“Take and read it?” Teia asked around the folio. So you’re not going to kill me right now?
He grunted and then suddenly tore off her blindfold. Dammit!
Something about how her lips had flared to speak had caught his attention. He dropped the folio, unheeded, and held her chin with his left hand. He was fixated. She opened her mouth, docile, and he slid a finger around her teeth, one at a time, his thumb testing each one’s edge.
The thought of biting him barely even flickered at the periphery of her mind, and then guttered out in the wind of fear.
He was transfixed. Lost, like a ratweed addict suffering withdrawals who catches a whiff of that poison he calls his love and salvation.
Murder Sharp never so much as glanced at her eyes. Teia should have drafted then and struck him down, but she didn’t dare.
He leaned close, drawing out his own handkerchief and wiping away the blood carefully.
She should headbutt him in the face. Smash his nose and blind him. No one leaned forward after you broke their nose. He’d throw himself back, and she’d have a few moments to . . .
But she couldn’t. Teia’s nerve failed, and she was just a small girl, weak, utterly in the power of a larger man who was dripping with malice.
The expression on Sharp’s face shifted, though, to the rapt concentration of a professional, intent yet dispassionately weighing the merits and demerits of her teeth against some Form of perfection he carried in his mind.
But his hunger wasn’t gone. It merely stood patient, like a dog salivating at the door, tail wagging, knowing it would soon be fed.
Having somehow rejected her upper teeth as unworthy of further examination, he leaned over her to inspect the inner faces of her lower teeth.
He’d done this before, for Orholam’s sake. Did he not remember?
She couldn’t forget.
A stream of drool dribbled from the corner of his mouth. She flinched hard, blinking, near gagging.
Murder released her jaw. He stepped back, and dabbed at the slobber on his chin. He seemed suddenly embarrassed, like a man caught with an erection straining his trousers at an inopportune moment.
“What’d you say?” he asked. He was fully in control of himself now. Any opportunity she’d had, she’d squandered.
For a moment, to her shame, she couldn’t even remember. Here was her chance to get some initiative back, and she couldn’ t—“You want me to read it?” she blurted.
“Read?”
“The folio,” she said.
When he spoke again, his voice was old, as if regret had lifted a shovelful of the barren earth of his life, revealing a thick, gritty gray layer in the clay that betrayed an anger vast but long extinguished, as if its fires had consumed a forest of beliefs, trees roaring into red flight with sparks flung from their wingtips until every living thing traded green for red as Teia did, and lost all color as Teia’s life had, and then embers fell from the sky like defiled gray snow, and even that cooled to ashes, and the ash had aged to soil.
“You’re like me, Adrasteia, me in a shitty tin mirror anyway,” he said, grim, lifeless. “Not as strong, not as fast, not as good a drafter. But we’re both paryl drafters, sent as spies, as infiltrators to uproot the Broken Eye once and for all—that’s what my Prism told me. Sayid Talim said my gift made me the only person who could do what had to be done. That I could end centuries of trouble. Surely saving untold numbers of lives was worth everything bad I had to do to get to where I could do what had to be done, right? Whenever I was troubled by the people I had to kill, he said I should think that I was saving a hundred in the long run for each one I killed now. He said it was war. Said we’ve been at war with them since the beginning. He said in war, if you can trade one life for a hundred, you have to take that choice every time.
“He was convincing himself more than me, I think.
“I didn’t want to do it. I was too scared, too certain my nerve would fail me when it came time to kill some innocent. He said to let the blood be on his head, not mine. And then this man who pretended to be such a hard cold bastard, while he secretly fretted and drank himself to death, he told me he wasn’t giving me a choice. He said it was war, and this was an order.”
It was different, a little, but too much of it was eerily familiar.
Karris had given Teia that speech. And Karris had trembled in her chambers like a hypocrite—afterward—but before the crowds, she strutted with her back straight, as if she were Confidence made flesh.
“He told me that no one must know, because anyone could be a spy,” Sharp said. His voice was tinged with bitter amusement. “He would tell no one and I couldn’t, either. He said that if I were caught or even too close to getting caught, I should kill myself before the Order could find out too much, or trace my infiltration to him. He said in that event, he would personally beseech Orholam for forgiveness for my suicide, and for any . . . you know, lingering guilt I might so wrongly feel for all the murders.” He sneered the last line, finally finding his anger’s heat once more.
“What happened?” Teia asked softly.
“His nerves failed, or someone got to him, but the Blackguard imprisoned him quietly, saying he was ill. Everyone used to know what that meant. He was quietly wheeled from his chambers to the top of his tower to do the balancing every month. The Blackguard was a much larger force then, and it was impossible for me to get to him. I didn’t have my own cloak yet, of course. So what happened? I guess nothing happened. He died. No one from the Chromeria ever said a word to me. I had no friends, because how can you have friends when you have a secret like that? How do you keep it secret if anyone’s close enough to you to wonder where you spend so much of your time? Prism Talim had set me to sail in a sea of blood, and I’d lost sight of shore. He was my only anchor, and . . . with that cut loose . . . ? What was I going to do?”
“Join the people you sold your soul to destroy,” Teia said. Obviously.
Murder Sharp scanned her face.
T, you moron! Are you trying to die?
“But I guess,” he said, “the real question is what are you going to do?”
“Huh?” she asked.
“They gave you the same assignment, same lies, didn’t they? Gavin or Andross or Orea or Karris. One of them.”
She gulped. If he asked her now who it was, what did she say?
He really didn’t know?
“No, you don’t need to tell me. I see the horror on your face.”
She couldn’t even understand what he meant for a moment. Oh, the horror that she’d heard the same lies, not horror at one of the names. She hadn’t given Karris away.
Not yet.
“Who knows?” Sharp said. “Maybe you’ll go left where I went right. It’d figure, huh? That’s what mirror images do. Always confused me how that works.”
Teia could say nothing.
“Never mind. The Old Man came to me after Talim died. Bastard didn’t even leave last instructions for me in our dead drop. But no one signaled me, either, so I knew he’d kept my existence secret to the grave. Or forgotten me. What did it matter, then? No one was coming for me. No one saw me. No one had heard about me. No one cared. No one was going to save me. The Old Man didn’t know about my mission, either. I was still safe. As safe as a spy gets when they’re trying to do what we do, anyway, right? He said he wanted to trust me, but he didn’t.”