Usha’s heart ached for the girl, the child who had gotten what she wanted and now was being forced to admit how vile and ugly it was.
“I… I never thought you would do something like this.”
He laughed, the hard sound of winter ice cracking on the river. “You’re judging me, Tamara? By the same measure you judge your faithful father, perhaps? The man who decided he’d sell you—”
Usha gasped at the naked insult.
Loren leaped to his feet. “I have not sold her! I haven’t liked the idea of this marriage—”
“You promoted it!” Sir Radulf’s smile vanished. “For what, Halgard? Your comfortable place in Haven, consulted but not on the Council? Were you thinking you’d like to step in when the Council is finally disbanded, the lord mayor made irrelevant? You have found a way, haven’t you? You say you sold the girl for the sake of peace in Haven. But was that really it?”
He crossed the distance between them. As though he were picking up something he’d carelessly dropped, he took Tamara’s hand.
“And you, my dear. You’ve made your own bargains, haven’t you?” He nodded toward the table, the platters of food cooling, uneaten. He slipped a finger down the length of her lovely neck, tracing the delicate hem of her gown’s gold-edged bodice. “And I’m a fair man. I’ll marry you. I’ll send you home till that day, and we’ll do it right and well before all the city. And then your food will be the finest, your gowns of the best silk, and our bed, my Tamara, will be of deepest down.”
He turned her around and put his hand at the small of her back, caressing as he urged her toward the corridor. “Go pack your things. Your father is impatient to have you home.”
She went, stumbling once when she looked over her shoulder. In her eyes Usha saw terror and shame. Usha rose and opened her arms to the girl, but Tamara fled in tears.
Beyond the two doorways out of the solar Usha heard the sound of knights—walking, armor rattling, a word exchanged, a grunt, and silence. Sir Radulf had posted watch.
“I’ve sent for your carriage,” the knight said. “It is waiting in the courtyard.” He paused, a cool smile returning to his blade-thin lips. “I’ll look forward to seeing you again, father-in-law.”
He bowed to Usha, and there was something lurking in his eyes now she hadn’t seen, before—cold suspicion. “You, mistress, have become a very interesting person to me. People speak of you who—” He broke off deliberately. “I look forward to learning more about you.”
Shuddering, Usha watched him leave. Her knees weak as water, she stood braced against the back of the chair. Loren’s expression was that of a man sick with grief and impotent fury. He could only look into the shadows outside the solar where Tamara had gone. The daughter whose safety he had hoped to purchase with his cooperation had become a hostage.
Usha wrapped her arms around herself, remembering Sir Radulf’s words. People speak of you who—and she thought of the prisoner he’d tortured.
She must find Dezra. She must warn Aline!
Usha stared out the carriage window, surprised to find that night had not fallen. In the twilight, the dim shapes of buildings jerked past as Rowan guided the team down from Old Keep and into Haven. In the carriage, silence lay like a funeral pall. Loren sat like stone beside the other window, unmoving. Tamara was a half-seen form in the gloom of the seat opposite. She lifted her head.
“I will not marry him, father.”
Usha glanced at Loren. The announcement didn’t seem to move him.
“Tamara,” she said, then said no more, for Loren looked away from the window and the night rattling by. His face was like that of a bleached skull, his eyes hollow, the flesh vanished in shadows.
“I will not marry him.”
Choking on words Usha knew he hated, he said, “Child, you don’t have a choice.”
“I used to have one.”
“Tamara, we both used to have a choice.” The carriage slowed to approach an intersection. Loren glanced out the window. The watch was changing at the corners—tall knights on tall horses making ready to guard Sir Radulf Eigerson’s city. “We don’t anymore.”
Usha reached for the girl’s hand. It felt cold as ice and thin as frost. Her refusal was not the child’s stubborn willfulness Loren had allowed—or had not discouraged while it propelled his daughter through her own part of the course they’d taken. A child, Tamara had demanded the suitor she desired and didn’t look deeply to see how dangerous the choice. The woman sitting beside Usha now knew better.
Yet Tamara’s willfulness and Loren’s determination to have what he would had combined to make the woman’s resolve late-grown and useless. Usha pressed Tamara’s hands between her own, trying to warm them.
Loren had wanted to soften the blow of the occupation, he’d wanted to ensure his child’s well-being, and he’d wanted his piece of power.
He has none of that now, Usha thought, and in the gamble he’s lost his daughter.
“Tamara, it’s done,” Loren said. His bleak glance took in Usha as well as his daughter. “Sir Radulf won’t allow the betrothal to be broken. And if I fall out of favor with him, things will be harder for Haven, impossible for… you, Tamara.” He looked away, then back to Usha. “And for you, my love.”
He was rationalizing. Usha knew him well enough to know that. He didn’t know what else to do.
Silhouetted against the purple twilight, her face pale as though it were cast in alabaster, Tamara said, “If you go along with him, father, you might as well be him.”
No one spoke after that—no word of reproach or accusation or even comfort. They rode the rest of the way in silence, like people going to a funeral.
“Loren,” Usha said softly.
He didn’t move. He lay on the bed in silence while the stars wheeled above the river. Usha heard the voice of a servant whispering in the corridor. Tamara said something in return. The girl’s voice no longer sounded brittle or frightened. Neither did it sound weary when she said, “Thank you. If you leave it there…” The rest of the words trailed away as she walked toward her bed chamber.
Usha sat propped with pillows, a small book on her knee. She glanced at the doorway, then at Loren. Wine goblets and a plate of untouched food sat on the small table in the center of the room. Usha had Loren eat, but the food remained, the wine barely tasted.
Usha put aside her book, the pages unread, the words hardly understood.
“Loren, I want to go back to the Ivy.”
He looked up. “Why?”
She wanted to find Dez, to get word to her that Sir Radulf knew about Qui’thonas. This she dared not say, and so she said, “I want to see how things are in my studio. There’s work yet to do, and I have been neglecting it.”
The explanation seemed to suit, for he settled again, returning to staring at the ceiling.
“I’ll have Rowan take you in the morning.”
Usha put her book aside. “We’ll see. I might like to walk.”
He raised none of his usual objection to that, and though she thought it was strange, the whole night had been strange. “Good night,” she said and kissed him.
He returned her kiss then leaned up on his elbow. “I love you.”
The sudden passionate declaration startled her.
“I love your generous heart,” he whispered. “Your soul always open to wonder.” He touched her hair, her face. “Shaper of images, married to a man who cannot see what he has and what he’s losing.”
The words sent a pang of sorrow through her.
“You are the most mysterious woman I’ve ever met.” He sat up now and took her into his arms. Usha felt his heart beating, hard and fast. “All that I love, Usha. You fill a place in me that has been too long empty.”
His voice shook, his arms trembled a little. She had felt him tremble with passion, but if strong emotion shook him now, it was not the same thing.
“Loren—”
Loren shook his head. He moved away, and his expression
was closed to her. A chill ran down Usha’s spine, and in the moment it did, the closed expression left him, as though it had never been.
22
Tamara ran like a ghost through alleys she’d never known existed. She felt like a phantom, a wraith ripped out of her body. She ran in darkness, a woman who had never gone anywhere unattended. Terror spurred her faster, even as she pleaded with fate to keep her from running into men with weapons who would escort her back home. Her stomach turned. If they knew where she was going, what she planned, the knights on watch who caught her would drag her bound and gagged to Old Keep.
A cat screamed outrage in the darkness. Another howled.
Tamara stumbled and fell hard onto slick cobbles. Pain shot through her knee. Her hands slipped in something foul enough to make her gag.
Something clattered against the fence beside her. A woman’s voice, ragged and shrill, screamed, “Damn cats! Shut up!”
Tamara staggered up and righted herself as panting breaths became sobs. She knew where she wanted to go, but she didn’t know where she was. The last time she’d been at the Grinning Goat, she’d gone in daylight.
Weaving from weariness, Tamara dragged breath into her lungs in rough, painful gasps. She didn’t know him, the man to whom she fled. Madoc Diviner they called him. Radulf had mentioned him once or twice. He’d said Madoc was a ragged wreck from the days the gods left Krynn, a fallen son of a noble family, a ruined mage who couldn’t find anything more to do than spy and listen and attempt to turn a profit from rumor and word.
Radulf said the mage had his uses, but not many. Better, for Radulf’s use, to put Sir Arvel into the bar, to glean what was true and what wasn’t from those who came to Madoc Diviner.
Tamara had a word for Madoc Diviner. Qui’thonas.
Images of blood and torment, the horror of a man driven to betray his friends, his cause, for the mercy of death pursued her. Qui’thonas must be warned.
Tamara sobbed. There had been traitors all around tonight. Radulf, her father… and she had done a traitor’s work, too. She’d betrayed herself for a man unworthy of her. She’d eaten the dark knight’s food and draped herself in the silks he gave her. She had been ready to climb into his bed while Haven’s people hungered and died. If she could warn someone that Qui’thonas had been discovered, it might not be redemption, but it would be part payment.
The noisome alley ended in a garden fence, the slats split, the whole thing rickety and slumped across her way. Tamara scrambled up to the ragged edge, looked, and saw a shabby house, a little shed. Out of the darkness, a dog came raging. She cried put, jumped back, and the hound hit the thin fence. From the house came a cry and a curse.
Tamara turned, looking for a way back, and stopped, frozen. A shadow slipped across the ground some yards behind her.
The dog slammed against the fence again, and wooden slats cracked loudly. Tamara flung herself back and staggered against a pile of refuse. A rat skittered out from the shadows, a squealing, filthy gully dwarf in pursuit.
The shadow was gone as though it had never been.
Tamara found the Grinning Goat, coming at it suddenly and from the back where the narrow street, barely an alley itself, descended to the sad garden by cracked stone steps.
The sour stink of old drink and ancient frying grease crawled on the night. The barman, a dim figure seen through an open window, leaned on the bar, yawning. He looked up, a swift, predatory glint in his eye when she came in. In the dim light of guttering candles, he seemed to recognize her. She was Sir Radulf’s woman and off limits.
Tamara didn’t know his name, but he didn’t seem to care. He told her Madoc had been in earlier then gone out again.
“I don’t keep track.” He scratched his belly. “Stay here if you like. Madoc comes in, he’ll be here. He doesn’t, he won’t. Me, I’m here till the next watch.” He looked around and shrugged. “If you’re here after that, you’re locked in or locked out.”
Outside, the wind awoke. Refuse scuttled across the garden. The fresher air outside made the thick, rancid odors inside the tavern even worse.
“I’ll wait in the garden for a while,” Tamara said, but he had turned away, gone into the kitchen. If the barman heard her or cared, he didn’t reply.
Outside, clouds slipped across the sky, black between the stars, silver before the moon. Their shadows flowed like water on the ground. Tamara sat on a cracked stone bench, arms wrapped tightly around herself. The wind grew stronger, pushing the sky. Watching the shadows, Tamara laughed—a thin, harsh sound. They reminded her of Usha’s sketches, the terrible images of death and terror.
Tamara stood, restless. She paced the garden, listening to the night, the faraway sound of the river, the clop of a horse’s hooves a few streets over. Nearer, from one of the tumbledown shacks that staggered along the street beside the Goat’s garden, a child cried—the desperate, infant wail of hunger.
In the tavern, the barman stood by an unshuttered window. His eyes met hers then turned away.
A shadow spilled down from the street.
Tamara jerked her head up, heart slamming. She became aware of two things at the same moment—a woman’s eyes alight with anticipation and the cold kiss of steel across her throat.
Madoc stood on the first of the six stone steps down into the garden of the Grinning Goat. Behind him, Dezra halted.
“What?” she whispered, her voice barely heard.
They were old hands at slipping past the night watch, old hands at seeming to be invisible to anyone who would wonder what they were doing out past sundown. Madoc wouldn’t have known Dez was speaking if he hadn’t felt her breath on his neck. He nodded toward the garden. Something lay in the shadow of one of the crumbling walls. No light touched it; it was a darker patch of night.
The two of them smelled of sweat and river water, of smoky torches and stinking fish oil. Qui’thonas had taken no refuges out of Haven since Konal had been killed and Barthel captured. All three ways into the tunnel under Rose Hall had been collapsed. By Aline’s order, every member of Qui’thonas had been told to stand down. Tonight, Madoc, Aline, and Dunbrae had been exploring the catacombs. The old burial chambers were far more extensive than had been believed, and they were drier than the tunnels, though still so damp that torches sputtered.
Through the reek of that work, like a crimson thread in a black tapestry, Madoc smelled blood. The hiss of Dezra’s indrawn breath told him she did, too. She started to step past him, but he held her where she was with a quick gesture.
“We don’t know who that is, and we don’t know if he’s dead.”
“Not he,” Dez said. She pointed, and Madoc saw the wind ruffling dark, curling hair. “There’s a tryst gone bad, eh?”
Madoc looked around the ruined garden, into dark corners and beneath tangled arbors. Nothing moved. If an angry lover had done murder, he didn’t linger to look on his work. If a robber or ravisher had tried too hard to get what the poor woman wouldn’t give, he’d long fled.
Madoc went down the steps, noiseless with Dez a shadow on his heels. He saw the young woman’s face, her eyes wide in terror, but it was Dez who saw the pool of blood and the slit throat.
A shiver of recognition spun through Madoc’s head. “That’s Loren Halgard’s daughter.”
Dez started to say something. He grabbed her arm and turned her back toward the stairs.
“Find Usha. Go find her now.”
“Madoc, what are—?”
“Now! She’s in danger!”
He pointed to a small wooden placard near the dead girl’s knee. It was Lady Mearah’s writ, all to familiar in Haven these days. Black paint signed with the sigil of a bloody sword, it proclaimed the execution of a traitor.
“Find her. Get her to Aline. I’ll get Dunbrae.”
“But—”
“Meet me at Rose Hall.”
Madoc went through the city like a dark-eyed phantom, alighting on the doorsteps of his sources, every person who owed him fav
ors, everyone he could intimidate into a guess or from whom he could wring a fact. He cared nothing about watches and curfew. He knew where the secret places were, the walls that seemed to have no way past—unless one knew where to look.
He woke butchers and basket weavers, money lenders and coopers. He came to them silently, through a window, a back door left carelessly unlatched. With a blackmailer’s cold eye, he held up their secrets, their shames, their broken troths. For the fee of keeping these quiet, he demanded what they might know of the night’s murder. In the end, he found what he needed from an old woman whose granddaughter he’d once helped in the matter of a blackmailing lover. With a whisper and a sly smile, she told Madoc that Lady Mearah’s lover had died in a recent fight between knights and the elves who’d lately been hung for trying to leave the city.
“A dark elf, him,” Madoc’s reluctant informant said. “The fair flower of milady’s eye—but not so much loved by the knights under her command. Not so much loved by Sir Radulf himself… so it’s said. Not that ’e had any light in his eye for the lady knight. Just didn’t like ’em gettin’ so comfortable together.”
Indeed, Sir Radulf hadn’t. Lady Mearah and Tavar were gaining followers among knights who would rather have sacked Haven outright and taken the loot back to Neraka and be done.
“The waitin’… that’s not settin’ so well with some of the knights these days, not so well with the foot soldiers. The dark elf died for a warnin’.” The old woman shrugged. “Looks like Sir Radulf’s woman died for an echo.”
Again, she shrugged. “It’s also said Halgard’s girl was happy enough about it all. Till tonight. So who knows? Maybe Sir Radulf killed her himself.”
To the question of why Tamara had been found dead in the garden behind the Grinning Goat, the old woman had no answer. Madoc’s belly went cold. He thought of captured Barthel and Dunbrae’s certainty that the man would withstand Sir Radulf’s questioning.
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