom’s sleeping your nights far away from the confines of walls and uptight vassals. Freedom’s a jingle in your pocket, a skin of wine whenever you want it. Freedom’s spontaneity, a horse ride to the west and a stay on the beaches while you fish up some good food and tell some good tales.”

Amielle crossed her legs and rested her chin on her palm. “From what my spies told me, you’ve enjoyed your fair share of freedom.”

“Only recently,” I said. “My crusade for power turned me into a very foul thing, and make no mistake, I was a thing — not a person. If I had continued, who knows? I might have assassinated a king just to show the world that I commanded it. Would’ve started a great war, probably got all my Rots killed, and me? I’d be long gone, facedown in some ditch, fizzled out like a fast-burning flame.”

Amielle straightened herself and crossed her arms. “And look at you now,” she said impassively, clearly unimpressed.

I held my arms out and spun around, glimpsing into a panoramic world that I stood atop of. “Look at me now,” I said, smiling. “I parlayed my reputation and my deeds into contracts. And here I am today, a man whose blade lords call upon so they can quietly ascend the ranks, who’s hired to rectify miscarriages of justice, who families big and small alike need to stamp out competition and sniff out enemies. All for business, mind you, nothing personal. I have all the power I want and all the freedom I want, and I will do anything to preserve it.”

“Including killing your own brother,” Amielle said, drawing her lips tight in mock disapproval. “Murdering a king too, and butchering each and every one of his enlisted guardsmen. What was the final count, Astul? Two hundred?”

I strode over to her meaningfully. With an indolent brush of my hand, the edge of my ebon blade clacked up the buttons of her tunic and idled beneath her chin. With a subtle flick, the black tip lifted her head high into the air. She licked her lips and smiled wide.

“Sacrificed fifty of your dear Rots,” she said. “Marched how many mercenaries to their death upon these walls? I’m sure you didn’t inform them that their heroism would end with blood pouring from their necks, did you?”

I pressed the summit of the sword more firmly into her chin. Blood sprinkled out.

“My, my,” she said, “it sounds like the lust of power has claimed you yet again.”

The sword dug deeper into her flesh, lifting her onto the tips of her toes. She grinned like a skull.

“And that’s precisely why I won’t kill you,” I said, lowering the sword and sliding it inside its leather-bound home. “You’ve taken a lot from me. You’ve made me feel the familiarity of losing myself again. It ends now. I’ve preserved what I wanted, and I’ll take nothing more. Not your life, not Sybil’s. I’m done. But I do have a lingering question. What did you think forcing me to kill the mirage of Rivon Eyrie would do to me?”

Her head cocked. “I’ve never heard that name. And I did not conjure a mirage.”

I didn’t know why I bothered asking. Of course she’d play dumb. What would the truth get her now?

I hooked my arm around Amielle’s. “Let’s go. I’m sure you have some eager visitors downstairs.”

“You won’t ever eliminate the conjurers,” she said.

“I’m sure Dercy and Patrick and Braddock — wherever the hell he is — will draw up some plans and lay siege to whatever remnants you left behind in Lith.”

I tugged her arm, and we walked.

“We’re like ants,” she said.

I stopped and attempted some mental acrobats so I could harmonize conjurers and ants, but the pieces weren’t fitting. “Ants?”

“Ants,” she reiterated. “Have you ever attempted to kill them? They keep coming back. Unless you snuff out and eradicate their colony, they march on endlessly, no matter how many you flick off your arm or stamp into the dirt.”

“Colonies aren’t difficult to locate. You just follow the trail.”

A conceited smile touched her lips, and her brows flicked upward.

I chuckled to myself. One last charade to evoke a mind-breaking fear within me, that’s all it was.

“Move,” I barked. “I’ve still got one last bit of business with this frozen kingdom before I leave.”

W
ith the collapsed
wall of Edenvaile a good mile behind me, I crossed my arms and watched as forty mules dragged twenty wagons full of glittering gold through the snow. They slogged their way toward the Hole. A handful of Rots accompanied them.

A pair of feet crunched through the ice behind me.

“Have you spoken to Braddock?” Vayle asked.

“Briefly.”

Braddock, along with a small battery of Red Sentinels, had marched into Edenvaile a few nights ago, chasing those monstrosities of fire that burned the sky and dropped cocoons of conjurer reinforcements onto the battlefield. Apparently they were the remnants of an army that had fled his and Kane Calbid’s forces.

“He went on about his proposition,” Vayle said, “to unite the realm under one crown. I’ve heard Patrick is
very
interested.”

I locked my fingers behind my head. “Mark of a good king there, make you feel he’s interested in whatever you wish to talk about.”

“Only the king of Icerun at this moment. But I don’t imagine he won’t make a claim for the throne of Edenvaile.”

“Of course he will,” I said. “He’s got the support. And he doesn’t want a fractured, war-mongering North made up of ten different claims. Kane Calbid will claim the South, no opposition there. Eaglesclaw will be unstable — especially since the Rots managed to spur a rebellion of Edmund’s bannermen — but it’s good to have some instability. It’ll make the Rots a pretty coin.”

Vayle pointed her chin at the lethargic caravan in the distance. “Speaking of coin, how much did you take from the Edenvaile vault?”

“Four times what I was promised,” I said, grinning. “After all, we did a lot more than just discover who assassinated Vileoux Verdan.”

“He’s to die tomorrow,” she said. “Along with the others, even Mydia, who seems to have had little part in this.”

“Tomorrow,” I said, rubbing some warmth back into my frozen hands, “I’ll be fifty miles away from here. Will my commander be joining me?”

Vayle rubbed her tired eyes. “I do not mean to cause inconvenience, but I am in dire need of a month away from everything I’ve ever known.” Her chapped lips remained parted slightly. She drummed her hand along the leather of her thigh, eliciting a consternating tune. “Ah,” she said, pushing a deep breath out. She shook her head and flashed me a frustrated grin.

“It’s fine. I don’t need to know everything, Vayle.”

“You deserve to,” she said. “I, er—” Her hands revolved around one another, trying to churn the words out. “You know I’ve never accepted a job unless it resulted in justice. An assassination must be in good faith. I thought this war would end in the greatest capture of justice I’d ever experienced. And… it did, in a way. But, Astul, I…”

I reached out and held her hand. “It’s all the dead, isn’t it?”

Her eyes were closed. “The snow hasn’t covered them yet. And the cold, it… I thought it would—”

“Cover the rot?” I suggested.

Her teeth sawed across her lip. “I can still smell them.”

“I know,” I said quietly, closing her fingers inside my palm.

“I just, well — I feel very strange.”

“Am I going to lose you?” I asked.

She swallowed and looked up, eyes reddened and moist. “Let me go away for a while. I’ll return. I promise.”

After the lengthy silence, Vayle regathered herself. “And you? Where will you go?”

“I made a promise to Tylik that we’d rectify the small problem with the guard who burned his toes off.”

“What problem is that?”

“That he still has his toes.”

“You may want to get there quickly. Braddock, Dercy and Patrick are organizing a large force to sail for Lith soon. Well, in the general direction of where they believe Lith lies.”

“First I’m paying a visit to my brother’s grave.”

“I didn’t think you believed in talking to the dead.”

“It’s my brother, and on the off chance the dead have ears, I suppose a, er… well, a brief hello wouldn’t be out of order.”

Vayle embraced me tightly, patting my back. “Stay safe. I’ll see you back at the Hole soon enough, I promise.”

As my commander fled back toward Edenvaile, I felt cold and empty. Funny thing that, since I had enough gold to buy a kingdom, had earned myself a reputation as the death knell of the conjurers, and hell, I’d accomplished everything I set out to do: preserved my freedom and the Rots’ way of life. Thing is, this grand chase had ended. Throughout it, my nearest companion was Death. And now? Now I was safe and secure. The adventure and the peril had fled from my life, and I… well, I missed them.

And that was why I made plans to go visit my brother. Not to say hello to the dead, as I’d told Vayle I would. No, morbid curiosity drove me. Or perhaps less curiosity and more hope. A hope that I could recapture the adventure and the peril. A hope that maybe there was something greater and more dangerous out there than the conjurers. A hope that whatever words I would say at my brother’s grave wouldn’t fall on the ears of the dead.

My eyes fell to the hilt of my sword, still smeared with a small chunk of gelatinous blood from Rivon’s belly. I spat on my finger and wiped it off, till the blade ran clean with black ebon.