“Pick your color of poison,” Serith said. He tapped a quavering finger on the amphorae. “Red, purple, white.”
“Red,” I said. He filled an iron stein with the sweet smell of glazed strawberries. I didn’t dare taste it until Serith wet his mouth first — a small habit you pick up when people are out to poison you.
Serith took a seat, groaning as he lowered himself onto the chair. “I’ve learned a few things in my life. You cannot be certain that a man stabbed through the chest will die. You cannot be certain that those you trust will not be swayed by gold. You cannot even be certain that your cock won’t betray you when you get to be my age.” He snorted. “But you can be certain that when the Black Rot comes, they’ll foul your air.”
I leaned back and sipped the wine. “I hardly think that’s fair. The last time I came around, I brought with me the head of the bastard who killed your friend, as you requested.”
Serith’s mouth twisted. “You brought me the head of a wolf.”
I nodded. “Exactly. Of course, we couldn’t be sure. He did die while hunting, so who knows. It could have been a boar, a wolf, a bear — do you have bears here? At any rate, it could have been anything, but you’d like to think it was a wolf, wouldn’t you? Who wants to be killed by a pig? And a bear? Gods, you’d think you could spot one of those from a half mile away. But wolves… they slink through the woods, eying their prey for half a day, and then they strike without notice, without sound, without sight.”
Serith tilted back his head and pressed the stein to his mouth. He wiped his lips. “Drink.”
I smiled and tapped a finger on the stein. “I like to savor my wine.”
His heavy-lidded eyes closed, and his teeth began chattering. His lips formed words, but only air squeaked out.
“My apologies” he said, smiling devilishly. “So why are you here, Shepherd? To kill me?”
“You would have never let me in if you thought that’s why I was here.”
“Not unless,” he said, lifting an emaciated finger sagely, “it is my wish to die.”
He stared hard into my eyes, trying to pry loose a few words through intimidation. But I remained silent, and I was rewarded with a throaty laugh that quickly turned into a choking cough.
Serith pounded his chest until his hacking stopped. “It’s not an outlandish wish, death. Is it? The process has already begun.”
“A man like you,” I said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if this is all a ruse. Just to show you can pull the wool over even the Reaper’s eyes when he comes for you and discovers you have quite a bit of life left in your bones.”
Serith smiled and sipped from his stein. “I could use someone like you on my council. My advisers all walk around with a twig stuck up their butts.”
I swirled my wine around into a funnel. “Advisers and guards, that’s about all you have left, it seems. And I’m not even sure about the former, given the emptiness of your keep. Your people all run away from you?”
“I dispersed them into the north, far away from Vereumene. Forcing them out, all the men who weren’t guards, all the lasses, the kiddies, that was the best decision I’ve made in the past nineteen years. And the first one too. With my own mind.”
I leaned back comfortably. “Lookie there, Serith Rabthorn knew why I came to visit him all along.”
He rolled his eyes. “Of course I knew. Can you fault me for trying to get other information out from between those ears of yours? No, I knew from the moment I heard your voice. The Black Rot arriving not two weeks after Sybil Tath discovers me shattered and stuttering like a mad fool? That’s no coincidence.”
I finally took a drink of the wine. The aftertaste lingered bitterly on my tongue, but otherwise it’d do a fine job of letting my mind soar into the clouds.
“I’ve a lot of questions,” I said. “Lots and lots of questions.”
“You would do well to remember, Shepherd, that a conversation with me is never a one-sided affair. Just as the Rots must be paid to kill, I must be paid to talk.”
I shrugged. “There’s plenty of gold in my coffers.”
“I don’t want monetary payments. I want my daughter’s safety guaranteed when you leave here. You will take her with you. You will protect her. You will not let harm come to her, in any way, from any hand — natural or occult.”
“Your daughter?” I said, feigning ignorance. “Oh, that daughter. The one you claimed you never had? The one who, if I’m not mistaken, is rumored to be a… what do you call them?” I snapped my fingers and said, “Oh, right. A conjurer.”
Serith heaved his arms onto the table and set his jaw in a way that said he was done talking until I agreed to the stipulation.
Hauling around a conjurer is dangerous business, but sometimes you’ve have to make compromises when procuring information. “Fine. Consider it done. I’ll protect your little girl. Now tell me why the world never knew about her until now.”
Serith lowered his head and thumbed his flaky brows. “Her name is Lysa. Born early, barely breathing out of the womb. Nilly and I concealed her birth; it’s a painful thing, Shepherd, to tell the world that after fifteen years of assumed infertility, you finally bore a child, only to have her die in the crib.”
“And yet she lives.”
He grunted. “I wish she hadn’t. I’d heard that conjurers can heal the mind, and the mind can heal the body.”
“You enlisted the help of a bloody conjurer?”
“What could go wrong? If he harmed her, I’d kill him. She was going to die anyhow, Shepherd. I thought—”
“You thought someone who forages around in the mind, twisting thoughts, perverting desires, erasing memories — you thought no harm could come of conscripting someone like that?”
He leaned forward, baring his shriveled teeth. “I was desperate! A father would do anything to save his daughter. I never thought he would take advantage of my weak fortitude and corrupt me. I remember losing my grip on my thoughts, feeling the shadows pass over me… and then… there’s just bits and pieces of the last nineteen years. Fragments of time.”
“How’d you snap out of it?”
“You’ll have to ask my daughter that. I’m told she’s responsible; killed the one who took my mind. She won’t talk to me. She blames me for what she says is a pain that will never go away.”
“Are you afraid she’ll kill herself? Is that why I’m tasked with being her guardian angel?”
“No,” Serith said. “There’s a war coming, and she is the heir to my throne. If she is found here, she will be raped, tortured and hung in the city square. I ruined my life to save hers; I will not give up now.”
I had the rim of the stein pressed to my lips, and there it stayed as that dreadful word hung in the air like a bad stench. “War?”
“I’m told my bannermen have abandoned me for my cousin, Kane Calbid. He’s blamed me for many… unfortunate happenings, most recently for secretly supplanting various lords under the Rabthorn banner.”
I nodded my head. “That sounds like something a Rabthorn would do.”
“I don’t know if I did it or not. I can’t remember. But my bannermen shouldn’t have believed that. Thirty years ago, they’d have called for Kane’s head and catapulted it over my walls.” Serith tossed up his hands. “Now, after nineteen years of kingship that I cannot recall, they proclaim him a visionary, an heir to the South. Ten thousand men are marching on my walls.”
The emptiness of Vereumene now made sense. “You mean to surrender to Kane Calbid, don’t you?”
He smiled. “I mean to give the city to the true heir of my throne. Let Kane Calbid gallop inside my walls and chop off my head. My daughter will remain. She will survive. She will lay claim to her queenship when Kane least expects it; she is a Rabthorn, after all. Deceit runs in her blood.”
“And the way of a conjurer nests in her heart.”
“Don’t forget your promise, Shepherd — to keep that heart beating no matter what. They say, after all, t
hat your word is gold.”
Indeed, my word is gold. But just as gold is only good in the hands of a living man, my word does not apply to those who are not around to see it undone. And Serith Rabthorn would be dead soon enough. As would his daughter, unless she got to explaining just what a conjurer had been doing here nineteen years ago, taking over the mind of a king. Because the more I learned, the more it seemed this whole ordeal was part of a plan that had long ago been put into motion.
The trouble with conjurers isn’t that they think differently. Most people don’t give a sack of cow hooves how you think, so long as you don’t flaunt it. The trouble with conjurers isn’t that they behave differently, either. Most people are indifferent to those who collect rats as test subjects, in an attempt to pervert their minds, so long as they do so in the privacy of their own home. The trouble with conjurers is that they don't have the decency to be different far away from the public eye.
They trot into villages, claiming they can heal the broken and disturbed. Problem is, humanity hasn’t survived this long without being inherently distrustful. If some jolly old conjurer with gray hair and a red smile can root around in your mind, capturing the hurtful memories, erasing the heartaches, obliterating the troubled past, then surely some ne’er-do-well could root around in there and accomplish the opposite. And that line of thinking cultivates fear. Fear spreads like fire. Fear opens the door to chaos. And soon you’ve got yourself an entire world more than willing to rid itself of a potential problem, and the conjurer massacre begins.
Too bad we never tried to learn about them before our attempt at hunting them to extinction. It would, for example, have been prudent to know that apparently a daughter of a king could be turned into a conjurer. Prevailing thought said the mind-fuckers were born that way, like freaks with six thumbs and dwarfs with stubby legs.
What else didn’t we know about them? What special little surprises would I find by sitting down for a nice chat with Lysa Rabthorn? Well, first I had to find her.
Outside the keep, Vayle was talking to a few Rots, pointing vaguely beyond the walls. She dismissed them, wheeled around with a skin of wine and saw me.
“The guards were kind enough to allow us to hunt their land,” she said, walking over. “A river runs two hours east of here, is that right?”
“East…” I said with hesitation, “or west. One of those two directions.”
“Oh, well. I told them to hurry back if they don’t find anything. Hopefully they do; everyone is tired of stale bread. Something hot will do them good. Did you boys have fun gossiping with one another?”
Always the jester, my commander. “I’ve had more fun talking to squirrels. Can’t say they provide more interesting information than Serith, though.”
After giving her the rundown of Serith’s divulgence, she flattened her finger on her lips and said, “Now I understand why Lysa appeared a broken girl. She committed murder only weeks ago. Your first one, it stays with you, as I am sure you will recall.”
“Mm,” I grunted. “Where is she?”
“Come, this way.”
A slow patter of rain fell onto the black cobbles, kicking up volcanic dust like linens beaten into submission by handmaidens.
Vayle pointed to the city center with her chin. “Unless Nilly Rabthorn has two daughters, or is playing mother to an orphan, I believe that is her and Lysa.”
The two were sitting on a bench beneath the rising shadows of wall-to-wall buildings.
“That’s Nilly all right,” I said. “Let’s have us a friendly meet-and-greet with the queen and her conjurer daughter, hmm?”
“Astul,” Vayle said, restricting my stride with a tug of my arm. “Wait. I will talk to her.”
“Er…”
“You listen.”
“Well, if you’re that eager to get inside her mind, I suppose we can both interject from time to—”
“No,” she said firmly. “Trust me, yes?”
“Never have I ever not,” I said. “But remember to ask about her earliest memory, who this conjurer was she killed, if she heard about this plan that’s seemingly been put into action, why she doesn’t appear to be following it, why—”
“Astul. I know. Trust me. Please.”
I rubbed my hands together and offered up a weak, apologetic smile. “Right. Sorry.” While it was the absolute truth that distrust was something I never felt for Vayle, I was not accommodated to playing second-in-command. What if she didn't dig deep enough? What if she couldn’t pry the information from Lysa? You often only get one shot at these things, before your target clams up and swallows the pearl. Hmm… maybe I needed to revisit my definition of trust.
Letting my commander take the lead, I fell in behind. The assumed Lysa Rabthorn kept her head down, but her eyes banked hard toward our approaching footsteps, wary as an abandoned animal who’d been spurned by humans one too many times.
Nilly was massaging her daughter’s knee. She stopped when our shadows scurried over the bench like an unwelcome cloud. The queen’s blond hair had been chopped off at her ears. Her round face, which used to be so colorful and tight, now sagged into a droopiness of pale depression.
Vayle bowed her head. “Lady Nilly Rabthorn, it is always a pleasure.”
With a voice steeped in the kind of sorrow that bards sing about in morbid ballads, she said, “I thought that perhaps Kane Calbid sent the Black Rot here to kill us.”
“We are not in the business of killing queens or kings,” Vayle said.
I simply smiled and nodded. Was that the proper thing to do? Was I trying too hard? Dammit, this onlooker stuff was more difficult than it seemed. See, had it been me, I would have said the same as Vayle, and then looked slyly at Lysa and remarked, “Or conjurers.” On second thought, seeing how vulnerable the girl was, maybe Vayle had the right idea of shutting me up.
“Am I to presume,” Vayle said, crouching, “that this is the Lady Lysa Rabthorn?”
The nineteen-year-old woman with the color of strawberries rippling through her blond hair and a beauty mark on her cheek looked up. “Lysa,” she said slowly, “will be fine. I am not a lady.”
Nilly sighed heavily and continued massaging her daughter’s knee.
“You are a Rabthorn, though, are you not?” Vayle asked.
Lysa seemingly thought about this, searching the thin lines of rain for answers.
“I do not believe my daughter wishes to speak,” Nilly said.
“It’s vital that she does,” Vayle explained.
“Why?” Lysa asked. “Because I am a conjurer? And you wish to know what sort of monster I resemble?”
“I want to protect this world. I want to keep it from imploding on itself, and given recent events, that’s proving difficult. I’m hoping you can shed some light as to why the conjurers took you as a baby, and what they’re doing now.”
Lysa clammed up, as I expected.
Vayle took the young woman’s hand in hers. “I understand how you feel, Lysa.”
Oh, that crafty commander of mine. If you ever want to draw the ire of someone, wait until the person is wallowing in sadness and then go up to them and tell them you understand how they feel.
“You,” Lysa said, her tone accusatory and vicious, “cannot possibly… possibly understand how I feel.”
Vayle sat her butt on the dirty ground and folded her hands. “You feel you’ve been cheated of life. You wish your parents would have ended it in the womb, and you hate them for not doing so. You hate them for allowing you to become a tool, a plaything, a slave. You’ve not seen happiness but for glimpses, and those glimpses anger you. And even now that you’re free of your chains, you’ve yet to know peace. You feel empty, alone and afraid without them, don’t you? You feel that perhaps… perhaps you cannot live like this.”
The fury on Lysa’s face softened, and she appeared inquisitive, like curiosity had up and struck her right across the forehead.
Vayle soothed her fingers. “I know how you feel because
I lived your life.”
“You’re a conjurer?”
“A slave,” Vayle answered. “In my past life. Forced to use my hands to clean and cook, my mouth to service, my back to bathe men. They wanted us unable to read and unable to think. They wanted us to depend on them. I defied them. I learned to read, and I snuck books inside the nomadic camp sites. I was lashed for it, raped, beaten until my eyes swelled shut. And when I finally broke free… I wasn’t happy, because all I understood was the life of a slave. Being a free girl was suddenly very scary, much more so than fearing the whip or the hard fists of a drunken man.”
Silence lingered. And then, Lysa spoke. “Do you believe that I’m not like them? I’m not like the conjurers that did this.”
“Why did they want you?” Vayle asked.
“To help them, but I don’t want to help them. I want to help people who are broken. They gave me a gift, Miss—”
“Vayle,” Vayle said.
“Miss Vayle. I cannot give the gift back, and I don’t want to. I want to use it for good, the way I was told conjurers had always done. But I do feel very alone in this world. It scares me.”
“Your father said you killed the man responsible for all this. Is that true?”
“Yes,” Lysa said shakily. She side-eyed Nilly and continued. “Well, he wasn’t responsible for me. Lots of conjurers are responsible for making me one of them. I was an experiment. They’d never done it before, they claimed. But he was responsible for ruining my dad. For ruining my mom.”
She blinked a tear from her eye and stared unrelentingly at the volcanic cobbles. “Did you know most conjurers can’t control the domain of two minds at once? It breaks them, sooner or later. And it broke him, that awful, awful man. Siggy was his name. He began sleeping most of the day, mumbling when awake, on the edge of mindlessness.” She glanced up, eyes swollen and swirling with blood. “I went into his room. With a knife.” She licked her lips. “I held my breath. And I moved it across his throat. Like this.”
She mimed the ripping of her knife across her throat. And again. And again, each laceration more violent than the last.
An Assassin's Blade: The Complete Trilogy Page 9
