Kadra had the grim feeling that he had now joined that dubious group. He took Sarai’s elbow and led her a distance away. “Will you see that everyone assembles in the square?” he asked gently.
“Gods, yes.” Her sigh held both exhaustion and relief. “I know what you’re doing, Kadra. But I wasn’t looking forward to seeing the prisoners’ eyes change either. I’ve had a little too much of unexplained phenomena.” She looked up at him expectantly. “You’ve a way out for them, don’t you?”
He slanted a dark glance at her. “Is that doubt I hear?”
A huff of a laugh. “I wanted to hear you say it. You never lie.” Some of the anguish faded from her eyes. “You don’t know how much of a comfort that is.”
An icepick found his heart and cut deep. “They have a way out,” he assured her and was rewarded with a brilliant grin before she headed toward Sal Flumen’s bell tower, winding up a shoulder in readiness to ring it.
There was a time for the truth, and he was only just realizing that he had missed it.
Kadra’s walk to the town’s prison with Florus was as excruciating as he had expected. The other man glanced at his profile, then opened his mouth and shut it in a pitiable impression of a trout. An interesting shade of green suffused his lined features before he released a sound, like a goat being strangled mid-bleat.
“Ask,” Kadra finally ground out.
“Are you—”
“Yes.”
Florus’s face ran the gamut from white to blue. At this rate, they’d end up at a healer before the prison.
“Does she know?” the Praetor croaked after another moment.
Kadra didn’t answer.
They ended the squalid stone building Sal Flumen reserved for its worst, which, until recently, had apparently been the odd drunkard, tourist, or both. Walking past the few vigiles on-duty, he turned the corner to find a long hallway of rusted metal bars and cramped cells. A host of bedraggled people, four to a cell, stared at him from behind the bars, faces torn between fear and awe.
Kadra hissed out a low breath when no less than a quarter of those faces blanched in recognition.Yearsin the south with his own Quarter not knowing him at times, and the north read his father’s face in him within seconds.
“What are you?” A wiry man clawed himself upright using the bars. “Have we died or has the Clanlord of Clan Kader come to take us there?”
He was conscious of Florus leaning against the wall, watching him. The next few seconds would determine whether this town chased him out or not. Yet, he had no choice. “Drenevan bu Kadra.” He waited for the explosion.
The group didn’t disappoint. Those who’d recognized him looked bewildered. Roars of “the Magus Supreme?” mingled with “the fucking Tetrarch?” and his personal favourite, “Who?”
His ego was doing well tonight.
“How the fuck do you sleep knowing you’re ruining our lives?”
“I have children, you rich asshole!”
“How does Guild cock taste?”
Kadra’s brows rose mildly. “Formerly Drenevan bu Kader.”
This set off an even louder storm of garbled yells and accusations about everything from the size of his cock to the state of his mind to claim all these extravagant titles, until a voice croaked above the rest.
“Step up here. Let’s see the truth of it.”
He went toward the speaker, finding a gray-haired man seated on the floor of his cell. The man stared, the line of his mouth never once relaxing. “I see the Clanlord in him,” he said after a moment. “Stronger resemblance than the scion. You’re the younger son, aren’t you?”
Kadra inclined his head in acknowledgment.
“Thought you died years ago after that fire,” another man said. “People stopped seeing you and assumed.”
In a manner of speaking, he had. “I went south.”
That prompted a chorus of annoyed spitting on the floor, before the older man spoke again. “You’re the killer. The one the Clanlord used to butcher folk when he didn’t feel like going himself.”
