Trell had felt as if she’d reached into his stomach and turned it inside out. He pressed the back of one hand against his mouth and looked up at her. “Does that include breathing?”
She smiled sweetly. “Yes. But I give you permission to continue that for a while longer. Now, clean this up.” She turned and walked away.
“With what?” he’d called after her.
“You have a shirt.”
It had been one of her more pleasant lessons, upon reflection.
Beyond his window, the sloop rounded the jetty, and the dock men headed out to receive the ship, accompanied by a pair of soldiers.
Trell heard a latch click behind him and felt the air stir as his bedroom door opened. He didn’t turn to see who’d come in. He didn’t need to.
“You will go to help the men unload the supplies today,” Taliah said as she entered.
“Why?”
“Because it pleases me to watch you work.”
Trell turned her a look over his shoulder. “As you wish. Shall I go as I am, or do you prefer to dress me differently?” His tone held the respect she required, but his eyes smoldered.
Taliah’s lips curled in a smile. She came across the room and planted herself in front of him. He stood a head taller than her and might’ve strangled her with his bare hands, save that he knew she could kill him faster and more painfully than he could accomplish the deed in return.
She reached one hand to cup his face. “I know I haven’t broken you.” She stroked his cheek and gazed into his eyes, yet she might’ve been training a dog or a horse. She certainly didn’t see him as a man. “I know you think there is still hope, Trell. But you and I walk the path of mor’alir together now. On this path, hope is only a reflection from hal’alir, the sunlight glinting on the surface of the waves while we sink further below. It may call to you, but in the end, you will discover that you cannot reach it.”
Trell removed her hand from his face. “Would you like to pick a new shirt for me, Taliah, or should I go like this?”
She pulled away from him with a little pout. “Wear your cloak.” Then she turned and stalked out.
The ship was tied and the men had begun unloading by the time Trell reached the dock. He was heading out to join them when a flat blade caught him across the chest. He turned his head to look into the hard, unforgiving eyes of one of the Nadoriin soldiers, a captain by the rank on his surcoat.
“Put up your hood and keep it that way.”
Trell held his gaze and did as he was told.
The sword lifted, and he moved on.
Reaching the ship, he set to helping the sailors unload their cargo, taking care to keep his hood up. The unloading took the better part of two hours. When he and the two sailors were finished, a pile of crates occupied half the dock. No doubt he would spend the rest of the day hauling it all inside by himself, but at least such labor gave him something to do and kept Taliah away from him.
Trell had just loosed the bow line when one of the sailors let out a cry. “Wait!” He’d found one more crate.
Trell stuck a foot on the boat’s edge and leaned to receive the crate from the sailor, an older Nadoriin with gentle eyes. But just as the man was placing the crate in his hands with a grateful smile, a wave surged and lifted the boat. Trell lost his balance and toppled onto the deck in a tangle of crate and limbs, and his hood fell back.
“Sorry! Sorry!” The sailor hurried to help Trell to his feet.
“Mamnoon,” Trell murmured in the desert tongue, smiling thanks to the older man. He pressed palms together and bowed. “Enshalah Jai’Gar baray barekat biareh.” May Jai’Gar bring good blessings to you.
The older man’s eyes widened with his smile, and he answered in kind, “You speak so well of our language. I—” but whatever he’d meant to say, the crossbow bolt stole from his tongue. It struck him just below his sternum and sent him crashing backwards into a pile of empty crates.
Trell spun in shock even as the other sailor yelled a furious protest.
The soldier standing on the dock repositioned his crossbow to aim at the sailor. “Speak another word and share his fate.”
The younger man clapped shut his mouth, but his brown eyes welled with rage.
“Speak of what you’ve seen,” the guard growled at the sailor, indicating Trell with a flick of dark eyes, “and you’ll know the sting of the Shamshir’im.”
The sailor went pale.
Trell couldn’t blame him. Viernan hal’Jaitar’s network of spies and assassins wasn’t known for tolerance and compassion.
“You.” The guard motioned to Trell. “Get on with it.”
Trell slowly picked up the crate and stepped from deck to pier. The surviving sailor hastened to unhitch the stern line and pushed the boat away from the pylon. As the sails filled and the sloop pulled away from the dock, Trell set down the crate and then sank down on it. He watched the ship until it passed beyond the jetty. Then he rubbed his forehead and closed his eyes.
A man had lost his life solely for the crime of seeing his face.
Dropping his hand, he turned a look towards the fortress and the retreating guard and wondered if Taliah had meant for something like this to happen.
Ever she played such games with him: cruel, twisted exercises meant to disturb him, to unravel him, to discompose and antagonize and unnerve him, to shatter the cage of his conviction.
She wanted to change the shape of his mind.
He should’ve broken by now—had he claimed even a shard of the self-pity that was his due, he would have—but the acts Taliah undertook to break him were no worse and no better than any prisoner of war could expect.
And he was a prisoner of war, no mistaking it, so he’d assumed that identity and likewise the understanding of the horrors that would come with it. He believed nothing Taliah or anyone else said, he trusted nothing they did, and he made no decisions about himself, no matter what Taliah made him do, for her every act was intended to humiliate and shame him. She wanted him to hate himself.
She could cause him enormous pain. She could make him do nearly anything she desired. But Trell knew instinctively that she would only succeed at degrading him if he took the first step down that path.
That night she let herself into his room, as she often did.
Sometimes she came in the night to hurt him. More often she came to use him. Taliah could twist his life pattern to make him do most anything she desired, even to coax an erection out of his body in spite of his unwilling mind. On such nights, she would often use him at her leisure—and then she would make his erection so pronounced and agonizing that he would finally beg her to release him, too.
She would make him work for it then, reminding him with every thrust how he had succumbed to her will.
That night she slipped into his bed and draped her leg over his hips, smooth skin gliding along his flesh as he lay on his side. Trell liked to imagine a viper had just slithered into bed with him. The vision kept him grounded to reality.
“You let your hood fall back today,” she whispered. Her tongue probed the outside edge of his ear.
He kept quiet. Sometimes snakes left you alone if you remained still.
“Why did you do that, Trell? You knew what would happen to those poor men.”
Did he? He supposed he might’ve guessed if he’d thought the scene out beforehand. Taliah’s tactics were perverse but rather predictable.
“Two lives.” Her tongue probed the backside of his ear and caught in the hollow at its base. Then she took his lobe between her teeth and bit down. “Two men whose blood is on your hands.” Her teeth slid slowly off his earlobe, scraping his flesh.
His eyebrow twitched. “Two?”
She pulled his shoulder to force him onto his back and climbed atop him. The moonlight limned her naked form and made her dark eyes bright. A demon would’ve been more welcome company.
“Two men, Prince of Dannym.” Her hand reached between his legs while her mind clutche
d his life pattern. He felt her working both hand and mind and fought against the tide of arousal, but he could no more resist her demands for pleasure than he could her demands for pain.
She sheathed him inside her and exhaled a delighted sigh. “The one who died today.” She began moving her hips in a slow gyration. “And the one who will die once he reaches port.”
Trell gritted his teeth. “Why wait?”
“We cannot be seen to kill the sailors who service our island, or none will dare to make the voyage.”
Trell closed his eyes and turned his head away rather than watch her take her pleasure out of him like an animal to be pinned and milked. “The one who survived will tell the tale.”
“Ahh…” She pushed her hands to stroke herself and threw back her head as she ground atop him. “Precisely why…he will be killed after he reaches port.”
Trell offered the nameless sailor a silent and grave apology.
When she was finished with him, Taliah laid her bony chest across his and kissed his mouth. He’d trained himself to endure her kisses by imagining the head of a cobra swirling around his tongue. A soldier became still and obedient in the presence of such kingly snakes, or he didn’t live long in the Kutsamak.
Taliah pushed up on her elbows and ran her fingers along his collarbone. “I’m very pleased with you tonight.”
Trell tensed beneath her. “Why?”
“To bring needless harm to others is the beginning of the mor’alir path. In Vest, Adepts will be given a blade and instructed to kill. A child may gut a grown man, a woman slay a child, or a man his own mother…the Sorceresses’ choice varies. The doomed have only their innocence in common.”
And all of you, your inhumanity.
“I didn’t harm those men on purpose, Taliah.”
She chimed a laugh. “It doesn’t matter. Knowingly or unknowingly, the path is the same.”
She slid off him then, and a moment later he heard his door click shut.
Trell sat up in bed and gripped his sheets in clenched fists. He should’ve known better than to engage in any discussion with her. She always found a way to leave a stinging barb beneath his skin, that he might worry and work at it until he’d made a weeping sore.
He pushed out of bed, walked to the windows and threw them open. Then he leaned both hands against the jamb and breathed deeply of the scent of the sea. If he couldn’t cleanse his body of Taliah’s touch, at least he could purge the air they’d shared from his lungs.
Believe nothing. Trust nothing.
He wanted to ignore her, but her words had caught him, just as she had known they would.
Taliah had become adept at finding the cracks in Trell’s moral compass and working some toxic thought between them to corrode the gears. Would that she’d known nothing of him at all, but in their weeks together, he’d too often laid helpless while she’d taken apart and inspected the turnings of his mind. She knew him well enough now to understand where to place her stakes so as to disrupt the cogs of his certainty.
He would not walk the mor’alir path. She knew this. That’s why she’d said what she said.
But he couldn’t let those words go uninspected. Was the path the same whether he knew it or not? He’d caused the death of an innocent man. Whether through carelessness or neglect or succumbing to trickery, he was responsible. Trell thought of the old sailor’s smiling eyes and felt guilt clench in his chest.
He hung his head while his hands made fists against the wood. Yes, he’d caused that man’s death. Likewise, in a way, his friend Graeme’s, whose life had been claimed first by a Nadori arrow meant for Trell and next by the River Cry; and the holy man Istalar, who’d pushed Trell free of a collapsing cave that he might find his way back to himself.
Was he any less responsible for their deaths or any more responsible for the sailor’s?
Didn’t a man choose the path he walked?
The Emir certainly believed so. The scriptures of Jai’Gar taught that a man has free will to walk the road of the righteous, and the Emir believed that a man confirms his choice with every action and decision. Faith in the scriptures inspired him to form the Converted, to offer men of all races a chance to choose a new and righteous path, no matter how entrenched they’d become along their existing one.
Trell straightened. He drew in a deep breath and exhaled a sigh, letting the tension drain from his shoulders and the guilt from his chest.
He’d been a military commander—a part of him always would be—and as such, he claimed responsibility for every life lost beneath his command. Jai’Gar willing, one day he would have an opportunity to atone for all of them.
Trell sat on the windowsill and slung a long leg over the rim to hang outside the tower. Far below, the ocean foamed over rocks of razor-edged basalt. At high tide the sea battered against the tower’s very foundations. If he’d been a gambling man, he might’ve tried his luck with the waves. Naiadithine had twice kept him safe while a guest in her realm. She might protect him again.
Then again, she might let him die just to demonstrate his own foolishness. Gods were fickle that way.
He leaned his head back against the jamb and looked up at the stars. The chill night air raised gooseflesh on his bare arms and chest, but he welcomed the sensation. It held an odd sense of freedom in it.
The constellation of Gorion the Archer hung low on the eastern horizon, while Sepheune’s Trident blazed at its zenith. He recalled a different night, some few months ago, when he’d sat beneath the stars of the First Lord’s sa’reyth sharing a drink with the Whisper Lord Loghain. How long his path seemed between then and now, and how convoluted it had become. And yet…
He scanned the sky. Then he grabbed hold of the jamb and leaned precariously out of the tower window to gain a wider view of the heavens. One slip and he’d have met the rocks, but he knew the constellation had to be there…
Finally he saw it, still low in the west and nearly hidden by the curve of the tower: Cephrael’s Hand.
Ah-ha. There you are. Trell pulled back inside and leaned against the wood again. One corner of his mouth curled in a smile. I thought you’d be watching.
When he’d said goodbye to Alyneri on that fateful night in the Kutsamak, it had all been so clear—the promise of his path, the Mage’s plan suddenly outlined in stark simplicity. Trell still recalled the moment when he’d glimpsed the future and past touching in a circle of promise, but he could no longer recall exactly what he’d seen. Too many dark days and nights of pain blurred the vision now. But he remembered seeing the Mage’s plan, remembered how it had flashed before his eyes as if the heavens had opened and bathed him in the light of prescient understanding.
‘If it was Cephrael delivered me to your doorstep, Viernan, you can be sure he had his reasons.’
Trell smiled to himself at this recollection. Had he really made such a bold claim to Viernan hal’Jaitar?
The vision from that night had faded, and with it the singular sense of purpose he’d once known. Though he couldn’t recall anymore what he’d glimpsed beneath those skies, he remembered the feeling of it. He remembered what it felt like to know he figured into the Mage’s plan.
And it had made him realize that Cephrael had been watching the night he took the first step on his path. The angiel had been watching when events brought Trell back into Radov’s hands, full circle as it were. And Trell had no doubt the angiel was watching him still.
He had to wonder, too…if during all of that time he’d been upon his path, as the Emir would say he had, no matter how twisting its route…what made him think he wasn’t upon it now?
‘…the Mage has taken a liking to you…’ Vaile’s words, spoken the day they’d met, ‘and that is lucky, too.’
Taliah would have him believe Fate had abandoned him to her, but what if it was the other way around? He had to believe he still had some role to play in the Mage’s game—the idea just felt right.
Maybe he was clinging to senseless hope, as Ta
liah proclaimed. Or maybe he was trusting his instincts. Whether or not anyone was looking for him, whether he had any hope of ever knowing freedom again, he still had to live by the same code.
He had inspected Taliah’s logic and found it wanting.
Yes, he’d made a foolish choice in not wondering why Taliah really wanted him out on the docks that day. The old man had made a poor choice in looking on Trell’s face instead of wondering why this stranger had taken such care until that time to keep his hood low.
Perhaps, of the three of them, the remaining sailor would make a better choice and think the situation through, even as Trell promised himself he would do a better job from there on out.
This was his path now. He had to walk it to know where it led.
Feeling finally free of Taliah’s cloying scent and noxious thoughts, Trell returned to his bed. The stars of Cephrael’s Hand moved in their silent arc across the heavens, following a path charted by the gods. Traveling west to east, they passed above Trell’s open window, and he slept soundly beneath them all the night.
***
The sailor Hafiz hurried down the shadowed alley, feeling the press of the high stone walls too nearly akin to a bare, earthen grave—the one that would no doubt be waiting for him if the wrong people recognized his face. He looked both ways before crossing the street and entering the Al-Nefaru café, which dominated a corner across from the Souk Marmadii, the long, covered market adjacent to Tal’Shira’s central-most square.
Hafiz hurried through the outer café and down a spiral stair into the bowels of the restaurant. Hovering above the long rows of tables, a haze of scented hookah smoke blurred the headier fragrances of cardamom, cinnamon and saffron into one inseparable bouquet. The hum of conversation from hundreds of mouths formed another haze, this one of sound, which obscured individual words in the same fashion. Looking nervously around, Hafiz made his way among the tables and down a narrow hallway in search of a specific room.
Most dared not even whisper of this room, though all the sailors of Tal’Shira had heard of it. Hafiz had spent the last of his coin bribing the captain of the Ha’azali into telling him which café actually housed the room. He’d risked his life even asking about it, but Hafiz was a marked man already. If the information he held could keep him alive—if it could keep his family alive—he had to sell it.
Paths of Alir (A Pattern of Shadow & Light Book 3) Page 56
