“Wait a moment,” he cautioned. “I don’t think you want to be in the middle of this.”
Sabira paused, annoyed. The barrister was the one who was getting in the middle of something he didn’t fully understand, and she was about to tell him so in the most scathing terms possible when the volume of noise at the center of the crowd suddenly rose dramatically.
“… a priestess is dead, at her hand! If the mere suspicion of that crime is enough to imprison my son for days on end, how can you possibly justify allowing her to go free? When we all saw her loose the bolt that killed Dorro?” Kiruk’s voice had taken on a thunderous timbre as he railed against Tiadanna. “A bolt, I might add, that was meant for my son! And for what? Because her lover is dead? Is that why you’re so eager to see my son hang for his murder? To mollify her? Or to divert suspicion from yourself? Because if anyone in this room had a reason for wanting that priest dead, it was you!”
Stunned silence followed the Tordannon chief’s outburst, and Sabira turned to look at Rockfist.
“I thought Deepshaft was her cousin …?” she whispered, leaning close so her words wouldn’t carry.
“By marriage,” the barrister murmured back. “They’d been having an affair for the past year. At least according to all that ‘local gossip’ you hold in such disdain,” he added with a self-satisfied smile.
Sabira probably deserved that. She might even owe him an apology, but it would have to wait. She’d get no better opening to speak to Torlan than this.
“Your pardon, Councilor Mroranon,” she said loudly into the silence, pushing her way past a gaggle of guards. The other Council members parted to let her through—no doubt unwilling to risk being in close proximity when Torlan unleashed his wrath on her and the target she so conveniently presented. Except that the arbiter wasn’t going to want her head on a pike after he heard what she had to say. Quite the contrary.
“I realize the timing is inopportune, but I’ve just received word from Sentinel Marshal headquarters in Vulyar. We have another suspect for the murders, and you’ll be relieved to know it isn’t you.”
Torlan’s face was a mask of fury and for a moment Sabira thought she might have overplayed her hand. The arbiter looked angry enough to strangle someone with his bare hands, and her death might well have fewer repercussions for him than Kiruk’s. Then Sabira’s words seemed to register, and his anger gradually cooled, though it never quite left the corners of his eyes or the curve of his mouth. There would be bad blood between Mroranon and Tordannon from this day forward, Sabira knew, but she couldn’t save the whole clan. She wasn’t even sure she could save Aggar, though the information Tilde had uncovered should help with that.
The arbiter put his arm around his wife, who was still bleeding from the knife wound in her hand. Sabira did her best to focus on Torlan and ignore the look of pure hatred on the dwarf woman’s face. When neither of the Mroranons spoke, Sabira took that as tacit permission to continue.
“These murders bear the same signature as those committed by Nightshard seven years ago. Since there was never any indication back then that the assassin had a partner, then it was logical to assume that whoever was doing the killing this time around must have had intimate knowledge of those previous murders, since the exact manner of death was never released to the chroniclers—only the investigators and members of the victims’ families had that information. That yielded a very small suspect pool, which the Inquisitives assigned to the case were further able to whittle down when it became clear that only one person in that group had had contact with all the victims: Aggar Tordannon. But the only reason he ever came under suspicion in the first place was because we all assumed Nightshard had been working alone. We now have reason to believe that assumption was wrong.”
She had the entire Council’s attention now. Though the assassinations had ultimately been limited to only the southern holds, they all remembered the fear they had felt during Nightshard’s reign of terror, wondering if their clan, their children, would be next.
Surprisingly, it was a calm Kiruk who answered her.
“You said the Marshals have another suspect, aside from my son? Who is it?”
“We don’t have a name yet, but we believe he is hiding out in the vicinity of Frostmantle.” She had nothing on which to base that assumption, save for the fact that it was where the first and most anomalous of this new rash of murders had occurred. But she’d been involved in a handful of serial murderer cases before, and often the first victim yielded the most clues to the killer’s identity. And, unfounded or not, it was the best lead she had at the moment. She had to give them something besides a dragonshard imbedded in a yrthak’s skull. “That’s why I need to get there as soon as possible and track him down. If he is the real killer, who’s to say he’ll be satisfied with stopping at thirteen victims?”
“But wasn’t your whole defense going to be predicated on the argument that Aggar was framed?” It was Anneka this time; Torlan remained inexplicably silent. “If Nightshard did have an accomplice, why would he suddenly be more interested in setting up Tordannon than in simply finishing the job he and Nightshard started?”
“To have you do his dirty work for him,” Sabira answered, warming to her theory. “Aggar was the victim that got away. If Nightshard’s accomplice has been obsessing over that failure all this time, he wouldn’t just want to kill Aggar, he’d want to see him humiliated first. What better way than to have him tried by this court and found guilty? Maybe even declared clanless?” Sabira didn’t really think Kiruk would go that far of his own accord, but there was more than his son’s reputation at stake here. If he had to choose between protecting his beloved son and protecting the honor of his clan, what choice would he really have? Much as in her own House, the whole mattered more than any of its individual parts. Better to declare Aggar clanless than to have him take the entire clan down with him.
“But framing Aggar for thirteen murders … that seems like a lot of work just to sully the Tordannon name,” Anneka said dubiously. “Why not just kill him and be done with it?”
“I doubt he intended to have to kill so many others; it just took that long—and the murder of a priest—before Aggar was apprehended. As for why—I think you’re underestimating the allure of inflicting so much damage on the Tordannons; a murder conviction for Aggar would cripple them. And, frankly, it’s no further than, say, Londurak would go to bring Laranak down a notch.” Before either of those two clan leaders could protest, Sabira moved on.
“It’s possible Aggar isn’t even the ultimate target of all these machinations. We thought, back then, that Nightshard was choosing his victims not for themselves but to get at their parents and their families. What better way to destroy Kiruk than to kill his only child and weaken his clan, with one terrible blow?”
“So now we’re to believe these murders are actually some sort of elaborate attack against Kiruk?” Hilgg Narathun asked, her tone skeptical and impatient. “Make up your mind, Marshal.”
“Why now?” Torlan asked, finally breaking his silence. “Why wait so long to exact revenge, if that’s what this is?”
“I don’t know,” Sabira admitted. “Maybe he was there in the cave with Nightshard, and somehow escaped, albeit injured? Perhaps it’s taken him this long to regroup? Or maybe there’s something we don’t yet know about that happened to trigger this rampage. I’m not sure it matters at this point. What does matter is finding him. That’s why I need you to delay this trial—if you still insist on going through with it—for at least another week or two. To give me time to go to Tordannonhold and track him down.”