She blinked and drew back. “No. The first assignment wasn’t to kill anyone. A man named Nadrek was a huge collector of powerful artifacts.”
Darius’ face brightened in recognition. “That is where you found the Astrian.”
She nodded as her eyes filled with a prideful glow. “Among other things, I had quite a stash. Some were just pretty, others were what I was sent there to fetch.”
Cade sat forward. “Can you describe any of the other artifacts? Can’t hurt to know what he has access to.”
Eylsa glanced around at them all before closing her eyes. “His list was short: a pair of glasses with red lenses, a rod notched and pocked with use, a handful of stones that, when assembled correctly, fuse together, and a lock of hair the color of wheat held with a leather band. I had to search his collection for them and gathered several other things. There was a blue gem bigger than my thumb, the little silver Astrian, a dagger with a ceramic blade, a cuff that looked to be metal branches, and a green vial.” She jerked forward, her hands splaying in a small arch before her face. “The vial turns any liquid into a deadly poison!”
Brendan nodded. “How practical.”
She giggled and clapped her hands. “Extremely practical!”
Cade continued his scribbling. “What did he do with what you brought him?”
“He displayed them in the throne room.”
Brendan held up a finger. “Wait. I’ve been in his throne room, I didn’t see any display.”
Her eyes rolled to the ceiling as if he were being intentionally dense. “Not that throne room, his throne room. He had a separate one for when he met with the Trinity. He had a display case of trophies he used to intimidate people.”
Cade rolled his hand in the air. “Were you common knowledge among the Trinity? Did he use you to…intimidate people?”
Her musical laughter filled the room. “You do not use an assassin to intimidate. That would be ridiculous!”
Cade flashed a small smile. “How silly of me.” He waved his pen. “So after that, he sent you out to eliminate his competition.”
“No.” She shuffled the food on her plate absently. “After that, he sent me to retrieve a person.”
“A person?”
She kept her gaze on her plate. “A child. The ten-year-old daughter of a man named Lernor.”
The room fell silent. Brendan’s voice was barely a whisper when he braved the void. “What happened to the girl?”
She drew a deep breath. “He kept her at the castle for a while. Lernor showed up several times, saying he couldn’t pay, but he would always be sent away. Then one day she wasn’t there anymore.”
She stared up at Brendan when he laid his hand over hers. He couldn’t imagine the guilt that must be eating at her. “I’m sorry, Eylsa.”
Her brow wrinkled. “Sorry for what?”
His mouth worked for a moment as he sat stunned by her reaction. “For having to experience this…for having taken that child to her fate…for never knowing you had the option to refuse!”
Her laugh was harsh. “Option?” She flung his hand away. “Refusal was not an option! Refusal is only an option when you would rather face death than do what they are asking of you!” She lurched to her feet, knocking the chair behind her to the floor. “This was not the world of polite and avoidance. You do as you are told or you are punished.” Her body was animated as she charged around the room.
Brendan held out his hands. “Okay, we understand. Just calm down.”
She growled as her fists balled in her hair. “No, you don’t understand! You never understand! You think it is some easy thing—‘Today I woke up and decided to stop killing.’ That’s not how it works!” She jerked back from Brendan’s hand as he reached for her. “There is no choice. There is only obey or die.”
She stormed from the room, leaving the three men in silence.
Their eyes locked uncomfortably on the table as the quiet stretched between them. Cade closed his notes as his eyes drifted to Darius and his voice cracked with nerves. “I’ll compile everything we have, sort it up some.”
He nodded. “When you are finished we’ll deliver it to Keena. I’ll make it be enough.”
Brendan left them bent over the notes, scribbling lists as he made his way down the hallway. He listened at each door until he could hear the muffled sounds of crickets and felt a gentle draft. He knocked then pushed it open.
Eylsa sat with her arms wrapped around her legs and stared out the open window from the bed. She made no acknowledgment that he was there even as he sank to the mattress beside her. He leaned down on his elbows. “You’re not going to run on me, are you?”
She blinked. “It is too late for that now. I have already been retrained. The next step is termination.”
He watched her, marveling at the lovely face that masked such a treacherous landscape of emotion. He wondered if they would ever be able to bridge the gap between them.
“I’m sorry, Eylsa. You’re right, we don’t understand, there really is no way for us to understand. That doesn’t mean we do not care how you feel.”
She remained wrapped around her knees. “You would have helped her, wouldn’t you?”
He slid his fingers in between hers and encouraged her to face him. His hand trailed down her cheek as he waited for her eyes to meet his. “You can help her now. Her, and all the other little girls like her, like you. It doesn’t matter what any of us would have done, we weren’t there. You didn’t have the power then, but you can take it now.”
She took his hand from her face as she laid her head in his lap and curled onto her side. “But Gregor is okay?” Her voice was back to its normal pitch without a hint of the former emotion.
Brendan laid his hand along her forearm. A man didn’t have time to register her mood before it changed. “Gregor is fine. He’ll be here before you know it.”
“Likely. Stealth was always one of his best attributes.” He rubbed his temples as she rolled onto her back to look up at him. “Tell me about your life.”
He coughed a laugh. “You want to know about my life?” She watched him expectantly. “Well, what do you want to know?”
“Cade told me about his school.”
“School, huh? Well…”
She jumped up from his lap and twisted until she sat facing him. Her eyes sparkled as she crawled toward him on her knees. His deep laughter narrowed her eyes. “What?”
“Well, it’s…no, nothing…just…do you always change emotions so…quickly?”
She blinked. “I do not understand.”
He dropped his head into his hand. “Of course you don’t. How can you go from being so upset to excited so quickly? You switch from one to another with no transition at all.”
Her head tilted. “What would be normal?”
“Most people would calm down before changing to another emotion.”
“I did calm down.”
His smile was flat. He didn’t know why he bothered arguing with her, it never solved anything, but the urge was always there. He pushed it away as he focused. “I believe you asked me about my school.” Her eyes sparkled. “I’ll have to admit that Cade was always better at school than I was. I’m afraid I’ve always had a talent for finding trouble.”
“You were punished after?” She nodded, excited that she could anticipate this one thing.
“Well, yes, I guess I was. There was this—”
They turned as the door creaked open, revealing Cade. “Darius and I are going to take our notes over and talk to Keena again. You two just lay low. Trey will bring Gregor over later tonight.”
He slipped from the door and Eylsa tapped Brendan’s leg. “Go on.”
His eyes rolled as he leaned back on his elbow. “Well, our teacher had assigned us an essay on the benefits and detriments of the different forms of the Agriano spell and its uses. So I’m sitting here with a blank page staring me in the face and I notice Trey with the same then I have this great idea. So I catch T
rey’s eyes and he knows exactly what I’m thinking. We jump up on our desks and start a display of magic that would shame the great Astriadus himself. Stuff was flying around the room, students were ducking and cheering, the professor was yelling at the top of her lungs; it was great. We spent a month in detention writing line after line of Performing magic does not constitute an essay.” His chest rocked with his laughter.
She blinked up at him. “Your punishment for such an act of rebellion was writing?”
He shook his head. “That wasn’t rebellion, it was just a little outlandish disobedience.”
“How is that different?”
“We didn’t really do anything that bad, just unexpected and not what the teacher wanted us to do.”
“I did that once. The teacher wanted me to stand quietly and I sneezed. They sent me to Grull and he peeled the skin off my feet, but it only went on for an hour or so.”
Brendan pressed his eyes closed at the casualness of her voice. “Eylsa…” He took her forearms in his hands. “That isn’t discipline. If you are going to stay with us, be a part of our world, you need to understand the difference. What they did to you was torture. Children should not be treated like that.” He watched her eyes as she studied him.
“How do you treat children? Take things away from them?”
“You need to guide children, show them the proper way to do things. When they get out of line, you chastise them so they understand what they did was wrong.”
She trembled beneath his hands. “I always knew when I did wrong.”
“Because they tortured you.”
“I learned great techniques from my school.”
“For torture.”
“What did you learn from your school?”
“I learned to use magic, how to heal and treat injuries and illnesses, history, how to defend myself…”
“I learned those things!” She was defensive now, her mind working hard to find a connection.
He dropped onto his back and covered his eyes with his hands. “You are completely ridiculous.”
“How is what you learned different from what I learned?”
“Ellie—”
“Eylsa.”
He growled as he rubbed his hands over his face. “When you understand that, we’ll know you are ready to join our world rather than being hidden among the few of us.”
Eyes batting, her forehead wrinkled. “But I like being with you.”
He sat up at the heartbreak in her voice. “I don’t mean you’ll not get to see us, just that you won’t have to be sequestered with us. You can go out and meet other people.”
“What if I don’t like them? What if they are like that Keena, or Arna? Why would I want to meet other people?”
The laughter bubbled up from his chest as he shook his head. “Fine. You can just spend the rest of your life living in Darius’ attic and we will just keep bringing you food.”
She threw her hands up. “I thought you were sending me to this prison! That’s what you said before!”
He growled as he dropped his head into his hands. “This again?”
“This what! You say I change quickly! Now you want me to make friends?”
“I told you before, it is more complicated now.”
She shoved him back onto the bed and pinned him down. “You make everything complicated!”
He was exasperated now. “Yes I do complicate things! I allow my friends to talk me into protecting crazed ex-assassins! I don’t know any better way to complicate one’s life!”
Her eyes sparkled as she stared down at him. “Don’t blame me—you spread your poison into my brain!” She dropped down to the mattress beside him her fingers tapping along the side of his thigh.
The silence stretched out as they stared up at the ceiling.
“Brendan, do you really want me to live in your world? Be a part of it?”
His head turned toward her as his fingers slipped into her hand. “Would you like that? Like to live like us?”
Her mouth twisted. “Live under people I have no respect for but cannot hurt to stop them?”
“You did it before.”
“I did it because they would kill me.”
“So, if they wouldn’t have been willing to kill to keep you, you would have left?”
“Why do you always ask why I didn’t leave? My answer won’t change.”
His hand slapped to his forehead before he jumped up onto his elbow. “Eylsa, I—”
She was up in a flash, her fingertips trailing along his neck as she pressed her mouth to his. Eyes wide, he froze, shocked for a moment but she pulled away from him before he could recover. Her hand remained on his neck; her tongue wet her lips. His mind caught on the fact that they were alone in the house, so close on a bed. Not a trail for your mind to go down, Brendan. But he couldn’t force the thought from his head, not with her lying so close, not with her hand so warm on his skin.
Mouth working, it took him a moment to find his voice. “So…what is it…you would like to do?”
“I don’t know.”
He rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. “You never thought about it?”
“Never seemed to be useful at the time.”
Teeth flashed as he chewed his lip. “Well…we’ll…”
“You are nervous.”
He coughed a laugh, a small smile jumping to his face. “A little.”
Her eyes searched his. “You are afraid of me. You have never been afraid of me before.”
His head dropped as he stared at his hands in his lap. “Not afraid exactly.”
“You frighten me.”
His eyes shot to her face. “What?”
“I think it is fear. It is what I associate with fear, what I assume would be fear. You bring thoughts to my mind that I never knew were there.”
A grateful sigh slipped past his lips as he cupped her cheek in his hand. “That’s beautiful. Thank you.”
“I didn’t say it was a good thing.”
His expression flattened into a glare. “I’m sorry to cause you so much trouble.”
“I’m sure you couldn’t help it. That is how they trained you.”
He shook his head and dropped his hands to his lap. “Yes, we have a terrible handicap to overcome.” He let the anger flare, let it feed on the image of him kissing her again. When his mind was free, he was finally able to set a course of action. He stood and pulled her up behind him. “I believe I saw some books down the hall earlier.”
“What do you need books for?”
He ignored her as he began to snap covers from the furniture in the living room. “We’ll see what we have. You might find some that are interesting.” His search revealed a low bookshelf and he kneeled on the floor smiling as his finger trailed along the bindings. “This one looks good.”
Her eyebrows twisted as she glared at the tome in his hands. “It has birds on it.”
“It is a book on animals.”
“Animals?”
“Yes, animals.” He forced the book into her hands. “And then, I would like you to read a book on magical artifacts.”
“Why?” She flipped through the pages as her fingertip tapped the spine.
“Just read them for me, and tell me what you think.”
She turned from him and made her way toward her room never glancing back at him.
* * *
Brendan snapped the file shut and pushed it across the coffee table from him. Arna may have given him the leeway to stay away from the Tribunal but she wasn’t about to let him escape from his work. The daylight had faded to pale twilight and they had yet to hear from Trey or Gregor. Eylsa had taken the book he had handed her and sequestered herself in her room, barely even glancing up at him when he stopped in to drop off a few more volumes.
He slipped one for himself from the shelves and dulled the lights before he made his way toward the bedrooms. Free hand waving, he lit the room to a soft glow, slipped his shoes off near the bed, an
d stripped down to his shorts before climbing between the sheets. The binding creaked in protest as he pulled the book open.
His eyes caught movement and he started at Eylsa standing just inside the door, a book dangling from her fingers. “This one was interesting. Had your little unicorn one in it.”
She tossed the book on magical artifacts at the foot of his bed as she leaned against the wall. “The Astrian, I know.”
Her chin bobbed toward him. “What is that one?”
He pointed to the book as he sat up. “This? It’s just a biography”—he paused as she crossed the room and climbed up onto the bed beside him—“on Walderon the Noble.”
“Never heard of him.”
A long suffering smile spread across his lips. “He was a good man. Ended the reign of Lacrim—”
She jumped with an excited shout. “Now him I know!”
He dropped his head, hoping his hair covered his exasperation.
“Is it good?” she asked.
He flipped the book around and showed her page one. “Haven’t started it yet.”
“Could you read it out loud?”
He opened his mouth to tell her no but it wouldn’t come out. Her eyes sparkled with an intense curiosity that wouldn’t let him turn her away. With a wave of his hand he motioned her forward and had to laugh as she twisted and flopped down to the pillow beside him. Her body left a tingling along his where her skin touched. He was losing himself to the intoxication when she lifted her head. “Bren?”
He tensed head cocked in annoyance as the sweet sensations fled his body. “Yes, Ellie?”
“Is it nice? Being a part of your world?”
Book folded on his lap, he leaned back on the pillows behind him. “It can be, and for the most part it is.”
“Except for Keena and Arna?”
“Them, among a few other things.”
“But overall, it is better?”
He cupped her hand under his. “Well, you don’t have to worry about people beating you for refusing to do something.”
“But you can’t hurt them if they do something you don’t like!”
He rolled onto his side and propped himself up on his elbow. “And could you hurt Mavrin if he did something you didn’t like? Or Ashlan?”
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