In the years before Leesil, all she had was loneliness, which turned to hardness, which turned to cold hatred of anyone superstitious. A mother she'd never known was long dead, and her father had abandoned her to a life among cruel peasants who punished her for being spawned by him. Why would she want to remember such things? Why would she want to look back? There was nothing worth concern in the past.
As she walked quickly toward home, she noticed the sun had dropped a bit lower. She suddenly felt an urgency to get back to Leesil. For all his cryptic words, Welstiel was right about one thing. They had to give up their defensive position and go after their enemies-and they had only a few hours to prepare before sundown.
Sitting on his bed in his room, in complete solitude, Leesil decided that he hated uncertainty more than anything else, perhaps even more than sobriety. At the moment, he was as sober as a virtuous deity, and that condition gave him clarity-another distasteful state of affairs.
Unlike Magiere, he'd neither bathed nor slept and the odors of blood, smoke, and red wine permeated his nostrils. He knew he should go downstairs and wash, but something kept him here in his room.
Brenden had left the tavern for his home, promising to return soon with appropriate weapons. Caleb had taken Rose into their room several hours ago so he could speak with her. He had closed the door and not come out. Chap still lay by Beth-rae's body, which Caleb had carefully cleaned and laid out in the kitchen in case anyone stopped by to pay respects. And Magiere had disappeared sometime during the afternoon.
Leesil was alone and sober. He was not sure which of those conditions he disliked more.
He went over to a small chest Caleb had given him for storage. Since Constable Ellinwood's examination of the murder scene-or lack of it-Leesil had taken a few private moments to remove Ratboy's dagger from under his clothes, clean Chap's blood from the blade, and store it away. He now pulled it from the chest, careful to grab it by the blade and not the handle. Even while cleaning it, he'd been careful not to wash the handle, for that was the one place he could be certain Ratboy had touched. He would have need of any lingering trace of presence the dusty little invader had left behind.
And once again, uncertainty gnawed at him. Dropping to his knees, he pried up two floorboards that he'd loosened the first night they'd arrived. A long, rectangular box lay inside where he'd hidden it. Even touching the container made him shiver with revulsion, but he never once in his life considered throwing it away. He pulled out the box and opened it.
Inside lay weapons and tools of unmatched elven craftsmanship, given to him by his mother on his seventeenth birthday. They were not what any boy would have wanted as a gift. Two stilettos as thin as darning needles rested beneath a garroting wire with narrow metal handles. Alongside them was a curved blade sharp enough to cut bone with minimal effort. Hidden inside the lid behind a folding cover was a set of thin metal picks that in his hands could unlatch any lock. Just inanimate objects, but the sight of them almost drove him down to the wine barrel and his cup.
He closed his eyes and breathed deep, long, and hard for several moments. Drunk, he was no use to Magiere. But the close proximity of these items and his current sobriety allowed in a rush of memories he'd fought for half his life to keep at bay. Eyes still shut, he could feel the pain.
Rich green shades and the enormous trees of his birthplace appeared. So beautiful. Magiere had never traveled north as far as Doyasag, his place of birth, and he'd never bothered describing it to her. Joining the game with her had been the start of his new life, his erasure of past deeds. He'd left it all behind the night they met.
The fresh smells and scenery of his homeland were merely a painted canvas that hid a mass of power-hungry men who struggled for domination. Instead of being ruled by a king, the country was held by a warlord named Darmouth, who saw treason all around nun. Warlords who rule need spies and other hidden servants, and Leesil was fifteen years old and nearly seven years into his training before realizing his father and mother did not simply work for Lord Darmouth. Darmouth owned them.
Leesil's mother's tan skin and golden hair, her exotic elven heritage, made her a useful weapon as she created the illusion of a tall but delicate girl or a rare foreign beauty. His father, for his part, could blend into the shadows as if made of dust in the air, and his passing left no mark and made no sound. They betrayed whomever they were told to betray and killed whomever they were told to assassinate. And they taught Leesil everything they knew. It was the family craft and art, and he was the family's only inheritor.
"We have a tenuous position here, Leesil," his mother whispered to him late in the night. "Necessary, highly skilled-and expendable. If we refuse or hesitate, we will be the next ones to die unexplainably in our sleep or be exposed and executed for our crimes. Do you understand, my son? Always nod and do as you are bid."
No matter what the monetary rewards, Leesil did not possess the temperament required for a life of isolated servitude. Spies and assassins make no friends. His mother must have felt his loneliness. On the day of his fifteenth birth celebration, she presented him with a large, silver-blue puppy that crawled all over him with uncontained wiggles and licked his face. It was the one moment of pure happiness that he could remember.
"This is a special hound," she said, her graceful hands held outward. "His great-grandfather protected my people in frightening times long past. He will watch over you."
That was all she'd ever told him-that he recalled-of Chap or of her homeland, wherever it might have been. And Leesil gave few thoughts to her words at the time. If he hadn't been so happy in that one moment, he might have asked more questions, or even remembered to ask later, but he only cared that some part of his life seemed like other boys'. He had a dog.
When Leesil turned seventeen, his father declared his training finished, or perhaps did so at Lord Darmouth's insistence. His mother presented him with the box filled with all the tools he would need for his duties.
"You are now anmaglahk," she said, her voice quiet and hollow-a statement of fact filled with no pride.
She seldom spoke her native tongue in all of his life that Leesil remembered. Though he'd learned several of the land's dialects, she never taught him the elven language other than a few words he'd picked up on his own. Once, when he tried to beg her to teach him, she turned coldly angry.
"There will never be a need for you to speak it," she said.
And as he left her, quick to exit her chamber, he was uncertain of what he saw. As she sat on the window bench, looking out, her face turned away from him, a shudder ran through her body as if she were sobbing silently.
Looking at the box in his hands she had given him as a birthday present, he did not need to ask what the word she had used meant. He knew what he'd become. The same day, he was ordered to assassinate a baron believed to be plotting against Darmouth. The command came from his father.
That night, Leesil scaled the walls of Baron Progae's fortress, slipped past a dozen guards, and climbed down from the tower into the target's bedroom window. He drove a stiletto into the base of the sleeping man's skull, just as his father had shown him, and then slipped out again. No one found the body until nearly noon the next day. What servant would willingly disturb the late sleep of a nobleman?
Progae's lands were confiscated. His wife and daughters were driven into the street. Leesil sought out information about the family later. One daughter was taken in as the fourth mistress of a loyal baron. The wife and two youngest daughters starved to death as everyone feared assisting them. Leesil never asked about the families of his victims again. He simply slipped through windows, picked what were often considered unpickable locks, carried out his orders, and never looked back.