"I understand Wulfgar's motives," Tristan gasped. "But why are you doing this? Why do you serve…such a monster?"
"For the money," she answered. "I need it, you see, to complete a lifelong mission of my own. We all have our own hopes, our own needs."
"Don't you care about anything other than yourself?" he asked. "You work for Wulfgar. You must have met him. Couldn't you sense the rage and hatred within him? Is that who you want to rule Eutracia?"
Trying his best to remain conscious, Tristan looked up into her eyes.
"Don't you care about your loved ones?" he pressed. "Do you really want to see them and your entire nation suffer forever beneath the yoke of his oppression? His will be a darkness that will know no equal. Your actions here this night will forever be a part of that."
Something in her face changed. For a moment Tristan thought she looked conflicted. Then her face darkened again and she stepped closer.
"Enough of this," she said. "It is time. Drop your sword."
Tristan shook his head. "At least let me die with my dreggan in my hand."
Satine thought for a moment. "I will grant that request because I understand it so well. If our positions were reversed, I would ask it of you. Besides, I doubt that you can even lift it anymore."
She placed one hand atop Tristan's head and pushed it down to expose his neck.
"No!" he growled. "If I must die, I want to see it coming!"
"Very well," she answered. She kept her hand in place to steady his head.
Satine lifted her sword. The edge of her blade glinted in the moonlight.
At the apex of her swing, her eyes caught his. All of the contradictory thoughts that had been collecting within her suddenly collided. For a split second, the Gray Fox hesitated.
Sensing his chance, Tristan reached up with his left arm and grabbed the wrist of the hand that supported his head. He pulled her down to him and raised the dreggan with his other arm. As she understood what was happening, Satine brought down her sword, but the die had already been cast.
Tristan rolled to one side and narrowly avoided the edge of her blade. Using the momentum of her swing against her, he pulled her down toward him and shoved the point of the dreggan into her chest. With his final bit of strength, he pushed the hidden button on the sword's hilt.
The dreggan's blade shot forward, impaling her and exiting through her back. A look of surprise crossed her face. She collapsed, her body sliding down the blade of Tristan's sword as she fell on him.
For the briefest of moments, Tristan thought he heard the flurry of Minion wings.
Then everything went black.
CHAPTER LXXIII
Jessamay writhed in pain
Faegan strengthened the spell that would help her cope with her suffering. She's being so brave, he thought. Then again, she always was.
Faegan finally stopped applying the craft and he sat back in his chair. He caused yet another drop of blood to rise from the open wound in Jessamay's arm and he guided it to land upon a parchment on a nearby table. It twisted itself into the sorceress' blood signature, then slowly dried up, and died.
Smiling, he looked back at Jessamay. He used a damp cloth to gently wipe the perspiration from her forehead.
"Are you all right?" he asked. She gave him a brave smile, but he could see that she was near the end of her strength for the day.
"The pain can be intense," she said. "This brings back such awful memories. At first I wasn't sure whether I could go through it again. But at least this time it's you, rather than Failee, trying to alter my blood signature. I feel safe with you."
"Do you need more help with the pain?" Faegan asked.
She shook her head. "I don't think we should risk it. We cannot be sure that it won't interfere with what we're trying to accomplish. We must succeed no matter the cost, and I fear we are running out of time."
"Very well," Faegan answered. "Just try to rest while I check the latest result."
Wheeling his chair over to the table, he positioned the signature scope over Jessamay's fresh blood signature and examined it. He was not pleased with what he saw. He sighed and looked over at her.
"Another failure, I'm afraid," he said glumly.
"I understand," Jessamay said. "We'll just have to keep trying."
Faegan wheeled himself back over to Jessamay, raised one arm, and removed the wizard's warp that enveloped her. Grateful to be free, Jessamay stood on unsteady legs. Faegan hadn't wanted to use a warp on her, but it had seemed necessary to keep her from moving in response to the pain as he applied the various spells.
She shuffled stiffly to the table and poured herself a glass of wine. As Faegan watched her drink he saw that her robe was soaked through with sweat, and he winced. She sat down heavily beside him, and they delved into their work once more.
Tristan, Wigg, and Celeste had been gone for four days. Since then, Faegan and Jessamay had been prisoners of their own research in one of the many Redoubt laboratories. Piles of reference books sat on several nearby tables, along with various parchments, charts of esoteric symbols, jars of dried herbs, and bottles of precious oils. A network of tubing carried colored, bubbling fluids from beaker to beaker.
Failee's red leather grimoire lay open on the table between Faegan and Jessamay. The Tome of the Paragon had been placed upon a pedestal in one corner of the room, the Scroll of the Vigors upon another. Sighing, the crippled wizard pulled the grimoire toward him to read more of Failee's elegant Old Eutracian script.
When Faegan and his group had returned from the archery shop, the acolytes had informed them that Sister Vivian had been found dead in her quarters. She had bled out, just as Bratach had done.
An examination of her body had convinced Faegan and Jessamay that Wulfgar had placed the same death Forestallment into Vivian's blood that Bratach's had carried. As for Bratach, his identity had been confirmed by documents gleaned from the Hall of Blood Records.
Their assumption was that Vivian's death Forestallment had been placed into her blood without her knowledge and that Bratach had been able to activate it at will-even from so far away as the archery shop. Faegan felt certain that when the consul activated his own Forestallment, he had activated Vivian's as well.
Clever, Faegan thought, as he turned over another page of the grimoire. Imagine the ability to kill one's enemy with a single thought and from such a distance. Wulfgar has been one step ahead of us-right from the moment we thought we defeated him that night on the palace roof. How little did we realize…
Faegan and Jessamay's research centered upon reestablishing the proper lean of Jessamay's blood signature. They did this not purely for Jessamay's benefit-although under normal circumstances that alone would have been reason enough. Rather, they both thought that if they could accomplish this feat, it might help them in their fight against Wulfgar. If any of the Enseterat's traitorous consuls could be taken alive, the Conclave could perhaps change their signatures and return them to the Vigors.
But so far there had been no progress, and the stress that their experimentation placed upon Jessamay tormented Faegan greatly.
All they had ascertained so far was that Failee had concocted a formula that could change the lean of a blood signature. The grimoire clearly outlined the formula, which combined both the craft and the science of herbmastery. But even Failee had been able only to force Jessamay's signature to morph from right-leaning to neutral. The grimoire gave no evidence that she had accomplished the other half of her work-completing the shift all of the way to the left.
Faegan and Jessamay's goal was to change the lean back to the right-returning Jessamay's blood signature to its original state. But the research meant reversing the late First Mistress' work step by agonizing step.
Faegan shook his head. Aside from Failee's initial experiments, this work was entirely without precedent in the craft, he thought. It made him wonder whether this dark area of study was really the kind of thing into which the Ones Who Came Before wanted craft-users to delve. It was a true wizard's conundrum. If they succeeded, the implications of the murky ethics of their accomplishment would be staggering. If they failed, they might never save the world from the Vagaries. They knew one thing: They had to forge ahead, regardless.