“Katalin. And clearly she was the epitome of warmth and love.”
He burst into laughter. “Indeed.”
“No child deserves to be neglected. No child deserves to question his worth.”
“My mother…” He sighed. “She was not the ideal nurturer. Nor was she a monster. We are who we are, Sari. And though you might have a temper fit for the battlefield, that passion also warms my bed and my heart.” He kissed her cheek. “You love me. You love me ferociously and fearlessly. You would sacrifice anything for those you love. Our child would know this. Any child of ours would know the ferocity and fire of her mother’s heart. You might drive a child to distraction, Sari, but she would never feel unloved.”
※
Sari was still thinking over what Damien had told her the next day as she and Mala looked over the plans Damien had drawn up.
A dozen warriors, Mala signed. Maybe more.
“That’s what Damien was thinking as well.”
We come from two sides. She pointed at the road and the river. One team to take out the Fallen, another to remove the women and children from the equation.
Days of observation had given Sari and Damien better intelligence about the numbers inside Aurel’s compound. There were three human woman—all pregnant—and at least ten children. Most were boys, two were girls. They ranged in age from toddlers to the oldest child, who looked to be around six years old. He was most often seen with the guards assigned to the children, and Sari guessed he was approaching the age when he’d be removed to a different location.
“The children might resist,” Sari said. “It may seem strange to us, but Aurel’s compound is their home.”
The women could resist too.
Sari put her hands on her hips. “We drug them if we have to. The priority is making sure they’re not harmed.”
And their guards?
“We’ll have to make that judgment call on the ground. My instinct is to kill them all, but if they’ve been protecting the women and children—”
Removing their familiar protectors could backfire. Mala paused. If they are true protectors, they will not object to our mission.
Sari pursed her lips. “Solomon’s baby? Let another have them so long as they’re not harmed?”
We try reason. Make it clear we mean the women and children no harm. If they still resist, we take them out. If their loyalty is to the women and children, we let them live. Mala frowned. In a sense, these Grigori are prisoners too.
“You’re being very reasonable about this,” Sari said. “About this new way of things.”
The majority of the Grigori are evil, she signed. Some are good. The majority of the Irin are good. Does that excuse those who are evil? There is no single truth in this world. That much I have known since my family disowned me.
“They were wrong to do it.”
From their perspective, they were right. Mala smiled. Their customs and traditions were set down centuries before Alexander and I met. They were set down for good reasons. We ignored them because we fell in love. Yet I would not have given up my mate for a thousand lifetimes of peace in my mother’s house. I have lived in competing truths for years. I’m quite comfortable with them.
“We’ll all have to become comfortable with competing truths if we’re going to survive this new world,” Sari said, glancing up as Katalin entered the room, grabbed a large tome from a lower shelf, and exited without saying a word. “How do you think she’ll do?”
Not well. But maybe she’ll surprise us both.
“Not likely.” Sari leaned her hands on the table and let the layout of Aurel’s compound sink into her visual memory. “We can’t get anyone on the inside, can we?”
The woman you saw the other night?
She shook her head. “There’s no way of knowing if we can trust her. She clearly cares for the child, but she might care for Aurel too. If she tells him or lets anything slip to one of the guards, the whole operation is compromised.”
We have a bigger problem than that.
“What?” Sari frowned at the satellite images of the road leading up to the compound. There were numerous cars in the images. A coincidence, or was the road frequently traveled? A busy road might make the initial approach easier, but it would also mean any guards at the gate were always on high alert.
Mala rapped on the table to get her attention.
“What?”
What the hell are we going to do with them?
“The gate guards? I’m thinking we bypass them entirely. We deal with the perimeter gate another way and take them out from the back. I want to scout a bit and find out how dense this forest—”
Not the guards at the gate. The woman and children. The ones we’re rescuing? What are we going to do with them once Aurel is dead?
“Oh.” She frowned. “Well, I need to call Ava about that.”
Ava?
“To get Kyra’s number. I figure if anyone is going to have an idea what to do with thirteen women and Grigori children—and any guards who might be attached to them—it would be Kyra and her brother.”
Do you have her number?
“No, but Ava does. That’s why I need to call her.”
Mala shook her head. She won’t give it to you. She promised Kyra. But she can pass a message along.
Sari huffed out a breath. “Kostas is still that paranoid?”
There’s a saying about that. Mala raised an eyebrow. It’s not paranoia if they’re actually trying to kill you.
CHAPTER SIX
“FIREARMS.” Damien walked to the front of Katalin’s desk and started taking various small arms out of a backpack and lining them up. “You need”—two nine millimeters—“to be training your people”—a Russian submachine gun—“with guns.” The last thing he set down was an eighteenth-century flintlock pistol. Heaven knew where that relic had come from. “Honestly, Katalin. This is what the watcher in Prague has recovered just in the past few months.”
His mother curled her lip. “Disgusting invention. When did the Grigori start carrying them?”
“I would guess sometime in the past three hundred years.” He put his hands down on the desk. “This is no longer an option.”
“Bullets rarely kill scribes.” She waved a hand. “They are clumsy weapons.”
“They kill us if they sever our spine in the right place.”
She frowned. “But they can’t—”
“They’ll kill us if they manage to hit an artery and we can’t get to a healer quickly enough. Or if our magic is weakened. Or if a Grigori gets their hands on some of the high-tech rounds the humans are inventing.”
She sat up straight, her back like a steel rod. “Mikael’s warriors do not hunt with guns.”
“They do if they want to step into the twenty-first century. Hell, the nineteenth might be an improvement, Katalin.”
“Noisy.” She rose to her feet. “Dirty. Clumsy. They attract too much attention from the humans, and I refuse to—”
“You cannot be this ignorant,” he erupted. “When I was drilling the men yesterday, only three of them had any firearms training and that came from their parents. This is not the twelfth century, praetora. Grigori still prefer blades to bullets, but that is changing. And while bullets rarely kill us, it is possible and becoming more and more probable every year. Further, your singers do not have talesm for body armor. By limiting their training, you limit their usefulness.”
That got her attention.
Katalin narrowed her eyes. “What do you suggest?”
“I suggest a full training program for firearms. Sniper training for those who show aptitude. Even the playing field for your people when it comes to guns. Even if the Grigori don’t use them often, they do use them. And ignorance can kill.”
“Who would do this training?”
He racked his memory. “I can think of four instructors in Europe, including one of my men in Istanbul. One in Kazakhstan. Two in North Africa and three in South. And that’s not counting th
e Americans, who are acknowledged experts when it comes to anything with rifling. Malachi would know who to contact.”
“And you?”
“What about me?”
Katalin raised a bored eyebrow. “Now who’s being ignorant?”
“I am not an expert in anything to do with firearms. I’m competent, but nothing like a true master.”
His mother paused before she sat down. “I will bow to your wisdom on this decision because it is fitting that you innovate the training regimen based on your experience, praetor.”
Damien shoved away from her desk. “I have never claimed that title.”
“That means nothing to me or any other warrior here. You are praetor, whether you want it or not.”
“That is not the life I have chosen.”
“It is the life chosen for you. The honor and responsibility of your blood. Who will train these men and women if something happens to me? Our bloodline preserves a martial tradition handed down for millennia. Is your stubborn refusal to acknowledge it supposed to mean anything to me?” She shook her head. “You selfish child.”
“Amazing,” Damien said. “It seems that after nine hundred years, I have finally become immune to your manipulations, Mother. No one is keeping you from choosing a successor from one of the hundreds of students you have trained over the centuries. No one but you.”
Katalin rested her chin in her palm. “Is it so abhorrent to you? This legacy we’ve built? It is for you as well. I have resigned myself to your mate. She has—at least—a little warrior blood and a fine spirit for battle. Eventually you will have children if she can get over—”
“Do not”—Damien’s voice dropped to a growl—“mention children to Sari.”
Katalin’s mouth twisted into a bitter smile. “Does Sari think she is the only one who has ever lost a child? We birth them. We lose them. If we are very lucky, one survives. That is life and she hides from it.”
“Whether Sari and I have more children has nothing to do with you, Mother. And if you think I’ll let you browbeat my mate, you are very much mistaken. No more veiled insults. No more leading questions. That subject is not your concern.”
Katalin rose, fury painted across her face. “Yes,” she hissed. “It most certainly is. You are my son. My only living child. Your birth was the culmination of centuries of sacrifice and magic from two ancient lines. Do you really think I will see that die out because—”
“We are more than our blood!” Damien took a steadying breath. “And Sari is more than my mate. She is my reshon, Mother. You have never understood that.”
“She makes you weak,” Katalin spit out. “If you had mated a warrior of Mikael’s line, you would have already taken your place here. You would have picked up your father’s shield and carried his banner. Meros ni she-ar, Damjan. No legacy survives without sacrifice.”
“You’re not wrong about our legacy,” he said quietly. “You and Father taught me more about leadership than any teacher in over nine hundred years. I know sacrifice because you practiced it.”
He saw his mother’s shoulders relax. Her eyes softened toward him.
“But you are wrong about Sari.” Damien was weary of Katalin’s belligerence, but he would not relent on making his point. Anyone with eyes could see his mate was more than a match for him. “The Creator himself chose that singer as my reshon,” he said quietly. “Are you more wise than heaven?”
Katalin had no answer.
“You will let her come to whatever decision suits her about bearing a child. And it will be in her own time. If we have children, they would be blessed to have a grandmother who would love them as fiercely as you would. But that will never happen if you are at odds with their mother. Think about that, praetora, when you think about your legacy.”
※
The tension between Damien and Katalin was so thick at dinnertime Sari had taken his hand under the table and held it throughout the meal, knowing how her touch anchored him. He picked at his food. Most of the dishes at the table were childhood favorites Damien guessed his mother had ordered from the kitchen as some kind of conciliatory gesture.
He tried not to think of it. Not when his own guilt was picking at his conscience. He wanted to believe his bluff from earlier in the day. Wanted to believe that his mother’s words about tradition and legacy meant nothing. He would be lying. The more time he spent at Rěkaves, the more he realized how much he was needed.
Sons and daughters of warrior blood still petitioned Katalin for training. From all over the world, Irin parents brought their children to Mikael’s praetores for training. And that training—while still brilliant—was verging on irrelevant because Katalin had not incorporated or accounted for the new realities of the Irin world. Firearms were only one example.
Many of the men and women he’d spoken to had little idea who or what free Grigori or kareshta were. Few had any idea what the current mandate was and even less knew that much of that mandate depended on the watcher of each house. Fully trained Irina were waiting for calls from the Watchers’ Council, not knowing if their skills were needed or welcome in the new Irin world.
And while singers only made up a quarter of new petitions for training, they were disproportionately represented among the trainers because Irina warriors were not welcome in the scribe houses. Some trained singers stayed in the valley. Others left for havens around the world. Most had drifted into the human world.
Sari squeezed his hand under the table, snapping Damien’s attention back to the present conversation. His mother, as usual, was interrogating someone about their bloodline.
“But surely you have some idea what your line is,” Katalin said to Leo. “You said your grandfather came for you.”
“Eventually,” Leo said. “But… I don’t think anyone ever asked about our bloodlines. They were just happy we were alive. They thought Max and I had been killed with our village. When our grandfather arrived, he took us until our training at the academy in Kiev. He wasn’t a talkative man. He rarely spoke of the past.”
“But how did you survive?” Sari asked. “If your parents were killed, your aunt and uncle—”
“We have no idea.” Leo gulped from his pint of ale. “We were only three when we showed up at the scribe house in Vilnius. It was almost a year after the Rending.”
“So someone saved you,” Katalin said. “Cared for you for a year—which a human could not do—then dropped you off at a scribe house?”
Leo shrugged. “Yes.”
“An Irina,” Sari said. “It must have been an Irina who survived, then fled and couldn’t take you. Or thought your family was at the house and wanted to reunite you.”
“Probably. Max and I never looked into it.”
Damien was betting that Leo hadn’t, but Maxim surely had. A mysterious benefactor would irritate the man too much. Leo’s cousin was surprisingly good at finding answers when dead ends appeared. How he did it, Damien didn’t ask.
“Well,” Katalin said, “it is evident to me that you are of Mikael’s line, though not directly. The blood is still very strong but diluted, I’d guess, by Chamuel’s line. Nevertheless”—she looked pointedly between Leo and Mala—“a strategic mating would be a benefit to your offspring.”
Leo’s jaw dropped and his eyes went wide. Mala’s signs were hard and fast.
Damien, if you want me to leave your mother unmaimed, tell her to stop trying to breed me like one of her mares.
Sari was the one who spoke. “Katalin, let’s leave the breeding talk for the stables, shall we? Besides, I’m fairly sure that Leo is a sentimentalist like Damien and me.”
Katalin rolled her eyes.
Leo said, “Sentimentalist?”
Damien said, “Because you want to wait for your reshon.”
Leo blushed but didn’t look away from Damien. “Oh. Well, I don’t think that’s sentimental.” He looked at Katalin. “It’s strategic.”
Katalin raised a dark eyebrow, her smile amused. “Oh?�
��
“A reshon is a mate chosen of heaven,” Leo said. His face was still red, but his voice was strong and sure. “She will be a singer created to meet my soul. Surely, praetora, no one could prove a better or stronger mate than one chosen by heaven.”
Damien’s desire to laugh in his mother’s face was overwhelmed by his pride in the quiet sincerity of Leo’s words. He squeezed Sari’s hand. No one better or stronger.
He leaned over to Sari and whispered in Norwegian, “I need you to think about why our path led us here. To Rěkaves.”
Sari’s eyes went wide. “What?”
“I need your counsel on this.”
“What are you thinking, Damien?”
He couldn’t judge her thoughts from her voice. Sari had taken on the even tone she used when she wanted to conceal her feelings. She might have been surprised or angry. She certainly wasn’t pleased.
“I am thinking… Our path has been in shadow. But it may be becoming clear. And I need my mate’s counsel when she has thought on this.”
Sari nodded slowly. “I can do that, reshon.”
“Thank you.”
“I can’t promise you will like my thoughts.”
He smiled. “That’s why I need them.”
※
They didn’t speak of it anymore that night. After dinner, Katalin joined Damien, Sari, Mala, and Leo in the library to talk about the plan they’d been working on.
“How did you find such detailed blueprints?” Katalin asked.
“Computers,” Damien said, spreading out satellite images he’d found online.
“The computer?”
“The Internet can provide much useful information.”
“But some false.” Sari tapped on one photograph with a marker. “This guardhouse is no longer here. It’s been moved off the road. We should expect that some of these paths aren’t accurate either.”
Leo said, “The basics don’t appear to have changed. The guardhouse at the main road is the same.”
Mala tapped on the table. The dock is longer. Aurel has added to it.
The Staff and the Blade Page 37
