Worried he might give her exactly what she wanted, I took Tain’s arm and pulled him back. The muscles trembled beneath my hand and he stepped back as if in a daze, stunned by his own violence. “Don’t worry,” I said to Aven, as her hoarse screams gave way to snarls. “Sure, you need all those bones and muscles to hold a sword. But you won’t be holding one, ever again, so no harm done.”
Hadrea pulled the knife out of Aven’s hand and, after three others helped her bind the Warrior-Guilder’s hands and feet, she wrapped a firm cloth around the oozing wound. “We will send a physic to see to that hand when there is one free. Though it might be a while.”
“Please get her out of my sight,” Tain said, and they dragged her out, hissing and spitting. Around her gasps of pain and aggressive curses, Aven looked back over her shoulder, not at Tain but at me.
“Don’t think this is over.”
I looked away as if the sight of her bored me. As my Darfri helpers left the room, the Order Guard Mago arrived. He moved out of the way of the struggling Guilder and her captors, looking alarmed, but saw our grim faces and did not comment. He cleared his throat. “Honored Chancellor, people are arriving for the meeting. Shall I allow them entry?”
Hadrea wiped her hands off and glanced over at Tain. “You had best go. You should not keep the elders waiting.”
“Are—are you not coming?” Tain asked, his voice thin. Under my hand, his shoulder shook still.
“My mother will be there. I am better at pointing out problems than deciding on messy solutions. I will leave that to you.” Hadrea smiled. “And hold you to account about it afterward.”
“Jov?”
I squeezed his arm, but let him go. “You go. I need a bit of time to breathe. Start the meeting without me and I’ll join you soon.”
“I must care for my brother,” Hadrea told me. “But I will find you after your meeting?” I nodded, unable to fake a smile, and the three of them left.
* * *
The truth was, I wasn’t sure how to face them all now. It was a time for empathy and diplomacy, and I lacked the capacity for either at the moment. Scrubbed out like an old pot, nothing left inside me but scratches.
Tain would have to explain Aven and Marco’s role in all of this to the others, which was difficult since we still didn’t understand it fully ourselves. Though some of the mercenaries or “travelers” who had helped supply and ignite the rebellion had claimed to be disgruntled soldiers, Aven herself had never openly supported the rebels; she had never had any intention of helping them sack the city. She had simply used them for her own ends, not caring how many lives would be lost in the process.
Her cold eyes flashed before me again. I hadn’t asked how my sister had died. What would she have told me? I began to pace. My chest burned with the effort of suppressing my imagination. If only I had done things differently. I counted my steps. Mustn’t think of Lini, must focus on the logic, the reasons.
Though I understood why Tain had wanted Aven out of his sight, what I needed was more information from her. Certainly there was bound to be some crooked accounting in the Guild books, and possibly in the Reed family accounts as well, but she wasn’t rich enough to have funded a rebellion on her own. And she had mentioned her “friends”; there were still enemies out there, wealthy ones. I wondered, though, what they had wanted. Aven had hungered for the Chancellery, but thanks perhaps to the beetle-eye she had as much as admitted she had used someone else’s support of the rebellion to achieve her own goals.
I counted steps, following my thoughts around and around, skirting the edges of the painful ones. I needed to wash, and remove the small arsenal of things strapped around my body in preparation for this meeting with Aven: the remains of my poison supplies, the sedatives I’d spent half the night making, even the last of Baina’s explosives. Aven was a warrior, and a cunning, intelligent woman; I had taken no chances. Yet in the end I hadn’t needed much of anything. It felt almost anticlimactic.
My brain wasn’t satisfied it was over. Something was wrong, something was missing. Yes, there were still enemies out there. We would need to have a longer-term strategy for guarding Aven, and some means of determining her loyalists in the army; we would be foolish to assume they had been limited to Marco. Aven had commanded deep loyalty and affection from her troops. Would her loyalists attempt to free her, try something new to destroy us, or simply fade back into the army, hoping never to be exposed?
Somewhere in the distance a faint rumble sounded; I jumped at first, thinking back to the lake, but realized it was more likely thunder. We were due some of our late-summer storms. It still felt odd, unreal, to think of something supernatural having a role in the weather. But no one in this city would be able to ignore the connection anymore, not after yesterday. I pushed back some of the heavy drapery at the edges of the room, letting some sun in, and peered out at the blue sky. No sign of clouds, but there was the thunder again.
I stared blankly at the sky, then started pacing again, trying to capture my disquieting thoughts. If Aven was in the employ of a third party, or at least had been funded by one, what would they do now that she had failed? Perhaps I needed to speak to the mercenaries. Their loyalty was, by definition, for sale, so perhaps we could buy information from them.
The distant boom was constant, now. Not thunder. I looked again out the window and this time saw smoke rising; something was happening in the city. Honor-down, could we not have one day of peace? I started down the hallway and heard a sudden burst of voices within the building—muted, probably from the business wing of the Manor. The meeting must have finished early. But farther along the spiral corridor the voices became clearer and my sense of wrongness intensified. Shouting, people were shouting. Had the meeting gone so badly?
Then I smelled the smoke.
I slowed my pace and softened my footfalls. Smoke in the city, smoke in the Manor. Aven had warned me it wasn’t over. Padding closer, I listened.
“… think because of a few words, that erases the past? I say this city is rotten to the core! Even the Chancellor himself admitted it was built on a lie.” Cheers in response. I didn’t recognize the voice—young, male—but chances were good we were dealing with some of the rebels who’d been shouted down at the lake yesterday. And an enthusiastic crowd of supporters, from the sound of it. “They took everything from us! Now we take everything from them!” This time amidst the cheers came thuds and crashes and the tinkle of breaking glass.
My insides grew cold.
Closer than the shouting I heard panting and footsteps. I ducked into an alcove, holding my breath. One of Tain’s servants ran past, face wet with tears, looking over her shoulder as she ran. “Wait!” I stepped out and she jolted and drew in her breath to scream, but caught it in time with a shaking hand over her mouth.
“Credo,” she whispered. “Credo, they’ve stormed the Manor. They—they’ve barricaded the Council chamber.” She jolted again at another crash and skittered backward. “They’re burning them alive!”
Tain. Salvea. Eliska and Marjeta and the innocent Darfri elders. “They’ve set the Council chamber on fire, and barricaded the door?” Too calm, I was too calm, and it was frightening her even more. She nodded, but took several more rapid steps from me.