Mortals lose everything, eventually. The goddess’s thoughts sounded resigned. Love, even that of a mortal for a mortal, is a spark in the world’s darkness, and a precious thing. Most love, but all die.
She claims unfinished business.
A sharp, silver thought; a bright light penetrated Lakini’s blindness, and she both cringed away from it and craved more. This light was hard and white, like the surface of the full moon on a clear night.
It continued. I may have unfinished business with her.
Lakini was deeply weary. She couldn’t fight them all. Shall I die then, Moonmistress?
She felt a cool touch on her face.
As the smith died at your hands? The thought was like the tinkle of silver chimes in a jeweler’s window.
What could I do? He had become a beast.
You didn’t give him his chance.
What chance?
All creatures of the night are mine, to some degree. You didn’t give him his chance to give himself over to my power, to control the beast inside.
Many are not able, and become dangerous.
But some can. There is hope for any infected with the curse of lycanthropy, so long as they seek help before they are sunk too deep in their bestial nature. I might have saved Jonhan Smith. You were too arrogant to let him try.
I thought it was for the best.
Even as your apostate companion, Lusk, thinks what he does is for the best.
It was Jonhan Smith, shaking with sweat and fever, his mangled arm scarring over unnaturally, his face changing to a beast’s.
It was Jonhan Smith, looking up in mute appeal as he drew her dagger, kneeled, stroked his hair, and slid it into his brain.
It was Jonhan Smith, who could have been saved.
So I have committed murder, thought Lakini.
She was as guilty as Lusk, slaughtering the innocent.
No, returned the silver voice. You did what you thought best. Now you know better.
Lakini felt them all withdraw from her, the silver presence and the red-haired goddess, and the coiling horror, the imperious one. The first presence, still patient, remained.
If you refuse this, you deny your entire nature. Are you prepared for the consequences?
No, I am not prepared. But I will face them.
A pause, then came the following words:
Because you understand this, it will be permitted. It will be harder than you know, Lakini, for so you will remain.
Your path will be difficult.
She felt a touch between her eyes, and everything exploded into white light.
She kneeled, alone in the clearing. Her shoulder and her ribs throbbed, but when she tentatively touched the wound, she found it had stopped bleeding, and the edges were already beginning to scar. The night was graying as dawn approached. From the shoulder to the hip, her tunic was stiff with dried blood.
The bracelet was still wound tight around her wrist, and she took a moment to contemplate it. The links were narrow, long, and flat, and embedded along the bracelet’s length were three dull red stones-rubies, perhaps, or more likely garnets.
Now she remembered. It was the bracelet Kestrel had given her in the Hold. Take it away, she had said. Don’t let them get it.
And then Lusk had come, demanding the bracelet.
She remembered tucking it inside her clothing, more to keep Kestrel quiet than for any other reason. How had it come to be around her arm? She had a vague memory of movement against her skin, of it questing like a snake, sometime before she had refused her reincarnation and faced the gods’ judgment. She must have been hallucinating.
But, as she watched, the bracelet flexed again and undid itself, wind by wind. It was very like a snake as it crawled up her arm, the small links tickling her skin.
She felt a wave of inquiry from it, not enough to distinguish words or even feelings, but certainly a sense that it possessed some sort of intelligence and wondered where it was. It was almost the feeling she had at Shadrun-of-the-Snows, that of some invisible presence quietly manipulating everyone it could.
When it got to her shoulder and started to wind around her neck, she tensed. She considered pulling it off and flinging it away, but it had had all night to strangle her, so she let it be. And, indeed, it simply looped around her neck, invisible beneath the neck of her shirt, and lay still.
She could find out more about the artifacts of Jadaren Hold later. Now she needed to concentrate on healing herself. The chill air was growing warmer, and the dull gray light was brightening as the sun rose.
Dawn was coming, and she was Dawnbringer.
As such rapid healings were, it was painful. Lakini used all her powers of meditation to find her still center of grace, and drew the lambent, pulsing Power she found there throughout her body. Now and then she felt a gentle touch to her Powers, a gift, she decided, from the sister goddesses, and the strength and duration of the healing increased.
Split flesh rejoined. Shattered ribs came back together. Broken vessels were whole.
She would live on as Lakini. But her face, although she didn’t know it yet, would never be the same.
JADAREN HOLD
1600 DR-THE YEAR OF UNSEEN ENEMIES
Lusk paced, uncharacteristically impatient. The pain across his ribs where Lakini had slashed at him stung, and the bruised place on his shoulder ached where she had struck him with her fist closed around the hilt of her dagger.
He glanced at the Hold. The late-afternoon light was casting purple shadows against the surface.
Why had she done that? She could have stabbed him rather than punching him. Instead, she turned the point of the knife away at the last instant, giving him the advantage, letting him strike back in return.
He wasn’t grateful. She should have struck swift and true, the deva way.
More and more he suspected that his path, twisted though it seemed, was the right one, and that Lakini, companion of his many lives and dagger-mate, was straying away from the gods’ plan for them. He had tried to convince her to listen to the Voice, the Voice of the sanctuary that had set him and so many others on the course to meet their destiny. Instead, she had rejected its guidance and left the sanctuary-left him-to wander among the useless people of the world. She was convinced to return and join him in his quest to bring an artifact, a coil of metal stolen many years ago, back to the sanctuary where it belonged. But when he had revealed himself to her, his true nature, the things he had done to make the world safer, purer, she had rejected him.
She had called him an abomination.
She had forced him to fight her.
She would pay for that, if she was still alive.
Kaarl vor Beguine stood a little way apart, watching the pacing deva with a wary eye. The Beguine guards were stationed at intervals around the Hold, their bows at the ready for any of the besieged that might try to escape. The great doors that led into the caverns at the base of the monolith had been barricaded, and they had already learned that any attempt to break them down would be met by a volley of arrows.
Kaarl had vowed to rescue Kestrel and her family, and it broke his heart that they had failed to get them safely out. He knew Arna was dead, killed by some Jadaren treachery, and had heard terrible rumors about the children.
It went against his every instinct to fight beside the terrible creatures he’d seen preying on mortal men last night. But his guards were too few. As he’d told Sanwar, they were no army. Without the help of the bandits and ghouls, they’d stand no chance against the Jadaren forces. Someone within the tunneled monolith had taken charge last night, organized the defenders, and managed to push them out and keep them out until dawn, until the bulk of the bandits, unable to tolerate the sun, had slunk away.