For Emre. His father, his mother. For Drenth. For Brynn still imprisoned.
Cadrianna grabbed the Guilder’s hair, pulling his head back, the Strix slicing neatly across his throat, blood spraying the bedding and the scourge below. Thestile’s eyes opened, but Cadrianna clamped a firm hand over her mouth. The blood of House Richtel streamed down the traitor’s cheeks in red rivulets.
The naked scourge struggled against her hand, kicking. Her slightly slanted brows furrowed. She should know better, sex made legs weak during the throes of passion. Thestile was the one who’d taught Cadrianna that.
But the woman’s connection to aetheurgy potentially presented a problem.
“DO IT,” the Strix commanded, wary of Cadrianna’s hesitation. Hesitation led to death, that was the core of a scourge’s training.
The dying Richtel burbled on the bed, hands futilely trying to stem the flow of lifeblood, but death drew him on as he went limp, eyes rolling back into his head, convulsing. Fresh crimson rivers gushed from his neck, soaking the mussed linen sheets. The Guilder of House Richtel died without a whimper, one contract settled.
Thestile went still. Cadrianna released her mouth knowing she could still cut down the traitor with but a thought. A level of respect and trust, even amongst the Fallen’s coven. A scourge to a scourge.
“It comes to this?” Thestile finally said. “The Fallen has learned the truth of my deceit? Seventeen years… ah, that was but a gift, I know it now.”
Cadrianna glanced around the room. The window was open to the pale moon. Alarm not yet raised over the dead goblins. A fire burned brightly in the brazier; the room unbearably warm for summer. A portrait of a bird, a thrush within a golden frame above the fire. For a heartbeat, she thought she heard the Strix sighing in the void.
“There’s none but us, Cad.” Words soft and sad. Knowledge her time was over. The scourge scooted back to the headboard of the bed, not bothering to cover herself. Her Void Form scars glistened with sweat. “No words? After all this time, young Nightingale?”
Cadrianna stared at the woman, saying nothing. Nightingale, her family’s surname. She couldn’t muster the words. Thestile was there when it all happened. Complicit in the murders of her family, of her beloved Emre, and the chaining of Brynn.
“Then be on with it.” Thestile hooked her long, fine hair over one of her pointed, elfirish ears. Thestile was well over a thousand years of age and yet, she still had a youthful glow about her. Something that had always made Cadrianna wary of trusting her. And now, with what Thestile had just confessed, maybe she wasn’t wrong. “Come, I won’t fight. I dare not want to see the Fallen open the way to Eminence. What he will do once he breaks the Seals. You could only imagine the war he will bring. I was there the first time, Cad.”
Thestile was from the Forest of Calibrath—one of the elfirish homelands, the other being Kanja—prior to the Fall and had been one of the finest aetheurgists the Mistlands had ever seen. But now, like Cadrianna, was nothing more than a tool. A pawn of the Fallen. A scourge and a stain upon the land.
Cadrianna was only twenty when the Fallen had conquered Drenth, barely old enough to truly understand the murder of her entire family, and her young daughter Brynn taken from her. Barely capable of making the choice of bringing death in order for the babe to live. A choice that was no choice. Then and now. When the Fallen commanded, she answered.
Thestile’s face was set, determined. Bosom rising and falling in controlled, calm breaths. She hadn’t moved an inch, hadn’t gone for a weapon. Hadn’t burned her Void Form aetheurgy. Only stared at her. “Do it, Cad. Like you’ve been shown.”
Cadrianna put on the blank face of the Fallen’s assassins, the face of a scourge. Showing nothing, feeling nothing. The vault door where her emotions sparked like a slowly dying fire was closed, leaving only the task at hand.
Thestile tapped the center of her chest, right where the runes of Void Form had been scarred centuries ago. “Do it quickly.”
Cadrianna leaned forward, gripped the woman’s shoulder, the tip of the Strix pressed against the woman’s ribs, black on gentle brown flesh, point drawing a droplet of crimson.
Face serene, all-onyx eyes watching Cadrianna’s, soft and loving as they searched, opening her soul. “Never forget the truth of who you are, Cad. You are a Nightingale. That is the real you, not the Fallen’s scourge. Trust in the Pentax. Trust in Nightingale.”
And that’s when Cadrianna realized something: Thestile was ready for death. Had been for some time. Maybe these seventeen years had been a gift, a life already given up to help the traitor Valeria Dunleith recover the Eye of the Soul. What was seventeen in more than a millennium?
A tender hand caressed Cadrianna’s cheek, and she almost pulled back, but didn’t. Couldn’t. A tear brimmed. The scourge smiled and lurched forward, void-wrought steel piercing the unyielding skin, passing through bone into the heart, sure and precise.
For Brynn.
“I’m sorry, Thestile, but I cannot trust the gods. Never again. Mors expectet,” Cadrianna intoned the prayer of her sect. “Death awaits you in the Meadows. Fire begets, Fire taketh. Water rears, Water recedes. Earth sculpts, Earth razes. Air breathes, Air stifles. Scales ward, Scales break. Scales are All. Scales are Nothing. Immortality does not come from the proliferation of Life, but upon the wave of Death.”
And finally, a single tear fell for her role in sending souls to the Meadows.
III
Ashe
PINPRICKS REVERBERATED DOWN Ashe’s spine but the mist at her ankles reared in excitement, a needless anticipation because she had no desire to dance with a vicar of the Scattered Shards.
“How many?” Evander carefully wrapped the satyr mask into a cloth, then stuffed it into a pouch that was slung across his chest before buttoning his jacket up again.
“Only saw the blue cassocks,” Wren answered. She was comely, not beautiful, and maybe a year or two older with a fringe of flowing blonde. Her lips turned up at the edges, and she had high cheekbones under large, perfectly round nibs of cacao. And Ashe was entirely enthralled by her. “Two or three at least.”
“Godsdamnit,” Evander said as he tossed his fine cloak at Ashe. “Cover up that stola.” His gaze went slack momentarily, his head cocked as if listening to some unseen voice. Then, “I expect it laundered before you give it back.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Ashe threw the cloak around her shoulders, fastening it with a brooch over her bloodied gown. “The cloak or your dead mother’s stola?”
“My what?” His aura was utterly confused.
She held out her stola’s hem, stained with blood. “Your mother’s stola?” Ashe glanced toward Wren for some help, but the pretty woman merely rolled her eyes. “Zenith’s cock, don’t you get a joke?”
Moonlight poured into the atrium from the high-ceilinged windows as Evander ignored her attempt at crude humor and opened the door, bathing the entire villa in a silvery twinkle. Long shadows interlaced the red carpet as the swell of orchestral music danced about the atrium from the ballroom on the first floor.
A set of circular stairs wound around the open-aired foyer. Each level divaricated by long hallways leading to Pentax-knew-what treasures and troves. Mosaics of visceral lands without the mist, most likely from before the Fall of Eminence, adorned the walls in an array of colored pebbles. Expertly crafted friezes above fluted columns stood near seventy-five feet in height. Ostentatious, this villa.
The three thieves of Slag’s End padded across the landing, pausing beside the railing.
“Guards on the next level,” Wren indicated with a whisper.
Peering over the railing, it took Ashe a few moments before she spotted a pair chatting within an alcove on the floor below, only the random glint from the flameless chandeliers glancing off their firedrake-scale armor. She noted wheellock rifles slung across their backs; single-shot pistols holstered at their hips.
“Where are the vicars?”
