“The others will have gone back to the city with Lord and Lady Verengir,” said Mandyl. “Their personal servants. I don’t know if… Do you think they got free when we did?”
“I don’t know,” said Branwyn. “If they aren’t now, they’ll be so soon. There are plenty of people in Heliodar who can take off that spell, once they know what to look for. It won’t be as sudden or dramatic as it was with you, that’s all. And maybe it did vanish on all of you at once.”
She imagined that: the personal servants, the ones closest to the cultists, who’d probably been under the tightest control, suddenly having their bonds snap. For the sake of getting any information from the other Verengirs, she hoped that the knights had put them under close watch by the time that happened.
Slowly, they got most of the others into the study, leaving Mandyl to wait with a huddled old man—the steward, possibly—who refused to be touched or moved. There the servants stared at each other like strangers. Branwyn supposed they were, having hardly met or spoken as themselves. Horror was all that united them.
She’d seen similar groups in Oakford and elsewhere, strangers except for one or two awful commonalities, but they’d never been like this. The servantshadknown each other, for years, they just…also hadn’t.
Branwyn wanted Zelen’s touch at her back, or Yathana’s no-nonsense presence in her head. Failing either, she wanted a hot bath with plenty of soap and a brush with good hard bristles, which was equally unlikely. Only the winter wind helped, once she’d gotten everyone secure and stepped outside into the cold night. Rain spat into her face, and Branwyn welcomed it.
Hoofbeats approached. Branwyn turned toward them, though she didn’t raise Yathana. She’d be no good against a mounted foe in her condition, and she didn’t think there were any nearby.
She’d hoped for Tanya and Zelen, but seeing them on Jester, the girl hanging onto the saddle and Zelen’s arms sturdy around her, was as good as the bath she’d been longing for. The six mounted knights in armor, and the two shadowy figures in leather who rode near their sides, were the gravy on top of the meat.
“We’d feared we came too late,” said Lycellias, pushing open the visor of his helm, “and rejoice to know otherwise. What can we do to assist? What do you still need?”
“Sleep, for the most part,” said Branwyn. “Anywhere but in this house.”
Chapter 42
If not for Tanya, Zelen would likely have lost the struggle to keep his eyes open on the way back to Heliodar. The rain and wind wouldn’t have sufficed, nor would his own sense of self-preservation. He’d never been so weary—not only from lack of sleep and physical activity, he recognized, or even from the aftermath of Letar’s presence, but as a result of days of tension that his body now recognized it could let go.
Looking back at the house, unable to see it against the darkness but knowing it was there, he correcteddaystoyears.
His lids kept drifting closed as they rode, Jester’s steady walk lulling his mind deeper into the silence that had already started to fill it. Tanya was perched in front of him, though, her whole form stiff with wariness about large smelly beasts as a method of transportation. If Zelen fell, he’d almost certainly take her with him.
That, and occasionally biting the inside of his cheek when matters got too dire, kept him awake until the familiar structure of his own home emerged out of the darkness.
Feyher was there among the grooms, helping Tanya off Jester and handing her over to one of the maids—gods, had the entire household turned out?—and then standing nearby as Zelen practically oozed out of the saddle, ready to catch him but not being too obvious about it. “Bless you,” Zelen said, or intended to say.
Very little was clear after that. He was fairly certain he got to his rooms under his own power, and even that he stayed in motion long enough to wash off the blood and the worst of his sweat. For one instant, he saw his hands clearly, and the water in the basin below them turning red.
That was his blood, Gedomir would have said, Verengir blood on Zelen’s hands, a sin and a crime.
The presence in his head examined it and said, without saying:All blood is blood.
And he’d never seen a family crest in it, he had to admit.
Zelen laughed and swayed backwards with the motion. Branwyn caught him. She smelled of soap, and her hair was wet. “Be easy,” she said, “or your people will have to carry both of us to bed.”
“I don’t much care how I get there,” said Zelen. “The floor’s seeming quite hospitable, to be frank.”
They made it, though, through force of will and the allure of feather pillows. All became darkness of an extremely welcome sort.
Occasionally he woke, prompted by his body’s needs, but only for as long as it took to stagger down the hall and back. On other occasions, after the initial long spell of sound sleep, he dreamed. He saw blood in the hallway and Branwyn on her hands and knees, struggling for air, or the demon seizing Tanya in its massive claws, or Hanyi’s bloody mouth forming his name.
He held Branwyn tighter following those moments. At other times, as he dozed, he heard her quick inhalation and felt her turn toward him, burying her face between his shoulder and neck. Zelen stroked her back gently.
We’re here. We’re both still here, he said to himself, and they both slid back into sleep.
Branwyn wasn’t in bed with him when he woke fully. She was sitting by the window instead, sipping wine and eating small things out of a porcelain dish. As Zelen focused, he saw that they were candied nuts, and that she was readingFive Years in Semele. She closed the book before Zelen had made a sound, though. Yathana’s fire opal sparkled in the sunset light.
“This,” she said, glancing down at the small red-leather volume, “is either desperately inaccurate or written by a man with more leisure than I ever had. Wine?”
“Please.” He couldn’t remember his throat ever feeling dryer, and he gulped from the glass Branwyn poured in a way that did no justice at all to a good vintage. “How long were we out?”
“You’ve been asleep for the better part of two days. Me? Half a day less, or roughly.” She watched him rise with an appreciative eye that Zelen felt his collection of bruises and sore muscles didn’t merit. He wasn’t going to object, though. “I’m not surprised. For one thing, I didn’t play host to a goddess.”
