His blond hair whipped in the wind. He squinted into the distance, but no words were forthcoming. I saw the struggle, his search for the false calm he always painted on his face. It was beyond his grasp now.
“You’re the one who just proposed truth,” I reminded him.
An anguished smile pulled at his mouth. “All those years … I didn’t want to see the Komizar for what he was. He saved me from a monster, and I became just as driven as he was. I was ready to make an entire kingdom pay for the sins of my father—a man I haven’t seen in over a decade. I’ve spent half of my life waiting for the day he would die. I blocked out the kindnesses of every person in Morrighan that I ever met, saying it didn’t matter. It was the cost of war. My war. Nothing else mattered.”
“If you hated him so much, Kaden, why didn’t you just kill your father? Long ago. You’re an assassin. For you it would have been an easy enough matter.”
He cleared his throat, and his hand tightened on the reins. “Because it wasn’t enough. Every time I imagined my knife slitting his throat, it didn’t give me what I needed. Death was too quick. The longer I planned for the day, the more I wanted. I wanted him to suffer. Know. I wanted him to watch everything he had denied me slip from his fingers one piece at a time. I wanted him to die in a hundred different ways, slowly, agonizingly, day by day, the way I had when I begged on street corners, terrified that I wouldn’t bring in enough to satisfy the animals he sold me to. I wanted him to feel as sharp a lash as the one he took to me.”
“You said it was beggars who beat you.”
“They did, but only after he laid the first marks, and those were the deepest ones.”
I flinched at the cruelty he had suffered, but the horror of how long he had planned and hungered for vengeance left a sickening lump in my throat. I swallowed. “And you still want this?”
He nodded without hesitation. “Yes, I still wish him dead, but now there’s something else that I want even more.” He turned to face me, worried lines fanning out from his eyes. “I don’t want any more innocents to die. The Komizar will spare no one, not Pauline, Berdi, or Gwyneth—no one. I don’t want them to die, Lia.… and I don’t want you to die.” He looked at me as if he could see death’s pallor on my face already.
My stomach rolled. I thought of the last words Venda had spoken to me, the missing verses someone had torn from the book, Jezelia, whose life will be sacrificed. I hadn’t shared that verse with anyone. Some things I had to keep tucked and secret for now. Truth was still far off for me.
“It’s a whole kingdom in jeopardy, Kaden. Not just the few you know.”
“Two kingdoms. There are the innocents in Venda too.”
My eyes stung, thinking about Aster and those who were slaughtered in the square. Yes, two kingdoms in jeopardy. Anger bubbled inside me at the scheming of the Komizar and the Council.
“The clans deserve more than what they’ve been dealt,” I said, “but a terrible threat grows in Venda, one that has to be stopped. I don’t know how to make it all work, but I’ll try.”
“Then you’ll need help. I have nothing to go back to, Lia, not as long as the Council is in power. And I’m just as hated in my birth home of Morrighan. I can’t even go back to the Vagabond camps anymore. If I’m with you—”
“Kaden—”
“Don’t make more of it than it is, Lia. We want the same thing. I’m offering you my help. Nothing more.”
And there was
the truth that Kaden was trying to believe. Nothing more. But what I saw in his eyes was more. There was still so much need in him. It would be a difficult path for me to navigate. I didn’t want to mislead or hurt him again. Still, he was offering me something I couldn’t turn down. Help. And a Vendan assassin in my employ was something of unquestionable value. How I would love to see the cabinet’s reaction to that—especially the Chancellor and Scholar. We want the same thing.
“Then tell me what you know about the Komizar’s plans. Who else in the Morrighese cabinet was he conspiring with besides the Chancellor and Royal Scholar?”
He shook his head. “The only one I know of is the Chancellor. The Komizar kept those details to himself—to share his key contacts would give away too much power. He only told me about the Chancellor because I had to deliver a letter to his manor once. I was thirteen and the only Vendan who could speak Morrighese without an accent. I looked like any other messenger boy to the maid who answered the door.”
“What did the letter say?”
“It was sealed. I didn’t read it, but I think it was a request for more scholars. A few months later, several arrived at the Sanctum.”
More and more, I had been pondering just how many had conspired with the Komizar besides the Chancellor and the Scholar. I’d been thinking about my brother’s death and was sure it wasn’t a chance encounter. What was a whole Vendan battalion doing so far from the border in the first place? They weren’t marching on an outpost or kingdom, and as soon as my brother’s company was dead, they turned around and went home. They were lying in wait, perhaps uncertain when the encounter would occur, but somehow they knew my brother’s company was coming. Had word been sent ahead by someone in Morrighan? The slaughter was planned. Even when I met with the chievdar in the valley, he never expressed surprise at running into the platoon of men. Could the treachery in Morrighan have reached even into the ranks of the military?
A sudden hard gallop clipped the air. A soldier circled his horse around to my side. “Madam?” The word was stiff on his tongue as if he wasn’t quite sure what to call me. He strained to keep the innuendo out of his tone. It was obvious that Rafe hadn’t told the captain everything yet.
“Yes?”
“The king wishes for you to come ride at his side. We’re almost there.”
The king. This new reality rattled beneath my ribs. The coming days were going to be difficult for Rafe. Besides dealing with his grief, he’d be under as much scrutiny as I would be. This could change everything. Our plans. My plans. There was no way around it.
I glanced back at Kaden. “We’ll talk more later.”
He nodded, and I followed the soldier to the front of the caravan.