15 Strings in the Shadows #2
“Sit.” Kadra uncorked a fresh wine bottle. His fingers drummed the table to the tune of the pulsing air as the terrified group scrambled to find their chairs.
Verentia shrank back against the wall. “I refuse to obey these coercive—” She paled as a spark scorched her sleeve and sat down immediately.
He considered them all in the silence that followed.
“Guildmasters, Inquisitor, let’s do away with the playacting.
You’ve been searching for a pretense to supplant my Petitor and I since Aelius’s much-deserved end.
All tonight has proven is that you’re willing to trust an unknown book and an equally unknown woman if they say what you want to hear. ”
Verentia sputtered incredulously. “Is that your defense? That she’s lying?”
Kadra curled his fingers. Filaments of lightning formed and broke around the table. “Sarai submitted to a public Hearing. The least your source can do is submit to an Examination.” He angled his head at Anek’s grim figure. “It’ll only take a moment.”
Dalvia’s gaze frantically latched onto the door when Verentia turned to her expectantly. His lips curved in sardonic amusement. So, the Inquisitor didn’t know that her source was lying.
Cassandane stood. The granite in her eyes said that she had reached the end of her long rope of patience.
“If not now, then please do liaise with my Petitor to make the arrangements. And should the Guilds withhold their labor in any way,” she yelled above the resulting furor, “the Tetrarchy will fill that gap. The north will cross our palms with coin, not yours. We may not have your distribution network. But we aren’t without power.
” She nodded at the suddenly pale faces around the room.
“Tibi gratias ago for attending tonight. The Tetrarchy has spoken.”
The room didn’t empty quietly. Dalvia was the first to flee, followed by Verentia, who graced Kadra with a parting look of loathing. The wine in Kadra’s bottle sunk lower as Guildmasters raged, attempted to bargain with Cassandane, and finally stormed off with Harion trailing behind them.
This hadn’t been the opening onslaught. Far from it. He knew the game, and he knew Noceo. This was too simple an attack for a man who would have been behind the two bounty hunters waiting for Kadra in that whitesleep den weeks before he had arrived.
No, Noceo’s first direct move would be ugly. Explosive. He might even have Coerced several lightning magi to attack Edessa.
Kadra grimly drained his wine bottle, then went downstairs in time to watch ornate Guild raedae speed away from Delran Tower. Numbness drowned the ever-present line of fire burning up his damaged spine. Old wounds.
Cassandane leaned against the opposite wall. “The Inquisitor, the Guilds, even the skittish Clanlady Dalvia, everyone at that table was hiding something. I can’t see a pattern. It’s wave upon wave of chaos.”
He had thought the same at first, but the strings were clearer now. He was close to seeing the web. He only needed to anticipate where the spider would appear. “Someone’s making them all dance.”
“You have a guess, don’t you?”
“I do. I’m waiting for a move.”
Cassandane stared. “And you won’t tell me?”
There was no telling if Noceo had gotten to her. “Not yet.”
“Is your guess why you’ve left Sarai in the north?”
He tipped his head to one side and studied her with unflinching intensity, searching for proof that she was fishing for information to relay to Noceo. When her eyes remained clear, he nodded.
She considered the wall beside him. “Do you think things would have gotten this bad if you were Head Tetrarch?”
“No.” She was better suited for the mantle. “I’d prefer not to receive even more complaints from irate parents.”
Cassandane released a sound that was both laugh and groan. “Gods, I nearly strangled you at the graduation.” Her tension eased. “At least you’re less bloodthirsty these days because of Sarai. A year ago, you’d have followed at least one Guildmaster home to splatter his guts across the interior.”
Kadra wasn’t ruling it out just yet. “They know little. Our puppet master has been very careful.”
“I once thought we were too.”
So had he. Now, he was closer to losing everything than he had ever been.
One more day until he told Sarai everything.
Then, the noose would pull tight.
The blue sliver that was Silun crested behind the wispy clouds over Aoran Tower.
Hours bled at a sedate drip until its pale-blue moonlight gilded a slight figure examining the end of the cobblestone path leading to his home.
Dalvia pressed her palms against his wards with a sound of frustration and stared at the illusion Cato had crafted of a grassy field as though she would see straight through it to his tower if she looked hard enough.
“Aelius didn’t have much luck either,” Kadra remarked from his shadowed corner of the pathway to her squeak of surprise. He emerged, raising an inquiring brow when she pressed herself against the barrier shielding his tower. “Did you think that I wouldn’t expect you?”
“But you didn’t.” Dalvia’s voice was thin with apprehension. “You didn’t see any of this coming, Magus Supreme Kadra,” she said with a shadow of a smile. “What a name, Drenevan.”
Metal hissed in the dark as he drew his sword.
She blanched. “I didn’t come to harm you, Drenevan. You know I lack that power.”
Empty amusement played on his lips. “You allied with someone who could. Was this the power you wanted? Hiding in Noceo’s shadow and doing his bidding?”
“You have no right to pass judgment,” she bit out. “You abandoned us. We had little more than the clothes on our backs, and you ran off to play Tetrarch in the south.”
“I offered you the chance to come, and you informed Clevsin.” Anger roared in him at the memory. “He took me by surprise. I saw a chance to strike and took it. I didn’t predict that it would tear through the manor.”
She laughed weakly then, a surprisingly bitter thing for all that it was little more than a puff of air.
“You still see it as a betrayal, but I feared for you! I thought you would fail. And when you didn’t…
” Her hands fisted. “I had no illusions that the three of us would form a proper family, Drenevan, but I thought better of you than to leave us with nothing.”
He studied her tight expression. “Ah, this is about coin. You hoped that I would leave you Clevsin’s empire after I killed him.”
“Why didn’t you?” Her eyes glittered. “Because of you, we inherited all his enemies and none of his strength. That power, that prestige, can you understand how desperately we needed it once he was gone? We were fourteen and thirteen when you threw us to the vagaries of the world. Noceo nearly killed himself right after your departure, overextending his magic to make the Praetor his puppet and give us some semblance of strength.” She swallowed.
“He had no choice but to enter the Order.
You could have come back. Put things to rights and set us free.
“You were free. You, of all people, never needed me to escape,” he said with cool mockery, approaching her in a glide.
There was nowhere she could run. The Academiae’s wards prevented Bridgers from opening portals in or out.
“You seem to be forgetting that I was thirteen too. You act as though I left without reason.”
“I have never been free.” Her quiet voice held a scream’s worth of anguish.
An abyss seemed to yawn in her eyes before she shuttered them.
Her shoulders sunk. “I shouldn’t have come.
I thought our shared hell made you care at least a little.
” Her voice lowered and grew thorns. “If it were your Petitor abandoned to the north, you’d have moved the mountains to give her a better life. ”
“I would.” On that they were in accord. “And yet, she accomplished that on her own.”
Dalvia laughed soundlessly. “She’s going to start regretting it. Noceo has every intention of breaking her. I thought you should know.”
A primal fury that bordered on madness surged in him at the thought of Sarai trapped in her head, screaming as her body followed Noceo’s orders. He lunged forward to find Dalvia’s pulse with the edge of his blade.
“Are you enjoying this?” he asked softly. “Imagining an innocent being put through what you wanted to be rescued from?”
“No,” her voice shook. White-lipped, she finally met his raging eyes and recoiled.
Her head struck the barrier of his wards.
“I never enjoyed any of it. But I don’t know what else to do when no one’s listening.
I have known nothing but the Clan and Noceo, and I am what you all made me.
” Her chin wobbled. “It’s too late for change. ”
Silence permeated the air. Understanding crystalized. He withdrew the blade. “How long have you been in love with Noceo?”
She winced and took a stuttering breath, pulling the tattered shreds of her pride around her like a cloak against the cold. “I don’t think it’s love, Drenevan.” She inched away from him, dark eyes haunted. “I think I’m just empty.”
There was no torturing Noceo’s whereabouts from her. His brother would have Coerced her into silence, and her loyalty to him meant that she wouldn’t choose to fight it.
“Dalvia,” he said quietly when she turned to leave. She halted, her back to him. “I would have returned if I had known that this was not the freedom you’d wanted.”
Her shoulders flinched as though he had struck her. Apparently having used up her capacity for conversation, she walked away.
Kadra leaned back against the gates to Aoran Tower with a low exhale.
The book of his past opened wide, flipping beyond his revisitations of the night of Sarai’s Fall to an equally bitter one, that he had avoided for years.
Now, he wondered if he had done the right thing then.
Would any of this have come to pass, or would it have been worse?
He was too late in this, too. He could only alter the present.