Surprise went through her like lightning and Ciardis leaned back quickly to search Vana’s eyes and face for mockery. But she saw nothing but delight.
“Are you well?” Ciardis asked—without thinking. She winced right after she said it, but she couldn’t take it back.
Vana, being Vana, said acerbically, “I think we’ve already established that I am indeed not.”
Weakly, Ciardis replied, “I meant mentally.”
Vana said, “I’m pretty sure I’m all here. Pain and all.”
Cackling a bit as she leaned back in the couch, Vana observed her semi-protégé with what Ciardis could only describe as pride.
Which is insane, right? she thought, amazed.
Apparently deciding she had tortured her young friend enough, Vana said, “Well, this is the most well-wrought and darkest spell you’ve ever done. If I wasn’t such a pain-filled mess I might pick you up and kiss you. Instead I’ll settle for knowing exactly how it is you’ve done it.”
Ciardis blinked and then blinked again astonished. She was still trying to process everything that Vana had just said. She replayed it in her mind twice, wondering if she had misheard the words. Then deciding she hadn’t, she said hesitantly, “You want to know how I’ve done it?”
“Yes,” Vana said, beaming.
“And you don’t care why I’ve done it?” Ciardis questioned.
“Oh, without a doubt it’s something to do with this damned empire,” Vana said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “It always does.”
Flummoxed Ciardis pressed on, “But you don’t care that I’ve done it to you?”
“Well, now that you mention it…” Vana said with a thoughtful pause. “Not really.”
“Why not?”
You could have heard a pin drop as throughout the room there was silence. Everyone’s ears were straining to hear the answer, including the man whose wife had so coldly thrown Ciardis away and the koreische who felt emotional pain as wounds against his own psyche.
“Because, darling,” Vana said softly, “I have sacrificed for this empire time and again. What’s one more go-round? I was dying anyway.”
“You were already dead,” said Meres in a roughly contemptuous way.
Vana flicked an amused glance his way. “Oh, that’s right. I was.”
“Well, then,” Ciardis said slowly. “I guess it happened this way…”
And she began to tell her tale again. This time, she felt less judged in the presence of an assassin who laughed and smiled the entire way. Then another hour passed and Vana was once more thrown into a world of pain. But this time when she awoke, she didn’t slip into a quiet sleep again. She fought to stay awake and conversant. Ciardis appreciated that and was more proud of the woman who had taught her much of her magical skills in that moment than at any other time before.
So talk they did. They discussed the details of the plans. Sebastian’s actions so far. Even Thanar’s last-minute dash off to deliberate with the Shadow Council and to capture Seven…if he could. Vana gave her opinions on the topics as best she could as they all waited and flinched for the third round on the pain.
“On the hour every hour,” Christian said in a harried voice as Vana leaned over. But this time he didn’t threaten Ciardis or brush her aside. They worked as a team to make her as comfortable as possible even as Christian sounded quietly furious as he could do nothing but watch as Vana hunched in on herself in blinding agony again. But at least he didn’t take that anger out on her for a second time. He just muttered evilly as he stroked Vana’s sweat-soaked hair.
When Vana woke again, this time she was more deliberate in her talks.
“There’s something I want to ask you, Ciardis Weathervane,” the assassin said as soon as she could talk again without wincing in pain. She even took a few sips of water to keep her hydration levels up.
Ciardis walked back over from wringing out a wet cloth in a small bowl which a servant had placed on a stool sometime between this hour and the last.
“Anything?” the lady companion said with firm eyes.
A ghost of a smile came across her face as Vana said, “That bastard of a man. Did he put this into motion?”
Ciardis blinked and said slowly, “No, as I said—it was my plan.”
“And Thanar’s,” Ciardis added in a mutter. She wasn’t trying to take the glory from his…accomplishment. She just didn’t want Vana to blame him for the ritual. Because she would blame someone eventually. She knew that right now Vana was caught up in a whirlwind of pain that drained every drop of strength from her psyche. But when she was well and whole, she would see what Ciardis Weathervane had done to her, ‘set in motion, as it were,’ and she would hate her for it. As all the others did.
Frowning, Vana gave a dismissive curse.
“Not that,” Vana grumbled.
With a wave at herself, she clarified. “This. This pain.”
“Well, well…I don’t know,” Ciardis said, uncertain. “As far as I know, none of the others suffer this additional malady, but they all have the moonlight skin.”
Ciardis looked at her shoulder to confirm. Both Meres and Christian nodded their heads to agree with her. Lord KinSight even demonstrated by waving his hand in Vana’s face to show her that he too glowed when he moved.
“Well,” said Meres. “You were in the dungeon with us…before they came.”
“To kill you, you mean?” Ciardis asked.
“Yes, that,” Meres answered in a clipped, cold tone.
“What do you mean I was?” Vana demanded.
Lord KinSight raised an eyebrow and said, “I meant that a guard came and took you away from us before we died. You weren’t with us.”
“So someone else killed me?” Vana demanded.
Meres shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know.”
“Do you?” Ciardis asked while looking at the older companion with some concern.
“No, I don’t,” the assassin said in a grumpy voice.
“Well, isn’t this just grand?” Christian said unimpressed.
“Before I died,” Vana said slowly, “I was in pain. So much pain. The pain has nothing to do with this stupid undead thing.”
Eyes wide, Ciardis looked up at Christian, the only healer in the room, and said, astonished, “Is that possible?”
He knelt down on one knee, and took Vana’s wrist in his hand. Feeling for her pulse, Ciardis supposed though she wasn’t quite sure what effect this would have on anything.
Apparently Vana had the same doubts, because she snatched her wrist away and dryly said, “I can assure you, I’m quite dead. Or whatever it is you call this ‘awoken’ state.”
“I certainly wouldn’t call it living,” Meres said with a darkness in his voice that hinted at depths of depression Ciardis hadn’t even considered.
She flinched at the self-hatred she heard in his dulcet tones and he didn’t try to shield her from that either.
That’s all right, she thought to herself calmly. He shouldn’t have to.
“So,” Christian said in a healer’s demanding voice, “you do remember that you’ve been in high-level pains since before you were killed.”
Vana slipped her tongue on wickedly dry lips and Ciardis hurried to give her a sip a water.
“I don’t know. I don’t think it was long before,” Vana said with ire in her eyes. “Which is why that good-for-nothing ruler had to have something to do with it.”
Sadly, Ciardis had to ask, “The emperor didn’t…not if it was in the past few days.”
Ire changed to fire as Vana said, “And why is that?”
“Because he’s been dead just like you,” Ciardis said firmly. “He’s the key to the nexus point and we had to bring him back as well.”
Vana turned shocked eyes to Meres but he only nodded his head solemnly, confirming Ciardis’s claim.
Vana laughed quietly as a silent tear trailed down her cheek. “Well then, that’s the first time someone can legitimately say Mara
dian is innocent of an accused crime. I almost wish he had been the person who killed me. It’d be fitting.”
Ciardis bit the inside of her cheek. “Even if he wanted to, and that’s a big if, this kind of sinister cycle would take a lot of hate.”
Vana snorted. “Maradian is perfectly capable of that.”
Sitting back on her heels, Ciardis said thoughtfully, “Yes, but if it wasn’t him, then who?”
Mystified Vana whispered, “I don’t know. I can’t remember. I just flash back to endless white silence…then screams.”
16
As they talked and discussed Vana’s actions and memories leading up to her traumatic death, it became clear that Vana didn’t remember much—of anything. Probing wider, Ciardis asked her about secrets that she should know that had nothing to do with her death and, to Ciardis’s amazement, even as Vana tried to hide it, the assassin wasn’t quite clear on those memories either.
Her mother’s trial? Wiped from the assassin’s memory.
Vana’s trip into the Ameles Forest and subsequent rescue of Ciardis from a dark shadow mage and his disciples? Fuzzy at best.
It became clear that the memories that were most wedged in Vana’s memory were further back in time. Not exactly the distant past, but nothing less than half a moon ago was even sparking a recollection in her mind, let alone a stream of knowledge spouted off-hand.
As this gentle line of questioning drew a clear line of evidence, Vana would fumble and try to hide her lack of knowledge. That is…in between the hourly episodes of pain that felt like living torture to her friends who had to stand witness. Still the sessions lasted a few minutes, no longer, and Vana was determined to get up to speed on everything. She just was even more determined to hide her memory loss.
Ciardis wasn’t sure if it was because she was embarrassed or she was just too damned prideful to let anyone help her. Even the people who were best equipped to handle such a malady—a healer, the best damned one the empire had to offer on short notice, and her friends by her side. But Ciardis also knew that it could seem like the worst thing that could happen to a mage and Companion as powerful as Vana. She’d endured being stripped of parts of her identity and was handicapped at the same time. After all, an assassin and a companion’s best asset beyond their magical and physical capabilities was their mental cognizance. If Vana couldn’t remember the five branches of family members of a patron’s extensive relations, she risked committing quite the faux pas at the banquet table. If she used a poison that a victim was immune to or stabbed the wrong heart—most Midlanders had two, after all, and one was useless until needed as a backup, in effort to complete a contract—well, she’d never be hired again.
So it could have been embarrassment. It also could have been pride. Either way, her answers were becoming more elusive and vague by the minute.
“Vana,” Ciardis asked in an off-hand manner. “Did you ever figure out what was on the Kasten ship?”
Vana looked at her with narrowed eyes, not fooled in the least.
“Why?” the assassin asked as she sat still between bouts of pain.
“No reason,” Ciardis said hastily as she changed the subject.
No reason at all, she thought to herself quietly.
She wanted to ask more questions, delve deeper into what Vana could have possibly known before she died, but it was clear that in the attack that had caused her her life, she’d lost more memories than even they had first surmised.
And Ciardis had to wonder, had Vana been attacked because of the Kasten ship and her knowledge of it? And if that was the case—what did that mean for them all in the grand scheme of things?
It was disturbing to think that someone could have wanted the ship that much and what was stored in its cargo hold, for them to take on the empire’s most predominant assassin and kill her for it in the process.
Ciardis had to wonder if during the torture they had managed to break Vana in a way she’d never faced before. What a normal person could endure and what Vana Cloudbreaker could endure were two very different things. Whips of the lash across her flesh weren’t enough to faze Vana, let alone make her admit to something she would rather die than give away.
If they mentally tortured her, Ciardis thought. If they did that. Maybe her bouts of pain aren’t just a mistake; perhaps they’re a relic of the magic used to mentally subdue just before she died?
Ciardis stopped at the very thought. It wasn’t a very pleasant feeling. Wondering if someone had dug into her brain and changed her mental response rate so that she felt as if she was in a living hell from inside. Regardless of how they had done it, the obvious logic was that Vana had been tortured for the knowledge that she had. Ciardis felt miserable but not because of her regret of their actions. She wasn’t responsible for that, though she would gladly give the executioners a taste of their own medicine if she ever got a hold of them. No, Ciardis Weathervane was wondering if Vana had given them any information during the torture. If, during the most excruciating point of her life, she had broken under the collective pressure.
There’s no way to know, she thought to herself miserably as she stared at her hands, which she was wringing in her lap.
The only thing she could comfort herself with was the fact that this didn’t sound like the Vana she knew. Someone who would break under pressure, that is. No matter the pressure. No matter the fact that it could, and did, cost her life. But that didn’t change the fact that everything was wiped from her recent memory. Every little detail that would help them solve a crime.
Apparently her visible distress caught Vana’s eye, because the assassin slapped an irritated hand down on Ciardis’s own and snapped, “If you don’t stop twisting your hands, you’ll twist them right off.”
The bite in her voice could not be mistaken.
Ciardis looked at her and said, “You don’t scare me, old lady.”
Vana gave a gruff laugh. “And you don’t fool me. What were you thinking just now, Ciardis Weathervane? Tell me what’s going on in that fluffy brain of yours.”
Ciardis could have taken that as an insult, but coming from Vana it almost felt like a compliment. The fact that she at least wanted to know Ciardis’s thoughts.
So Ciardis spoke and she started off slowly. “There is something, actually.”
“Uh-huh, go on,” Vana said with a knowing look as she sat back on the pillows and crossed her arms.
Ciardis threw back her head and sighed and then decided to come out with it.
“There was something we discussed many weeks ago,” the lady companion said
“I take it it was important?” Christian said while reaching around Vana to take her pulse at the wrist…again.
Ciardis jumped. She’d almost forgotten that he and Meres were there. But the koreische’s subtle reminder of their presence was a welcome sign, not one that caused her to clam up as Christian might have assumed.
Giving him a measuring look and Meres one too, Ciardis said, “Yes, it was. And it might have caused Vana her life.”
Meres was in her line of sight. Sitting on the edge of the stool next to the wall. His arms crossed in pique.
But all he said was, “We’re listening.”
Ciardis was frank as she held his gaze. “And if I speak about it with you in the room, it might cost you yours.”
Christian let out a bark of laugh. “Well, that’s funny.”
Ciardis gave him an offended look. “I don’t see how.”
It was Lord Meres KinSight who answered her gently. “I’m already dead, Ciardis. They’ve already done the worst they can do to me. After this I will go back into the ground, and quite frankly I’m relieved.”
Christian asked in a voice that was just a tad hesitant, “Looking forward to the peaceful rest, are you?”
Meres snorted. “Looking forward to seeing that beast of an emperor dead and back in the ground alongside me. That’s all I need.”
“Just not before he does his damned job,” said Va
na in irritation. “And not before you do yours.”
Meres gave her a sidelong look and said slowly, “I’m not going to attack him. Though he deserves that and more.”
“We did give him a fine beating in retaliation for what he did,” Ciardis said meekly. “That is how he died.”
“And I appreciate that,” Meres said. “But this time I want to see it for myself.”
Ciardis swallowed harshly. “I can see how that would appeal.”
Meres gave her an irate look. “He killed my wife. He killed me, Ciardis Weathervane. For no reason at all. A little pettiness is not without its merits.”
Ciardis held up placating hands, palms outward. “You’ll hear no arguments from me.”
“Well, you’ll hear it from me,” Vana said grumpily.
This time it was Christian who snapped, “You’re quite protective of a ruler who might as well have killed you for all the good he did you.”
Vana gave him a wicked look and said, “Sugar, I’m laid up here glowing with moonlight and have barely any control of my body thanks to the ‘light touch’ of others. There’s nothing I can do about that or for retribution. But a good assassin knows when to go in for the kill and when to hold back her attack. And now we hold back.”
Christian stilled.
Vana continued, “And do you know why now would be a good time to hold back? Because there’s more here than meets the eye. Maradian has already been dealt with and he is not the answer to our questions.”
“Besides,” Ciardis said a little hotly, “he’s been beaten to here and back. Now he’s a dog on a leash. You don’t beat the dog once its cowed.”
“That’s right, little companion,” Vana said while leaning back into her window pillows with a bit of sigh. “That’s quite right.”
They waited for Vana to catch her breath, and then Ciardis cleared her throat to continue, “Well, now that we’ve cleared that air. Does everyone here want to hear why Vana might have died?”
Three intense gazes turned to her and gave her their sole attentions.
Ciardis smiled weakly and began.
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