Banebringer

by Carol A Park

  Vaughn fought to remain in control of the feat. He wasn’t skilled at this. His vision blurred, but it wasn’t enough to prevent him from pulling his bow out and loosing an arrow into his father’s back.

  His father’s mouth formed a surprised ‘o,’ but Vaughn saw no more, because a wave of weakness pushed him to his knees.

  The room swam in front of him, and he felt strangely cold. Too much. It had been too much, but he wasn’t dead, so he would live—assuming his father didn’t.

  He felt a rush of wind, and then a shout.

  He tried to look, but felt only cold stone against his cheek.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Death

  Ivana struggled to push herself up before Gildas reached her.

  It turned out she didn’t have to. He became rigid, and Ivana saw Vaughn reach for his bow out of the corner of her eye.

  Gildas blinked and turned to face his son, who had fallen to his hands and knees. Blood blossomed from the arrow in Gildas’ back, and yet he still managed to change direction and lurch instead toward Vaughn.

  He started to lift his dagger, and she propelled herself onto his back and slit his throat.

  Gildas staggered. The dagger fell from his hand; he fell to his knees, and then finally collapsed onto the ground.

  Ivana retrieved her dagger and moved cautiously toward Gildas. She nudged him with her foot to turn him onto his back. He didn’t appear to be breathing, but it couldn’t hurt to be sure this time.

  Dead already or not, she felt grim satisfaction at plunging her dagger into the heart of the man who had killed her father.

  Only when the blood pulsing from his body had slowed to a trickle did she turn back toward Vaughn. He was laying facedown, cheek pressed to the stone floor.

  “Vaughn,” Ivana said, shaking him. “Vaughn.”

  He groaned. “I’m alive.”

  “Then we need to get out of here.”

  “A minute,” he said. “Just a minute.”

  Ivana tapped her fingers impatiently against her thigh, and then shook him again. “Vaughn!”

  Vaughn stirred, and then pushed himself up. He looked first around the room.

  Gildas lay face-up, a broken arrow protruding from underneath him, in a pool of his own blood.

  His mouth worked, and then he looked at Ivana. “Is he dead?”

  “Yes,” Ivana said. Amazingly enough. The man had the strongest constitution she had ever seen. “And I made sure he stayed dead this time.”

  He glanced at Gildas again and then turned away.

  “What happened?”

  “He didn’t take kindly to your putting a hole in his back, so he tried to kill you before he died. I stopped him.”

  “So you saved my life.”

  “Or I prevented a bloodbane from coming through.” She stood up. “Let’s go. I don’t know if they have guards standing by.”

  Almost as if in response, the sound of jangling armor and footsteps sounded distantly down one of the adjoining halls, and both of them rose to their feet and started for the stairs.

  Toward freedom? Toward safety? Toward…what, exactly, for her? Was mere survival enough?

  She hesitated.

  “What are you doing?” Vaughn hissed as he placed one foot on the bottom stair.

  “Staying behind.”

  “Why in the abyss would you do that?”

  “To slow the guards down.” She would kill as many of them as she could, of course, but even she had her limits, especially when already exhausted.

  The guards were getting closer. “So, what, you’re going to stay and sacrifice yourself?”

  She was silent. It was a fitting end. A just end. And why not? It would take so much energy to repair what Vaughn had broken. She didn’t know if she had it in her. Not after today, not after the outpouring of her girls and her own tears.

  “I can’t let you do this.”

  Damn it, why wouldn’t he just leave? “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’ll stay,” he said. “You go with your girls. It’s where you belong.”

  She didn’t belong anywhere. Kayden had offered to take the girls to his family estate, far to the northeast in Fuilyn, and from there they would find new places for them. But her? There was no place for her. Only more of the empty darkness that had consumed her life since she had started down this path.

  A new voice spoke from behind them. “Both of you are idiots. Go and make sure the others get on their way safely.”

  Ivana started. Danton?

  “I’ll take care of it,” Danton said, more insistently, and then placed one hand on each of their chests and pushed them back into the stairway.

  The guards burst into the room.

  Vaughn touched Ivana’s arm and wrapped her in invisibility. Despite Danton’s orders, they both stood there, watching the scene unfold.

  Except Danton was no longer Danton. He was Vaughn’s father, in every perfect detail. And the corpse on the ground?

  Vaughn stared. He caught even Ivana staring. It was her own.

  The guards—a good half dozen of them—skidded as one to a jumbled halt. “Ri Gildas?” one of them asked as he extracted himself from the group. “We heard there was a problem…”

  “Taken care of,” Danton as Vaughn’s father said. He gestured to the corpse.

  “Good, good,” the spokesman said, nodding. He was obviously relieved not to have to deal with it himself.

  But they hesitated when they saw what Danton did next. He removed one of the lanterns from the wall, broke it, and spilled the oil over the corpse. He then promptly lit it on fire.

  “Ri Gildas?” another guard asked. “What…?”

  Danton spat on the corpse. “The assassin my demonspawn son worked with.” He nudged the corpse with his foot, encouraging the flames. “She doesn’t deserve anything better than this.”

  He looked up. “Go on. Tell your superiors that the ringleader was the assassin Sweetblade, and she is now dead. Tell them also that I’m starting in immediate pursuit of the Banebringer Teyrnon and his associates.” He turned around, facing Vaughn and Ivana, though he surely couldn’t see them.

  The guards nodded and filtered back out of the room.

  As soon as they were gone, Danton collapsed against the doorway, his illusion disappearing. “I know you’re still there,” he said.

  Vaughn let go of his invisibility. “Danton?”

  He closed his eyes. “I’ll be okay. I’ll be right behind. Don’t worry. Go. Just go, please.” He glanced back. The corpse had almost been consumed beyond recognition, which was, of course, the point.

  “Don’t you understand?” he said, but he looked at Ivana. “You’re dead. Do you want to be found alive again?”

  Ivana stared back at Danton. “You just—” she started. Risked everything for a woman he barely knew. The illusion might not have worked. He could have been killed or captured himself.

  He smiled, almost wistfully. “I know. Now would you get out of here?”

  Ivana turned and started up the stairs, though her compliance was involuntary. Her conscious self was too much in shock to argue.

  Vaughn followed her in silence while they slipped out of the door and past guards in the invisibility Vaughn provided, on the way to the rendezvous point with the women, their children, Yasril, and Tharqan.

  Ivana breathed a sigh of relief as they left the palace compound. They had all made it this far, and with what Danton had done, they would have no problem making it much, much farther before someone realized that Ri Gildas wasn’t coming back.

  And as for her…

  She was dead.

  No. Sweetblade was dead.

  Was she angry? In one foolhardy move Danton had ensured that she—Ivana—would have to start over. Rebuild a reputation under a name other than Sweetblade.

  Or…not?

  She didn’t have to. She could truly start over. Anywhere, as anyone. She had the resources to do whatever and go wherever she
wanted. Did she want to continue on the path she had chosen so long ago?

  If the past months had taught her anything, it was that she wouldn’t be able to just leave that life and move on. The ghosts of her past would haunt her, and she would have new burdens to add to those that she had run from in the first place. She would have to find a way to deal with them. A different way. A potentially more painful way.

  She couldn’t do it before. What made her think she would be able to now?

  Her head was still reeling with the possibilities by the time they arrived at the rendezvous point. Her girls immediately swarmed her, and she had to push aside her own problems for later contemplation.

  Eventually, the girls drifted away, crying or laughing and hugging each other and their children for the hundredth time.

  She gestured to Aleena, who hung back. “Is everything ready?”

  Aleena nodded. “They’ve just been waiting for you.”

  What? Not “we?” “They?”

  Aleena hesitated.

  “You’re not coming,” Ivana stated.

  “No. I…I think it’s time I made my own way, Da.”

  The two women looked at each other. Aleena was tense, as if expecting Ivana to demand that she stay.

  Or as if expecting a threat.

  Ivana closed her eyes. Whatever she did going forward, there were people who would pay to know that the person behind the assassin known as Sweetblade was alive. Which meant she had to trust anyone who knew her real identity to continue to keep it a secret.

  Her real identity? Was that what Sweetblade was? And yet Sweetblade was dead, and so likewise was that identity. How did she function now? Who was she without Sweetblade?

  Did she trust Vaughn? This whole affair had begun because she had needed to get rid of Vaughn, who knew her identity. Some impish god was cackling at the delicious irony that now, in the end, she would choose to trust him with that very thing.

  But what of Danton, whom she hardly knew? Yaotel, who hated her for good reason?

  If she could trust all of them, certainly she could trust Aleena.

  She could take this step, at least. If she thought of it as an experiment, the idea of such final trust wasn’t so terrifying.

  She opened her eyes. “Good luck…my friend,” she said quietly. “If you ever need anything…”

  Aleena visibly relaxed, and then she smiled. “The same to you, Ivana.”

  With that, she turned and walked away—and Ivana couldn’t help but feel that by letting her go, she had given up a part of herself. Now she had to figure out what would take its place.

  Vaughn hung back as Ivana’s girls gathered around her. Yasril and Tharqan were taking seriously their role of guarding the entrance to the old, closed off sewer exit from the city. They were on the east side; there wasn’t a lot of traffic here, so it was their best bet for making an undetected exit.

  “You ready?” Tharqan asked him.

  “Ready?”

  “To get out of here.”

  He glanced back at Ivana.

  “The smart one, Aleena—she’s already got it all figured out,” Tharqan said.

  “We donated some blood while we were waiting, so they have some resources,” Yasril added.

  Ivana was having a side conversation with Aleena. “All right,” he said. “Just…give me a minute, okay?”

  Tharqan and Yasril exchanged glances and then shrugged. “Guess we should wait for Danton,” Tharqan said. Then he hesitated. “He is coming?”

  “Hopefully,” Vaughn said.

  He stepped aside and caught Ivana’s eye as Aleena left her. She pulled apart from the group, farther back into the tunnel.

  She immediately handed him the qixli, a poignant symbol of the inevitable.

  “Thanks,” he said, wanting to say more, not knowing what to say or how to say it. “What will you do?”

  “My primary concern is getting my girls to safety. The life I provided for them is no longer viable, but I need to at least make sure they get safely to Fuilyn with Kayden and Caira.”

  They both turned to look at the aforementioned couple. Caira was in the process of handing Kayden her son. She was crying.

  He shook his head. That was obviously another story.

  “You?”

  He turned back to Ivana. “Disappear,” he said, and then flashed a smile. “Literally and figuratively.” He hesitated. The inevitable was upon him. “So. I suppose this is where we part ways.”

  “Indeed.”

  He met her eyes, and his stomach twisted. “It’s been…” He began, but he didn’t know how to continue. Instead, he reached out a hand to touch her face.

  She closed her eyes, briefly.

  It was enough. He turned both of them invisible as he pulled her into his arms and pressed his lips to hers once more.

  She accepted the kiss, but didn’t return it. He pulled back, looking into her eyes. “Disappear with me, Ivana,” he said.

  She started to shake her head.

  “After you’ve secured the future of your girls, of course.”

  “Vaughn…”

  “Just a…companion for a lonely road.”

  She gazed back at him. “Vaughn, I have the opportunity to start over. I don’t know exactly what that means for me yet, but whatever I decide to do, I’m not going to begin this path the same way I began the other.”

  “I’m not my brother,” he said softly.

  “No. Though I hate to admit it, you are a better man.” She paused. “But you’re close enough where it counts.”

  He sucked in air through his teeth, trying to ignore how that smarted.

  Pity touched her eyes. “You’ll get over it. I have full confidence in that.” She let go and stepped away from him.

  He would. But he knew she would be in his dreams for a long time to come.

  She touched his cheek briefly. “Take care of yourself, Vaughn.”

  And then she walked away.

  He watched her until she disappeared into the distance with her women and Kayden, without a glance back.

  Not even a single glance back, damn it.

  Danton and Tharqan appeared a moment later. “Ready?” Tharqan asked a second time.

  Vaughn tore his eyes away from the place where she had been lost to his sight. “You made it back,” he said to Danton, relieved.

  “I told you not to worry,” Danton said, his boyish grin back in place.

  Vaughn looked back at the city. Smoke curled up from the palace district. “I have a feeling we’re going to want to be far away from here when the Conclave dogs come hunting.”

  “Besides,” Tharqan said, coming up beside him and slapping him on the back. “We’ve got a lot to do yet. You know. A government to overthrow. Gods to discredit.” He grinned, and Vaughn smiled back.

  For the first time in nine years, Vaughn felt hope. Not only for himself, but for all of his kind. That things could turn around.

  Whatever the priests were up to, it would all be exposed soon.

  But Tharqan was right. They still had a long road ahead of them.

  “All right. I’m ready.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Carol lives in the Lancaster, PA area with her husband and two energetic boys. She loves reading (duh), writing (double-duh), music, movies, and other perfectly normal things like parsing Hebrew verbs and teaching herself new dead languages. She has two master’s degrees in the areas of ancient near eastern studies and languages.

  For more information on upcoming books, visit www.carolapark.com

 

 

 
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