For some reason, she froze. He was dying, she saw. Internally bleeding in half a dozen places, as from a great fall.
His men piled up behind him, unready for the sudden stop.
He sat up, though it was a bad idea in his state, ignoring everything in the world for her. He was like that. A good man, Corvan Danavis.
“Oh, my Aliviana,” he said. “You’re here! You’re alive!”
She looked at him, and she saw instantly what he couldn’t bear to see, and thus, like a human, he did not see: the gulf between them was unbridgeable now.
He seemed to see it in her eyes, though, and then, finally his own eyes took in the superviolet crystal clumps at her joints and hands and by her eyes, and the placid stillness of her face.
He started weeping weakly, horrified. “Oh, my Aliviana, what have they done to you?”
That sparked something in her. Some old defiance. Some old, human outrage. It almost felt good.
“ ‘Done to me’?” she asked. “They did nothing to me. I chose this.”
“Liv. No. My daughter. My darling one. Please. Come back.”
Come back? To what? To being human and frail? To being subservient? No. There was a hierarchy, she saw now. But it was organized by power, not by affection. It had to be.
Nothing else made sense.
Though she couldn’t have said why, with a dismissive flick of her hands, she healed the wounds that would otherwise kill him.
Then she departed, and she thought of Corvan Danavis no more.
Chapter 147
The lock on the door to Andross Guile’s sitting room clicked, and Grinwoody stepped into the darkened room as he had so many thousands of times. He hesitated when he saw Andross sitting in his wing-backed chair.
“Please, sit,” Andross said, lighting a lamp with one finger, gesturing for Grinwoody to sit in the other chair. There was a cocked flintlock pistol on the arm of his own chair. A measure of whiskey was waiting on the table for each of them. Andross had never said ‘please’ to Grinwoody, not in all their years together.
Grinwoody dropped his head, his mouth twitching at a hundred thoughts. Then he took off his servants’ white gloves and tucked them away in a pocket. He sat opposite Andross.
They sat, sipping their whiskey, as if they were two gentlemen enjoying a pleasant summer day rather than mortal enemies whose paths had crossed as a battle wound down.
“Smoke, Lord Anazâr?” Andross asked.
“Please.”
They smoked as a fleet and a city burned, as sea demons tore through the remaining bane and devoured the wights thrown into the water and the Wight King’s fleet dissolved into chaos.
“It was an excellent gambit,” Andross said. He didn’t have to say that he meant Grinwoody’s long betrayal, not his failed poisoning attempt. “Not only well conceived but also flawlessly executed. Breathtaking daring wedded to such patience? Few would be capable of it. To sublimate one’s ego for so long? To become a slave? Astounding.”
“Thank you. I learned from the best.”
Andross inclined his head.
“So many temptations, you know?” Grinwoody said. “To step free of this garb, this face, these servile manners. Just once, not in front of a few subordinates, but to actually take my rightful place among equals.”
“To be fully yourself,” Andross said.
“Yes! There’s something so grating about the world thinking less of you than you know yourself to be.”
“Your Braxians put on masks once every few months, but for you, those holy days were the only time you got to take your mask off.”
“Perhaps just a different mask,” Grinwoody said, pensive.
“Lonely,” Andross said, looking not at him perhaps but at his own reflection in the window.
After a pause, Grinwoody smirked. “Me, too.”
“The Old Man of the Desert,” Andross mused. “I’ve always liked that.”
Grinwoody shook his head. “Your nightly bitter-almond tea was for mithridatism? That was . . . unexpected.”
“Oh, I know. You might’ve chosen any of the dozens of poisons it won’t work for. What can I say? The idea appealed to me when I was young and still romantic.”
“Why did you keep it up?”
“Honestly? It was a convenient way to test new help. I’d tell them not to touch my special liquor. If they got deathly ill shortly later, I’d sell them immediately.”
“I don’t know whether I should be angry at you that you’re so lucky or at my own error, or if I should be impressed that you kept the ingredients secret even from me for all these years. So why is it instead that I’m hurt that you didn’t trust me enough to tell me?”
“It’s a hell of a thing,” Andross said.
“What? All your secrets? My infiltration? Trying not to make a single mistake, knowing it will get you killed, against an enemy who can make a hundred and never lose?”
“Betrayal,” Andross said quietly.
“You goddam Guiles. It’s not even fair, opposing you.”
“You chose to be in opposition. You might have done otherwise.”
“No, I think not,” Grinwoody said.
“How’d you do it?”
“Which part?” Grinwoody asked.
“The hardest part. Getting me to buy you of my own accord.”
“You actually weren’t the target, oddly enough. You were my second failed attempt. I was trying to get purchased by Ulbear Rathcore. He seemed more likely to go far than you did.”
“In a kinder world,” Andross said. He sipped. “But . . . a slave?”
“Impossible to keep many secrets from your slaves.”
“And if I were terribly abusive, what? You had a magistrate standing by? Witnesses who would swear you’d been enslaved illegally? That sort of thing?”
“Naturally,” Grinwoody said. “I almost called on him a dozen times that first year. I did not like taking orders. Caused me quite some panic when he died a decade later. Then I realized I had assassins at my command. Getting a magistrate to authenticate papers wasn’t going to be any problem. Now, your turn. Who was your assassin? Everyone drank the bloodwine. I nearly drank it myself. I usually do. You almost got me—but I had too much to do in the morning, so for the first time in many years I abstained. But no one else did. I have spotters to watch for such things. The only thing I can figure is that your poisoner must have drunk the lacrimae sanguinis, too. Who was it?”
Andross shrugged.
“There are only five people it could be,” Grinwoody insisted. “And they’re all dead. It was one of my high priests, wasn’t it? Atevia Zelorn?”
“It actually wasn’t my doing,” Andross said.
Grinwoody almost dropped his zigarro. “You can’t be serious. All this time playing against you, and I’m undone . . . by some side player? Who?”
“Karris, I think,” Andross said.
“Little Karris? Karris killed four hundred and thirty people?” Grinwoody sat back. “And here I thought that Iron White business was a pretention to impress the small folk.”
“Then she became what she pretended,” Andross said.
“Perhaps so.” Grinwoody looked at his empty glass. He set down his zigarro, and glanced at the pistol. “But I did not.”