Erin Evans - The Adversary

Farideh glanced at Dahl, at the cold anger etched on his features. “I’m glad,” he said, “that I was no fledgling of yours. There’s no clemency because the choices are clear.”

Panic raced up Farideh’s core-he didn’t mean her, but he might as well have. And choices could get very murky, very quickly when devils got involved. She pulled him aside, back toward the door.

“Can you leave us alone?” Farideh asked. Dahl gave her a worried look. She rubbed her brand through the fabric of her sleeve. “You don’t want me to peer at your soul,” she said lightly, “I don’t want to discuss my. . entanglements in front of you.” She looked down at Tharra. “I doubt she does either.”

Dahl stared at her a moment, searching her face. “No secrets,” he warned.

“None that matter,” she clarified. Then added, “I’m not baring my soul or hers, because you don’t trust me to know what’s important and what’s not.” And she wasn’t telling him about being the Chosen of Asmodeus, unless it meant life or death.

He studied her a moment more. “Fine,” he said. “Remember I’m on your side though. She isn’t. ” With a quick glance at Tharra, he turned and left the little room.

Tharra looked up at Farideh, warily, as she approached. “You might have figured me out,” she said. “But I’m not like you.”

“Aren’t you?” Farideh asked. “I’m here because I accepted a deal to save two of the dearest people in the world to me, and the price was far more than I expected. What happened to you?”

Tharra’s gaze flicked over Farideh once more. “Fine. We’re all unlucky ones.” She fell into a silence, her eyes shining. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” she said after a moment. “I was figuring out a way to make it turn right. I’m not a monster.”

Farideh’s heart ached at her own words coming out of another.

“I always assumed,” Farideh said gently, “that people ended up indebted to the Hells because they sought it out. But they come to you and there are no strings on their lures.”

Tharra laughed once. “Until there are. They like those rumors, I think. Makes it seem like you can’t be caught if you’re clever.”

Farideh settled herself beside the other woman on the cold ground. “Did he tell you what’s happening? Magros?”

Tharra’s lip curled. “As little as he could, of course. Just what I was supposed to do, but never why. He said there was another devil, another player. You.”

“The both of them together were supposed to use this camp to collect Chosen for Asmodeus-to make Shar’s followers collect them, really,” Farideh said. “But Magros and Sairché are also under conflicting orders-they need to make the plan fall apart and lay the blame on the other one, so that Asmodeus doesn’t get what he wants and the other archdevil gets faulted.”

“So you want me to break my agreement?” Tharra asked. “Switch sides and lose my soul.”

“No,” Farideh said. “I want both of us to outsmart these karshoji fiends and find a way to save these people. What were you supposed to do? What were the powers they gave you-you made me want to agree with things.”

Tharra shook her head. “That was the pin. Magros enspelled it, so I could pass for a Chosen and do my job. Keep everyone in line. Keep them calm. Keep as many as I could out of the wizard’s laboratories. That was easier than you’d think until you came along. And then-” Her eyes flooded. “He gave me a ritual-a scroll and components. I knew it would be bad. He told me as much, without saying it. ‘Make sure you dig yourself a hidey-hole and make enough time to get down to it.’ You don’t say that about anything subtle.”

“He never said what it would do?”

“The agreement did. ‘Gather the Chosen,’ as you said. He means to kill them, maybe all of us.” Tears started falling. “But I owed him.”

“How did he catch you?”

Tharra wiped her face, hesitating. “Seven years ago, a warm Eleint night, a fellow came up to me, out of nowhere. Said there were two folks being held by cultists for a sacrifice near to the village we were standing in, and they’d be dead by morning. Gave me a single clue-‘cowslips’-and vanished. I’d just been given a pin of my own and was looking for my own troubles to right. I knew the meadow he meant, the hollow hill-so I headed in and played the hero. Magros found me the next night-he didn’t bother hiding his horns that time. Thanked me for the assistance-those cultists worshiped someone he didn’t want gaining any power, and wasn’t it nice how we could help each other? I asked why he didn’t just tell me, and he smiled. ‘Where’s the fun in that?’ “So that’s how we were for years after. He’d turn up, give me a clue, and I’d save some innocents and end some evils. I’m sure someone better than I would say that helping Magros was tilting the balance-weakening his enemies only meant he got stronger-but I saved a lot of people. I got to be the hero.

“And then, the better part of a year ago, Magros came to me and said there was a Sembian force moving through the Dales. That they were going to sack one of three farmsteads-three families I knew and loved and counted on. And this time, no clue. He would tell me which it was, for a price-my soul. I told him no, made for the nearest farm, and got them packing-down to the little ones. Out of harm’s way.

“I rode hard for the next, but there wasn’t time. Magros came and made me another offer-he’d throw off the Sembians, force them from their path and save my friends. But I’d have to do something for him. I’d have to run his half of this camp scheme. I’d have to trigger the gathering ritual. And if I didn’t, my soul would be his. I thought I could handle it. I thought it was fine. And then it wasn’t. The only thing I could do was agree to this awful deal.”

“But you saved those people,” Farideh said.

“Those, yes. But Magros turned the army into the path of the ones I sent fleeing. Because I’d said no the first time.” Tharra looked up. “I wouldn’t have gathered the children, I swear. I made sure I never promised to catch everyone. I read that agreement, every word.” She chuckled through her tears. “Made that devil spitting mad. And in the end, it didn’t matter.”

“It matters,” Farideh said. “If you don’t break your agreement, you keep your soul. We can make this turn out-”

“That ritual has to go off,” Tharra said. “Even if Oota let me out of here to do that. . People are going to die. Will you tell me that you’ll let that happen?”

Farideh squinted at Tharra. “Where’s the ritual now?”

Tharra shrugged awkwardly. “The scroll’s buried under my bed. The components are hidden in the thatching. Rotate a poison or two out of them and keep it on me, for safety.”

“That’s where you got the hamadryad’s ash,” Farideh said. “Have you got any more?”

“What’s left is in a pouch in my sleeve,” she said. She met Farideh’s gaze as the warlock fished the pouch out. “What are you going to do now?”

“See if these are secrets Dahl can use,” she said. She bit her lip, not wanting to ask, but knowing she had to. “You read your agreement, and you agreed anyway?”

Tharra lifted her head. “In the moment, there were no other options.”

Farideh left the former Harper in the makeshift cell, not sure whether she was more culpable than Tharra or less, or if it mattered in the end. A soul was a soul, after all, however it landed in Asmodeus’s basket.

She found Dahl just beyond the dais, talking to a haggard-looking Oota. “What did she say?” Dahl asked. Farideh told him about the ritual, about the components hidden in Tharra’s hut.