by Tanya Huff
Vree nodded. “I know.”
Avor paled, wet his lips, and somehow found the courage to face the inevitable with dignity. “Don’t leave me for the crows,” he said softly.
Slitting a throat does not bring instant death. Consciousness can linger as the heart pumps blood out onto the ground and the lungs fill with scarlet froth. The razor edge of Vree’s dagger flashed through soft tissue too quickly for pain, found the spine, slipped between two ridges of bone, and ended it. There was, at that moment, no separation between herself and her brother. It made it easier.
*Blood shared, sister-mine.*
She felt Gyhard’s eyes on her as she stood. “Get the horses.” Sheathing her dagger, she bent to drag the body farther off the road.
“What are you going to do?” The curve of her back as she’d bent over the messenger had been almost identical to the curve that haunted him—except this time, there had been nothing at all vulnerable about it.
Vree didn’t answer. A grove of trees up ahead would provide both shelter from prying eyes along the road and dirt deep enough to bury Avor and the gear they’d stripped from his horse.
“We leave the mare outside the next village we come to. I’ll give good odds that whoever finds it will keep their mouth shut.”
“Your commanders will still know he’s disappeared.”
Vree shrugged. “Nothing to connect him to us.” With a silent prayer that the goddess would take the courier into her company, even though he hadn’t exactly died in battle, she lifted the onyx pendant over her head and dropped it onto the crimson gap at Avor’s throat. Her life had been Bannon and the army. Now there was only Bannon. “And they’re not my commanders anymore.”
*At least you were right about Emo.*
*Thank you. That makes me feel so much better.* Avor began to disappear beneath double handfuls of earth.
Bannon remained silent for a long time. *So now what’ll we do?*
*Save the prince.* She threw a rock into the hole. *After that, I don’t care.*
*We don’t need the army, sister-mine. You’ll see. It was like a weight around our necks, holding us down.*
Her hand lifted to where the pendant had hung for so many years. She clutched at nothing, then spread her fingers and began to smooth the grave, blurring the edges into the surrounding dirt.
Working across from her, Gyhard frowned. He would give a great deal to know what Vree and her brother were discussing.
“Why, when as far as he knew he was facing a pair of deserting assassins and had every right—or even obligation under the law—to kill us, didn’t our young messenger go for his crossbow?” he asked when they were once again on the road.
“Crossbows take time to load. He didn’t have that time and he knew it. His only hope was escape.”
“Not much of a hope.”
She snorted softly. “No.”
Gyhard couldn’t quite identify the new tone in her voice. It sounded almost melancholy. “Does it bother you that you killed a comrade?”
Her profile tilted enough to fix him in a scornful glare. “Having my throat slit in the dark would bother me a lot more. If Avor told the garrison that he saw us, they’d send out comrades harder to kill.”
“We’re not so very different, then, you and I. I also kill to stay alive.”
If he’d hoped to provoke a reaction, he was doomed to disappointment. “Everyone kills to stay alive. Even if it’s only meat for the table.”
*Yeah, but the rest of us live the lives the goddess gave us. Ask the carrion eater how many lives he’s lived.* “Bannon wants to know how many lives you’ve lived.”
“Bannon wants to know?”
She shrugged.
Gyhard considered the question. It felt strange to be talking about it. Strange, but not unpleasant. “Counting the life I was born into, and not counting this borrowed one, six.”
*So five people have died for you to live.*
When Vree repeated Bannon’s words, Gyhard threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, more than that. Many more than that.”
“He meant innocents,” Vree snapped.
“I beg your pardon,” Gyhard graciously inclined his head. “Can I assume by this condemnation that a pair of military assassins have never taken an innocent life? What of poor old Governor Aralt? He was no threat to you.” He lifted a hand to cut short his protest. “Oh, wait, I forget, he had to die for the sake of the Empire. Well, I consider myself to be of at least as much worth as your Empire.”
*Worth as much as the Empire? You’re a worthless piece of shit!*
Vree ignored Bannon’s protest. “So you died five times …”
Gyhard sighed. “You’ve missed the point, Vree. I don’t die.”
She turned to face him, trusting—or not caring—that the horse would continue to follow the road. “You’ve left behind five lives, that’s the same as dying. How did you do it?”
He got lost for a moment in the intensity of her gaze. Because it looked very much as though she needed to know the answer, he heard himself say, “Except for the first one, I left by choice. That made it easier.”
“Choice,” she repeated, and her tone cut with the same precision her dagger had.
There was no point in misunderstanding or in pointing out that she could have chosen not to save her brother. “You could have chosen to let that courier live. Chosen to die.”
“No one chooses to die.”
“My point exactly.”
She stared at him for a moment longer, then whatever need it was in her eyes vanished and, her expression carefully neutral once again, she turned back to face the road, the moment when something could have been shared between them gone.
In a hundred and twenty-two years, Gyhard mused, trying unsuccessfully to push away a rising memory, everything reminds you of something else.
* * * *
“Why, Kars?” Because he couldn’t look at the other man, he stared at his own reflection in the polished goblet, dark eyes wide with betrayal.
Kars smiled sadly. “I love you. If I kill you, you’ll never leave me.”
“I wasn’t going to leave you.” But even with the taste of poison on his lips, his protest sounded weak.
“You were. I saw your face when I Sang Ora back to into her body.”
“She was dead, Kars, it isn’t right.”
“You’ve had three lives. Why shouldn’t she have two? It wasn’t right for her to die. It isn’t right for you to leave me. I’ll kill you, then I’ll Sing you back to your body.”
Kars, his beautiful tragic Kars, gifted with the ability to Sing all four quarters but born in Cemandia where bards were seen as demon-kin. His life had been one of torture and torment before he’d finally escaped to hide in the mountains, no longer entirely sane. Gyhard could no longer ignore that insanity. He should never have told him how he’d moved his kigh from body to body. Should never have given him the idea of turning his incredible twisted power to Singing a fifth kigh.
“I didn’t drink the wine, Kars. I tasted the poison before I swallowed.”
Full lips trembled. “I thought you loved me.”
“I did. I do.”
“Then stay with me, my heart. Please, stay with me.”
He remembered how Ora, neck broken in the fall that had killed her, had struggled to her feet, head lolling to one side. Perhaps they might still have a chance. “Free Ora.”
“No. The dead won’t leave me.”
“Then the living will. Choose.”
Tears welled up in deep blue eyes. “The dead won’t leave me.”
* * * *
Gyhard stared down at the young hands that held the reins, seeing for a moment the hands that had guided his horse down out of the mountains, away from a crazy bard and his dead companion. He’d gotten rid of that body as soon as he could because every moment in it reminded him of the life he’d left behind. Of Kars.
Old choices. He’d lived almost a hundred years since then. Kars wa
s long dead.
Six
“Gyhard i’Stevana isn’t an Imperial name.”
“Very true.”
As he left it at that, Vree searched desperately for a way to keep him talking.
*You stink at this. You sound like you’re going to shove hot metal under his fingernails if he doesn’t answer.*
*Look, I said exactly what you told me to!”
*It’s not what you’re saying, sister-mine, it’s your own unique way of saying it. Ask him where he’s from and try to sound like you care.*
*Slaughter it, Bannon,* she growled. *Wouldn’t it be easier just to rip off my clothes and impale myself on him?*
*Not on horseback. Should’ve tried it last night.* I told you so, was implicit in his tone.
Vree took a deep breath and forced unwilling lips up into a smile. “So where are you from?”
Gyhard tore his gaze away from a plump young woman spreading manure in a field by the road and glanced over at his companion. “Why do you want to know?”
*Well, Bannon? Why?*
*You’re just … curious.* He layered heated meaning onto the final word. Vree had no idea how he did it. Her own response fell sadly flat.
“How odd.” Gyhard’s smile suggested he knew how Vree’s answer should’ve sounded. “I’m rather curious myself.”
*He’s patronizing me, Bannon.*
*Shut up and listen to him, or we’ll never get on with this.*
“I was wondering,” he continued, “how someone so beautiful could allow her entire youth to be eaten up by the army.”
*We didn’t have a choice.*
A morning spent trying to echo Bannon’s words and Bannon’s tone in what was essentially Bannon’s seduction betrayed her. This time, she got the tone right. The bitterness surprised her.
“You didn’t have a choice?” Gyhard repeated.
“We were raised in the garrison.” She wasn’t sure why she was answering. She wasn’t sure who. “Our mother was in the army. We weren’t very old when she was killed. The army raised us; fed us, clothed us, housed us, trained us. We owed them everything.”
“Did they raise all their orphans as assassins.”
Her shoulders straightened and her chin rose. “No, only the best.”
“Did they often tell you that, that you were the best?”
She swiveled in the saddle so she could stare full into his face, not understanding either the question or the almost gentle way he asked it. What right did he have, sitting there in her brother’s body without a life of his own, to pity her? A flick of the wrist and she could kill him as they rode. He’d be dead before he even saw the blade.
*Why are we talking about us? You’re supposed to get him to talk about himself.*
*Bannon …*
*Get him out of my body, Vree.*
“You never said where you were from.” She turned her attention back to the road, all at once very busy with reins and riding.
Why not? Gyhard, fully aware that this delving for information most likely had ulterior motives involving his removal from Bannon’s body, frankly didn’t care. Whatever she … they were planning wouldn’t work anyway. And whatever he told her could hardly be called secret compared to what she’d known right from the beginning. It was, in a way, very freeing. “I was born and raised in Shkoder. Do you know where that is?”
Vree smashed a bug against her thigh and wondered if he thought she was stupid. “Shkoder’s on the other side of the mountain range that guards the Empire’s north border. They have no standing army, a well-trained militia, and usually base rank on birth rather than ability.” His flummoxed expression drew a scornful laugh. “If an army’s to keep the Empire, it has to know about the surrounding countries.”
“For defense?”
“Or attack.” Everything kept coming back to the army. She supposed it was like losing a limb but having the pain go on in parts long rotted and food for worms.
“Or attack,” Gyhard agreed. “Although I doubt that Shkoder would even consider something so innately suicidal given the respective sizes of the two countries. Also, Her Imperial Majesty, the Empress Irenka is a younger sister of King Theron of Shkoder.”
Lifting her face to the heat of the sun, Vree sighed. They’d—she and Bannon—once removed an old army commander who’d gathered a group of veterans around her and attempted to set up a private little fief inside the Empire. “Allies change.”
“Very true.”
Something in his voice pulled her head around again. Something in his eyes drove her heels in hard against her horse’s sides.
*Vree, what are you doing? He’s supposed to get interested in you.* How to explain that she wasn’t running from his reaction but hers. That she was in danger of responding to the face Gyhard wore and not the enemy who wore it. Slitting her eyes against a heated wind, she thought of nothing at all save staying in the saddle.
Hooves pounded behind her. Challenged, her gelding increased his pace. For a time they raced neck and neck, and then both horses began to slow. Too much to hope that they’d run on forever…
*Are you afraid of him, sister-mine?*
Easy to respond to Bannon’s arch tone and brush aside the actual question. *Don’t be an ass.*
“Well,” Gyhard began when they were walking again, “that was interesting. I assume you’re unaware that racing on the Imperial roads is against the law and can result in heavy fines.”
Vree carefully leaned forward to stroke the damp curve of chestnut neck, her heart beginning to drum less violently. “It doesn’t count as racing until a second horse joins in,” she pointed out. “I wasn’t racing. You were.”
“You were merely allowing your mount to work off excess energy?”
“If you like.”
Clearly, she wasn’t going to tell him why she’d so suddenly needed to get away. All things considered, he wasn’t certain he wanted to know. “So, what were we talking about?”
“You. Who you were.”
“Why not who I am?”
His question abruptly turned her mood. Her mouth twisted, and her eyes flicked over the length of his borrowed body. “I know what you are.”
* * * *
Gyhard i’Stevana squinted at the rapidly setting sun and tried, unsuccessfully, to convince himself that he could be home before dark.
“You should’ve stayed in Caraford,” he muttered. “Should’ve diced with that toothless old man, choked down a bowl of disgusting mutton stew, and slept safely with the bedbugs until morning.”
But he hadn’t. And now it was almost dark.
He hunched his shoulders as a chill Fourth Quarter wind tried to push an icy gust down under his collar and kicked his horse into a trot. He should’ve stayed in Caraford, but he’d wanted to get home and surprise his family who weren’t expecting him back for days.
Shadows in the forest flanking the trail grew deeper.
Fortunately, he’d traveled between the village and home a hundred times or more over his twenty-three years and couldn’t possibly get lost. He knew every rock and every tree. Unfortunately, he also knew what might very well lurk behind them.
His horse suddenly shied sideways and he pulled it back to a walk, senses straining. He could hear nothing but the wind in the evergreens. See nothing but branches tossed against a darkening sky.
Moving slowly, so as not to attract undue attention should there be watchers in the dusk, Gyhard slid his light crossbow from its strapping and fumbled for a quarrel. Loading it would have been easier had the young stallion not continued to fight his control.
“Might be nothing,” he muttered, hooking the string back under the steel claw and resting the loaded bow on his thigh—but he didn’t believe it.
His eldest sister, who’d taken over the forest contract when their mother died, had sent him to ask their lord, the Duc of Sibu for help. An early freeze and a desperately cold Fourth Quarter had driven a small band of rough men whose lives had always been margina
l onto the dark side of the law. Gyhard had insisted they could handle it themselves. His sister had disagreed.
I should’ve waited for the Duc. Come back with him.
A branch snapped. He twisted toward the sound.
Something hit him between the shoulder blades with enough force to lift him out of the saddle. His finger tightened on the trigger and the crossbow bolt slammed into the frozen ground barely a heartbeat before he did.
A small panicked voice in his head shrieked at him to roll over, to draw his long dagger, to fight. Gasping for breath, right arm folded under him at a torturous angle, he wished the voice would shut up. He swallowed, tasted blood, and struggled to suck air through teeth he couldn’t unclench.
The boot caught him under the ribs and kicked him over onto his back. Jagged ends of bone grated together in his arm. He screamed.
The sandy-haired man standing over him smiled, slabs of yellow teeth barely visible in the midst of a bristling red beard.
Time slowed and Gyhard stared in horror at the descending spear.
I don’t want to die!
The crude point dimpled his heavy fleece jacket, parted the leather and the fabric beneath it, then finally touched the skin of his chest. To his surprise, it hurt less than the constant agony of his arm. The audible crunch as the heavy steel forced its way through bone was the worst.
Terror opened his bowels.
Then time took up its normal speed again and whatever gods had cushioned him from the initial blow retreated. He felt the spear slam out through his back and into the earth, and he jerked like a worm on a hook. He no longer felt the pain in his arm because pain was all he had left.
Almost all.
Out of the waves of scarlet and black came one coherent thought. NO. NO. NO. NO!
Somehow, he focused on the pale-blue eyes staring down at him in rapt fascination. Frantically, he began to claw his way up the spear shaft toward them. He could feel the rough wood ripping new abrasions around the edges of the wound. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but not dying.
Then his right hand reached out and touched a filthy cheek and the pale eyes widened.