I found myself swaggering towards the back of the restaurant. A few people looked up to see what I was doing. I gave them a smile and a wink. I heard a melody that I didn’t recognise, and only then realised I was whistling. When I pushed through the back door of the restaurant, I saw an alleyway. The serving girl was kneeling there, washing wine glasses in a bucket of soapy water. She looked up, scared but not surprised, almost as if she’d been expecting me.
Run, I thought. Please, just run!
When she saw the look in my eyes, she rose up and retreated until her back was against the wall. The wine glass dropped from her hand, shattering on the hard ground.
Run, damn you! Don’t stand there like a rabbit with its leg caught in a trap! Run!
I grabbed her roughly. She cried out, but didn’t scream. “Please, sir…” she said. “Please don’t. I’m sorry. Whatever I did wrong, I’m sorry.”
“Shut up and don’t move,” I said.
Kick me, I pleaded silently with her. Kick me in the groin and run. Drive the heel of your foot into my knee and break it. Scratch at my eyes. Scream! Do something! Don’t let me…
Unbidden, my hands reached out and took hold of the top of her dress. I could feel every thread of the fabric against my fingertips. The softness of cotton washed many times. The dampness of sweat from her labours suffused the neckline.
“Please don’t,” she said, then once again, “please.”
Don’t do this, I begged the white binder. You’ve made your point. It’s over now, you hear me? It’s over. You can stop!
My grip tightened on the front of her dress. The material bunched in my hands, loose threads catching on the calluses of my fingers.
The girl began to weep. “Oh, no. Oh, no,” she moaned, as if it had already happened, as if it was all done now, and all that was left was to pick up the pieces of a broken life.
No! I screamed, but the white binder kept me mute. I hurled my will against him. I am Argosi, I said. I walk the Way of Stone. You cannot make me bend. You cannot make me break.
But he could.
Slowly, inexorably, my hands pulled at the fabric of the dress. I heard the crackling hiss of the stitches in the neckline begin to come apart. Every good thing I’d come to believe about myself since I’d first met Ferius Parfax was being proven wrong. You’ve got to help me, Ferius, I pleaded. You said a piece of you is in me. Where is it? Where’s the part that can’t be chained? Show me the Way of Stone!
The tear in the dress became a rip, exposing bare skin underneath. I tried to force my eyes closed, to escape the terror of this girl who had no idea why a stranger was doing this to her. Stop! I begged the white binder. You’ve won. I’ll leave town, I swear. I’ll do anything you want, but please, don’t make me do this!
Nausea spread throughout my body, and I thought—I hoped—I might throw up. But the white binder did something to me and the queasiness went away. With my right hand still holding tight to the girl’s dress, keeping her from getting away, the fingers of my left began to open the buckle of my belt. The white binder made me look down at myself.
I’ll murder you, I swore silently to the binder. If you make me do this, I’ll find you. I’ll get to you when you’re asleep and I’ll tear out your throat with my bare teeth. Colfax wouldn’t go to all this trouble if he wanted me dead. That means I’ll be alive, and you’ll know I’m coming for you.
But Sophistus wasn’t listening any more. He was too busy laughing.
Suddenly the back door of the restaurant burst open. The owners—husband and wife—came through, screaming a name I couldn’t even make out through the echoes of the white binder’s laughter. They carried knives in their hands and death in their eyes.
Colfax and Sophistus pushed past them before they could put me to the blade. Colfax grabbed me by the collar and slammed me against the back wall of the restaurant. “What do we have here, Mister Kellen? You so damned black-hearted that you’d defile an innocent girl for no worse crime than she didn’t serve you fast enough?”
I looked over at the girl, crying in her parents’ arms.
“Next time,” my mouth said.
“Best quiet down now, Kellen,” Colfax said sagely. “This here’s a serious business.”
Sophistus took off his coat and covered the girl with it. She clung to his filthy white robes as if he were her saviour, crying into his shoulder as he patted her back, then stroked it. He smirked surreptitiously at me before passing the girl to her parents. I wondered why they didn’t push the old man aside and gut me then and there. Maybe they figured the marshal was going to do it for them. If so, they were disappointed.
Colfax shook his head. “Wish I knew what to do with you, Kellen. Technically speaking, what with your status in the court, I’m not even sure I have the power to arrest you.”
The parents started to protest and the mother took another run at me. Colfax held her fast. “I’m sorry, Lavinia, truly I am. It’s a horrible thing here. But there’s nothing we can do. Kellen here is one of the queen’s royal tutors. I couldn’t hold him even if I wanted to. In fact, even if you went to the queen with this, she might not believe it. It’s a damned shame, but he’s in control here.”
“I’ll kill you, you pig,” the father shouted.
The marshal nodded sympathetically, but kept a firm hand on him. “You go back inside, take care of your girl. Heaven knows she’s had a terrible ordeal and needs your love right now. I’ll deal with Mister Kellen here—try to reason with him. Make him see the error of his ways.”
Still shaking with rage, their eyes on me the whole time, the couple took their daughter back inside. Colfax and Sophistus turned to me. “So. Any questions about what you’re going to do next, Kellen?”
All at once the binder was gone from inside me. I fell to the ground and threw up.
“Damn, Sophie—give me a warning before he’s going to do that!”
Sophistus shrugged. Colfax knelt down and patted my head. “Hard to come face to face with what you really are, isn’t it?”
I threw up some more. Colfax put a comforting hand on my shoulder. “There you go. Let it all out. It’s a rough truth to come to.”
There was barely enough strength left in my arms to push myself up. The only energy keeping my body moving was a hatred so deep and so hot that I felt feverish.
“So I’ll ask you again: any questions, tutor of cards?”
I shook my head. No questions.
“A bad business,” the marshal said. “Nobody’s got clean hands here. But my job is to keep the queen safe, Kellen, and if Sophistus could do this to you, well, then it stands to reason that there are other people, and other ways, to do it again. Imagine what might happen if they did it when you were alone with the queen. I can’t take that chance, and if you care about her at all, you shouldn’t want to either. Now, like I said, even I can’t just kill a royal tutor in cold blood or drag your sorry arse out of town. So you’re going to pick yourself up, go back to the palace and write your letter of resignation. Then I’d suggest leaving as fast as you can, before everyone figures out it’s open season on you.”
As much as I hated Colfax, as much as I wanted to kill him and his damned white binder, he was right: I was a shadowblack. Over the last two years people who cared about me had tried to convince me it didn’t mean my soul was forfeit. Turned out they were all wrong. The only thing left to do was to accept it—go back to the palace, grab Reichis and our belongings and leave as fast as I could. No retribution. No vengeance. Just running. Running for the rest of my life and hoping I never had to look into a mirror again for as long as I lived.
“One last thing,” I heard Colfax say as I felt his hand on the back of my head, twisting it around towards the alleyway. At first all I could see were feet clad in sandals, and just above them the hem of a woman’s dress. It was red, deep red—for some, the colour of love. For others, the colour of grief.
“No,” I said, willing the image to disappear.
> Colfax whispered in my ear, “I had to, kid. Had to make sure you didn’t get distracted on your way out of Darome, that you didn’t get any ideas in your head about maybe staying somewhere in the north where someone with a good heart but too much faith in humanity might convince you to come back.” The marshal gently but firmly forced my head up at an odd angle until I could see her fully, and her me. It was Mariadne, and the sight of her standing there, knowing she must have seen what I’d done, drained the last drop of hope from my body.
For a brief moment in my life there had been a woman, a smart, beautiful and blessedly damaged woman who had wanted me, who might even have come to love me one day. Mariadne had seen me lie, cheat, steal and kill a man without hating me. She’d touched the shadowblack around my left eye without running screaming away from me. “I like it,” she’d said, as if it were a birthmark or a tattoo. She knew different now. We both did.
Mariadne stayed in the alley looking down on me just long enough for me to witness the revulsion and betrayal on her face. I could see the disgust was so deep it wasn’t even for me: she was disgusted with herself. She turned, and I heard the sound of her sandals clacking down the alley as she ran from me.
Colfax let go of my head and patted me gently on the shoulder. “It’s a tough road, kid.”
Sophistus, the White Binder, took control of me once more—just long enough to force my face down into the pool of my own vomit, before he too left.
45
The Alley
I lay there in the dust and dirt of the back alley, my cheek half buried in my own puke, and listened to the sounds of Colfax’s boots and the binder’s sandals as they walked away from me. An honourable man, a brave man, the kind of man who could have faced up to the truth of himself and what he had to do next, would’ve remained there and waited. Death would come, one way or another. Whether in the form of a blow to the head delivered by one of the righteous souls who would surely come running soon enough to seek retribution on the girl’s behalf or a horse cart trampling blindly through the alley in the dark. Maybe just by waiting for the ground to slowly swallow me up. The part of me that was too cowardly to lay down and die pushed me to my hands and knees. My holsters had come open and most of my powders had spilled onto the ground. It was a miracle they hadn’t come into contact and set me on fire. Of course, miracle was the wrong word.
I scooped up what I could and replaced it carefully in the holsters. By the time I’d gotten to my feet, I heard someone coughing behind me. Don’t turn around, I told myself. Just wait, and let them do what you haven’t got the courage to do yourself. But the reflexes built up over two years of living as an outlaw betrayed me. I spun around, pulling a pinch of red and black powders without even meaning to, the spell I was so determined not to cast already on my lips.
“Perhaps you’d like to reconsider,” the tall one said, a crossbow aimed lazily at my chest. The other carried a short-hafted mace. Both wore the long grey coats and broad-brimmed hats of the queen’s marshals service. Neither looked the least bit nervous.
“Why don’t you come with us?” the shorter one said. He was stocky, with a carefully trimmed black beard that matched his eyes. There was something a little too refined about him—about both of them, in fact.
“Who are you?” I asked, the sound from my mouth so raw and gravelly it bore only the faintest resemblance to my own voice.
“Who do we look like?”
“You look like marshals,” I said.
The short one nodded. “There you go. I’m Kaeus.” He jabbed a thumb at his partner. “He’s Jax. Happy now?”
“I said you look like marshals, but what I meant was that you dress like them.”
The smiles on the pair of them widened as their posture changed subtly, losing the hunched-shouldered, wide-legged stance of Daroman lawmen, and standing taller, less grounded, and infinitely more arrogant. “Hello, brethren,” I said.
“You see, Kae’taius?” the tall one said to his colleague. “Half the stories we’ve been hearing about Kellen of the House of Ke claim he’s the shrewdest outlaw in Jan’Tep history. That he so quickly pierced our disguises suggests the tales are true.”
The shorter one pointed to the pool of puke on the ground next to me. “And yet, Jax’ered, the other half of the stories insist he is a fool, and his current situation indicates they have the right of it.”
“I’m a paradox all right.” I took in a slow breath and tried to loosen the muscles in my neck and shoulders in preparation for what would come next. Had it been anyone else who’d come to kill me, I probably would’ve let them. But Jan’Tep? No, I hadn’t spent two years facing off against every hextracker and bounty mage in the territories just to get driven down the Grey Passage by this pair. Maybe if I did this just right I could get all three of us killed at the same time.
A bell ringing in the distance caught me by surprise. The sounds of shouts and people scattering were followed by the sight of men and women running down the street from the buildings on either side of the alley.
“Looks like it’s begun,” Jax’ered said.
“Time to go, spellslinger,” Kae’taius added. “She doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
I didn’t budge. “If you expect me to believe the queen of Darome sent a pair of—”
“Who said anything about the queen?” the Jax’ered asked, turning as if he expected me to follow.
“Besides,” Kae’taius said, chortling as he followed his colleague, “from the sounds of things, I suspect Darome won’t have a queen for much longer.”
46
Sympathy
The two Jan’Tep agents took me through back alleys and side roads until we reached one of the servants’ entrances to the palace. The guards let us through without so much as a nod, which told me they were either on the take or someone had pulled a silk spell on them. Bribing or ensorcelling Daroman palace guards is a good way to either get yourself killed or set off a war, so even before we reached the diplomatic wing of the palace and the outlandishly decorated apartment—furnished to draw attention not only to its sole occupant’s yellow-gold tresses, but with lines and shapes that complemented her slender figure—I knew who was responsible for bringing me back here.
“Sha’maat,” I said.
She was there, standing in the middle of the room as if she’d been waiting for me the whole time, the early dawn light from the large stained-glass windows refracting a prism of colours on her floor-length silver dress. “Dearest brother,” she said with a sigh. “You smell of… unseemliness.”
Even more than during our previous encounters, it struck me how much Shalla had changed—how much we’d both changed. Where before she’d covered what I’d always believed to be a decent, if a bit wayward, heart in an armour of petulance and smugness, now all that was wiped away by a presence equal parts commanding and unabashedly sultry. At only fifteen years of age, she was already an unstoppable force among our clan, and soon among the Daroman court as well. Of course, I was beyond caring about such things any more. “Where’s Reichis?” I asked.
“I imagine your pet nekhek is wherever you last left him.”
She ran a finger down her neckline. The sleeves of her dress ended in points at the wrist. The tattooed bands on her forearms gleamed with unnatural light, causing the thin silver of her dress to shimmer in six different colours. She was holding a hairbrush in one hand, as if she’d just finished styling her hair. Usually she wore it down, the long golden curls framing her face and neck. Now it was done up, arrayed in ringlets around her head—just like the queen. Just like the girl at the restaurant.
“When did our father turn you into such a heartless wretch, Shalla?”
She cocked her head. “Is that how you greet your own sister? Who loves you. Who sent men at substantial expense and personal risk to protect you.”
My sister, I thought, who says she loves me. Whom I swear I believe sometimes. “Your hair. You did that just to taunt me?”
She looked at me as if I’d wounded her terribly. “How could you… I knew the memory of the girl would upset you. Now whenever you see this hairstyle you’ll think of me and feel better.”
Her voice was utterly sincere.
“Was it you who did this to me, Sha’maat? Were you working with Colfax this whole time?”
She walked over to the mirror and started fiddling with her curls and the brush. “Don’t be silly. Could you really imagine me doing such a thing? And working with that frontier barbarian? No, brother, I discovered the presence of the white binder only a short while ago. I had my men follow you and used a scrying spell to see through their eyes.” She set down the brush on a shelf beneath the mirror. “What they did to you…These people are monsters. I would have killed them all, but Colfax, fool that he is, has too much influence for me to openly challenge him. That’s why my men had to wait until the marshal and his wretched old witch doctor had left before they could come to your aid.”
“Then I suppose I’m in your debt,” I said, my voice as cold and ironic as I could make it.
“You’re welcome.”
I turned towards the door and prepared myself for whatever resistance her two lackeys would offer. They’d made a mistake waiting outside. At close distance, I’m faster on the draw than most Jan’Tep mages. “Goodbye, Sha’maat,” I said.
“Oh, stop being so belligerent!” she called out to me before I’d gotten the door open. “You’ve made a mess of things and I’m trying to help you clean them up. I’m trying to protect you!”
I felt her hand on my shoulder. I hadn’t noticed her bridging the gap between us. When I turned around she surprised me by throwing her arms around me and putting her hand on the back of my head, pulling it towards her shoulder. I surprised myself by letting her.
“Dearest brother,” she said, then she repeated it, patting the back of my head over and over. “Oh, my dearest brother.” I wanted to pull away but I couldn’t. I hated myself for it, for taking any comfort from her, but a man can only be brought so low before something inside him breaks and he’ll cling to anyone who’ll take him.
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