Chapter Four
CALMLY THIS TIME POPPIE said, “Sit down, Alana. This tale is only half-done, and it will never be spoken of again. You helped me to bury it. You took away the nightmares. You gave me back my humanity. You deserve to know what you saved me from.”
Slowly, she took her seat again, but only because she was feeling faint. She felt sick to her stomach—oh, God! She’d thought she’d solve her own dilemma today. She’d never thought she’d be shocked, again and again, by things too horrible to contemplate.
“It was a struggle at first after my brother and I lost our home. We moved to the city, where jobs were plentiful, only to find that no one would hire me when I was not quite a man yet. But I supported us meagerly with menial jobs until a watchmaker took me on as his apprentice. It was precision work. I enjoyed it much more than growing grapes. And it supported us well. He was a kind man who lived alone with his only child, a daughter younger than I. It was impossible not to fall in love with her. Several years later she agreed to be my wife. I felt blessed. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen—and she gave me a son. They meant everything to me, they were my life. And then they were taken from me, my brother with them, in a senseless accident.”
“I’m sorry,” she gasped.
He didn’t seem to hear her, he was so deep in his memories now. “I was consumed with rage—and possibly a little insane over how painful their deaths had been. They burned, trapped inside their coach, which had been pushed over into one of the contained street fires that are used to melt the ice. If the coach had covered that fire completely when it toppled onto it, it might have snuffed it out. If the wagon that crashed into them hadn’t been overladen, the oxen might have been pulled back off the coach in time, instead of making escape impossible. It had been an accident, but the driver of that delivery wagon was drunk, so it was an accident that never should have happened. That is why my rage wouldn’t go away, and why I finally found that drunken old man and killed him. But that didn’t make the rage go away either. Everything important in my life had been ripped from me. With nothing left to live for, I wanted to die. So I sought out the owner of the company that drunk had worked for and killed him, too. I wanted to be caught, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t bear to see my father-in-law again because he reminded me of my wife, so I stopped working for him. I was starving by then and spending every last coin I had on drink so I could stop remembering what I’d lost. And then I heard of someone who would actually pay me for what I’d been doing.”
And this is how a killer was born? Alana wondered. But Poppie wasn’t like that. She’d lived with him all her life. Nothing, ever, had prepared her to deal with this tale.
“Were they at least deserving of death, those you were sent to kill?”
“Is anyone, really?”
“You say that now, but what about then?”
“No, back then I did the job mindlessly and collected the money. I didn’t care. But, yes, some were deserving. Other jobs, the ones who paid me were the ones who should have died instead. I didn’t value my life any more than I valued the lives of those I was sent to kill. There were so many reasons to hire men like me, politics, revenge, simply eliminating business competition or enemies. And I certainly wasn’t unique in my profession, far from it. If I didn’t take the jobs, someone else would have been hired for them.”
“You can’t claim that as an excuse. Fate might have decreed it otherwise.”
“True,” he agreed. “Yet that justification was still somewhere in the back of my mind. I was good. I could kill mercifully. Better me than a butcher who enjoyed his work too much. I was known only as Rastibon, and as Rastibon, my fame quickly grew.”
“Another false name?”
“Yes, a name that wasn’t associated with my true identity in any way. And eventually I actually valued my reputation for never having failed a job. I’m not even sure why. Pride in a talent, I suppose, even if it was a despicable talent. After seven years I began to think of retiring Rastibon with that perfect record, before it was tarnished by a failure.”
“Was that the only reason you considered quitting?” she asked.
“No, the rage was gone, it no longer governed me. The desire to be caught so someone else would end my life was gone, too.”
“You couldn’t do it yourself?”
He gave her a wry look. “I remember trying several times during the worst of my hell, only to find my sense of self-preservation hadn’t died with my morality. But that morality began to assert itself again, making me question what I was doing, and if no sense of justice was involved in a job, making me disgusted by it. So it was a good time to quit.”
She had to ask it. “You’ve trained me to become an assassin like you, haven’t you? Why else would you teach me to master so many weapons?”
“Don’t be absurd. I trained you in weapons so you would be able to protect yourself and use your body effectively as a defense.”
“Why would I need to?”
“Because of who you are, Alana.”
“And who is that?”
“You are a Stindal.”
The name sounded familiar, but she couldn’t place it, not with so much horror clouding her mind. Did it mean she had family still alive, or . . . ?
“How did you come by me? And please, Poppie, please don’t tell me you killed my parents. I don’t think I could—”
“No, princess,” he quickly cut in. “I wasn’t hired to do that. I never had to kill a woman, although I thought I could. I even thought I could kill an infant.”
Nothing surprised her at this point. “You were hired to kill me, weren’t you?” she guessed.
“Yes.”
