The Broken Eye (34 page)

“F-fuck,” Fukkelot said, impressed.

Antonius jumped to his feet, shaking it off. He began patting his pockets, looking for something. “My spectacles. My red spectacles! Where are they? I can’t burn open your manacles without them!”

The slaves began looking around furiously. Suddenly, freedom was this close—and with Leonus dead, it suddenly seemed real.

“Ah!” someone cried out. He lifted a mangled frame, the red lenses shattered to dust and tiny bits nowhere near big enough to draft through. There was blood on the deck—could it be enough? No, there wasn’t enough light. To Gavin’s eyes, it was a black pool.

Then Orholam stood. He lifted a hand. He held the manacle key.

Chapter 31

Arys Greenveil rose from the bed where her new lover lay spent. She drew a silk robe around her heavily pregnant belly. Child number thirteen didn’t seem to want to leave her womb yet. Stubborn, like his mother. Her own mother had taught her that lovemaking would help convince a child to come to the light, and Arys had no baseline to say her mother was wrong—she’d tried it with every pregnancy. With her third, Jalen, her climax agonies had melded directly to labor pains, and Jalen was the sweetest of her children by far.

But this boy, number thirteen—the number of Orholam added to the number of man—he was going to be special, she knew it. Just as she knew it was going to be a boy. She moved to her desk and began reading her correspondence. The correspondence never ended for Arys Sub-red. Letters from her satrap, of course, but also letters from family begging favors, from family friends begging favors, from friends of family friends begging favors. There were people asking favors for things she couldn’t control in a hundred years. Her secretary, mercifully, separated all the beggars into stacks, and usually did an excellent job of it, but there were things a woman had to do herself.

Arys kept her own lists of favors granted and favors owed, and when she could, she matched those back and forth, trading up favors so that the right people would owe her for times such as this. Her home satrapy, Blood Forest, was going to be invaded, perhaps within weeks. The news wasn’t encouraging. Against orders, General Azmith was preparing to make a grand stand at a town named Ox Ford on the Ao River. Her sources didn’t think much of the man, or of the plan.

Atash had fallen as fast as a bard’s pants, barely slowing the Color Prince’s advance. If this wild gamble at Ox Ford didn’t work, her own people were next. Arys would do anything she had to do to save her people.

She looked at one of her personal letters. It was from her sister, Ela. Ela was at least as passionate as Arys, and not half as wise. Ela claimed that Gavin Guile had seduced and murdered her daughter, Ana. She begged, demanded, ordered, and begged again that Arys do everything in her power to avenge her niece.

Not that Arys had been sitting still. As soon as she’d heard Ana had died, she’d begun investigating. Of one thing she was certain: Gavin hadn’t seduced Ana; Ana had been trying to seduce Gavin. According to her roommate, Ana had tried half a dozen times despite increasingly firm rebuffs. The roommate had also said that Ana had been under intense pressure from her mother Ela to seduce Gavin, though that had taken some prodding to get out of the frightened girl. Whatever had happened in that room, Ana, the damned fool girl, had gone there of her own accord, and she shouldn’t have been there. The Blackguards on duty had sworn, at least three times, that Gavin had screamed in fury at the girl and she’d jumped off the balcony in terror.

Ana had been a pretty girl, and love her though she did, Arys had thought she was spoiled horribly. When people had less than half a dozen children, they always spoiled them. Ana had probably never had a man scream at her in her life. And yet, jumping off a balcony?

Was Ana
that
stupid? Arys didn’t think so, but there was no way to prove it, was there? There were three witnesses, and they all said the same thing. Arys had hired the most beautiful courtesan she could find, and paid the woman a ruinous sum to seduce one of the young Blackguards who’d been there, a Gill Greyling. The courtesan had seduced him, got him drunk, and asked him about the event. His story hadn’t changed. The courtesan said she thought he was lying, but if a man wouldn’t let go of a lie when drunk and blinded by lust, there was no shaking it from him. It was a dead end, a sadly literal one.

Damn you, sister. What was the worst that could be true of Gavin Guile here? That he got furious at the daughter that you’d sent to seduce him repeatedly, and when she’d succeeded in getting into his bed and nearly ruining his relationship with Karris White Oak, whom everyone knew he’d loved for fifteen years, Gavin threw her off the balcony? If that was what had happened, Ela was as responsible for it as anyone.

Not that Arys wouldn’t make Gavin pay for it, too, if she ever found out that was true. Family was everything. The Greenveil motto was
Fásann Ár Gciorcal
, Our Circle Grows. ‘Circle’ was understood to be family, and territory, and friends, and influence. Orholam knew that Arys had done her part on that account, and more. But anyone shrinking that circle would pay—damn it, Ana. Arys had liked the girl, mostly, though Ana had tried her luck seducing men who had been interested in Arys herself. Shooting high, and sometimes artlessly. How, though, was one to object to will in a drafter? Ana had been pretty enough to mostly go unpunished.

And found punishment too great by far.

But Gavin Guile was out of reach for the time being. Someday, Arys would ask him herself. Certainly she would before she voted his way ever again—but it wouldn’t affect her vote in the end. She was practical, eminently practical. As practical as any sub-red had ever been, she liked to think.

And knowing that she was always laid up for a few days at least after a birth, she quite practically moved on to her stack of must-read letters.

Another from her satrap, Briun Willow Bough, telling her things she already knew. Urgent, help immediately, you serve for such a time as this, et cetera. What did he think Arys was doing here, anyway? At the end, the letter asked if she needed to be replaced because she was too pregnant. Arys saw red. Too pregnant? That upjumped son of a carter was questioning
her
? She’d rip his squinty right eye out, pound it flat with a meat hammer, pan fry and feed it to that slobbering stupid piece of—

She breathed slowly. Easy, Ary.

The sub-red was close, always close these days. Two more years, Arys. You can make two more years if you’re careful.

She put that letter down in a different stack. She’d have to answer that when she was no longer furious. Sometimes she hated her work. She caught a glimpse of her lover stirring in her mirror.

The work did have its perquisites, though, she supposed.

With her unfashionable red-red straight hair and freckles, many other women of thirty-five years would find it difficult to procure lovers. She did what she could to darken her skin and hide the freckles and the worry-lines, and few would guess that she’d had twelve children (though, honestly, most would guess she’d had one or two), but even dressed well, Arys’s beauty was not the type of beauty that was celebrated at the Chromeria. Her blue eyes were her best feature—everyone loved blue eyes. But she’d had a lover—in her younger days, before she figured out how to pick men who knew the proper use for their tongues—who, immediately after they’d made love, had told her that her freckles were a tragedy. That otherwise she would be a beauty men would praise to the stars.

She’d been young, and not so good with her impulses as now. She’d grabbed his stones and tried to rip them off. She’d broken all of her nails, but his scrotum had torn in her hand. And then he’d beaten her fiercely.

It was easy to forget when you had so much power that sometimes the only power that mattered was the power of muscles.

It had taken her a minute to even remember she could draft while being battered and thrown against the wall by that screaming, terrified, furious man, holding his torn scrotum in one hand and making a fist with the other. And then, drafting at long last, she’d burnt him to a husk. She’d lost the baby she was pregnant with at the time, and had never known if it was from the beating or from the huge amounts of heat that she’d drafted. Either would have been sufficient, she supposed.

She was at peace with her relative good looks now. Power made up for it. Pretty men and boys sought her out. Mostly, though, she preferred those who were not too pretty, but were instead strong enough to bring good blood to the Greenveil family, either drafters, or intelligent, or charismatic—they had to have some excellence, when she was looking for a father. Her current lover was probably a short-termer, though. Elijah was terribly interesting with his amber eyes, and wonderfully willful, a skilled lover, intelligent, and there was something oddly dangerous about him. But she wasn’t sure she wanted him to be the father of child fourteen. She doubted she would keep him for another six months. But in the meantime, she planned to enjoy herself.

Drafting a little sub-red, she inhaled deeply. The sub-red blew on the coals of her lust.

“Elijah?” she said.

He sat up on the bed. He was exactly what she liked at this point in her life. Lean and muscular, with some interesting scars on his arms and chest, he kept his orangey-red hair cut close to his skull, his freckles were faded on his face and arms, his skin was ruddy, and he had beautifully white teeth. He looked at her—pregnant as she was—with undisguised desire. Having a man who would worship your body when you were hugely pregnant and awkward was perhaps the greatest luxury a woman could have.

But as she stood to go to him, she felt the familiar tightening in her belly. She hesitated. She’d been having practice labor pains for months, and she wanted to be sure.

Elijah stood and walked over to her, naked. “Is it time?” he asked. He held her from behind, kissing her neck and cupping her swollen breasts in his hands.

She couldn’t breathe for a moment. Her stomach felt as tight as a drum.

“Yes,” she said finally, pushing his hands away. “I have to prepare myself. If there’s time between cramps, I may need you again. Get dressed.”

“Do you need me to summon your slaves?” Elijah asked.

She hesitated. The pain passed. “Not yet. It may be hours yet. Maybe you can put on that cloak of yours and nothing underneath,” she said. Truth was, she couldn’t imagine making love now that she’d actually started labor. But if it was false labor, she wanted him here. She could fuck out her frustration.

If she were honest with herself, she wanted him here regardless. If there was one thing she regretted about not having married just one man, it was in a few times like this, where she wanted someone to love her and worry about her and try to protect her foolishly from things he couldn’t protect her from. She wanted to tell Elijah she needed him for that, but she couldn’t.

She sat at her mirror, drew out her kohls, powders, paints in grease to withstand the sweat that would be her lot for the next hours. The Greenveils were from the deep forest, and they kept the old ways in this. New lands and new titles were well and good, but he who loses the center of his circle is lost. Like the pygmies from whom they were long ago descended, the Greenveil women prepared for childbirth as for battle. Arys was a good hand with the paints. Before she’d risen so high that it was unseemly for her to help other women with their makeup, she’d done it often. She missed it.

For her first few children, she’d planned elaborately what her paint would look like, believing it would be an omen for how the child’s spirit would turn out. She’d given up on that, and drew as the whim took her when she sat. She bound her long red hair back in simple braids, and applied the nine black dots across her forehead symmetrically around what would become a drawing of a fire crystal, then she connected the dots with yellow paints, making wings sweeping out toward her temples. An inverted triangle under one eye, a tear under the other. She had barely touched the rouge to her lips when the next cramp hit her, taking her breath, sending lightning through her belly to her back.

She paused, eyes closed, for a full minute. Then, though the pain hadn’t passed, she continued with her rouge. Lips full and red, exaggerated. Lines of gold paint to emphasize her cheekbones. The contraction eased and she worked more quickly. Thorns.

How could one forget this pain? How could anyone want to go through this more than once?

Arys drew black thorns on the back of each hand, down the fronts of her thighs, in the center of her chest, bracketing her breasts, bracketing her swollen belly.

It wasn’t good enough for the perfectionist in her, but as the next contraction hit, Arys decided it was good enough. She reached for her bell.

And Elijah trapped her be-thorned hand.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I could ask the same,” he said. “Nine points on your forehead? For nine gods you never knew?”

There was something odd in his amber eyes. His smile was a little too big, and so white. “Elijah, this is not the time,” she said.

“Oh, Arys, but this is exactly the time. I need you to listen closely to me for a very few minutes, and then make the most important decision of your life.” He lifted her hand from the bell. “Would you like me to help you with your paint? I’ve got quite a delicate hand for this sort of thing.”

“No!” she said. “Take your hands off me or I’ll scream.”

“If you scream, you and your baby both will die.”

He said the words in such a pleasantly neutral voice that she couldn’t believe she’d heard him correctly. She froze.

“I seduced you so that I could be here at this very moment, Arys Greenveil. My name isn’t Elijah, it’s Murder Sharp, of the Order of the Broken Eye. But I do some sidework, too. And when I can satisfy two factions at once…” He smiled. “I’m a very special kind of drafter. I can kill you without leaving a trace. And I can get away with it. Childbirth is so very dangerous, isn’t it? Especially for an older woman like you. And before you try anything, please know that I can kill you very, very quickly and silently. If you say anything, you’ll die. Your death would please one of my employers more than the other, but it would upset me greatly. Nonetheless, all are free in the light. Light cannot be chained, nor can the will of any drafter.”