by Carol A Park
Why Fereharian?
Any other Fereharian woman who stood in that crowd today would have fixated on that rumor simply because it would have struck too close to home. She, on the other hand, was annoyed. The last thing she needed was another reason for people to pay attention to her. Already, she could see how more heads turned toward the Fereharians in the crowd than normally would, subconscious reactions to the thoughts no doubt churning in people’s minds.
Glad I’m not Fereharian.
Poor thing must be scared witless.
My neighbor is Fereharian; what if that draws the murderer closer to me?
She turned away and trudged back toward Elidor’s. Her own thoughts took a different direction.
A serial murderer seemed to be lurking about the city; Elidor had to know something about it. He had access to sources that the Watch didn’t typically rely on.
She determined to ask him at the next opportunity.
As it happened, the next opportunity was that same night at suppertime.
Elidor was eating with her tonight. He didn’t always; in fact, he was often away. He tended to divvy out the jobs closer to home to her, probably so that he could better keep an eye on her progress.
“The Watch posted a notice in the square today,” she remarked as they were finishing.
And when they did eat together, they rarely talked. The only acknowledgement Elidor gave was a twitch of an eyebrow. He didn’t even look up.
“It was about two murders that occurred recently,” she continued, as though he had inquired further. “Do you know anything about the situation?”
“I do not.”
“There was another murder a couple weeks ago. The Watch thinks all three are related.”
Still nothing more.
“There wasn’t a contract you didn’t tell me about?” she pressed.
He did look up then, if only to cast her a disparaging look, and she took his point without need for further comment. If they had been hits ordered by the government—or Conclave—they would have done their best to be sure authorities stayed out of it—unless getting the Watch involved were part of the point, of course.
“There are those in our profession who don’t work for the government,” she pointed out.
“Indeed, and if that were the case, how would I know about it?”
She paused. An odd comment to make. He would know about it because the sources he used for his own jobs didn’t only work with him. He would know about it because it was part of his job to be informed. True, he couldn’t know everything, but these were murders near their own district, not the other side of the city. Surely, he would have heard something, even if only that it had happened, and the circumstances.
“Are you sure you don’t know anything about it?” she asked. “The rumor is that the victims have all been Fereharian. I don’t like how that might draw more attention to me.”
He wiped his mouth and set down his napkin. “Sometimes murders happen. Perhaps a group of women were keeping the wrong company at the wrong time in the wrong place and discovered something they shouldn’t have.” He stood up. “I’ll be in my study.”
Women? She didn’t recall specifying that the victims had been women. “Don’t forget your boots,” she said, jerking her head toward the boots she had removed from her satchel and set by the door for him.
He bent down, removed the scrap of paper from the left boot, and unfurled it, leaving the boots where they were.
His eyes skipped down the paper and then he stood, motionless, and stared at the paper.
“New job?” she prompted.
Still, he said nothing. A slight frown touched the corners of his lips—unusually expressive for him.
“Dal?”
He gave her a cursory glance. “I’ll be in my study,” he repeated. He started toward the door and then stopped, as if hitting a wall. He turned. “Actually, see me in my study.” His eyes flicked to a clock on the sideboard. “In about an hour.”
With no further explanation, he left.
Preoccupied again? She frowned. This was strange.
And identifying the victims as women?
Ivana sat back, sipped at her wine, and reviewed their brief conversation.
It could have been a thoughtless assumption, but Elidor wasn’t normally given to thoughtless assumptions. More likely, he had already heard about the murders.
If so, why conceal that from her? Why was he hedging? Was it some sort of test? Was he the one behind them after all, and he simply hadn’t told her about the job? Was that what that comment about the victims “learning something they shouldn’t have” had been about? Or had they learned something about him, and it wasn’t a job at all?
She swirled the last of the wine around in her glass. Whatever the case…
He was hiding something from her.
Chapter Twenty
Ivana drifted back to the tiny room she still occupied even after all these years. Elidor had no other spare bedroom, but there were ways in which hers could have been expanded to give her more space.
He had probably never thought about it.
She lit the lantern in her room and turned to the washbasin, her thoughts still on what discreet steps she could take to discover what Elidor was hiding. He wasn’t one to play games with, after all.
She reached down to pick up her brush without looking, only to miss by a millimeter and instead knock it off the basin top. It clattered to the floor and slid under her cot.
She crouched and felt under the cot. She didn’t immediately find it, so she sighed and knelt on hands and knees to look under the cot.
The brush was there—out of easy reach—and so was a long, narrow box.
She stared at the box. She knew what it was, since she herself had put it there more than three years ago. She had forgotten it was there.
She reached for the brush, aiming to ignore the box, but instead found herself drawing out the box as well.
She didn’t stand. Instead, she moved to a sitting position, leaned back against the cot, and opened the lid of the box.
There, lying on a bed of cotton fluff, was a rose pendant attached to a tarnished silver chain.
Her sister’s.
It had lain on the lower shelf of the basin until that day she had decided she didn’t need its constant reminder of who she had been. She couldn’t, at the time, bring herself to get rid of it, but she had hoped it could be forgotten.
And she had, indeed, forgotten about it.
She tried not to think about her past. Most days, she succeeded.
It was hard to continue to mourn when she had so thoroughly desensitized herself to those sorts of feelings otherwise. She had to in order to do this job. She couldn’t stop to lament every death, couldn’t feel guilty, couldn’t hesitate.
Her plan had worked. She wasn’t sure if she liked what she had become, but at this point, her feelings on the matter, when she had them, were in so many ways irrelevant.
She couldn’t leave this profession—nor indeed Elidor’s service, before he deemed her training complete—even if she wanted to.
And she had achieved, or at the least, was achieving, what she wanted.
Death.
Death of the pain that used to consume her. Death of sorrow, death of despair.
Oh, she was no Elidor. She told herself those things had died, but they were merely locked away behind a wall she herself had built. The fact that she had drawn this box out—when she ought to have left it alone—was witness to the fact that she wasn’t there yet.
But whoever she once had been: daughter of Galvyn and Avira, sister of Izel, Airell’s plaything, almost-mother, street urchin…
She pulled up her sleeve and ran her fingers over the scars on her arms. Tormented soul.
No, the person who was all those things was long gone.
As if to prove it to herself, she lifted the necklace out of the box and fastened it around her neck. Why not? It meant nothing to h
er now, but it was a pretty bauble. She’d have to get the chain cleaned, of course, and if she lost it—it wasn’t worth much anyway.
The shadows cast by the light of the lantern danced against the wall, and she looked up at the lantern. The flame was bobbing about as though a breeze had whispered through the room. She didn’t think anything of it. It happened on occasion, as some unseen air current disturbed the flame momentarily.
Until she stopped to think about it.
She stood, set the box down on the basin, glanced at the lantern again, and then around her room.
Her room was tucked far enough into the house that the opening of an outside door shouldn’t have reached her small lantern, and there was no window or other opening.
Well. No other obvious opening.
She carefully removed the shade of the lantern, exposing the flame directly to the air. Once it had settled from her jolting of the lantern, it shone steadily, with only a small sputter here or there. She picked it up and spun in a slow circle. The flame danced with her movement, of course, but once she stopped moving, so did it.
Something had to have caused that flame to move like it did. She stepped up onto her bed and held her lantern up.
The flame shuddered. She held still, hardly daring to breathe. It was bending ever-so-slightly toward the wall adjoining the broom closet next to her room.
Da Veryna used to keep cleaning supplies and such in there, as she recalled. She had always thought that, if he had been so inclined, Elidor could have knocked the wall out and given her a bit more space.
She put the lantern down on the bedside table and reached up to run her hands over the wall.
The wood was so knotted and creviced, it was hard to tell if there was anything unusual about it.
She jumped off the cot and poked her head into the hall, listening.
No sign of Elidor.
She set the glass back on the lantern, picked it up, and padded the few feet down the hall toward the closet.
She opened the door and stepped inside. It was tiny and now empty but for two buckets, a mop, a broom, and a few sponges. A small window was in the outer wall; one pane of glass had broken and someone had attempted to repair it by boarding over that section, but there was still a draft.
That answered that.
Like her room, the closet walls were plastered all around except for the one adjacent to her room.
She turned toward that wall now. Brackets to hang shelves still stuck out of the wall, but the shelves had either never been hung or had long since been removed. She stretched toward the top part of the wall, but without her cot to step on, she couldn’t reach as high.
So she set her lantern aside, turned the bucket upside down, and stepped up onto it. She felt along the wall with her fingers, as she had in her room, and found a spot where one of the boards jutted out at the corner a bit. She pried at it, and it moved enough that she could squish the tips of her fingers into the gap, but it refused to budge any farther.
The board was above her head, even though she stood on the bucket, which made it awkward to pry at. She placed one of the unused shelves on top of the first bucket, turned the other bucket upside down on it, and tried again.
It was a precarious balance, but the loose board now came to eye level.
She dug her fingers into the gap again and pried at it, expecting it to remain obstinate.
Instead, it came out abruptly in her hand, and she lost her balance. She reached out to steady herself against the wall, knocking the mop over in the process. Her other hand shot out to stop it from hitting the door, but in the process she fumbled the narrow board itself, and it clattered to the floor.
She closed her eyes and held her breath, listening, hoping Elidor hadn’t heard the racket.
After a moment of hearing nothing, she looked back at the much wider gap the board had revealed. She peered through the gap…
And into her room.
The slot was narrow. She would have never noticed the slit from where she sat on her bed.
She had no doubt as to its purpose. Elidor had been spying on her. Probably the entire time she had been staying here.
Had that been why he had taken her in? He had wanted his own personal peep show?
That was unlike Elidor. She had never noticed any sort of lewd streak in him.
But what did she know about him, even after almost five years?
“I see you’ve discovered my little secret.”
Startled, Ivana turned too quickly, and the entire contraption came down with a horrendous crash. But it hardly mattered because Elidor stood in front of the doorway to the closet.
She crouched down where she had landed, one hand on the ground to break her fall, and stared at the floor for a moment, collecting her thoughts.
“How did you find it?” he asked.
She rose, and he didn’t move. His face was unreadable. “My lantern,” she said. “I noticed a draft.”
He nodded. “I’m surprised it took you this long to notice.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “You were here, not that long ago, weren’t you?” Hence the sudden draft. Probably opening the door.
“Yes.” He moved into the doorframe, blocking her exit.
A wayward thought flitted through her brain. What if he had killed those women, and what if it hadn’t been collateral damage or cleanup? What if he had snapped for some reason and gone on a self-selected killing spree? Could that happen to assassins?
Her heart pounded as it hadn’t since those first terrifying jobs, many years ago. Why in the abyss hadn’t she waited until he was away to investigate?
Control, Ivana. She was being foolish. In all the time he had known her, he had never laid a hand on her in that way. In fact, he had hardly laid a hand on her in any way, inappropriate or otherwise. He wasn’t affectionate, physically or otherwise, and though he could have a cold temper, any lashings had always been verbal.
If he had wanted to hurt her, why would he begin now?
She ventured to push him, if only to see his reaction—if indeed she could manage to get one out of him at all. “Elidor, if you want to see me unclothed—or frankly, anything else—do you think I would refuse your demand? You might as well ask me to wash clothes or weed the garden.”
There was a long silence, long enough that he had to either be considering it, or considering how he would punish her for her cheek.
He stepped in closer to her, and light from the hallway filtered back in. Her earlier thoughts betrayed her body by causing her hand to twitch at her thigh, ready to draw her dagger.
His eyes flicked to the movement and back again, and she cursed inwardly, hoping he would take it as an unconscious reaction on her part and nothing more.
She forced herself to hold his eyes and wait for his response.
He lifted a hand and, for a moment, she thought he would touch her face. Instead, he lifted the rose pendant at her throat. “What’s this?”
She raised an eyebrow. “A necklace?”
“It’s not new.”
“No. It was my sister’s.”
He let go of the pendant and lowered his hand.
“Your proposal is…” He paused, and the word hung unspoken in the silence. Tempting. But instead he gave a low, throaty chuckle. “Unwise.”
He turned and stepped back through the door. “It’s been an hour.” With that, he disappeared around the corner.
She sank back against the closet wall, her mind racing. This was a revelation about his character that she had not known. His self-discipline may have prevented him from propositioning her, but it hadn’t stopped him from a more discreet way of using her as an object of pleasure all these years.
The intrusion into her privacy was more annoyance than anything else—though she was glad he hadn’t actually taken her up on her offer. Sleeping with a strange man was one thing. Sleeping with Elidor would be…awkward.
Nonetheless, she returned to her room before answering Eli
dor’s summons, found an old shirt, and tacked it up over the hole.
Elidor responded to Ivana’s knock on the door with a grunt, and she found him standing in front of that painting on his wall, his hands clasped behind his back, studying it.
“You wanted to see me?” she asked.
He turned around and went to his desk. He opened a drawer and drew out a slip of paper, just big enough to fit into the palm of his hand. He unfolded it, turned it around, and pushed it toward her.
“We have an unusual job.”
She walked to the desk and read the slip of paper. It took a moment while she worked out the code, but finally she understood the gist. They wanted Elidor to find and catch the murderer? The same murderer they had been discussing over dinner?
There went the theory about it being collateral damage or some such. If Elidor had had to clean up some extras after a job or track down someone who knew too much, he would have informed Llyr. Had he truly not known about the murders then? That was still so difficult to believe.
There was always the other theory, of course. But that was almost as far-fetched. He was so composed and controlled. Assassin or not, he didn’t seem the type to randomly snap.
She studied his face, but he merely gazed back at her, as if to gauge her reaction.
“That’s peculiar.” They specialized in assassinations, not bounties. “Wouldn’t this fall under the purview of the Watch? Or better, a bounty hunter?”
“If I ventured a guess, I would say they’re desperate.”
“The Conclave? Why in the abyss would the Conclave care about a rogue serial murderer?” It wasn’t as if the killer were going after priests.
“They wouldn’t. This is the meddling of local bureaucrats concerned with public opinion.”
“So…”
“So they’ve pled with higher powers to do something, and the government turned to their best assassin, who happens to be leased to the Conclave.”
She became stuck on the middle part of his sentence. “Turned to their best assassin to not assassinate someone?”