So why did I not kill him once I had him captive? I fully intended it at first. But my father's questions echoed those nibbling at my own mind. Why was I able to capture him so easily? Why did he not tweak his scarred hand and drive me mad or set me afire? If he'd made the slightest move, I would have driven my knife home, but he did not. . . and so I could not. In the final event, what stayed my hand was not my gentle father's belief that the villain had truly changed, but the sober consideration that someone needed to find out what he was up to. His death might not halt the evil growing in the north. All right. Let him think he had fooled the kind old man and his foolish daughter. Then watch him. That was my plan.
I gave up my profession as a Builder's assessor and became expert at lurking and skulking, at listening at doors and peering into windows, and at diving into bushes. Holding my tongue when he stumbled on me was much more difficult. Once free of my collar and its consequences, I had reverted to the indiscipline of my childhood.
The tall, skinny fellow at the guesthouse caused my first confusion. In the beginning I guessed that the young man must be the young Lord's manservant, but they seemed so easy together, I decided they must be accomplices. But then one day I found my borrowed horse panicked and wild from an inflammation of his hoof. The skinny young man encountered me in the guesthouse stable and was generous with his help and genuine in his concern and care for the animal. Unless he was the finest actor I'd ever encountered, he didn't even have an idea about who I was or what I'd done to his friend. He must be another innocent dupe. So I decided to warn him. But the moment I broached the subject of his companion, he turned bright red, slammed his mouth shut, and said he didn't talk about his "master" to anyone.
As for my quarry, I came to understand what an Imager must feel when he had inscribed a new object on his mind. Given material of flesh and bone I could have reproduced the slender form with the prideful bearing, the musculature so unexceptional until one witnessed the strength and power in the long legs and arms, the straight brown hair with a touch of red in it, the scarred hands he kept hidden from the day I noticed them. I could have sculpted his every facial feature: the wide-set, shadowed eyes, the narrow face and high cheekbones, the straight nose and slightly jutting chin. I could have stated his weights and measures as if he had been one of my clients' building projects.
It infuriated me that in all my secret watching I could not catch him out of his quiet, serious demeanor—a mask, as surely as the gold and diamonds he had worn in Zhev'Na. Only with his skinny friend and with the Lady did he ever soften his expression, and even then he held his smiles and laughter close-reined as if he were embarrassed to show them. He spent almost every waking hour with the Lady D'Sanya, and I was sure he meant her harm, but the longer I watched the two together, and listened to scraps of their nonsensical conversations, the more confused I became.
"What game does he play?" I threw my ripped and muddy cloak onto the floor of my father's room one afternoon after spending three hours getting wet, scratched, and muddy while watching the two of them gather raspberries in the rain. "He trails after her like a hungry calf; he does her bidding in everything: what he eats and drinks, where he walks, what he reads, what he wears. He cringes in distaste when she drags him to meet her friends, flinches as if he'd been struck when anyone walks up to them at Tymnath market, yet you'd swear he doesn't even know he's doing it. He puts on this never-ending show of mooning adoration, but I can't see who it's for, except the Lady herself, and she . . . Well, I just can't decipher it. He as much as admitted to us that he was planning to deceive her."
My father fluttered the pages of his book with his thumb, then closed it and set it aside. "Did you ever consider, dearest of daughters, that it might be nothing more than what you see? Is it impossible that the young man has fallen in love with the Lady?"
"He is incapable of love. He has no soul. I saw its last remnants burned away. Remember?"
"And what of the Lady? How does she react to this villainous mooncalf?" His eye smiled in the firelight, but I would have none of it. "Is she capable of love?"
"It makes no difference in the world what I think of her, Papa. She must be told who he is."
It's true I didn't care for the Lady. She was beautiful and kind, and the comfort her enchantments had given my father was undeniable, but I thought she talked too much and listened too little, and it seemed to me that every kindness she did was done mostly for herself. She hungered after doing good in the way some crave influence over others or power to feed their talents. And I saw in her the same thing I'd seen in so many when they glimpsed the scars of our slave collars. She wouldn't look us in the eye, and shied away as if we were dirty or diseased.
But I didn't have to like her. She was the rightful Princess of Avonar, and she had been a prisoner, too. I wouldn't wish anyone to fall under the hand of the Lords of Zhev'Na even once, much less a second time.
Papa drew me down onto the couch beside him and pulled my head onto his lap, ruffling my short, ugly hair. "Why this masquerade, Jen? You cannot be your brothers, nor would I ever wish it. You are my beloved daughter, a woman of intelligence and generous heart, and I glorify good Vasrin's creation every day that your path travels alongside my own. But you hide here with rae and chase these ghosts of the past instead of finding friends and living your own joys. Why do you treat yourself so slightingly?"
"I wear men's clothes because they are more comfortable and more practical when I work or travel. I keep my hair short because I don't have time to waste. I don't wear rings and baubles like Lady D'Sanya does at every hour of every day because I don't want to feel like a jeweler's cart at Tymnath market. I am what I am, Papa. Letting my hair grow long or wearing silk gowns or smiling at smarmy men who squirm when they see my neck will not change it. Now stop hiding from my question. Why won't you let me warn the Lady?"
"Because he asked us not."
"How can you—?"
"Because I have faith in the Way. Vasrin's creation is not disordered; we just cannot always discern the Shaper's pattern. There is a reason I was sent to serve in his house. A reason his mother was sent to me there. A reason we found refuge here and crossed his path."
It was strange to hear him speak with such firmness and conviction. Since he'd come to the hospice it had been as if the heart had gone out of him, so that even decisions so small as to what to wear each day had become difficult. But I still didn't share his belief.
"Perhaps the reason is that we can warn our princess of her danger."
He pulled my face around to look at him, and his eyes no longer sparkled, but shone with wonder that stilled my protests. He dropped his voice to a whisper as if someone might overhear. "Jen, I have seen the one he comes here to visit—not the Lady, but the one he names father. The man stays apart as you've noted for yourself. But one night when I could not sleep, I went walking in the gardens. He was doing the same, and we came face to face in the moonlight. Though he turned away quickly, I knew him, daughter. Back when you were a child, I had a close friend, a Healer named Dassine, one of the Preceptors and a man of great power and daring—"
"The man who fostered Prince D'Natheil."
"Yes. Back in those days Dassine asked me to Speak for him, for he was sorely troubled at something he had done. He confided only part of a very great mystery and made me vow on my life never to reveal what he had told me or anything of a man—two men, in fact—that he allowed me to speak with on that day, though I only saw one of them in the flesh. But I tell you, girl, the man I saw in the hospice garden was indeed the man who reigned for four years in Avonar as the Prince D'Natheil. The great Healer. The man who destroyed the Lords."