Silver dawn the long dre.., p.35
Silver Dawn (The Long Dream Book 2), page 35
Her thoughts turned to Jeta, the depths of her trauma concealed behind such fragile control, isolated from those who should have supported her by the tangled, strained bonds of love and friendship. Sedaine could not do anything to resolve that, but she could ensure the girl was not entirely alone, that she didn’t have to endure the agony of waiting, far away and blindfolded. It was why she had not challenged her over the thing she carried, the resonance of which Sedaine had felt on the edge of her senses since they had left Rhiannas. She could guess what it was. She didn’t need to guess where it had come from—she had known that signature her whole life. If it gave the girl comfort to have the means to do something, who was Sedaine to take that away from her? As long as she was not foolish enough to actually use it.
Were they so different? Why else was she here, if not because now that she had found him, she could not bear to let Aarin out of her reach? That she could not, again, let him go away from her into danger that was partly of her making. Danger that she could not protect him from, no matter how much she wanted to.
That she could not give up on the promise of reconciliation.
The cool evening was turning chill. As she reached out to close the window, she finally realised what had been bothering her. Not a something, but an absence. The absence of Vianor’s needling conjury that Jeta had carried with her since Rhiannas.
A surge of alarm took her to the door and she flung it open, almost sending Derias flying as he raised his hand to knock.
He saw her face and his smile faded. ‘What is it?’
‘Jeta—where is she?’
His eyes narrowed in confusion. ‘Jeta? I don’t know. Why –’
‘Find her!’
Her urgency was infectious, and he backed away. ‘Stay here,’ he tossed over his shoulder as he walked quickly down the corridor to Jeta’s chambers.
Sedaine stepped back inside, closing the door and leaning against it. The room felt airless, starving her lungs and making her dizzy. How could she have let this happen? What had been meant as a kindness had been exposed as an appalling error of judgement, and Jeta would not be the only one to pay the price.
Derias returned a few minutes later, frowning. ‘She’s not in her room. And she’s not downstairs. The groom thinks he saw someone leave the grounds at dusk. It could have been Jeta, but he’s not sure. He did not see their face. He did not even remember it until I questioned him.’
‘He would not have,’ she said grimly, striding past him. ‘She was wearing a glamour.’
‘What?’ Derias hurried after her. ‘A glamour? I don’t understand.’
But she didn’t waste time trying to explain, already half-way down the mansion’s grand staircase. Dusk was already more than an hour ago. Jeta would be out of the city by now. If they didn’t act fast, it would be too late.
Derias took the steps two at a time to block her path. ‘Where are you going?’
She tried to go round him, but he held out an arm to stop her.
‘Talk to me. Please.’
She took a deep breath. He was here to protect her, which in Galydon’s view largely meant keeping her within the relative safety of the city walls and as far from Darred as possible. But it was Galydon she needed now. She had to warn him.
Derias’s frown deepened as she spoke her thoughts aloud. ‘But he’s here.’
‘Indeed I am,’ came Galydon’s voice from above, and she turned to see him standing at the top of the staircase, looking down at her with a frown of his own. ‘What is so urgent that you must leave the city, and against my express instructions?’
Of course. She had forgotten that he had promised to report to her this evening. Relief almost took her legs from under her, and she grabbed the handrail to steady herself.
He saw it and took two quick steps towards her. ‘Your highness?’
Sedaine shook her head, hand raised to stop him. ‘Not here.’ And started back up the stairs to the privacy of her rooms.
Derias and Galydon followed close on her heels. Inside, Galydon made instinctively for the desk in the small alcove where a secretary would normally sit. She was too restless to take the chair he offered her, pacing to the window and back, searching for the words.
‘Please,’ he said, his dark eyes studying her face, seeing the strain. ‘Tell me.’
She spun on her heel, facing him. There was nothing for it. ‘Jeta has gone. Vianor has given her a glamour of some kind. I think she intends to kill Darred.’
Derias’s shocked inhale barely registered. Her eyes were fixed on Galydon, who closed his eyes, leaning his weight on balled fists. ‘You need to leave, now. Derias will take you back to Rhiannas.’
She started to shake her head, to object. ‘I –’
‘You will go, now,’ he repeated, and she could not mistake it for a suggestion. ‘I won’t ask if you let her go. I don’t want to know. But now she has gone, you cannot be here. My lord—see to it. You leave tonight.’
The flare of anger was all-consuming. For a moment she couldn’t speak. Then Derias touched her arm, murmuring her name, and she snapped. ‘I don’t know what you think I have done,’ she told Galydon coldly. ‘But I did not encourage or allow this.’ But she had known what Jeta carried with her, and what it meant, and not told him. Of that she was guilty.
His fist slammed down on the desk, making her jump. ‘You let her come with us, knowing what she wanted to do. She should never have been here!’
‘She had the right to be here!’ Sedaine shot back. ‘You dismiss her, all of you, but she knows exactly what she is doing and why she is doing it.’
Galydon shook his head, his words a growl. ‘I don’t care what her intentions are. Don’t you understand? She has betrayed the truce. That is all the excuse Darred needs. So, you will go, tonight, and you will not argue. And I will deal as best I can with what comes next.’
And then she did see. Not just the awful risk to Jeta herself and the destructive hurt it would cause to those who loved her, but the opportunity her action would hand to Darred. To the potentially deadly consequences. For all of them.
‘I don’t want to leave.’ It was an admission. It was also acceptance.
Galydon’s face eased a fraction. ‘You must,’ he told her, more gently. ‘If you are here, you tie my hands. I must protect you at all costs, and I assure you, you will find that cost too high.’
His anger she could withstand. His understanding undid her. She nodded, not trusting herself to speak, and he turned from her to Derias, moving swiftly from one problem to the next, organising her departure in the time it took to cross the room. Derias followed him with a backward glance that tried to both reassure her and ensure she remained where she was. Then they were gone and she was all alone.
CHAPTER FIVE
Kallis trudged empty-handed back to where Galydon waited. His boots were slick with river mud, and water had seeped through the worn leather, the discomfort adding to his black mood.
Galydon appeared out of the gloom. He was alone. ‘Anything?’
Kallis shook his head. ‘The boatmen said they took a magician over an hour or more ago, but when I pressed them they could not be sure.’ And they had not thought to question the magician, a lapse for which Kallis had berated them at length. Their confused response had only fuelled his frustrated anger, but at least they hadn’t seen Jeta, and there was no other way she could have crossed to the far bank.
Kallis couldn’t see Galydon clearly in the darkness, but he could feel his tension.
‘Sedaine said she was wearing a glamour.’
It took only a few heartbeats to put it all together and the red flash of rage all but blinded him. ‘Vianor.’ The magician would have had no compunction about sending Jeta to her death if it served his ends, and no one but a magician could have given her the means to disguise herself so perfectly as one of them. Or known, as he had done, that there would be no mages on this stretch of the river to detect the illusion. And Sedaine had known. ‘What was she thinking? How could she?’
‘She did not,’ Galydon said tiredly, not looking at him. ‘The fault here is mine.’
‘Why? What did you do?’
Galydon sighed. ‘She came to me, in Rhiannas. She asked me to send her to Darred. To kill him.’
‘And you let her come with us?’ Kallis asked, incredulous with anger. ‘Did you think she would just give up because you said no?’
‘I did not want to. The queen insisted.’
‘You let her come,’ Kallis said again, the words grating through clenched teeth.
‘As I said, the fault is mine.’
Kallis turned away, disgusted and furious with all of them, Jeta included.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Where do you think?’ he replied without looking back.
‘You can’t go after her, Kallis.’
Something in the general’s tone stopped him short. ‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s too late to bring her back. She’ll be in the camp by now.’
‘You’re saying we just abandon her?’
‘No, I’m saying we don’t hinder her.’
The angry protest died on Kallis’s lips. ‘You mean to let her try.’
‘Since it is too late to stop her, yes, I mean to let her try,’ Galydon retorted, his own anger finally stirring. ‘Whatever you think of his methods—no matter how angry you are with me—Vianor has given her the means to get closer to Darred than any of us could. If you go after her now, all you achieve is both of you in his hands.
‘And when she fails?’ Kallis demanded. ‘What do you suppose he will do to her then?’ His own imagination shied away from the answer, his anger a convenient shield.
Galydon didn’t flinch. ‘Nothing that you could save her from.’
The words hung between, cold as a northern winter, and it was Kallis who looked away first, his shoulders slumping in defeat. He drew a hand over his face as despair replaced anger. ‘What do we tell Kinseris?’ And Aarin. Maker, that was not a conversation he wanted to have.
Galydon didn’t reply at once, his expression equally bleak. Then he sighed. ‘Nothing. Not tonight.’
‘Nothing?’
Galydon stared out over the black expanse of the Istelan as though he see into Darred’s camp. ‘How do you propose we stop them, either of them, if they decide to go after her?’
Kallis closed his eyes. Not if, when. Galydon was right, and he hated it. He hated his own helplessness more, but they were not ready, this moment, to deal with the consequences of rash action. They had come here under a flag of truce. That was their shield, however flimsy, however likely it was that Darred had no intention of honouring it, but thanks to Jeta’s precipitous action, that was gone now. Left unspoken was the harsh truth that Galydon must weigh the risk to an entire nation against the life of one woman.
Why Jeta? Why did you do this? But he knew the answer, because he knew her, and he should have paid more attention—they all should.
‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘As long as you understand what this means.’
Galydon looked at him then. ‘I know.’
And Kallis wasn’t sure which of the possible calamities he was referring to.
CHAPTER SIX
She kept her hood up and cloak held tight around her as Vianor had instructed. The glamour would hold, he had told her, until the moment she dropped her hood—and she meant to use that moment to maximum effect.
She hailed the sentries as soon as she was close enough to see them, holding her hands—and the message cylinder bearing Sedaine’s forged seal—high above her head. Her heart was thumping in earnest now and her mouth was dry as her shout set the perimeter of the camp into urgent motion. Two guards approached while behind them more soldiers appeared and spread out along the picket line.
The two sentries stopped around twenty yards away and one called out in broken Amadorian. She pretended not to understand, repeating her request, holding the message cylinder out. A third, an officer of some sort, pushed his way through the gawking line of sentries and joined the first two.
‘State your business,’ he called in Amadorian. His accent was Situran. The flash of outrage helped steady her.
She repeated the words Vianor had given her, trusting her life to his illusion and his assurance that the phrases he had taught her would gain her the audience she needed.
The officer snapped his fingers and a soldier approached, moving cautiously. At another gesture, the men on the perimeter spanned their crossbows and pointed them in her direction. ‘Don’t move,’ he told her. ‘Don’t speak.’ She did not.
The soldier reached her and held out his hand.
‘Give it him. Slowly,’ the officer commanded, and she had no choice but to hand it over.
The solider backed away until he reached the Situran officer, who glanced at the markings on the cylinder before sending the man running back into the camp.
‘You will wait here,’ he told her. Then repeated his warning as her legs wobbled and the crossbows twitched. ‘Don’t move.’
Their fear of her was palpable and shocking, until she remembered the guise she was wearing. For an instant she feared Vianor had played her false and her stomach churned dangerously. If she had dared to move, she would have turned and fled. But that option had gone. Her legs were shaking so badly she was worried she might collapse and that the sudden movement would get her killed. A thudding in her temple matched the thudding of her heart as she waited, eyes locked with the Situran officer.
A shout drew his attention back to the camp, where another officer flicked his wrist, beckoning.
The Situran repeated the gesture in her direction, stepping aside to let her pass before falling in behind her. She didn’t need to see him to know he had a weapon drawn at her back.
She could not retreat. She could only go on.
This was what she had come for. It was what she had wanted ever since Escarian had betrayed them in Kas’Tella. Yet now she was here, she knew it for the foolish impulse it was.
The night deepened as they led her through the camp, soldiers surrounding her on all sides at a respectful distance. She wondered what they were seeing. Certainly not a girl in a dark cloak much too big for her. Did she look like Vianor? Tall and stately and radiating power?
A pavilion came into sight, dominating the centre of the camp. Two soldiers stood guard at the entrance, more milled about in the space around, a steady coming and going even at this late hour.
The Situran ordered her to stop and advanced to exchange a quiet word with the guards before ducking into the tent. He returned a few moments later, beckoning her forward, but her legs would not move. He repeated the gesture, more forcefully, and she stumbled a step toward him, then another, until she was standing just outside the entrance.
‘Inside. He’s waiting.’
And she went inside.
Darred was reclining in a chair, his booted feet resting on a camp desk. He was just as she remembered, everything about him neat and controlled, from his clothes to the mocking smile in his eyes as he turned the message cylinder over in his hands.
He leant back further as she entered, studying her with sardonic amusement, and she felt sure he would see straight through the glamour, but it must have held because he tapped the cylinder with a finger as he said lazily, ‘So, the magicians are regretting their hasty betrayal? I imagine you must have more to offer, something you think I might find to my advantage, because I’m struggling to see why I should care, one way or another. It’s rather too late to decide you’re on the losing side when your treachery makes so little difference.’
The voice and the manner touched off a spark of anger.
‘No?’ he enquired with mock politeness. ‘Nothing? I expected at least the proffer of some intelligence, a secret or two, the revelation of a weakness… What can you possibly give me that I do not already know?’
The spark spread, igniting the core of molten fury that had burned since Kas’Tella. She pulled back her hood and saw Darred’s eyes widen as the threads of Vianor’s glamour fell away.
He sat up, boots hitting the floor with a thud. ‘Jeta. Well, well, I was wrong. This is… unexpected.’
‘I imagine it is,’ she said coldly, locking down her fear behind hatred, red-hot and burning. ‘After all, I’m supposed to be dead.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed, watching her with an unblinking gaze. ‘You are.’
‘Then how disappointing it must be for you to find I am not.’
Darred’s lips quirked as he leant back in his chair. He was recovering his composure. ‘My dear, I am ecstatic to see you. But I am somewhat surprised, given your memorable declaration last time we met. Something about death being preferable to my company?’
‘I am not here for me.’
‘No, really?’ he murmured. ‘Don’t tell me—you’re here for Aarin?’
‘Aarin can take care of himself, as I think you know.’
‘Perhaps.’ He stood, walking around the desk until he was facing her, arms crossed. ‘I shall certainly enjoy finding out. But if not Aarin, what else is so important that it requires such a desperate sacrifice?’
She would not play his game. ‘I think you know. After all, you’ve already tried to kill him once. But you failed, didn’t you? Kinseris is alive.’
She saw the words hit him, hard, shattering his cool mask for the second time. Something flashed behind his eyes, a storm of emotion she could not read, and suddenly the certainties on which she had planned her course shifted beneath her feet.
‘Escarian failed,’ she repeated. ‘You failed, and I won’t let you succeed this time.’
Darred’s eyes were very dark. His silence was unnerving.
‘I know your offer of truce is lie,’ she said, a little desperately. His reaction was all wrong. ‘I know you are planning to kill him.’
‘You do?’ he asked with a puzzled frown. ‘Oh yes, the meeting. How clever of you.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘You don’t deny it.’
