Oriech plucked Dowser from the ground and held him out. “Take care of your puppy, Desmeres.”
Desmeres collected the wriggling beast. “I intend to.”
Genara stood. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Mr. Oriech. I am happy… and somewhat troubled to have met you.”
“I trust you shall take what you’ve learned here to heart.”
“I assure you I will,” she said. “Oh! If I may ask another question?”
“Ask.”
“We speak of the gods, the creators… Why don’t we speak their names?”
“Genara, you must always take care when you speak someone’s name.”
“But why?”
“Because if you speak it, they may answer. A fine journey to you both.”
When Oriech spoke his final words, a stiff wind rushed through the room, stirring up the flames. Embers twirled and rushed from the fireplace, filling the small room. Genara and Desmeres flinched and turned away. When they turned back, the room was empty. No table, no chairs, no cabinets, no rug, and no Oriech. Not only had it all vanished, but there was the sense that somehow it had never been there.
Genara blinked and looked about in disbelief, then turned to Desmeres, who did not appear surprised in the slightest.
“I can still taste the tea in my mouth. The sweetness of the honey,” she said. “That was real.”
“It is possible that what has just occurred is more firmly rooted in reality than anything either of us has experienced before.”
“What have I gotten myself into…”
#
For several minutes, neither Desmeres nor Genara spoke. Each climbed into the cart and Desmeres had guided it though the crowded streets toward the inn. All the while Genara stared at her hands, now and again licking her lips as if to hammer home that even if her eyes and ears had lied to her, her sense of taste never would. She retreated so far into her head, grappling with the gravity of the situation, she failed to react to Dowser slowly working his way from Desmeres’s coat onto her lap.
“Here we are,” Desmeres said.
His voice jarred Genara from her contemplation. She recoiled somewhat and pushed Dowser to the bench between them.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“The inn. I thank you for your visit, and I wish you a safe journey back to—”
“I’m not going.”
“Not going where?”
“Not going back. I’m staying with you.”
“I don’t recall inviting you.”
“Desmeres, we just had a word with a messenger from the gods. In a roundabout way, he brought me here. That’s not the sort of thing one disregards. I’m here for a reason. Even if I don’t know what it is, I damn well mean to finish what I’ve started.”
“Not to lessen your value, Genara, but I suspect I was the target and purpose of the visit. It is my destiny and supposed redemption on display, not yours.”
“Oh, really? He manipulated you to bring me to you. And he did it ages ago. Which means he knew you’d be seeing me, and he knew what I would need to know to find you. And I was the one who had you turn around to meet him. I’m tied up in this, Desmeres. And he is the messenger, not me. So if I’m here, it is because I was meant to be here.”
“Don’t try to figure out what you were meant to do, Genara. You were meant to do what you want to do.”
“Fine, then I want to go with you. Desmeres, you know how I told you I was proud of my life?”
“Are you going to confess to me that you were lying?”
“No. I was going to confess that the one thing that had always bothered me was how little difference I have made. I have done fine work, achieved more than anyone could have expected of me. But nothing I have done is enduring. When I am gone, I will not be remembered.”
He sighed. “So you’ve reached that age have you?”
“What about my age?” she snapped.
“I’ve lived for several human generations. It has become painfully clear that past a certain age, humans become acutely aware of their mortality. I understand that feeling is most acute when they’ve not yet had children.”
She sneered. “Not you, too. If you knew half as much about mortals as you seem to think, you’d know that talk like that is enough to earn a hair pin to the ear. Now I’ve made up my mind. I’m coming with you until I feel my role in this has been fulfilled. If for once in my life the eyes of the divine are turned in my direction, I intend to make a good showing.”
“I have no intention of supporting you along the way.”
“I have no intention of needing support, Desmeres. Now wait here while I fetch my things. Don’t even think of wandering off. I found you once, remember. I could find you again.”
With that, she stepped from the cart and hurried inside. Desmeres looked to Dowser and dragged him back by the tail after he very nearly marched off the seat in his eagerness to follow her.
“Dowser, shame on you. You should know better than to fall after a woman just because she smells nice.” He pulled the puppy to his lap. “There are far better reasons to fall for a woman like that.”
He sighed.
“She’s wrong, you know. If we were to leave now, she would never find us again. … Still, no sense wasting her time by making her try.”
Genara returned far more swiftly than Desmeres would have expected, bundled a bit more warmly and clutching a few bags. He took them and opened a wooden hatch leading to the flat cargo bed of the cart. The bed was largely empty, so there was ample room to store her things. Dowser made a mad dash for the bed, drawn to the scents that neither Genara or Desmeres could detect, but Desmeres snatched him back and shut the hatch.
“Do you have enough provisions, or should we stop at the market for more?”
“I’m sure we can manage with what I have,” Desmeres said. “With two horses to feed, I hadn’t planned on spending more than a night or two at a time without stopping at a town or village with a stable.”
“But you are on the run. I would have thought you would need to stay hidden.”
“I’ve spent most of my life having to cope with one person or another out for my blood. It would surprise you how little effort it takes to stay ahead of your enemies once you’ve taken a few simple precautions.”
He helped her to the seat and snapped the reins to guide the cart to the nearest gate. They rode in silence for a time, watching first the city, then the snowy countryside roll by. Desmeres glanced to her from time to time. She was endeavoring to put on a brave face, but he could see a weight upon her that wasn’t there before. As the night and its sharper cold began to set in, she began to shiver.
“Do you have anything warmer to wear?” he asked.
“I do. In my bag. I don’t need it.”
“Are you trembling for some other reason than the cold?”
“Don’t you worry about me, Desmeres. Just keep your mind on your own problems. I’ll worry about me.” She clutched her hands tightly and gazed into the darkness. “Where exactly are we going?”
“Thanks to your valuable insight, we now know that the Elite intend to raid my storehouses. If they have a full list, it won’t take much effort to work out which is the most important. If Oriech found it reasonable to interfere with my life and yours to deliver that information to me, I can only assume it is an event with far deeper implications than I had realized. That is reason enough to rearrange my schedule and clear it out first.”
She nodded and crossed her arms.
“What precisely do you imagine your presence here will achieve?” he asked.
“I’m sure it’ll be clear when the time comes. This is destiny, right?”
“Destiny is a badly overused word. Most of the things chalked up to destiny are just average people doing what they have to in order to survive. Destiny isn’t something you set out to fulfill, it’s what you look back on when you’ve lived your life.”
“How can you act as though this doesn’t mean
anything to you?” she snapped.
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. How dare you have a chat with the messenger of the gods and continue with the same smug attitude as before.”
“It isn’t my first brush with ‘destiny’ and it won’t be my last.”
“That doesn’t make it any less monumental, does it? My family lives in Verril, and every day they see the queen, they bow their heads with the same reverence as the first time. Something important is important no matter how common it is to you. You should treat it as such.”
She uncrossed her arms and adjusted her gloves, then crossed her arms again and tapped her foot. A soft thump drew his eyes to the area between his feet. For the fifth time since they’d left the city, Dowser had wriggled free of Desmeres’s coat and plopped down to the floor of the cart. The puppy had the astounding ability to unfailingly land upon his back. Wedged between Desmeres’s feet, the puppy could only flap his stubby legs and wriggle.
“Here,” Desmeres said, reaching down to fetch the beast. “Hold onto Dowser.”
“I don’t like dogs.”
“Exactly what use do you think you’ll be to ‘destiny’ if holding a puppy is too much to ask of you?”
“I hardly think tending to your pet is the sort of thing fate had in mind for me.”
“Oh? So you were summoned in order to sit beside me and fret instead? Take him. He’s a crucial part of my plans for the future. He’s enough of a handful without also having to guide the cart.”
“Then let me guide the cart.”
“Just take the puppy. The sooner he gets used to you, and you to him, the easier this will be for all involved.”
“Fine,” she grumbled, holding out her arms.
He dropped the puppy, who almost immediately slipped through her grip and landed on her lap. Between Dowser’s excited squirming, his baggy coat, and her inexperience with animals Genara spent quite a bit of time fumbling. When she finally managed to keep him relatively secure, she was covered in tawny fur and the dog was sitting in her lap facing front, tipping his head up periodically to sniff at her face and neck.
“You are doing this on purpose,” she fumed.
“Everything I do is on purpose.”
“Listen, if I’m going to be riding along with you, I want to know a thing or two more about the man I’m helping.”
“I’ve already spent a drunken night blathering into your ear. And you shared a bed with me. That’s more than most people I’ve worked with over the years could have hoped to achieve.”
“It isn’t enough for me. Tell me about this woman of yours. Trigorah.”
“Trigorah… What can I say about her that I haven’t said already? She was a match for me in every conceivable way. We met as adversaries, even if she wasn’t sure of it at the time, and in a way we never ceased to be so. Even as we became closer, it was always a dance. Every word we spoke was in some way measured to hide some information and tease other information out.”
“The most cherished relationship you’ve ever had was based upon secrecy and deceit?”
“All relationships are based on secrecy and deceit. The average person will live and die without ever accepting his or her true self. Do you honestly believe anyone would willingly reveal the truth to a stranger? To risk that sort of judgment and rejection? Perish the thought. No, the game is the thing. Who continues to work at a riddle once they know the answer? The mystery is what keeps a relationship vital. And no one played it better than Trigorah.”
“So true love is based on lies.”
“No, no. Never lies. It is a poor player of the game who resorts to lies. The truth is often so much more misleading, and furthermore it cannot be disproved. The proper way to deceive is to conceal. We mislead and tell half-truths. Invite someone down the wrong path. Sprinkle the clues to send them astray. Let them work out for themselves what you would have them believe. If you do it properly and let them deduce the lies you would have told, even when confronted with the truth, they will hold firm to the lie. Otherwise they would have to admit their mistake.”
“Talking to you curdles my stomach sometimes, Desmeres. You can be a monster.”
“Maybe so, but at least I’m an honest one.”
She clutched the puppy a little tighter as it tried to wriggle free again. “You said Trigorah died because of you.”
“In a way.”
“How?”
“She’d been seeking the Red Shadow, and at the time I was working by her side to find him. I was able to lead her to him, as well as the other Chosen. She and her Elites won the day, with no small amount of aid from the General called Epidime. When all was said and done, and the Chosen were captured, Trigorah made ready to present her prize to General Bagu. Epidime had other ideas. He planned to take credit himself. It was the latest of a long string of abuses of power and poor decisions in her opinion, and so she decided to end her association with the Alliance Army once and for all. It would be… difficult to explain what happened next. Suffice to say, the exchange ended with Epidime hurling Trigorah, who was already beyond rescue, into a valley.”
“That’s awful.”
He lowered his gaze. “There is a grim humor to it, really. As her enemy, we became closer to one another than either of us had ever been to another person. But the day we joined forces, it was the beginning of the end. Let that be a lesson to you, I suppose. Don’t fall in love with me. It won’t end well.”
“First of all, I wouldn’t worry about me falling in love with you. Even if you weren’t an over-confident idiot who is too full of himself to look after himself properly, one of the key skills in my line of work is learning to keep love one-sided. Second, if you are avoiding love for fear of how it might end, you’ve got a lot to learn about love.”
He nodded and smirked. “Maybe so. Maybe so…”
Chapter 4
Travel in the Northern Alliance was an unpleasant experience in the best of circumstances. Cold that barely relented even in the summer had forced the people to cluster into small, isolated villages. Thick blankets of snow and regular snowstorms made roads barely more navigable than the fields and forests, so travel times could swell by several days depending on the weather. Most residents of the north were born, lived, and died within the same tiny village, never straying more than half a day from their homes. The solitude was one of the first things Desmeres had been forced to become accustomed to upon leaving his birthplace to seek his fortune.
It took only a few days with Genara to begin to remember how delightful the company of a spirited companion could be. Genara was pleasant to have along if for no other reason than, as neither a client or target, he was free to share the more entertaining tales of his long career. As the harshness of night descended upon them for a fourth time, he shared one of his favorite tales.
“It was a fairly common source of work for us,” Desmeres said, continuing the anecdote that had stretched over several miles of road. “The man was certain his wife was unfaithful, which she plainly was. He hired the Red Shadow to mete out what he felt was a proper punishment to both her and the current focus of her dalliances. In our preparations, we learned our would-be benefactor wasn’t precisely a shining beacon of marital fidelity either. It seemed only fair to approach his wife with this information. A wealthy woman in her own right and similarly jealous and hypocritical…”
“You didn’t…” Genara said, covering her mouth.
“Of course I did. I offered our services to her as well. It was only fair.”
“And she did she hire you?”
“Of course.”
Genara threw her head back in laughter. The words “musical” or “melodic” were commonly applied to women’s laughter. Those words did not apply to Genara. Her laugh was boisterous and indulgent, not an ounce of shame or restraint. It was the sort of laugh that felt like a reward for a joke well told.
“The job itself was simple. When you are tasked with eliminating two p
eople who share supper each evening, one dose of poison is all it takes.”
“That is a pair who deserved one another.”
“I’ve got to imagine you’ve got your fair share of interesting tales from your career.”
“Oh, heaps of them.”
“Care to share?”
“Absolutely not. I’ve got to return to that job when this trip is through. I don’t trust you to keep your mouth shut about me.”
“That’s prudent. But surely you’ve got some stories that are safe to tell.”
She drummed her fingers on her lap. “I wasn’t always in my present career.”
“Oh, no?”
She shook her head. “Father held out hope that I would follow in the family business of metalworking. I tried it for a bit. Couldn’t get the knack. Then for a time I made some coin on the side by applying tattoos.”
“Tattoos?”
“I was good. Fast, too. Which is important, because some people just can’t handle pain. It paid well. Better than when I was a singer.”
“Oh, this is getting better and better. You sang?”
“Not well enough to keep myself fed.”
“Care to give a demonstration?”
“Not on your life.”
A stirring between them drew their attention. Dowser—who, after the second day, seemed to finally grasp the fact that attempting to explore while riding a moving cart seldom earned him anything more than a tumble—had finally learned not to wander about unless the cart had stopped. That came as a great relief to Genara, who hadn’t been enjoying her task of wrangling the less-than-brilliant animal. He had been sleeping peacefully between them for most of the day. Now he stood bolt up, nose high and eyes wide. He rumbled with something between a growl and a howl. It was a very distinctive sound, and quite efficiently communicated the little beast’s fear and agitation.
“He smells something he doesn’t like,” Genara said.
She reached out and patted the puppy. The woman was clearly attempting to comfort the creature, but the rigidness of the motion and the look of vague disgust on her face suggested the gesture was not one of affection.
The Redemption of Desmeres Page 16