Chapter 5
The Last Privilege of the Doomed
Elloven Hawthorne was the last person Sesto expected to see in the middle of the night at the Hermitage and was immediately glad he was the one who had answered the door.
And then she told him why, and he was especially glad.
He woke Asterin first. Rhiain could handle a crisis, but Asterin’s cool rationality would be the only thing keeping her from riding to Mythgarde and threatening to kill every guard in the place.
Sesto had to admit it was tempting to let that play out, to watch them quake at the trained assassin swinging her violence as far as she could spread it, but Rhiain had enough worries swimming around in her head, and this one would take precedence over the rest soon enough.
He would spare her as much of the inevitable pain he could.
Sesto told Asterin everything Elloven had said, as Elloven stood staring out the window, quiet as a mouse.
Then he told Asterin the part Rhiain definitely could not hear until there was no way to avoid telling her.
Asterin rubbed the sleep from his eyes, released a drowsy breath, and said, “Well that’s just not going to happen, Sesto.”
“But, As, their laws—”
“Mythgarde may think they possess the ultimate authority over what happens in their village, but it goes only as far as Lord Quinlanden allows.” He turned his eyes toward the door to his bedroom, where Rhiain was still sleeping.
Not for long.
“The same Lord Quinlanden who let his son...” Sesto hushed to a whisper. “Abuse this poor woman? Don’t forget your father is a close, personal friend of the lord.” He didn’t need to say the rest, that Asterin and Rhiain had been the catalyst for Sestinn’s expulsion as steward.
Asterin rubbed his knuckles against the stone wall. “And Jesstin is his son. He can do something useful, for once.”
“You know he won’t.”
“Doesn’t matter. Theo is steward now, and he’ll never let this happen.”
“Steward Edevane is in the Northerlands brokering a trade deal for Quinlanden, remember? There isn’t time, Asterin. They arrested Jess just after midnight, and they’ll execute him at dawn if we—”
Asterin raised a silencing hand. “Stop. Talking. Sesto. Can I think?”
“Do you want to know what I think?”
Asterin’s eyes fluttered closed. “You’ll tell me either way.”
Sesto hated to say it as much as Asterin would hate hearing it. “I think it’s time to wake Rhiain.”
Jesstin had been in the Mythgarde jail once before, visiting an acquaintance accused of the same crime. He’d pleaded on the man’s behalf, even thrown both his family names in a desperate final attempt to make them see reason, but he might as well have been entreating with the walls.
It was an old ancestral crypt, once belonging to a family with a deep and proud lineage.
They’d sold the land when the last of their line had been dying off, with the condition that the graves remained undisturbed.
All the cells had been built around the various tombs.
His was wedged between one that said, Our three angels, Esther, Rebecca, and Jerome, perished of the flux and another that had been carved into the bust of a man whose only name on the epitaph was Conqueror of Mythgarde.
While he waited, the young spectral Jerome, dressed in apparel popular in Jesstin’s grandparents’ era, watched him from atop the tomb across the way, labeled Antica and Simon of Eastern Haven. But he was quiet, and no other specters joined him, which was a small but welcome mercy.
The other cells were empty, but that was expected, because unlike everywhere else, Mythgarde welcomed sin in all colors and flavors. Few found themselves on the wrong side of the bars.
Light dancing along the dusty stairway accompanied a commotion he recognized even before it came into view.
Elloven had followed through then.
“Jesstin!” Rhiain stormed toward him, her auburn hair a windblown mess, her cloak half-fastened.
She stopped just outside his cell, casting a wild appraisal over him and the surroundings.
“What a macabre place.” Her head jerked with a sharp breath, her hands shaking the air as she took him in from the other side of the rusty bars.
“Have they harmed you? At all? In any way?”
Jesstin shook his head. He had a twist in his shoulder from the rough arrest, and Taven’s messy, unskillful punch would smart for a couple of days, but he was fine.
He didn’t know where to start, with her or with Asterin, who arrived with Sesto moments after.
Explaining the rules would be a waste of what little time he had left, and there were things he needed her to know, because the last thing he wanted was for her to spend her life avenging him. “Rhiain, can you sit down?”
She tugged at her cloak with a hard glance to her sides, then dragged a small stool over. “If you’re about to tell me not to fight for my baby brother...”
“I’m not a baby anymore. I never was.” Jesstin swallowed the lump forming in his throat. “But I will always be your brother. In this life and the next.”
“No. No. Have you lost your mind?” She reached a hand through the bars. “Jessie, you listen to me, listen. I don’t give a bloody damn about the rules of degenerates, and I will burn this entire village to the ground before I let them hang you.”
“Rhiain, listen to me. Please.” He couldn’t look directly at her or Asterin, who was standing behind her, deep in thought. “There are some fights you just can’t win. I asked Elloven to bring you here because... because this is the end, for me. And I know—”
“You really have lost your cursed mind if you think I’m going to stand back and watch them—”
“Rhiainach.” Asterin rolled his hands over her shoulders. “Let him talk.”
“But he’s accepted this madness! He’s speaking like a man drugged!”
“None of us will accept this madness,” Asterin said calmly. “But let him speak. We don’t know how long they’ll let us stay.”
“We’ll stay as long as we damn well please,” Rhiain retorted but seemed to ease some. “Tell me everything. From the start.”
“I could speak ’til my breath runs out, and nothing I say would do a thing to stop what’s happened.”
Sesto stepped forward. “Elloven said the false claim was made by Taven Considine, the stable hand.”
Jesstin loved him for the insult and wished Taven had been there to hear it said so casually. That was all Considine had been—and more than he’d ever amount to, no matter how deep he’d weaseled himself into the Hawthornes’ world.
“Well, go get him then!” Rhiain cried, a slow, devastating smile of relief forming. “We’ll get him to retract this lie. Is it money he wants? Access to Mathias?”
Rhiain invoking Mathias was a dire indication of how deep her fear ran. “He wants something you can’t give him, and neither can I,” Jesstin said. “Nor would I. He’s a waste of flesh.”
“Lady Elloven,” Asterin guessed aloud. “He was angry because she came to see you in Mythgarde?”
Jesstin nodded, sighing. “I invited her.”
“Out of kindness for someone who had endured a nightmare,” Sesto said with a scoff and a flip of his hand. “He was trying to be helpful, not seduce the woman. Heavens.”
Rhiain craned her head back. “Which makes this Considine no better than Castien or the monster poor Elloven married. But there is something. There’s always something with men like them. It’s not really Elloven he wants. It never is. It’s power over her.”
“It’s Ellie he wants, and he’ll settle for nothing less,” Gennady said from the corner. He had his knees drawn up and was gazing thoughtfully at the bars, as though mulling what he might eat for breakfast if he weren’t dead.
“Rhiain, you don’t understand how the laws of this place work,” Jesstin stated.
“Nor do I care, Jesstin! You are a citizen of the Easterlands, and you have rights that supersede whatever immoral code they’ve built to uphold their reprehensible way of life. No matter how strained our relations with the Quinlandens are, they will not allow this to stand.”
Jesstin shook his head to clear everyone’s words.
None of it was helping. He’d gone rounds with himself about whether to make his full confession to Rhiain or let her grieve the fantasy of who she wished he could be, but after all they’d been through together, he couldn’t stomach another lie.
“The Quinlandens allow Mythgarde to operate under its own rules because it benefits them,” he said.
A slow drip from a leak in the walls pushed through the anticipatory silence of those listening.
“They receive twenty percent of all profits, on top of the taxes they pay, and this town is a lucrative venture. They make money from doing nothing. They won’t intercede. ”
“You cannot know that,” Rhiain retorted. “Not until we’ve tried.”
“I do know...” He continued slowly. “Because I’m a proprietor of one of these establishments and have myself packed the coffers that get sent to Whitechurch by a long litter of wagons every quarter.”
Rhiain’s face twisted in confusion. She looked up at Asterin, then back at Sesto, waiting for their reactions to match hers. “A proprietor? Of what?”
“Of the Azure Haunt. I bought it with Mathias’s blood money.”
“No you didn’t.” She scoffed. “Why would you say such a thing?”
Jesstin locked eyes with Sesto, who nodded.
He trusted Sesto’s counsel, and the man wouldn’t encourage him if it wasn’t the right thing to do.
“I needed something that was mine, something no one could take from me. And...” The devastation in her eyes kept him from finishing.
There wasn’t anything more to be said anyway.
“I...” Rhiain’s breath hastened, growing louder, her eyes darting around in frantic deliberation. The silence thickened until it was louder than her emotion. “Is that what you’ve been doing all these nights, Jesstin? Running a... a house of ill repute?”
He sank back on the bench with a faint sigh, relieved to finally be unburdened of his lie.