“You think I’m afraid of a man like him?” Jesstin grabbed his mug and pressed it to his throbbing temple. The ale was no longer cool though, so he shoved it across the table in annoyance.
“No,” she said, her tone smooth and calm. Too calm. Her hair seemed to move again on its own, but that couldn’t have been right. “But you underestimate him. He can’t match you for strength, but he’ll find another way.” She leaned her head back with a fractured gulp. “It was a bad idea coming here. I should have known. I should have known he would do this.”
Jesstin slid his bruised hand across the table and wrapped it around one of hers. “I’m glad you came. Even if it meant I had to deliver Considine’s ass to him in front of all these people.”
She eyed his gesture with a solemn, sorrowful gaze, but when she looked up, her rage was back, and he wondered how her late husband had ever thought he would survive what he’d done to her. “Broken people can’t always resist breaking others.”
Jesstin ruminated a moment. “Don’t make excuses for him. You and I have been through our own hell, and we don’t break people who don’t deserve it.” His mouth hitched in a humorless half grin. “Other than ourselves.”
Elloven’s smile was just as halfhearted. “If only it were so tidy.”
He didn’t know where the feeling had come from, but he had the gutting sense he would never again see her in Mythgarde, or anywhere. That whatever happened next, for him or for her, would set them on courses with no intersection.
As awful as that was, he was not sorry their paths had crossed.
Commotion drew their attention toward the door. Six guards stormed in, followed by a smug, seething Taven and a Virtue he didn’t recognize. She pointed right at Jesstin.
She mouthed the words. That’s him.
The guards started toward them.
Elloven looked to Jesstin for answers, but he had none. Only a terrible suspicion. You underestimate him.
“Jesstin Skylark, you are being detained for violation of the One Sacred Law of the Ivory Rogue, the mishandling of an Ivory Virtue. You will be imprisoned until the hour of your death and may request the presence of family to make your final amends to this life.”
Dizziness swept over him; the room turned hazy, a dreamlike version of the reality he’d been a part of only moments before. He knew exactly what had happened. Taven had swayed the Virtue to lie, through money or some other coercion, and her word would be taken as the only truth.
“What a bald-faced lie!” Elloven declared, but no one was listening. She might have been invisible for all they cared about her thoughts on the matter. “He didn’t go anywhere near her. She wasn’t even here!”
Taven’s eyes narrowed as he watched Jesstin accosted and bound, the message living in his arrogant, vindicated gaze.
“Will you listen? I was with him the whole time, and he didn’t touch her!” Elloven cried. Her voice dissolved into a sea of disorder. “Take your hands off of him and listen to me!”
“It’s all right, Elloven,” Jesstin lied. It was the last kindness he could do her.
“What can I do?” she pleaded.
Jesstin’s arms were snapped tight behind his back. “Send for Asterin.”
Chapter 5
The Last Privilege of the Doomed
Elloven Hawthorne was the last person Sesto expected to see in the middle of the night at the Hermitage and was immediately glad he was the one who had answered the door.
And then she told him why, and he was especially glad.
He woke Asterin first. Rhiain could handle a crisis, but Asterin’s cool rationality would be the only thing keeping her from riding to Mythgarde and threatening to kill every guard in the place.
Sesto had to admit it was tempting to let that play out, to watch them quake at the trained assassin swinging her violence as far as she could spread it, but Rhiain had enough worries swimming around in her head, and this one would take precedence over the rest soon enough. He would spare her as much of the inevitable pain he could.
Sesto told Asterin everything Elloven had said, as Elloven stood staring out the window, quiet as a mouse.
Then he told Asterin the part Rhiain definitely could not hear until there was no way to avoid telling her.
Asterin rubbed the sleep from his eyes, released a drowsy breath, and said, “Well that’s just not going to happen, Sesto.”
“But, As, their laws?—”
