By Dark Deeds (Blade and Rose Book 2)

by Miranda Honfleur

  A hot whisper against his lips. “What do you want to be tonight, dreshan?”

  “Yours.”

  A deep rumble of a laugh, and Ambriel led him to the bed.

  Chapter 49

  Rielle stared out at the sliver of the bay visible through their room’s window at Claudine’s. The dull morning sun had risen to its highest, and her gaze hesitated to stray from the discontented waves. “The worst part about it is that I don’t even have the right to be angry. He’s done no worse than I have.”

  A clink. Brennan setting down his tea. “You had no choice. He did.”

  Did he? She knew nothing of Jon’s situation. The only thing in her head had been… the sound of him with… another woman, and even when he’d found her, that had been all she could hear.

  He was getting married, wasn’t he? She’d spent the past few months translating news of him and his suitresses. He’d chosen one, of course.

  “You were in an impossible situation. A choice between dying or suffering, between greater and lesser odds of survival. You can’t be blamed for pursuing life.”

  Pursuing life. Isn’t that what Jon had done? Instead of sitting around and waiting for her to return, if she returned, he’d chosen to go live his life. Turned the page from her chapter in his life to something new.

  Beyond the diamond-grille window, Courdeval was a muted gray. Freezing rain had drenched the city all morning.

  The door creaked open behind her, and Liam entered with a thin smile, his mess of straw-blond hair secured in a knot at the back of his head. He held up a hand in greeting. “Still planning to head back to Trèstellan?”

  “I have to.” Given all that had happened, she’d neglected to tell Jon about Shadow. And those words couldn’t come through a message that could be intercepted. She owed him that much.

  And leaving it like this… She’d made a spectacle of herself. Wept, shouted.

  She pressed her lips together. The calm thing to do would have been to meet him, cool and poised, and tell him she wished him happiness in his new relationship, and that should he ever require the assistance of an elementalist, he’d have to look elsewhere. Then smile sweetly and leave.

  The calm thing to do. But right then, calm had been about as possible as flying.

  Now was her chance to leave things differently, try not to be a sopping mad mess, so it wouldn’t nag at her the rest of her life.

  With careful steps, Liam approached her and gently rested a hand on her shoulder. “I hate to see you like this, all because of this… king.” He spat the word with snarling disdain. “Forget him. Forget all of it. Come with me on the water and take it out on some pirates.”

  Brennan sighed through his nose. “Don’t be an idiot. She’s not going anywhere.”

  Liam jerked his head. “Did I ask you?”

  She shook her head. “Liam, I know your heart’s in the right place, but—”

  Brennan rose, his brow engraved with a scowl. “Do you honestly think she’s going to walk away from this and run like some coward? Like you?”

  Liam clenched the hilt of his rapier. “Let’s have this discussion outside, Marcel, and let our blades do the talking.”

  She spun to face them. “Win or lose, do you think either of you dying will improve matters?”

  Chest puffed, Liam stared at her blankly, and Brennan nodded smugly.

  “Liam, I know you mean well, but Brennan’s right. I could never just leave. Not until I speak to Jon and kill Shadow, at least.” No matter how much Jon had hurt her, the pathetic truth was that she still loved him. Seeing him again had reaffirmed that truth, loud and clear.

  Liam clenched his jaw, but when he glanced in her direction, he deflated and sighed. “Sorry. I just—you’re sad, and I feel like I can’t do anything.”

  “You can’t.” Brennan curled a fist and cracked his knuckles. “This is for her to resolve.”

  Resolve… She couldn’t even begin to think how.

  Time? Distance?

  A return to routine, maybe. And the Tower. That was where she belonged.

  “What you going to do?” Liam asked her.

  She sighed. “I’ll tell him what he needs to know, then I’m going back to the Tower.”

  Brennan’s upper lip curled. He hated the Tower, of course, but she’d always found comfort there. It wasn’t always easy to live there, but she knew what pains awaited in those white-marble walls, and she could bear those. This… this was different. Being in the same room with Jon had clenched her heart like a vise, and being in the same city surprisingly didn’t feel much better.

  Someone knocked at the door. Liam opened it a crack.

  “Visitor,” Claudine said gently, smoothing her frock with nervous hands. Managing an inn with an iron hand, she was nevertheless clearly unsettled by whoever it was who’d arrived.

  It couldn’t be… could it? Jon? Would he have followed her here? Her heart beat faster, battering against her chest.

  “Would he be so bold,” Brennan began, “and so incredibly stupid?”

  She smiled despite herself.

  “A man?” Liam straightened, squaring his shoulders. Great Divine, if it was Jon—

  “A woman.” She glanced at Brennan. “Said you knew her.”

  Brennan rubbed his face. “Nora.”

  His sister?

  “Thank you, Claudine,” Brennan replied. “I’ll be right down.”

  Claudine was closing the door when footsteps clicked up the stairs.

  “Is that the room? Stand aside, Madame,” a woman’s voice said.

  Her heart leapt. Olivia.

  Past the middle-aged innkeeper, Olivia entered the room, and there she was, Rielle, liveried in Tregarde’s red and gold.

  “Olivia.” Her eyes wide, Rielle closed the distance between them, her frail body so much less than it had always been. Rielle’s arms were around her before she could reply.

  Alive. Rielle really was alive. She hugged her back, tears pricking her eyes.

  When Jon had told her, she’d believed it, but the spiritualist’s words had seeped into a part of her and pooled, so deep that nothing but these arms could reach. “Are you—”

  “I’m fine.” Rielle pulled back and grinned, her sky-blue eyes lively, intense. “I am, now that you’re here.”

  “What happened to you?” Olivia whispered. Where had she been? Was she all right?

  A man cleared his throat, and she glanced aside, where a tall, tan-skinned man stood, arms crossed, his messy blond hair knotted at the back of his neck. He wore a rapier at his side, and worn leather boots that had seen far too much ocean water. He had to a sailor, for at least a handful of years in his… nearly three decades?

  His face—Divine, he was handsome, in a rugged way—was familiar, his eyes a sky blue she knew all too well.

  “Aren’t you going to introduce us?” he asked Rielle, his voice deep, gravelly.

  Eyebrows high, Rielle slowly smiled. “I was going to, but Olivia doesn’t have time for ship captains gallivanting about… Are you a ship captain? Or… or is there some other identity you claim?” Her eyes sparkled, and next to her, Brennan covered his mouth, his own gaze gleaming.

  The blond man rubbed his chin and scowled at Rielle before sweeping a graceful bow before Olivia. “Captain Verib of the Liberté, my lady, at your service.”

  She inclined her head. He had to be an Amadour. A cousin of Rielle’s, perhaps? “Well met, Verib.”

  “The pleasure’s all mine,” he said, those sky-blue eyes locked with hers.

  Handsome, yes, but Rielle was right. She did not have time for ship captains, especially when her best friend was back from the dead.

  Brennan clapped him on the back. “Let’s leave these two to catch up. I’ll buy you a round.”

  Verib hesitated before nodding and leaving the room with Brennan.

  Rielle took her hand and led her to the bed, where they both sat.

  “Tell me everything,” Olivia said, “from the
very beginning. What happened on the night of Spiritseve, after we parted ways?”

  Rielle heaved a sigh, fell back into the pillows, and bit her lip. She began a tale of the past several months’ events, spoke of how Shadow had abducted her, sold her into slavery on the order of some mysterious client; she described the ship and its captain, the chaotic mess of images that was her memory aboard. The long torment of the market slave stables in Harifa. The violence, the death, the inhumanity. The lengthy trudge across a desert to a new nightmare.

  She spoke of the other women there, sisters of circumstance, and a brave young apothecary, and a master with an offer. Of her pregnancy, Jon’s child. A child. Brennan’s arrival, her drugging, the assassination. Losing her child, Great Divine. Fleeing Xir, nearly losing Brennan, crossing the Bay of Amar, battling a kraken, being saved by mermaids. Helping to free a slave ship. How she’d longed to see Jon. How she’d found him.

  By the end, Olivia lay crumpled, her head in Rielle’s lap. A sickly heat spread in her stomach. Too much. It was all too much. “If only I had stayed with you—”

  “Then you might’ve suffered with me. Or worse. It’s good that you didn’t.”

  Suffered. Rielle had been abducted by a vengeful enemy, kept prisoner on a pirate vessel, and sold into servitude. She’d discovered herself with child and clung to a master to survive. She’d nearly died and had lost her child escaping… Had nearly lost Brennan… And had come close to drowning while battling an Immortal.

  “Needless to say, this doesn’t go beyond you and me,” Rielle added, tucking a lock of Olivia’s hair behind her ear.

  Doesn’t go beyond…? “You’re not going to tell him?”

  “I will,” Rielle said, “but after this nightmare with Shadow is over. And it has to be me.”

  All that Rielle had suffered… Jon had to know the price Rielle had paid to save her, him, and Courdeval on Spiritseve, that he was a father. Share in her grief. He’d never want Rielle to bear the sadness of their baby’s death alone.

  Here she was, between the two of them like a wall, holding Jon’s heart problem on one side, and their baby’s death on the other, keeping truths from them both. But they were truths Jon and Rielle needed to share with each other. “I understand.”

  She squeezed Rielle’s hand. “Jon sent countless knights and paladins to look for you, but you’d vanished without a trace. I have no idea how Brennan found you.”

  “He knows me,” Rielle said softly, “far better than I thought he did. Than I expected him to.”

  There was a quiet affection in her voice, a gentleness, that hadn’t been there before whenever she’d spoken of Brennan. “He’s changed?”

  Rielle nodded. “You have no idea how much.”

  Do you love him? The thought formed in her mind unbidden, but she couldn’t ask. Wouldn’t.

  Olivia shook her head. “I know it looks very bad, but both Jon and I thought you were dead. A spiritualist told us so. And Jon, when he found out… he didn’t take it well.”

  Rielle rose and went to the mirror, but she dropped her gaze, didn’t look at her reflection. “He thought I was dead?”

  “We all did,” she replied quietly. Surely that would ease things now?

  “Olivia, I heard him in bed with another woman.” Rielle’s watery gaze locked with hers. “Even if he thought me dead, even if he had a thousand valid reasons, that night is not something I can just erase from my mind.”

  “Talk to him,” she said. Let him tell you he thought you were dead, and that he’s dying. “After what you’ve meant to each other, and everything you’ve been through, you need to hear him out. Understand why he reacted the way he did. And maybe, with time, things will get better. All wounds heal with time, don’t they?”

  With a sigh, Rielle nodded. “Perhaps so, but… we have a bigger concern right now—Shadow trying to kill him.”

  Shadow—she was alive? She was the one who’d been hunting Jon all this time?

  Rielle flitted about the room and collected some clothes, then she stepped behind a screen and threw off her Tregarde livery. “She won’t stop until he’s dead or she is. Increase his guard. Lay down wards.”

  “We’re already doing that, but with the Veris ball coming up, it couldn’t hurt to check again. To do more. She might strike then, in the thick of all the activity.”

  Rielle was silent a time, only the sound of clothes rustling as she changed. “Stay vigilant,” she said. “And there, on the desk”—a note lay there—“if you can get that to him and get me an audience tonight, I’ll talk to him.”

  Olivia raised her eyebrows. Then she was willing to forgive him after all? “You will?”

  “About Shadow, yes.”

  But not about anything else. “Rielle—”

  “After Shadow is dealt with.” Rielle stepped out from behind the screen, an ankle boot clicking on the floor. “I promise. But right now, I just… I can’t think beyond the sound of… them.”

  It was a lot to take in. If she’d been in the same position with James, even if she sympathized with his reasons, purging such a thing from her mind would take time.

  It wouldn’t be perfect. Nothing ever was. But when they loved each other so much, wasn’t it worth the effort to try?

  Perhaps Rielle had put Jon up on a pedestal, admiring and loving him so much that she’d believed he had no faults, no weaknesses, that he could even make her own disappear. Treated him more like an ideal than a real person, with flaws, fears, insecurities, and the unfortunate human tendency to err. If a woman believed a man had hung the moon, he had that much farther to fall when she found him wanting.

  And he’d fallen all right. Very, very, very far. Pedestal or not, he’d succumbed to doubt when he should have had faith.

  With her irresponsible oversight of the spiritualist, she’d only pushed him down the wrong path, but he was still the one who’d taken it, one willful foot in front of the other. The man he was now could never be a good partner in life, not until he redefined how the man and the king would keep peace inside him.

  Perhaps it was for the best that Rielle was taking a step back, at least until they could find a way forward.

  “I understand,” Olivia said, rising. “I’ll head back to Trèstellan and expect you at…?”

  “Midnight.”

  Brennan waited on the stairs until finally, the lithe woman left Rielle’s room, her head of dusty-red hair bowed as she tightened her moss-green velvet-and-rabbit-fur cloak. One of her slender, pale hands bore a brassy gold ring set with a misty emerald jewel. The Ring of the Archmage.

  Olivia is Rielle’s friend. She had been, long before becoming Archmage.

  He hadn’t eavesdropped on their conversation—Rielle deserved better—but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t find out what had happened. And Olivia would tell him.

  She approached the stairs, and when her green gaze landed on him, she gasped. “Brennan.”

  Arms folded across his chest, he met her wide-eyed glance with unwavering adamancy.

  “Let me walk you out, Olivia,” he said, hitting her with the full effect of his deep, aristocratically apathetic voice, and all the practiced allure that had unsettled a legion of women before her. He flexed his arms, straining the crisp black cotton of his shirt, as she joined him in the stairwell. “So, do you think the king deserves her sympathy after he betrayed her?”

  “That’s up to her.” She scowled at him, her face set. “And he didn’t betray her.”

  Interesting. “Did he neglect to mention his lover to you?” he asked as they strolled down to the landing.

  She heaved a sigh. “I know, but… he didn’t betray her.”

  “He didn’t wait.”

  “He believed she was dead.”

  “He didn’t wait.”

  She slammed a palm on the wall. “A spiritualist told him she was dead!”

  The pub went quiet, and the crew of the Liberté stared at them for a moment before Brennan grinned and escorted he
r to the door. He opened it for her, and she walked through.

  “A spiritualist?” He laughed, escorting her toward the stable. “A spiritualist who clearly lied. And the fool believed it, all too readily.”

  “Jon didn’t think—”

  He raised his eyebrows. “ ‘Jon,’ is it?” He chuckled coolly. “I admit a grudging respect. Just how many lovers does he have?”

  With a glare, she pulled up the hood of her cloak. “It’s not like that. We bonded over Rielle, and we’re friends. That’s all.”

  Her pulse was even. It was the truth. “Like I care.”

  She hissed. “His Majesty didn’t think the boy would have any reason to lie.”

  “The boy?” Brennan frowned.

  “The spiritualist.”

  Great Wolf. If it was— “What was his name?”

  Olivia scrunched her face. “The boy’s? Why?”

  “What. Was. His. Name?”

  She shrugged. “Francis.”

  Great Wolf. But he had to know. “ ‘Francis’ what?”

  “Francis… I don’t know!” she spat. “When I asked my friend Erelyn, she said he could do it, and that was all.”

  “Erelyn Leonne?” He held his breath.

  Olivia nodded. “How do you know her?”

  Erelyn Leonne. Master Erelyn Leonne. His nephew’s magic tutor. Francis’s magic tutor. Francis Marcel Vignon, the future Count Vauquelin. Nora’s son.

  Nora, his sister, who had so fawned over the king when he’d been Tor’s squire. Nora, who had recently lost her husband in the siege and scrambled for some security, to keep the king from appointing a steward to manage Vauquelin, and perhaps to insulate herself from Father’s ceaseless grasping for power.

  “You idiot.” The people in the street paused a moment before resuming their walking.

  “I don’t take kindly to being insulted,” she bit out through gritted teeth as she looked around.

  “The truth is often unkind.” He continued to the stable. “Let me tell you what an idiot you are. You had the king in a vulnerable position, grappling with the question of whether his beloved was alive or dead. Naturally, you couldn’t watch him suffer, so you decided to help,” he said, with mock sweetness. “So what you did was… You brought in the only spiritualist anywhere near Courdeval, and because your friend was his tutor and the boy was, merely, a boy, you didn’t question his name.”