intended. She blunted the effect with softer words. “He’s a strong man, even for one late in his years.”
Stepping away, Delia stood with her arms crossed over her chest-not a stern pose, but more like she was hugging herself in a measure of reassurance. Kathryn studied her askance. There was a puffiness to her eyelids. She had been crying. Small lines marred a smooth brow. Still in this moment, Kathryn suddenly recognized the youth behind the worry. She had to remind herself that Delia was a full decade younger. Eternally serious, seldom smiling, she had always struck Kathryn as older in years.
But not now.
The girl shone behind the woman, worn through by grief and worry.
Delia caught Kathryn staring, with a flick of her eyes toward Kathryn, then down to the floor. A fleeting glimpse of Delia’s guilt.
For some reason, this only piqued Kathryn’s irritation again, setting her lips into hard lines. She fought against it, remembering the stolen kiss atop Stormwatch. There was no true blame here. She knew better than to fault the other woman. The man was equally to blame for any broken vows. And besides, what vows remained between Tylar and Kathryn? Whatever had once been sworn and promised had been broken into so many pieces as to be all but unrecognizable.
A groan from the bed returned Kathryn’s attention to the greater threat, reminding her of her responsibility, to Lorr, to everyone in Tashijan. Her face heated slightly, shamed at the momentary lapse into childish resentments. She was not a young girl to moon over lost love. Especially when all of Myrillia was threatened.
Lorr stirred on the sheets. His eyelids fluttered weakly open despite the squint of pain in his face.
“He wakes,” Healer Fennis said.
The woman glanced back at her husband. “We should draught him while we can. Willow bark and nettle wine.” She waved toward a side table.
The other nodded and deftly began working on an elixir.
“Two drops of poppy oil,” she reminded.
“Yes, my dearest.”
Kathryn stepped closer, shadowed by Delia. “Can you revive him enough to speak? We must-”
“I kin hear you,” Lorr croaked out. He lifted his good arm, but it fell back to the bed. “How can a man sleep with all this babbling?”
“Don’t stir,” Delia warned.
Lorr’s eyes finally focused on the two women. “Such a sight would wake any man…” His attempt at levity fell on worried ears.
Kathryn knelt to bring her face even with his. “Lorr, if you’re able, can you tell us what you saw below Tashijan?”
The false cheer drained from the muscles of his face, tightening his features with a pain beyond his burns. He attempted to rise up on an elbow but was scolded back down to the pillows. He lifted a hand, surprised to find an empty palm.
“Tylar found the diadem,” Kathryn said, reading his worry. “Castellan Mirra’s diadem.”
He nodded and sighed. “I went down that dark stair to lure whatever lurked away from the young ones. A stumbling, broken-stone maze it were down there. Almost got myself nabbed up.”
He coughed hard. Healer Fennis approached with his draught, but Lorr waved him away.
“Then I caught a scent. A familiar enough one. I’d been dredging the sewers looking for it long ’nough, so when it caught up in the back of my blessed nose, tasted on the tongue, I knew it right. I went back to look closer. And there she was among that black clot of shadow, whispering to them.”
Kathryn closed her eyes for a breath. So Lorr hadn’t found Castellan Mirra imprisoned or discovered her dead body. He hadn’t returned with the diadem as proof of either. It was much worse.
“These shadowknights-” she began.
“Not knights. Mayhap once. No longer. Ghawls, she called them. Black ghawls. Black-cursed to the bone.”
Kathryn remembered the stern woman who had been counsel to Ser Henri for many decades. Though hard, she had always been evenhanded and of wise sensibility. Kathryn had wished often of late that she could be half the castellan that the old woman was.
“So Mirra was tainted, too,” she said tiredly. “Cursed like the knights.”
Lorr sighed. “That’s just it.” The tracker’s amber eyes found Kathryn’s. “I smelled no corruption from her. She scented as she did when wrapped up here in her hermitage. But those ghawls…they listened to her, lapping about her like beaten dogs. They were hers. Flesh and bone. I drew closer-too close. They fell out of the shadows around me like scraps of darkness. Only escape was fire and light.”
He fell silent a moment, eyes lost in some unimaginable horror. Kathryn only had to look at his blistered flesh to know the cost of that escape.
He closed his eyes, and Kathryn was glad for it. “I fought through them…” he mumbled. “Grabbed for her throat, but they reached through flames and tore me off. All I could do…I fled…”
Healer Fennis again stepped forward with his draught.
Kathryn rose and backed, but her motion was sensed. Lorr opened his eyes and fixed her with a firm stare.
“She was not tainted…of that I am certain.”
Kathryn nodded and stepped back to allow the healer to minister to Lorr. Lorr sank more deeply into his pillows, as if unburdening himself had finally granted him some measure of peace.
Delia crossed to the other side of the bed. “I’ll stay with him.”
She nodded again, too shaken for words, not trusting her voice. Lorr’s words stayed with her as she headed away. She was not tainted. If the tracker’s senses read true, then what did that portend? Had Castellan Mirra been a willing participant, a member of the Cabal? Had she always been the enemy, hiding behind her ermine cloaks and lined face, at the very pinnacle of Tashijan?
Ice numbed her limbs and coursed through her heart. How many nights had she sat with Mirra, entrusted her with secrets? What about Ser Henri? Had he been duped as well?
Suddenly Kathryn had to reach to a wall to hold herself upright. All she had supposed, all she had believed shifted inside her. It was as if she had slipped through a dark mirror. But which side was she on?
The missing knights…the loss of Perryl…so many certainties and suspicions no longer made sense. She pictured again the slain young knight she had discovered last year, sacrificed in some dark rite. She had believed the Fiery Cross to be to blame, painted Warden Fields with the blackest of brushes. And though the warden lusted for power, Kathryn now knew whose hand truly pulled the dark strings of Tashijan.
Not Argent.
It had been Castellan Mirra all along. She must have purposely laid that false trail, instilling rancor and distrust throughout Tashijan, splitting them from within while crafting her own dark plots beneath their very towers.
Kathryn leaned against the wall, sensing a well of tears rising, a mix of frustration and something that bordered on grief.
Had Henri finally discovered Mirra’s secret? Was that why he had been murdered? It hadn’t been a plot by Argent, as Kathryn had always supposed; now she knew the black truth.
He had died because of trust.
And now all of Tashijan…all of Myrillia…faced the same fate.
“I must have the skull,” Krevan said.
Dart had retreated to her bed in the small garret. The hearth was cold, but Rogger had lit the small lamp on her table. The thief now leaned against the closed door. She stared between Krevan and Tylar, both cloaked, both their faces triple-striped, though neither was a true knight any longer.
What was this about a skull? she wondered.
Tylar frowned at the pirate. “I don’t think this is a time to worry about such a cursed talisman.”
“But it is more than mere bone…more than you could imagine.”
“We know about the trace of seersong. Gerrod has been studying it.”
The pirate’s gaze swept to Dart, then back to Tylar. Dart remembered his earlier words. It concerns your father. Your real father.
