The Nightborn

by Isabel Cooper

  She imagined that: the personal servants, the ones closest to the cultists, who’d probably been under the tightest control, suddenly having their bonds snap. For the sake of getting any information from the other Verengirs, she hoped that the knights had put them under close watch by the time that happened.

  Slowly, they got most of the others into the study, leaving Mandyl to wait with a huddled old man—the steward, possibly—who refused to be touched or moved. There the servants stared at each other like strangers. Branwyn supposed they were, having hardly met or spoken as themselves. Horror was all that united them.

  She’d seen similar groups in Oakford and elsewhere, strangers except for one or two awful commonalities, but they’d never been like this. The servants had known each other, for years, they just…also hadn’t.

  Branwyn wanted Zelen’s touch at her back, or Yathana’s no-nonsense presence in her head. Failing either, she wanted a hot bath with plenty of soap and a brush with good hard bristles, which was equally unlikely. Only the winter wind helped, once she’d gotten everyone secure and stepped outside into the cold night. Rain spat into her face, and Branwyn welcomed it.

  Hoofbeats approached. Branwyn turned toward them, though she didn’t raise Yathana. She’d be no good against a mounted foe in her condition, and she didn’t think there were any nearby.

  She’d hoped for Tanya and Zelen, but seeing them on Jester, the girl hanging onto the saddle and Zelen’s arms sturdy around her, was as good as the bath she’d been longing for. The six mounted knights in armor, and the two shadowy figures in leather who rode near their sides, were the gravy on top of the meat.

  “We’d feared we came too late,” said Lycellias, pushing open the visor of his helm, “and rejoice to know otherwise. What can we do to assist? What do you still need?”

  “Sleep, for the most part,” said Branwyn. “Anywhere but in this house.”

  Chapter 42

  If not for Tanya, Zelen would likely have lost the struggle to keep his eyes open on the way back to Heliodar. The rain and wind wouldn’t have sufficed, nor would his own sense of self-preservation. He’d never been so weary—not only from lack of sleep and physical activity, he recognized, or even from the aftermath of Letar’s presence, but as a result of days of tension that his body now recognized it could let go.

  Looking back at the house, unable to see it against the darkness but knowing it was there, he corrected days to years.

  His lids kept drifting closed as they rode, Jester’s steady walk lulling his mind deeper into the silence that had already started to fill it. Tanya was perched in front of him, though, her whole form stiff with wariness about large smelly beasts as a method of transportation. If Zelen fell, he’d almost certainly take her with him.

  That, and occasionally biting the inside of his cheek when matters got too dire, kept him awake until the familiar structure of his own home emerged out of the darkness.

  Feyher was there among the grooms, helping Tanya off Jester and handing her over to one of the maids—gods, had the entire household turned out?—and then standing nearby as Zelen practically oozed out of the saddle, ready to catch him but not being too obvious about it. “Bless you,” Zelen said, or intended to say.

  Very little was clear after that. He was fairly certain he got to his rooms under his own power, and even that he stayed in motion long enough to wash off the blood and the worst of his sweat. For one instant, he saw his hands clearly, and the water in the basin below them turning red.

  That was his blood, Gedomir would have said, Verengir blood on Zelen’s hands, a sin and a crime.

  The presence in his head examined it and said, without saying: All blood is blood.

  And he’d never seen a family crest in it, he had to admit.

  Zelen laughed and swayed backwards with the motion. Branwyn caught him. She smelled of soap, and her hair was wet. “Be easy,” she said, “or your people will have to carry both of us to bed.”

  “I don’t much care how I get there,” said Zelen. “The floor’s seeming quite hospitable, to be frank.”

  They made it, though, through force of will and the allure of feather pillows. All became darkness of an extremely welcome sort.

  Occasionally he woke, prompted by his body’s needs, but only for as long as it took to stagger down the hall and back. On other occasions, after the initial long spell of sound sleep, he dreamed. He saw blood in the hallway and Branwyn on her hands and knees, struggling for air, or the demon seizing Tanya in its massive claws, or Hanyi’s bloody mouth forming his name.

  He held Branwyn tighter following those moments. At other times, as he dozed, he heard her quick inhalation and felt her turn toward him, burying her face between his shoulder and neck. Zelen stroked her back gently.

  We’re here. We’re both still here, he said to himself, and they both slid back into sleep.

  Branwyn wasn’t in bed with him when he woke fully. She was sitting by the window instead, sipping wine and eating small things out of a porcelain dish. As Zelen focused, he saw that they were candied nuts, and that she was reading Five Years in Semele. She closed the book before Zelen had made a sound, though. Yathana’s fire opal sparkled in the sunset light.

  “This,” she said, glancing down at the small red-leather volume, “is either desperately inaccurate or written by a man with more leisure than I ever had. Wine?”

  “Please.” He couldn’t remember his throat ever feeling dryer, and he gulped from the glass Branwyn poured in a way that did no justice at all to a good vintage. “How long were we out?”

  “You’ve been asleep for the better part of two days. Me? Half a day less, or roughly.” She watched him rise with an appreciative eye that Zelen felt his collection of bruises and sore muscles didn’t merit. He wasn’t going to object, though. “I’m not surprised. For one thing, I didn’t play host to a goddess.”

  “I’d have presumed you would, out of the two of us,” Zelen said, shrugging on a robe and then taking a chair across from her. “More in the way of firsthand experience and so on.”

  “Not with Letar. Her brother and mother, yes, but even there…” Branwyn shook her head. “They lent their skill to my reshaping, but that was acting from the outside, and if it touched my soul, it was by way of my body. The opposite happened with you. From what Yathana says, the two don’t blend particularly well.”

  She has too many lines to break along. The sword was clear now, and he blinked. She might have closed the rift. She wouldn’t have survived. I was pretty sure that you could, and that you might live through it.

  “I can’t fault your logic,” said Zelen, reaching for his wine again. “Tanya?”

  “Cleaned, fed, and back with her family.”

  “And—” He tried to frame a more specific question, found that words failed, and fell back on vagueness. “Everything else?”

  Branwyn set down her glass. “The knights intercepted your parents and your sister on their way here,” she said, and her voice became gentler, though still matter-of-fact. “Your father was badly injured, your sister somewhat so, and your mother got off lightly. Their coachman was freed at the same time as the other servants. Their personal attendants were in another carriage, which is likely all that kept them alive.”

  In the silence that followed, Zelen heard Hidath’s screaming again. “Yes,” he said, “yes, I’d bloody well think so. Are the servants…recovering?”

  “As well as the ones back at the house. Lycellias says Tinival might be the best god to tend to them, since his domain is generally affairs of the mind. He also requests our presence at the temple when we’re ‘feeling sufficiently restored.’”

  “That should only take a year or two,” said Zelen, but he finished his wine and rose with a groan. “Can you give me any advance knowledge?”

  “I think,” said Branwyn, “that your father’s agreed to talk.”r />
  * * *

  Behind the outer room of Tinival’s shrine, hung with blue silk and shining with silver, plainer hallways led back to rooms where the god’s less showy work was carried out: barracks, armories, offices, and, up a long, winding set of marble stairs, a tower open to the sky and caged with intricate silver bars.

  There, three knights stood in a triangle, armor polished to a mirror sheen, swords and heads both bare. Behind them was a Blade, tall and gaunt in a black robe.

  Janayal Verengir, lord of his house, distant ruler and occasional terror of Zelen’s youth and more distant dictator of his adulthood, traitor to humanity and the gods, knelt in the center of the triangle. He was bald, thin, frail-boned with age, and wearing the plain garb of a prisoner, but his eyes were as cold and superior as ever.

  He watched his son walk in, side-by-side with the Sentinel that he’d tried to frame for murder, and his upper lip curled in a sneer that Zelen knew very well. It mixed a complete lack of surprise with a maximum of weary contempt, and it had never before failed to make Zelen either ashamed or angry, often both.

  For the first time, he felt neither.

  “I should have expected this,” said Lord Verengir. “The distraction was always a necessary weak point. Most of you sensibly pursued self-destruction, but…” A shrug raised his bony shoulders for a fraction of a second. “I should have watched more closely, even so.”

  “You’ll speak when you’re instructed,” said one of the knights, “or we’ll gag you, my lord.”

  “It’s all right,” said Zelen. “I hadn’t hoped for…” He tossed aside both affection or remorse, as both seemed too much even for what he hadn’t let himself desire. “Anything else.”

  “We’re here to witness a bargain, I believe,” said Branwyn. “Has the prisoner sworn his oath already?”

  “The lesser,” said Lycellias. “Now comes the greater.”

  He raised his sword, point straight up in the air, and the others followed. None of them showed fear of what their prisoner would do now, without weapons leveled at him. Faith was on their faces, and confidence, and nothing to mar that clarity.

  “Traitor,” said the Blade, stepping forward. They kept their empty hands at their sides and were somehow more menacing than any of the armed knights. “You stand in the shadow of the Dark Lady. The smoke of your own burning curls about you. The Fifth can give you no aid now, and She has no mercy. Save yourself, if you can.”

  At a distance, Zelen sensed power stirring, turning attention to the scene in the unhurried way of eternal beings.

  “I offer knowledge,” said Lord Verengir, “true knowledge. You and your masters can use it, if you let me pass without torment.”

  The thin voice didn’t crack. The expression of scorn didn’t waver, especially on the word masters. All the same, Zelen thought: Gedomir wouldn’t have taken the bargain.

  It was no better to be a fanatic than a pragmatist. Maybe it was worse. But Zelen faced the man who’d talked endlessly of family loyalty, of duty and purity and obligation, and saw that he might not, in the end, value anything more than his own skin. He hadn’t gotten the chance to stab his father as he’d done to Gedomir, not even to strike him or shout at him, but he knew why he’d regarded him with so little feeling earlier.

  There was nothing there.

  “You who speak for Letar’s brother, for the Lord of Truth,” said the Blade, turning to Lycellias, “do you take his bargain?”

  “I do so accept these terms,” said the knight, glittering eyes grave, “and I ask that the Deathmistress stay her hand, for the love she bears the brother who remains to her.”

  Zelen perceived stillness. He thought it was consideration, but he could only dimly sense Letar now and was very far from knowing Her intent. Despite his devotion, he was glad of it. He only knew when the sense of impending power faded.

  The Blade bowed their head. “She gives her assent. Speak, traitor. Buy your final mercy with the truth.”

  The western wind blew through the tower, bringing with it the scent of rain and roses again. When it passed the silver bars on the sides, they rang like chimes, and the note went on for far longer than it should have.

  Lycellias waited until it died, then, sword still held upright, he told the prisoner, “Begin with names.”

  Lord Verengir wet his lips, opened his mouth, and spoke.

  * * *

  He mentioned a half-dozen names in all. It was more than Branwyn had expected, with her limited experience hunting human monsters, and fewer than she’d feared. She recognized most of them, though not well, from her stretch at court.

  “Ranietz?” Lycellias asked at the end, the name unfamiliar to Branwyn until the knight clarified. “We know of your wife already, of course.”

  “Then it’s no matter. She’s the only one of the bloodline left,” said Lord Verengir, but as Lycellias bent his attention on the old man and Branwyn, a cold wind blew past them. Verengir grimaced. “Her father served, though he was never particularly dedicated. His wife didn’t, but she died before that could be a complication, as did her other…issue.”

  There was a nasty story there. Branwyn could guess most of the details, whether Zelen’s mother had been old enough to take part or not. Zelen himself, she observed, was taking all of the information in with a complete lack of expression and a straight back that would’ve done credit to most of the soldiers she’d encountered.

  Lycellias nodded. “And those are all of Gizath’s servants that you know?”

  “All I know. There are far, far more. You know that.” The old man’s thin, wormy lips turned up at the corners. “You all know that.”

  “Our knowledge is not your concern,” said Lycellias. “What of enchantments?”

  “None exist now,” said Lord Verengir, and sighed. “Hanyi and Gedomir were competent enough for temporary matters, but those with the truly intricate skills perished years ago. Roslina was weaker, or less pure, than we anticipated. A pity.” He did look truly sorrowful, though Branwyn wouldn’t have laid odds on it being out of human caring rather than regret over lost resources.

  “Yes,” said Lycellias, tilting his head slightly. “How was it that she and the babe perished?”

  “She burned. Her and those around her. From inside.” Branwyn, who’d seen Gizath’s fire at work, shuddered. The wind blew past her again, ice edged and implacable. Verengir’s face twisted in effort, but his mouth opened again, and he said, in a voice not entirely his own, “But the boy lived.”

  “What?” Branwyn and Yathana spoke at once.

  “Explain,” Lycellias commanded.

  “The boy survived. Alive, in a heap of ashes. There was great potential there.”

  “Where is he?” the knight asked.

  Verengir laughed, dry and thin. “We’ve been trying to discover that for years.” He didn’t try to resist this time. “It was before we’d learned to ensure the servants’ loyalty. We assumed them schooled enough in the proper order not to interfere. The child thrived. Alize and Hanyi tended him, as was proper. Then our manservant vanished, and the boy with him.” The old man hissed at the memory. “We found the man and dealt with him, but he never said what became of the babe.”

  Branwyn silently made the sign of the Four for the butler. However long it had taken the man to see the truth, he’d done well at the end, and died for it—likely in torment. She saw Zelen gulp and Lycellias’s sharp-angled features grow harder.

  “And you seek him still?” the knight asked.

  “Of course. If he can be…taught…he’s valuable. If not, his death will release the crucial element to go elsewhere. Now, likely, it’ll be into the nearest biddable host, not one trained and prepared as we would have done.” Verengir shook his head. “Thyran was always a hasty idiot. I’ll never know why my great-uncle told him as much as he did, but…”

 
Lycellias raised his hand. “We have no more need of your speech, nor of you,” he said. The other two knights stepped forward, each taking the man by one shoulder. “Go now, and reflect, if you will, on what you’ve done in this world.”

  He might. One never knew. But Branwyn didn’t have much hope. From Lycellias’s tone, she doubted that the knight did either.

  Chapter 43

  The council delivered their decision a week after Lord Verengir confessed, after the executioners had done their duty and the bodies had been distributed in pieces to the four quarters of Heliodar, after an entire flock of rumors had flown about the city.

  Branwyn stood in the chamber where she’d come on her first day, wearing the same blue wool gown she’d worn then, and the same bronze-and-opal torc around her neck. She bore Yathana openly at her waist now, though, and the council didn’t treat her as if she was a new problem or a foreign curiosity. A few regarded her with admiration. Others looked at her like an omen of doom: the Skull card in a fortune-teller’s deck, the black dog at the crossroads.

  Two who’d been there before were simply absent. Marior Rognozi sat in her uncle’s place, though without his rank on the council, absorbing the goings-on.

  Verengir’s spot had vanished, without even an empty chair to mark it.

  “The rot went too far,” Zelen had explained a few nights before, as Branwyn lay beside him in bed. “I’m the only immediate heir who survived, and…well, I’ll be surrendering my title soon enough, won’t I? Hardly the sort to sit in judgment for the city. Best for the council to go down a member, until some other house works its way to prominence. It won’t be long.”

  “You don’t sound as though you regret the loss of your position,” said Branwyn.

  “I can come up with more enjoyable ones,” he’d replied, and kissed her.

  Recovery, and delay, had had their benefits.

  Now Branwyn waited with her hands clasped in front of her and tried not to speculate. The decision would be what it would be. She and Yathana—and the Sentinels, as a whole—would have to make their plans from the next moment onward, and she could do nothing until then.