“I accepted your offering.” She glanced down at the bowl and saw that his blood had vanished. “And so has Bian. You’re free to remain or leave as you choose.”
“Do I have reason to fear you?” he asked.
“You know you don’t.”
After a brief pause, he nodded once. “Then I’ll stay.”
“As you wish.”
Still, he didn’t move. “Mother Prioress,” he said at last, facing her once again. “There is someone for whom I’d like to give blood. Will the god accept two offerings from one man?”
“Of course. Come forward, the knife and bowl await.”
The man returned to the altar, pushing up his sleeve again.
Yoli began to repeat the invocation, then paused. “What is this person’s name?”
“Is that necessary?”
“It’s customary, when offering blood for someone.”
He lowered his arm. “Isn’t there any other way?”
“I suppose if you have this person foremost in your heart and your mind, Bian will know.”
“Thank you, Mother Prioress. That would be… easier.”
She finished the invocation and cut him a second time. Afterward, when she had wrapped the wound, and swirled the blood in the bowl, she looked the man in the eye as best she could.
“You’ve been kind to me,” he said. “Perhaps kinder than I deserve. I won’t forget it.”
“I’ve done no more or less than the god would expect of those who serve him.”
He dropped his gaze. “Of course.”
“If you return here next year, you’ll probably find someone else wearing the robe.”
He looked up again. “Are you ill, Mother Prioress?”
“No, just old.”
“I see. And why are you telling me this?”
She shrugged. “I just thought you should know that there will be a new prior or prioress. I don’t know yet who I’ll choose, but whoever it is will be far younger than I.”
He grinned, and after a moment nodded as well.
“You’re an extraordinary woman,” he said. “I wish I could have met you when you were younger.”
The prioress couldn’t remember the last time a man had made her blush, but she knew that she had missed feeling this way.
“When I was younger,” she told him, “I wasn’t nearly this wise.”
“I’m not sure I believe that.” He paused, his smile slowly fading. “I’m grateful for the warning, Mother Prioress. I’ll keep it in mind next year at this time.”
“Good. In the meantime, I hope that you find some comfort in the shrine.”
“As do I.”
He bowed to her a second time, then left the altar.
Yoli watched him walk off, and despite what she knew of him, she truly wished him peace on this night. She felt certain, however, that there was nowhere he could go to escape the wrath of his dead. She sensed that he realized this as well, that the most he could hope for was the comfort of knowing that the prioress who took his blood was too old and too blind to see his face.
Walking to the farthest corner of the shrine, Cadel couldn’t keep himself from shaking his head. For the second time in recent days, he had revealed far more of himself than he had intended, to a virtual stranger. The duke was dead, of course, and he didn’t believe that the prioress posed any threat, but he had been far too careless. He might have expected Jedrek to act this way, but he demanded more of himself.
He stopped in midstride.
Jedrek. Could that be the problem? For the first time in nearly two decades he was alone, wandering the land and killing without a partner. Could it be that he was lonely? He nearly laughed aloud at the very idea of it. It didn’t help that he now found himself trapped in a dangerous alliance with the Qirsi, but had Jed still been with him, the white-hairs wouldn’t have mattered, at least not as much.
“I need a new partner,” he said, his words echoing off the stone walls.
He glanced around to see if anyone had heard him, then remembered that it didn’t matter. Everywhere he looked, men and women spoke as if to themselves, confronting their dead, sobbing like children, cowering like beaten curs. Even if they had taken notice of him, they wouldn’t have thought it odd to see him speaking to himself.
He hurried on. It wouldn’t be long before his own dead found him and began their torment.
As if prompted by the thought, a wraith appeared before him, indistinct at first, but white and luminous as if it were made of starlight. Slowly the figure took form, like the lead soldier of some great army emerging from a mist. It was a man, tall and lean with white hair and dark eyes. Cadel would have recognized him immediately even without the odd tilt of his head and the dark thin bruise encircling his neck. It had only been three days.
“You know me,” the duke of Bistari said, his voice as bleak and hard as the moors during the snows.
Cadel nodded.
“Do you fear me?”
“No,” he said evenly.
The duke gave a terrible grin. “Of course not. An assassin learns to live with his wraiths. Isn’t that right?”
Cadel shrugged. “What choice do we have?”
Another figure emerged from the shadows, a knife wound in his chest. The marquess of Tantreve. Cadel had killed him a bit more than a year ago, near his castle in northern Aneira.
“What about him?” the duke asked.
“No, not him either.”
Others stepped forward: Fihb of Thorald, his throat slit and his ring finger cut off; Hanan of Jetaya, unmarked save for the contorted expression the poison left on his features; Cyro of Yserne, the angle of his head and the mark on his neck so similar to those of the duke of Bistari that they might have been the twin sons of some cruel demon from the Underrealm. Soon there were dozens of them. Cadel couldn’t even recall all of their names, though he remembered each kill as clearly as he did the garroting of Chago.
Yet, he felt no dread. He could hear worshipers wailing all around him, begging for forgiveness, or at least mercy. He had heard stories of mercenaries clawing out their eyes on the Night of the Dead, so desperate were they to rid themselves of their wraiths. Several years ago he had been in the Sanctuary of Bian in Macharzo when a man used the prior’s blade to take his own life. Maybe the others knew something he didn’t. Maybe he should have been scared. But he had been paid to kill these men, and while they might not have deserved death, they would have been more than happy to pay him to do the same to their enemies had they thought of it in time.
He spent the Night of the Dead in Bian’s Sanctuary each year not out of fear of his wraiths, but rather out of respect for the god who sent them to him. If the Deceiver could bend the rules of life and death in this way, didn’t he deserve such homage? That was why Cadel came.
At least until this year. Because unlike all the years before, there now was one whom he did not wish to meet, one whose face he couldn’t bear to see again. He had known it would be like this almost from the moment he saw her. It had been the middle of the planting season, a warm clear night in Kentigern, but even then he had been prescient enough to know how difficult this night would be because of her. If only he had been hired to kill her father, the fat, foul-tempered duke, or, better still, the spoiled boy to whom she had been betrothed. But Filib of Thorald had already been killed, and Cadel’s Qirsi employers worried that the death of another heir to the Eibitharian throne would raise suspicions. They insisted that it be the girl.
He had heard tales of her beauty and her kindness, but only that night on the tor, when he met her in the duke’s great hall, did he truly appreciate how little justice these tales did Lady Brienne of Kentigern.
She had worn a dazzling gown of deepest sapphire that made the yellow ringlets of hair spilling down her back appear to have been spun from purest gold. Though Cadel posed that night as a common servant working under Kentigern’s cellarmaster, the duke’s daughter favored him with a smile so warm and genuine that he would have liked to run from the castle rather than kill her, though it meant leaving behind all the riches promised to him by the Qirsi. But it was far too late for that. The white-hairs had paid them a great deal, and Jedrek was already spending the gold they were still owed. And then there was all the Qirsi seemed to know about Cadel’s past-his family name, the disgrace that had driven him from his father’s court. What choice did he really have?