30
Ilinca
Costin closed the distance while Kason's attention remained locked with Ossendrei's, exactly as I'd feared he would, his blade already angled with the economical precision of a man who'd killed considerably more people than I wanted to imagine.
"Six weeks," he said, almost conversational, circling with the unhurried confidence of a predator who'd already decided the outcome.
"Six weeks of careful patience, wardsmith, and here you are, right back where you started.
I find myself almost disappointed by how little you managed to change your circumstances, for all your stubborn resistance. "
"I changed markedly more than you realize.
" I kept my voice steady despite the fear hammering through me, my hand finding the small carving knife I'd managed to conceal within my sleeve during the chaos of my escape — a poor weapon against a trained killer's blade, but the only one currently available to me.
"You should have searched me more thoroughly before you assumed six weeks of captivity had left me entirely helpless. "
Something flickered across his cold composure, brief reassessment, and he pressed his attack before I'd finished speaking, the blade's edge catching torchlight as it swept toward me with considerably more speed than his earlier conversational pace had suggested.
I dodged, barely, the blade catching my forearm in a shallow line that burned with an intensity I recognized immediately, cold horror flooding through me even as adrenaline dulled the worst of the pain.
Wolfsbane. He'd coated the blade in wolfsbane, the same particular acrid burn I remembered from a night eighteen years buried in memory, Katra's blood and a claw scar across my own collarbone and a fear I'd spent six years trying to outrun.
"You'll find the poison far more debilitating than a simple cut," Costin said, almost gentle, watching me stagger back with the burn already spreading fast up my arm.
"I'd apologize for the necessity, but I find myself entirely without genuine remorse for a woman who's cost my organization six weeks of increasingly expensive searching. "
I fought through the poison's spreading burn with six years of practiced discipline, the same wardsmith's precision that had carried me through Costin's initial interrogation now serving me in a considerably more desperate capacity.
He came at me again, and I met his blade with my small carving knife more through instinct than skill, the impact jarring up my already-weakening arm with a force that nearly cost me my grip entirely.
"You killed Katra." I said it plainly, understanding, with a clarity the poison hadn't yet managed to fully cloud, that I needed him talking, needed the confrontation drawn out long enough for whatever advantage I could find, whatever the physical cost. "Eighteen years ago, on a shrine road.
You were there, weren't you. I never saw your face clearly, but I've always known, somewhere beneath the memory, that I'd recognize you eventually. "
Something shifted behind his cold composure — not guilt, I understood immediately, but a kind of professional pride, the distinct satisfaction of a craftsman confirming his own work's lasting impact.
"I was there. She fought much harder than her age suggested she should have been capable of, protecting a child she had no blood obligation to protect at all.
I've always found that kind of loyalty curious.
Costly, and ultimately futile, but curious regardless. "
The rage that moved through me at that admission burned hotter than the wolfsbane's spreading poison, six years of careful, managed grief finally, fully breaking free of every restraint I'd built around it.
I moved before the poison's growing weakness could fully claim my limbs, driving forward with a speed born entirely of fury rather than any remaining strength, and buried my small knife in the gap beneath his sword arm where his own confidence had left him carelessly exposed.
Costin's eyes widened, more surprise than pain, and he staggered back with my knife still lodged beneath his ribs, blood already spreading dark across his tunic.
"Futile," I said, watching him fall to his knees, my own vision beginning to blur at the edges from the poison's spreading effect.
"That's the word you used, for a woman who died protecting a child she loved more than her own safety.
I'd rather be futile in exactly that particular way than efficient in yours, for however long either of us has left to matter. "
He didn't answer. Whatever final words Costin Drell might have offered died with him, slumping fully to the ritual chamber's ancient stone floor, and I stood over him a long moment, breathing hard, my whole body beginning to tremble with a combination of shock and the poison's steadily worsening grip.
The ritual circle waited behind me, incomplete but close, close enough that some deep, wardsmith instinct understood exactly what needed doing before whatever remained of this night's chaos claimed the last of my strength.
I turned toward it, my vision swimming, my hands shaking with a tremor that had nothing left of six years of careful control, and began, despite everything the poison was currently taking from me, to carve the final lines the ancient pattern still required.
My hands remembered the shapes even as my mind grew increasingly unreliable, six years of careful, patient craft asserting itself past the poison's spreading fog the way instinct always eventually overrode conscious thought when conscious thought could no longer be fully trusted.
Each line I completed seemed to hum faintly beneath my fingers, the old stone responding to a bloodline's touch the way Katra had always promised it would, though I hadn't fully believed, until this exact moment, that the old stories carried any literal truth beneath their comforting shape.
The chamber around me had begun to blur at its edges, sound growing distant and strange, and I understood, with the particular detached clarity that came from a body beginning to fail despite its owner's stubborn refusal to acknowledge the failing, that I was running out of time considerably faster than the ritual's remaining lines required to complete properly.
I pressed forward regardless, my knife hand shaking so badly now that each cut required a concentration that cost me more than the last, the poison's cold burn spreading steadily toward my chest with an insistence I could no longer fully ignore.
Somewhere beyond the chamber's blurring edges, I heard Kason's voice raised in something that might have been my name, distant and urgent, though I could no longer trust my own senses to confirm it clearly.
I did not stop carving. Whatever waited at the end of this pattern's completion, I understood, with the last clear thought the poison's advance allowed me, that stopping now would waste every sacrifice that had brought me to this exact chamber, this exact moment, this exact desperate attempt to finish what six generations of loyalists had died protecting.
I did not know if I had the strength left to finish it. I understood only that I intended to try, whatever it cost me, for Katra and Sela and every voice that had vanished into this valley's dark before I'd ever understood what I was fighting for.