by Carol A Park
“And that’s why you became angry?”
The condescension in his voice annoyed her. “Don’t lecture me. I know you get angry, or at least irritated. I can see it in your eyes sometimes. If you feel nothing else, at least you feel that.”
“I do. And it can be useful, but only if you are the one controlling it. If it controls you, you may do something rash in a moment when you need your head.”
“All right, master,” she said. “What would you suggest I do?”
“Fortunately, Llyr has informed me that you have passed your evaluation period. I have permission to continue your training at my discretion, and so you no longer need to train with Llyr.”
Elidor’s first statement intruded on her relief at the second. “I passed?”
He gave her a grim smile. “Indeed. Did you think our masters would simply accept at my word a new apprentice? Your combat training served dual purposes: to prepare you for more advanced study, and so that our masters could evaluate for themselves whether you are capable of this job.”
“Llyr is one of your—our—masters?” she asked incredulously. Burning skies, she hoped not.
“He reports to them,” Elidor said.
She exhaled through her nose. “And what if I had failed?”
“You would not have lived to know it.”
Ivana swallowed. She had expected that answer, but it still sent a shiver down her spine. She had jumped into this hole with eyes open, and she couldn’t go back. “So what are the next steps?”
“Now that you have satisfied my masters, I am in full charge of the direction of your training. We will begin to focus more on skills specific to our profession—‘stealth and trickery,’ I believe you once called it. You will continue to practice the hand-to-hand and dagger skills you have already learned. You will continue studying the apothecary arts. And”—he held up a finger—“I wish you to renew your study of foreign languages.”
She blinked. That had been unexpected. “But why?”
“Not all of our targets are Setanan,” he said. “I could see the usefulness of being able to understand the languages of the surrounding countries. And since you already have a foundation, there is no reason not to build on it.”
“Is this…sanctioned?”
“Absolutely not,” he said. “And you will not mention it to anyone, least of all our handler, when you finally meet him.”
“Of course,” she murmured, lowering her eyes. “But what will I use to study?”
“I will see to obtaining the necessary resources.”
She nodded, hardly daring to look up, lest Elidor see the excitement reflected in her eyes. She didn’t think he would approve.
“I have one final course of training that you will begin immediately,” Elidor continued.
She did look up then. His tone…
He stood up and clasped his hands behind his back. “You have one advantage over me. You are a woman.”
She furrowed her brow. That was an advantage?
“I would estimate ninety percent of targets are men. Of those, half—if not more—would be easily manipulated into doing or saying exactly as you please, if only you have the right tools. I—at least in most cases—do not. You, on the other hand…” He turned to look at her, and then, for the first time since she had met him, his eyes swept over her in an appraising manner.
Oh. Oh! She felt herself flushing. “I-I…”
“Stop stuttering.”
She pressed her lips together and forced herself to meet his eyes. “You mean to say, I can trick men into thinking I’ll sleep with them, so as to put them in a position where I can do what I need to do.” She still tried not to think about the result. It was all hypothetical right now.
He gave a cold smile. “Oh, no. You will sleep with men to put them in a position to either use them or kill them. Overcome by base urges and thus prone to irrational and foolish decisions, and likely alone…often you will find this to be a perfect setting to do your work.”
Ivana’s rage, despair, petulance, and even anticipation—anything she had felt in the past several hours—were washed away by his words, leaving in their place a disbelieving numbness. “What?”
“Was I unclear? You will learn to use your body as part of your arsenal of tools.”
“You’re serious!”
“I,” he said, nostrils flaring, “do not jest.”
He was irritated again, but she didn’t care. She was trying to wrap her mind around his suggestion. No, his demand.
She couldn’t do that. She just…she couldn’t. It was the one thing she couldn’t do. “I can’t. I-I won’t.”
His eyes glittered dangerously, though his speech was measured. “This is the most logical direction for your training. You will not defy me.”
“You don’t understand,” she said.
“You would hold to your purity over your life?”
She clenched her teeth. “I’m not—I’m not pure.”
“Then I don’t see the difficulty.”
Of course he didn’t. Even if she tried to explain it to him, she doubted he would.
“On the contrary, this seems to me to be the perfect solution to your earlier problem. If you wish to control an aspect of yourself, then you must become numb to that which provokes you.”
Numb. That was what she had wanted, wasn’t it?
She cast her eyes to the ground, her palms sweaty. “What is it you want me to do?” she whispered.
“This is not something I can train you in. For the next few months, one Da Lavena, the proprietor of a local consort house and informant for our masters, will instruct you in this matter. I have already made the arrangements.”
That could not mean what she thought it meant. It couldn’t. “Consort house?”
“In common parlance, a high-class brothel.”
It did. “You…you want me to train to be a whore?”
Elidor glanced absently at his calendar and continued on as though she hadn’t spoken. “Since the sky-fire is in three days, you will begin one week from today. This will give time for preparation and any cleanup needed after the sky-fire. Obviously, if cleanup turns out to be extensive this time, we can be flexible.” He frowned, as if the possibility that a roving monster might interrupt his plans was merely an annoyance.
But she had barely heard him. Who cared about the sky-fire? Bloodbane be damned—he wanted her to train to be a whore? Her mind was spinning, her stomach clenched tight in revulsion.
“From what you’ve told me, this should be nothing new to you.”
Apparently, he had heard her.
And it stung. It shouldn’t have, coming from Elidor, but it did all the same. It pierced her chest and wormed its way into her already broken heart, making her relive the taunts, the whispers, the looks, all in one moment. Whore. Whore. Whore.
She wanted nothing more than to desperately escape back to her room and her blade.
For months? How would she survive such humiliation?
This was not playing with herbs in a back room. This was not sparring with blunted blades. This was not poring over books or learning how to pick a lock.
This was not hypothetical.
“Unless, of course, you wish to pursue your other option?” he asked.
She swallowed. Death. She had committed to this, knowing she couldn’t back out. And she had said she would do anything, hadn’t she? She had thought that meant slitting people’s throats, not seducing men.
She almost laughed at the craziness of what she was feeling. You think you can kill someone, but you can’t sleep with another man? Remember why you did this in the first place.
She gritted her teeth. She could do this. She could look it in the face and laugh, and if in the end, it numbed her to everything she was feeling right now…
She bowed her head. “I am at your service.”
Chapter Ten
The door off the back of Elidor’s study did indeed lead down to his safe room, whi
ch doubled as his wine cellar, apparently—a luxury she hadn’t even realized he had.
Ivana dropped the last of the supplies they might need in a corner of the room and shook out her arms, glad to be done. Elidor had told her to haul anything they might need to the safe room and then disappeared. He had given her no further parameters. She didn’t know if it was supposed to be some sort of test, to see if she had enough foresight to gather supplies not only for the night, but for any potential lengthier stay, or if he was just lazy.
Either way, he conveniently appeared now that all the hard work was over, carrying a single satchel.
She said nothing while he surveyed the pile.
Enough food and water for up to a week. Sleeping rolls and blankets. Books, paper, writing utensils. Lanterns and oil to keep them burning. Two large covered chamber pots. And a moveable screen.
His gaze lingered on the last, and he turned to her with one eyebrow raised.
“For privacy,” she said, lifting her chin. The gods knew it was bad enough to be cooped up for a single night with other people and nowhere else to go. What if they had to stay longer?
One never knew how bad it would be any given year. The tears in the veil between worlds that appeared during the annual sky-fire—the tears that also let hundreds or even thousands of bloodbane through—manifested at random, and the monsters that came through them could be anything from mostly benign bloodsprites to horrific beasts that didn’t even have a name.
Therefore, cleanup from the sky-fire could likewise mean anything from repairing minor damage to days of the Watch having to hunt down and fight bloodbane that were rampaging around the city. Meanwhile, citizens were trapped in their homes, or safe rooms, if they had enough means to build one.
Despite his scrutiny, Elidor ended up making no comment on the screen or any of the other supplies. He merely set his satchel down on one of the many crates in the room and then returned to the safe room door. Ivana supposed he was satisfied with her preparations.
He put his hand on the handle. “The first fire is crossing the sky. If there’s anything else you need…”
She shook her head.
He gripped the handle, leaned back, and put all his weight into forcing the heavy metal door to move. It groaned, but once it had moved an inch, it swung the rest of the way with relative ease.
It shut with a resounding clang.
Elidor slammed the metal bar down across the door as an extra precaution—causing a secondary clang.
Ivana had been prepared for the first clang; she jumped at the second and chuckled to tame her nerves. “I guess no one’s ever sneaking into your wine cellar to steal some wine.”
He flicked his eyes to her and then settled down onto one of the crates to begin unpacking his satchel.
Right. He didn’t jest.
She sighed and sat down cross-legged on another wooden crate in the corner. She nestled her back against the corner and picked up one of the books. This was going to be a long night.
A few hours later, Ivana was still reading the same book.
At least, she was trying to read the book. It was plenty bright enough—she had placed several lanterns around the room—it was just…quiet.
Too quiet, given that she wasn’t alone.
She lifted her eyes for what seemed like the hundredth time since Elidor had shut the safe room door and studied the man who sat across the room from her.
He had made a makeshift desk by laying a thin, flat piece of wood on top of a crate, and he sat hunched over on the crate adjoining it, poring over a sheaf of papers and occasionally making notations on what looked like a ledger.
He hadn’t spoken a word to her since the door had shut.
He seemed absorbed in his work.
She knew better.
She had caught him watching her at least four times since she had started reading. Well, not her precisely. Her hands. Usually when she was turning a page.
It was difficult to read a book without exposing one’s hands, and it was becoming a little disconcerting.
He glanced at her hands for a fifth time; he wasn’t trying to hide it very hard. She gave up.
She laid a bookmark in the page she was on, closed and set aside the book, and waited.
It took a moment, but he finally lifted his eyes to meet her own.
He regarded her for a moment, dark eyes glimmering with unreadable thoughts. And then he turned back to his work.
She exhaled. She didn’t know if she could take this much longer, and the gods forbid that they might have to stay longer than the night because of rogue bloodbane.
She stood up and stretched. She had to do something to keep her mind off her impending training in four days, and the pile of blankets she had dragged in to sleep on didn’t seem inviting at present. “Would you believe I’ve never spent a sky-fire in a safe room?”
“Of course you haven’t.”
That gave her pause. It wasn’t the answer she’d been expecting. It wasn’t the expected answer, which should have been polite surprise or further inquiry.
“What is that supposed to mean?” she asked.
He made a mark on a paper. “If you had come from stock able to afford a safe room as a child, I would not have found you a half-starved wretch on the streets.”
She wasn’t sure whether she ought to feel affronted or abashed. Since she was sure to be plenty abashed in the days to come, she chose affronted. “And I suppose you come from a long line of well-to-do assassins?”
“I was raised in an orphanage. I haven’t the faintest idea who my parents are—or were.”
She blinked. She hadn’t expected him to respond to her sarcastic reply, except perhaps with derision. Certainly not with an actual answer. “I-I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
“Why?” he snapped. “My parentage and background is of no consequence to me. Neither will yours be to you, if you learn your lessons well.” He flipped over a page. “And don’t stutter. It shows hesitancy. There is no room for self-doubt in this profession.”
Ivana choked back a laugh. No room for self-doubt? She had practically perfected the art of self-doubt. That didn’t seem to bode well for her work in “this profession.”
She sank back down to the crate, pulled her knees up to her chest, and wrapped her arms around them. Was it even possible for her to become what Elidor was? It had been over a year and a half since her father had died, and she felt no closer to finding peace than she had on that day. Perhaps this whole endeavor was crazy.
If so, it was too late to turn back now. She would learn indifference like Elidor, or she would die trying. Either option was acceptable.
And yet… “You make it sound so easy,” she said, more to herself than him.
His pen hovered above the paper, and though he didn’t look at her directly, his head tilted. For a moment, she dared to hope for some sympathy. A friendly squeeze of the shoulder, assuring her not to worry, how one day she too could care as little as he about the wreck she had made of her life.
But an edge of something beyond merely cold now crept into his voice. “Dozens of times in as many years I have spent this evening, and occasionally a few beyond, in pleasant solitude.”
She should have known better. “If you enjoy your solitude so much, why in Yathyn’s name did you agree to take me on as your apprentice?”
“A mistake I could easily correct.”
She swallowed and laid her head back against the stone wall behind her. There wasn’t a back door to his safe room, was there? The only exit was the entrance, the heavy metal door that was now shut and sealed against any bloodbane that would come through tears created that night.
She wasn’t even sure she’d be able to open it without his help.
Elidor was still looking down at his work.
He hadn’t changed his cold, clipped tone when he had made the not-so-subtle threat. She studied him again. He was so normal-looking in his loose tan shirt and brown trousers, hunched over his
ledger like any businessman. One would hardly believe that he could trade that pen for a dagger in an instant.
A dagger he no doubt had with him, though she didn’t see it.
She ran one hand absently along the top of the crate next to her. Why had he agreed to take her on? He certainly had no fondness for her. He obviously had no need or desire for company. He had made no indication that he wanted a free whore—were that the case he could have now taken the opportunity to “train” her himself, rather than delegating the task to someone else. Did he feel some connection or obligation to her, because—as she had discovered—they were both orphans?
But he didn’t seem the type to put weight on such commonalities.
She couldn’t come up with any logical explanation, which was, perhaps, the most disconcerting part of it all.
A sudden and sharp pain shot through her hand. She jerked her hand back in surprise and spread it wide in front of her. A clean slice ran across her palm. Though it was shallow, blood was already oozing out of the length of the cut.
What in the abyss? She squeezed her hand shut and then leaned over to look at the crate. The metal closure on the crate had one sharp, jagged bit sticking out, and in her distraction, she had run her hand across it.
She opened her hand again, tentatively. It could be worse. The gods knew she had dealt worse damage to herself in the past months.
Somehow, this was different. It stung, and she hadn’t wanted it there.
She bit her lip. Elidor said nothing. He probably hadn’t even noticed, and she was sure he would be annoyed by her making a mess, asking for aid—anything related to another disturbance to his peace.
She hesitantly lifted her eyes to him.
She was wrong.
He was already watching her—or, her hand.
“Um,” she said. “Do you have a rag or something? I’m not sure what I did… This box…” She was mumbling, and he, by all accounts, wasn’t listening. “Never mind.” She slid off the crate. “I’ll use one of my blankets. I’ll-I’ll work on getting the stain out later.” She went to the pile of blankets, bent down, and picked one up with her uninjured hand.
