by John Tristan
“They found you, then.” Caedian paused a moment, breathing hard, then attacked the target again with vicious gusto.
Amon stood frozen a few paces behind him. “Yes, my lord.”
The muscles of Caedian’s arms stood out in tense contrast; a sideways swipe against the target hit it so hard it scored a line into the metal. “Where were you?”
“Where—what do you mean?”
“You weren’t in your quarters.” Another hard swipe. “You weren’t in the House of Dust.” Another one, this from the opposite direction, forming a ragged cross. “So where were you?”
Amon took a deep breath. He wasn’t sure if he could trust Caedian with the truth—he wasn’t sure if the elf would even believe him. So all that he said was, “I’m sorry.”
Caedian halted his attack on the target. His shoulders rose and fell with his ragged breaths; he still would not turn toward Amon. “It doesn’t matter. You can stop looking for Seoras. I am dismissing you from my service.”
The words came like a blow. Amon sucked in a harsh breath. “Why, my lord?”
“Because I no longer require you. What other reason do you need?” His voice was cutting and cold. “You can keep the kings that I gave you, if that’s the issue.”
Amon closed his eyes a moment. One. Two, two. He is an elf. This is how they are. “Have you found him, then?”
Caedian laughed—No, Amon realized. He wasn’t laughing. His shoulders were shaking, but the sound he was making had nothing of cheer to it. “My brother...” He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “My brother is dead.”
A shiver crawled down Amon’s spine and settled in his gut. “They haven’t turned the sky.”
“No. They’ll turn it when we mourn him.”
“Who killed him?”
Caedian turned around then. His eyes were bleared and bloodshot, his face wet with mingled sweat and tears, but underneath all of that there was the same sharp beauty, sharpened further by a sudden flare of interest. “What?”
Amon took a step backward. He could not remember a time when he had done that, taken that instinctive step as if backing down from a threat. Then again, he could not exactly remember a time when a grief-stricken elf had stood in front of him with a sword in his hand. “People have been after me. They were constables, or pretending to be.” He took a deep breath. “They tried to kill me. I thought maybe—”
Caedian shook his head, not in denial but as if trying to clear it. “My mother was told there had been an accident in a low house. There was a fire. Seoras...” He did not go on.
Another cold shiver joined its twin in Amon’s stomach. “Did she tell you it was Una’s house? By the old armory?”
Caedian carefully placed the sword against the metal target, point up. “Does it matter? Seoras is dead. His friends, his friends from the Rim...they’re dead alongside him.” He let out a long, shuddering sigh. His eyes were dry now, but the curve of his lower lip was trembling.
“The women in the white clothes you sent to fetch me. Who are they?”
Caedian looked up sharply. “What do you mean?”
“Are all your servants dressed that way?”
“It’s a traditional—” He shook his head. “What does it matter?”
“Because men in white came for your brother at his black house, to bring him back home. They came for him a day before Dragonfall.”
Caedian lashed out and grabbed his wrist. His grip was startlingly strong. “Who told you this?”
Amon extricated himself from the elf’s hand and told him the story he had pieced together—Seoras’s story.
Caedian listened quietly, wiping the sweat from his chest with a white cloth. When he had finished, Caedian shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense. If our mother had dragged him home she would have told me—even if he gave her the slip afterward. And who else would do so? There is no queen or priest among us who could command our obedience.”
“I don’t understand it either,” Amon said quietly, “but I do know that once I began to ask questions, I was set upon by people who wanted me dead.”
“How could you possibly know those things are connected? There could be a hundred reasons why people would want you dead!”
Amon kept his face still—the words had bored into him like an augur, but he made no sign of it. “If that was the case, my lord, why didn’t they want me dead before I started working for you?”
Caedian threw the cloth across the metal target. “Seoras’s memorial is today. They’ll turn the sky black, and all of the City will be invited to mourn him.” His smile was bitter. “As Lady Liléan says, certain proprieties must be observed.”
“I’m sorry,” Amon said softly. “I’m sorry about your brother.”
Caedian turned his back toward him again and walked to a metal stand in the corner upon which a white shirt hung. “If what you told me is true, then perhaps I am being lied to. Me, and perhaps my mother as well. If—if what you told me is true, my brother does not require your apologies.” He turned back toward Amon, purple eyes blazing. “What he needs is your help to avenge him.”
“So...” Amon pronounced the next words slowly and carefully. “So you are not dismissing me?”
A smile cracked through his hard, grief-stricken mask. “It would appear I am not.”
“My lord. Caedian?”
His face danced through the same series of weird expressions it always showed when Amon called him by his title, or his name. “What is it?”
“Why did you have me brought here? If you thought I was of no more use to you, you could have simply had your servants deliver the message.”
Caedian was silent for a while. He used the silence to pull on the loose white shirt. It was made of pale wool, tied at the collar with thin golden threads. “I wanted to tell you face-to-face,” he said. “I thought I owed you that much, after what you did for me.”
Liar, Amon thought—all his instincts screamed it. He was lying as much as Edina had lied that night in the music hall, before they winkled the truth out of her. There was a nervous tone to his voice, a flutter to his heartbeat that Amon could not decode, but he knew that what Caedian had told him was a falsity.
The lie should have raised some alarm in him, some suspicion of the pale-haired elf, but Caedian had not sent the constables with their swords. Of that, Amon was also sure. Whatever Caedian was concealing, it wasn’t the intent to kill him. He’d had plenty of opportunity for that, in any case. Even if he wanted to do it himself; that sword he wielded looked sharp enough to slice through Amon’s throat.
“So what do we do now, m’lord?”
“You’ll come to the memorial with me.”
Amon gaped at him a moment, all words lost. He can’t really mean this. It has to be some bad jest. “I’m sorry?”
“You will be my guest. No one will be rude enough to gainsay that.” He subsided a little, looking down. “I cannot escape from my duties to attend, Amon, but afterward? Afterward, we can begin to find out who is lying about my brother.”
Caedian swallowed and looked up, and Amon’s breath caught in his throat. It seemed to him that there were two Caedians. One was the elf-lord, polished and perfect and hard as glass. The other was the man—not human, but a man—whom he saw now, whose beauty had softer edges, whose eyes were not always so sure.
“You will help me, won’t you? You can tell a lie.”
“Yes,” he said, without thinking. “Yes, I can tell a lie...unless the liar is very good indeed.”
Caedian nodded a little, then showed a sudden, bright smile, as incongruous as a kiss. “We will have to find you something to wear.”
Chapter Thirteen
Not an hour later, Amon was naked, soaking in a massive marble bowl of warm water, feeling as if he had been dr
opped into another world.
He had heard of baths before, of course—they were common enough in stories—but he had never taken one. No one he knew in the Rim had the kind of riches that would allow them to fill an entire tub with clean water; it was far too precious for that. The elves had no such compunction though, and once Caedian had decided to take him as a guest to his brother’s memorial, it wouldn’t do to have him carry the dirt of sleep and pursuit on his skin.
Caedian had marched him into a bathroom near as large as the House of Dust and set him down in the great white tub. “Wash,” he’d commanded Amon. “And I’ll get you some clothes for when you’re done.”
Amon was sure that there would be nothing in Caedian’s quarters, massive as they were, that would fit him; he was a head taller than the elf, and nearly twice as broad to boot, despite the well-developed swordsman’s muscles that Caedian sported.
Well, Amon thought, if he can’t find anything, I’ll just have to follow him to the memorial naked.
He washed under his arms and between his legs, trying to think of nothing except the warm, silky feel of the water on his skin. It was easy enough to lose himself in the luxury of it, but every now and then he would look up and his eyes would light on something new and strange—a column of gray branches, a glowfruit the size of his head dangling from the ceiling by a network of deep green vines—and he would be pulled back to the reality of his situation: sitting in the bath of an elf-lord’s quarters, being scrubbed so he could attend the memorial of his twin.
Him. A halfdead. No one will be rude enough to gainsay it, Caedian had said, but Amon was not so sure of that.
“Are you clean?”
He looked up. Caedian was standing near the door, leaning against the wall. He held a bundle in his hands. Amon could see dark fabric and the gleam of metal.
“Clean enough,” he muttered, adjusting himself in the water so the white scum of soap covered his naked form.
Caedian walked closer. His eyes seemed to be wandering everywhere, darting back and forth so that he could not be accused of staring. “Are there many others like you?”
“Like me?” Amon cleared his throat. “A halfdead, you mean?” He wondered what Caedian thought of his halfdead body—if he found some strange fascination in it, in his unnaturally strong limbs and the hard swell of his belly, covered with its black web of veins.
Caedian nodded and sat down on the edge of the tub. He unfolded the bundle in his hand, taking out a bottle of soap and a shining straight-edged razor.
Amon shifted in the tub. “Hey, what are you doing?”
“Calm down,” Caedian said, and he put his hand on Amon’s shoulder, sliding him deeper under the water. He poured out a measure of soap in the palm of his hand and rubbed it on Amon’s cheek. “I’m not going to slit your throat. But you need a thorough shave.”
Amon held himself very still. Caedian’s touch was warm and unfamiliar, and the blade was very close to his face. His heartbeat already felt too near the surface of his skin with the heat of the bath—he was sure that Caedian could see every leap of his blood in the thick veins of his neck.
“You were telling me about the halfdead,” Caedian said. There was a slight tremor in his voice that Amon could not quite decipher.
He swallowed carefully as the first lick of the blade touched his throat. “There...there used to be many halfdead. They weren’t called that at first, of course.”
Caedian moved the razor over the stubble on his neck. “I know. You were the dragonhunters, weren’t you?”
“No, we—”
“Tilt your head back a little.”
He cleared his throat. “Dragonhunters are older than the halfdead. They...they were the ones who dared to venture in the wastes outside the Last City, to make a sortie against the dragons.”
“Mmm-hmm.” Caedian sheared the blade down his cheeks now. He was bent so close that Amon could feel his breath as he spoke. “But only for a little while, right? The air is poison out there.”
“Yes. They needed adamantine armor—not just as a shield against dragonfire. It protected them from the poison of the dragonlands, but only for so long. The halfdead were made to survive in the dragonlands without armor. They wouldn’t need to weigh themselves down, and they...” He was losing track of his words; the elf’s proximity was making his mind go blank. The razor made its second circuit of his chin. Caedian’s hand was resting against his other cheek.
“It was meant to make them stronger as well, wasn’t it?”
Amon gathered his thoughts. “Yes. Stronger, faster. Halfdeath was meant to be a gift. It was meant to change the dragonhunters into...into heroes of legend.”
“Instead, we got you.”
“Yes.” He laughed carefully, so as not to scrape his skin against the blade. “You got me.”
Caedian drew back. His face was unreadable. “You’re done,” he said, soft-voiced.
Amon touched his chin. It was strangely smooth. “Why don’t you know all this, about the halfdead? It was your kind that gave the ‘gift’ to—”
“To your mother?”
Amon nodded. It was all he could do.
“I was not yet born then.” It was the first hint Caedian had given of his age—it meant he was barely older than Amon. “And it isn’t exactly a proud part of our history.” He stood up and wiped the razor on a dark towel. “When you’re done rinsing off, I have some clothing laid out for you. We should get ready to go. Lady Liléan will be here soon.”
Amon looked up at him. “Are you sure about this?”
Caedian shook his head. “Since you told me about my brother, I am not sure about anything anymore.”
“They won’t let me in. They won’t want a halfdead at the top of the world...”
“You are my guest.” His voice snapped out cold and sharp as a blade. “They cannot refuse you without insulting me.”
He snatched a dark towel up from the bundle he had brought and handed it to Amon. He wrapped it around his waist as he stepped out of the bathtub. His face felt oddly bare without its stubble—strangely even more naked than the rest of him.
“Here,” Caedian said, and he pressed a soft black heap of fabric into his hands. “This will fit you.”
Amon shook it out and gave it a skeptical look. It was a long-sleeved shirt, loose at the neck and fitted at the waist, with ribbons tying back the sleeves. It looked just about large enough to suit him. He almost wanted to ask where Caedian had gotten it, but instead of asking questions he pulled it over his head, leaving only the towel covering his legs. “Are there trousers I can wear?”
Caedian lifted one corner of his mouth. “Nothing that will fit you, I’m afraid. Here.” He handed him a kilt of a soft, dark blue material. “This is slipsilk. It grows or shrinks to fit the wearer.”
When Amon was dressed, Caedian led him out of the bathroom, back to the entry hall where the white-clad woman had left him. The wall had slid apart, showing the door to the moving room—and on either side of it, two shimmering full-length mirrors. Amon saw himself, a halfdead vagrant in an elf-lord’s clothes.
“I had your boots polished,” Caedian said. “Shoes, I couldn’t find in your size.”
Amon turned away from the mirrors. “This is crazy, Caedian, this isn’t—”
The curtain of leaves slid aside, and the door to the moving room opened. Amon and Caedian looked up at once, meeting Liléan’s eyes. She was dressed in a long gray gown trimmed with metallic white, and her dark eyes were accented with a shimmer of white shadow.
If she was surprised by Amon’s presence, she did not show it; she stepped in, flanked by a tall woman in white—one of her servants, Amon guessed. “It is nearly time,” she said. “I came by to make sure you were coming.”
“Coming to watch your coterie pretend they cared
about my brother?”
Liléan’s mouth went tight. “You may make your empty gestures now, Caedian. Do not make them at the memorial. You are not the only one to grieve him.” She seemed to notice Amon for the first time, sweeping her eyes across him as lightly as if he were a piece of the furniture. “Not content with keeping your fun down where it belongs, hmm?”
Caedian took Amon’s arm. “Amon is my guest.”
She smirked, then realized that Caedian was serious. Her smile snapped shut like a door. “This is your brother’s memorial, Lord Caedian.”
“Yes. And when an elf perished, were not the dragonhunters invited to serve as honor guard? The Tree has room for heroes as well as elves.”
“This...this man is not exactly a dragonhunter.”
“He is the nearest we have, in this degraded age.” His tone of voice was different when he spoke to Liléan—there was the coolness of the elf on full display, and below it the desperate petulance of a child. His fingers dug deep into the muscle of Amon’s arm. “Are you saying he will be turned away?”
“Turned away? He is your guest, apparently. You know he will be welcomed.” She turned back toward the door to the moving room. “The memorial begins in an hour, exactly. When the sky turns.”
“We will be there, Mother.”
“I don’t doubt it, somehow.” She sighed again. “Keep him on a short leash, will you?”
Amon stepped forward, shaking off Caedian’s hand. Liléan did not move a muscle, but her white-clad servant—or bodyguard—reached down to her belt. A glance told Amon she carried a short sword. The prohibition on steel did not extend to the elite servants of the Tree, apparently.
Instead of lunging at Liléan as she half seemed to expect, he bowed deeply, with military correctness, in just the way that Zoran had taught him. You will be a dragonhunter one day, my boy, he had told him. You had best learn to go through the motions.
He had never become a dragonhunter—the corps had been disbanded long before Amon came of age—but he still knew all their niceties. “My lady,” he said. “I am at your son’s service.”