“I am thinking about how this will end.” There was no warmth in his eyes.
“Then you will not object to assuaging my own wonders,” Fayne said.
He shrugged with his tankard.
“First question,” Fayne said. “Why did you drink my wine rather than your own? Had you decided what manner of wench I am—one who would expect to be trusted?”
Kalen gestured to the full goblet. “I could drink this,” he said. “Or shall we talk more?”
Fayne’s smile didn’t falter—she wouldn’t give him a hint as to her scheme. It was far too delicious. “We should talk, and you should answer my question.”
“I knew,” Kalen said. “Because I know you, Fayne.”
“I suppose you do at that—in a certain sense.” She winked lewdly then composed herself. “Second question—you knew I was crooked. How?”
“Lady Dawnbringer,” Kalen said.
“Ah.” She nodded. “But that didn’t let you save Cellica. So you must not have been certain. You didn’t know Rath was mine?”
“I suspected,” Kalen said. “I saw the way you looked at Lady Ilira—the triumph in your eyes. Was anything accidental about that night?”
“Well struck,” Fayne said. “What I told you was true—the whore killed my mother, and nothing pleases me more than hurting her. I didn’t pay Rath to kill Lorien, but I don’t care that he did. The only part I lied about was whether I would have killed her myself.” She smiled. “Yet still you let me share your bed, even after you knew I was bent. I don’t suppose you really did love me? Just a touch?” She batted her eyes at him.
“No more than you did,” he replied, his eyes never leaving hers.
Good, that was good. All his attention fixed upon her.
“Glad my true face didn’t steal your virility,” she confessed. “But I’m so terribly curious—make love to many of my kind, do you?”
“I like my lasses wicked.” Kalen shrugged. “But I’ve never known one quite like you.”
“Mmm. Good.” Fayne laughed lightly. “Not wielding your paladin’s sword, I see.” She gestured to his empty belt. “You murdered Rath in cold blood?”
“And if I did?”
“Then I can see why Myrin has left you.” She reached across the table for his wrist but he drew away. “Ah, Kalen! You and I know too much darkness for a soft thing like her.”
“Yes,” Kalen murmured. “I suppose we do.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Are you—and this is my last question—here to fight me, rather than claim me for your own?” Kalen said nothing.
Fayne sighed. “Of course. Well—it would have been joyous, saer, but I can’t say as I disagree. You and I were not meant for one another. Irreconcilable philosophical differences.”
Kalen shrugged. “I suppose this is where I ask how you intend to kill me.” He gestured to the wine goblets—hers empty, his full. “I suppose one of those was poisoned.”
“Mayhap.” Fayne looked him up and down. “You seem to be alive.”
“This likely would have been some game of yours,” Kalen continued. “You’d suggest we both drink, and let me choose which wine to take for myself. You just had to decide which I would drink—and poison that cup.” He gestured to them. “Apologies if I spoiled your plan.”
“And I apologize for insulting you earlier,” she said. “Mayhap the gods did endow you with some brain after all—just not enough. You’ve missed one little detail.” When Kalen narrowed his eyes warily, she laughed. “I’ll tell you for free—a free lesson in Waterdeep, aye?”
“What could you teach me, Fayne?”
“Every thief,” she said, “knows that the first rule of thievery is misdirection.”
When Kalen frowned, Fayne gestured to his chair. The paladin reached down tentatively, as though to scratch an itch, and felt one of the tiny, poison-coated needles that were stabbing into his legs, buttocks, and back—needles Fayne had placed there an hour gone.
The irony, she hoped, was not lost on him. Because of his sickness, he’d not have been able to feel them pierce his flesh when he sat down, and by then it was far too late.
“Farewell, lover,” Fayne said. She gathered her feet off the table and stood. “I would have liked to share a tumble with you again, but … we never would have come to pass.” Then, dipping low to give him one last eyeful down her bodice, she claimed his wine goblet and drank. When she was done, she licked her lips. “You and I are too much alike, and yet not enough.”
She started to go, but Kalen laid his bandaged right hand on her wrist. The hand was shattered—only partly healed—and had no strength to stay her, but she stopped anyway.
“You’re sweet,” she said. “But with that much poison in you, you won’t even be wakeful but for a few more heartbeats—and your heart will stop in a ten-count. Hardly time for—”
He started to rise. He came away from the needles, leaking trickles of blood, and rose before her like a black specter. She saw, in the folds of his stained gray cloak, the edge of a watchsword, which he drew into his bare left hand.
“There’s—there’s no way you could fight off that poison,” said Fayne. “Unless—”
“Unless I managed to restrain myself”—he rose fully to his feet and kicked the table aside—“took Rath to the Watch instead of killing him”—with a flick of his wrist, he laid the watchsword across her throat—“and retained the favor of my three-faced god.”
And thus speaking, Kalen began to glow with silver-white light, as though his skin itself was aflame, as though a deity had chosen that moment to smile upon him—and gaze through him. In the face of that divine radiance, the other patrons stared, transfixed.
“Well.” Fayne trembled a little bit, then smiled. “Well played, Kalen—you really are a cold-hearted bastard.” Her eyes flicked down to the steel he held at her throat, then up to him. “And you saved your soul to spend on me? I’m flattered.”
He looked at her impassively.
She smiled bewitchingly. “I’ve waited many years for someone as clever as you—a foe who could defeat me. I’m glad he was so handsome, too.”
Kalen’s eyes were cold.
“Come now, lover—don’t you want me?” She stepped forward, letting his blade cut a tiny red trail along her throat. She purred. “Don’t you want to hurt me? I’ve hurt you, haven’t I—killed your little sister and chased off your blue-haired tart?”
Her face was almost against his. Only the sword, keen enough to slit her throat with a twitch of Kalen’s arm—one false step—stopped her from kissing him.
“When you think about that,” Fayne said, “when you look at me—you don’t have even just a little hate in your heart?” She tapped Kalen’s chest. “That big, strong, dying heart?”
Kalen tightened his hand on the sword hilt.
He shoved her back. She fell to the floor and looked up at him, eyes and hair wild, sneering as he stepped forward. Her heart was pounding and she knew this was the end.
“No,” he said. He sheathed the sword at his hip and turned his gaze aside.
Fayne trembled. She didn’t dare move—he could whirl and open her throat at any instant. But he just stood, silent and still. Death might as well have taken him as he stood—his sickness crept up and slain him. She panted on the floor behind him, blood trickling down her heaving chest from the wound she had inflicted on herself.
Fayne rose. She dusted her leathers and smoothed her hair.
“Well, then—farewell, Kalen, though I don’t expect you will.” She winked. “Cellica’s dead, Myrin has undoubtedly left, and you just pushed away the only other woman who could have made you happy. But I suppose you’ll always have the memories.”
She started to walk away.
“Fayne,” Kalen commanded. “One last question.”
She turned. His back was to her. “Yes, lover mine?”
“What’s your real name?”
She pursed her lips. “I told you, it’s—”
“Just because I don’t hate you,” Kalen said, “doesn’t mean I’m letting you go.”
Fayne tried to retort, but her face exploded in pain.
Kalen pulled a set of manacles out of his belt. “You and Rath might just share a cell,” he said. “Perhaps you’ll have a nice conversation about how you betrayed him—but I doubt it.”
Fayne only moaned on the floor, clutching her bloody face.
“No clever quip?” Kalen sheathed his sword. “Fayne, I’m crushed.”
Drizzling blood from her broken nose, she smiled up at him with surprisingly sharp incisors. Her eyes drifted up his frame, lingering in places.
“I’ve had better, you know,” she said.
Kalen smiled. “So have I.”
FORTY
Fayne hadn’t stopped smiling all day.
She’d smiled silently when the Watch stripped her of her possessions, including her mother’s wand and her ritual amulet, crippling her magic. She’d pressed herself hard against each of them in turn, inviting with her eyes, but none of them had taken her offer. Pity.
She’d smiled silently when they asked for her name—then again when the stuffed peacock from the Watchful Order of Magists had threatened to call the Blackstaff to interrogate her personally. He didn’t realize that the red-haired half-elf was a false face, though, so he had not tried to break her transmutation. Thank Beshaba for small blessings.
She’d smiled silently, regardless of how much it hurt, when the gray-faced priest of Ilmater set and bandaged her broken nose. She did lick his hand once, because it amused her. She loved the look in his eyes—desire warring with faith.
The Watchmen, the mage, and the priest probably got the impression she was laughing at them, but that wasn’t true. Granted, she had not the slightest esteem for the Watch, but today, she felt like laughing only at herself.
Only after they led her into her cell, dressed in her blood-spattered doublet and breeches, and after the door had slid shut behind her, did she finally give voice to the laugh that had been building inside her. It was all so amusing. She was the one, after all, who had trusted a paladin.
She laughed loud and long for quite a while, until the other prisoners—cutpurses and swindlers, hungover nobles and the like—slapped the bars, trying to get her to be silent. But it was just so funny, this whole ludicrous situation, and she was the lead comedienne.
“Oh, Ellyne, Ellyne,” she mused. “You’re such a gods-tumbled fool! Such a fool!”
The Watchman on duty thought she was simply mad, and he made the mistake of asking her to be silent. That man—a bulbous-nosed fellow of thirty winters or so—became the target of her lewdest and sharpest barbs. She threw herself into her mockery with a passion, pantomiming the jests and prompting more than a few cheeks around the prison to redden.
For she was Fayne, the Trickster of Waterdeep, and who would she be if she weren’t the center of attention?
The Watchman gave up and stopped paying attention to her after a while, and she turned to tease her fellow deviants. Rath dwelt among the prisoners, sitting silently—mostly wrapped in bandages—in the cell opposite hers. He said nothing, no matter how she teased him.
After an unsuccessful hour of teasing anyone and everyone, Fayne grew bored. And thirsty, too. Not for the pond-scum water they’d given her—which she’d emptied on the guard’s head—but for good brandy. Enough to make her face stop hurting.
Another hour passed. Having run out of breath to voice her japes and too proud to beg outright for attention, she contented herself with fuming at times, weeping at others.
Then, in the space of a heartbeat, all went silent.
Her sensitive ears could no longer hear the quiet murmur of the Watchmen at the front of the prison. She looked around, and her fellow prisoners all seemed asleep—or dead. Her heart started racing. What had happened?
“Aye!” she called. “Water, sirs! Please, goodsirs?”
No response.
The door swung open at the end of the hall, quiet and calm as soft death, and her heart almost froze. What was coming for her?
She sensed a presence—someone standing not a pace away from her at the door—and she shrieked and fell to the floor. She scrambled backward on her hands and feet and cowered against the wall.
Then came laughter.
“Mercy, child,” a familiar voice said out of the air. “You are just like your mother.”
A figure materialized before her, invisibility fading around it.
Relief flooded Fayne when she recognized her rescuer. “Gods,” she said. “Did you leave me here long enough?”
The gold-skinned elf clad in the loud garb of a dandy swept off his plumed hat and bowed to her. He wore a bright rose pink shirt with dagged lace at the wrists, and his ebony overcoat was trimmed with complex gold swirls on the sleeves. Over this he wore a red half cloak that fell to about his waist, below which he wore white leather breeches. The outlandish garb might have seemed foppish or puerile on someone else, rather than dashing. She suspected, though, that he could wear anything and not fail to dash.
“Truly, Ellyne, you do me such dishonor,” her patron said. “I was merely seeing to affairs of my own—I was quite unaware of your unfortunate circumstances.”
“Hum.” She didn’t believe that for a heartbeat. “You’ve the key?”
Her patron lifted a ring of twenty keys. Then, as Fayne knew he would, he selected one completely at random and fit it in the lock. It turned, and he made a show of gasping surprise.
“You’re impossible,” Fayne said.
He shook his head. “Just lucky.”
Her patron swept in as though he owned the city, and perhaps with good reason; privately, she suspected he was one of the masked lords who did exactly that.
“How positively dreadful.” He pointed to her face. “Shall I avenge your honor, love?”
“No, no.” Fayne’s voice was made ugly and hollow by the broken nose. It rankled her, not being beautiful. “I prefer to do that myself.”
“I thought you might.” He leaned across the doorway, blocking her path out the door. “My darling little witch, I really must rebuke you.”
“Oh?”
“For breaking the first rule of proper villainy,” he said.
“Misdirection?”
“Point.” Her patron smiled. “Very well, the second rule of villainy,” he corrected.
Fayne spat on the floor indelicately. “And that is?”
“Never do anything yourself.” He smiled and bowed. “Hirelings and minions, child! That way, you’ve no chance being caught—and their antics are always amusing.”
Fayne crossed her arms and pouted. “Which am I, a hireling or a minion?”
“Oh, tsch.” He kissed her on the forehead.
She pushed past him and started walking down the corridor. He stepped out and, as an afterthought, wove a bit of magic over the lock so that it would work only occasionally. He grinned at the mischief that particular cantrip would cause.
“Hold,” he said.
“Aye?” She turned and fell to her knees as a wave of power struck her, pulling apart her disguising spells one by one. It felt like Lorien’s rod on the night of the revel, but harsher. The power was not gentle, and Fayne felt every bit of its intrusive touch.
When it was done, she coughed and retched on the ground, reduced back to her true form, with its pale skin, hair the color of his doublet, and gleaming eyes of silver. She had long elf ears and delicate features, leathery wings, and a long tail tipped at the end with a spade-shaped ridge of bone. She glared at him with her fiendish eyes.
“This is my punishment?” Her bright red tongue darted between her too-sharp teeth.
He shrugged. “No hiding for a tenday,” he said. “You allowed that paladin to use you because of your insecurities. I won’t have that—not in a child o
f my blood. So deal with your weakness.”
“Well.” She stretched and yawned.
He blinked—he truly hadn’t expected that. “Already? You are content?”
At least one person thinks I’m pretty, Fayne thought, but she didn’t say that.
“Mayhap my true face is not so bad.” Fayne rose, slowly, and stroked her hands down her silky hips. “Mayhap you should wear your own—or am I the brave one?”
“Mayhap you’re not as smart as I,” he corrected. “Who’s the one with the broken nose, who spent half a day in a Watch cell crying her eyes out?” He averted his gaze. “Your punishment stands—until you remember your place.”
“Hmpf!” Fayne stuck out her tongue.
He laughed. “Gods know I’ve made mistakes like yours, and mostly for the same reason.” He patted her head. “Love is the sharpest sword of all.”
Fayne swore colorfully.
Her patron winked. Then he handed her the amulet and bone wand.
“And what did you do,” Fayne asked, “to correct those mistakes?”
“Oh. A bit of this”—he waved three circles in the air—“a bit of that.” He put his hand on the hilt of his rapier. His white-gloved fingers caressed the starburst guard. Then, as though its touch had reminded him, he looked at Fayne with affectionate, twinkling eyes. “She made the same mistake many times.”
“My mother?” Fayne asked. “Cythara?”
He smiled knowingly.
“Not that again,” Fayne said, rolling her eyes.
“I speak with all sincerity,” he said. “You remind me of your mother at your best—and at your worst. She made many mistakes of the heart—at your birth and at her death. You see?”
Fayne only nodded. She wondered why he wouldn’t say her mother’s name. He probably found it painful. A weakness, perhaps?
As they left the jail, the binding spell that had frozen the Watchmen expired, and they bolted upright, searching in bewilderment for their prisoner. Fayne almost started to cast a hiding spell of her own, but of course, her patron had prevented that.
She was, after all, his best and most important asset. She could trust him—at least, until her usefulness to him ended.
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