Brent Weeks - Beyond the Shadows

He froze. She felt it and her eyes flew open. Her pupils were pools of desire. “Please, don’t stop,” she said. “I’ll take care of you. Promise.” She gave the bulge of his trousers a peck.

Her casualness threw Kylar. There was a disconnect here, in what was supposed to be a connection. It wasn’t let’s share this, it was let’s trade. It wasn’t love—it was commerce.

“I’m sorry,” she said, picking up on his confusion. “I was being selfish.” She threw back the blanket and in the illogic of a dream, her ugly nightdress was simply gone. In its place, a fitted red nightgown clung to her curves. She stretched like a cat, displaying herself to marvelous advantage. “You first. It’s all yours.”

“It’s all yours,” not “I’m all yours.” She was offering herself like a sweetmeat. It was nothing to her.

The door opened abruptly and Elene stood there. Her eyes took in Vi, half-naked, draped over Kylar, her hand on his crotch and Kylar stupidly enjoying it.

Kylar scrambled out of bed. “No!” he cried.

“What?” Vi asked. “What are you seeing?”

“Elene! Wait!”

Kylar woke and found himself alone in the safe house.

Dorian was in his chambers with Jenine, poring over maps of the Freeze and the Vürdmeisters’ estimations of the clans’ strength, when the Keeper of the Dead entered. Dorian and Jenine followed the man into one of the cheerier rooms where a body lay wrapped in sheets. Two huge highlanders in nondescript southron clothes but with the bearing of soldiers stood after making their obeisance.

Ashaiah Vul opened the cloth around the corpse’s head. The stench was magnified tenfold. The bald head had been split in half, but not cracked. Nothing had been broken or torn. There was simply a slice missing from his crown to his neck.

In that instant, Dorian knew not only the victim, but also the killer. Only the black ka’kari could make such a cut. Kylar had done this. The rotting sack of meat was Dorian’s father Garoth. His knees felt suddenly weak. Jenine came to stand close beside him, but she didn’t touch him, didn’t take his hand. Any show of comforting him would make him look weak to his men.

“How did you do this?” Dorian asked.

“Your Holiness,” the highlander who had a birthmark over the left half of his face said, “we thought you’d want His Holiness’s body for the pyre. There was a demon in the castle. It did this. The lieutenant went with our ten best men to kill it. He ordered us to take the body, sire. They were supposed to meet us, but they never came.”

“How was your journey? Really.”

The man stared at the floor. “It was real hard, Holiness. We got jumped three times. Sa’kagé twice and once some damn traitors in Quorig’s Pass who went bandit after we lost at Pavvil’s Grove. They thought we were carrying treasure. Red’s not breathing right since I pulled the arrows out.” He nodded at the other highlander, who didn’t have red hair. “We hoped the Vürdmeisters might take a look once you’re finished with us, sire.”

“They weren’t bandits. They were rebels.” Dorian stepped forward and put his hand on the highlander’s head. Red tensed, uncertain. He had blood clots and infections all through his lungs. It was amazing he’d lived as long as he had. “This is beyond the Vürdmeisters,” Dorian said. “What about you?”

“I’m fine, Your Holiness.”

“What happened to your knee?”

The man blanched. “My horse got killed. Fell on it.”

“Come here. Kneel.” The men knelt and Dorian was infuriated at the waste of their bravery. If Dorian weren’t such a skilled Healer, one would die and the other live a cripple, and for what? To deliver bones. These heroes had made great sacrifices for nothing. “You have served with great honor and courage,” Dorian told them. “In the coming days I will reward you appropriately.” He Healed them both, though it was oddly difficult to use his Talent.

There was a low spate of awed cursing from the men as the magic swept them clean. Red coughed once and then inhaled deeply. They looked at Dorian with awe and fear and confusion, as if they couldn’t believe that saving their lives was worth the Godking’s own effort.

Dorian dismissed them and turned back to his father. “You sick bastard, you don’t deserve a pyre. I should—” Dorian broke off, frowning. “Keeper, the Godkings always leave orders that their bodies be burned so that they may not be used for krul, yes?”

“Yes, Your Holiness,” Ashaiah said, but he looked gray.

“How many times have those orders been obeyed?”

“Twice,” Ashaiah whispered.

“You have the bones of every Godking for the last seven centuries except two?” Dorian was incredulous.

“Sixteen of your blood were used to raise arcanghuls and subsequently destroyed. We have the rest. Do you wish me to prepare a substitute corpse for Garoth’s pyre, Your Holiness?”

Garoth Ursuul deserved no less for all the evil he’d done, but refusing his father a decent burial would say more about Dorian than it would about the dead man. “My father was monster enough in life,” Dorian said. “I’ll not make him one in death.”

Only after the little man left did Jenine come hold his hand.

We’re not going back, are we?” Jenine asked, coming before the Godking’s throne. Dorian waved the guards away. He stood and walked to her, taking her hands in his.

“The passes are snowed in,” he said gently.

“I mean we’re not ever going back, are we?”

She said we. It made him tingle, that unconscious admission of unity. Dorian waved a hand at the gold chains of office he wore. “They would kill me for my father’s crimes.”

“Will you let me go?”

“Let you?” That hurt. “You’re not my prisoner, Jenine. You can go whenever you wish.” Jenine. Not Jeni. That formality had stuck. Maybe she feared she had merely traded gaolers. “But I have to tell you, I’ve just received news that Cenaria is under siege. The last warriors to make it through Screaming Winds saw an army surrounding the city.”

“Who?”

“Some Ceuran general named Garuwashi and thousands of sa’ceurai. It may be that come spring—”

“We’ve got to go help them!” Jenine said.

He paused, letting her think. Sometimes she did act sixteen. “I could order my army to attempt the pass,” Dorian said. “If they were lucky and the weather cooperated and the rebel highland tribes didn’t attack while my army was spread out, we might only lose a few thousand. By the time we got there, the siege would probably be finished. And if we arrived in time and seized the city ourselves, do you think Cenaria would welcome us? The Khalidoran saviors? They will not have forgotten what my men did a few months ago. And my soldiers who lose brothers and fathers and sons in the passage, or who lost friends in the Nocta Hemata, will want the spoils of war.

“If I forbade rapine and murder, they might obey me, but it would plant doubts about me. Two hundred of my Vürdmeisters—that’s more than half—have disappeared. I don’t yet control the Godking’s Hands, who are the only people who will tell me where those Vürdmeisters have gone, or who is leading them. Garoth Ursuul had other aethelings I haven’t accounted for. I may be facing civil war in the spring. So if it came to it, who do you think the Vürdmeisters will follow, Khali, who gives them their power, or the once-treasonous aetheling?” The line between her eyebrows was deep with anguish now, helplessness, but Dorian wasn’t finished. “And if they do follow me, and we are successful, what will your people say? They’ve installed a new queen, Terah Graesin.”