Nicci said she understood. Since she had ability, it was only right that she use it to help those in need.
At the Palace of the Prophets, Nicci was said to be the most selfless, caring novice they had under their roof. Everyone pointed to her, and told the younger novices to look to Nicci’s example. Even the Prelate had commended her.
The praise was but a buzz in her ear. It was an injustice to be better than others. Try as she might, Nicci could not escape her father’s legacy of excellence. His taint coursed through her veins, oozed from every pore, and infected everything she did. The more selfless she was the more it only confirmed her superiority, and thus her wickedness.
She knew that could mean only one thing: she was evil.
“Try not to remember him like this,” Sister Alessandra said after a long silence as they stood before the body. “Try to remember what he was like when he was alive.”
“I can’t,” Nicci said. “I never knew him when he was alive.”
Mother and her friends at the fellowship ran the business. She wrote Nicci joyful letters, telling her how she had put many of the needy to work at the armorers. She said the business could afford it, with all the wealth it had accumulated. Mother was proud that that wealth could now be put to a moral use. She said Father’s death had been a cloaked blessing, because it meant help at last for those who had always deserved it most. It was all part of the Creator’s plan, she said.
Mother had to raise her prices in order to pay the wages of all the people she’d given work. A lot of the older workers left. Mother said she was glad they were gone because they had uncooperative attitudes.
Orders fell behind. Suppliers began demanding to be paid before delivering goods. Mother discontinued having the armor proofed because the new workers complained that it was an unfair standard to be held to. They said they were trying their best, and that was what counted. Mother sympathized.
The battering-mill had to be sold. Some of the customers stopped ordering armor and weapons. Mother said they would be better off without such intolerant people. She sought new laws from the duke to require work to be spread out equally, but the laws were slow in coming. The few remaining customers hadn’t paid their account for quite a while, but promised to catch up. In the meantime, their goods were shipped, if late.
Within six months of Father dying, the business failed. The vast fortune he had built over a lifetime was gone.
Some of the skilled workers once hired by Father moved on, hoping to find work at armories in distant places. Most men who stayed could find only menial work; they were lucky to have that. Many of the new workers demanded Mother do something; she and the fellowship petitioned other businesses to take them on. Some business tried to help, but most were in no position to hire workers.
The armory had been the largest employer in the area, and drew many other people employed in other occupations. Other businesses, like traders, smaller suppliers, and cargo carriers, who had depended on the armory, failed for lack of work. Businesses in the city, everything from bakers to butchers, lost customers and were reluctantly forced to let men go.
Mother asked the duke to speak with the king. The duke said the king was considering the problem.
Like her father’s armory, other buildings were abandoned as people left to find work in thriving cities elsewhere. Squatters, at the fellowship’s urging, took over many of the abandoned buildings. The empty places became the sites of robberies and even murders. Many a woman who went near those places regretted it. Mother couldn’t sell the weapons from her closed armory, so she gave them to the needy so they might protect themselves. Despite her efforts, crime only increased.
In honor of all her good work, and her father’s service to the government, the king granted Mother a pension that allowed her to stay in the house, with a reduced staff. She continued her work with the fellowship, trying to right all the injustice that she believed was responsible for the failure of the business. She hoped one day to reopen the shop and employ people. For her righteous work, the king awarded her a silver medal. Mother wrote that the king proclaimed she was as close to a good spirit in the flesh as he had ever seen. Nicci regularly received word of awards Mother was given for her selfless work.
Eighteen years later, when Mother died, Nicci still looked like a young woman of perhaps seventeen. She wanted a fine black dress to wear to the funeral—the finest available. The palace said that it was unseemly for a novice to make such a selfish request, and it was out of the question. They said they would supply only simple humble clothes.
When Nicci arrived home, she went to the tailor to the king and told him that for her mother’s funeral she needed the finest black dress he had ever made. He told her the price. She informed him she had no money, but said she needed the dress anyway.
The tailor, a man with three chins, waxy down growing from his ears, abnormally long yellowish fingernails, and an unfailing lecherous smirk, said there were things he needed, too. He leaned close, lightly holding her smooth arm in his knobby fingers, and intimated that if she would take care of his needs, he would take care of hers.
Nicci wore the finest black dress ever made to her mother’s funeral.
Mother had been a woman who had devoted her entire life to the needs of others. Nicci could never again look forward to seeing her mother’s cockroach-brown eyes. Unlike at her father’s funeral, Nicci felt no pain reach down to touch that abysmal place inside her. Nicci knew she was a terrible person.
For the first time, she realized that for some reason she simply no longer cared.
From that day on, Nicci never wore any dress but black.
One hundred and twenty-three years later, standing at the railing overlooking the great hall, Nicci saw eyes that stunned her with their sense of an inner value held dear. But what had been an uncertain ember in her father’s eyes was ablaze in Richard’s. She still didn’t know what it was.
She knew only that it was the difference between life and death, and that she had to destroy him.
Now, at long last, she knew how.
If only, when she had been little, someone had shown her father such mercy.
Chapter 12
Trudging down the road between the edge of the city of Fairfield and the estate where the three Sisters had told her Emperor Jagang had set up his residence, Nicci scanned the surrounding jumble of the Imperial Order’s encampment, looking for a specific station of tents. She knew they would be somewhere in the area; Jagang liked to have them close at hand. Regular sleeping tents, wagons, and men lay like a dark soot over the fields and hills as far as she could see. Sky and land alike seemed tinted by a dusky taint. Sprinkled through the dark fields, campfires twinkled, like a sky full of stars.
The day was becoming oppressively dim, not only with the approach of evening, but also from the dull overcast of churning gray clouds. The wind kicked up in little fits, setting tents and clothes flapping, fluttering the campfires’ flames, and whipping smoke this way and that. The gusts helped coat the tongue with the fetid stench of human and animal waste, smothering any pleasant but weak cooking aroma that struggled to take to the air. The longer the army stayed in place, the worse it would get.
Up ahead, the elegant buildings of the estate rose above the dark grime at its feet. Jagang was there. Because he had access to Sisters Georgia, Rochelle, and Aubrey’s minds, he would know Nicci was back. He would be waiting for her.
The emperor would have to wait; she had something else to do, first. Without Jagang able to enter her mind, she was free to pursue it.
Nicci saw what she was looking for, off in the distance. She could just make them out, standing above the smaller tents. She left the road and headed through the crowded snarl of troops. Even from the distance, she could distinguish the distinctive sounds coming from the group of special tents—hear it over the laughing and singing, the crackle of fires, the sizzle of meat in skillets, the scraping rasp of whetstones on metal, the ring of hammers on steel, and the rhythm of saws.