“And yet you’ve clearly got an issue with my having it.”
Gunnett looked up from her pieces then, her black eyes glittering as she regarded Sabira for long moments. Weighing her words, Sabira thought.
Finally, the dwarf woman shrugged.
“Some might question whether your actions were truly worthy of the honor,” she said at last, moving her own siege engine opposite Sabira’s without taking her eyes off the board. Sabira recognized Sor’s Sacrifice, an intricate series of moves that would end in Gunnett losing her queen in order to take Sabira’s tower. It was a combination seldom used in play—the gain was not typically thought to be worth the loss. Wherever Gunnett had learned it, it hadn’t been from Aggar, because it wasn’t a move Sabira or Ned would have taught him.
“Hmm,” Sabira replied noncommittally as she considered her options. She’d obviously undervalued Gunnett’s skills as a Conqueror player. She wondered what else about the woman she might have overlooked.
Sor’s Sacrifice didn’t actually force a move. It only worked because it required a greater sacrifice to escape it, which most players were unwilling to make. In this case, Sabira would have to offer her up her siege engine, leaving her priest momentarily unprotected. In other words, bait.
She made the move casually, as if it were of no consequence.
“Most people would think ridding the Holds of Nightshard’s evil was worth the gift of a shard axe.”
“Evil,” Gunnett repeated, laughing. “Such a simplistic concept, really. People are rarely ever ‘good’ or ‘evil,’ despite what the bards and the priests tell us. Most are simply self-absorbed, and whether their actions fall into one category or the other depends entirely on who benefits from them, don’t you think?” She swooped her tower in, taking Sabira’s priest with a quick smile.
Sabira just stared, unable to believe what she was hearing.
“I’m sorry. Are you actually saying you don’t think Nightshard was evil? He killed more than a dozen people, including two children, whom he made claw out and eat their own eyes. And you don’t think that qualifies as evil?”
“That’s not what I’m saying at all, Marshal,” Gunnett replied calmly. “I just think it would be interesting, from an academic standpoint, to understand why Nightshard did what he did. If we’d bothered to find that out, perhaps we could have prevented this latest series of tragic deaths, and Aggar wouldn’t be in the situation he’s in now. And you wouldn’t have had to come back here.” The dwarf woman smiled again, this time sympathetically. “Orin told me you left a lot of bad memories in the Holds.”
Sabira almost snorted at that. Memories were the one thing she hadn’t been able to leave behind, and the one thing she most wished she could.
Turning her attention back to the game, Sabira pretended to ponder for a moment, then moved her remaining priest into a cluster of footmen.
“I don’t care why he did it. He killed my partner. He deserved what he got, and worse.” Much, much worse, if only Sabira could have given it to him.
“Did he, though?” Gunnett asked, moving one of her footmen to intercept the priest, exposing her archer in the process. “Kill your partner, I mean?”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s just that I’ve heard different versions of the story. For instance, I’ve heard that you let your partner die so that you could keep the whole fee for saving Aggar for yourself, probably because you needed to pay off some gambling debt. I’ve also heard that you knew there was a position in the Marshals opening up, and you knew Leoned was far more likely to get promoted than you were, so you used the cave-in as a way to get rid of your competition and cover your tracks. I’m not saying I believe those versions, mind you,” Gunnett added, “but it does go to prove my point—who the villain is depends largely on who’s telling the story.…”
But Sabira had stopped listening. As if Gunnett’s words had opened a portal in time, she found herself back in Korran’s Maw, her vision filled with images of that terrible day. A bruised and bloody Leoned suspended upside-down over one of the cave’s many magma pools, his head close enough to the molten rock that she feared his hair might catch fire at any moment. Aggar, who’d followed her instead of waiting for help from Frostmantle, coming across the cavern and heading straight for a trap that would surely kill him. And Nightshard, twin rings sparkling in the fiery light as he taunted her with the knowledge that she couldn’t possibly save them both.
“No,” Sabira said vehemently, shaking the memories away, denying them as she denied Gunnett’s preposterous theories. “That murderous bastard was the only villain, believe me. All the rest of us were just his victims.”
Then she slid her forgotten paladin out from his place in the back rank and captured Gunnett’s archer, the only piece protecting the black king.
“That’s mate,” she said, holding out her hand to the stunned dwarf. “Good game.”
As Gunnett slowly took her hand, still staring in disbelief at the board, the office door opened and Elix hurried in, a grave look on his face.
“Lady Mountainheart, Sabira. I need you to come with me. Now.”
Sabira stood quickly, responding to the urgency in his tone as much as to his words. She slapped her urgrosh into its harness and strode toward the door.
“What is it? What’s happened?” she asked. Had Mountainheart taken a turn for the worse? Olladra forbid, had her trick with the ironspice actually killed him?
“I just received word from Krona Peak. They’ve moved Aggar’s trial up. It starts tomorrow.”
It was raining when they exited the building, the sky cold and gray, and Sabira realized she’d left her cloak back in Elix’s office. There’d be no going back for it; Elix was in too much of a hurry. He strode briskly through the wet streets, avoiding cloaked pedestrians and puddles and explaining as they went.
“The Deneith airship isn’t ready to go—some sort of issue with a control fin, they tell me. But I was able to get you seats on an airship that’s leaving right now—they’re holding the gangplank for you. It’s a passenger run, since the lightning rail’s out of service, so it will be crowded, but it should get you to Krona Peak by daybreak. We’ll cut through here.”
Elix turned a corner and led them into a wide courtyard filled with carts and vendors who hid beneath drenched awnings and hastily erected tarps, unwilling to close up shop even in this foul weather. There were more cloaked figures here, darting from cart to cart, likely hapless servants who needed to procure some vital bauble for their lords and ladies, rain or no rain.
This was not an official marketplace but rather one of those that tended to spring up in any available space whenever shipments came in from Irontown and the Mror Holds, where prospectors, artisans, and hunters could peddle wares the dwarves either wouldn’t take or didn’t want. The items—usually animal hides or horns, chunks of raw ore and uncut gems, or jewelry and weapons made from them—were deemed inferior by the dwarves, though Sabira had often seen them fetch high prices in Khorvaire’s larger, more cosmopolitan cities. She had herself purchased trinkets at similar markets that she later sold in Aundair or Breland for twice what she had paid.
That had been a long time ago, though. She’d managed to avoid Karrnath completely for going on three years, and hadn’t set foot in Vulyar for more than seven.
But if the market was a testament to all the things she’d lost when she’d run from this place so many years ago, it was also a reminder that there were some things she’d simply let go, and not all of those had been bad.
She glanced over at Elix, with the rain sparkling in his dark hair like diamonds and his dragonmark curling across his jaw like a lover’s caress.