“I was surprised to receive your summons,” Harp continued.
“Yes, it is a matter of some delicacy,” the elf began.
Harp snorted. “Are you sure I’m the one you want? Delicacy isn’t my strength.”
Avalor studied him. “I believe I can trust you in the matter. Let me begin by saying that we will pay you two thousand gold. Half of it on acceptance of the job, and the rest when you return with the information I need.”
Harp frowned. “That’s a lot of coin. You already had my attention.”
“Yes, but I need your secrecy. You’re a man of strong loyalties. The general nature of the task may be shared with your crew. But I’ll ask you to keep the specifics to yourself, at least in the early stages of the venture.”
“You want me to keep information from my crew?” Harp asked.
“At first. At least until you’re away from our shores. If you don’t feel like you can do that, we can end our conversation right now.”
“It’s not my way to keep secrets from my men,” Harp said slowly. He knew that the coin from the advance itself would let them pay their debts and keep the ship. And without the ship, there wouldn’t be any crew anyway.
“I know,” Avalor said sympathetically. “But I need to make certain this information does not find the wrong ears.”
“All right. But if there comes a time that I have to tell them for their safety, I will.”
“Agreed.”
“So what’s the job?”
“Liel was murdered. I want you to find evidence of the crime and … bring her home.”
Avalor’s words hit Harp like a fist to his throat. He found himself coughing uncontrollably, as if he had swallowed water wrong. When he finally got control of himself, he looked at Avalor, whose angular face betrayed a hint of anger and sadness.
“I’m sorry to be so blunt. There’s no way to soften a truth this hard.”
Harp nodded, still trying to master his shock at the news that Liel was dead.
“I apologize if I upset you. I don’t know the extent of your relationship-”
“I haven’t seen her in years,” Harp interrupted.
“But I know she cared for you deeply and had many regrets after you went to prison. It was at her request that I sought you out in the Vankila Slab. I would have on my own accord, had I known the situation. But, of course, I did not. Until she told me.”
“Why me?” Harp managed to say. “Why of all people do you want me to look for her?”
“Isn’t that is obvious?” Avalor said. “You of all people will take the matter to heart.”
“Who do you think murdered her?”
Avalor reached for the nearby staff, his hands gripping the wood until his knuckles were white. “Do you even have to ask?”
“Why would Cardew want his own wife dead?”
“He’s quite involved in the Branch of Linden. They’re backing him for a powerful position on the Privy Council, but having an elvish wife is an embarrassment.”
“How could you let her marry him?”
Avalor laughed. “Let? She knew I didn’t want her to marry him. But she thought their marriage would help the tensions between elves and humans in Tethyr.”
“She did?” Harp asked. Liel never told him that.
“I told her it wouldn’t make any difference, that she shouldn’t sacrifice her happiness for such an unlikely possibility. It became such a raw issue between us, that we stopped talking about Cardew.”
“Still, why kill her? There are other ways to end a marriage,” Harp pointed out.
“Not if you want to marry a queen.”
“Cardew wants to marry Queen Anais?” Harp said doubtfully. The queen already had a consort, who was rumored to be perfectly weak-willed and unambitious enough for her tastes.
“Her niece, Harp. He wants to marry Princess Ysabel.”
Maybe if Harp had been sober, the wheels of his mind would have spun a little faster. As it was, he didn’t comprehend what Avalor was implying.
“Ysabel is just a girl …”
“Impressionable and easily manipulated.”
“What about the queen we already have?”
“As you may or may not know, there have been plots to remove her since The Children’s Massacre. With coordination and cleverness on the part of her masters, Ysabel could become queen of the realm.”
“Which would mean that Cardew …”
“Would be royal consort and have the ear of the queen.”
At that thought, Harp automatically reached for a drink that wasn’t there. “What do you have in mind?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
29 Kythorn, the Year of the Ageless One
(1479 DR)
Chult
We have to stop him,” Boult said when Harp had finished. “I knew Ysabel. She was a sweet child. She used to follow us around the castle yards, pretending she was an elf. Just a tiny little thing with a huge gap-toothed smile.”
“She’s not a child anymore,” Harp said.
“Her brother and mother were murdered on the same night. Granted, her mother was as bad as the daughter of Asmodeus himself.”
“So you’re with me?” Harp said. “We’ll do it for Princess Ysabel?”
Boult shot him a look. “We’ll do it for what Cardew did to you.”
Despite himself, Harp winced. “And to you.”
After a quarter hour of walking along the path through the thicket, the ground opened up, and they found themselves in a stand of towering trees. The ground was nearly devoid of plants between the massive buttress roots, and sunlight filtered down in streams through the ceiling of leaves above them. There was an unnatural silence in the grove, as if the wildlife saw them approach and found places to hide.
“The thickets must have been the outer band of the jungle,” Harp said looking up at the towering treetops hundreds of feet above them. “Have you ever seen trees that tall?”
“Captain?” Verran asked, walking up behind him. “The body’s over there.”
“Could it be an animal carcass?”
“Possibly,” Verran said, but he didn’t sound very convinced. “I didn’t look too closely.”
“Everyone have a look around,” Harp said. “Keep an eye out for more … plant monsters.”
Verran led him to a spot beside a buttress root. When Harp reached it, he could see that the root was partially hollow and someone was tucked inside.
“Can you get Boult?” Harp asked Verran. The boy nodded and headed across the grove.
When Harp bent down, he could see that something had been gnawing on the body and most of the face was gone. And there was something odd about the remains. It was as if sections of the corpse had disintegrated down to the bones while other parts were untouched by decay. A netting of skin bound the corpse into human form, and as soon as those skin-strands broke, the body would fall into an unrecognizable heap. Harp had seen many bodies in various states of decay and dismemberment, but nothing quite as disconcerting as the one before him.
He could see strands of reddish hair tucked under a green hood and a gold necklace hanging around the neck. He heard Boult come up behind him and pulled back so the dwarf could see inside the hollow.
“Let me,” Boult said gruffly. Harp wandered a few steps away and stared up at the towering trees as the light glittered through the spaces between the rustling leaves. He could feel every muscle in his chest as he took each breath. He’d wondered about Liel so often in the past ten years that it seemed impossible that the Chultan jungle would be the place he found her, curled up in a hollow like a frightened animal.
Suddenly he didn’t know if he could take it. He wasn’t a sentimental man. Those who were close to him called him cold. And he wouldn’t have admitted it to another soul, not to Boult or Kitto, who were the only family he had. But the first time he Liel on the deck of the Marderward was frozen in his memory like a painter’s still-life. If it was possible to love someone from the first moment you saw them, Harp had loved Liel starting then.