The Adversary

by Erin M. Evans

  Dahl held his response in—not wanting to disagree, not wanting to be wrong, not wanting to be right—until he was quite sure he might burst. “But why would a devil just set a person—set people aside for over seven years? There has to be more to it.”

  “That I won’t doubt,” Tam said. “But it’s not either of their doing. Neither one has the sort of mark such evil leaves. Perhaps it was some kind of punishment.”

  “Or a small step in a greater plan?” Dahl suggested. “I’m not saying she’s wicked, but you’re not going to argue in Lorcan’s favor.” He thought of the devil Farideh had an agreement with, the smirking human face he’d worn the last time Dahl had seen him, the last time Dahl had left a gift for Farideh. If Dahl was a prat, that one was a straight bastard.

  Tam sighed. “I would argue he has moments of goodness, and I suspect he’s not the sort to lead an invasion of the mortal plane. But I wouldn’t trust him to black my boots, no.” He paused. “When will Mehen arrive?”

  “The day after tomorrow. Earliest appointment for the portal.”

  “So you have that long to tease anything useful out of them then,” Tam said. “Once Mehen’s here, I doubt he’ll let anyone near them for a time, and if you’re right . . . well, it might be too late.”

  “I don’t—” Dahl stopped himself and tried again. “Is that the wisest course? Surely there’s someone else. Someone they’re more likely to talk to.”

  “You and I are the only souls in this building—maybe even in this whole city—who they know,” Tam had said, in a way that said he would hear no argument. “And as you are so fond of pointing out, I am terribly overextended. This is your task.”

  This is my next failure, Dahl thought, standing in front of the door to Farideh’s room. His chest was a knot of guilt and fear and anger—a snarl of feelings all pulled up and pressed together into something new and unnameable and awful.

  She hated me, he thought, considering the grain of the door. She convinced me to do things I still regret. Or did he have it all jumbled—did she try to save him and he scorned her? Was she more a herald bearing the god’s message than a devil sent to vex him? He couldn’t deny—not even in his worst moments—that he’d been the one to lead her into terrible dangers, that he’d had good reason to wonder if he bore a portion of the blame for her rumored death. But he thought surely he could remember Farideh laughing, smiling, talking in a serious but comradely way. So which way was he wrong?

  After more than seven years, Dahl still wasn’t sure.

  He was sure, however, that if he couldn’t get a little information out of someone he knew Tam would be right to throw him out of the Harpers. “Farideh?” Dahl called through the door. “Are you in?” There was no answer. She does remember, he thought. You were the worse one. He turned to go. Maybe Havilar was still awake.

  The door cracked open, and Farideh peered out, her silver eye framed in the gap of the door. “Yes?”

  A flood of fear rushed through him—without realizing, he’d been hoping she wouldn’t open the door. “Well met,” he said. She eased the door wider. Her face was red and swollen from crying—ah, gods. “I thought you should know. Mehen will be here the day after tomorrow.”

  Whatever sorrow she’d pushed down threatened to burst free for a moment, but she looked down, overcame it. “Oh.”

  Gods, don’t make her cry, he thought. “He’s well. If you’re worried about that. Not . . . not a Harper. I think he thinks we’re all making things harder than they have to be.” He gave a nervous laugh. “I was surprised, when I first met him, you know? I didn’t know your father was a dragonborn.”

  “Is he angry?” she asked, and in that moment, Dahl couldn’t imagine why he’d ever cast her as a devil.

  “No,” he said gently. “Not at you, anyway.” He hesitated. “I assume . . . he’s going to be mad at Lorcan.”

  She gave him a strange look he couldn’t read. “Lorcan didn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “Oh. Well . . . whoever it was,” Dahl said, “do you think they’re likely to come after you?”

  Farideh shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you have any idea what . . . the devil wants? Why they took you? Why they brought you back?”

  She swallowed hard. “I said before. I don’t know.”

  Stop asking, he told himself. Just go. This is not the time.

  He held the card case out instead. “Here. They’re Wroth cards,” he added as she took them from him. “I was trying to buy just a playing set. That’s what they had. They’re meant for fortune-telling, but you can divide the numbers and it will work.”

  “Thank you,” she said, sounding reflexive.

  “There’s a reason. I mean, do you know Deadknight?” he asked. She shook her head. “It’s a card game. You play it alone. When my father died . . . It’s hard not to just sink into all that sadness. I was starved for things to distract me, to keep my hands occupied. I played a lot of Deadknight.” He stared at the case, all too aware of that sick, sad feeling creeping up on him. Whiskey worked a lot better than Deadknight these days. “I wished someone had told me about that. Before.”

  “I don’t think cards will fix this,” she said, her voice catching.

  “No,” he said. “They just make it easier to sort through. Slow it down.”

  She blew out a heavy breath. “Give them to Havilar.”

  He took the second deck from his pocket. “I have one for her too.”

  She stared at him. “I don’t know how to fix it.”

  “Maybe you can’t,” Dahl said and regretted it immediately. It might be what he wished someone had said to him, but it wasn’t what she needed to hear.

  “Thank you for the cards,” she said after a moment, her voice softer, smaller. She turned the deck over in her hand. “Is there anything else? I’d . . .” She swallowed again. “I don’t really want to talk.”

  “No,” he said quickly. “Sorry. I’ll check back another time. But can I say—”

  She slammed the door before he could finish and a moment later . . . a heart-wrenching wail, muffled so he wouldn’t hear. Dahl shut his eyes and stood before the door, wanting so badly to be anywhere else, but finding a perverse penance in listening.

  You didn’t cause this, he told himself. You couldn’t have. Whatever you regret, whatever you were afraid happened . . .

  He shouldn’t have stayed so long. He should have left her alone. At least, he thought, as he went to Havilar’s room, he hadn’t managed to apologize—that had been a foolish plan.

  His life had gone on, snarled and frayed as it was, but hers had stopped. He tried to imagine what it felt like—if it was anything remotely like how it felt to have fallen.

  Gods, he thought as he knocked on Havilar’s door, either no more whiskey or enough to shut you up. Two makes you maudlin.

  Havilar wasn’t much happier to see him. She took the cards as if they were some sort of trap. “Brin is coming too. Isn’t he?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dahl said. That might smooth things over and it might start everything up again. “Do you want to talk about what happened, before they—”

  “My pothac sister made a deal with a devil,” Havilar interrupted. “That’s what happened.”

  “What did the devil have you do in exchange?”

  Havilar scowled. “I didn’t do anything but get sucked into her stupid decisions. This aithyas isn’t my fault.”

  “I wasn’t blaming you,” Dahl said.

  “Well, don’t. Go bother Farideh. She’s the one who has to fix this mess.” Havilar slammed the door in his face.

  Dahl sighed. You still have tomorrow, he told himself. He could show them each the rules to Deadknight, get them talking. He wandered back down the stairs, through the twisting corridors. He was already dreading it.

  The sound of an off-key lute drifted through the hallway and he stopped beside a small alcove, where two battered chairs faced each other. Khochen ha
d draped herself across one.

  “Are you going to tell me?” Khochen asked, not looking up from her instrument.

  “Tell you what?”

  “The tiefling. The one with the odd eye.” She plucked a string, frowning as she tweaked the pins to raise the pitch. “Although, I’m curious about the other one too. She just seems to be less interesting, when it comes to you.”

  “Oghma’s bloody paper cuts, Khochen,” Dahl said. “Stop trying to invent me a love life you can gossip about.”

  She raised her eyebrows as she adjusted another string. “I didn’t say love life.”

  “But were you about to. Honestly—say no and I’ll owe you an ale.”

  Khochen looked up at him and smiled. “What’s her name?”

  “Farideh,” he said. “And Havilar. They’re . . . they know Tam. And one of the Suzail agents.”

  “And you.”

  “And me,” he agreed. “It’s not that interesting, I promise.”

  “Don’t tell me what’s interesting,” Khochen chided. “If she hadn’t gotten into a shouting match with Nera, I would’ve guessed they were agents, maybe you were assigned together at some point. You and Tam both hopped-to, casting sendings and summoning the wizards, not even once suggesting this is a trick of Shade or Thay or Vaasa or who-in-the-Hells-can-even-predictanymore, so she’s—”

  “They’re,” Dahl said.

  “—someone you trust and care a little about. If she weren’t a tiefling, I’d guess old lover and be done.”

  Dahl rolled his eyes. “There we are. She’s not. Not even close.”

  Khochen waggled her fingers at him. “You say that, but you’re loitering around her room with gifts?”

  “I got both of them gifts.”

  “I’ll spare you the obvious ribbing about twins,” Khochen said dryly, and Dahl scowled. “I’ve never heard of you going for anything more complicated than a half-elf, so it’s not that.”

  “It’s not that, because I said it’s not that.”

  “So I’m left with two options,” Khochen went on. “Either your mother had a tumble with a devil-child at some point and those are your misbegotten sisters, or you have a very good story you’re not sharing with me. And I know you’ll tell me your mother is practically Chauntea come to mortal flesh.” Khochen patted the seat beside her. “So do you want to tell me, or shall I just keep guessing?”

  Dahl stayed standing. “It’s personal.”

  “Everything is personal with you, Dahl. That’s part of your problem.” When he didn’t speak, Khochen rolled her eyes. “I figured out about Oghma and your fall,” she said. “I’ll figure this out too.”

  “Please don’t,” he said.

  “You’re upset,” she said. “So you’re feeling guilty, I suspect. Embarrassed. It’s old, because you’re not angry—and you, poppet, stay angry a long time. You’ve had time to cool off and realize this might actually have been your fault and not hers or the world’s. Which means it’s something rather bad, isn’t it? Accidental though—you can be thoughtless but never cruel.”

  “Stop.” But Dahl knew there would be no stopping Khochen, and his heart was too close to the surface to ignore. He dropped into the opposite seat. “Look, it’s complicated. It’s terribly complicated, and embarrassing, and it’s not for gossip, all right?”

  Khochen’s brown eyes met his. “I’ll trade you,” she said solemnly. “I’ll tell you something personal, and you tell me this.”

  Dahl snorted. “Be serious. You’ll tell me some fancy full of shocking details that I can’t verify—or won’t dare to. Nothing’s personal with you, Khochen.” He sighed. “Which is probably quite wise of you.”

  “Poor Dahl,” she said. She regarded him a long moment. “I’ve started sleeping with Vescaras.”

  Dahl waited for the jest, the sly mockery to come. But Khochen watched him, as if she’d done no more than remark on the possibility of finding currants in the market this time of year.

  “You have not.”

  “Have so,” she said. “You know how it is—you carry out a mission, you get to talking, one thing leads to the next. Naturally, we’ve agreed it’s no one’s business but ours—Tam would have opinions. Vescaras’s family would rather he settle down. And I lose a certain amount of . . . effectiveness if my network gets word I take a man who wears silk smallclothes to my bed and he leaves keeping all his coin.” She snickered as Dahl looked away. “But,” she added, “now it’s your business too. So trade me.”

  Dahl tried to tell her that wasn’t fair, he hadn’t agreed. He tried to tell her that wasn’t such a terrible secret, not worth his own. He tried to ask her what in the world she saw in Vescaras.

  “I’m sorry,” he said eventually. “I didn’t know. I should have kept my tongue about him.”

  Khochen waved him off. “Oh, why? You’re not sleeping with him. Come on, out with it. Or I’ll start telling you more personal things.”

  “Gods.” Dahl rolled his eyes. “Shortly after I joined the Harpers,” he said. “They assigned me to Tam, and . . . I don’t think I ever got the full story, but he was watching out for the twins. Only I convinced Farideh to go to this revel. And the host—do you remember Adolican Rhand?”

  Khochen frowned. “The mission that—” She bit off what she’d been about to say, a skip so quick and subtle anyone else might have missed it. But Dahl knew what she meant: the mission that broke you.

  “—you were on before you were pulled into the house?” she finished. “What was the twist? Something unpleasant.”

  “Four bodies,” Dahl said quietly. “Mutilated coin lasses. And an apprentice.” He’d found the apprentice, the freshest victim, himself, and he never had shaken the memory. She’d been one of the sources Rhand was playing him through. If he’d been quicker, if he’d found out Rhand had been feeding him false information sooner, she, at least, might have survived.

  “Right.” Khochen shuddered. “You ever catch him?”

  “No. He’s still in Shade for all we know. Untouchable. Seven years ago, he held a revel,” he said, “and he’d invited Farideh. He’d marked her, I suppose. She was afraid, and I needed to get into that revel. Tam was going to do something dangerous, and we were going to lose the artifacts we needed to get ahold of—I thought.” He rubbed his forehead, the tension that rose there. “I convinced her it was safe, and then as soon as I walked away, Rhand drugged her. If I hadn’t dragged her off . . .”

  Khochen was quiet a moment. “He liked to take pieces unevenly, as I recall. A hand. A foot. Some fingers. Let them bleed out eventually.”

  It wasn’t until they’d found those bodies years later, that he’d realized what a terrible set of cards he’d dealt her. And then there were the scraps of rumors about what had happened to the twins—and no one could say, only that they’d disappeared on the road to Suzail—well within reach of Adolican Rhand.

  “I wasn’t nice to her,” he said, “even after, although she was just as bitter with me. I just sort of decided she was exactly what you’d expect a tiefling to be—wicked and sharp-tongued and not half as clever as they seem. She embarrassed me once, in front of Tam, and not on purpose and that was it, I—”

  “You don’t have to describe it,” Khochen said mildly. “I’ve seen you with Vescaras.”

  But it was not the same as Vescaras. If Vescaras pointed out Dahl’s shortcomings, it was to put him in his place. But when Farideh had called him out—told him he thought he was so smart but that every other word out of his mouth was another assumption that wasn’t fair—she’d been right.

  And it had made Dahl wonder if that was why he had fallen from Oghma’s grace, if perhaps he hadn’t failed at one of the many strictures of paladinhood but done something more fundamentally opposed to Oghma’s doctrine. For the first time in the years since he’d lost his place as one of the God of Knowledge’s paladins, Dahl had an idea of what he could remedy.

  But it hadn’t been enough, and the world had yanked
Dahl around like an errant hound as he tried to find the answer. He’d started to curse Farideh for even putting the thought in his head—wasn’t it just like her to get under his skin like that?

  He’d nearly given up, nearly decided that he’d wasted time and energy on utter nonsense that some tiefling girl out of the mountains had poured in his ear.

  And then Oghma spoke to him.

  But after that, it had been the Church of Oghma’s turn to speak, and Dahl had lost his hope, his future, his father’s respect, all in one awful year. And part of him still traced the thread of heartbreaks back to a mission in the Nether Mountains and to a tiefling girl whom he couldn’t stop fighting with.

  Who is she? Khochen had asked. A devil, an angel, an ally, an antagonist, a symbol, a nightmare? I don’t know, Dahl thought. I don’t know.

  “So your secret shame,” Khochen said, “is that you were a smug, reckless hardjack to someone and you feel bad about it?”

  “More or less,” Dahl said.

  “Hmmph. That’s less interesting than I expected. I don’t think it’s worth my secret.”

  She said it light and teasing, as if she meant to lighten his burden. But it wasn’t so minor—through Farideh, Dahl had lost his last hope at returning to the Church of Oghma and his faith in his skills as a Harper. The urge to prove the Oghmanytes wrong, to find the answers and regain his standing, still rose up in him from time to time—but that was what ale was for, after all. His old mentor, Jedik, sent letters, now and again, and Dahl relegated them all to a box beneath his dresser, not sure enough to burn them, hurt enough to never read them.

  If Khochen said a single, witty word about any of that, he would never speak to her again.

  So Dahl only smiled. “You’ll just embellish it to be more interesting, anyway.” He stood and headed toward the taproom.

  “You don’t think,” Khochen called, starting another little tune on her lute, “that there’s something odd here?”

  Dahl turned. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s awfully convenient that this girl—these girls—that you and Tam cared about and grieved for have suddenly turned up, in the taproom of the Harper Hall, hale and whole but in need of care and comfort?”