Lilith Saintcrow: The Bandit King

My voice surprised me, rough as if I had been at ale or acquavit . “If I suspect di Cinfiliet of treachery, Adersahl di Parmecy, I will show no mercy.”

A long pause, filled only with the snap and rush of flame. Would I have to be more explicit? I did not think so. What did he believe, if anything? There was a time when I would have been certain he would take my word as a writ from the Blessed themselves.

Adersahl sighed. It was a long, heavy exhale, full of weariness. “I know nothing of treachery from his quarter. What would you have of me, Captain?”

“You will remain with her when I cannot, and you will kill Adrien di Cinfiliet if he threatens her. And you will breathe no word of my orders.” Even as I said it, I flinched inwardly. It was the first lesson a Left Hand learns: The only way to keep a secret is to consign the bearer of it to Death.

Including, sometimes, the Hand himself. That is the oath we take: As one already dead, I swear myself to service. I had often thought long and deep on the meaning of such a vow. If I was a dead man, did it matter who I killed or how I debased myself?

The problem was, I was still alive. She had resurrected me.

He still did not look at me. “You truly think di Cinfiliet so much of a danger?”

“His aunt raised him to hate the King.” A world of meaning lived under those words.

“The King is dead,” Adersahl murmured. “Long live the Queen.”

Absolutely. “If I have aught to say of it, she will live to a ripe old age. No matter what I must do to ensure it. Do we understand each other, di Parmecy?”

That caused his gaze to swing through the darkness, but not to me. He looked up at the ceiling, closed his eyes. Was he even now expecting a knife to the throat? The garrote? “I thought I understood you, Captain.”

“And do you?”

The weary old veteran examined the roof beams. “I am no fool.” He settled himself further in the chair’s embrace. “Loyal to a fault, but no fool.”

“I am gladdened to hear it.” I turned on my heel, gave him my back. “Go to your rest, sieur . Tomorrow may well bring surprises.”

“Of what sort?”

“Of whatever sort Vianne will dream up next.” The skin of my back tightened and tingled, expecting… what, a blade? No, twas not in Adersahl’s nature. He had defended me to my d’mselle . My unease was the sort that had followed me since I arrived at Court, the expectation of danger such a constant refrain I could hear no other music.

He said nothing else, and I left the room dissatisfied. The conversation had gone as well as could be expected… but still, there was something amiss.

What bothered me—now that I had time to turn my attention to less pressing problems, as I closed the door and set off down a stone hall in the house of the Blessed—was what further use d’Orlaans and di Narborre had thought to gain from such a paper as the one my d’mselle now held.

For I could have sworn I burned the only copy of that distressing oath, on paper as fine as any the King’s brother had access to, the night before the conspiracy broke loose.

A priestess in green-and-white robes swayed gently out of sight down the hall as I relieved Tinan di Rocham of his vigil at my d’mselle ’s door. The boy was pale, but he returned my salute and hurried away in the opposite direction, wincing as if pained. To be sent away from the lady’s door was probably mortifying. And he had recently come close to death, gut-stabbed by a Pruzian assassin and healed by sorcery. Wounds closed in such a manner sometimes pain one more in the aftermath than in the receiving. The body knows it has been violated, and not even the grace of the Aryx can dissuade it from remembering. Ghost-pain , the healers call it, the same term for a limb lopped off and yet still felt.

Which led me to the Aryx, the Great Seal of Arquitaine, its triple serpents twined in an endless knot and its power singing through my d’mselle . The Seal had been asleep since King Fairlaine’s time, true, but it was still a mark of the Blessed’s favor for Arquitaine. And now it was awake. Plenty of the old accounts of its power were… thought-provoking. Did Vianne know what other Left Hands had written of the Seal’s capabilities in the secret archives, she would no doubt seek to claw it from her flesh.

One more danger to guard her from.

I touched the door’s surface, smooth wood-grain under my fingertips. No line of candle or witchlight showed under its edge. She must be in her bed, prepared for dreaming with a soporific draught and left to embark on the sea of sleep. Danae would have prayed over her, and I pondered what wonder, if any, the priestess would have witnessed. Would the Aryx respond to this ceremony as it had responded to the marriage-vows?

A chill walked up my back. The door smelled of hedgewitchery. A thread-thin tracery of green, visible to passive, sorcerous Sight, twined through the wood. Was it a defense, a hedgewitch charm meant to bar passage? Did she fear to sleep here, knowing I would be at her door?

Not that. Please do not let her think that.

I took up my position to one side, and listened. The temptation to enter the closet of Kimyan’s elect and peer through the darkened eyeholes, to perhaps hear her breathing, ran through my body like fever, like ague.

Instead, I played the same game I have played through countless nights of watching and waiting. A Left Hand spends many nights in silence, like a viper under a rock, waiting in darkness for a victim to blunder past or an assignation to take place. Moreover, many a man has been proved unfit for the Guard, no matter how noble his blood, by the simple inability to wait .

To wait successfully, a man fills the time as best he may. My game runs thus: I think of Vianne. I consider her in different lights—under a flood of sunlight in her garden, on her knees and digging, sometimes cursing under her breath before she worked hedgewitchery, a green flame on her fingers threading through whatever herb or flower she sought to save or replant. I envision her under torch- and witchlight during the Court dances, in the slow stately measures of a pavane or during the wild whirl of the maying, her feet unseen under her skirts and her dark curls flying.

I think of her perched in a windowsill, bent over a book, the kiss of sun through glass bringing out threads of gold and darkness in her braided hair, gems winking against her throat and ears, sometimes with pearls threaded into the complex architecture of Court style.

I think of the moment Henri told me of his design to marry her to some Damarsene tradesman-turned-noble, if his plans came to fruition and the ruling house of Hese-Arburg suffered a setback. To a king, the female side of Court is a garden, some flowers culled for pleasure and others to be used as bargaining chits, played for alliance or to shift the balance of power.

That is a singularly unpleasant thought, though it arrives during any dark watch. So, I turn myself to remembering the grace of her wrist as she plucks at a harp, or of the grace of her wit when she and Princesse Lisele played riddlesharp and Vianne let the Princesse win, making a blunder too subtle to be anything but intentional.

I had sweeter remembrances to take the sting away. The moment she turned to me, in a bandit’s hut in the Shirlstrienne, and told me her strength depended on mine. The moment I realized she was mine for the taking, that my patience had plucked the flower I had tended as carefully as she ever tended a bed of priest’s-ease or finicky aurlaine.

The night wore on. That thin thread of green wedded to the wooden door mocked me. I longed to touch the knob, to steal on cat-feet into the d’mselle ’s chamber and whisper the truth in her ear. Would she take it for a god’s voice, and would I be struck down for blasphemy?