Brandon SANDERSON - The Alloy of Law

“Every gentleman needs a hobby,” she said evenly. “And, considering the self-indulgences of some men I’ve known, this wouldn’t be problematic by comparison.” She leaned forward. “In short, my lord, I see you for what you are. The two of us, we are beyond the points in our lives where expecting the other to change would be realistic. I will accept this about you if you will accept me. I am not without my faults, as my previous three suitors chose to explain to me – at length – in written communication.”

“I hadn’t realized.”

“It is not an issue worthy of your attention, really,” she said. “Though I did think that you’d have realized I did not come to this potential union without – no offense – a measure of desperation.”

“I understand.”

Steris hesitated; then a bit of her coldness seemed to depart. Some of her control, her steely will, fell away. She looked tired, suddenly. Worn. Though behind that mask, he saw something that might have been affection for him. She clasped her hands before her. “I am not… good with people, Lord Waxillium. I realize it. I must stress, however, that you have my thanks for what you have done. I speak it from the depths of all that I am. Thank you.”

He met her eyes, and nodded.

“So,” she said, growing more businesslike. “We progress with our engagement?”

He hesitated. There was no reason not to, but a part of him found that he thought himself a coward. Of the two offers this day – one unspoken, the other blunt – this was the one he was contemplating?

He glanced toward the room where Marasi was giving the report of her involvement in this mess. She was entrancing. Beautiful, intelligent, motivated. By all logic and reason, he should have been completely infatuated with her.

In fact, she reminded him a lot of Lessie. Perhaps that was the problem.

“We move forward,” he said, turning back to Steris.

Marasi attended Miles’s execution.

Daius, the senior prosecutor, had counseled against it. He never attended executions.

She sat on the outer balcony, alone, watching Miles walk up the steps to the firing platform. Her position was above the execution site.

She narrowed her eyes, remembering Miles standing in that underground room of darkness and mist, pointing a gun at her hiding place. She’d had a gun to her head three times during that two-day span, but the only time she’d really believed that she would die had been when she had seen the look in Miles’s eyes. The heartless lack of emotion, the superiority.

She shivered. The time between the Vanisher attack at the wedding and Miles’s capture had been less than a day and a half. Yet she felt like during that time she’d aged two decades. It was like a form of temporal Allomancy, a speed bubble around her alone. The world was different now. She’d nearly been killed, she’d killed for the first time, she’d fallen in love and been rejected. Now she’d helped condemn to death a former hero of the Roughs.

Miles looked with contempt on the constables who tied him to the restraining pole. He’d shown that same expression through most of the trial – the first one she’d helped prosecute as an attorney, though Daius had been the lead on the case. The trial had gone quickly, despite its high-profile and high-stakes nature. Miles had not denied his crimes.

It seemed that he saw himself as immortal. Even standing up there – his metalminds removed, a dozen rifles cocked and pointed toward him – he didn’t seem to believe he would die. The human mind was very clever at tricking itself, at keeping the despair of inevitability at bay. She’d known that look in Miles’s eyes. Every man had it, when young. And every man eventually saw it as a lie.

The rifles went to shoulders. Perhaps now Miles would finally recognize that lie himself. As the guns fired, Marasi found that she was satisfied. And that disturbed her greatly.

Waxillium boarded the train at Dryport. His leg still ached, he walked with a cane, and he wore a bandage around his chest to help with the broken ribs. One week wasn’t nearly enough time to heal from what he’d been through. He probably shouldn’t have left his bed.

He limped down the corridor of the lavish first-class carriage, passing handsomely appointed private rooms. He counted off to the third compartment as the train labored into motion. He walked into the chamber, leaving the door open, and sat down in one of the well-stuffed chairs by the window. It was affixed to the floor, and sat before a small table with a long, single leg. It was curved and slender, like a woman’s neck.

A short time later, he heard footsteps in the corridor. They hesitated at the doorway.

Waxillium watched the scenery passing outside. “Hello, Uncle,” he said, turning to look at the man in the doorway.

Lord Edwarn Ladrian stepped into the room, walking with a whale-ivory cane and wearing fine clothing. “How did you find me?” he asked, sitting down in the other chair.

“A few of the Vanishers we interrogated,” Waxillium said. “They described a man that Miles called ‘Mister Suit.’ I don’t think anyone else recognized you in the description. From what I understand, you were hermitlike during the decade leading up to your ‘death.’ Save for your letters to the broadsheets about political matters, of course.”

That didn’t answer the question exactly. Waxillium had found this train, and this car, based on the numbers written in Miles’s cigar box, the one Wayne had found. Railway routes. Everyone else thought they had been trains the Vanishers had been planning to hit, but Waxillium had seen a different pattern. Miles had been tracking Mister Suit’s movements.

“Interesting,” Lord Edwarn said. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his fingers as a servant entered, bringing a tray of food and setting it on the table in front of him. Another poured him wine. He waved for them to wait outside the door.

“Where is Telsin?” Waxillium asked.

“Your sister is safe.”

Waxillium closed his eyes, and fought down the welling of emotion. He’d thought her dead in the wreck that supposedly claimed his uncle’s life, but had dealt with his emotions, such as they were. It had been years since he’d seen his sister.

Why, then, was finding out that she lived so powerfully meaningful to him? He couldn’t even define which emotions he was feeling.

He forced his eyes open. Lord Edwarn was watching him, holding a glass of crystalline white wine in his fingers. “You suspected,” Edwarn said. “All along, you suspected I wasn’t dead. That’s why you recognized whatever description those ruffians were able to give. I’ve changed clothing styles, my haircut, and even shaved my beard.”

“You shouldn’t have had your butler try to kill me,” Waxillium said. “He was too long in the family employ, and he was too ready to kill me, to have been hired by the Vanishers on such short notice. It meant he was working for someone else, and had been for some time. The simplest answer was that he was still working for the person he’d served for years.”

“Ah. Of course, you weren’t supposed know he caused the explosion.”

“I wasn’t supposed to survive it, you mean.”

Lord Ladrian shrugged.

“Why?” Waxillium asked, leaning in. “Why bring me back, if only to then have me killed? Why not arrange for someone else to take the house title?”

“Hinston was going to take it,” Lord Ladrian said, buttering a roll. “His disease was… unfortunate. Plans were already in motion. I didn’t have time to search out other options. Besides, I hoped – obviously, without basis – that you’d have overcome your overdeveloped childhood sense of morality. I had hoped you’d be a resource to me.”