Skein of Shadows (5 page)

Then he turned his gaze on her and she lifted her chin in response.

“Well, Sabira. Will you take this mission for the honor and protection of your House?”

She didn’t miss a beat.

“No.”

Even Aggar’s jaw dropped at that, but Sabira ignored him, and Elix, and the long velvet box sitting between them on the table. Her eyes were on Wilhelm, who wore the same stoically anguished expression as he had on the night when she’d had to tell him that Ned had died, and that it was her fault. When she spoke again, it wasn’t to Breven.

“No, I won’t do it for the House. But I will do it for Ned.”

Y
ou don’t have to go.”

They’d argued about it most of the night, until the sky turned violet in the hours before dawn and Sabira reminded him that there were better ways to spend what little time they had left together.

“You know I do, Elix.”

They were sitting around the table in the smaller family dining room, enjoying a light breakfast of fruit, ved cheese and bread: her, Elix and Aggar. Breven had departed shortly after he’d gotten what he wanted, giving her the name of her contact in Sharn as well as a letter of credit drawn on his personal account before he left. Khellin’s reprieve from his prison cell was long over; he’d never returned to the manor, and Sabira hadn’t cared enough to find out if that’d been the Baron’s doing, or the Kundaraks’. Wilhelm hadn’t come down this morning; his steward sent word that the Count was feeling ill.

“Then at least wait a few days, so Aggar and I can accompany you—”

“Every day I wait is another day Tilde is left to Host knows what horrors. Whatever our differences in the past, I can’t leave her to that. I can’t watch your father go through that again, regardless what he thinks of me.” Maybe
because
of what he thought of her. “Can you?”

Elix’s hazel eyes glistened. They both knew the grief the Count had felt over Ned’s loss; it had paled in comparison to their own.

Sabira reached out a hand to caress his cheek, the one not marred by the Mark of Sentinel.

“Especially not if he’s going to be my father too.” Well,
some
day.

Elix caught her hand in one of his, turning his head and pressing her palm tightly against his lips for a long moment. Then he kissed her wrist lightly, right where a betrothal bracelet would lay, before relinquishing his hold.

“You knew?” he asked, his lips quirking into a rueful half-smile.

“Having
my
father here kind of gave it away.”

Aggar mumbled something from around a mouthful of bread and silverfruit jam. It sounded like, “Told you so.” Both Elix and Sabira ignored him.

“I know it’s a silly tradition, but I wanted to honor it—and you.”

Sabira smiled softly at that.

“So what did he say?”

“I said, ‘Have you taken leave of your senses?’ when he asked me,” Aggar answered, wiping cider from his beard with the back of his hand. “I offered to get a Jorasco to come take a look at him, maybe do a cleansing ritual.”

“Quiet, you,” Sabira warned, throwing the dwarf a stern
look she couldn’t quite hold.

Elix’s own smile faltered a bit.

“Does it matter? I realize now it was a mistake securing his release.”

Sabira quirked an eyebrow.

“That bad, hmm? Well, it can’t be any worse than what I’d have called him.”

Like assassin, traitor, excoriate, steaming pile of carver dung—and those were the nice things.

“He said you were always more Breven’s daughter than you were his, and if Elix wanted to marry you, he was asking the wrong man for permission.”

The three of them turned to see Count Wilhelm standing in the open doorway, still in the clothes he’d worn the night before. From the dark circles around his red-rimmed eyes, it was clear that he hadn’t slept.

“Have you told her yet what
I
said, Elix?”

Elix’s smile disappeared completely.

“Father—” Elix began, his voice holding a tone of warning Sabira had never heard him use with the older man before. Wilhelm continued on, either oblivious or uncaring.

“I said ‘no.’ ” The unveiled disgust in the Count’s words was like a slap in the face, and even though Sabira had her own doubts about her worthiness to be Elix’s wife, hearing his father give voice to that same sentiment so contemptuously made her hackles rise. Who was he to tell her she wasn’t good enough?

Only the man to whom she’d said those exact words when she’d tried—futilely—to apologize for not being able to save Ned.

Wilhelm continued, oblivious to both her anger, and
her guilt.

“No to having that scum Khellin under my roof, no to having his traitorous line linked to mine and no to having you one day bear the title of Countess of the Wood Gate.”

Vulyar had three entrances. There was the Iron Gate in the northeast, which led to Irontown and the Mror Holds; the Sand Gate in the south, which since the Day of Mourning had led only to Fort Bones and Gatherhold in the Talenta Plains; and the Wood Gate in the northwest, which led to the rest of the Five Nations and was named for the several forests that awaited travelers who took that road out of the city—the Nightwood, Shadowmount Forest, and of course, Karrnwood. Each gate served one of the city’s major wards, each of which encompassed several minor wards and was governed by a titled member of House Deneith. Wood Gate was by far the most populous of the three major wards, though Iron Gate was understandably the most prosperous, since all the lightning rail shipments from the mines in the Ironroots came through there.

Sabira hadn’t even considered the fact that accepting Elix’s still unvoiced proposal would also mean eventually accepting a role in the politics of Vulyar. It wasn’t a thought that particularly thrilled her. Then again, neither was the fact that Wilhelm clearly didn’t think she was suited for the position—even if she did agree with him.

“I told him that d’Sark girl would have been a much better choice for the family.”

Elix stiffened beside her, but Sabira couldn’t look at him. She’d never been more grateful for a chair in her life; she might well have fallen otherwise, the blow was so sharp, so unexpected.

Tabeth d’Sark had trained under Elix for a year back in ’93. She’d been a Marshal at the Vulyar outpost after that, and Elix had known her well enough to take her on a dangerous mission into the Blade Desert—a mission from which she had not returned. Elix still carried the weapon that had killed her in his traveling chest.

Though Sabira had never met the other woman, she had met Tabeth’s twin, Tobin, a Defender with curly brown hair, sculpted features, and eyes nearly as gray as her own. She remembered feeling a pang of jealousy thinking how beautiful his sister must have been, but at the time she’d pushed it aside, deeming the emotion silly and unwarranted.

Apparently, she’d been wrong.

“Saba, I—” Elix began, but his father wasn’t finished yet.

“But I may have misjudged you, Sabira. You bring my niece back to me, and I’ll withdraw every objection I ever had to your marrying my son. I’ll even step down as Count and leave Wood Gate to the two of you as a wedding gift, if that’s what you want.” His eyes blazed as his gaze bored into hers. “Just bring her back, Sabira. After Ned, you owe me that much.”

What could she say to that?

“I will.”

An uncomfortable silence settled over the room after Wilhelm left. Sabira stared at her plate where the velvet box had sat the night before, unwilling to look over at Elix. Not wanting to see the truth of his father’s words there.

Logically, she knew she had no right to be angry, or
even hurt. She was the one who’d left him behind, fleeing his arms in the wake of Ned’s death, ignoring his letters, rebuffing his every attempt to reach out to her. How could she blame him for turning to someone else for comfort, when she’d given him no reason to believe he’d ever find it with her?

But logic was a tepid brew that did nothing to ease either the cold taste of betrayal from her tongue, or the hot pain lancing through her heart.

Predictably, it was Aggar who spoke first, clearing his throat apologetically.

“I can’t go with you, Saba—I got word late last night that Father needs me back in the Holds—but I think I know someone in Sharn who may be able to help you. He’s been looking to get out of Khorvaire for a while, anyway. I’ll go make some inquiries.” She heard the beads in his beard clack as he pushed back from the table and crossed over to her seat, but she didn’t look up or acknowledge him. He gave her shoulder a tight squeeze with one hand, then paused for a moment by Elix’s chair, presumably offering him the same gesture. Then he walked quickly from the room, making sure to close the door behind him.

She expected Elix to say something, to offer an apology, or excuse, or anything. What she didn’t expect was him for him to push her plate out of the way and slam the bracelet box down angrily on the table in front of her.

“Open it.”

She hesitated, her hand hovering over the black velvet, not quite touching the embroidered copper hearth that was the sign of Boldrei, the Sovereign invoked to bless marriages.

“Saba. Please.”

Inside was a mithral disk set at the center of a thick-linked chain. The circle bore a crest that Sabira didn’t recognize at first, but as she lifted the bracelet out of the box to examine it more closely, she gasped.

Two weapons were crossed on a field of thin mourngold, a violet-blue metal made from gold alloyed with mournlode mined from within the heart of the Mournland, what had once been Cyre, beneath the Field of Ruins. Many claimed the mottled iron ore could be used to turn undead, but the dwarves—and this bracelet was undoubtedly of dwarven make—seldom used it for that purpose, preferring instead to combine it with other metals to yield an incredible variety of colors. The mourngold plating was probably worth more than the rest of the bracelet combined.

Even more impressive than the alloy, though, were the weapons themselves. One was a simple broadsword, its pommel a closed fist, identical to the one Elix usually wore. The other was a tiny replica of her own shard axe, perfect in every detail, down to the sliver of a Siberys dragonshard at its tip.

In addition to the miniature weapons, detailed etchings graced each quarter of the circle. Above the crossed haft and blade was the Deneith chimera; below, the wolf of Karrnath. To the left was the mark of Wood Gate, three trees with sword blades for trunks. The etching on the right looked slightly different from the others, and it took Sabira a moment to realize that an older carving had been painstakingly filled in and then replaced by a newer one—the Tordannon crest.

“Turn it over.”

Sabira did. On the back was an inscription, with a date.

It was the final couplet from Theodon Dorn’s popular poem, “The Marshal and the Maiden.” Every Deneith knew it, and could recite it by heart, especially the last two stanzas:

But Sabira saw that some of the words had been changed, and they altered the meaning considerably:

Below the two lines had been inscribed a month and a year. Aryth, 991 YK. The same month Ned’s remembrance service had been held, in this very house. Where Sabira had embarrassed herself by getting very, very drunk and Elix had taken her to his rooms so she could sleep it off before she could do something she’d wind up regretting. Only she’d wound up in his bed with him instead, and had fled Karrnath the next morning, unable to face either Ned’s death or Elix’s need.

He’d likely commissioned the betrothal bracelet that very day, not realizing she wouldn’t be coming back for another seven long years. In ’91—two years before he even met Tabeth.

She raised her eyes up to his and the fear she saw there nearly choked her.

“Tabeth was beautiful and strong, a credit to the Marshals, and I will admit I was attracted to her—but only because she reminded me of you. I almost kissed her, once, at some function we had here. That’s what my father was talking about—he saw that part. He didn’t see what happened after I called her by your name.”

Sabira snorted, amused in spite of herself.

“You couldn’t walk for a week?”

“Or see out of my left eye,” he said ruefully.

With a laugh, Sabira leaned over and kissed him full on the lips, a familiar and welcome warmth spreading through her as his arms wrapped around her, pulling her close.

“That’s nothing compared to what I would have done to you,” she murmured after a moment.