"Oren is twenty-four."
"Oren is extremely capable and also these are my people." I see him properly now, see the exhaustion under the composure, at whatever is drying on his shirt. "Are you hurt?"
"No."
"The blood?—"
"Not mine."
I hold his gaze and I don't ask the follow-up question, because I can read the answer in his face and the warehouse is full of people who have had enough horror for one night. Instead I say, "Sit down," and to my genuine surprise, he does.
We sit side by side on the crate Reva vacated and he looks at the space around us — the families, the children, the physician moving through the makeshift shelter — and something in his face goes through several things he doesn't usually let happen in public.
"Thirty-one missing," I tell him. "Fourteen confirmed. Vel'eth money, Maerath hands."
"I know," he says.
"The not-your-blood."
"Yes."
I should ask what that means. I don't. I lean my shoulder into his instead and we sit in the dim warehouse light surrounded by the aftermath of someone else's cruelty, and for a few minutes neither of us tries to be strategic about any of it.
It's the most honest we've been with each other in a room full of other people.
18
SEVARETH
The part that breaks something in me is the children.
I have done a great many violent things in my life and I have not, until recently, felt particularly disturbed by most of them. Violence is a tool. Pain is leverage. The only moral question worth asking is whether the outcome justifies the instrument, and I have always been very good at answering that question in the direction I needed.
The Tanner's Row rubble contains the remains of three children under ten.
I stand in the ruins at the first hour before dawn, after leaving Mireya at the warehouse, and I look at what's been left of a neighborhood that existed because my legal protections covered it and Vel'eth did this anyway, and something happens inside me that I cannot be precise about. It's not grief, exactly. It's older than grief. It's the feeling from thirty-two, from watching everything that was supposed to be safe burn anyway, and underneath that feeling the Maw is right there, waiting, because it has always lived in that particular temperature of emotion and it knows exactly what to offer.
Power. Certainty. The clean simplicity of just ending the source of it.
I let it in. Just slightly. Just enough.
I tell myself those words while I'm doing it and I know, even as I say them, that they are the same words every person uses to give themselves permission. Just slightly. Just enough. The pact is full of those words. The whole last thirty years of my life is built on them. You'd think I would have learned by now what they actually mean, which is: more than intended, more than safe, and never as controlled as you believed when you started.
What I do to House Maerath's secondary estate in the harbor district is not something I will describe to Mireya. It is not something Draevik will write in any report. Two of the guards who were with me will not look me in the eye the following morning, and that tells me everything I need to know about what they saw.
The shadows did most of it.
I know this the way you know something you don't want to examine closely — from the edges, from inference, from the quality of the silence after. The Maw was very pleased. I could feel its satisfaction like a second heartbeat, steady and warm, and that warmth is the most frightening thing about it, that it feels like satisfaction, that some part of me cannot entirely distinguish between what I wanted and what it wanted.
As I reach the Coppice — two streets over, another noble contractor's safe house, the one Draevik identified as the operational staging point — I am not entirely in control of the perimeter of myself. The shadows I'm trailing are not behaving like shadows. The two guards with me have gone very quiet.
"My lord," one of them says.
"I know," I say.
"The shadows?—"
"I know," I say again, and I stop walking and stand in the middle of the street and I do what I have been doing for thirty years, which is find the center, find the place where the Maw's hunger and my own rage aren't the same thing, and pull myself back to it.
