Sweetblade

by Carol A Park

  It was working.

  The first time a man other than Airell had brought her to his bed, she had been not-Ivana. Playing a part that wasn’t her, just to survive.

  In a strange reversal, that night, she would also have to play a part. But it wasn’t the part of not-Ivana. No, this time, the part was Ivana. As much of Ivana that Boden thought he knew anyway.

  She didn’t know what she was. But she wasn’t that same Ivana.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought it would be too awkward.”

  “I understand,” he said. “And I don’t mean to bring, well, that, back up. I just wanted you to know that I’ve missed you.”

  She met his eyes. Oh, Boden. In another life. “I’ve missed you too,” she said instead. “Have you learned anything new and interesting lately?”

  He relaxed. And Ivana settled in to play herself, perhaps for the last time.

  Elidor was furious.

  Ivana had never seen him so angry before.

  He was cold. He sometimes snapped. He ridiculed. But this…this was more.

  No sooner had the last embers died from the sky than Ivana had excused herself, with thanks, from Grania and her family—and Boden. She ventured out into the streets to retrieve her cloak and dagger and return to Elidor’s, hoping this had been one of those lucky years.

  She had almost forgotten, in her flight from the scene of the assassination and subsequent sheltering with Da Grania and her husband, that things had not gone according to plan. And how livid Elidor had looked when he had sent her home.

  Nothing had changed overnight.

  She knew he was still angry the moment she stepped through the door, because he was in the front room waiting for her, pacing.

  At any rate, she was still alive. For now.

  “Where were you?” he growled the moment door had closed behind her. “I told you to come directly home.”

  “I had to find shelter,” she said, a bit taken aback. Perhaps it wasn’t the bungled job he was angry about? “I could hear bloodbane in the streets.”

  “Where?”

  She hesitated only a moment. “With the family at that apothecary I used to go to.”

  He halted his pacing, turned, and looked at her as if for the first time since she had come in. His eyes roved to the bandage on her shoulder and then to the dagger at her thigh.

  “The apothecary helped patch me up,” she said. And before he could protest, she continued. “And don’t worry. I discarded my dagger and cloak before I got there and told a story about being out in the streets looking for my lost cat.”

  “Lost cat,” he repeated.

  “They have absolutely no reason to think I would lie,” she said. “You think average people will jump to the conclusion I must have been roaming the streets looking for someone to murder?”

  His jaw jumped, but he conceded the point by ending the conversation. “Come with me.”

  “What? Where?”

  “To meet our handler.”

  Ivana didn’t know what this portended. Was this the reward for completing the job or the punishment for messing it up? Perhaps it wouldn’t be Elidor who would administer the final judgment, but some higher power.

  Ivana hadn’t even changed; her shirt was still in tatters and stained with sticky red-brown blood.

  Heedless, Elidor had grabbed her arm and was now dragging her across the city in the pre-morning dark, light enough to tell that their neighborhood appeared to have been spared the spawning of further bloodbane.

  However, there was plenty of evidence to the contrary elsewhere. At one house a window had been smashed through from the inside. At another, four or five chickens had been torn to bits and scattered about the road. A foot here, a bloody pile of feathers there…

  A half-dozen Guardsmen barked at them to stay back as they approached the entrance to one dead-end alley, as if the unnatural shrieking coming from the end weren’t enough warning.

  And then, of course, they passed one convoy of Conclave priests. They surrounded a cage on a cart being pulled by donkeys, inside which a man sat, staring out through the bars with hollow eyes.

  This, Elidor and Ivana gave a wide berth.

  Her attention was drawn back to the promised meeting when they approached and entered a small shrine. Ivana had never met their handler. She had picked up jobs and payment from secure locations, but she had never met the man himself.

  Except…she had.

  When the man who stood inside, waiting, turned around, she immediately recognized him.

  “You!” she burst out, unable to help herself.

  Elidor cast her a silencing glance; Llyr ignored her.

  “Elidor,” Llyr said, as calm as could be. “I hear payment is in order. A few extra bodies, but none that will be missed. Why did you summon me?”

  “You,” Elidor snarled, far more intimidating than her own affronted exclamation, “are never to set me or my apprentice on a Banebringer again, are we clear?”

  “Yes, I heard about that,” Llyr said. “A bit of a complication, wasn’t it? My apologies.” At that point, he finally acknowledged Ivana with a smirk. “But your apprentice handled the job, didn’t she?”

  “Are we clear?” Elidor repeated.

  “The job does come with risk,” Llyr said.

  Elidor growled and took two menacing steps toward Llyr, who, to Ivana’s satisfaction, flinched.

  Llyr waved Elidor back with his hand. “Fine, fine. In the future, we’ll warn you first. Fair enough compromise?”

  Wait. Did Llyr know the target was a Banebringer or not? There was a subtext here that Ivana wasn’t catching.

  Elidor gave him a cold stare. “Where’s the payment?”

  Llyr tossed him a leather pouch. “Your apprentice looks as though she’s been through it,” he said, giving Ivana a once-over, and then a second once-over, far more probing than necessary.

  She narrowed her eyes at him, trying to give him the same cold look Elidor had given him, and he snorted and smiled.

  One day, she thought. One day you will no longer mock me.

  Elidor jerked his head, and she followed.

  She glanced back once at Llyr, who was still smirking at her.

  One day.

  When they returned to Elidor’s house, Ivana went to the kitchen to attempt to clean and change the bandage on her wound. Elidor followed her, but all he did was pace.

  Ivana watched him, wary, while sitting on a chair in the kitchen, gingerly dabbing at the wound with an antiseptic-soaked cloth, waiting to see if he would speak.

  At least, in the chaos of the night, the last thing on her mind was her first murder.

  Finally, she couldn’t take it anymore. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Elidor turned on her. “Stupid girl,” he snapped. “None of my anger is directed at you.”

  She blinked, startled. She knew he was furious with their handler, but she had assumed he was also angry with her for almost botching the job. “But I—”

  “Did everything you were asked to do with perfect execution.” He started pacing again. “No, it’s them. A Banebringer! And they didn’t warn us? It could have been worse, so much worse.” Elidor’s nostrils flared. “Reckless fools. At least the others weren’t Banebringers as well.”

  Ivana digested that. So he wasn’t blaming her for the near-disaster? Granted, the target was dead, and anyone who had seen was dead as well. But she was certain she had messed it up. “Surely, they couldn’t have known,” she said, though by the conversation she had been privy to, she suspected that wasn’t true.

  He jerked his head. “Oh, they knew. The Conclave knows.”

  “The Conclave?” Ivana said in disbelief.

  Elidor sniffed. “Yes, the Conclave. Our masters.”

  Ivana sat, stunned. “I thought you worked for the government.”

  “I do, after a fashion. But my leash has been rented to the Conclave for a long time now.”

  “But why would they s
end us to kill a Banebringer? Don’t they have Hunters for that?”

  “Don’t be naïve. A Hunter can’t kill a Banebringer. A Hunter subdues and Sedates Banebringers. Anything else would undermine their own narrative.”

  That took her aback. “Their narrative? They don’t Sedate Banebringers to keep the bloodbane population down?”

  Elidor snorted. “The gods only know why they Sedate Banebringers. Whatever they say and however much truth there is to it, the real reason is certainly because it somehow bolsters their own power.”

  His words spawned a dozen more questions, but none of them were relevant to what she wanted to know the answer to the most. “But that still doesn’t explain, why bother with assassinating a Banebringer?” Ivana pressed. “If Sedation is as good as death—”

  “The weapon does not question its master!”

  “But—”

  “Obviously, they had something to gain by his death over Sedation.”

  “Why didn’t they warn us?”

  Air hissed through his teeth. “Because I would have refused.”

  Ivana blinked. “That’s an option?”

  “No,” Elidor said, “but the only problem with creating a dangerous weapon is that you must have control over it. I am far too dangerous for them to chance losing control of me.”

  A moment of realization hit Ivana. “And, of course, I’m not.”

  “No. And at present, you are dispensable enough to chance losing you on a job like this.” Elidor stopped pacing. Instead, he turned to look at her attempts at nursing her shoulder.

  “Give me that,” he snapped, yanking the rag out of her hand.

  She let him finish cleaning and rebandaging the wound, afraid to say or do anything else while he worked.

  The silence and sudden lack of frantic activity left time for her whirling mind to settle. It settled on reliving the events of the evening.

  She had done it. She had actually done it. She, Ivana, had killed a target herself. She felt strangely dispassionate. In retrospect—other than the surprise of the target being a Banebringer—it had been mechanical. She had executed and applied the knowledge she had learned. And yet she wasn’t wholly numb. Something still niggled at the back of her mind.

  She found herself watching Elidor’s face. “Do you think he had a family?” she asked, almost unbidden, and she immediately regretted the words.

  He lifted his eyes to her, cold, aloof, but he said nothing. It wasn’t exactly an invitation to go on, but now that the words were out, she felt the need to explain herself.

  “It’s just… My father. He wasn’t assassinated, but he died on a blade. Murdered. After a fashion. I-I couldn’t help but wondering…”

  “A weapon does not think. A weapon does not wonder.” He tucked the end of the length of bandage under itself. “Continue to clean it daily and change the bandages,” he said, “or a wound like that will fester and sour. If it doesn’t appear to be healing well, I’ll see about a doctor.” He turned to leave the room.

  “Dal,” she said, before he could leave.

  He turned to look at her.

  “Did I pass, then?” she asked.

  “Yes. You are no longer a neophyte, but truly my apprentice.” He gave a mirthless chuckle. “Congratulations.”

  With that, he swept out of the room, leaving Ivana alone.

  A state she was, and would have to continue to be, very familiar with.

  Culpable

  After a terrible week of waiting, Ivana watched, helpless, while her mother continued to worsen until at the end, she was so weak and delirious she didn’t even recognize her own daughters.

  The morning after that, Ivana had a third corpse on her conscience.

  She tried to be strong for Izel. She really did. But she was as scared as her sister, and the burden of the devastation that her choices had caused was almost too much to bear.

  They spent the last of their coins on a proper burial for their mother, next to their father and Ivana’s daughter. It had been a foolish gesture—why did the dead care? But Ivana couldn’t stomach the thought of having her mother thrown into a mass grave or burned—which is what the landlord, panicked at the news of blood fever in his building, had wanted to do with her body.

  Thankfully, he let them stay on. They still had over a week left in their prepaid rent, at which point he made it clear that they would either have to get out or pay up.

  They didn’t know what they would do after that. They had little money left, nowhere to go, and no one to ask for help. They already were rationing their food and firewood to the barest minimum needed to survive, huddled together for warmth at night, and huddled near the tiny fire they allowed in the woodstove during the day.

  The only upside was that they were talking again. For so long Izel had withdrawn from her, but with their mother’s illness and death, they had had no choice but to set aside whatever was between them and work together to come up with options.

  That was what they were doing one chilly morning, three days after their mother had died, and six days until their lease was up, as they sat as close as they dared to the woodstove. They had already discussed finding work, but they already knew from experience that no one would hire them.

  Izel politely didn’t say why. Instead, she proposed another option altogether. “Mama’s family,” Izel said. “In northern Ferehar. Didn’t she contact them, after Papa…” She folded her hands in her lap. “If we could find a way to get there—”

  Ivana was already shaking her head. “It’s too dangerous.” In fact, they had never met their mother’s side of the family. Oh, their mother had talked about taking a trip, from time to time, but traveling that far with an entire family was expensive—unless one wanted to chance not having armed guards. And so the years slipped by, and now they barely remembered the names of their maternal grandmother and grandfather.

  “More dangerous than staying on the streets here?” Izel countered.

  “We don’t even know the name of the village where they live,” Ivana said.

  Izel wilted. “Oh. Right.”

  And their father’s extended family was no help. He was an only child, and his parents were both dead, several years back.

  But Ivana wanted to be encouraging, even though she herself felt no hope. “But we might have to try.”

  Izel swallowed and nodded, toying with something in her hand.

  “What’s that?” Ivana asked.

  Izel flushed and clenched her hand around it. “Nothing.”

  “It obviously isn’t nothing. Come on. What is it?”

  Izel sat stubbornly still for a few moments and then finally opened her hand.

  It was her rose necklace.

  Ivana blinked in disbelief. “You still have your rose necklace?”

  “I-I just… Papa gave it to me.”

  Ivana found herself rising to her feet. Tears were shimmering in Izel’s eyes. Ivana ought to stay calm, but her throat had tightened. “We sold everything, and you held on to that?”

  “It isn’t even worth anything! You wouldn’t even understand. Papa gave it to me,” she repeated stubbornly.

  “And I sold his microscope!” The pitch of Ivana’s voice rose at the end of her statement. She was losing the battle with calm.

  Apparently, so was Izel, because she also rose to her feet. “His microscope? His microscope? Who cares about his stupid microscope!”

  Ivana hugged her arms around herself and dug her fingernails into her arm. Calm. “I do. I did.”

  “You don’t care about anything!” Izel retorted. “If you did, we wouldn’t be here in the first place! But no, all you cared about was your precious Airell—and look where it got us! I told you. I told you, and you didn’t listen.” Izel clenched the rose pendant in her hand, the chain dangling from her fist. “So don’t tell me I should have sold the last thing I have left. You have no right.” Izel now faced Ivana as if they were about to have a duel. “This is all your fault!” She spat th
e final phrase out as though it were poison.

  Ivana stepped back. The words hung in the air between them, thudded in Ivana’s head, her heart, every part of her. You think I don’t know that? she wanted to scream. You think I don’t tell myself that every miserable day of my life?

  And until now, Izel had never spoken it. Until now.

  Choked by her attempts to suppress her grief and fury, all Ivana could do was hold out her hand. “Give me the necklace,” she said through clenched teeth.

  “No!”

  She broke. She lunged at Izel, who unsuccessfully tried to leap out of the way. Instead, they landed with a thud onto the hard floor in a tangle of arms and legs. Ivana managed to pin her, pry her hand open, and wrench the necklace away from her. Izel looked up at her, daggers and hate in her eyes.

  And there was a knock on the door, breaking the stand-off.

  Ivana’s chest was heaving. She shoved the necklace into her pocket, pushed herself up off the floor, and flung the door open while Izel rose behind her.

  It was none other than the landlord…and Lord Kadmon.

  Hope welled up in Ivana’s chest. Had he heard about their predicament and come to rescue them? Did the old man have a kindly streak after all? Even if he would hire them as servants, they would be taken care of.

  The landlord disappeared, and Ivana stepped back from the door to allow Kadmon in.

  “Well, well.” He inspected their apartment visually and then wrinkled his nose. “I heard about the death of your mother. So sad, so very sad. Well.”

  He didn’t look like a man about to bring good news.

  “Despite everything, you are both in good health, I trust?”

  Ivana turned to exchange a glance with Izel, who looked mutually bewildered.

  Ivana shrugged. “I suppose, my lord.”

  “Good, good.” He stepped out of the door. She heard the murmur of voices, and when he entered again, two more men accompanied him, one bearded, and one clean-shaven.

  Either way, they didn’t look like kind men.

  Ivana stepped backward, into Izel, and Izel clung to her arm.