Elene, I’m sorry,” Kylar wrote in a shaky hand. “I tried. I swear I tried. Some things are worth more than my happiness. Some things only I can do. Sell these to Master Bourary and move the family to a better part of town. I will always love you.” Taking the ring box from his pocket, he placed it on top of the scrap of parchment.
“What’s in the box?” Jarl asked.
Kylar couldn’t look back at his friend. “My heart,” he whispered and slowly uncurled his fingers from the box. “Just some earrings,” he said, louder. He turned.
Jarl saw right through him. “You were going to marry her,” he said.
A lump rose in Kylar’s throat. There were no words. He had to look away from Jarl’s eyes. “Have you ever heard of cruxing?” he asked finally.
Jarl shook his head.
“It’s how Alitaerans execute rebels. They stretch them on a wood frame and pound nails through their wrists and feet. To breathe, the criminal has to lift his weight on the nails. It sometimes takes a man a day to die, asphyxiated by his own weight.” He couldn’t complete the metaphor, though he could feel himself being stretched out, a rebel against fate in a malevolent universe bent on crushing all things good, stretched between Logan and Elene, nailed to each with loyalty owed and gasping under the crushing weight of his own character. But it wasn’t just Elene and Logan that stretched him here. It was two lives, two paths. The way of the shadows and the way of the light. The wolf and the wolfhound. Or was it wolfhound and lapdog?
Kylar had thought he could change. He’d thought he could have everything. He’d run headfirst into either/or and chosen both. That was what had driven him to the crux—not the machinations of a trickster god or the implacable roll of Fortune’s wheel. Kylar’s options had spread further and further apart, and he’d held on until he couldn’t breathe. Only one question mattered now: What kind of man am I?
“Let’s go,” Kylar said, all wolfhound.
Jarl was standing at the window, pensive. “I was in love once,” Jarl said. “Or something like it. With a beautiful girl nearly as fucked up as I am.”
“Who was she?” Kylar asked.
“Her name was Viridiana, Vi. Beautiful, beautiful—” Jarl looked up and stiffened. “Vi?”
He went down in a spray of blood, an arrow passing fully through the center of his neck. His body dropped to the wood floor like a sack of flour. He blinked once. His eyes were neither afraid nor angry. His expression was wry.
Can you believe that? his eyes asked as Kylar drew him into his lap.
And then Jarl’s eyes said nothing at all.
“Can I show Kylar?” Uly asked. She was clutching the very doll that Kylar had picked up a few days before. Elene smiled; Kylar was doing better at being a father than he knew.
“Yes,” Elene said, “but you run right home. Promise?”
“Promise,” Uly said, and ran.
Elene watched her go, feeling anxious, but she always felt anxious about little things. Caernarvon wasn’t like the Warrens. Besides, the house was only two blocks away.
“We need to talk, don’t we?” Aunt Mea said.
It was getting late. The sun’s rays slanted down on merchants who were packing up their goods and heading home. Elene swallowed. “I promised Kylar. We agreed that we’d never tell anyone, but—”
“Then don’t say another word.” Aunt Mea smiled and took Elene’s arm to guide her back to the house.
“I can’t,” Elene said, stopping her. “I can’t do this anymore.”
So she told Aunt Mea everything, from the lie of their marriage to their fights about sex to Kylar’s being a wetboy and trying to leave it behind. Aunt Mea didn’t even look surprised.
“Elene,” she said, taking her hands. “Do you love Kylar or are you with him because Uly needs a mother?”
Elene paused to fully humble herself in the face of the question, to make sure what she would say was true. “I love him,” Elene said. “Uly is a part of it, but I really love him.”
“Then why are you protecting yourself?”
Elene looked up. “I’m not protecting—”
“You can’t be honest with me until you’re honest with yourself.”
Elene looked at her hands. A farmer’s cart loaded with the day’s unsold produce rattled past them. The light was fading and the street was beginning to get dark. “We have to get back,” Elene said. “Dinner must be getting cold.”
“Child,” Aunt Mea said. Elene stopped.
“He’s a killer,” Elene said. “I mean, he’s killed people.”
“No, you were right. He’s a killer.”
“No, he’s a good man. He can change. I know it.”
“Child, do you know why you’re talking to me even though you promised Kylar you wouldn’t? Because you agreed to something that isn’t in your nature. You make a terrible liar, but you tried because you promised. Isn’t that what he’s done?”
“What do you mean?” Elene asked.
“If you can’t love Kylar for the man he is—if you only love him for the man you think he could be—you’ll cripple him.”
Kylar had been so unhappy. When he’d started going out at night, she hadn’t asked, hadn’t wanted to know what he did. “What am I supposed to do?” she asked.
“Do you think you’re the first woman who’s been afraid to love?” Aunt Mea asked.
The words cut deep. It cast a different light on their nightly making out and fighting. She’d thought she was being holy by not making love with Kylar, but she was just terrified. She felt so far out of control already that surrender in the bedroom would have left her powerless. “Can I love him if I can’t understand him? Can I love him if I hate what he does?”
“Child,” Aunt Mea said. She gently laid a thick hand on Elene’s shoulder. “Loving is an act of faith as much as believing in the God is.”
“He isn’t a believer. An ox and a wolf can’t be yoked together,” Elene said, knowing she was grasping at straws.
“You think a yoke only refers to wedding rings or lovemaking? You don’t need to understand him, Elene, you need to love him until you do.” Aunt Mea took Elene’s arm. “Come on, let’s go eat our dinner.”
They walked back to the house together, Elene feeling lighter than she had in months—even if she was going to have to have a big talk with Kylar. She felt a new sense of hope.
Elene threw the door open, but the house was silent, empty. “Kylar?” she said. “Uly?”
There was no answer. The food was cold on the counter, the jelly Kylar had been making congealed and cracked. Her heart clogged her throat. Every breath was an effort. Aunt Mea looked horrified. Elene ran upstairs and clawed at the box of Kylar’s wetboy clothes and his big sword. It was empty. There was no sign of anything.
She walked back downstairs, the truth coming to her as slowly as the setting sun.
“Are we going to be all right?” she had asked him.
“After tonight we are,” he’d said, unsmiling.
Kylar’s wedding ring sat next to the stove. There was no note, nothing else. Even Uly was gone. Kylar had finally given up on her. He was gone.
Vi slung the wiggling child off her shoulder as they came into the stable of the seedy inn where she’d put up her horse. The stable boy lay unconscious and bleeding by the door. He’d probably live. It didn’t matter; he hadn’t seen Vi before she’d clubbed him with the pommel of her short sword.
The girl squeaked through the rag Vi had tied over her mouth. Vi knelt and grabbed the girl’s throat in one hand. She pulled out the gag.
“What’s your name?” Vi asked.
“Go to hell!” The girl’s eyes flashed, defiant. She couldn’t be more than twelve.
Vi slapped her, hard. Then she slapped her again, and again, and again, impassively, the way Hu used to slap her when he was bored. When the girl tried to get away, she clamped her hand down on her throat, the threat explicit: the more you wiggle, the more you choke.
“Fine, Go To Hell, you want me to call you that, or something else?”
The little girl cursed her again. Vi spun her in to her body and clamped a hand over her mouth. With the other hand, she found a pain point in one of the girl’s elbows and ground her fingers in.
The girl screamed into her hand.
Why haven’t I killed her yet?
The job had gone flawlessly. Kylar had taken Jarl’s body after arming himself for hunting. Vi had only seen brief glimpses of blades being sheathed and disappearing— surely it was a trick of the light and the distance, Kylar couldn’t really be invisible. Regardless, after a while he’d taken Jarl’s body and Vi had gone into the house.
She intended to set a few traps. There was a perfect contact poison that she could smear on the door latch of his bedroom and a needle trap that would fit perfectly in the little box he kept under the bed. But she couldn’t do it. Still reeling from Jarl’s murder, she walked around the house like a common prowler.
Vi found a note and a pair of earrings that looked expensive—the note said as much—even though they were oddly mismatched, one larger than the other. She pocketed both but didn’t touch the thin gold wedding band by the stove. Let the happy little family keep its heirlooms. She wasn’t sure what the note meant. Kylar had tried? Tried to protect Jarl?
The door opened, surprising Vi, and the little girl had walked in. Vi bound and gagged her, then stood looking at the mess she’d got herself into.
She was finished. She couldn’t kill this child. She couldn’t even kill Kylar. No, that wasn’t true, she was sure she could still kill Kylar. The only way she could escape the Godking with her life was to please him. He would be more pleased if she delivered Kylar alive. If she delivered Kylar alive, the Godking would never know her weakness. She’d buy herself time to recover whatever it was that had cracked in her as she’d watched Jarl die in a spray of blood.
Galvanized, Vi went back to Kylar’s bedroom. She carved the Cenarian Sa’kagé’s glyph into the bedside table in a fine, light hand. Beneath it she traced, “I’ve got the girl.” When Kylar came back, he’d find his daughter gone and he’d scour the entire house. He’d find it, and he’d follow Vi straight to the Godking.
So now all Vi had to do was figure out how to smuggle a wailing child out of the city.
“Let’s try again,” Vi said. “What’s your name?”
“Uly,” the little girl said, tears making her face blotchy.
“All right, Ugly, we’re leaving. You can come with me alive or dead. It doesn’t matter. You’ve served your purpose. I’m going to tie your hands to the saddle, so you can jump off the horse if you want, but you’ll just get kicked and dragged to death. Your choice. Open your mouth.”
Uly opened her mouth and Vi stuffed the gag in. “Be silent,” she said. She scowled at the rag. “Say something.”
“Mmm?” Uly said.
“Damn.” Vi fixed her will on the rag. “Be silent!” she whispered. “Again.”
Uly’s mouth moved, but no sound came out. Vi pulled out the rag; it wasn’t necessary now. It had been a little trick she’d discovered a few years ago by accident. It was spotty, but a merely silent child would be easier to get out of the city than a gagged one. Vi saddled her horse and the second-best horse in the stable.
In half an hour, Caernarvon was fading into the distance, but freedom was still a long way off.