“Well, there’s at least one force in this city that wants me dead. I’d like to think secrecy and Zelen’s wards will help, especially given the ones you put up yesterday, but I liked to think I’d have quick and uneventful success here.” When Altien left the bed for his customary chair, Branwyn picked up the scroll of formerly hidden papers again. “I’ve been considering these too,” she said. “Did Zelen ever mention his family conducting magical experiments?”
“He rarely speaks of them at all,” said Altien, “except to tell me when he has to depart the city and pay a visit to the country estates. His elder brother occasionally arrives to deliver news, or orders. It’s not a warm family, even by the human standards with which I’m familiar.”
“It doesn’t sound that way even by the human standards I’ve observed. Lady Rognozi said there was a tragedy when Zelen was three or so, a mother and child both perishing. That would have been around the time of these notes.”
Altien’s tentacles rose, then fell. “We can guess, though we shouldn’t assume, that the procedure went badly.”
“True. Especially since there’s no god-powered youth running about. This story you heard, do you happen to remember whether it had the soul in question as a force for good?”
“No,” said Altien regretfully. “I never even heard the entire story, only read a mention or two of it.” He paused. In the silence, Branwyn heard footsteps approaching the door. It was probably Zelen returning, but she tensed anyhow, and reached under her pillow for the knife Altiensarn had brought her. “I believe it was about the primordial battle, the one between Talleita and—”
“Gizath,” said Zelen, opening the door.
In dress and grooming he was as impeccable as ever, but his face was gray, and his eyes were shadowed. He carried a cloth-wrapped bundle that immediately filled Branwyn with hope, though it was matched by equal parts worry. Zelen moved like a man with a knife in one kidney.
“My family worships him,” he said numbly. “Some of it. Possibly all. I’m bloody certain of Mother and Gedomir. They were the ones who killed the Rognozis. Here,” he said, and pulled the wrappings off the object in his hands, revealing Yathana’s gilded-for-Heliodar hilt and fire opal. Zelen thrust her toward Branwyn, hilt-first. “I brought her back for you. It was the least I could do, after… Given what we are.”
* * *
The sword took the strength in Zelen’s legs with her. He fell as much as sat on the bed, the world blurry and colorless.
He knew that the questions would come soon. He owed answers—owed the story, in fact. He was thinking of how to begin when Branwyn put an arm around him and he looked up, startled.
“Your sword—”
“Yathana and I can speak just as well without touching,” she said, and her hand was warm on his bicep. “Thank you for returning her. She thanks you too.”
Altiensarn was kneeling in front of him, peering from face to body and back. “You don’t appear physically wounded,” he said. “Are there injuries I don’t see? If not, I’m going to get you a cup of tea. Nourishment won’t solve our problems, but it will help a great deal.”
“I—” Zelen didn’t seem able to finish a sentence. They trailed off, boats loosed from their moorings. He made an effort. “No. No, I’m not injured. I don’t—”
“Think that you can eat,” Altien finished for him. “I’m perfectly aware, and we’ve both seen these circumstances before. I’m going to go extract the necessary provisions from your servants.”
Zelen watched him leave, more because it was too much effort to move his eyes than out of any real attention. There were next steps. There were steps that came next. Branwyn was beside him. He turned his head, which felt as though it took a year, and observed that she was beautiful.
It hurt.
“Gedomir asked me to get to know you,” he said, laying the words down between them, “then to tell him what I found out. I’d been reporting more or less faithfully up until the ball.”
Branwyn didn’t pull away. She didn’t move either. Zelen waited, deserving what came next.
“Did he know I was a Sentinel?”
“No. Neither did I.”
“I didn’t think so,” she said, in the same calm voice he’d heard when they’d been preparing to fight the demons: evaluation, instruction. “You seemed surprised. You might have been a very good actor, of course.”
“I might still be.”
“There’s no advantage in it for you, none that I can work out. I don’t suppose you stopped reporting for any reason other than circumstance.”
“No,” said Zelen. He didn’t know that he would have, and it wouldn’t have mattered.
“Did he tell you why he wanted the information?”
“Only that you were a foreign agent.”
“Well,” said Branwyn, after a minute that stretched out longer than Zelen’s entire carriage ride back, and he’d thought that had lasted an eternity, “that doesn’t seem unreasonable. If I were a noble family, even if I didn’t worship the Traitor God, I’d want to learn as much as possible about me, too, since I’m trying to get you involved in a war.”
Zelen, who’d been expecting rage of either the hot or cold variety, and hadn’t known what to say to either, found himself at even more of a loss for words than he’d predicted.
While he sat staring and, he feared, resembling a frog, Branwyn started to speak, stopped, actually flushed, then asked, “Was that the only reason you…took an interest in me?”
“No!”
He spoke with more passion than he’d felt in days, more than he’d known he was still capable of, and clasped the hand on his arm gently with one of his own. The skin was smooth under his fingers, save for the sword calluses that had been there as long as he’d known Branwyn—that had been there most of her life, if the stories about Sentinels were true.
“Well,” she said, still blushing. “Then here we are.”
“Yes,” he said, and then, “You’ve healed bloody well in my absence.”
“Good,” said Branwyn. “I wish there was a better way to put this, but—”
“You expect you’ll need to be in fighting form soon? So do I.” Zelen stopped. “That is to say, fighting other people. Who I’ll also be fighting. That did sound a bit like a threat.”
He’d missed her chuckle, which was as comfortable as a hearth fire on a winter day. “Don’t worry. I don’t think you’re stupid enough to bother threatening me if you wanted me dead. There are a number of things we each need to tell each other, but I doubt you’ll be in any shape for talking about them for a little while. Have you eaten today, at all?”
“I don’t think so.” He’d left the country house before breakfast, claiming the desire to get an early start on preparations. The journey had been gray and endless. Zelen thought he’d have remembered food. He wasn’t sure. “Are you a healer now?” He tried to joke.
“Only in the direst need, but I’ve seen any number of people in various states of devastation. It goes along with the calling.”
Was he devastated? He supposed he was. The way he felt certainly went along with pictures of crumbling buildings and blackened fields, all that had been familiar suddenly gone.
“Stupid of me, really,” Zelen said. “It isn’t as though we ever got on.”
“It strikes me that there’s a fair amount of difference,” said Branwyn, “but I lack expertise.” She paused again and tilted her head in a way that Zelen had only seen glimpses of before: listening to her sword, he realized, and now not bothering to conceal it from him. “Yathana says she could talk to you because you’re both devoted to Letar, by the way. Neither of us are sure if that’s helpful information, but there it is.”
He’d thought himself incapable of being surprised any more. “But I’m—”
“Not a priest, no, and she hasn’t been a priest
ess as such in a hundred years. The gods leave their mark on their followers, even when they can’t work through…official channels.”
“Oh,” said Zelen, and a band or two around his heart loosened.
“You’ve improved,” said Altien, coming in with a tray like the world’s oddest valet. “A minuscule improvement, but there it is.” He poured a cup of tea, added a liberal dose from a bottle by the side of the kettle, then handed the cup and a plate of seed cakes to Zelen. “Drink this while you eat a cake. Pace yourself equally. I suspect you can’t afford intoxication now.”
“Is that my brandy?”
“It’s nobody else’s.” Altiensarn added brandy and tea to the other two cups on the tray as well, passed one to Branwyn, then took a cake and sat back in his chair. “I have no story to tell. You have one, and Branwyn, or Yathana, has another. I suggest we share information, and quickly.”
“Let me start,” said Branwyn, sitting forward. She kept her arm around Zelen, though, and her hair brushed against his cheek. “You eat.”
* * *
I sensed the demon when it entered, Yathana said, and Branwyn relayed that to the others. It wasn’t long before you returned.
Experience both in a human form and out of it had rendered her calmer than any living person, but Branwyn still got a trace of horror when Yathana spoke, and no wonder. She’d lain unable to act, sensing the presence of not just a murderous juggernaut but one of the creatures she’d dedicated herself to fighting, in life as well as death. Most people would’ve been driven beyond rationality.
Branwyn wished it were possible to pat a sword’s arm or give it a drink.
Nothing to be done, said Yathana, now or then. You came back. I told you as soon as you got in hearing distance.
The demon had already finished with Lord Rognozi by that point, likely slaughtering him in his sleep. Lady Rognozi had been awake. Branwyn hadn’t heard her scream. Neither, by Zelen’s account, had any of the servants who had been in the house. Maybe the lady had been too scared: fear could lock the lungs.
She had tried to run, though by that point she’d already been fatally wounded. Branwyn had kicked down the door and found the demon dragging her back toward it, one taloned hand around her ankle. Blood was pouring out of the lady’s back, drenching her nightgown and the floor beneath her.
Her gaze had fastened on Branwyn.
“She thought I was coming to save her,” Branwyn said. Her memories were secondhand, from Yathana, but one or two of the facts the sword recited called answering notes from the darkness. She remembered Lady Rognozi’s expression. “But I was too late.”
“All the same,” said Zelen, “she knew you were there at the end. That’d be worth a fair amount, were I in her place.”
Smart boy, said Yathana.
Branwyn tightened her arm around his shoulders. “Well. We fought, of course.”
The demon had been nearly as tall as the room, and the Rognozis didn’t believe in low ceilings. Its arms had been too long for its torso, its hands too big for its arms, and its jaw vast and permanently open, perhaps because the spike teeth inside couldn’t fit in a normal mouth. It had been cold and glutinous when Branwyn cut it, and there had been orange-gray eyes studded all over it.
Branwyn stabbed through what passed as its body a few times. Its maw had yawned wider in a roar on those occasions, though no noise had emerged—neither she nor Yathana knew whether it was mute or whether its voice had been bound.
Some are void-silent, Yathana said. But I think its orders were to make it seem like you’d killed the Rognozis, then yourself. I’d have kept my demon quiet in that case, if I were the sort of bastard who’d do that.
Eventually, Branwyn had seen what she’d thought was an opening. She’d leapt up and in, striking for the head—and the demon had peeled back its face.
“It was like the things in Oakford,” Branwyn said, “the creatures that made men stand still while other abominations slaughtered them, but more so. The Sentinels could resist those. This one, even with Yathana—no.”
The soulsword didn’t give her those memories, only the words. Branwyn still had to pause and drink from her cup of well-fortified tea before she could go on.
“If I hadn’t been a Sentinel, it could have put a knife in my grasp and made me slit my own throat. And if it hadn’t had orders, it could probably have crushed my neck while I stood there like a stunned ox—being metal doesn’t prevent that.”
Instead, the demon had wrenched Yathana out of Branwyn’s grasp, then tossed Branwyn out the window, and returned to the Verengirs with its dubious prize.
It knew what I was, said the sword, and so did Zelen’s siblings. They didn’t want to touch me more than they had to. Neither did they want to bring me into the place where they conceal most of their work. There are enchantments there that mine might disrupt. So they covered me, and stuck me in a place where they figured I’d do no harm but they could still be sure I remained in their possession.
“Which of my siblings, my lady?” asked Zelen, once Branwyn had related Yathana’s words.
“Gedomir,” said Branwyn, after consultation with Yathana, “and Hanyi. They referred to telling a sister about the results, though. I’m sorry, Zelen.”
“As am I,” said Altien, “though I also, forgive me, wonder how it is that you turned out differently, and why they didn’t raise you in the faith, so to speak.”
Zelen grinned bitterly. “Easy enough to answer that one. The council invokes the gods to close each of our sessions. They needed one of the family who could do that without being struck down. I’m sure it also helped to have one of us who really didn’t know a damned thing the rest were doing. A distraction, as my mother said.”
He told his story then, quickly but leaving out no detail, staring straight ahead. The tall form beside Branwyn might have been a marble pillar, and the shoulders under her arm were taut as wire.
“You had no knowledge of their actions or their allegiance,” Altien said at the end. “We all know better than to say you can’t blame yourself, but I can state certainly that you shouldn’t.”
“No, and yes, and…” Zelen set his empty cup down on the table, every movement very careful. “I didn’t know, true. But I’ve no doubt that they got away with more because of me than if I hadn’t given them cover. Now I do know—and I have to act. Surely you understand that.”
Chapter 30
“Yes,” said Branwyn immediately. “I can clean Yathana quickly, and you can wrap my leg in case we’re wrong about it being healed. That’ll take perhaps half an hour. Do you have any armor?”
“Afraid not,” said Zelen. He still wasn’t feeling at his best, but a quick ride would sober him up. “I can’t imagine it’ll end in much of a fight, though. The demon’s contained, and only Gedomir’s really… Well, there are our household guard, but—”
He’d never stopped to consider which side the men would be on. It had never been a question before. He realized, with a sinking heart, that it wasn’t truly a question now. If they didn’t know the family’s ties and Zelen or Branwyn could prove them, that would be one thing—but otherwise, between their liege and a younger son making wild accusations, it would be no contest.
The guards might well be in on the whole affair too.
“How many would you say there are?” Branwyn asked. Her arm dropped away from his shoulders, but Zelen felt no insult. She was beginning the hunt. “And how are they disposed?”
“Both of you,” said Altien, getting smoothly to his feet, “would do well to stay where you are and not rush off as though you’re the only people in the world who can wield weapons, or the only ones interested in seeing this matter brought to a just conclusion.”
“Generous of you, Altien, but it’s my—” Zelen began.
“Are you proposing to go on your own?” Branwyn asked at the same time. �
��I’m sure you fight well, but—”
“I’m proposing,” Altien said slowly, breaking down the word into its separate syllables, “that I go to the temple of Alcerion—Tinival, as you have him—tell them of the situation, and bring back one of the knights to let you both swear to the truth of your stories. Then I’m proposing that they, who have a multitude of armed and trained warriors who have neither been severely wounded nor suffered great shocks in the last few days, take the measures that I assume they—or the guard—are prepared to take against murderers and traitors. I’ve never wielded a weapon, Sentinel, and I’d predict I would do so very badly, though I thank you for your misplaced confidence.”
The air of great purpose left Branwyn, replaced by one of considerable embarrassment, which was a comfort to Zelen, as he was sure it matched his. “Oh. Yes,” she said. “I should probably have thought of that first.”
“You’re not the one who lives here,” said Zelen. “Much obliged to you for stepping in, Altien. Don’t know what I was thinking.”
“You were thinking with guilt, exhaustion, and the aforementioned shock,” Altien replied more gently, “and you’re both too close to the matter to see clearly. Just try to remember that while I’m gone, I beg you.”
“I suppose,” said Zelen, “that now I shouldn’t say that I can go to the temple myself and save you the errand.”
“And yet you have said it. I’ll choose to ignore it and trust that neither of you will have set yourselves on fire until I return,” said Altien. “Remember that I would mourn deeply if you managed to harm yourself, please.”
“Oh,” said Zelen. Unable to find anything to say, he sat still, got a pat on the shoulder from a furred hand, and let Altien depart.
* * *
“He’s very fond of you,” said Branwyn, relaxing back onto the bed.
She wasn’t sure how the waterman regarded her, though she thought they’d reached a tentative understanding over the last two days, but she was glad he’d intervened. Neither she nor Zelen needed to be running into a fight then.
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