Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

Now, before he slept, he owed her a visit. Gabril seemed to have other thoughts on the matter, and his jaw tightened as Kaden changed course for the Crane.

“Whatever your past with that woman, she is an abomination. She should be killed, not coddled.”

“She’s hardly being coddled,” Kaden replied, his own voice harder than he’d intended. “She’s locked away.”

“Allowing a known leach to live is hardly a way to build support for the republic,” Gabril said. “Especially a leach who only just now cut down hundreds of your subjects.”

“They’re not my subjects anymore,” Kaden said. “And it will be the council, not me, who determines Triste’s fate. It doesn’t change the fact that she has been with me since this all started, has saved me more than once, and I intend to see her now, to offer her what comfort I can.”

Gabril shook his head. “Then you go alone. I will be outside your quarters when you have finished with this folly.”

“Not alone,” Kiel said. “I will join you, if you allow.”

Kaden nodded wearily, watching the First Speaker turn on his heel and stalk across the courtyard.

* * *

At first Kaden thought the room was empty. Someone had drawn the heavy shutters without bothering to light the lamps, blocking out the faint blush of light seeping into the eastern sky. He could make out a small pallet at the far side of the room, two lacquered chairs, and a basin with water on a low table; the chamber was hardly a cell, but it was certainly a far cry from the other guest suites in the palace. The air was hot and stuffy, as though the window hadn’t been open for months.

Kaden took a few tentative steps into the room as Kiel pulled the door shut behind them.

“Triste?” he called.

Silence.

He crossed to the window, unlatched the shutters, and pushed them open. When he turned he saw her, crouched between the pallet and the wall, arms clutching her knees to her chest, eyes staring at nothing. Despite the bowl of water, she had made no effort to scrub the blood from her face or hands. It had dried and cracked, making it seem as though her skin was sloughing away. Her dress, too, was black and heavy with blood. She paid no attention to any of it, staring blankly at a section of wall a few paces distant.

“Triste?” he said again, crossing toward her hesitantly. “Are you all right?”

Her body convulsed, shaking with something that was part sob, part bitter laugh.

“My mother is a traitor,” she said without shifting her eyes or raising her voice. “She sold me to my father, who was a traitor and a leach. I am a leach and I just murdered I don’t know how many people.”

The bald statement of the facts brought Kaden up short. He wanted to offer some consolation, but had no idea what to say. As the silence stretched, she raised her eyes at last.

“When will I be executed?” The words held no fear. If anything, there was a note of hope in her voice.

Kaden shook his head slowly. “Triste … I … The council will decide, but I’m going to fight for you, fight to see you saved. Not all leaches are evil.”

Her mouth dropped open in disbelief. “I saw the bodies, Kaden! The people I killed! A child with her head torn halfway off … A man holding his intestines in his arms … I slaughtered them .”

Kaden hesitated, then nodded. “You killed them, but you didn’t mean to kill them. That’s important.”

“I didn’t?” she asked, staring at him bleakly. “How do you know?”

“Do you remember what happened?” Kaden asked. “In the tunnel, back on the island with the kenta ?”

She shook her head, a tiny defeated motion. “Parts. Glimpses. I remember fury. And blood.” She paused, tears streaking her blood-soaked face. “And power. I’m a leach. A leach . Just like the Atmani.”

“Maybe you are,” Kaden said, “but there are worse things to be.”

His years with the monks had ground out most reflexive aversion, but there was still something deep inside him, some vicious muscle trained in his early childhood, that recoiled at the thought. All the old words, like dumb fish rising to the light, floated into his mind: foul, twisted, loathsome . He looked at Triste, at the delicate arc of her neck, the fall of her hair onto her shoulders. It seemed cruel of Bedisa to weave something so vile into a being so beautiful.

Put it away, he told himself, taming the feeling that crouched, muttering, inside of him. At every point since he’d met her, Triste had been kind and generous. When events came to a head, when she fell into the hands of the Ishien, it had been Kaden who failed her, not the other way around. If she was a leach, she was a leach.

“It doesn’t change who you are,” he said, though as the words left his lips he remembered her pressing Matol up against the kenta, his hand at her throat, her lips pressed to his as she forced him struggling through the gate, remembered her standing, silhouetted, at the end of the corridor, her scream loud as the sun.

She raised her head. Firelight reflected in her streaked tears as though she were crying flame. “Who am I?” she whispered, eyes boring into him, both defiant and desperate.

Kaden shook his head helplessly, and for the first time, Kiel stepped forward, crouching a pace away from Triste, considering her carefully.

“Tell me everything,” he said. “Start at the start.”

“Why?”

“Because,” the Csestriim replied, “you want to learn the truth. I have lived a long time, and seen more than you know.”

Triste glanced at Kaden, then back at Kiel, and then the words were tumbling out of her, like water spilling over the lip of Umber’s Pool back in the Bone Mountains, falling too fast and far to recall, pulled by a force as old and strong as the earth itself. Kiel listened in silence, nodding when Triste faltered, his face still as stone, eyes intent as she recounted it all: the flight through the mountains, her reading of the script in Assare, her impossible passage through the kenta and killing of Ekhard Matol, right up through her utter destruction of Adiv’s guard.

“There’s something wrong with me,” she concluded finally, voice breaking. “Something awful and broken.” She had managed to dam up her terror and grief, but Kaden could hear them pressing behind her low voice, a massive weight barely restrained. “I know things,” she concluded. “Things I shouldn’t know. I can do things.…” She trailed off, staring out the window.

Kiel glanced at Kaden, then returned his gaze to the girl.

“A remarkable account,” he said. “Unique.”

“I’m a leach,” Triste said, circling back to where they began.

“Almost certainly,” Kiel replied. “It would explain your ability to match pace with Kaden and Tan in the mountains, not to mention the fact that you just held up a hundred tons of stone. You are not just a leach, but an extremely powerful one.”

Triste nodded helplessly, but Kiel pressed ahead.

“There is more.”

Kaden nodded slowly. “Just being a leach wouldn’t allow her to pass the kenta, would it?”

He hesitated, then shook his head. “No. Not that I’ve ever heard of.” He turned to Triste. “How did you feel when you stepped through the gate?”

She frowned. “Terrified. Every single time. Confused and terrified.”

Kiel nodded. “It should have destroyed you.”

“And then there’s the languages,” Kaden said. “You didn’t learn them in the temple.”

Triste shook her head weakly. “I wanted to believe that, but … no.” She paused, gazing out at the blank sky, eyes wide and lambent as the moon. “It’s like there’s … someone else.”