Beyond the flaring of the fierce light in his eyes, Zaredis’s expression remained controlled, his voice even quieter. Every hair on Gharek’s nape rose. Zaredis tilted his head to the side as if considering the puzzle known as the cat’s-paw. “Yet it didn’t stop her from torturing and killing my brother Kalun when he tried to help her.” Those dark eyes narrowed. “You played a principal role in his death.”
Gharek’s instincts for survival didn’t fail him now, and he stayed quiet as well while Zaredis slowly circled him and Siora before returning to stand in front of them.
“You aren’t quite what I imagined,” he finally proclaimed after a silence. “Dalvila’s cat’s-paw had a reputation throughout all the Empire. He was feared. He was hated and, in some quarters,admired. I expected someone... I don’t know.” Zaredis waved his hand as if to capture the right word. “Bigger, maybe. Child of an ogre woman with daggers for teeth and the snout of a boar.” Gharek’s eyebrows climbed at the description. “Someone who turned every head when they walked into a room and made women and men faint with terror.” Zaredis’s burgeoning smile lacked any humor. “But that would make you memorable, wouldn’t it? And a good assassin never wishes to be memorable.”
Had he not served as the dagger in the dark for the most lethal, unpredictable woman in the world, Gharek might have floundered with how to respond, but years spent running the gauntlet of verbal traps that defined conversations with Dalvila had left him well-prepared for how to respond to Zaredis. “Your captain recognized me.”
Zaredis’s grim smile turned even grimmer. “Enough people with clear memory and a wish for your death were happy to describe your appearance to an artist with a flair for drawing faces, including those with or without beards. I honestly never expected to find you, though I’ve a bounty on your head to make a man and two generations after him wealthy. That Captain Horta crossed your path in the town and recognized you was luck or the beneficence of the gods.”
The gods and their beneficence could kindly go fuck themselves, Gharek thought sourly, uncaring that some outraged deity might hear his private blasphemy and strike him down with a perfectly aimed lightning bolt. He held his tongue and waited for Zaredis to confirm what Gharek already knew. His stomach dropped through the floor when Zaredis finally ended the waiting.
His smile that was more a grimace disappeared, and his nostrils flared. Gharek stiffened even more when Zaredis’s hand dropped to the hilt of one of the daggers sheathed at his belt. “My brother,” he said, biting off each word with his teeth, “was one of three physicians summoned to the royal palace to try and save the empress from dying of a poisoned wound.”
A hum started in Gharek’s ears, high-pitched and panicked. Blood froze in his veins and images of his sweet Estred at every year since he’d found her spooled across his vision, blocking out Zaredis’s cold visage.
Three physicians. The best the Empire had to offer brought to the summer palace with orders to save Herself. They’d succeeded, but not in the way Dalvila had hoped, and she’d punished them in a manner that left every witness to their deaths vomiting or fainting in the corridors once they were allowed to flee the throne room. Gharek, who’d thought himself numb to the sight of the worst sort of violence, had retched so hard he saw black spots dance in front of his eyes. He’d gone home and drank himself into a stupor, revisited, after a long absence, by a guilt that warped and wefted his insides into a tapestry of misery. He’d been the one sent to fetch Zaredis’s brother to the palace.
“Kalun was a good man, a skilled physician.” Zaredis continued to bite through every word. “He didn’t deserve to die, nor did he deserve the death Dalvila meted out to him. He’s beyond my reach now, just like the bloodthirsty bitch who ruled us all.” He closed the distance between them until no more than a cloth’s thickness separated him and Gharek. The fires of pure hatred had turned his eyes into hot coals. “But you aren’t.”
Time and silence froze on a sword point as Gharek stared at Zaredis and saw the promise of his own slow death there. Both were shattered when the woman he’d forgotten beside him spoke in a gentle voice.
“You’re wrong, general,” Siora said. “Your brother stands right beside you.”
CHAPTER FOUR
If silence could be woven like thread, then the silence that descended in the tent after Siora’s statement would have made a blanket thick enough to insulate against the cold of a blizzard. Her heart thumped hard against her ribs as every eye turned toward her. Even the ghost standing next to the general had leveled a stunned gaze at her. It seemed it was as easy to surprise the dead as it was the living. If the mirror image of the living general was a true indicator, this ghost was Kalun, Zaredis’s unfortunate brother.
The spirit vanished only to abruptly appear in front of her. Were she not used to this behavior in ghosts, she might have jumped, startled. But ghosts had appeared before her since childhood, been playmates to her and companions on occasion. They’d sought her out to tell their story, relay a message, or simply to stand there and weep over some tragedy that might have happened long before Siora was even born. A few were hostile, and these Siora still feared. Most though deserved her pity, not her fear, including this one.
She offered him a small smile, knowing how odd, not to mention rude, it looked to everyone else in the room, who only saw her ignore the general and stare off into space, wearing a mysterious smile.
You can see me, Kalun said, his ethereal voice as surprised as his expression.
I can, she replied with the same thought conversation she always used to converse with the dead, and which had earned her more than a few puzzled or disapproving looks from others over the years when she’d seemed to drift into a dazed state. People weren’t particularly tolerant of those they thought of as odd.
Zaredis, nearly incandescent with fury, flung a hand at her and said in a guttural voice, “Get her out of here!”
A trio of soldiers lunged for her, their grip on her arms rough and bruising as they dragged her toward the tent’s opening. Gharek took a step in her direction only to be shoved back. His eyes were dark mirrors reflecting back the same shock the other occupants in the tent displayed.
Siora struggled in her captors’ hold. “Wait, please! The cold. Have you not noticed it?” The space encompassing her, the general, and Gharek had grown bone-chilling, so much so that their breath was visible as if they stood outside on a midwinter morning instead of inside a sweltering tent during the height of summer. “It’s because he’s here. He could be mistaken for you except for a mark along his jaw, paler than the rest of his skin.”
At her words, Kalun reached up to touch the sickle moon shape of a thickened scar that curved along his jaw to end just below his cheek.A gift from my brother during a brawl over a girl, he said, his face wreathed in a wide smile.
The guards paused in dragging her, unsure what to do. They let her go at another gesture from Zaredis, who’d forgotten Gharek and turned all of his wrathful attention on her. “How do you know Kalun?”
“I don’t. I’ve never met him before now. His spirit lingers here, drawn to you.” She glanced at Kalun, who nodded.
“For gods’ sake, Siora. Shut up if you want to live.” Gharek’s voice rasped harsh in the pulsing quiet.
The command earned him a sharp blow from Zaredis, and he stumbled. When he straightened, blood ran in a bright ribbon from the corner of his mouth and his cheek beneath the beard was red. He glared at both Siora and Zaredis but this time kept his tongue behind his teeth.
Zaredis ignored him after that, as if he were no more than a pesky fly he’d swatted out of the way. Siora backed into one of her guards when Zaredis approached her. “A shade speaker,” he said, not bothering to hide his contempt. “Why am I not surprised that Dalvila’s cat’s-paw keeps company with such worms?”
His opinion only mattered to her in the context that he believed her to be authentic. If she could convince him of that, she might find a way to help Gharek, or at least buy him time to find a way to save himself. And this time it wouldn’t be a betrayal. She held out a hand to Kalun.Go ahead, she said.Take my hand.
Siora rarely offered such a gesture to spirits and never in front of witnesses. The one time she had, it hadn’t ended well. The ghost’s living relatives were so terrified of the vision before them, Siora had to flee a mob of villagers armed with scythes and shovels. It was a huge risk to do it again. The tent was crowded with people more than willing to carve out her heart if the general commanded it, and Zaredis himself looked ready to give such an order or do it himself.
Once more for Estred, she thought. And for Gharek too.