“Actually, why don’t you two go with Starros and check the other bedrooms?” he suggested. That would keep them occupied and lessen the opportunity for butchering pretenders. “Just don’t kill anyone without asking first.”
Starros looked at the two women a little warily, and headed back down the hall with them, leaving Damin and Kraig standing outside Mahkas’s door.
Damin hesitated, afraid of what he might find.
“You have come this far,” Kraig said. “Don’t falter on the brink of victory.”
“Is it victory to kill a sick old man in cold blood?”
“Compassion is something one can only afford when one is through being ruthless, Damin.”
The prince smiled faintly, not at the Denikan’s words so much, as how similar he sounded to Elezaar. Physically, the handsome big Denikan and the deformed little dwarf had nothing in common, but in every other way they were soul mates.
“Then let’s go butcher the pretender, shall we?”
But he got no further than putting his hand on the latch before Starros called out urgently from down the hall.
“Damin! In here!”
Abandoning Mahkas’s room, Damin and Kraig turned and ran, following the young thief’s cry into the next suite down the hall. Bylinda’s room.
When they burst through the door, Damin discovered Lyrian lighting all the candles she could find in the room.
Mahkas Damaran—the man he’d come here to remove or kill—was lying on the floor near the settee.
At least, Damin assumed it was Mahkas. It was hard to tell with all the blood.
“It would appear someone has already butchered the pretender for you,” Kraig remarked, staring down at the body.
Whoever had killed Mahkas Damaran had stabbed him over and over again until there was little left but a bloody carcass. He’d been stabbed so many times it was impossible to guess which of the hundreds of blows might have killed him. The rage, the pain behind such a vicious attack left Damin gasping.
“Luciena!”
Damin looked up and discovered Starros bending over his adopted sister’s body, which lay lifeless and broken by the fireplace, the pool of blood under her head glistening in the candlelight.
“Dear gods! Is she …” he began, hurrying over to them, almost afraid to complete the question.
Starros shook his head. “She’s alive. Help me.”
Mahkas temporarily forgotten, Lyrian and Barlaina hurried to Starros’s aid and together, the three of them lifted her gently onto the settee. Damin stared at her limp form, guilt warring with concern.
It was his fault Luciena had stayed in Krakandar with Xanda.
“Are you sure she’s … there’s an awful lot of blood.”
“Head wounds always bleed profusely,” Barlaina informed them, pushing Starros out of the way so she could tend to Luciena. “Bring me more light.”
Lyrian hurried to comply and Starros stepped back as he found himself superfluous in the face of the Denikan woman’s competence. Damin watched Barlaina working, wondering if it was Luciena who had murdered Mahkas so brutally.
And what might have driven her to it.
“Damin.”
He glanced over at Kraig, wondering at his odd tone. The Denikan was standing by Mahkas’s body, pointing to the floor.
With the additional light, a series of small, bloody footsteps were revealed, leading away from the corpse. Curiously, Damin picked up a candlestick and followed them. They led, not out into the hall, but into the bedroom.
Had Mahkas’s murderer come and gone through the slaveways?
He opened the bedroom door and found it undisturbed. The bed was made, the entrance to the slaveways in the dressing room off to the left still firmly closed.
The footsteps led to the open window.
Was it an assassin, then, Damin wondered, who finally ended Mahkas’s life?
The curtains billowed in a faint wisp of breeze and Damin caught sight of someone moving out on the roof. He put the candle down on the table by the door and walked over to the window, wondering if the assassin was still out there.
Were they so close on his heels they’d disturbed him in the act?
He pushed the curtain aside and froze when he realised the figure standing on the edge of the sloped roof was Bylinda Damaran.
He turned to Kraig. “Find Wrayan,” he ordered softly, thinking if he couldn’t get his aunt back from the edge, then Wrayan might be able to force her back magically.
Kraig glanced out of the window, saw the figure perched on the edge of the roof and nodded. He was gone from the room by the time Damin climbed out of the window and began to make his way cautiously towards the edge of the roof, high above the paved courtyard of Krakandar Palace, where the blood-splattered figure of Bylinda Damaran stood, perched at the very edge of oblivion.
CHAPTER 78
Bylinda looked up as Damin approached. Draped in her white mourning clothes and the blood of her dead husband, she’d been studying the drop to the pavement below as if debating something important within herself and Damin’s arrival had distracted her.
She glanced over her shoulder at him and smiled distantly. “Hello, Damin.”
“Aunt Bylinda.”
“When did you get back? Luciena said you were waiting at the Walsark Crossroads.” She spoke as if they were standing in the parlour, catching up after a long absence.
“I was going to … you spoke to Luciena?”
“Just before Mahkas killed her. She wanted me to leave the palace, to come visit you, but I explained I couldn’t leave. I had to stay near Leila.” His aunt sounded lucid, but her calm demeanour was at complete odds with a woman standing on the edge of a precipice.
Damin smiled at her reassuringly. Despite her rational tone, it was clear Bylinda had tipped over the edge of reason into insanity. “Luciena isn’t dead, my lady. Just unconscious. She’s going to be fine.”
Bylinda nodded. “I’m glad to hear that. I’ve always liked Luciena. She’s so … assured. Confident. I would have liked Leila to have grown up like that.”
Damin inched his way forward as she was speaking, hoping to get close enough to pull his aunt back from the edge. The breeze was cool and, at this height, quite strong, and he was wearing riding boots, which (he discovered with alarm) gave him nothing like the sure-footed grip he remembered having as a child when he flitted across these roofs in bare feet.
“She’d like to see you, too, Aunt Bylinda. Why don’t you come back inside so you can speak to her?”
Bylinda shook her head. “I don’t think so, Damin.”
“Bylinda …”
“Did you not see what I did?” she asked, turning to look down at the dizzying drop once more.
“Do you mean Mahkas?” he asked warily.
“I killed him.”
Given the amount of blood she was wearing, and the footsteps he’d followed to find her, the news was no surprise to Damin. What did surprise him—and concern him greatly—was her calm, almost unnatural poise.
“Don’t blame yourself, Aunt Bylinda. You merely got to him first. I came here to kill him, you know.”
Bylinda glanced at him over her shoulder. “I realised that as soon as Luciena told me you were coming home. After what happened with Leila and Starros, there wasn’t any other way this was going to be resolved.”
“Bylinda, come inside,” he urged, holding his hand out to her. “Nobody is going to hold you accountable for—”
“But I am accountable,” she cut in, looking up at the starlit night. “Guilty by association. Mahkas’s crimes are my crimes, Damin.”
With that sort of reasoning, she was a mere step away from walking off the edge of the roof. “Don’t be silly. Nothing he did can be considered your fault.”
“What if I knew?” she asked. “What if all this time I saw the signs and turned a blind eye to them because he was my husband and a wife must support her husband, even when she knows he’s evil.”
<
br /> “I can’t believe you did that.”
“Then you are naïve, Damin. I knew Mahkas had something to do with Darilyn’s death. And Riika’s. I could tell by the way he was acting when he brought Travin and Xanda back to Krakandar after they buried his sisters. It wasn’t his responsibility to raise those boys. It was your father’s job. Laran Krakenshield was their guardian and he had a wife, so there wasn’t anything stopping him taking on their care. Your mother should have raised your cousins, not me. But Mahkas insisted. He said he owed it to the boys. As if he was somehow obligated to them.”
“Maybe he was just being generous …” Damin suggested, finding it a little bizarre to think he was standing here on the roof of Krakandar Palace trying to justify Mahkas’s actions. He couldn’t think of anything else to do. He had no idea what Bylinda was talking about. He knew who Darilyn and Riika were, of course. They were his father’s sisters, both of whom died before he was born. But he’d never imagined Mahkas might have been involved in their deaths.
Bylinda fixed her gaze on Damin. “Don’t confuse charity with self-interest, Damin. Mahkas was generous only when it suited him. Or when he thought it would make others think well of him. He did nothing that wasn’t designed to further his own ambitions.” She turned back to look out over the city. There were only sporadic pinpoints of light in the sea of darkness. Most of the city was deserted. “He married me because my family had money, you know,” she told him, in a voice devoid of emotion. “It meant he wasn’t reliant on Laran, you see. I knew that right from the start; but I didn’t care because he was young and handsome and the Warlord of Krakandar’s brother—who could have had any highborn woman he wanted—chose me, a simple merchant’s daughter. You were born a prince, Damin. You have no concept of what that can mean to someone like me.”
Damin had no idea how to answer that so he said nothing, letting her ramble on, wondering where the hell Kraig was with Wrayan.
“From the moment Leila drew her first breath he planned for you to marry her,” Bylinda continued. “He tried so hard to make you love him because he needed your support and if you loved him like the father you never knew, then you’d give him what he wanted when you were old enough.”
“It might have worked if he hadn’t beaten Leila and Starros half to death,” Damin agreed, hoping to keep her talking while he inched his way forward. While she was talking, she wasn’t jumping.
Bylinda shook her head, seemingly unaware of the perilous drop before her, or the absurdity of having this conversation on the palace roof in the small hours of the morning with her husband lying dead by her hand in the room behind them.
“The irony,” she sighed, “was he never understood you were far smarter than you let on. He thought you shared his delusions. He thought I shared them too, but that’s my fault, because I let him think that.”
“You can’t know how things would have turned out if you’d acted differently, Aunt Bylinda.”
“Do you think things would have worked out differently if I’d shared my fears with your father?” she sighed. “If I’d gone to Laran Krakenshield and told him my suspicions about Darilyn and Riika, when you were still a baby, Damin, he might be alive today, because forewarned, perhaps he wouldn’t have been fool enough to trust his brother with anything, let alone watching his back in battle.”
That accusation took Damin completely by surprise. “Are you saying Mahkas killed my father?”
Bylinda shrugged. “I don’t know. But I am saying he killed Darilyn, he undoubtedly had something to do with Riika dying, which is why he killed Darilyn, and even if he didn’t kill Laran himself, he probably stood back and let the Medalonians kill your father for him.”
Even knowing what he did about Mahkas, that seemed too much to comprehend. “I … I can’t believe he’d do something like that …”
“Damin, you ripped his throat out for what he did to Starros and Leila. Why do you think he would balk at standing back to watch your father die if it suited his plans? It wasn’t love that drove Mahkas. He didn’t care that his daughter had been violated. He was distraught because he knew if you suspected—even for a moment—that Leila and Starros felt something for each other, you would have refused to consider marriage to his daughter.”
“I didn’t need to refuse it, Aunt Bylinda. It was never my decision. My mother would never have allowed Leila and me to marry.”
“We all knew that, Damin,” she agreed with ominous finality. “So did Mahkas. He just wouldn’t admit it.”
“Please, Aunt Bylinda … let’s go inside …”
Bylinda didn’t seem to hear him. Instead, she looked down. The faint sound of someone calling to her wafted up on the breeze. He didn’t know who it was; some of the remaining Raiders, perhaps, or maybe some palace slaves had spotted the figure perched on the edge of the roof in the darkness. Then he heard a noise behind him and let out a sigh of relief as Wrayan climbed through the window.
The thief walked across the tiles with the assurance of one familiar with rooftops. He stopped beside Damin and studied Bylinda for a moment.
“Is she threatening to jump?” he asked softly.
“Not in so many words,” Damin replied in a low voice.
“I saw what was left of your uncle. Did she … ?”
Damin nodded.
“And now she’s riddled with grief and remorse and wants to kill herself, I suppose,” Wrayan concluded. “What do you think I can do to stop her?”
“Get into her mind. Make her walk away from the edge.”
“I can’t.”
Damin looked at him with concern. “What do you mean, you can’t?”
“I can’t coerce someone against their will. Even if I could unravel the shield on her mind quickly enough to get into her thoughts, if she really wants to jump I can’t stop her, Damin.”
Damin glared at him, but before he could answer, Bylinda turned to look at them, amused by their pitiful attempts to save her. “You can stop whispering about me, boys. I know what you’re expecting him to do, Damin, but it won’t work. I want this to be over and Wrayan can’t make me do something I don’t want, even with magic, can you, Wrayan?”
“No, my lady,” the thief admitted. “I can’t.”
She looked back to the starlit sky, holding her arms wide. “I should have just jumped as soon as I got out here. I was meaning to. But it was such a lovely night and the wind was so cool … the skies so clear … the stars so bright … . It seemed a much nicer memory to take into the afterlife than the sight of Mahkas begging for his life.” She suddenly smiled in fond remembrance. “No wonder you children used to sneak out here with a wineskin when you were younger.”
“How did you know about that?” Damin asked, moving a little closer. Maybe, if he kept her attention on him, he reasoned, she’d not detect Wrayan closing in behind her. “We always thought our nightly trips out onto the palace roof were our best-kept secret.”
“I always knew more than I let on, Damin,” Bylinda said. “Don’t you understand, yet? That was my greatest sin.” She smiled at him warmly and held out her hand. Damin let out a sigh of relief as he reached out to take it and pull her to safety.
“Happy birthday, Damin.”
She didn’t jump so much as step off the roof. It happened so suddenly he had no time to react, no chance of preventing it. She made no sound as she fell, the only cry coming from someone in the courtyard, followed by a wet, thudding sound as she hit the unforgiving cobblestones below. Damin lunged for her as she went over the edge, but he wasn’t nearly close enough yet to reach her in time. In his mad rush to save her, however, he overbalanced dangerously and suddenly found himself on his belly, slipping toward the edge, his smooth-soled riding boots offering no purchase on the tiles as he scrambled for a foothold.
Wrayan caught him by the arm just as his feet were going over the edge and with a super-human effort, pulled him upward until Damin was able to haul himself to safety. His heart racing, Damin flopped on his
back on the tiles while he gathered his wits, the sound of his own racing blood the only thing he could hear, the image of Bylinda stepping calmly off the roof burned into his retinas, an after-image that refused to go away.
Breathing heavily from shock, grief and the nearness of his own brush with death, he blinked back the disturbing visions of Bylinda and glanced up at the thief standing over him. “Gods, Wrayan, I swear I tried …”
“I know you did, lad.”
“I couldn’t stop her …”
“Neither could I.”
Damin pushed himself up onto his elbows. He could hear voices far below as the witnesses to Bylinda’s fall hurried to her side in a futile effort to aid her. Then he glanced up at the sky and noticed the faintest hint of dawn edging over the distant horizon.
“It’s nearly daybreak,” he said after a time.
“Aye,” Wrayan agreed. “It’s been a very long night.”
“Travin will be here soon. With the army. I guess we won’t be needing them now.”
Wrayan sat down beside him on the roof. “Be thankful, Damin. There are never any real winners in a civil war.”
“Did you find Xanda?”
“He was down in the slaves’ quarters with Orleon, gathering the last of the palace servants for the evacuation. When I told him you were here, Starros went after them and called them back, so I suppose if you want breakfast, there’ll still be somebody in the palace to wait on you, my lord.”
Wrayan was taunting him, Damin knew that, but he was in no mood for it. “Is Xanda all right?”
“He’s fine. He was worried he hadn’t been able to find Luciena, though.”
“She’ll be fine. Mahkas only thought he killed her.”
“There’s something to be grateful for.”
He slowly sat up, looking out over the darkened city, wishing he felt something other than powerless. If this was what it meant to win, for the first time in his life, Damin wondered if it was worth it.
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