Dawnbringer: A Forgotten Realms Novel

by Henderson, Samantha

  Lakini did remember, and she heard again the sound of Lusk’s arrows finding their targets.

  “Don’t hurt her,” said Kestrel. “You can have anything you want. Just don’t hurt her.”

  The vampire ran a pale finger over Brioni’s neck, just over the jugular, speaking to the Kestrel now. “But this, my dear, is what I do want. You don’t know this, but your ancestor did me a very bad turn some two hundred years ago. And I don’t forget easily.”

  She grinned, showing her fangs. “The delicious irony is this—his friend, his very dear friend, his bosom friend—he also did me a very bad turn at just about the same time. And while your great-grandsire was a Beguine, this one’s great-great—so many greats—grandsire was his good friend. A Jadaren.

  “Yes,” she said, grinning at Kestrel’s wide eyes. “They were friends, until I gave them a reason to hate each other. And they were both, you will be delighted to know, pirates. And”—she sighed—“not very good pirates.”

  “So this is what I am going to do. I’m going to kill this little chit in front of you, and then I’m going to drain you. But first, I think I’ll take your shatter-faced friend’s sword.”

  Still keeping her grip on Brioni, the vampire maneuvered over to where Lakini’s sword lay. As she passed Kestrel, two long, thin cords leaped from the back of the woman’s wrists. They looped themselves around the vampire’s legs and pulled hard. With a shriek, she stumbled and fell, releasing Brioni as she did.

  In a single movement, Lakini scooped up her sword and cut off the vampire’s head.

  Kestrel clasped Brioni tightly to her, and the girl’s arms were locked around her mother’s waist. As Lakini watched, Kestrel stroked her daughter’s hair and took her by the shoulders.

  “You followed us,” she said gently.

  Brioni nodded and hiccupped. “I knew about the tunnel. When I came back and found your empty cell, I didn’t want to call the guards. I thought they’d kill you.”

  “They’ll always want to, said Kestrel, her voice dark and bitter. “And I don’t blame them.”

  NONTHAL, TURMISH

  1600 DR—THE YEAR OF UNSEEN ENEMIES

  At the entrance to House Beguine, Lakini asked for an audience with Vorsha Beguine. The doorkeeper was very polite, very ingratiating, and said the mistress was busy with the kitchen, or with her husband, or in her private chambers. Could the fairlady come back another time?

  Lakini bent close to the doorkeeper’s ear and informed him that if he didn’t tell Sanwar Beguine, immediately, that a deva late of Shadrun was here to tell him of the Key, she would not be responsible for the state of his guts. The man paled and hurried away.

  Sanwar received Lakini in the library of House Beguine, with the sun shining through the domed glass overhead. Since she’d seen him at Shadrun a few months ago, he’d gained a little weight and had more white in his hair, but he was still a good-looking man.

  He frowned, obviously not expecting her.

  She knew she had to act quickly, before his caution overcame his greed.

  “You’re not whom I expected,” said Sanwar.

  “The other sent me,” she said smoothly, still walking toward him. She was almost to him before his eyes widened and he raised his hand and a smell like lightning on a hot day filled the room. Before he could manifest the spell, she smashed him to the floor.

  He groaned and tried to roll away, still gesturing with his fingers. She already had a thin rope in hand. Kicking his hands apart, she seized him by the wrists and bound them together. She reached for his feet and he kicked at her.

  “Do that again and I break them,” she growled, and he subsided.

  There was a gasp, and Lakini looked up to see a servant in the doorway, mouth open as she looked as her master trussed like poultry on the floor.

  “Bring Vorsha Beguine here, now,” Lakini told her.

  The woman hesitated, obviously unsure whether to obey or raise the alarm.

  “Now!” Lakini growled.

  The woman scuttled away.

  Something plucked at her throat. She turned to see Sanwar muttering a spell. She kneeled next to him and clamped her hand across his mouth.

  “Unless you want to be gagged,” she said, “you won’t try that again.”

  “Sanwar—? What are you doing?” said a voice. Vorsha Beguine stood there, looking bewildered. Lakini could see some of Kestrel’s features in her mother’s pretty, now-worried face.

  “I’ve come to see you. Your husband can wait there for now,” Lakini said, nudging him with her toe.

  Open-mouthed, the woman looked from Sanwar to the deva. “But … you can’t just—”

  “But I can, and I did.”

  “I’ll fetch the guards.” Vorsha turned to the door.

  It opened and Kestrel stood there.

  “Kestrel! I thought—! I had heard—”

  Vorsha flung herself at her daughter. Hesitantly Kestrel’s arms went around her mother. Lakini saw thin wires vibrating beneath her skin.

  “So it’s not true?” said Vorsha.

  “I’m sorry, Mother. It is.”

  Vorsha drew back and cradled her daughter’s ravaged face with the palm of her hand. “Then Arna?”

  “Is dead. And Geb. And Shev. And little Bron.”

  With each name Vorsha flinched as if she’d been struck.

  “And the worst thing, Mother, is that I killed them.”

  Vorsha looked at Kestrel as if she were mad. At her feet, Lakini felt Sanwar stir, and she put a cautionary foot to his throat.

  “How is that possible?”

  “Like this.”

  Kestrel held out her hand. On her palm was a lump of melted glass. With trembling fingers Vorsha took it.

  “Look inside,” said Lakini.

  The woman blinked at five strands of brown hair that twisted inside the ruined charm. Lakini saw she didn’t have to explain. Three of the hairs fused inside, Vorsha had plucked herself from her daughter’s hairbrush. The other belonged to Sanwar.

  Vorsha’s lips pressed together, tight and white, and her eyes were enormous. She turned her unblinking gaze on Sanwar.

  “What did you do?” she said, her voice cold.

  “He made Kestrel a weapon, against her will and inclination, to strike against the Jadarens from inside,” said Lakini.

  Vorsha clutched the ruined charm so tightly that part of the glass cracked apart and sliced her palm. She ignored it.

  She kneeled by Sanwar. “It’s not true. Tell me it’s not true.”

  “It isn’t true,” said her husband.

  But Vorsha saw the truth in his face.

  She seized his hair, yanking it back fiercely. A terrible expression distorted her placid face.

  “I’m a wicked woman, Sanwar, but I love my children. I never loved Nicol, and I was unfaithful, but I thought if I married you, if I was a better wife to you and a faithful mistress of the House, I might do honor to a good man’s legacy. And now I find that I desired a monster, and opened my legs to the worst kind of traitor.”

  She spat in his face. “I would’ve done better to sell myself at the yuan-ti market. Whore’s business is more honest than this.”

  She rose and moved away from him. There was a bloody handprint on her silk shirt.

  “Kestrel,” she said. “Will you stay? You’ll be safe here.”

  Her daughter shook her head. “I killed your grandchildren. I can’t face you, my sister, our friends, our servants. I know you would be kind, Mother. But I can’t.”

  “I can take her somewhere,” said Lakini. “Somewhere she can heal.”

  Vorsha nodded, tears streaking down her face.

  “I came to give him over to the goddess for punishment,” said Lakini. “But perhaps you will say he doesn’t deserve that kind of mercy.”

  The small woman prodded Sanwar with the toe of her elaborately embroidered slipper. Casually, she turned and strode over to the row of weapons displayed on the wall. She ignored th
e greatswords and the thick-hafted spears that would be an effort for a half-orc to wield, passing her hand over the long knives and the daggers. She let her fingers finally touch a blade small enough to slip in one’s sleeve, an assassin’s weapon with a wickedly sharp, thin blade the length of her palm.

  She pried it from its mount and turned back to Lakini. Sanwar saw the weapon and grunted at her feet.

  Her face was wet with tears, but her back was as straight as a birch tree. She was Vorsha Beguine, mistress of the House now.

  “I think you can leave any matter of mercy to me, deva,” she said. It was a dismissal. Lakini only inclined her head in response. It seemed that Ciari Beguine was in some ways very much her mother’s daughter.

  Vorsha watched as Lakini and Kestrel left the room.

  “Do you want to see your sister?” asked Lakini.

  Kestrel shook her head. “No. She would try to be kind, if she knew, but she would still hate me.”

  When they reached the dusty street outside the compound, Lakini thought she heard a cry from inside the dwelling. She saw Kestrel’s back stiffen, but neither of them mentioned it.

  “Is there really somewhere you can take me?” asked Kestrel.

  “More like to someone,” said Lakini.

  SANCTUARY OF SHADRUN-OF-THE-SNOWS

  1600 DR—THE YEAR OF UNSEEN ENEMIES

  Bithesi examined the cut in the dog’s side. The big mongrel cur lay on its side, panting heavily and whimpering slightly when Bithesi’s careful fingers probed the edges of the wound. It kept as still as it could, however, and never snapped at her, even when she dipped a rough rag in a bucket of warm water and washed away the clotted blood.

  She muttered an apology, and the dog’s tail thumped lightly in the straw that mounded the floor of the stable. Then its gaze went over her shoulder, and its eyes narrowed. Its body tensed, and it lifted its head. Its lips drew back, exposing impressive white canines, and a liquid growl rumbled up its throat.

  Bithesi laid her hand, damp with water, on the animal’s neck.

  “Hush, Torq,” she said. “They’re friends.”

  The dog quieted and laid its head back down, but it kept a distrustful gaze on the two figures in the doorway.

  Bithesi didn’t turn around, keeping her attention on the wound in Torq’s flank.

  “Come in, Lakini,” she said. “And your companion as well. It’s chilly outside.”

  It was. The warmth of the autumn day had fled with the setting sun, and the mountain air now hinted of the bone-cold winter to come. The barn, occupied by a dozen-odd horses as well as their keeper, the dog Torq, and the usual contingent of cats, was warm, with the pleasant earthy smell of a well-kept farmyard.

  “Bithesi,” said Lakini.

  “You never said good-bye,” said Bithesi, breaking in on her.

  “I don’t—” Lakini began.

  “Good-bye,” Bithesi said. “It’s a thing friends say to each other when they part. A grace note, in the midst of our small business, our comings and goings, our mortal squalor. A simple thing to say. You’re not mortal, but you might try to remember.”

  Lakini had no answer.

  Bithesi glanced up at Kestrel, and her gaze lingered. The wounds on her face were healing, and the scars were forming pink on her hands, but her cheekbones stood out and her eyes glittered as if fevered.

  “Would you like to help?” Bithesi spoke to Kestrel as she would to a small child.

  Kestrel reached out a trembling hand to the dog. She paused, looking searchingly at Bithesi, her hand suspended in the air.

  She touched the dog’s side. Torq jerked in response, then quieted as she gently stroked his short, coarse fur.

  Bithesi waited until the dog’s breathing grew regular before raising the threaded needle with her right hand and pinching together the sides of the cut with her left. She muttered something that sounded like a short prayer or invocation before she bent to her work, stitching the animal’s skin back together with tiny knots, delicate as the embroidery on a lady’s court dress.

  Torq’s eyes jerked open and he whimpered, but Kestrel placed a firm hand on his neck and kept stroking his side, and he didn’t stir.

  “Good-bye, Bithesi, my friend,” said Lakini.

  She would not say Ashonithi. She knew she would never see Bithesi again.

  Lakini waited a long time at the barn entrance, feeling the cold air on her back and the barn warmth on her face. From one of the corners where the wall met the ceiling, a nesting dove cooed. Bithesi focused on the dog’s wound as if nothing else existed. Kestrel glanced up at the deva once, a serious look that recalled the grave manner of her daughter.

  “Good-bye, Lakini,” said Bithesi, not looking at her.

  Kestrel turned toward her, still keeping her hands on the dog’s side. She gave a small, tight smile.

  Lakini smiled back and slipped away.

  Standing in the mud outside the barn, Lakini became aware that she held within herself the small hope of staying at Shadrun, of finding for herself the idea that the mortal races called “home.” But with the realization came the knowledge that hope lay stillborn inside her. However many years she had spent at the sanctuary, even if she stayed here a century more, she would always be apart. The place would be familiar, even comfortable to her. But she would never cherish it in her heart, or long for it when she was away, as a crofter did his hovel or Bithesi her stables.

  Home … Lusk had tried to find it with his adopted human family, until the chance violence that always threatened to engulf the mortal destroyed them and made him the twisted creature he had become—and was doomed to be forever. Kestrel had found it, and it had been torn from her. Bithesi wove her home around the animals she tended, finding a warm place inside the meditative task of caring for them.

  The moments she had spent in Bithesi’s company were her home, Lakini realized, and the many years she had spent with Lusk. But Lusk’s madness had taken one home away from her, and Bithesi’s mortality the other.

  Something stung her eye, and she halted, blinking. The sting became a mild burn, and the burn gathered into liquid within her eye, and as she shut it briefly, a drop of moisture fell to the dust at her feet. The burning was gone.

  Lakini touched her cheek in wonder, feeling one more drop there. A tear. She had wept. Was that one of the consequences of denying her reincarnation? Would she become more mortal?

  Was it a punishment or a reward?

  Fandour was puzzled. Two of his vectors had winked out, one soon after the other, just at the point of seizing the Rhythanko.

  But now the Rhythanko was close—closer than it had been in millennia, although it was … changed, somehow. It had taken refuge in a different form.

  Fandour went over his connection in the Rogue Plane like knots in a fishing line, finding none broken until he tried to touch those vectors, then … nothing.

  He was patient. He still had his foothold. And the Rhythanko was near.

  FOOTHILLS OF THE CURNA MOUNTAINS, BEASTLANDS

  1600 DR—THE YEAR OF UNSEEN ENEMIES

  The heat of the day still lingered, cloying and oppressive in the still air. In the tall, dry grass, a few insects chirped wearily. Now and then a birdsong sounded from the low trees that clustered in deep, stream-cut ravines that threaded the foothills.

  A figure trotted through the dry grasses, casting a long, thin shadow diagonally over the ground. It was a human boy. He had the scrawny frame of a child, but his face, gaunt and anxious, hinted that he was older. He was clothed in worn leggings and a thin shirt, and his feet were bare and calloused.

  The Boy—he had had a name once, but his masters had called him nothing but “Boy” for so long, he’d forgotten it—cast a worried glace at the sun, reddening low over the foothills of the Curna Mountains. If he didn’t find the runaway swarm and capture the queen by nightfall, one of Lord Mahijith’s hives would be lost.

  The Boy didn’t think that Skreetchu, the raven-headed kenku over
seer that supervised the lord’s outlying estates, would show mercy to a slave who lost a valuable swarm.

  For one thing, busy with the extra task of changing out soiled straw in the stables, he’d been late going out to the hives. Despite the heat and his weary shoulders, he enjoyed the walk to the outer fields. A rare, refreshing breeze tumbled past him, cooling his sweat-soaked shirt, and the wheat was ripening in great golden knots on top of swaying stems. The Boy strode down the worn path between one furrowed field and the next, spreading his fingers at his sides to touch the stiff stalks on either side. Past the thick rows of grain the world fell away in gentle curves, humping and mounding in the distance until the foothills reared up and became the Curna Mountains, with their sharp, white-capped precipices and knifelike, purple-shadowed sides. He paused and breathed deeply, fancying he could feel the mountain’s icy breath in the hot air.

  Sometimes he pretended he came from a cool climate and would someday return to a place where a handful of chilled snow could cool a hot face after the labor of the day. Perhaps he did. He had been sold into Lord Mahijith’s household as a child, and he remembered little before that. He didn’t know if his dim impressions of a protective father and a gentle mother were real or simply products of his imagination.

  The haystack-shaped hives were arranged in two even rows. His first task was to check the perimeter to see if the wards that protected the combs and their sweet treasure still held. Only Skreetchu knew the cantrips that would keep bears and other hungry animals from scenting and tearing apart the hives, but the charmed crystal in his pocket would tell him if they needed renewal.

  The Boy frowned. In the distance, a black cloud hovered over one of the farthermost hives, a cloud that flexed and compacted into a black ball and then spread out until he could see its component parts. Bees—thousands of bees, hovering over their hive, when they should be returning from their labor and settling in for the night.