Banebringer

by Carol A Park

  He sat in the chair and started removing items from the satchel.

  The first item that came out was a knife—sharp, but not designed to be a weapon—the kind one might use to pare fruit. That was followed by a second, similar knife. Then a teacup saucer, a needle, and last, a coin purse.

  Ivana drifted closer, standing at the side of the table looking down at the assortment of items as Vaughn stashed the satchel under his chair.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  He placed one knife closer to the bed, and one in front of himself. He sat for a moment, staring at the table, and then said softly. “Helping you get out of here.”

  Ivana froze. “What?”

  He looked up at her. “I haven’t told anyone about our discovery. That a non-Banebringer could use aether.”

  “Why in the abyss not?”

  His jaw twitched. “Because Yaotel is an ass, and I was being petty. But I’m glad I didn’t. Because now, we know something they don’t know, and it might help you.” He gestured to the bed. “Have a seat. This could take a while.”

  She understood now what he was going to propose. They were going to make her own stash of aether to use—specifically the kind she could use to turn invisible. Useful when trying to escape, certainly, but…

  She wasn’t ready to escape yet. How could she explain that to him, without giving away the content of the note from Aleena?

  She perched on the edge of the bed and stalled. “You used the term Gifted earlier.”

  “Yes. It’s what the Ichtaca call themselves.”

  Well. That explained the dirty looks when she used the term Banebringer around here.

  “But you don’t?”

  He shrugged, but said nothing else.

  “You know,” she said, as if she had just thought of it. “Just because I can turn invisible doesn’t mean I’ll be able to escape right away.”

  “No,” Vaughn said. “But if the opportunity presents itself, I want you to have every available advantage.”

  “Why are you helping me?”

  He paused. “Because Yaotel is an ass, and I’m being petty.”

  She raised an eyebrow, and he sighed and ran a hand across his face. “Because now that I know why Yaotel hates you, I’m convinced that he’s never going to let you go. You’ll rot here until he decides he’s done with you, and then come up with an excuse to be rid of you. He’s not a cruel man, but he carries grudges.”

  She shook her head. That only half answered her question. Why would he want to risk Yaotel’s trust in him to help her?

  “You realize that I would betray the Ichtaca if it became expedient for me to do so?”

  He glanced at her, but said nothing.

  “All right,” she said, shrugging. “I won’t turn down free help. What’s the best way to go about this?”

  He pushed the knife closer to her with one finger. “Same way I make my own aether, except once you have a few drops, try to squeeze them onto the saucer. We’ll mix it, wait for it to turn to aether, and then peel it off.” He held up the purse. “You can keep it in here. Ready?”

  Ivana picked up the knife and skimmed one thumb along the blade. It was sharp enough to make a tiny slice in her finger even as careful as she had been, merely a paper cut. Plenty sharp enough for the task.

  “I would recommend your forearm,” Vaughn said. “Shallow cuts.” He demonstrated. “You keep pricking your fingers, they’ll quickly become sore.”

  Ivana followed suit. She was unprepared for the rush of emotions and memories that followed as the knife bit into her arm.

  Sitting in the closet that passed for her room, alone but for a razor and her own skin. Her own blood had been the first she had let, long before her mentor had set her to taking out easy targets. Burying the pain and guilt in physical punishment. It had helped somehow, before she had found more permanent ways to deal with it.

  At least, what she thought had been permanent.

  It had been years since those marks had faded into paper thin scars, barely visible unless you were looking for them. He had seen them once. He didn’t know what they were.

  “Ivana?”

  She looked up. Vaughn was watching her, his own blood already glistening red on the plate. “We have to be quick.”

  She took a deep breath and scraped a few drops of blood off with her fingernail, and then onto the plate. Vaughn immediately mixed the blood with the needle. Then, they waited.

  He looked at the cut she had made. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I figured since you’re so…ah…handy with a knife already, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal for you to draw your own blood.”

  “It’s fine,” she said, unsettled that he had noticed her own discomfort. She deflected. “That researcher didn’t seem to like you much.”

  Vaughn grimaced. “Citalli? Uh, yeah.”

  “What’d you do to her?”

  “Well, I think she was hoping for a little more than I gave her.”

  Ivana snorted. “What, all the women around here don’t already know what to expect?”

  “She’s the only woman from here that I’ve slept with.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “I try to avoid women that I have to see again on a regular basis,” Vaughn said.

  “Well. That makes sense,” she said dryly. “What happened with her, then?”

  “It was when I first came here. She was angry at Perth for some reason—they were together at the time—and was trying to get back at him. She told me they were no longer together and just wanted some temporary comfort.” He shrugged. “I didn’t question it, and I’m certain the fact that she’s a charmblood didn’t hurt her skills of persuasion. Unfortunately, she was hoping for a little more than one night and was furious when I refused. As a consequence, she holds a grudge against me, and Perth hates me.”

  Ivana shook her head. “For once, Vaughn, I can sympathize with you. Women who are so petty deserve what they get.”

  He smiled and pulled a sliver of bindblood aether out of the pouch at his side. He crushed it and rubbed it into the first cuts he had made, and then offered it to her. “Keeps it from scarring,” he said. “Shallow cuts like these will be gone in the morning, without a trace. Learned that somewhere along the way.”

  She accepted his administration of the aether. “You do this all the time?”

  He shrugged, watching while the latest mixture of blood started to shimmer, and then fade to silver. He pried it off the plate with his knife and set it aside, and then made another cut. “You get used to it.”

  “But not everyone does it.”

  He was silent for a moment. “Not everyone cares that using our gifts could end up causing even more harm.”

  “Yet you care enough to do this to yourself? Even without hard evidence?”

  “Like I said. You get used to it.” He shifted and then gave a weak chuckle. “Honestly, it’s not so bad. There’s something almost…” He shook his head and fell silent.

  “Comforting about the pain?” she asked, before she could help herself. It was too raw, too close. Damn it, get control, Ivana.

  He didn’t look up. “Thanks. As if I wasn’t already enough of an aberration.”

  She looked at his forearms. She had never noticed them before, but they had a myriad of paper thin scars, fading into non-existence, from long ago, before he had discovered he could put bindblood aether on the cuts, no doubt. So much like her own. “It wasn’t meant to be a slight,” she said quietly.

  He looked up at her, studying her face.

  She didn’t know what led her to do it. Maybe it was the feeling that mixing her blood with someone else’s was somehow intimate. Maybe it was the weeks, even months of time with him, flirting with the dangerous notion that someone might begin to know her…flirting with the dangerous notion that there was someone else to know.

  Maybe it was simply seeing her own weakness displayed so openly on someone else.

 
; She put down her knife, loosened her robe, and slid the right side off her shoulder, baring her entire arm to him.

  He looked at the generous amount of skin that her nightshift displayed first, of course, but then at her arm. He stared at the scars. They were hard to see, but he would know what he was looking for, since he had seen them before.

  “At least you have an excuse,” she said.

  “I don’t understand,” he said, not taking his eyes off the scars.

  She slipped the robe back over her shoulder. “Don’t you?”

  He met her eyes.

  Her chest felt tight. She felt exposed. She didn’t know why she was doing this to herself. She nodded toward the most recent cut on his arm, where he had failed to siphon the blood off. “Your blood is turning.”

  He cursed and looked away to peel the aether off his arm. He tucked it into his own pouch, hanging at his side, and didn’t look at Ivana again.

  Maybe she had made a mistake. Maybe he had no idea what she was talking about.

  They continued in silence for a while, until he suddenly broke it. “None of those are fresh,” he said.

  “No. They’re not.” She had traded drawing her own blood for drawing the blood of others. The former hadn’t erased the pain, it had just allowed her to control it. The latter, on the other hand, had desensitized her to pain, until she no longer felt it.

  At least…until recently.

  She could see his mind turning it over. Trying to puzzle her out. Drawing conclusions. She could tell he wanted to speak, but he wasn’t sure what to say.

  “How did you know my brother?”

  She made one cut a little too deep and sucked air through her teeth with a hiss. She quickly put her arm over the saucer, not wanting to waste the especially heavy trickle of blood that ensued.

  That had not been what she had expected.

  “I believe we’ve already been over this,” she said. She was not discussing this with him. She didn’t care how vulnerable she was feeling right now. She was simply not going to tell him.

  “I’m not trying to be nosy. Really. I’ll admit he was an arrogant ass, but this is still my brother we’re talking about. What did he do to you?”

  She slapped the knife down on the table. “Destroyed my life,” she said through clenched teeth. “That’s all you need to know.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “That’s rather dramatic.”

  Something inside her snapped. “Do you know that at the university, my father was thought to be one of the most promising young scholars there? He could have stayed. He could have become a teacher of more than snotty-nosed noble brats. But as prestigious as that would have been, young scholars barely make enough to provide for themselves, let alone a family. He met my mother. So he took a job as a tutor. It paid better. We were comfortable enough. He should have stayed at the university. He would have lived longer.”

  “My brother killed your father?”

  “No, your father killed my father, because your brother was a self-absorbed ass who couldn’t take responsibility for his own actions, and your father was an arrogant, cold man who probably cared more for the mice in his stables than some commoner.” What was she doing? She hadn’t spoken of this to anyone. Ever. She spoke, and she didn’t believe the words coming out of her own mouth. She wanted to be angry. She wanted to hate him. She wanted to believe it was his fault.

  She only hated herself, as she always had, and that made her angrier than anything else could have.

  Vaughn didn’t say anything. He just watched her, knife held limp in his hand.

  “Your brother took advantage of a girl who didn’t know any better, who was naïve enough to believe the honeyed words of a handsome noble when he spoke of love, when all he really wanted was a free whore.”

  She had said the words so many times, but to her girls. About their situations. That the men were as much to blame, probably more, than they were. In every case, it was true. Every case, except hers. Because she couldn’t bring herself to believe her own advice.

  The dam had been compromised. It had been leaking for months. Now, it broke, and the pain welled up like the blood from her broken skin.

  She knew the truth. It was her fault, her fault her father was dead, her fault they hadn’t had the resources after her father’s death to care for her sick mother, her fault her sister was the gods knew where in slavery.

  Her fault she had run. Her fault. She should have known better. She had known better.

  She had known Airell was trouble, but she had been so desperate to prove herself, so desperate to be thought of as a woman, that she had pretended she hadn’t known. Even when she pressed him on when they could be together, she knew it was a lie when he had always said, soon, love, soon. But by that time, she was so ashamed of herself, ashamed for falling prey to him, ashamed of, at times, liking it, she couldn’t bring herself to admit it.

  Until it was too late. Until she had happily announced she thought she was pregnant, sure that would bind him to her.

  Stupid, stupid girl.

  She had never seen him again.

  “He got you with child, didn’t he?” Vaughn asked.

  She gritted her teeth. She had already said too much.

  “I’ve seen the stretch marks, Ivana. I can add.”

  Shut up. Shut up!

  She only knew one way to get him to shut up.

  “When my father demanded compensation for my virginity and an allowance for the child, Gildas told him he should have thought of the consequences when he didn’t keep his whoring daughter under control. My father challenged him to a duel.” Foolish man. Swordplay had never been his strong suit, but he had been blinded by love. Love that Ivana had so desperately sought, when it had been there all along. “Your father ran him through with a sword about five seconds into the fight.

  “Without my father’s income, we couldn’t afford to live. The pitiless noble he worked for let us stay on his estate just long enough that, after my mother fell sick and died, he felt the need to try and recoup his losses by selling me and my sister into slavery. When they came for me, I ran. My sister wasn’t so lucky.”

  Ivana could hear her own heart thudding in her chest, anger, shame, frustration warring. She wanted to strangle Vaughn for making her feel this way. She wanted to hate him for being a specter of her past come to haunt her these past months, and she most certainly wanted to despise him for pushing her to open herself up to him in a way she never had to anyone else.

  “What happened to the child?” Vaughn asked.

  “Premature birth. Died a few hours later.” After all of that. She hadn’t expected to care. She had. Could still remember holding the tiny, silent body, too numb even to cry. She had cried later, when her had mother died. When she was alone, and scared, and helpless in the months and years that had followed. And then one day, she had found the tears were simply no longer necessary. One day, she had stood over a corpse and found herself as dead inside as the body at her feet.

  The room was silent. She couldn’t look at Vaughn. Why, oh why, had she chosen to speak at all? Because they shared scars?

  Vaughn scooped up the pile of aether they had made into the coin purse. “I would recommend keeping it on you. I don’t know if they’re searching your room.”

  She was suddenly immensely, deeply grateful to him that he didn’t try to pursue the subject. She took the purse and put it under her pillow, but not before removing a sliver and tucking it between her breasts. She had nothing to attach the purse to at present, but it couldn’t hurt to be prepared. She walked to the wall and put her hand on it. She didn’t know if it faced outward, but it felt like the place where a window would have been had it been above ground.

  There was a rustle from behind her, and then he joined her at the wall. In his hand was a larger knife. Long, slender. For cutting vegetables. He handed it to her, hilt first.

  “Not your dagger,” he said. “But should you need something. Don’t let them catch you
with it.”

  She took the knife, held the blade up to the light, and turned it. It was functional, if not elegant. She’d have to figure out a way to carry it discretely without impaling herself, though. She didn’t have a sheath. Maybe she could “borrow” a few scraps of leather from somewhere and make one for herself.

  Vaughn was still talking. “Yaotel would be highly displeased, to put it mildly, if he finds out I helped you.” He hesitated. “I realize that I didn’t put you under a condition of silence when I offered you the help. And I realize that should it become useful to you to tell someone, you probably would…” He didn’t say, betray me, but that’s what he meant. “But…” He shrugged. “There it is.”

  She set the knife down on the table. So he did understand her, knew what he was risking, and yet he helped her anyway.

  She didn’t understand him.

  He ran a hand over his face, made to speak, stopped, and then finally spoke. “I know what it is to be used,” he said quietly. “I went to my fiancée for help, after I had been changed. She made it clear that the only reason she had been with me was for the wealth and power my family would offer.” He paused. “I had thought she loved me. I had thought I loved her.” He hesitated. “I know it’s not the same thing, but…” He trailed off, fiddling with the cuff of his sleeve.

  No, it wasn’t. “I miss the moon,” she said.

  “Not the sun?”

  “It’s been a long time since sunlight held any warmth for me.” Darkness, on the other hand, had become her friend, her companion. It was peaceful, even in chaos.

  “I know a way up onto the roof. There’s a guard, but I can get past one guard easily enough.” He paused. “Want to risk it?”

  She stared at the wall, and longing filled her. “Absolutely.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Science and Moonlight

  It had been a while since Vaughn had been up here, but it had always been his favorite haunt, especially on nights he couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t much: a tiny balcony cut outside a window from an empty room on the topmost floor of the manor. It was mostly hidden from prying eyes by the slope of the roof, yet allowed an unhindered view, for himself, of the moon and the forest beyond the walls.