Visitors would be nonplussed. Zelen suspected the servants already were, though, as he’d told Branwyn, the ball provided more than adequate justification. “I haven’t heard stories about a demon either. People would notice that, wouldn’t they?”
“If it were independent and the mindless rampage sort, yes. It could be controlled, or smart enough to scheme and hide, though the Rognozis’ death argues somewhat against the latter.” She sat back on the bed with a grimace of pain.
That drew Zelen’s notice. “I’d like to check how disturbingly fast you’re mending, if I may.”
“Yes, thank you.” She arranged the shirt carefully to expose the knee while maintaining modesty, and her expression became, briefly, both wry and a touch sad.
Zelen understood. Above the shirt was nothing he hadn’t touched, licked, gotten to know quite thoroughly—but that had been before. The last few days were a gulf like the western sea. He perched on the bed, placing the sealed papers to one side, and turned his attention strictly to Branwyn’s knee.
The improvement got a low whistle from him, and that made her chuckle. “I’d give my right eye to study how you do that,” Zelen said.
“Oh, don’t. You’re much better off with both, and I’m certain we have copious notes in one of our chapter houses. About how long do you think I’ll still be incapacitated?”
“If the current rate of healing continues?” He prodded gently, feeling heat and swelling but not the break that had been there the previous night. “You’ll be able to walk in a day, if you’re careful. Run, or fight, in three or four. It’s bloody amazing.”
“Our makers do good work,” said Branwyn. That called Zelen’s attention to a part of her leg he hadn’t noticed before—it had always been too dark, or he’d been too concerned with her wounds. A thin bronze line, perhaps the width of her fingertip, ran up from her anklebone on each side.
He had to check, and yes, the lines were on her other leg too, like welded seams in metal.
“And they sign their masterpieces,” she added from above him.
“I’m sorry—” Zelen said, sitting up quickly, but Branwyn was grinning faintly. She pushed back a sleeve to show him the same pattern on her arm, starting close to her wrist.
“I’d have had the same curiosity in your place, and given that you’ve healed me and let me stay in your house, I don’t have much grounds for complaint. Besides, I don’t hide them as a rule—only when I’m playing spy, which I didn’t do until a few weeks back.”
The lines were astoundingly straight, the contrast with her skin subtle and fascinating. Zelen wished he’d had paper and pen handy, but he wasn’t sure any oils could have come close to the shift in color or the metallic gleam. The healer in him took over from the artist, then, and he asked, “Do they feel different?”
“Not from the inside, not usually. I can turn to metal—could, with Yathana.” Her expression was briefly very controlled. “It ripples out from those lines, and when I was first reforged I was much more aware of the process. I’m used to it now. As for the outside, somewhat. Would you like to—”
Awareness hit them both as she held out her wrist, Zelen thought, in what he even then knew was a spectacular display of rationalizing, that turning down the offer would only make the moment more awkward. He set his fingers lightly on Branwyn’s arm.
The line did feel precisely like polished metal, slightly cooler than the rest of her skin. Zelen thought it thrummed faintly with her pulse, but that might have been his own heartbeat suddenly picking up speed and volume.
You’ve already had your hands all over her, fool, he told himself, no more than a day ago.
But this was different. This was exploration rather than duty, pleasure rather than simply relief of pain. Was the pulse beneath his fingers, if he did feel it, speeding up like his own?
She’s possibly a murderer, but she likely wasn’t.
Zelen lifted his gaze. Branwyn’s eyes were dark, her lips faintly parted, and her breasts rose and fell quickly, making his shirt far more interesting than it had ever been. He envied the fabric, sliding against her firm body like that.
She’s injured, and she’s trapped in your house.
That got through, cold water enough for the moment. “Thank you,” Zelen managed. By force of will, he laid her hand gently back in her lap. “I shouldn’t pry.”
He reached for the pile of letters as though the scraps of paper might lend him stability and tore one open seemingly at random.
“You seem popular,” said Branwyn. Zelen tried to tell himself that her voice was only throaty because of her injuries.
“Most of the council gets more, I’d think. I—” He blinked down at the message.
“Not more bad news, I hope.”
“It could be worse, but it couldn’t have come at a worse point. At least the food will be horrible.” He met Branwyn’s questioning look with an explanation. “Gedomir wants me in the country tomorrow.”
Chapter 27
Leaving Heliodar proper behind, one approached the Verengir house across a long stretch of flat land: tree-studded plains that rapidly gave way to marshes. In summer, these were a hell of insects, but now they were, if gloomy, at least subdued. Slim, dark cypress trees clumped sociably together above brown cattails and water that reflected the flat gray of the sky overhead. Zelen’s carriage rumbled along steadily, but with squashy enough noises to make him occasionally nervous—as though he didn’t have plenty to worry about.
Fields of barley and other plants Zelen had never learned to recognize punctuated the landscape occasionally, all in clumps like the houses that went with them. Solitude had never been the death sentence in Heliodar that he’d heard it was in Criwath and the other kingdoms that hadn’t had sea or southerly positions to keep them from the worst of the storms, but living too far from one’s neighbors was still a bad idea.
A high fence marked the boundary of Verengir lands. Orderly rows of trees began to line the road after that. Passing between them had always made Zelen feel as though a harsh hand descended on his shoulders, pulling his back rigid against the carriage seat, and a cold voice pointed out every wrinkle in his doublet and bit of dirt on his boots. This time, he was acutely conscious of the secret he carried as well and wondered how obvious it was.
He was still thinking it over when the carriage pulled up at the front door.
The Verengir house was dark wood, plain but large, with four stories and chunky, sprawling wings to either side of the square central building. What few windows it had squinted out suspiciously from the upper floors. Standing stiffly at the large double doors, footmen in livery regarded the carriage with the same lack of reaction they showed everything.
Zelen got out, nodded politely and received polite bows, and passed through the doors, miniscule in their shadow.
Inside was as he remembered: high hallways and tapestries in sober colors. Duty, Purity, and Prudence lined the front hallway, each one a maiden with pale skin, rosy cheeks, and a sickeningly earnest expression. Duty had her head bent over a cradle, Purity was holding one hand out in front of her in a warding gesture, and Prudence was closing the door on a well-stocked larder.
As he’d done twenty years ago, Zelen crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue at them. It felt embarrassingly juvenile but extremely satisfying, and nobody was likely to box his ears now.
“Brother.”
Zelen’s ears actually did tingle at the greeting, and the swish of skirts that went with it. He turned to meet Alize with far less composure than he’d hoped.
She kissed him on each cheek, her lips cold and dry. Her hair, white blond like Gedomir’s and their mother’s, was twisted into a tight bun, as always. She probably hadn’t been wearing the same all-concealing black wool dress since she’d been fifteen and Zelen six, but he couldn’t have told the difference between one gown and another.
“It’s good to see you,” he lied.
“And you. You look…” She scanned his clothing, taking in every bright color and scrap of ornament. “Well. Gedomir is in the library.”
“Much obliged. Mother and Father?”
“Getting ready to go to the city, naturally,” she said. Immediately Zelen wanted to look away, sheepish for having asked. “It’s hard on them, particularly at their age, but for a state funeral…well. There’s no point objecting to duty.”
“No,” he said. “And Ilesen?”
“Overseeing our estates.” Alize’s husband was a washed-out and rather chinless man, who gave the impression of being a petty tyrant in his own home but obeyed Lord Verengir’s suggestions as soon as he heard them. That quality had probably recommended him as a match as strongly as his impeccable bloodlines had done. “I’ll give him your regards.”
“Much obliged,” Zelen said, realized that he’d repeated himself, and coughed. “Well. I’ll just duck in and have a word with Gedo, shall I?”
“You’d best do so. He’s quite busy. I’ll see you at dinner,” she added, and then swept off on some errand immeasurably more important than talking to him.
* * *
“How much pain would you say it gives you to stand?” Altien’s tentacles waved idly as he observed Branwyn, and his fingers tapped his legs in the same rhythm. Branwyn suspected it was a barely repressed desire to take notes.
“Only a little now,” she said, closing her eyes to better concentrate her other senses. “I’ve had worse after a day of hard training. But I’m keeping my weight on the other, mostly. If I shift—”
She did so, not entirely but evenly. The pulse of discomfort made her grunt. “No. I couldn’t maintain that for very long.”
“Then don’t,” said Altien, and waved her back toward the bed. “Progress will happen faster if we don’t get in its way. I will provide you with mild exercises. They should be helpful, insofar as I understand human musculature, which I do. You’re not as dissimilar that way as you are skeletally.”
“We must have some advantages,” said Branwyn, sitting back down and not disguising her sigh of relief. Sitting in bed and reading the books Zelen had brought her had left her restless, especially with her half knowledge of the situation outside, but four turns around the room—one for each of the gods, Altien had said—had left her sweating and sore.
“As a people, yes. You excel at violence, and you’re paradoxically quick to form attachments, both of which can be useful qualities. We did not, you note, construct an Order like yours after the storms.”
“You weren’t facing the kind of attacks we were, from what I heard.”
“That’s true as well, and not a fact many humans have cited—though you’re the first I’ve spoken to about the issue.”
“I spent a month or so working in partnership with another of the waterfolk, out in Kvanla. They’d studied as a mage, and I was hunting an oviannic.”
“The name is unfamiliar to me.”
“They’re a malicious sort of a house spirit, mostly a nuisance until they get enough power. Then potentially very nasty.” Branwyn remembered dozens of eyes in an elongated face and fire hotter than a smith’s forge springing up in a circle around her. “They’re also extremely difficult to track, or to keep in one place long enough to fight or banish, without magic. Anyhow, Vemigira and I spent a fair bit of time together.”
Altiensarn nodded. “That name is also unfamiliar, but my brood was raised far from Kvanla. The sea is much colder there, I hear.”
“Most places are, in my experience.” Branwyn hesitated over the story and then said to the other outsider what she wouldn’t have said to Zelen. “A few of the Adeptas, the Order’s scholars and leaders, used to debate whether Heliodar got off lightly because it was farther south to begin with, and near the ocean, or because Thyran still couldn’t bear to strike his home too hard.”
“I would be very much inclined to believe the former,” said Altiensarn.
“Me too. Practically speaking, the spell never exactly worked as he intended—he got stuck in time before he could build it up and direct it as much as he wanted, or so say witnesses.”
“The general who I hear has come back?”
“Him, and the soul in my friend Darya’s sword.” There was a long and involved story there, one that Branwyn didn’t entirely know was hers to share. Besides, she was trying to keep her mind off of soulswords. She moved on. “From all I’ve heard, Thyran had no reason to feel at all fondly toward the city either. I’d have expected it to be his first target, really, or the most severely hit one, if he’d had things entirely his way.” Branwyn laughed without humor. “I should’ve made that argument to the council while they’d still listen to me.”
“You may yet have their ear,” said Altien, calm as ever. “But I wouldn’t be certain, myself, in your estimation of Thyran.”
“Gods know I’m not overly familiar with the man, and glad about that, but how so?”
“People’s sentimental attachments very rarely obey common sense, in my experience. I have often found it surprising to witness what one can still be fond of, or want to believe, even in the face of hostility.”
* * *
“Thank you for joining me,” said Gedomir, standing up from behind his desk and bowing quickly before waving Zelen to a seat in one of the hard horsehair chairs facing him. “I hope the roads are still adequately maintained. We’ve had workers out, of course, but haven’t been able to properly supervise them this year.”
“The ground’s what it is in winter, but they did a good job,” said Zelen, not wanting to expose the laborers to his brother’s notion of proper supervision.
“Good. Good. Your journey was a pleasant one then?”
“Fairly, thank you.”
There were always more pleasantries here, where Zelen was the visitor. Until a few years before, he’d assumed Gedo was busier in the city. Eventually he’d come to see the truth: a matter of territory and control, points awarded based on who could get their business over with first.
Asking about the reason for his summons would annoy Gedomir, and Zelen needed his goodwill just then. Besides, he had the entire evening, and it wasn’t as though there were more congenial places in the house than the study.
A few changes had taken place in that room: a couple new books stood in the cases against the wall behind Gedomir, their covers catching the yellow magelight with more of a shine than those of the other, more weathered volumes. The portrait of their great-grandfather had been reframed, and the man’s hawklike features peered out from a border of dull gold, ugly but expensive. The heavy curtains were the same, and so were the dark desk and chairs, but while the bookcases themselves hadn’t changed, the shadow one of them cast was subtly different.
“Has the council discussed the succession?” Gedomir asked.
“Not in any useful way,” said Zelen, “or I would’ve written.”
“You’ve had a great deal on your mind lately.”
“Nonetheless.” He let the point go. “The obvious heir is Kolovat.”
Var, said a voice: high, female, and familiar, though Zelen couldn’t for the life of him have said who it was. He blinked and glanced behind him.
Nobody was there. That, after a second, was no real shock. The voice hadn’t sounded like it came from anywhere in the study.
It had been inside his head.
Verengir.
“Zelen? Is everything all right?”
“Ah. Yes, sorry. Thought I heard a fly.”
Gedomir frowned. “If you do, I’ll have words with the servants.”
“No, no.” Zelen hastily waved off the complaint. “You’re right. I’ve had too much on my mind lately. I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to repeat yourself.”
The way Gedomir smirked was als
o familiar. Zelen had seen the expression when he’d fallen off his first horse and started wailing. “I was saying that Kolovat is the obvious heir, if one measures simply by duration in the post. Starovna was bred and raised to nobility, so it would come far more easily to her.”
Zelen had never noticed either of the councillors struggling with their duties. Gods knew that Kolovat, who’d been an army officer before a few uncles had died childless, acted far more sure of himself than Zelen, “bred and raised” to his status, ever felt. He didn’t make the argument, both for the same reasons that had kept him from speeding the conversation and because he knew it would make no difference. “I’m not certain she wants it. She’s a great one for her studies, you know.”
Verengir, said the voice again. It was clouded and cracked, as though coming to him through a wind-filled tunnel. …ind. The…
He tried to appear interested in the matter of Starovna versus Kolovat, and only in that.
“It hardly matters what she prefers. She knows—” said Gedomir, and then there was a knock on the door. “Yes?”
His anger was icy. He’d come to sound entirely like their father at such times. Zelen’s back twinged with memory.
It wasn’t a hapless servant standing at the door, but Hanyi, the younger of Zelen’s two sisters. She usually had more of a friendly word for Zelen than his other siblings did, but just then didn’t even seen to see him. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but you’re needed.”
“Incompetence,” said Gedomir, in the same tones other men might have used to curse. “Wait here, would you? With the gods’ favor, I’ll be back before too long.”
“Of course. Can I help?”
“No,” Gedomir said, and vanished out the door.
Zelen closed it behind his brother. Later, he would say that the hallway was drafty, which wasn’t entirely a lie. He stood in front of it, listened to the footsteps as they receded down the hall, and, for lack of other ideas, opened his mind the way he did in prayer.
Bookcase, said the voice. It was clearer, but still not nearly conversational. Zelen got the impression that every word took effort.
The Nightborn Page 17