“I should just trust whatever you say is true?”
“Was I wrong about how to silence them?”
Jesstin was familiar with the tactic. He’d seen Asterin perfect it over the years, doing business with criminals to secure rare documents for preservation and translation. He knew how to make himself useful to gain their trust.
So what did Ryquin need from Jesstin?
“They’ve shut up,” Jesstin said, palms up.
“For now, until you fail to hear their pleas and they move on to more aggressive tactics.”
“You don’t think that was aggressive?”
Ryquin shrugged.
“What could the dead possibly want from me?” Gennady’s torture was personal, but the dead in Rivenholde didn’t know him.
“What everyone wants.” Ryquin spread his arms along the back of the bench. “To be heard.”
“Hear them yourself,” Jesstin retorted.
“Oh, we do. We do. We have hundreds of necromancers who spend their entire lives entertaining the notions of the departed.” Ryquin’s head fell to the side. “But none are like you. Do you know, they only hear the voices when they ask for them?”
Jesstin’s curiosity got the best of him. “They don’t hear them all the time?”
“No. No, in fact, some can only hear occasionally. Others must stay in a constant state of focus, like the ones in our sept. You’re the first we’ve met who can hear them all at once, and without even trying. A rare gift indeed.”
Ryquin’s intentions remained a mystery, but even if Jesstin had met him in the best of circumstances, something in the man’s cool, guarded manner would have kept him from getting comfortable around him.
“I wouldn’t call it a gift,” Jesstin said.
Ryquin lifted his gaze to the hazy sky. “There are very few in the White Kingdom who share it. We know of them all. Most, like you, are plagued by this ‘gift,’ failing to see it for what it is.”
He’d referred to the White Kingdom as though it was a separate realm altogether. “And what is it, if not a thorn in my ass that I can’t quite reach?”
Ryquin grinned, more polite than natural. He couldn’t even be sure Ryquin was a man at all. Solitude had become a natural state in the past decade of Jesstin’s life, one he’d quenched through his antics in Mythgarde, but it put him at a potentially dangerous disadvantage now. He wished Sesto were there. He’d know what Ryquin wasn’t saying.
All Jesstin had to offer was a clever wit and a chip on his shoulder deeper than the sea.
But he was also distracted. He couldn’t stop thinking about his last encounter with Elloven in the Night Soul. All he wanted was to go back and feel as he’d felt right before he’d said the wrong thing. He missed her, though he chalked it up to the consequence of the magic. But she wasn’t the same Elloven as when the dream had faded. Estelar had charmed her somehow.
Ryquin didn’t answer the question directly. “I’m here to help you find out.”
“I’m here to break this bond and go home, so you’re wasting your time.”
“How do you intend to do that? You heard my father,” Ryquin said, keeping the same, pacifying tone he’d had since supper the evening before. It reminded Jesstin of the hypnotists in Mythgarde who claimed to cure anyone of any ailment for a “mere” five hundred gold pieces. “So are you truly in such a hurry?”
Well, the shyster had him there. Elloven could do as she pleased, but there was no way he was letting her bond with the man who had introduced her to abuse by wrapping it in the deception of love. As for Jesstin bonding with anyone, even the idea was laughable. “Why are you so interested in me and what I can do?”
“Consider my interest in necromancy... a hobby.”
Jesstin snorted. “You need to get out of this place more, mate.”
“Are you so surprised a man of a curia that reveres death would be interested in a power that does the same?”
“How long have you known about me? I’ll keep asking until you tell me.”
Ryquin shrugged. “Since I started tracking necromancers.” A brilliant display of light followed an explosive boom. “Ah, the cirque begins soon!” He frowned. “Where... is she?”
