S Farrell - A Magic of Nightfall

Another sigh. She spread her hands wide. “I couldn’t do it.”

There was no apology in her voice or in her gaze. And he found that he couldn’t summon any anger toward her-he knew how it would have been with his own sons. He might have been a poor, absent vatarh for them, but had it come to that, he would have done whatever he’d needed to do for them.

At least that’s what he told himself. He wondered if it were true. What if Kaitlin had sent for him while he was in Nessantico, while Ana was alive? What if she’d asked him to return, for the sake of his sons? Would he have gone? Or would he have made some excuse, found some compelling reason that he must remain here with Ana.

“Karl?” Varina asked. “Are you angry with me?”

He shook his head. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “I understand.” His fingers prowled stubble. He felt old tonight. His bones were cold, and the fire in the hearth did nothing to warm them. “I’ll go back with her,” he said finally, when the silence had threatened to go on too long. “Maybe Talis will come for her. Maybe she knows where Talis is hiding.”

“If you go back, the Garde Kralji will find you, and the Kraljiki will have you tortured and executed. Your corpse will be swinging in one of the cages of the Pontica Kralji, with crows picking the flesh from your bones.”

He shivered, hugging himself with arms that felt tired and weak. “You may be right. But what am I running toward, Varina? Leaving Nessantico-what did I really gain by that? How will I find out who killed Ana somewhere else?” He shook his head. “No, I need to go back. Isn’t that the Numetodo method?-to learn, you must examine; to understand, you must experience. You must have facts. Finding Nico’s matarh…” He shivered again. “It’s almost as if Ana’s ghost had led me here.”

“You don’t believe in either ghosts or gods, Karl. Believe only in what you can see and touch and examine. Isn’t that the Numetodo method?”

He smiled faintly at that. “No, I don’t believe in ghosts,” he told her. “But it’s strange how comforting such a thought could be, isn’t it? It almost makes you understand the hold faith has on people.” He drew a long, slow breath. “Still, I’m going back.”

“Then I’ll go with you,” Varina told him. “Just like you, there’s nothing I’m running toward. And you’ll need help.”

“You don’t need to do this. The Kraljiki would do the same to you as he would me… or worse. There’s no reason for you to go back, after all…” His voice trailed off.

She didn’t answer, but he saw the set of her lips and the posture of her body, he saw the way she was nearly glaring at him, and suddenly he knew, and the revelation was painful. “Oh,” he said. He wondered how he could have been so blind. He got up from his seat at the bed and went over to where she was sitting. He started to put his hand on her shoulder, but her eyes narrowed and he drew his hand back. “Varina…”

Her gaze held him, her brown eyes searching his. “You loved Ana, even though she never quite loved you the same way in return. She was too caught up in what she saw as her own task in life,” Varina said quietly. She nodded. Her lips twitched once as if she wanted to smile, then fell back to a frown. “Well, I understand that, Karl. I understand that very well.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

She did smile then, the expression tinged with an underlying emotion Karl couldn’t decipher. “Then you shouldn’t say anything. I haven’t said anything that needs a reply-beyond telling you that I’m going back with you no matter what you say.”

She held his gaze, unblinking, until he nodded. “All right,” he said. She nodded but otherwise said nothing. The silence grew long and increasingly uncomfortable, both of them staring at the small fire in the hearth. The thoughts roiled in Karl’s head: all the times he and Varina had been together, the comments she’d made, the glances she’d given him, the occasional touches, the way she’d always deflected questions about any romantic interests she might have had, the way she’d flung herself into the work of the Numetodo.

He should have known. Should have realized. But the silence had already made the questions he should have asked more difficult. He cleared his throat. “If… If you’re going back to Nessantico with me, then perhaps you need to start showing me more of this Westlander way of magic.”

Retreating into work to avoid intimacy: that was what Ana had always done, after all.

She found Sergei’s tale fascinating, though she knew the man well enough to know that there were details he was holding back. She wasn’t bothered by that; she would have done the same in his place. She had done the same, during the long years she had been held in Nessantico. She had liked Archigos Ana, who had treated her fairly and respectfully, and she had been fascinated by Sergei, first by his reputation and his silver nose, then-as she’d come to know him-by his intelligence and his intriguing, dark personality.

“Ca’Rudka is an interesting and skilled man, and I would not be where I am now if it weren’t for him,” Archigos Ana had told her once, a few years into her exile, as Allesandra was blooming into a young woman. “But you can’t entirely trust him. Oh, he’s true to his word, but he gives that word carefully and grudgingly, and will keep to the letter of it and perhaps not the spirit. His true allegiance is to Nessantico, not to any person within it. I don’t think he loves any person, don’t think he ever has. His true love is the city and the Holdings itself. And some of his tastes, what he enjoys doing…” Ana had grimaced at that. “I hope those are only vile tales, and not true.”

She remembered that conversation as she regarded Sergei, now dressed in current Firenzcian fashion and colors. He had come at her invitation to eat lunch in her rooms in Brezno Palais, and if he had been offended by the careful search of his body before he’d been allowed entry, or if he noticed the two armed gardai who watched him closely from their stations in the room, he said nothing. He smiled at her as he might have at any ca’ in Nessantico, and he uttered pleasantries about the presentation and taste of the meal as the servants passed in and out, and he leaned back in his chair with a cup of tea as if he were relaxed and at ease. He related how he’d been imprisoned in the Bastida, and how he’d escaped. She watched his face, watched his hands-none of them revealed any emotion at all; he might have been telling a tale that had happened to some distant relative once upon a time.

“So the Numetodo Ambassador helped you?” Allesandra also remembered Karl ca’Vliomani, who was so obviously smitten with Archigos Ana, although she seemed to treat him as no more than a good friend. Allesandra had not cared much for him, or for the Numetodo, who scorned and mocked her own strong beliefs, who believed in no gods at all. They believed that the world had always existed, that it was impossibly old and that natural processes could explain everything within it-the sheer illogic and arrogance of their philosophy annoyed Allesandra. “That won’t please Archigos Semini… or Archigos Kenne either, I would guess.”

“It was an act of friendship and nothing else.”

“Archigos Ana once told me that every act reflects on the faith of the person who commits it,” Allesandra told him. “Are you a Numetodo now, Sergei?”

He shook his head. “No. I believe in Cenzi as strongly as I ever did.”

She wondered if that statement was simply an artful deflection, but let it go. “Can Kraljiki Audric truly rule the Holdings? Can Archigos Kenne hold the a’teni together as Ana did?”