She spat in his face. “I would’ve done better to sell myself at the yuan-ti market. Whore’s business is more honest than this.”
She rose and moved away from him. There was a bloody handprint on her silk shirt.
“Kestrel,” she said. “Will you stay? You’ll be safe here.”
Her daughter shook her head. “I killed your grandchildren. I can’t face you, my sister, our friends, our servants. I know you would be kind, Mother. But I can’t.”
“I can take her somewhere,” said Lakini. “Somewhere she can heal.”
Vorsha nodded, tears streaking down her face.
“I came to give him over to the goddess for punishment,” said Lakini. “But perhaps you will say he doesn’t deserve that kind of mercy.”
The small woman prodded Sanwar with the toe of her elaborately embroidered slipper. Casually, she turned and strode over to the row of weapons displayed on the wall. She ignored the greatswords and the thick-hafted spears that would be an effort for a half-orc to wield, passing her hand over the long knives and the daggers. She let her fingers finally touch a blade small enough to slip in one’s sleeve, an assassin’s weapon with a wickedly sharp, thin blade the length of her palm.
She pried it from its mount and turned back to Lakini. Sanwar saw the weapon and grunted at her feet.
Her face was wet with tears, but her back was as straight as a birch tree. She was Vorsha Beguine, mistress of the House now.
“I think you can leave any matter of mercy to me, deva,” she said. It was a dismissal. Lakini only inclined her head in response. It seemed that Ciari Beguine was in some ways very much her mother’s daughter.
Vorsha watched as Lakini and Kestrel left the room.
“Do you want to see your sister?” asked Lakini.
Kestrel shook her head. “No. She would try to be kind, if she knew, but she would still hate me.”
When they reached the dusty street outside the compound, Lakini thought she heard a cry from inside the dwelling. She saw Kestrel’s back stiffen, but neither of them mentioned it.
“Is there really somewhere you can take me?” asked Kestrel.
“More like to someone,” said Lakini.
Chapter Sixteen
SANCTUARY OF SHADRUN-OF-THE-SNOWS
1600 DR-THE YEAR OF UNSEEN ENEMIES
Bithesi examined the cut in the dog’s side. The big mongrel cur lay on its side, panting heavily and whimpering slightly when Bithesi’s careful fingers probed the edges of the wound. It kept as still as it could, however, and never snapped at her, even when she dipped a rough rag in a bucket of warm water and washed away the clotted blood.
She muttered an apology, and the dog’s tail thumped lightly in the straw that mounded the floor of the stable. Then its gaze went over her shoulder, and its eyes narrowed. Its body tensed, and it lifted its head. Its lips drew back, exposing impressive white canines, and a liquid growl rumbled up its throat.
Bithesi laid her hand, damp with water, on the animal’s neck.
“Hush, Torq,” she said. “They’re friends.”
The dog quieted and laid its head back down, but it kept a distrustful gaze on the two figures in the doorway.
Bithesi didn’t turn around, keeping her attention on the wound in Torq’s flank.
“Come in, Lakini,” she said. “And your companion as well. It’s chilly outside.”
It was. The warmth of the autumn day had fled with the setting sun, and the mountain air now hinted of the bone-cold winter to come. The barn, occupied by a dozen-odd horses as well as their keeper, the dog Torq, and the usual contingent of cats, was warm, with the pleasant earthy smell of a well-kept farmyard.
“Bithesi,” said Lakini.
“You never said good-bye,” said Bithesi, breaking in on her.
“I don’t-” Lakini began.
“Good-bye,” Bithesi said. “It’s a thing friends say to each other when they part. A grace note, in the midst of our small business, our comings and goings, our mortal squalor. A simple thing to say. You’re not mortal, but you might try to remember.”
Lakini had no answer.
Bithesi glanced up at Kestrel, and her gaze lingered. The wounds on her face were healing, and the scars were forming pink on her hands, but her cheekbones stood out and her eyes glittered as if fevered.
“Would you like to help?” Bithesi spoke to Kestrel as she would to a small child.
Kestrel reached out a trembling hand to the dog. She paused, looking searchingly at Bithesi, her hand suspended in the air.
She touched the dog’s side. Torq jerked in response, then quieted as she gently stroked his short, coarse fur.
Bithesi waited until the dog’s breathing grew regular before raising the threaded needle with her right hand and pinching together the sides of the cut with her left. She muttered something that sounded like a short prayer or invocation before she bent to her work, stitching the animal’s skin back together with tiny knots, delicate as the embroidery on a lady’s court dress.
Torq’s eyes jerked open and he whimpered, but Kestrel placed a firm hand on his neck and kept stroking his side, and he didn’t stir.
“Good-bye, Bithesi, my friend,” said Lakini.
She would not say Ashonithi. She knew she would never see Bithesi again.
Lakini waited a long time at the barn entrance, feeling the cold air on her back and the barn warmth on her face. From one of the corners where the wall met the ceiling, a nesting dove cooed. Bithesi focused on the dog’s wound as if nothing else existed. Kestrel glanced up at the deva once, a serious look that recalled the grave manner of her daughter.
“Good-bye, Lakini,” said Bithesi, not looking at her.
Kestrel turned toward her, still keeping her hands on the dog’s side. She gave a small, tight smile.
Lakini smiled back and slipped away.
Standing in the mud outside the barn, Lakini became aware that she held within herself the small hope of staying at Shadrun, of finding for herself the idea that the mortal races called “home.” But with the realization came the knowledge that hope lay stillborn inside her. However many years she had spent at the sanctuary, even if she stayed here a century more, she would always be apart. The place would be familiar, even comfortable to her. But she would never cherish it in her heart, or long for it when she was away, as a crofter did his hovel or Bithesi her stables.
Home … Lusk had tried to find it with his adopted human family, until the chance violence that always threatened to engulf the mortal destroyed them and made him the twisted creature he had become-and was doomed to be forever. Kestrel had found it, and it had been torn from her. Bithesi wove her home around the animals she tended, finding a warm place inside the meditative task of caring for them.
The moments she had spent in Bithesi’s company were her home, Lakini realized, and the many years she had spent with Lusk. But Lusk’s madness had taken one home away from her, and Bithesi’s mortality the other.
Something stung her eye, and she halted, blinking. The sting became a mild burn, and the burn gathered into liquid within her eye, and as she shut it briefly, a drop of moisture fell to the dust at her feet. The burning was gone.
Lakini touched her cheek in wonder, feeling one more drop there. A tear. She had wept. Was that one of the consequences of denying her reincarnation? Would she become more mortal?
Was it a punishment or a reward?
Fandour was puzzled. Two of his vectors had winked out, one soon after the other, just at the point of seizing the Rhythanko.
But now the Rhythanko was close-closer than it had been in millennia, although it was … changed, somehow. It had taken refuge in a different form.