Shadow's Edge nat-2 Read online

  The Speaker’s letters were getting shriller, demanding that Ariel find Jessie, that Ariel do something to help her avert the rising crisis with the Chattel. Ariel kept her eyes open, hoping to find a woman who might serve her sister’s purposes, but the villagers of Torras Bend were careful to send away every child who showed the least Talent. Ariel wouldn’t find what Istariel needed here.

  So she ignored the letters. There was a time and a place for haste. It wasn’t here and it wasn’t now.

  25

  Viridiana Sovari?”

  Hearing her name made Vi skid to a stop in the crowded market. A dirty little man bobbed his head nervously. He extended a note toward her, but she didn’t take it. He was being careful not to stand close to her and he wasn’t ogling her, so she guessed that he had an inkling of what she was. He smiled obsequiously, shot a look at her breasts, then stared stubbornly at his feet.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “No one important, miss. Just a servant of our …mutual master,” he said, eyeing the crowd around them. Her heart turned to ice. No. It couldn’t be. He extended the note again, and as soon as she took it, he disappeared into the crowd.

  “Moulina,” the note read. “We are curious indeed how you knew Jarl was going to Caernarvon, but that you did know tells us that you are indeed the best. We also desire that you deal with Kylar Stern. We prefer him alive. If this is not possible, we require his body and all belongings, no matter how trivial. Bring them immediately.”

  Vi closed the note. It was impossible that the Godking knew where she was. Impossible that a note from him had beat her here. Impossible that Jarl could be here—Jarl, whose identity was supposed to be secret. Jarl, whom she’d been fleeing! Impossible to do what the Godking asked. But the greatest impossibility was the only impossibility now: it was impossible to escape. Vi was the Godking’s slave. There was no way out.

  Somehow Kylar had been roped into making the dinner for Uly’s birthday. Aunt Mea had said no man should be intimidated by a kitchen, and Elene had said that compared to the potions he made, a dinner and dessert should be easy, and Uly just giggled as they put him in a frilly lace apron and dabbed his nose with flour.

  So Kylar found himself with his sleeves rolled up, trying to figure out arcane cooking terms like blanching and roux and proofing. From Uly’s giggles, he suspected they’d stuck him with the hardest recipe they could find, but he played along.

  “What do I do after the jelly, uh, weeps?” he asked.

  Uly and Elene giggled. Kylar struck a pose with the spatula, and they laughed out loud.

  The door to the smithy opened and Braen walked in, dirty and smelly. He gave Kylar a flat look that made him lower the spatula, deflated, but he refused to wipe the flour from his nose. Braen turned his eyes to Elene and looked her up and down.

  “When’s dinner?” he asked her.

  “We’ll bring it out to your cave when it’s ready,” Kylar said.

  Braen grunted and told Elene, “You ought to find yourself a real man.”

  “You know,” Kylar said as Braen shuffled back toward the smithy, “I know a wetboy who’d like to pay that cretin a visit.”

  “Kylar,” Elene said.

  “I don’t like the way he looks at you,” Kylar said. “Has he tried anything with you?”

  “Kylar, not tonight, all right?” Elene said, nodding toward Uly.

  He was suddenly aware of the ring box in his pocket. He nodded. Putting a serious look on his face, he attacked Uly, who squealed, and flipped her upside down and draped her over his shoulder. He pretended not to realize she was there as he went back to cooking.

  Uly yelped, kicking her legs and holding onto the back of his tunic with a death grip.

  Aunt Mea came into the kitchen, clucking. “I can’t believe it, we’re all out of flour and honey.”

  “Oh, no,” Kylar said. “How am I going to make the fifth mother sauce?” He set down his spatula and hunched over, extending his hands through his legs. On cue, Uly slid headfirst down his back and grabbed his hands in time for him to pull her through his legs. She landed on her feet, breathless and laughing.

  “Isn’t it someone’s birthday?” Kylar asked.

  “Mine! Mine!” Uly said.

  He pulled silver out of each of Uly’s ears while she giggled. Two silvers—it was a bonus the noble had given him. It left him and Elene with nothing again, but Uly was worth it. When he put them in Uly’s hands, her eyes got big. “For me?” she asked like she couldn’t believe it.

  He winked. “Elene will help you find something good, all right?”

  “Can we go right now?” Uly asked.

  Kylar looked at Elene, who shrugged. “We can go with Aunt Mea,” she said.

  “I’ve got to peel the peas anyway,” Kylar said. They snickered. He smiled at Elene and marveled again at how beautiful she was. He was so in love he thought his chest would burst.

  Uly pranced to the door and showed Aunt Mea her coins. Elene touched Kylar’s arm. “Are we going to be all right?” she asked.

  “After tonight we are,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll see.” He didn’t smile. He didn’t want to give it away. If he smiled, he’d grin like a fool. He couldn’t wait to see the look on her face. He couldn’t wait for other things as well. He shook his head and went back to cooking. Contrary to what he’d said, the meal wasn’t hard to prepare. It was just messy. He slipped off his ring and put it on the counter before he picked up the raw meat—there wasn’t much romantic about smelling like dead cow.

  Elene and Uly and Aunt Mea had only been gone for about thirty seconds when there was a knock on the door. Kylar put down the spatula again and walked to the door. “What’d you forget this time, Uly?” he said as he grabbed a hand towel and opened the door.

  It was Jarl.

  Kylar felt like the wind had been knocked out of him. He couldn’t believe his eyes. But there he was, lean, athletic, impeccably dressed, as beautiful a man as you’d ever see, his dazzling white teeth showing an uncertain smile. “Hey-ho, Azo,” he said.

  Why that greeting? Was Jarl just being cute, or was he also throwing in an appeal to their history together? Definitely the latter. For a long moment, they just stood there, looking at one another. Jarl wasn’t here for a visit. Jarl didn’t visit. For the God’s sake, the man was the Shinga. A true Shinga, the leader of the most feared Sa’kagé in Midcyru.

  “How in the nine hells did you find me, Jarl?” Kylar said, being cute too. It was what Jarl had expected Kylar to say the last time Jarl had shown up unexpectedly.

  “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  “Please,” Kylar said. He put some ootai on and sat across from Jarl, who helped himself to a seat by the window. Silence.

  “There’s this job—” Jarl began.

  “Not interested.”

  Jarl took that in stride. He pursed his lips and looked around the humble room quizzically. “So, uh …what is it about this that you like again?”

  “Didn’t Momma K teach tact?”

  “I’m serious,” Jarl said.

  “So am I. You show up after I tell you I’m out of the business, and the first thing you do is insult the place I live?”

  “Logan’s alive. He’s in the Hole.”

  Kylar just stared at him, uncomprehending. The words collided with each other and shattered on the floor, shards sparkling with the light of truth, but the whole nothing more than splinters and points too sharp to touch.

  “All the wetboys are working for Khalidor. The resisting nobles have retreated to the Gyre estates. Several of the frontier garrisons are still manned, but we have no leader who can unite us. There’s some trouble up in the Freeze that the Godking is worried about, so he hasn’t done anything to consolidate his power yet. He thinks that the noble families will tear each other apart. And if we don’t have Logan, he’s right.”

  “Logan’s alive?” Kylar asked stupidly.<
br />
  “The Godking has our former wetboys looking for me. It’s part of why I came here. I had to get out of Cenaria until we could get word out that Kagé himself is protecting me.”

  “No,” Kylar said.

  “Every day, the chances that Logan will be discovered get worse. Apparently none of the prisoners in the Hole has recognized him, but they’ve started throwing a lot of people down there. It might please you to know that Duke Vargun is one of them. Look at it as a little bonus. When you rescue Logan, you can kill that twist, too.”

  “What?” Kylar said. Wheels were turning too fast for him to catch up. “Jarl,” he said. “Tenser isn’t Tenser Vargun. Don’t you see? He got himself thrown in the Hole so he can do the hardest time there is. Then they produce the real baron—alive—and Tenser is released. He comes to the Sa’kagé a month later with a grudge for his false imprisonment and all the access of a duke and what happens?”

  “We take him in,” Jarl said quietly. “How could we resist?”

  “And he destroys you, because he’s not Tenser Vargun,” Kylar said. “He’s Tenser Ursuul.”

  Jarl sat back, stunned. After a minute, he said, “You see, Kylar? This is why I need you. Not just for your skills, for your mind. If Tenser’s there right now, he’s only going to wait long enough that his stay in the Hole is credible, and then he’ll tell his father that Logan’s in there. We have to go now. Now!”

  The ring box was burning against Kylar leg. He looked through the open window as Jarl spoke, seeing the city he’d hoped would be his home for the rest of his life. He loved this city, loved the hope here, loved healing and helping, loved the simple pleasure of being praised for his potions. He loved Elene. She proved to him that he could do more good by healing than by killing. It all made sense …and yet …and yet….

  “I can’t,” Kylar said. “I’m sorry. Elene would never understand.”

  Jarl rocked back on two legs of the chair. “Don’t get me wrong, Azo, because I grew up with Elene too, and I love the girl. But why do you give a shit what she thinks?”

  “Fuck, Jarl.”

  “Hey, I’m just asking.” Then he let the question sit, his eyes never leaving Kylar’s face.

  The bastard, he really had been studying under Momma K for all those years.

  “I love her.”

  “Sure, that’s part of it.”

  Again, that I’m-waiting stare.

  “She’s good, Jarl. I mean, like people aren’t good where we came from. Not good because it will get her something. Not good because people are watching. Just good. At first I thought she was just made that way, you know, like your skin is black and I’m devastatingly handsome.”

  Jarl raised an eyebrow. He didn’t laugh.

  “But now I’ve seen that she has to work at it. She does work at it, and she’s been working at it for as long as I’ve been working at learning to kill people.”

  “So she’s a saint. Doesn’t answer my question,” Jarl said.

  Kylar was silent for a full minute. He rubbed the grain of the wood table with a fingernail. “Momma K used to say that we become the masks we wear. What’s under the mask for us, Jarl? Elene knows me in a way no one else does. I’ve changed my name, changed my identity, left everything and everyone I’ve ever known. I’m all lies, Jarl, but as long as Elene knows me, maybe there is a real me. Do you know what I mean?”

  “You know,” Jarl said. “I was wrong about you. When you got yourself killed saving Elene and Uly, I thought you were a hero. You’re no hero. You just fucking hate yourself.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re a coward. So you’ve done bad stuff. Join the club. You know what? I’m glad you did; it made you something better than a saint.”

  “A killer’s better than the saint? What sort of fucked-up Sa’kagé thinking is—”

  “It made you useful. Do you know what it’s like in Cenaria right now? You wouldn’t believe me. I didn’t come here to find a killer. I came to find The Killer, the Night Angel, the man who’s more than just a wetboy because the problems we have now are bigger than any wetboy could handle. There’s only one man who can help us, Kylar, and that’s you. Believe me, you weren’t my first choice.” He stopped abruptly.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Jarl wouldn’t meet his eye. “I didn’t mean—”

  “What were you about to say?” Kylar said in a dangerous tone.

  “We had to be sure, Kylar. We were very respectful, I want you to know that. It was Momma K’s idea. He used to be immortal, we had to make sure …”

  “You dug up my master’s corpse?” Kylar demanded.

  “We put it—him—back just how you’d buried him.” Jarl winced. “It was maybe a week after the invasion—”

  “You dug him up while I was still in the city?”

  “We couldn’t tell you beforehand, and afterward there was no reason to. Momma K said the body would be there, that Durzo had given his immortality to you, but when she saw him…. It was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen, Kylar. I mean, I was practically raised by the woman and I’ve never seen her like that. Hysterical, weeping and screaming—here we are, in the middle of the cloudy night, we’d paddled out to Vos Island with oars wrapped in wool, and she starts wailing, out of her mind. I was so sure a patrol would come that I wanted to get off the island immediately, but she wouldn’t leave until he was just how you left him.”

  Like Kylar cared that Durzo be left on that damned rock. If they were going to dig him up, they could have at least brought him…. Where? Home? What home did Durzo Blint ever have?

  “How’d he look?” Kylar asked quietly.

  “Shit. He looked like he’d been in the ground a week, what do you think?”

  Of course he did. Dammit, Master Blint, why’d you give me your immortality? Were you just sick of living? Why didn’t you tell me anything? But then, maybe he had told him in the note he’d given Kylar: the note that had been soaked with blood, illegible. “You want me to break into the Hole and save Logan?”

  “Do you know who the Godking keeps as his concubines? Young girls from noble families. Prefers virgins. He guesses how much humiliation and debasement each girl can take. Puts them in tower rooms with balconies where all the railings have been torn off so the jump beckons every day. It’s a game for him.”

  Kylar kept his voice hard. “Get to the point.”

  “He took Serah and Mags Drake. Serah killed herself in the first week. Mags is still there.”

  Serah and Mags were practically Kylar’s sisters. Mags had always been his pal. Always quick with a laugh, always smiling. He’d been so self-absorbed since the coup that he’d barely thought of them.

  Jarl said, “I want you to rescue Logan, and then I want you to assassinate the Godking.”

  “Is that all?” Coldly amused. It was a tone Kylar had heard Durzo use a hundred times. “Let me guess, Logan first because my odds with the Godking aren’t so great?”

  “That’s right,” Jarl said angrily. “That’s how I have to think, Kylar. I’m fighting a war, and people better than us are dying in it every day. And you’re sitting around because of what some girl thinks?”

  “Don’t you talk about Elene.”

  “Or what? You’ll breathe heavily on me? You’re the dumbass who swore off violence. Yes, I know about that. Let me tell you something. Roth made a lot of people miserable. I’m glad you killed him, all right? He fucked me up bad. But he doesn’t hold a candle to his father.” Jarl swore. “Look at yourself! I know this hit is impossible. I’m sending you after a god. But if anyone in the world can do it, it’s you. You were made for this, Kylar. Do you think you made it through all the shit you made it through so you can sell hangover potions? Some things are bigger than your happiness, Kylar. You can give hope to an entire nation.”

  “It’ll only cost me everything,” Kylar whispered. His face was gray.

  “You’re an immortal. There’ll be other girls.”
<
br />   Kylar gave him a disgusted look.

  Jarl’s expression changed instantly. “I’m sorry. I guess there will be other Godkings and other Shingas too. I just …we need you. Logan will die if you don’t come. So will Mags, and so will a lot of other people you’ll never know.”

  It would have been easier if he disagreed with anything Jarl said. Kylar had asked Momma K, “Can a man change?” Here was his answer, and it sucked the life right out of him. “All right,” Kylar said. “I’ll take the contract.”

  Jarl smiled. “It’s good to have you back, my friend.”

  “It’s bad to be back.”

  “I didn’t want to say it before, but have you done something to piss off the local Shinga?” Jarl asked. He took Kylar’s expression to be an admission. “Because one of my sources told me the Shinga put out a contract on a Cenarian wetboy. He didn’t know any details, but uh, I don’t figure there’s all that many Cenarians wetboys hanging around. The longer you’re here, the more you put Elene and Uly in danger.”

  Durzo had taught Kylar that the best way to cancel a contract was to cancel the contract-giver. For Elene and Uly and Aunt Mea and even Braen to be safe, Barush Sniggle had to die.

  Kylar stood woodenly and went upstairs. He returned a minute later with a visage as dark as the wetboy grays he wore once again.

  Vi looked at the bow in her hands, trying to convince herself to pull back the red-and-black arrow. She was on a rooftop looking into the midwife’s home. She’d been there for an hour. Her back was to a chimney, and she’d wrapped herself in shadows. She wasn’t invisible by any means, but crouched low in the dying light, with the sun behind her, she was close enough.

  She’d come to Caernarvon to escape this. She’d thought the only way to not kill Jarl and still escape the Godking’s wrath was to kill Kylar. In the time she was away, Jarl would flee or be killed by another wetboy.