Her face fell, the flash of disappointment hiding behind a bland look, but not before he’d seen it. “I’m not your enemy, lord.” The deference in her address to him had changed. No longer in his employ but still of lower social status, she called himlordinstead ofmasternow. It didn’t matter to him either way, though a small voice far in the back of his thoughts wondered what his name might sound like on her lips. She went back to finishing her meal, her gaze no longer on him.
“I’m not a nobleman,” he said flatly. “And while you may not consider us enemies, I don’t consider us friends.” He’d take her offer of help and use it in whatever way benefited him and Estred and leave her to whatever fate the world held for her. No debt on his part, he thought. She owed him.
She shrugged. “Somehow I doubt either of us have had much experience with such an attachment.”
With their meal finished and the farmer watching from his doorway in an obvious hint for them to move on, they mounted theirhorses and set off to complete their journey to Domora. Siora held her tongue this time, and it was he who finally broke the silence.
“I will never understand your decision or your reasoning. You say you wanted to help Estred and save me? I didn’t need your help or ask for it. You intruded where you had no business.”
Before when he’d thrown darts at her she’d merely let them bounce off, or worse, stared at him with a pity that made his stomach curdle and his spirit rage. This time her delicate face lost its softness, sharpening into angles and a tight mouth. She still refused to look at him, but her eyes were narrowed to slits as she bore holes into the back of their point guard with her gaze. “You made it my business when you wanted me to coax information out of the old woman, when you bid me watch for observers as you took her from the house and hid her in that filthy abandoned forge, guarded by a man I wouldn’t leave to watch a stray dog for me.”
To his disgust, Gharek felt the red fever of an unexpected shame paint his neck and face. Rarely did he feel such regrets, and when he did, he crushed them under the justification of surviving the empress and her brutal desires or doing whatever was necessary to insure Estred had the best life he could offer. Siora’s rebuttal reminded him sharply that sometimes a justification was merely an excuse.
“I love Estred,” she said in a milder tone. “I think of her all the time.” Once more that hideous pity he so loathed rose in her eyes. “You were so desperate, so certain you’d found a way to make her like other children that you were blinded. You didn’t see Malachus’s face, the look in his eyes. He didn’t want to kill you, but you were forcing him into making that choice by refusing to give up the old woman. You refused to tell him where she was, so I did.”
Nothing slaughtered guilt faster than being pitied as pathetic. “And you destroyed our lives,” he all but snarled at her. “For all we know, the draga was lying. He used Estred against me, and you helped him do it.”
Their rising voices made the point guard turn and glare a warning. Siora called out an apology while Gharek wrestled down the urge to send the man a rude gesture to let him know what he thought of his demand for quiet.
“He wasn’t lying.” Siora picked up where she’d left off, albeit in a near whisper now. “You simply refused to believe your plan hinged on flawed information and failed because of it. I’m sorry draga blood wasn’t what you hoped it would be, but Estred without arms is still beautiful, clever Estred. Estred without her father would be forever changed, and not for the better. Telling Malachus what he wanted to know saved you to live another day for her. I can’t be sorry for that.”
Her preaching to him about Estred’s strengths and his lack of appreciation for them made him want to grind his teeth. “Do you have children?”
“No.” She eyed him warily, waiting for whatever weapon he was about to use to make an appearance.
“I didn’t think so. Gods save us from the ignorant who seek to enlighten the experienced with their sanctimony.”
This time it was she who went rosy from her collarbones to her scalp. “That’s unfair.”
“Spare me the hurt feelings. Estred could give you lessons on the meaning of unfair.”
The quiet this time was a frozen thing between them, and Siora slowed her mount enough so that instead of riding besideGharek she rode just behind him. It frustrated him to no end that they had the two Kraelian soldiers with them like fleas on a dog. He was spoiling for a fight, desperate to lance the poison building inside him since the day the draga came to his house and destroyed his careful, if risky, plans with the help of his daughter’s nursemaid. He wanted to fight it out with her, bellow in her face, and if he was honest, have her shout right back at him. Most of all he wanted her to apologize, to regret what she’d done—not to Estred, but to him. She hadn’t, and she wouldn’t, even if he threatened to end her life here and now. It wasn’t a matter of pride for her in refusing to admit she’d wronged him and Estred. She truly believed she hadn’t.
Submerged under all that fury, a question rose in his mind to make his heart’s rhythmic beat stutter for an instant.Why do you even care?
He buried the thought and worked to cool his fury by turning inward to his recollection of the palace and its many corridors, hidden chambers, and false doors. At the moment, the patriarch of the Goroza family sat on the Kraelian throne, crowned emperor but merely a puppet to the real power behind the throne, General Tovan. Zaredis had a challenge on his hands if he hoped to wrest control of the Empire from Tovan. The two commanded armies of similar strength and number but Tovan had the advantage of already occupying the capital city, protected by its formidable walls as well as the two major rivers that brought in trade from the inland territories.
Gharek had never met Zaredis until now, but he’d crossed paths with Tovan several times. As wily and smart as Zaredis and just as power hungry. Knowing the man, Gharek suspected he’dalready supplanted the old guard with his own, placing them in every strategic part of the city, on the lookout for anything or anyone who might be a threat to his control of the throne. That also meant a palace swarming with new soldiers unfamiliar with Gharek. That was both a good and a bad thing. His chances of being recognized were reduced, but so were his chances of bribing a few of them into turning a blind eye at the right moment. If, however, he could use one of Siora’s ghosts to help him sneak into the chamber housing the Windcry, he wouldn’t have to worry about who to bribe.
He slowed his horse to let Siora’s catch up. She brought her mount almost to a stop, unwilling to narrow the space between them. Gharek sighed. “No more questions over a past event neither of us can change. At least not now. I have other questions for you, about your abilities.”
Her expression went from frozen to curious and she gave in to that curiosity, allowing her horse to amble up next to his. “What do you want to know?”
“You said your father’s spirit has guided you many times, and we all saw how your touch made Zaredis’s brother visible to everyone. How long have you had the talent to speak with the dead?”
“For as long as I can remember.” The echo of memory flitted across her face. “I would tell my mother of my friends that others couldn’t see. She had the talent as well when she was young, but it faded away when she became pregnant with me. Maybe that’s how the gift works. It shifts from one generation to the next.” A tiny frown marred her smooth forehead. “Making Kalun visible to others is part of true shade-speaking and possible if the ghost is willing. He and Zaredis are twins. Kalun’s spirit is more firmlyanchored here than others I think because of that bond. It wasn’t me holding him that saved him from the ghost-eater. It was the general.”
This woman was more than a shade speaker whether she knew it or not, but he kept that to himself.
“Did you see your father die in the Pit?” he asked.
The shadow of melancholy darkened her eyes. “No, thank the gods. I almost died there too a year ago when I was a Flower of Spring. My father’s ghost saved me and others. It helped that the Savatar were laying siege to Kraelag at the same time. I saw the Savatar fire goddess burn the city to ashes.”
His eyebrows rose. She’d revealed that tidbit of information before as if it were as ordinary as saying she participated in the seasonal haying at one of the farmers’ fields. The old capital of Kraelag always hosted the gruesome Rites of Spring with its carnage of slaughtered men, butchered animals, and burned women. Gharek had witnessed it once when he was much younger and well before Estred was born. One of the horrors that kept him up at night, at least until Kraelag had burned to the ground, was the idea of Estred being picked as one of the unfortunate Flowers of Spring. He’d reconsidered his abandonment of faith when word reached Domora that a vengeful Savatar goddess hadn’t just burned the city, she’d reduced it to nothing more than a scorch mark of black glass on the earth. Yet somehow, some way, Siora had survived the rites and the city’s immolation.
“How in the gods’ names did you walk out of either of those events unscathed?”
Her smile this time was for a memory he couldn’t see. “As Isaid, with my father’s help, along with the words of a prostitute’s ghost, and the powers of a fire witch.” She shrugged. “It all sounds ridiculous, I know, but makes for an interesting story.”