She came around the side of the house at a run but stopped short of falling into my arms, her eyes darting briefly to Aran and Gilliam. “Padraig sends his regrets, Lord Dura, but he is unable to meet with you at present.” Her mouth turned up at the corners and her voice dipped into a register that made my knees wobble. “Is there any service I can render in his stead?”
I’d forgotten how much I’d missed just being in her presence, reveling in her challenging banter. She always won these little contests of wits. Gael was, after all, smarter and cleverer than I, but no man savored his defeats more than I did.
I let my gaze drift down to her feet and back up again. “Not precisely in his stead,” I answered. With a sigh, I brought myself back to the duty that brought me here. “But I do need your help.”
“Come, Lord Dura.” She nodded. “The storehouse will give us privacy.”
Chapter 16
We kept close to the walls of the mansion to avoid being inadvertently spotted by her uncle and came into the storehouse where Gael and Kera had practiced their craft, designing clothing that made the pair of women the center of attention each time they came to court. Then Kera had died, killed by a wasting disease.
The door to Gael’s office had barely closed when she came into my arms, her lips finding mine, and I felt a knowledge of her that had nothing to do with my gift, had no part of delving. Her kiss communicated love and fear and tension as her hands crept up my back to lock in my hair. When we parted we stood forehead to forehead, not speaking.
“Why did you take so long to come to me, Willet?”
I shook my head, unwilling to break contact just yet. “The Vigil has been brought under the direct control of the four orders of the church. The Chief of Servants decided the best way to safeguard my gift was to keep me under house arrest. Jeb bought me a temporary furlough by virtue of his fists. Any moment now they’re going to find me and put me someplace more secure.”
She stiffened, a prelude to the blaze of temper that would surely come next. “So you save the city from disaster at Bas-solas and this is your reward.”
I lifted my hand to tap my temple. “They don’t know what to do about my vault. Maybe if I were in their boots I would do the same thing.”
“Don’t make excuses for them, Willet,” she said, clipping her words. “You would do no such thing. Why did Jeb come to you?”
I took a step back so that I could bring her into focus. “There was a murder two weeks ago, the kind of thing I’m more likely to run into now than he is.” A bit of the color drained from her face, but her mouth firmed and she nodded, once. “What can you tell me about Viona Ness?” I asked.
Her brows, dark and perfect like her hair, drew together. “I heard about her death, but I barely knew her. She seldom came to court, and when she did, we didn’t speak. Men certainly seemed to favor her, as I recall.”
“She was killed by a dwimor, an assassin that can slip through a crowded room without anyone seeing it.” I shrugged. “Except for the young. It seems the older you are, the harder they are to see. The only witness to Viona’s murder is a girl of six whose mind is so damaged she has to draw pictures to communicate.” I took a deep breath. “Gael, you and Kera used to play your game of looking at people and working out their past. There’s something troubling me about her murder, and I can’t figure out what it is.”
When she nodded at me to continue I told her everything I could think of. No detail was too minute or trivial to include, everything from the tiniest stroke of Aellyn’s charcoal pencil drawing to the vision I’d seen in her head.
When I was done, Gael paced the room, thinking, while I waited for her to see what I couldn’t. Twelve times back and forth she walked. Then she stopped, staring at the floor. “Her wounds.”
“What about them?” I asked.
“Describe what you saw from the girl’s picture again.”
I pulled the image—put it at the front of my mind so that I could close my eyes and see it without distraction. “There are rips in Viona’s clothing, and through them I can see deep knife wounds, the skin pale on either side of the cut.”
“Is the blood keeping you from seeing the wound?”
I looked at each in turn. “Not so much. There’s a little on the fabric of her shirt, but . . .” I stopped as I realized what I was saying and opened my eyes to see Gael looking at me.
“There’s not enough blood,” I said. “Not anywhere close to enough.”
Gael’s eyes narrowed. “The dwimor didn’t mark her after the first wound.”
“No,” I shook my head. “He never marked her at all. In Aellyn’s mind I saw both Viona and the assassin in the Hawker. Viona was already at the front door and the assassin was back by the kitchen. She held her knife in her right hand and her left was covered in blood. It’s long odds to think the dwimor could have gotten lucky enough to cut just the inside of her wrist if she tried to defend herself.”
“Viona killed herself,” we said at the same time.
I pushed myself off the table I’d been sitting on and walked the length of the room as the pieces of Viona’s death finally slipped into place. “Viona was sitting in the Hawker waiting for her brother. She saw the dwimor enter the tavern by the kitchen and something in the way he moved, the way people looked through him as if he wasn’t there, alerted her. Instead of fighting or screaming, she opens her wrist.”
“But why run?” Gael asked. “At that point, she was dead already.”
I could only think of one reason. “To keep herself from talking.” I brought my fist up to my head. “I’m a fool. I kept returning to the thought that Viona was incidentally killed by the dwimor because he realized she could see him—but the truth was more basic. The assassin was after her—and, what’s more, she realized it.” I looked at Gael as a knot of steel began to form in my chest.
“But how would she have known what to look for?”
“Pellin would have warned the sentinel trainers of his concerns—maybe not about dwimors specifically, but to be careful, on the lookout. They would have been watching for trouble.” I took three steps and brought Gael into my embrace, my hands coming up to cup the deliciously soft skin of her face. “You are a treasure.” Even as I said it, a twinge in my gut rebuked me. And how can you take her to wife if you’re practically immortal?
I turned toward the door. “I have to find Bolt. I need to know what’s going on with the sentinels.”
Gael looked at me, tension in her brows for a second before she came to the same conclusion I had.
“That has to be it,” I said. “What other use would the Vigil have for a girl who loved animals so much that she preferred them to people?”
We strode through the storehouse back toward the front of the estate and stepped through the door and into the night . . .
Right into a pool of torchlight. Eight fully armed men wearing Merum red ringed us, the man on the far right wearing a captain’s badge. Behind them stood the four Servants Jeb had put down. One of them had a bandage circling his head. And farther back—out of reach, of course—stood Gael’s uncle, Count Alainn.
“There you are, Captain. As promised,” the count said before turning his attention to Gael and me. “It seems you’ve run afoul of the church, Lord Dura.” He smiled. “I think perhaps a petition to the queen might be in order.” Shadows from the torches danced on his face. “Surely Her Majesty will see the necessity of nullifying your betrothal now.”
I took the opportunity to remind myself that not all evil comes from the Darkwater Forest. Perhaps not even most of it.
“I can see how a person with your lack of character and limited perspective might see it that way, Uncle,” Gael spat.
“Do you know why I keep you around, niece?” the count said with a smile.
“Because even with the gift you have no talent for business or negotiation?”
The count’s vindictive smile soured. “I keep you here so that I can watch your dream of being m
arried to him die. Your presence is suffered precisely because I know that Lord Dura will wind up dead or imprisoned and then the queen will be forced to endorse the marriage for you that I had arranged for Kera.”
I looked at the men around me. I would have laughed except the count was almost certainly correct on all counts. Especially the part about prison.
“Captain,” he said, “I would take it as a courtesy if you could take him off of my estate now.”
I squeezed Gael’s hand. “Find Bolt or Rory. Tell them everything.”
The walk back toward the tor took longer than I expected, or maybe time only seemed to slow because my mind kept racing to find a way out of my predicament. Viona’s death carried implications for the Vigil that I needed to explain to Pellin, Bronwyn, or even Toria, but I had no way of knowing where they were or how to communicate with them even if I did. The scrying stones were useless, undermined by betrayal, and I had no hope of getting to messenger birds while the church had me under lock and key.
We trooped through Criers’ Square and turned left at the far end, away from the House of Servants and toward the Merum cathedral. The captain didn’t speak to me at all as we entered and descended toward the lightless halls just above the river. Torchlight flickered on the rough granite that formed the cells. A brother passed us going the other way, holding an empty tray, and unbidden, a memory arose in my mind.
The prisons weren’t empty.
I spotted hands sticking out through the bars of one of the heavy doors a bit farther on, and when the captain stopped short, I continued for a few steps until I stood before the door opposite. With a shrug, the captain came forward to meet me, opened the door to the empty cell, and waved me in. I waited within the growing darkness until the footsteps receded beyond hearing. When all sound and light had faded, the prisoner in the cell across from mine deigned to break the silence.
“Welcome, Lord Dura, to my home.”
I knew the voice even if I couldn’t see his face.
Peret Volsk.
Chapter 17
Peret Volsk, one-time apprentice to the Vigil and next in line to receive the gift of domere from Elwin, had betrayed the ideals he’d claimed to serve. All done in the name of love, of course. He’d allowed attacks on Bolt and me that nearly resulted in our deaths in the hope I would be forced to pass the gift on to him and he could live for centuries in perfect communion with Toria Deel.
Without scrying stones or colm messenger birds, I had no access to the other members of the Vigil. That I should find myself imprisoned across from the only other man or woman on the northern continent who might be able to shed light on the meaning behind Viona’s murder was a miracle. I pulled a prayer of thanks from my memories as a postulant in the priesthood and fumbled my way through its unfamiliar cadences. I was more accustomed to saying the antidon for the dead.
“What, no imprecations?” Volsk asked. “No threats of retribution? No earthy soldier’s curses, Lord Dura?”
“I need your help,” I said.
Weak laughter somehow made it the distance from his cell to mine. “At the risk of sounding condescending, I have to point out that I’m not exactly in a position to render aid. Else, I would have freed myself long ago.”
“It’s not freedom I want.”
“Strange how my viewpoint of time has altered since my imprisonment,” Volsk said as if he hadn’t heard me.
“I said it’s not freedom I want.”
“Once I believed that only centuries with Toria would suffice.” He sighed. “Now I know better, all thanks to a prison cell four paces wide and three paces deep.”
“Will you help me?” I asked, half expecting him to talk through my question as before.
“Why should I?” The tone of his voice sharpened from its blunt abstraction into focus.
“Why shouldn’t you?” I retorted. “What else is there for you to do except recount the measure of your cell?”
He surprised me with a soft chuckle. “In truth, four by three paces is a forced approximation. I’ve been considering different possibilities of measuring it more accurately. Would it surprise you to learn that my teachers in Cynestol considered me talented in the mathematicum? For example, I could verify its rectangular shape by measuring the diagonals. Of course, that would have to be done quickly while they’re bringing me my meals. But once that had been accomplished, it would be possible to use the sum of squares technique to refine—”
“They’re going to come for me,” I said. “I don’t know when, but it’s a certainty. If you don’t help me, I won’t help you.”
He muttered something under his breath I couldn’t quite make out. “What do you have to offer? You can’t override Pellin’s order of imprisonment, and even if you could, you can’t soften Toria’s heart.” He chuckled again, but there were hints of hopelessness in the sound.
I’d heard that same self-mocking laughter from men about to be sent to the gallows.
“The central problem in measuring my cell,” he went on, “is that I have no way of calibrating my instruments. Is my foot actually a foot? I can’t remember.”
“She’s dead,” I said. Self-accusation shot across my chest as I said it. I knew the conclusion Volsk would jump to, counted on it.
His laughter cut off. “You lie.”
“I do not lie,” I shot back. “Do I have your attention, Peret Volsk? The Vigil has been brought under the direct authority of the four orders of the church.”
I heard a sharp intake of breath. “Fools. Don’t they know the Vigil’s task is impossible without autonomy? The four orders will descend into squabbling, maybe even warfare.”
I ignored the invitation to rail against the shortsightedness of the church. “Pellin and the rest are gone. I don’t know where, and I have no means of contacting them.” I took a breath. “We believe Jorgen is corrupted and he killed a girl. I need to know if I’m right about the reason.”
I waited for Volsk to respond, half expecting him to hypothesize about the length of his toes and whether or not those five wiggling members could be trusted to help him measure his cell.
“Who?” he asked softly.
“Viona Ness.”
I heard him cursing, and as much as I hated the confirmation of just how bad circumstances had gotten, my heart lifted at the sound. His anger told me Volsk still held at least some hint of conviction and purpose within him. “How did she die?”
I told him everything, backtracking to tell him about Bas-solas and the dwimor attacks and even my conversation with Gael that led me to believe Viona had killed herself to keep from being taken.
“I knew Elwin,” Volsk said. “He would never have taken part in creating monsters like the dwimor.”
“Pellin said he did,” I said. “But it hardly matters.”
“It matters to me,” Volsk said. “Elwin was like a father.”
“Fine,” I said. “But you knew him at the end of his life, a very long life. What old man have you ever known who didn’t carry his share of some regret? Tell me about Viona.”
“It’s bad, Dura. She was the newest apprentice to help keep and train the sentinels here in Collum.”
I hated being right. Once, just once, I wanted to be right about something that worked in my favor. “Why didn’t Bolt tell me? Why would he lie?”
“I don’t particularly favor your guard, but lying is constitutionally impossible for him. He probably didn’t know. Pellin called him out of retirement to guard you, after Faran had chosen Viona to succeed him. It was a detail Pellin probably didn’t communicate.” He paused for a pair of heartbeats before he went on. “Viona knew what the dwimor was after. She died to keep the assassin from finding out where Pellin had moved the sentinel camp. Without the hounds, access to the Darkwater is unguarded. Anyone could blunder in there and back out again the next day.”
“They don’t have a reason,” I said.
Volsk laughed. “Whatever has gotten free of the forest has been a step ahe
ad of the Vigil all along. Even defeating it at Bas-solas did little more than slow it down for a time. There will be a reason. They’ll make one.”
“How can I find the sentinel camp?” I asked.
I hadn’t bothered to lower my voice, but for a while I wasn’t sure Volsk had heard me.
“I know where it is,” Volsk said. Then he fell silent again.
Ah. “You can’t imagine I have enough power or influence to free you,” I said. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I seem to be in the same predicament.”
“No. You’re not. You’re being safeguarded, not guarded.”
I laughed. “It looks the same to me, or maybe I’m just letting the fact that we’re talking to each other through prison bars in total darkness unduly influence me.”
“You said yourself that the Chief of Servants would be sending for you,” Volsk said. “You don’t have much time, Dura. You may not have any.”
“How so?”
Volsk chuckled. “Why was Viona in Bunard?”
“She wanted to see her brother,” I said.
“Granted,” Volsk agreed. “But that’s not the reason she was in Bunard. My guess is Faran sent her to get their winter supplies. Sooner or later he will deduce something happened and will have to send his other apprentice, Afyred.”
And the dwimor was still out there in Bunard somewhere. “How old is Afyred?” I asked.
“A couple years shy of forty.”
Afyred would never see the dwimor following him. The assassin would probably just hitch a ride on the back of the supply wagon and let Faran’s apprentice take him back.
“You have to help me,” I said.
Volsk grunted some noncommittal sound. “Actually, I don’t.”
“If the Darkwater wins, you’ll die here.”
He laughed at me. “Even if you win, I’ll die here. I really would like to avoid that. I find that being imprisoned has revealed to me a whole host of priorities that I’d previously taken for granted.”
The Shattered Vigil Page 15
