Wolfblade (51 page)

“Dear gods!” his sister gasped, covering her mouth with her hands in horror.

Mahkas turned his attention back to Laran’s letter. “It is my belief that Hablet himself was involved, but I cannot prove it. He and that leech, Lecter Turon, had a very plausible story worked out—one that lay the entire blame on the Plenipotentiary of Westbrook, a man named Symon Kuron.” Mahkas almost dropped the letter; his hand was shaking so hard. “Symon Kuron? But he was the slaver . . .”

Mahkas held the letter in both hands to stop the parchment from shaking before he continued. “Hablet gave me Kuron’s head and balls as a gift, to apologise for the misunderstanding and agreed to several million gold rivets in compensation, but none of this will bring Riika back or case the pain I know we share at the loss of our beloved sister. I am bringing her body home and expect to be back by next Fourthday. Will you arrange to have everything ready? I intend to head straight for Cabradell after a night’s rest. Jeryma will want her daughter buried in the family vault next to Glenadal.”

Mahkas couldn’t bring himself to look at Darilyn as he took a seat near the table before reading any further; his knees no longer had the strength to hold him. “I have another favour to ask of you, brother,” Mahkas read on, his voice shaking almost as much as his knees. “Before I left Qorinipor, Lecter Turon informed me this monstrous plot was made possible because of a traitor in our midst. His exact words were ‘a member of your family’. It may be that he was just trying to cause disharmony in the family, and besides, I cannot bring myself to contemplate the notion that Darilyn would stoop so low as to betray her own sister. I would appreciate it if you could investigate who in the household had reason to turn on us, and, although I am loathe to think ill of a member of our own family, a few subtle questions to establish Darilyn’s involvement (or lack of it) in this terrible business would also be prudent.

“I trust you’ll see this letter does not fall into the wrong hands, and that we can root out the traitor in our midst without causing any more grief to the family. I’ll see you soon. Yours in sorrow, Laran.”

Mahkas hung his head in shock for a moment before he looked up and stared at Darilyn. “He thinks you’re involved.”

“But not you,” she pointed out angrily. “How convenient.”

“I loved Riika,” Mahkas reminded her. “You’ve always resented her. And made no secret of the fact.”

Darilyn swung her foot around the big gilded harp until she was facing him on the stool. She had such big, ugly feet, he thought idly. A bit like her
personality. “You hypocrite!” she hissed. “This was
your
idea, Mahkas Damaran!
You
set it up! And now
I’m
to be blamed for it? I don’t think so!”

“We need to deal with this carefully,” he advised.

“
Carefully?
You mean in a manner that keeps you looking innocent, don’t you?”

“Laran doesn’t really think you’re involved,” he tried to assure her. “The letter says—”

“The letter says:
a few subtle questions to establish Darilyn’s involvement!”

“Yes, but I’m sure—”

“I’m not going to take the blame for this, Mahkas,” she warned. “Not on my own.”

“You certainly don’t expect me to confess
my
part in it, do you?”

“Gods, no!” she snorted scathingly, jumping to her feet. “Mahkas Damaran take the blame for something he did? Perish the thought!”

Mahkas watched her pacing back and forth with a growing sense of panic. To save her own neck Darilyn could—and would—expose his participation in the plot to kidnap Riika the moment their elder brother stepped into Winternest. Although she derided him at every opportunity and blamed him for the death of her husband, Darilyn was more than a little afraid of Laran and the power he wielded over her. Without Laran she was penniless. Without Laran she had no protection, no status in life other than that of a minor nobleman’s widow whose sons would inherit their father’s estate but to which she had no access. Her fear of alienating Laran guided most of her actions, Mahkas knew, and her actions from now on were all going to be directed at shifting as much of the blame as possible to Mahkas, to spare her own neck.

But Laran still trusted Mahkas. That was obvious from this letter to him questioning Darilyn’s motives. Preservation of that trust was the most important thing in Mahkas’s mind. He studied his sister carefully for a moment, aware that her desire to shift the blame in this affair was probably just as strong as his desire to remain untarnished by it.

“I’ll tell Laran you had nothing to do with it,” he promised, hoping that would silence her. “I’ll just have someone executed before Laran returns tomorrow and then you’ll be exonerated.”

“And suppose he wants proof your dead body really is the perpetrator of this crime?”

“I’ll . . . I’ll claim the person confessed.”

Darilyn nodded anxiously. “Yes, he might believe that. Who?”

“Who?”

“Who will you kill? I suppose it will be easier if it’s a slave. But which slave? It will have to be a house slave. Nobody else would have known where Riika was going to be.”

“Veruca?” he suggested, caught unawares by her question. Mahkas had
no intention of killing one of the slaves. He abhorred unnecessary bloodshed and, in reality, only those who knew of his role in this disastrous affair were a danger to him. One of them was the Plenipotentiary of Westbrook, Symon Kuron, and he was already dead.

“No! Not the nurse,” his sister objected, wringing her hands nervously. “Find someone else. I need her to look after the boys.”

He nodded, thinking the only other person who could expose him was Darilyn. Mahkas needed to silence
her
more than anyone else.

“I’ll think of someone,” he promised. “Would you like me to have your dinner sent to your room?”

“What?” she asked, confused by the abrupt change of subject.

“I think it might look better if you stayed here in your room,” he explained. “Once word gets out about Riika, nobody will think it strange that you’ve retired to deal with your grief in private. I’ll get Veruca to take the boys for the evening. And I’ll make sure you’ve nothing to do with my investigations, too. When I find our culprit, you won’t be anywhere near the scene so nobody can later accuse you of perhaps coercing a confession from an innocent to protect yourself.”

“You’d better make this look good, Mahkas,” she warned. “If Laran has even a moment of doubt about the guilt of the dead slave you present him with, he’ll go back to thinking I’m to blame. And trust me, if he does, I won’t be taking the blame alone.”

Mahkas rose to his feet and stepped in front of Darilyn to stop her pacing. He put his hands on her shoulders and smiled encouragingly. “It’ll be all right, Darilyn. I’ll fix this. You don’t need to worry about it.” He put his arm around her and guided her to sit on the chair by the table he had just vacated. “Why don’t you sit down and stop pacing. You’re making me tired just watching you.”

Darilyn let him sit her down, still wringing her hands. “Maybe it would be better if we told him what we did. He’ll be angry, of course, but if we—”

“We can’t tell him, Darilyn!” Mahkas cried, shocked by the mere suggestion. “There’s no forgiveness for this, no easy way out.”

“Laran would never make an orphan of his nephews,” she reasoned. “He might be angry, but he wouldn’t kill me. He feels guilty enough about Jaris being killed. He wouldn’t take away the boys’ mother as well as their father. And it wasn’t as if I actually did much. I mean, you were the one who brokered the deal . . .”

Darilyn’s reasoning frightened Mahkas. As he paced the room in her stead, he realised that in her own selfish, self-absorbed mind she was already distancing herself from him; heaping the blame at his door. At this rate, by the time Laran got back from Fardohnya, she would have talked herself into believing that she’d had nothing to do with it at all.

He looked at her, thinking her more threatening at that moment than any man he had faced in open combat. He was behind her now, the small round table between them.

“Laran won’t be thinking of your boys, Darilyn,” he tried to warn her. “Right now, the only thing he’s thinking of is Riika.”

Darilyn dropped her head into her hands and started crying again. Mahkas was certain it was for herself and not the sister she’d helped to kill.

“I can’t do this, Mahkas,” she sobbed. “It’s one thing to make a bit of money. But this is murder. I can’t live with it.”

Nice of you to decide that now!
he thought angrily. He realised then that he was going to have to silence Darilyn, one way or another. The danger she posed to him was extreme. One hint that Laran suspected either of them was involved in Riika’s death and she’d blurt out everything. On the table between them lay the pieces of her partially dismantled harp, the wire she’d been waiting on for so long to fix the broken strings and the two small horses with their proud riders that Laran had given the boys.

“You’re going to
have
to live with it, Darilyn,” he told her unsympathetically. Still standing behind her, he glanced up at the beam that supported the ceiling.
Would it hold her weight?

Darilyn kept sobbing but didn’t answer him. She wasn’t crying for Riika, he knew. There was no room in Darilyn’s self-obsessed mind for grief. Riika’s demise meant only the danger of being exposed as a conspirator in her death.

Darilyn is a bad person
, he thought, wondering how long the coil of harp wire was, and if he could get to it without alerting Darilyn to his intentions. Mahkas and Laran had both understood instinctively how shallow and selfish she could be from the time they were small children together. She cared for nobody but herself. Even her children ranked a poor second to her own desires.

“I swear, Mahkas, if you—”

He cut her off mid-sentence with a loop of the harp wire. Tossing it around Darilyn’s neck he pulled back with all the force he could muster. The thin wire sliced like a razor through her larynx before she could cry out, sending a spray of blood across the room as he pulled back on it. Pulling the wire even tighter, he clambered onto his knees on the table behind her for better leverage, his wounded arm crying out in protest as he strained against the stitches. A fountain of blood spurted across the rug from her severed arteries, some splashing so far Mahkas could hear it hissing as it hit the fire. She thrashed maniacally on the chair, unable to get her hands under the wire as he squeezed the life from her. With the last of her strength, Darilyn reached behind her, flailing wildly. Her right hand knocked the tools from the table and finally closed on one of the boy’s porcelain horses. She slammed it down,
hitting his wounded arm more by luck than anything else. Mahkas ignored the sharp pain and pulled the wire tighter.
Dear gods, how long was it going to take her to die?

Not much longer as it turned out. After a few more moments of uncontrollable thrashing, Darilyn slumped in the chair, her almost severed head lolling backwards on the table. Mahkas jumped clear of her open, accusing eyes, gasping for breath and knocking the table over in the process. His heart pounding with fear, his blood racing with the thrill of death, he glanced down to check his clothes. Miraculously, by staying behind her, he had escaped the torrent of blood, but the rest of the room was awash with it, already reeking with a sickly stench as the blood on the hearth began to steam.

He didn’t have much time. Forcing himself not to think about what he’d done—what she’d
forced
him to do, he corrected self-righteously—Mahkas grabbed one end of the wire still embedded in Darilyn’s throat and tossed it over the beam. He caught the other end and hauled on it until Darilyn began to lift from the chair. Then he encountered another problem. The wire cut through human flesh as if it was butter and the dead weight of her body was causing the harp string to slice so far into her neck he was in danger of decapitating her. Cursing, he had to let her down again. He’d have trouble convincing anyone she’d committed suicide if that happened.

Mahkas hauled on her again, lifting her more slowly this time, the wire sawing through the beam and Darilyn’s throat with almost equal ease. After a few minutes of careful lifting, though, he finally got her feet clear of the floor and the puddle of blood that had dripped down from her severed head and pooled beneath her. Hurriedly, Mahkas tied off the wire on one of the hat-pegs by the door, then, with infinite care, he tiptoed around the bloody floor to the door, making sure he left no footprints to betray his presence during Darilyn’s death throes. He refused to look at her too closely. The force of the wire had dislocated her jaw and her face was misshapen and grotesque beneath the veil of blood she wore.

Mahkas took several deep breaths and checked his clothes once more before opening the door. The only evidence he’d been in a struggle was a slight tear in the sling and a small bead of blood on the sleeve of his shirt, easily explained away by his wounded arm bleeding from overuse.

Lifting the sling back into place and forcing his face into an unconcerned expression, he let himself out of Darilyn’s room and walked down the candle-lit corridor to the main hall where his nephews were probably still trying to convince Veruca that Uncle Mahkas had promised them a treat.

In a little while, he’d send the boys to say goodnight to their mother and her tragic suicide would be discovered. That would further strengthen his
story when he faced Laran tomorrow. No man in his right mind would send two young boys to discover what was awaiting them in Darilyn’s room.