“I’d have presumed you would, out of the two of us,” Zelen said, shrugging on a robe and then taking a chair across from her. “More in the way of firsthand experience and so on.”
“Not with Letar. Her brother and mother, yes, but even there…” Branwyn shook her head. “They lent their skill to my reshaping, but that was acting from the outside, and if it touched my soul, it was by way of my body. The opposite happened with you. From what Yathana says, the two don’t blend particularly well.”
She has too many lines to break along.The sword was clear now, and he blinked.She might have closed the rift. She wouldn’t have survived. I was pretty sure that you could, and that you might live through it.
“I can’t fault your logic,” said Zelen, reaching for his wine again. “Tanya?”
“Cleaned, fed, and back with her family.”
“And—” He tried to frame a more specific question, found that words failed, and fell back on vagueness. “Everything else?”
Branwyn set down her glass. “The knights intercepted your parents and your sister on their way here,” she said, and her voice became gentler, though still matter-of-fact. “Your father was badly injured, your sister somewhat so, and your mother got off lightly. Their coachman was freed at the same time as the other servants. Their personal attendants were in another carriage, which is likely all that kept them alive.”
In the silence that followed, Zelen heard Hidath’s screaming again. “Yes,” he said, “yes, I’d bloody well think so. Are the servants…recovering?”
“As well as the ones back at the house. Lycellias says Tinival might be the best god to tend to them, since his domain is generally affairs of the mind. He also requests our presence at the temple when we’re ‘feeling sufficiently restored.’”
“That should only take a year or two,” said Zelen, but he finished his wine and rose with a groan. “Can you give me any advance knowledge?”
“I think,” said Branwyn, “that your father’s agreed to talk.”
* * *
Behind the outer room of Tinival’s shrine, hung with blue silk and shining with silver, plainer hallways led back to rooms where the god’s less showy work was carried out: barracks, armories, offices, and, up a long, winding set of marble stairs, a tower open to the sky and caged with intricate silver bars.
There, three knights stood in a triangle, armor polished to a mirror sheen, swords and heads both bare. Behind them was a Blade, tall and gaunt in a black robe.
Janayal Verengir, lord of his house, distant ruler and occasional terror of Zelen’s youth and more distant dictator of his adulthood, traitor to humanity and the gods, knelt in the center of the triangle. He was bald, thin, frail-boned with age, and wearing the plain garb of a prisoner, but his eyes were as cold and superior as ever.
He watched his son walk in, side-by-side with the Sentinel that he’d tried to frame for murder, and his upper lip curled in a sneer that Zelen knew very well. It mixed a complete lack of surprise with a maximum of weary contempt, and it had never before failed to make Zelen either ashamed or angry, often both.
For the first time, he felt neither.
“I should have expected this,” said Lord Verengir. “The distraction was always a necessary weak point. Most of you sensibly pursued self-destruction, but…” A shrug raised his bony shoulders for a fraction of a second. “I should have watched more closely, even so.”
“You’ll speak when you’re instructed,” said one of the knights, “or we’ll gag you,my lord.”
“It’s all right,” said Zelen. “I hadn’t hoped for…” He tossed aside bothaffectionorremorse, as both seemed too much even for what he hadn’t let himself desire. “Anything else.”
“We’re here to witness a bargain, I believe,” said Branwyn. “Has the prisoner sworn his oath already?”
“The lesser,” said Lycellias. “Now comes the greater.”
He raised his sword, point straight up in the air, and the others followed. None of them showed fear of what their prisoner would do now, without weapons leveled at him. Faith was on their faces, and confidence, and nothing to mar that clarity.
“Traitor,” said the Blade, stepping forward. They kept their empty hands at their sides and were somehow more menacing than any of the armed knights. “You stand in the shadow of the Dark Lady. The smoke of your own burning curls about you. The Fifth can give you no aid now, and She has no mercy. Save yourself, if you can.”
At a distance, Zelen sensed power stirring, turning attention to the scene in the unhurried way of eternal beings.
“I offer knowledge,” said Lord Verengir, “true knowledge. You and your masters can use it, if you let me pass without torment.”
The thin voice didn’t crack. The expression of scorn didn’t waver, especially on the wordmasters. All the same, Zelen thought:Gedomir wouldn’t have taken the bargain.
It was no better to be a fanatic than a pragmatist. Maybe it was worse. But Zelen faced the man who’d talked endlessly of family loyalty, of duty and purity and obligation, and saw that he might not, in the end, value anything more than his own skin. He hadn’t gotten the chance to stab his father as he’d done to Gedomir, not even to strike him or shout at him, but he knew why he’d regarded him with so little feeling earlier.
There was nothing there.
“You who speak for Letar’s brother, for the Lord of Truth,” said the Blade, turning to Lycellias, “do you take his bargain?”
