reincarnation.”
“You-” Lusk swallowed and looked past her shoulder, at the rough patterns in the bark of the oak, at the ancient letters carved there. “How?” he asked.
“It’s hard to remember everything,” said Lakini. “But I was … scattering, I suppose you’d call it.”
Her voice grew bitter. “You can’t remember, because they take that memory away from you, don’t they? All the memories of living and dying. How it must have maddened them that we remembered enough to come together within each lifetime. How it must have gladdened them that we turned against each other.”
Frowning, Lusk looked into her shattered face, searching it. “Who?” he queried.
“The gods, Lusk, that make us play this game of life and death. When it was time, I told them no. I refused to reincarnate. And since they made me to be reborn, they couldn’t let me die.”
A corner of Lusk’s mouth turned up. “Were they angry?”
She toughed her face again, as if self-conscious. “Yes. They were very angry.”
“Why, Lakini?” His voice was stern. “Why did you defy them?”
“Because I realized you were right.”
Unconsciously his hand brushed the hilt of his own knife. “Are you speaking the truth?” There was a thread of hope in his voice.
“I’ve been well marked for speaking the truth,” she said. “These human families do nothing but sell the same goods back and forth until everyone forgets what they have and buys more. I know now why you were sent here.”
She nodded at the dark stone eminence over his shoulder. “That bracelet. Shadrun needs it, and I know where Kestrel hid it. I saw her. Let me go inside and get it.”
“Where did she hide it?”
She shrugged. “Nowhere original. A box on her dresser. I can find it for you,
He tilted his head, dubious. “How? They’re well organized now, and fortified. And they still have …” He hesitated, then went on. “The bracelet. The Rhythanko, it’s called. It’s the source of the warding. It holds the spells about the place together, lock and key.”
That’s why it was so important to Kestrel, thought Lakini. She was its keeper. She was acutely aware of the slight weight of the Rhythanko about her neck, although it wasn’t moving now. But then, if the Rhythanko
Perhaps some of its Power remained with Kestrel. Whatever the truth of the matter, she had to get inside the Hold, by any means in her power.
Even if it meant lying to another deva.
“They’ll let me in,” she said. “Last they saw, we were going over the side together. Tell your men to fight me, and I’ll break through their line and make for the Hold. They’ll let me in.”
He considered her a long moment.
“Your sword is somewhere up there.” He waved an arm at the top of the Hold. “You have your dagger, but … how will you fight convincingly?”
“I am a deva, and they are but men,” she said. “But tell them not to press too hard. I don’t want to hurt them.”
Lusk grinned then, a sharp-toothed smile.
“My mother? You want to see my mother, who killed my father and my brothers and would have killed me if she could?” Brioni Jadaren demanded.
The surviving daughter of Kestrel and Arna paced the stone floor of the chamber. Lakini had been stunned and amused to find that she had organized the defenses of the Hold the night before, taking advantage of the confusion caused by Lusk’s and her tumbling off the top of the monolith, for despite the wings Lusk had been able to conjure out of thin air, many thought both devas had been killed. Under her command, the Jadaren guards had been able to push back the forces of both the Beguines and Saestra, and although the wards that Lakini now knew the Rhythanko controlled were compromised, much of the magic lingered.
“I do want to see her,” said Lakini calmly. “I didn’t make my way past the Beguine guards for a lark.”
She had learned that a body healed of horrific wounds wasn’t as quick as one newly made, but he had managed to get by five of Kaarl vor Beguine’s best men without lasting injury to either side. And they’d put on a good enough show-eager hands had helped Lakini over the doors into the caverns, and archers had discouraged the Beguines from coming closer.
The girl flashed her an odd look, and Lakini knew it was because of the crazed pattern on her face.
Brioni bit her lip. “You can imagine that it’s not pleasant to know that the woman who gave birth to you is a traitor to the core.”
“I don’t think she was.”
Brioni’s head snapped around at her. “Really? Killing my family and letting the enemy into the heart of our Hold was not the act of a traitor? You have strange ideas, Lakini.”
“I suspect, Brioni, that she was under a spell.”
“How can a spell make you hurt your children? I saw my baby brother. She smothered him in his cradle. She killed his nurse.”
She scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand, a gesture that recalled to Lakini how very young she was. “The men won’t let me see my father or my brothers. I did see the blood.”
“Fifteen years. What spell lets you live with a man fifteen years, and bear children with him, and then slaughter them all one night?”
“A very evil spell,” said Lakini.
Brioni blinked rapidly and looked down. “I’ll let you see her. I’ll take you there myself.”
Lakini nodded and turned to go.
“Wait,” said Brioni, and went to a corner. She lifted a white-wrapped bundle from the floor.
“It’s your sword,” she said. “We found it on the summit, afterward.”
The girl, older than her years, studied Lakini’s shattered face as she nodded her thanks and unwrapped the sword, examining the blade for cracks and the edge for nicks before slinging it into its accustomed place across her back.
“How did you live, Lakini?” Brioni asked finally. “You fell all that way. I saw the two of you, like a ball of fire falling past a window. And the men say you were hurt very badly.”
She studied the bloodstain on Lakini’s shoulder with frank curiosity.
Lakini waited until the girl’s eyes met her own.
“I’m a deva,” she said simply. “It’s not my nature to die.”
She followed Brioni down a series of passages. Now and then they passed an armed guard, each of whom nodded at Brioni and touched his or her forehead. She recognized some of them, and some greeted her by name.
“What’s the deva doing with Mistress Brioni?” she heard one guard say to another, both of them thinking they were too far up the tunnel to be overheard.
“Maybe she’s here to exact divine justice on that filthy bitch,” responded the other guard, with considerable venom.
Lakini’s keen eye caught Brioni shivering.
“Why hasn’t she been killed, Brioni? Emotions are running high.”
Brioni shrugged. “No one understood, at first, that she had let in the attackers and killed my father and my brothers. She was in her bed, lying next to my father. She wouldn’t speak, and we thought she was in shock from what she’d seen. But she had the knife in hand, and she didn’t deny it.”
She had left Lakini at the top of a passage that led down to Kestrel’s prison and a guard, gnarled and taciturn, led her the rest of the way.
They’d put Kestrel in a chamber on the lowest inhabited level of the Hold. There were lower tunnels, carved from the rock when the place was still called the Giant’s Fist, but no one ventured there, and despite the tales the
