She sighed, the faint uplift of her lips merely a parody of a smile. “Where would I go? That was my way out.”
He wanted to comfort her, tell her that she was alive thanks to the failure of her plans, that he would have tossed her over one of the walls if necessary to prevent her from hurling herself straight toward her own gruesome death. He couldn’t be sorry for that, but he could sympathize with her sense of defeat. It was an emotion with which he was intimately acquainted during his tenure in the Daesin army.
Choosing to believe she wouldn’t try and flee, he walked to where her frock still lay on the ground, one corner crumpled so that the symbols stitched there took on even stranger shapes. His instincts had steered him true when he’d doubted her story that the ragged garment had been a last gift from her amman, and it stung that, once more, she’d lied to him. Willingly, knowingly. He had no doubt she’d do so again in the near future.
He held up the skirt portion of the frock, studying the embroidered symbols while also keeping one eye on a now-docile Disaris.
During the first years as a new recruit training as a battle mage, Bron had been taught the languages known as Ezkutuan and Erakutsi—Hidden and Revealed. They were the languages of grimoires and rituals. The teaching of them was mostly reserved for priests and scholars blessed with magic, and sometimes those low-brow but especially useful and dangerous battle mages. Bron was both fluent and literate in Ezkutuan and Erakutsi. The symbols decorating the skirt were not part of either of those, though they weren’t unfamiliar. This was the arcane language of the lim-folk, and Disaris had read them as easily as if she recited from one of the schoolhouse primers they’d used as children. If he’d had any doubts before about her talent as an itzuli, they were gone now.
He turned to Disaris, holding up the skirt. “What do these say?”
Docile didn’t necessarily mean cooperative, at least not with her. She looked away and stayed silent, except for the occasional sniffle.
Bron returned to her, offering her the garment. She snatched it out of his hand, hugging it to her breasts as if it were a shield. “I ask out of curiosity, not necessity,” he told her. “The lim don’t carve the same key spell on their portals twice, and since your Daggermen mostly destroyed this gate’s ability to work correctly, your instructions are useless to us now.” He scowled. “But deadly to you. Why do you so badly want to cross that threshold, Disa?”
Her eyes had widened in disbelief the more he spoke. “But it did work. We both saw it.” She clenched the frock in her hands. “Why would they do such a thing?”
“Because preserving the secret of the Hierarch’s whereabouts is more important to the Daggermen than feeding or retrieving information to and from the disciples fortressed at Baelok. They always knew if we discovered they were using the gate, we’d find a way to do the same and capture their leader.” He considered her surprise. For all that she was the itzuli, it was obvious she didn’t belong to whatever inner circle of Daggermen had controlled Baelok. And where had Ceybold stood within the ranks of the fanatics? High or low, it seemed he hadn’t shared much with his wife. Just calling Disaris that in his mind left a sour taste in Bron’s mouth. “Surely, the Daggermen of Baelok noticed when the messengers who usually appeared at regular intervals no longer showed?”
She nodded, her gaze distant. “They just assumed the Hierarch chose to halt contact for a time. He’s done that before.” Her bowed shoulders slowly straightened, and it was she who regarded him with suspicion. “Do you know what’s on the other side of the gate?”
His eyebrows rose. “Do you?”
“I have a suspicion.” She looked away a second time.
Bron closed the space between them until they were chest to breast. While she still refused to meet his gaze, she didn’t step back. He framed her face with his hands and tilted her head up. “Look at me,” he said softly. She did, affording him a view he’d only seen in his dreams for the past three years until yesterday. Pallid and thin, with sunken eyes and tear-stained cheeks, she was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever known. “I am not your enemy, Disa.”
For an ephemeral moment, she pressed her check into his palm. Her half-smile wobbled and disappeared as quickly as it appeared. “But to the Daesin army, I’m yours,” she argued. “You’re a Daesin battle mage, and I’m the widow—hopefully—ofa Daggerman. A war captive of your general. Tell me that every word I speak won’t be relayed back to him?”
She asked the question such a way that it made it risky to answer. She was right to be suspicious. An unguarded tongue carried serious, even fatal consequences. “It depends on what I consider important enough to tell him,” he replied.
Her eyes closed. “Please, Bron, I beg you. Let me go through the gate.”
He gently massaged her temples with his thumbs. “I can’t. I won’t. The gate might look like it works, but it doesn’t. We found the last messenger—or part of him—who tried to come through after the stone was broken.” The memory of what they discovered still made his stomach turn, even more so now that Disaris had almost suffered the same terrible fate.
Her eyes snapped open, and her face paled even more. “What do you mean ‘part of him’?”
“Exactly what I said.” Bron tipped his chin toward the pavestone. “We’re sure the Hierarch’s lair is on the other side of that path, but the first Daggerman we caught cut his own throat before we could catch and interrogate the secret to the key spell from him.” It had been another fortnight of surveilling the temple and the area around the stone before the Hierarch sent another messenger. “When the second messenger came through, he discovered our ambush and damaged the stone beyond repair before we could stop him. Like the previous Daggerman, he took his own life.” He shook his head. “I sometimes wonder if they’re still human or merely demons. They don’t value any life, not even their own.”
Disaris clasped his wrists and pulled his hands down from her face. Her short laugh was the harsh croak of a raven. “You’ve described the essence of what it is to be a Daggerman. There is only the mission and the purpose. All else is expendable, eventhemselves.” She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. “What am I going to do now?” she whispered.
“What are you trying to do?” He’d stand here for the next month if he had to in order to coax the answer out of her. “What’s on the other side of the gate that you’re so desperate to reach?”
“Luda,” she finally admitted, her voice breaking. “Luda is on the other side.”
Bron’s stomach couldn’t have plummeted any farther or faster if Disaris had suddenly shoved him off the edge of a high cliff. “What?”
She clasped her hands in front of her, clenching her fingers so tightly that her knuckles turned white. “Luda is being held captive by the Hierarch. In exchange for my cooperation in translating Kocyte’s grimoire, they’ll keep her alive until I’m finished. If I refuse or if I die before the translation is done, then she’s of no use to the Daggermen, and her life is forfeit.” Her breath caught, making her voice tremble. “Even if I remain loyal to them, she’s still in danger. Ceybold hated me as much as I hated him, and he felt betrayed by the Hierarch for consigning him to the wilds of Baelok instead of raising him to higher status among the Daggermen.” Her strained smile never touched her eyes. “He’s always considered himself destined for a far greater title than that of a rich yeoman’s son.”
Knowing what he did about Ceybold from adolescence, Bron believed her. “To the Hierarch, you were more valuable.”
Disaris nodded. “Ceybold resented that too.”
The ever-present current of anger running through Bron every time he thought of Ceybold over the past six years flared hotter. His erstwhile friend hadn’t changed except to become more bitter, more resentful, more hateful. Only the people he wished vengeance upon had changed—first Bron and now Disaris.
She began to pace in front of him. “If he’s still alive, he isn’t hunting for me. He’s on a journey to find Luda and kill her. Unlike me, he knows where the Hierarch is hiding.”
“Killing her will satisfy two desires.” Bron ran a hand through his hair, trying not to panic at Disaris’s revelations. “Ruin or delay the Hierarch’s plans for bringing about the goddess and revenge against you for…” He paused, unsure what had happened during their marriage to birth such virulent animosity between them.
