Dead But Once

by Auston Habershaw

  That did it. The two of them left in a hurry, or the closest semblance of a hurry a woman in her eighties could manage.

  Andluss was still there. “I beg your pardon, Your Highness, but was that wise?”

  Sahand grunted. “What do you care? You’re getting what you wanted out of it, yes?”

  Andluss nodded slowly, twiddling his pudgy fingers, “Yes, but Velia Hesswyn isn’t one to surrender to fate. You’ve only driven her toward this Waymar. She may seek common cause with him.”

  Sahand laughed. “I can think of no richer fate for Waymar of Eddon than to be entangled in that old woman’s bitter scheming. I know exactly what she will do, too: she will seek to subvert Waymar’s nephew to her cause—she has grandchildren enough to do it, too. A boy like that is easy to snare with a pretty smile. He will be beset on all sides. Then, when she has controlled the boy, she will eliminate the man. Even if Hesswyn does make common cause, she will serve as our diversion. Waymar and his allies will have all their attention pointing in the wrong direction.”

  Andluss steepled his fingers beneath a double chin. “So . . . it was intentional, then? You knew the assassin would fail. How?”

  Sahand shrugged. “Let’s just say I had a reasonable suspicion. And now, let us discuss the business of my men moving through your fief.”

  Andluss held up a hand. “Under disguise, of course?”

  Sahand grinned. Oh, Lyrelle, how well you have trained me. If only you knew. “Yes. Of course.”

  Chapter 8

  Guest Lists

  “No.” Hool snatched the invitation card out of Tyvian’s hand and tore it up. Then she ate the pieces.

  Tyvian did his best to keep his smile pinned in place. He was thankful, at least, that they were alone in the study. “Hool. Darling. You are being unreasonable.”

  “No.”

  Tyvian arched his back, which hurt like hell, but it was a special kind of pain—the pain that let him know the thousand tiny muscles in his back were gradually returning to service. “Hool, if we don’t invite the Viscountess of Pontiverre-Nord, then we can’t invite the Earl of Forêt-Blanc, which means half the lesser peers of Camien County won’t show, which means we’ll be throwing a bloody Vora victory party, which will make everybody assume we’re friends with Vora, when the letters we received indicate that Count Duren of Vora wants nothing to do with us.”

  Hool folded her arms and fixed Tyvian with a coppery glare. “That woman smells bad.”

  Tyvian threw up his hands. “No one else notices! Not everybody has your nose, Hool!”

  “It is my party.”

  “Our party.”

  Hool growled a little, causing the crystal goblets on the desk to shudder. “My money. My party. That’s what you said.”

  Tyvian rolled his eyes. “You wouldn’t even have that money if it weren’t for me.”

  Hool nodded. “That’s why you can live here.”

  Tyvian took a deep breath, which made his abdomen tingle a little—various oblique muscles waking up, too. He had spent all morning gathering up as many chamber orchestras and horticulturalists and gourmet chefs as possible on short notice, and Hool hadn’t agreed to anything yet. “The invitations must go out today, Hool. We are at the very limit of polite notice for a party.”

  “Then we do not invite any of those terrible people.” Hool flopped in very gnoll-like fashion on the couch. As she was still wearing her shroud, it looked like she had just fainted or possibly tripped on something. “There,” she muttered into the pillows, “the problem is solved.”

  Tyvian looked at the stacks of invitation cards. At the moment, they were all made out in Artus’s blocky handwriting, which meant all of them would have to be redone before going out. Doing some social calculus, Tyvian determined that if they did not invite all the people Hool actively disliked (rather than those she merely potentially disliked), the resulting cascade of subtle insults and corresponding no-shows would put their likely attendance at or below forty persons. Which, of course, was entirely too small for anything to be defined as a party. It would barely qualify as an Akrallian-style soiree.

  Tyvian stroked his growing goatee. “What if we threw a salon instead of a party?”

  “I do not know what that is.” Hool put a pillow over her head.

  “It’s a more intimate gathering. No music or entertainers. No meal. It’s meant to be an exchange of thought and talent—a gathering of keen minds to discuss the issues of the day.” As he spoke, Tyvian got up—something he’d found he could do upon waking up, even if he was a little unstable. “Yes. That’s it!”

  Hool lifted the pillow and peered at him with one eye. “Explain your stupid plan.”

  Tyvian grabbed her by the hands and guided her to her feet. Hool went along with it, but her expression was sheer suspicion. “The salon is all about the cachet of the hostess.” He guided Hool before a full-length mirror in the corner. He stepped back and gestured to the elegance of Hool’s shroud, clad today in a gown of gold and cream, her illusory auburn hair done up in a pile pinned in place by a golden tiara. “You, my dearest Hool, are a woman of mystery. A woman of secret power. A woman who may one day be princess.”

  Hool arched an eyebrow. “But I’m not going to be a princess. You said so.”

  Tyvian nodded. “I know, I know—but they don’t know that, do they? Everyone in the city knows of your wealth—gods, Hool, that vault in the cellar has enough gold to buy Bramble House out from under old Velia Hesswyn! That isn’t even counting our—”

  “My.”

  “I beg your pardon—your overseas holdings. Your mercantile investments. Your accounts at the guild banks.”

  Hool looked at “herself” in the mirror, still frowning. “I know all of these things already. So what?”

  “Hool, if you were to hold a party, people might stay home because they would expect it to be gauche.”

  Hool glared at him. “I know what gauche means. It isn’t good.”

  Tyvian kept rolling. “But, Hool, darling—the thing that makes you a great hostess is not the table you set or the meals you have prepared or the orchestra you pay to perform—it’s you. You are the draw.”

  Hool was quiet for a moment. “So I can send the orchestras home now?”

  Tyvian grinned. “Who needs music when guests have your presence to inspire them?”

  “And we don’t need to have all those chefs in my kitchen?”

  Tyvian placed a hand on her shoulder. “The food at a salon is for the mind, not the stomach.”

  Hool stared at him in that way that meant she was thinking about something very hard. Then she nodded. “Okay. Let’s do it. I will be great at this.”

  Tyvian smiled. “You will.”

  “I will,” Hool repeated. She turned and swept out of the study and into the hall. Tyvian heard the sound of instruments being brought to bear by several dozen performers. Hool roared over them all. “No! No more! Everybody get out before I eat you! Go! Scat!”

  The door swung closed.

  Tyvian closed his eyes and let the ring apply a long, slow pressure to his hand. It hurt, but not as badly as his back. Besides, it needn’t have bothered—he already felt bad about the party and what it would do to Hool. Correction—what the salon would do to Hool.

  He needed Hool to plan it, because he needed it to be a failure. Granted, it would be a failure even if he planned it—Hool was so ill-equipped to be in sophisticated circles, she’d have the peerage in an uproar the moment she opened her mouth. However, with her actively doing her best to make the party work, Tyvian was reasonably confident the salon would be more awkward than a complete and total catastrophe.

  And for the purposes of his plan, it would be perfect. Hool, he suspected, would forgive him eventually.

  Well, probably.

  Tyvian sat down in a cozy high-backed chair by the smoldering embers of the fireplace, his muscles still screaming with stiffness. Out the window, gardeners could be seen trimming hedges and p
lanting flowers. They were overseen by an alchemist who specialized in horticulture—an old woman in a ridiculous conical hat that went about pushing a wheeled rack of potions that, with a few drops, could enhance growth or change color or shape or render a plant resistant to wild shifts in temperature. If memory served, Tyvian was paying her and her gardeners one gold mark an hour for their services. He wondered what the split was. He rather doubted all those strong-backed young men in their soil-stained hose were pulling down more than a pair of silvers apiece for the whole day, and even that was a good wage.

  Gods . . . He scowled. Myreon’s gotten into my damned head.

  Myreon hadn’t been at breakfast—sleeping off another long night, it seemed. She still wasn’t talking to him. She was also very clearly up to something and had been for some time.

  Tyvian couldn’t quite imagine what it was. Myreon had no underworld contacts to speak of—being an ex-Defender was something of a fatal flaw in that regard—and she had no obvious vices. When he thought about what she had been doing in the sewers all these nights, the best he could come up with was “forbidden sorcery.”

  At times he mused that she might have joined the Sorcerous League, but there was no evidence of it. Not that there would be, of course. That didn’t stop him from searching her chambers several times or running a mage-compass in her room to see if anything was out of the ordinary.

  He found nothing.

  There were some nights he thought to follow her—tail her through the streets until he came upon her little secret—but he hadn’t. Partly it was the ring; it didn’t object much to him rummaging around her room (as he could easily justify that to himself as being cautious for her safety as well as his own), but tailing her caused it to pinch and sting. It had a point: following her was something of a violation of their oaths of trust.

  That was what he had promised her, too, in that cabin aboard Gethrey’s odious ship the Argent Wind. They had whispered it in the dark, wrapped in each other’s arms. “I, Tyvian Reldamar, promise to never lie to you, to give you my trust, and to be your ally in all endeavors. With Hann as my witness . . .”

  She had said the same. He never doubted she would keep her word; she always had, even when they were mortal enemies. In following her, Tyvian knew he was only trying to prove that he wasn’t the bad one in the relationship. That she was, in the end, just like him. In his most honest moments, which were rare, he knew her failure would confirm that he really deserved her.

  For some reason, though, he didn’t want to know.

  Maybe Artus will find nothing. Maybe he’ll never look. He had half a mind to call the boy in and reverse what he had told him yesterday morning. But he didn’t.

  He took a deep breath and reached for a glass of wine that wasn’t there. All the serving specters were off cleaning, he guessed. Hool had been adamant about the cleaning. Tyvian looked at the writing desk across the room and weighed the merits of getting up and going over there against the merits of sitting here and warming his stiff body before the dying heat of the fire. It was a difficult debate but, eventually, he dragged himself to his feet and limped to the desk.

  These invitations weren’t going to write themselves. Only the middle class employed specters to write their correspondence and, for the moment, Tyvian had to pretend to be royalty.

  The House of Eddon was quiet in the midmorning, especially now that all the odious cooks and people with musical instruments had been sent away. No coaches were pulling up beneath the portico and dumping their perfumed, wigged cargo on Hool’s doorstep. No music was wheedling its way through the corridors as various dandies tried to woo various women. No lordlings were strutting and preening for each other over the t’suul tables. The entire place was, in a word, empty.

  Hool thought it was wonderful.

  After watching the plant wizard alter bushes and things in the garden for a while, she retreated to the room she referred to as her “den.” One side of the room had been fashioned into terraces decorated with animal pelts. The walls were fixed with racks of weapons and the heads of other animals. There was a bear, a griffon, and a big stag. In one corner, a stuffed cliff drake stood, wings spread and claws outstretched, as though in midpounce. The whole room smelled of stale hide and dander, which Tyvian had pointed out would go a long way to masking her natural odor from the average human visitor.

  She dozed with the windows open so the cool spring breeze could blow through her fur, just as it would have on the endless grasslands of her home, so far away. Brana dozed with her for a bit, but he was restless—he constantly was getting up, practicing with weapons, yipping and snarling to himself—so Hool kicked him out. At some point Artus brought up lunch—a hock of ham, raw, and a bowl of hard-boiled eggs. Artus lingered after he brought it—he wanted to talk about something. Hool didn’t, so she ignored him until he went away. She ate the eggs first, popping them into her mouth like grapes. She lingered over the ham hock, licking it thoroughly before stripping the meat off the bone and then cracking it in her jaws. The best part was that she didn’t need to worry about anybody seeing her, judging her, or wondering if she were some kind of monster. This was becoming the best day ever.

  There was a knock on the door.

  Hool sniffed the air, her ears alert—not Brana, not Artus. Damon Pirenne.

  Grumbling, Hool rolled off the couch and snatched up the shroud and belted it on by the time Sir Damon chanced a second knock. “My lad . . . ah . . . Hool? Are you there?”

  Hool straightened her posture and did her best human stride over to the door and opened it. “What do you want?”

  Hool had a difficult time figuring out human body language at the best of times, but Sir Damon was a complete mystery. He always seemed tense around her, as though he might run, or pounce or weep or something. She assumed it had something to do with the fact that he owed her money, but despite that, he always seemed to want to be around her. She was reasonably certain he was insane.

  Hool watched as he adjusted his clothes and sucked in a deep breath and held it for some reason. He was always doing that. “I have completed my investigation, milady.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Sir Damon’s face reddened and he mopped the top of his head with a handkerchief. “I . . . uhhh . . . the investigation into the assassin, of course.”

  “Who told you to do that?”

  Sir Damon grimaced. “I had assumed, of course, that as part of my duties here, I was to act as protection for the house, and so I—”

  Hool just wanted this social interaction to be over, so she decided to skip the next ten minutes of posturing, bowing, and him calling her “his lady,” which she felt was presumptuous. “Tell me what you found in as few words as possible.”

  Sir Damon froze, his mouth halfway open.

  Hool cocked her head. Had she broken him? “Begin.”

  “The assassin was let in by Lord Waymar, she poisoned him in the room, escaped via the balcony, and fled back into the city, where she hired a coach and there the trail becomes cold. I’ve tried to find the coachman all morning, but no luck.” He smiled.

  Hool nodded. “Thank you. Good-bye.”

  Sir Damon bowed. “As you wish, my lady.”

  Hool was about to slam the door in his face when she stopped. “I’m not yours.”

  “Your what?”

  “Your lady. I’m not yours.”

  Sir Damon’s face flushed pink. “Of course . . . I merely . . . I just didn’t have a . . .”

  “Just call me Hool.”

  Sir Damon brightened, smiling broadly. Hool had no idea why. “Of course, my . . . Hool.”

  Hool slammed the door in his face.

  As soon as the door closed, she slipped off her shroud and let her body fall out of the stiff upright posture of a human, yawning wide. It felt good.

  She flopped on a pile of furs, wanting to sleep but was wound too tightly to do so now. She hated the sensation; before she had come here, she had never
had trouble sleeping. Not even when her pups were missing. Not even in that wretched cage Sahand had put her in.

  Though unpleasant, living among humans was, in actuality, rather simple. All somebody needed, it turned out, was lots of money and you could do pretty much whatever you wanted—except “be a gnoll,” apparently. Still, Hool had lots of money. And because she had lots of money, people were always asking if they could borrow it, because everybody in Eretheria had lost a lot of money at the same time she had gained hers. This was when she learned about “interest” and “liens” and things like that—basically elaborate ways somebody with a lot of money could take money from people who didn’t have as much. It was a stupid and abhorrent system to Hool, but she had equated it with physical prowess in her mind, and that made it more palatable. Having money, to humans, was basically equivalent to having enormous strength to gnolls—they ruled because they had the power. If the weak didn’t like it, they were welcome to die or go off and start their own pack or country or whatever.

  She looked out the vast bay windows that made up one wall of her den. The outskirts of the city, punctuated by small estates and manicured tracts of land, eventually gave way to the rolling green pastures and rocky buttes of southern Eretheria, their limestone faces gleaming brightly in the midday sun. A smattering of rain from a sunshower speckled the windowpanes beneath the mottled blue sky. It was pretty, in its way.

  She took a deep breath and let it out as a sigh. But it isn’t home.

  She missed the endless, unbroken horizon of the Taqar. She missed the trumpet of the manticore herd as it marched. She missed the scent of the infinite wildflowers, the oceanic roar of the tall grass in the wind, the dead quiet of the still summer afternoons, the world coated in golden light. She missed the press of the pack in the dark of winter, huddled beneath the great yurt, singing songs over firelight.

  Don’t be stupid, she told herself. Only fools throw away food for dreams. The Taqar was far away—so very far, far away—and she was here, safe and powerful and fed. Even if it was among humans and even if it depended on something stupid like money.