CHAPTER 9
I woke up to pain and the wailing of children.
The world was soft and fuzzy, out of focus. I blinked a couple of times and saw Reynald’s face. He was sitting by me, dark and scary, lost in thought.
It would be a great time to quip something witty, but everything hurt too much.
“Ow.”
Reynald’s gaze snapped to me. Relief shone in his eyes.
“Well,” he said. “‘Undying’ is a bit of a misnomer, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but ‘dying horribly and then waking up in a lot of pain’ is a bit of a mouthful.”
I raised my hand. He grasped it and pulled me into a sitting position. The little girl I had carried threw herself at me, sobbing. Double ow. I winced, hugged her, and petted her back.
Clover made a strangled noise. Her eyes were red, and tears stained her face. Her voice shook. “I thought you died, my lady.”
Aww.
Behind her, Kaiden stared at me, a desperate, vulnerable look in his eyes. He looked like a little kid who’d been pummeled by life so many times, he didn’t expect anything good to ever happen again, and my heart squeezed itself into a painful little ball.
“Hey,” I told him.
He spun around, hiding his face.
“I’m fine,” I told them. “It’s all good. Everything is good.”
Everything wasn’t good. Everything hurt like hell. The little girl hugging me felt like someone was stabbing needles into my body.
I looked at Reynald. “Is he dead?”
He nodded.
“Good.” The relief that flooded through me was indescribable. I had never been so happy in my entire life. “How long was I out?”
“About half an hour,” Reynald said.
Less than last time. Or at least I was guessing it was less, but then last time I had been stabbed several times, my throat was slit, and I’d drowned. There was a lot more damage to heal.
I suddenly realized that I was still in the hallway. They must’ve been afraid to move me.
“Do we need to go? I can try to get up.”
“Why would we need to go?” Reynald asked.
“To escape.”
“Everyone is dead,” he told me.
“But we need to leave. What if the guards come here and discover all the dead people?”
“Why would they come here? In all these years they’ve never bothered with this house.”
“What if Derog’s clients show up?”
“I hope they do.” Reynald smiled.
I shivered and instantly regretted it. Shivering hurt.
He was on my side. At least for now.
I met Reynald’s gaze. “My brain is a little slow right now.”
He nodded. “I can tell. We have five children in our custody. We must provide them with a safe place to stay until we can return them to their families or determine what to do next. We’re in a fortress of a house.
We can hold it against a small army. In a little while, I will get a boat and dispose of the bodies in the bay, as is the time-honored Kair Toren tradition.
We will clean the blood. We will sleep safely and eat well, and after you recover, we will go through Derog’s ledgers. ”
And there would be a lot of ledgers. Years of them. Lasa kept meticulous records.
Reynald was right. Derog was a slaver. If he had paid off any guardsmen, they wouldn’t stick their necks out to get revenge for him.
His only living relative was his sister who lived in another province, and we would be able to handle her if she showed up.
The Kair Toren underworld would note that we had killed Derog and his crew and leave us alone because they were creatures who ate their weak and avoided their strong.
By their logic, Derog was strong, and because we took the house away from him, we were stronger.
Nobody knew anything about us, and nobody would want to test us.
Why would we go anywhere when we could just stay here?
“Are things a little clearer?” the blademaster asked.
“Yes.”
“Good. Come on, little one.” He reached for the little girl holding on to me like a baby lemur. “Let Maggie get a breath.”
PLANTER 8
I stretched my legs and leaned back in my new office chair. It used to be Derog’s chair and office, but he didn’t need them anymore. In fact, I now had an entire suite to myself: a luxurious bedroom, a palatial bathroom with running water, and this personal office with a desk and a lovely window.
I had offered the suite to Reynald. He gave me a short laugh and settled into a slightly less luxurious set of rooms previously occupied by Lasa. We put Clover into one of the other suites, the little girls in the room next to her, and Kaiden on the other side.
Twenty-four hours had passed since the massacre.
It had been justice, but it was still a massacre.
Shortly after I resurrected, we bathed the small kids in the huge bathroom downstairs and put them to bed.
Then the four of us wrapped the bodies of Derog, Lasa, and some other guy Reynald had killed upstairs in canvas we found in storage and carried them down to the basement.
It was backbreaking work, and I was deeply grateful most of Derog’s employees had helpfully run to confront Reynald in the pen.
Now we had a row of anonymous bodies swathed in cloth and trussed up with rope.
Reynald had been scarily efficient at wrapping them up and I was too chicken to ask where he had acquired that particular skill.
Once the corpses were handled, we took long baths, scrubbed ourselves clean, and fell asleep, or in my case passed out into a black dreamless hole.
In the morning, we fed everyone and cleaned up most of the blood.
Some traces of it were still there, too faint to see.
Removing the blood completely was almost impossible, but Clover had found some kind of powder that was probably a quicklime variant, so we made do with that.
She also insisted on stripping all the linens off the beds and boiling them with detergent in this massive pot we found in the laundry area in the courtyard.
Apparently, this was a common thing, because the pot came with three-foot-long wooden tongs for stirring the boiling laundry.
While she boiled linens, Reynald and I took stock of Derog’s blood money.
Most of Derog’s cash was with a banker and out of our reach.
The small safe in his room yielded us two hundred nomas, the equivalent of two gold grests, probably the purchasing capital, household budget, and payroll.
Reynald had used some of it to buy a lovely boat, which was now parked at our dock. Tonight, he would make the corpse run.
I had settled in the office to look through Lasa’s ledgers.
I’d cried after the first one, then I went numb, and now I was angry.
It was a cold, crystallized kind of anger and it grew out of me like an iceberg.
At some point Clover asked me if I wanted dinner.
I thanked her and told her no. I couldn’t stomach any.
The bells of the North Tower tolled, distant. It was ten pm. Outside the window, night had fallen.
The ledgers lay in neat stacks on the desk. The worst of Kair Toren documented with annotations in Lasa’s fluid, perfectly legible handwriting.
In my senior year of high school, we had to write a book report on a favorite novel or series.
I did mine on The Rise of Kair Toren. After I submitted my outline, my teacher asked me why I picked that book series and not some other, so I told her all about the characters, their conversations, their funny moments, the plots they brewed, and the tragedies they lived through.
The magic, the beauty, the horror. Everything.
I told her I had reread them three times, because everything was falling apart in Rellas, and wading into that darkness again and again kept my anticipation of justice fresh.
The reckoning was coming, and I would relish it.
I couldn’t wait to see the bad guys fall and my favorite characters—the few who had survived—get their happy ending.
I remember she smiled and asked what would happen if the third book never came out. And I, high on my teenage horse, told her that it had to come out. Things had to be fair. Karma was a bitch, she was sharpening her scythe, and there would be a harvest.
I graduated, went to college, grew up, and learned that life wasn’t always fair. Sometimes there was no third book. No resolution no matter how many times you reread or how hard you wished for it. It gnawed at me. I just couldn’t let it go.
In fact, thinking back on it, those books had shaped my path through life.
Somewhere between those rereads, I must’ve subconsciously decided that I would make sure the nightmare unfolding in Rellas wouldn’t repeat itself in our world.
That’s why I’d started out in criminal justice.
Except that I overdosed on reality in my first year by reading too much about the terrible things human beings did to each other.
I realized that it was smothering me, so I chickened out and switched to political science.
Teenage me thought Rellas was as dark as things could get. Post-criminal-justice me knew better.
Lasa’s ledgers were as bad as the worst of my real-world crime reading. They were made of human suffering. Pages and pages filled with matter-of-fact stories about children abused, sold, and butchered in secret.
But if Derog was still alive and I had somehow stolen those ledgers, I could have taken them to the Justice Chamber, and the royal prosecutors would have ripped the slavers apart.
Derog knew this. He paid his bribes and hid his dirty dealings by writing in code, pretending to be a legitimate businessman, and paying his taxes on time.
He didn’t do flashy spending. He didn’t draw attention to himself.
He didn’t parade around in black, red, and gold with a sour pout on his face because people didn’t jump to do his bidding fast enough.
No, for all the heinous shit Derog had done, when compared to Ulmar Hreban, he was definitely small-time.
Someone rapped their knuckles on the doorframe. I turned in my chair. Reynald stood in the open doorway.
“Come in.”