“Only in the direst need, but I’ve seen any number of people in various states of devastation. It goes along with the calling.”
Was he devastated? He supposed he was. The way he felt certainly went along with pictures of crumbling buildings and blackened fields, all that had been familiar suddenly gone.
“Stupid of me, really,” Zelen said. “It isn’t as though we ever got on.”
“It strikes me that there’s a fair amount of difference,” said Branwyn, “but I lack expertise.” She paused again and tilted her head in a way that Zelen had only seen glimpses of before: listening to her sword, he realized, and now not bothering to conceal it from him. “Yathana says she could talk to you because you’re both devoted to Letar, by the way. Neither of us are sure if that’s helpful information, but there it is.”
He’d thought himself incapable of being surprised any more. “But I’m—”
“Not a priest, no, and she hasn’t been a priestess as such in a hundred years. The gods leave their mark on their followers, even when they can’t work through…official channels.”
“Oh,” said Zelen, and a band or two around his heart loosened.
“You’ve improved,” said Altien, coming in with a tray like the world’s oddest valet. “A minuscule improvement, but there it is.” He poured a cup of tea, added a liberal dose from a bottle by the side of the kettle, then handed the cup and a plate of seed cakes to Zelen. “Drink this while you eat a cake. Pace yourself equally. I suspect you can’t afford intoxication now.”
“Is that my brandy?”
“It’s nobody else’s.” Altiensarn added brandy and tea to the other two cups on the tray as well, passed one to Branwyn, then took a cake and sat back in his chair. “I have no story to tell. You have one, and Branwyn, or Yathana, has another. I suggest we share information, and quickly.”
“Let me start,” said Branwyn, sitting forward. She kept her arm around Zelen, though, and her hair brushed against his cheek. “You eat.”
* * *
I sensed the demon when it entered, Yathana said, and Branwyn relayed that to the others.It wasn’t long before you returned.
Experience both in a human form and out of it had rendered her calmer than any living person, but Branwyn still got a trace of horror when Yathana spoke, and no wonder. She’d lain unable to act, sensing the presence of not just a murderous juggernaut but one of the creatures she’d dedicated herself to fighting, in life as well as death. Most people would’ve been driven beyond rationality.
Branwyn wished it were possible to pat a sword’s arm or give it a drink.
Nothing to be done, said Yathana,now or then. You came back. I told you as soon as you got in hearing distance.
The demon had already finished with Lord Rognozi by that point, likely slaughtering him in his sleep. Lady Rognozi had been awake. Branwyn hadn’t heard her scream. Neither, by Zelen’s account, had any of the servants who had been in the house. Maybe the lady had been too scared: fear could lock the lungs.
She had tried to run, though by that point she’d already been fatally wounded. Branwyn had kicked down the door and found the demon dragging her back toward it, one taloned hand around her ankle. Blood was pouring out of the lady’s back, drenching her nightgown and the floor beneath her.
Her gaze had fastened on Branwyn.
“She thought I was coming to save her,” Branwyn said. Her memories were secondhand, from Yathana, but one or two of the facts the sword recited called answering notes from the darkness. She remembered Lady Rognozi’s expression. “But I was too late.”
“All the same,” said Zelen, “she knew you were there at the end. That’d be worth a fair amount, were I in her place.”
Smart boy, said Yathana.
Branwyn tightened her arm around his shoulders. “Well. We fought, of course.”
The demon had been nearly as tall as the room, and the Rognozis didn’t believe in low ceilings. Its arms had been too long for its torso, its hands too big for its arms, and its jaw vast and permanently open, perhaps because the spike teeth inside couldn’t fit in a normal mouth. It had been cold and glutinous when Branwyn cut it, and there had been orange-gray eyes studded all over it.
Branwyn stabbed through what passed as its body a few times. Its maw had yawned wider in a roar on those occasions, though no noise had emerged—neither she nor Yathana knew whether it was mute or whether its voice had been bound.
Some are void-silent,Yathana said.But I think its orders were to make it seem like you’d killed the Rognozis, then yourself. I’d have kept my demon quiet in that case, if I were the sort of bastard who’d do that.
Eventually, Branwyn had seen what she’d thought was an opening. She’d leapt up and in, striking for the head—and the demon had peeled back its face.
“It was like the things in Oakford,” Branwyn said, “the creatures that made men stand still while other abominations slaughtered them, but more so. The Sentinels could resist those. This one, even with Yathana—no.”
The soulsword didn’t give her those memories, only the words. Branwyn still had to pause and drink from her cup of well-fortified tea before she could go on.
“If I hadn’t been a Sentinel, it could have put a knife in my grasp and made me slit my own throat. And if it hadn’t had orders, it could probably have crushed my neck while I stood there like a stunned ox—being metal doesn’t prevent that.”
