“You saw her die, Lord Maas,” the priest said. “You saw her fall. She has gone, and you can’t bring her back. Listen to my voice. Listen to me. The fight’s lost. Nothing you can do here matters. You can feel that. That thickness in your throat. You feel it. You know what it means. You cannot win. You cannot win. You cannot win.”
One of the guards moved forward, his blade before him, but his gaze kept cutting back to Feldin. Feldin, whose eyes were caught on nothing. Vincen started to close with the man, but Clara rushed forward, put her hand on his arm, pulled him back.
“You can feel the despair in your belly, can’t you? You feel it,” the priest said. His voice was sorrowful, as if he regretted every word. Each syllable throbbed and echoed within itself. “You feel it in your heart. You’re drowning in it, and it will never end. There is no hope. Not now. Not ever. You cannot win, Lord Maas. You cannot win. There is nothing for you. You’ve lost it all, and you know it.”
“Lord Maas?” his guard said.
The point of Feldin’s blade lowered to the floor like he was drawing a vertical line in the empty air. In the candlelight, it was hard to see, but she thought there were tears on his mask-empty face. The guards looked at each other, confused and unnerved. Feldin dropped his sword to the ground, turned, and walked away down the corridor. Clara trembled. The huge priest put one hand on her shoulder, one on Vincen Coe’s.
“We should leave before he changes his opinion,” the priest said.
They backed down the hallway, leaving a track of blood. The guards took a few uncertain steps toward them, then back toward their retreating lord. They reminded Clara of nothing more than hunting dogs given two conflicting commands. When they reached the double doors, Vincen stumbled. The priest lifted him up, slinging him over a shoulder. It took them minutes to find a door that led out, what seemed half the night to negotiate the darkened gardens and reach the edge of Maas’s estate. A thick hedge marked the border, and the priest knelt by it, rolling Vincen Coe’s body to the ground. There were voices in the night. Shouting and calling. Searching, Clara thought, for them.
“Under here,” he said. “Watch over him. I’ll bring a cart.”
Clara knelt, pushing herself in through the twigs and leaves. The hedge had little space beneath it, but there was some. Vincen Coe dragged himself in after her, digging his elbows into the litter of dead leaves and old dirt. His face was ashen, and everything from his belly down was wet and slick. In the darkness, the blood wasn’t red, but black. She pulled him in close to her as best she could without proper leverage. She had the sudden visceral memory of being thirteen, hiding in her father’s gardens while one of her uncles dashed about pretending he didn’t know where she was. She shook her head. The memory was too innocent for the moment.
Vincen rolled onto his back with a groan.
“How bad is it?” she whispered.
“Unpleasant,” Vincen said.
“If Maas uses his dogs, we’re as good as found.”
Vincen shook his head, the leaves under him making the softest crackling sound.
“By now, I’m sure everything on the estate stinks of me,” he said. “Take them till morning to find which blood’s freshest.”
“Still feeling well enough to joke, I see.”
“Yes, my lady.”
Clara struggled to rise, squinting through the leaves. There was more shouting now. And, unless she was mistaken, the crash of swordplay. She felt sure she heard Jorey’s voice raised in command. In the close confines of their shelter, she felt the huntsman’s fast, shallow breath as much as heard it.
“Be strong a bit longer,” she said. “Just a bit longer.”
When he reached his hand to her, she thought it might be the last gesture of a dying man, but his fingers curled around the back of her neck, drawing her toward him with a definite strength. His lips were rough against hers, surprising and intimate and strong. Clara was shocked, but then gave a little internal shrug. The young man might be dead in the next few minutes, so really where was the harm?
When he released her, his head dropping the inch back to the ground, Clara wiped her mouth with the back of a well-soiled hand. Her lips felt pleasantly bruised, her mind by turns scandalized, flattered, and amused.
“You forget yourself,” she said reprovingly.
“I do, my lady,” the huntsman said. “With you, I often do.”
His eyes fluttered closed. His breath remained painful and quick, and Clara lay in the darkness, willing it to continue until she heard voices she knew as her own household, and started shouting for help.
Abraham, Daniel
The Dragon’s Path
Marcus
Qahuar Em scratched his chin, his head tilted at a considering angle. Marcus kept his expression bland. The table they sat across was polished oak with a burned-in knotwork pattern. It didn’t have the green banker’s felt that Cithrin used. Marcus had expected that it would, but perhaps the customs were different in Lyoneia. The tiny box that sat on the table was black iron with a lid that hinged on the side and the image of a dragon on the front. If there was some significance to the design she had chosen, he didn’t know it.
“I’m sorry,” Qahuar Em said. “This is confusing.”
“Nothing odd about it,” Marcus said. “Banks and merchant houses hold items of interest for each other all the time, I’m told.”
“When they’re closely allied, and one has people in a city where the other doesn’t,” Qahuar said. “Neither of those applies here.”
“Strange circumstances.”
“Which you aren’t going to explain to me.”
“I’m not,” Marcus agreed.
Qahuar reached over and picked up the little box, cupping it easily in one palm. The lid opened with a clank, uncovering a brass key shorter than a finger bone. Marcus scratched his ear and waited for the man to speak.
“Why do I think this is going to be connected to something disagreeable and embarrassing?” Qahuar asked, making it clear from his tone that an answer would be welcome but wasn’t expected.
“I’m authorized to sign a statement that it’s here at the request of Magistra bel Sarcour,” Marcus said. “Press the key into wax and I’ll put my thumb across it so there’s no question we’re talking about the same one. Anything you like.”
The box closed again. The near-scaled fingertips tapped the oak with a sound like the first hard drops of a thunderstorm.
“I’m prepared to take no for an answer,” Marcus said.
“The magistra and I didn’t part on the best of terms,” Qahuar said, pronouncing his words carefully. “She sent you rather than come herself. I find it hard to believe she’s come to trust me.”
“There’s ways you can trust an enemy you can’t always trust a friend. An enemy’s never going to betray your trust.”
“I think she would say I’d betrayed hers, and I can argue she did mine.”
“Proves my point. You two were being friendly back then,” Marcus said with a smile they both knew he didn’t mean.
A soft knock came at the meeting room door. A full Jasuru woman in robes of grey and scarlet nodded to both men.
“The men from the shipyard, sir.”
Qahuar nodded, and the woman retreated, closing the door behind her with a soft click.
“Going well, that?” Marcus asked.
“Well enough. It will take a year at least to have everything in order, but time moves both ways. Actions can have effects long before they themselves happen.”
“Angry letters from the king of Cabral, for example?”
“Sometimes I wish I’d lost,” Qahuar said. And then, “For more reasons than one. Captain, we’re men well acquainted the world. I think we understand each other. Would you answer a question?”
“You won’t mind if I lie?”
“Not at all. You’re a man whose name is known all through the west. At the head of a private army, you could command any price you ask, but you’re working guard captain for a branch bank. You aren’t open to bribery. And-forgive me-you don’t like me very much.”