DAVID COE: Seeds of Betrayal

At least until this year. Because unlike all the years before, there now was one whom he did not wish to meet, one whose face he couldn’t bear to see again. He had known it would be like this almost from the moment he saw her. It had been the middle of the planting season, a warm clear night in Kentigern, but even then he had been prescient enough to know how difficult this night would be because of her. If only he had been hired to kill her father, the fat, foul-tempered duke, or, better still, the spoiled boy to whom she had been betrothed. But Filib of Thorald had already been killed, and Cadel’s Qirsi employers worried that the death of another heir to the Eibitharian throne would raise suspicions. They insisted that it be the girl.

He had heard tales of her beauty and her kindness, but only that night on the tor, when he met her in the duke’s great hall, did he truly appreciate how little justice these tales did Lady Brienne of Kentigern.

She had worn a dazzling gown of deepest sapphire that made the yellow ringlets of hair spilling down her back appear to have been spun from purest gold. Though Cadel posed that night as a common servant working under Kentigern’s cellarmaster, the duke’s daughter favored him with a smile so warm and genuine that he would have liked to run from the castle rather than kill her, though it meant leaving behind all the riches promised to him by the Qirsi. But it was far too late for that. The white-hairs had paid them a great deal, and Jedrek was already spending the gold they were still owed. And then there was all the Qirsi seemed to know about Cadel’s past-his family name, the disgrace that had driven him from his father’s court. What choice did he really have?

“None of the dead you see here can touch your heart,” the duke of Bistan said, gesturing with a glowing hand at the other wraiths who stood with him. “Is that what you want us to believe?”

“It’s the truth,” Cadel said, “whether you wish to believe it or not.”

A small smile touched the dead man’s lips, so that with his head cocked to the side, he looked almost like a mischievous child.

“There is one though, isn’t there? One that you fear?”

Cadel shuddered, as if the air had suddenly turned colder. He wanted to deny it, though it wouldn’t have done him any good. The dead could sense the truth.

“Yes. There’s one.”

The duke turned to look behind him, and as he did, the mass of luminous figures parted, allowing one last wraith to step forward.

He had known that she would come, of course-why should she have spared him this?-but still Cadel was unprepared for what he saw.

She wore the sapphire gown, though it was unbuttoned to her waist, as it had been that night. Her skin glowed like Panya, the white moon, and her face was as lovely as he remembered, save for the smudge of blood on her cheek. But Cadel’s eyes kept falling to her bared breasts and stomach, which were caked with dried blood and scarred with ugly knife wounds.

Lord Tavis’s dagger still jutted from the center of her chest, its hilt aimed accusingly at the assassin’s heart.

He had wanted to make her murder appear to be a crime born of passion and drunken lust. He had succeeded all too well.

“You stare as if you don’t recognize your own handiwork,” Brienne said, her voice shockingly cold. “Don’t let my lord’s dagger fool you. It was your hand guided the blade.”

Cadel started to say something, then shook his head.

“Do you deny it?” she asked, her voice rising, like the keening of a storm wind.

He looked up, and met her gaze. Her grey eyes blazed like Qirsi fire and tears ran down her face like drops of dew touched by sunlight.

“ Do you ?” she demanded again.

“No.” It came out as a whisper, barely discernible over the sobs of the other worshipers.

“Did I deserve to die like this?” She gestured at her wounds and the blood that covered her. “Did I wrong you in some way?”

“No, my lady.”

“Was I a tyrant? Is the world a better place without me?”

Cadel actually managed a smile. “Surely not.”

“Then why?” the wraith asked. “Why did you do this to me?”

“I was paid, just as I was paid to kill most of those standing with you.”

“You murder for money.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He blinked. “What?”

“Why would any person choose such a profession?”

Cadel stared at her a moment. With all that had happened, and the way she glared at him now, he found it easy to forget that Brienne was just a girl when she died. When he killed her.

“It pays handsomely, my lady,” he explained, as if she were simple.

“Of course it does,” she said. “I’m not asking why you do it now. I want to know how you started down this path. Certainly you didn’t go to your Determining hoping that the stone would show you as a hired blade.”

He felt his mouth twitch. Perhaps she wasn’t such a child after all.

“It started when he killed me,” came a voice from among the other wraiths.

Another man came forward. A boy actually; the young court lad who had been his rival for Venya’s love. His name was Eben. Cadel killed him with a blow to the head. The assassin didn’t need to see the matted blood behind the wraith’s ear to remind him of that. He could still feel his fingers gripping the rock. He could even hear the sound the stone made against the boy’s skull.

“Is it true?” Brienne asked, as Eben halted beside her. “Was he the first?”

“Yes, he was.”

“Did you kill him for gold as well?”

Cadel shook his head, a thin smile springing to his lips. “No, my lady. I killed him for love. Or at least what I thought at the time was love.”

“We were suitors for the same girl,” Eben said icily. “He surprised me on the farming lane west of Castle Nistaad, a lonely, desolate stretch of road. Few venture there, and I thought I was alone. I never even saw him.”

Brienne narrowed her glowing eyes. “And you enjoyed it? You decided to make it your life’s work?”

It was all I could do , he wanted to say. The only skill I had. I had fled my father’s court rather than face judgment for my crime. I needed gold to make my way in the world. What else was there other than filling ? But he had never told any of this to another soul, and he wasn’t about to now, not even to this wraith standing before him, so deserving of answers.

“Why does this matter?” Cadel said instead, looking away. “What possible reason-?”

“I want to understand!” the wraith said, her voice rising like a gale. “I’m dead, and I want to know why.”

“You’re dead because someone hired me to kill you. Isn’t that enough?”

“No, it’s not! Who was it? Whose gold bought my blood?”

Cadel faltered. “Why would you want to know that? ”

“I already told you. I want to understand why you did this to me.”

“But surely-”

“Answer me!” the wraith said, the words seeming to echo off the walls and ceiling of the shrine, though among the living only Cadel could hear her.

“No,” he said. His hands were trembling abruptly, and he thrust them into his pockets. “I won’t tell you. Someone gave me gold and I killed you. That’s all you need to know.”

“Did they want a war? Is that why they wanted you to do it? So that Tavis’s father and my father would go to war?”

“I don’t really know. Perhaps.”

“Were they Qirsi?”

Cadel felt his face color. She was a wraith, a servant of Bian. Yes, she was crying, and her face was lovely, almost flawless. But this was no girl standing before him. He had to force himself to remember that.

“I won’t tell you any more.”