“Griff,” I said, “I’ll wait-”
— outside to guard the door, to find a way out of this mazy mansion once the killing was done. He gave me no chance to say so.
“Come with me,” he said. To me, but looking at Cae all the while.
The door, shut by the servant, opened again. Griff lifted Cae to his shoulder. Her little head lolled, her thumb fell from her mouth. She whimpered faintly, then stilled.
Griff stepped before me into the chamber, a counting room where the largest piece of furniture was a broad desk upon which ink wells gleamed like jewels and quills marched in perfect alignment, the merchant’s little soldiers. No sign of the merchant himself did we see, but his double-eagle, those two heads in opposition, glared at us from every panel, from the hanging behind his desk, even from the thick blue and gold carpet underfoot. Griff’s shoulders twitched, just a little, to see those sigils, but he never lost his stride. Boots tracking mud across the richly woven carpet, he made a little thing of the distance between him and the desk.
I shut the door, paneled oak and heavy, firmly behind us and stood with my back to it. Cradled in Griff’s arms lay Cae, unseen beneath the green cloak, hidden. Cradled in mine lay Reaper, not hidden. The tapestry behind the desk stirred. A hand pushed it aside, and Egil Adare stepped into his counting room.
He looked more like a vulture than an eagle, that merchant, his hooked nose a beak, his ropy neck long, and his hooded eyes restless and watching everything, judging whether he saw predator or prey. I could see that he had been a big man, that his hands, now gnarled and swollen in the joints of every finger, had once been broad and strong. Where I come from they’d say those hands had been hammer-fisted.
Griff kept still as a breathless night, head up, eyes cold. Thus he stood, straight and proud before the man who had murdered his kin. In him his ghosts howled, keening their death agonies, then falling-suddenly! — silent. So it had been in every nightmare that owned him, waking and sleeping. Now he stood before the shaper of those nightmares, waiting to be recognized. He wanted to see shock in those muddy, brown eyes, surprise and then fear. The old man gave him nothing.
“I am Egil Adare,” the merchant said, shifting his glance so he looked at neither Griff or me, but at some point in the distance between us. He put a hand beneath his desk, sliding open a drawer. A small leather pouch sat in there, fat and full. We were meant to see it, as beggars are meant to see a hand reach into a pocket, withdrawing the few coppers that will send them on their way. “I am told you have news of my daughter.”
Griff’s heart must have pounded like drums in him, but no one could know it by looking at him. He stepped forward, letting his cloak fall open. Cae never moved, not when the green wool, sliding, brushed her pale cheek, not when Griff set her gently upon the broad desk and placed her exactly between Egil and himself. She whimpered a little then, moving her hands, turning her head. She was looking for Griff, the source of all the warmth and care she’d known these two days past, but he wasn’t paying any attention to her now.
“Here is the news,” he said to Egil Adare, his voice rough and hard. “Your daughter is dead. This,” he indicated Cae, “this is all that is left of her.”
The merchant’s face went ashen. He stepped to the desk, eyes on the child lying so still and silent.
In the instant, Griff’s sword flashed out. “Hold,” he said. “Ash Guth, you hold right there.”
Ash Guth, Griff said, speaking the name he’d known so long ago. Like a man turned to stone, the merchant held. His thin lips parted. In his eyes sprang a light, recognition. Soft, unbelieving, he said, “You? Is it you?” His eyes narrowed, and he drew himself up, all his thin bones. “How did you find me? I thought you were-”
Griff’s laughter rang like blades, one against another. “You thought I was dead? Did you think you were the only one to survive the Dark Queen’s assault on the High Clerist’s Tower? Well, you see you’re not the only one, and if you have forgotten me, I haven’t forgotten you.” He lifted his sword so the light coming in through the window glinted all along the edges. “Or the debt you owe me.”
The old man shuddered, understanding at once what I had yet a moment to grasp. “You-you killed my Olwynn?” He looked at me, then swiftly back to Griff. “You killed her?”
Griff smiled, as a wolf smiles. He said neither yes or no, but he knew which conclusion the old man would draw.
Tears sprang in the merchant’s eyes. “Olwynn,” he whispered, imagining every horror. “Oh, my child. . ”
Upon the desk Cae stirred again. Her lips parted, trembling with hunger and great weariness. She saw Griff standing above her, and she knew him. She lifted her hand, just a little, and touched the edge of the blade. Blood sprang, one drop, from her finger. In Griff’s eyes a wan light gleamed, pale like the phosphorous you see over swamps where dead things lie rotting.
My blood ran cold in me as I understood how deep was the vengeance he planned, a deeper one than I’d reckoned on. He was going to make Egil pay his debt with more than his own death. Your father’s precious treasure, so he’d named Olwynn and her child. In bloody coin would he extract his debt, doing to Egil what had been done to him, for if others had killed Olwynn before he could, still he had her child. This dark a deed even he hadn’t done in all his long years of killing. Still, it wasn’t my vengeance, and not my place to trim it. I do what I’m paid to do.
Outside in the hallway voices murmured, one servant to another. I tightened my grip on Reaper’s haft. Any moment a servant could knock at the door, the old man could cry out.
“Griff, if you’re going to do this-”
He turned, snarling, “Shut up!”
Just as he moved, the merchant reached for the child on the desk. He stopped still in his tracks as the tip of Griff’s sword touched his breast, then traveled higher to his throat, the drop of Cae’s blood glittering on the steel like a tiny ruby. Swiftly, the tip dropped again, resting at the infant’s throat.
“You killed.my mother,” Griff said to Ash Guth who’d renamed himself Egil Adare. He leaped, like a panther pouncing, and snatched the old man by the shirtfront, dragging him around to the front of the desk. “Her name was Murran. You killed my sister, and her name was Bezel. My father’s name was Calan, and you killed him even as he kneeled to beg for the life of his infant son. That infant’s name was Jareth, and he screamed all the killings through until at last-” his eyes never leaving the old man’s. Griff lifted his sword, the tip dancing over Cae’s throat “-until at last there was only silence.”
Egil Adare fell to his knees, cowering. “My grandchild,” he sobbed. He reached a trembling hand to Griff, then let it fall. “Oh, Olwynn’s daughter. .”
Cae whimpered, and then she wailed, crying with more strength than I thought she had in her hungry little body. Her eyes, blue as springtime skies, turned to Griff, widening as she recognized him.
Him, though, he stood there, his steel like silver in the failing light of the day. He looked down at the child, she his weapon of vengeance, her death to be put against those of his kin in a dark healing. He smiled like rictus.
“Please,” the old man sobbed, as surely Calan Rees must once have begged. Tears poured down, and it looked as if his face were melting. “Please, oh, gods, please don’t kill the child. .” He bent down, he did, and pressed his forehead to Griff’s dusty boots, wetting them with weeping. “My grandchild. Oh, my grandchild. .”
“My brother,” Griff snarled. Rage ran like fire now burning everywhere through him. “My mother, and my sister, and my father-my soul! You stole them all from me, you bastard!”