I had plenty of reason to hate Bron Jadaren and his sniveling nephew on my own, the smug, self-satisfied-”
He bit his lip and stopped, looking up at Kaarl with glittering eyes.
“Here.” He lifted the paper fractionally. “A scribe in Old Nonthal took this down from Ivor Beguine’s son, as the son lay on his deathbed. It tells why his father hated Gareth Jadaren and why he warned his generations against his. There’s a dark secret at the heart of House Jadaren, within that riddled rock they call their home. It explains the protective magic of the Hold. It explains why the alliance will prove disastrous to my niece.”
He let the paper settle back on the table. “They are patient. They’re willing to wait years for their plans to bear fruit, to see a crop from the seeds they’ve planted deep within the bosom of our family. I know of at least one spy that we all trusted with our lives.”
Sanwar smiled as his quick eye caught Kaarl’s shoulder muscles tense and his right hand flex automatically. “Yes, I know you’ve always suspected that Boro Nimor had something to do with the raid on the party to Shadrun, so many years ago. You can speak honestly to me.”
Kaarl took a moment to marshal his thoughts. “He was so insistent I keep to the back,” he said. “And he let the others slop around, out of formation, that distance from the sanctuary. It wasn’t like him. It wasn’t like a man of his experience. It’s always bothered me. It’s not my place to say so. But it did.”
“You’re a Beguine as much as I am,” Sanwar told him. “Wrong side of the blanket or no. You have every right to state your opinion, to me or anyone else, Cousin.”
The captain of the guard bent his head. “Thank you.”
Sanwar studied Kaarl dispassionately, aware it wouldn’t be as easy to trick him as he had tricked Nimor.
“They will attack you as you approach the sanctuary,” he had told him. “Keep the experienced men in the back, with the girls and the wagon. You’ll know them by the green uniforms-Jadaren uniforms.”
Nimor had frowned at that. “I don’t understand.”
Sanwar had sighed internally and put an expression of patient concern on his face. “I know the Jadarens intend something sinister in this so-called alliance. How they’ve convinced my brother baffles me. If he didn’t live so transparent a life, I’d suspect blackmail. I do believe they’ve wrought an undue magical influence upon him, and I have tried to nose it out, to no avail.”
“My lady Kestrel … she has no such concerns?”
Sanwar had bit back an impulse to tell the captain of the guard to concern himself with martial matters and leave the thinking to him. “She obeys her father’s wishes. And the spell might extend to her as well. I would do so, if I had cast such a thing.
“I need to put doubt in my brother’s mind, just to crack the surface of whatever it is they’re doing to him. Just so I can talk some sense into him, and have a chance of his listening.” Sanwar studied Nimor’s face, seeing obstinacy in his lowered brows. Carefully, he composed the tonalities of his voice, pitching his words in such a way as to make everything he said seem eminently reasonable.
“Do you think the Jadarens would be any kinder to my niece than they were to your sister?”
Noting the involuntary widening of the eyes and the clenched muscle at the side of the jaw that betrayed a sudden flare of rage, he adjusted his voice accordingly, making it more insinuating. “Forgive me, my friend. I don’t wish to prod such a painful wound. But you can’t deny that they entangled that poor woman into debt, encouraging bad decision after bad decision, until everything had been stripped from her and she was destroyed.”
In fact, Boro Nimor’s sister had been an extraordinarily unlucky and poor businesswoman, in debt to many before ill health and despair had cut her life short. At the end, the agents of House Jadaren she had cheated had been dunning her, as were half a dozen other merchants.
But Nimor loved his sister and couldn’t bear to believe her lack of business acumen was her own failing. He needed a scapegoat to blame, and Sanwar had long since convinced him that Angharah Nimor was the innocent victim of Jadaren manipulation.
Sanwar chose his words carefully, cajoling the captain into believing that his plan was the only sensible solution.
“If Nicol thinks there’s a chance Jadaren guards would attack Kestrel, he’ll delay the wedding. The more time I have, the better chance I have of convincing him to call the whole thing off.”
Nimor shifted his weight, considering. “I would not like any of my guard to be hurt in this charade. Many of them are young and untried.”
“My men have orders to retreat when you fight back. Make it last a little, though. Enough that your guards see the uniforms.”
“Are you sure of them?”
“I would not risk the safety of my niece. Or that of your guards, either. They’re actors, playing at bandits, no more. I doubt they could hurt any of you if they tried. I would ask that on your end you avoid killing any of them.”
The burly guard had grinned. “I can’t guarantee they’ll escape unscathed.”
Sanwar spread his hands. “What can one do? They’re well paid and take on the risks of their profession. I would appreciate it if you could manage to avoid killing any of them, though. Good actors are hard to find.”
Not a tenday later Boro Nimor’s body lay under a ragged piece of cloth, just outside the sanctuary, apart from the corpses of the ill-fated raiding party. The fabric was tented slightly where the base of the crossbow bolt that had killed the Beguine captain still protruded.
The mountain air had an edge of frost to it, but Sanwar felt his face burn. He was drained from the working that had killed the she-orc, preventing her from betraying him to that damned insidious monk. And more, he was furious that his plan had failed. Not only had those two guardians, unearthly in their strange facial markings and preternatural stillness, interfered with the raid, but Kestrel, ironically enough, had spotted the false uniforms for what they were.
The bandits, under his orders, were to rough up the party, kill the one Beguine besides himself who knew of the plot, and kidnap Kestrel. The survivors were to struggle on to the sanctuary, where they would meet him, fortuitously having arrived early and suspecting foul play. He would feign outrage, take a couple of the surviving guards, and hunt down the bandits and their prey at a prearranged spot, claiming to use a locator spell and Kestrel’s hair, saved for the amulet, to do it. After an impressive display of battle magic, he would rescue his ersatz niece and bring her safe to Shadrun, where she would repeat the bandit’s carefully scripted threats and gloating-all of it implicating House Jadaren. Trust would be shattered, and any proposed alliance between the Houses would be stillborn from the start.
Instead, the wedding seemed more likely than ever to go forward-curse that fresh-faced Jadaren cub’s playing up to Kestrel like that! And the girl fell for it-and Sanwar’s man, the closest creature he had to a friend, was dead for nothing.
He kneeled, the pebbles of the unpaved path biting into his knee, and lifted the cloth away from Nimor’s face. Someone had tried to close his eyes, but the lids weren’t completely shut, and a dull gleam peered from beneath them. A scarlet bubble had dried in the corner of the man’s mouth.
Something about the half-open lips and the arch of the eyebrows spoke of astonishment. Sanwar wondered whether, in his last few seconds of life, Boro Nimor knew that he’d been double-crossed by a man he’d trusted.
From the inception of the plan, Sanwar had regretted, most profoundly, the necessity of eliminating the captain. It would have made him very happy to find a way to allow him to live. But he couldn’t. Nimor would never have betrayed him intentionally, but it would have been too easy for him to let his secret slip when he was in his cups, or talk in his sleep, or have the truth coaxed out of him by a man such as that Diamar. And if that happened, any power Sanwar held within his merchant clan would be gone.
Thank the gods all the bandits were dead, Garush among them, and none could know his secret. Harilpina Andula would suspect, but she had her own interests to protect. He flexed his hand, which was still aching after the working that had blocked the half-orc’s throat. He had feared that one of the queerly marked guardians, the male, had seen him cast the spell, and that perhaps the female had as well. But they said nothing, and he dismissed the thought. He had plenty to worry about without being paranoid.
A hand closed lightly on his shoulder and he stifled a yelp. Looking up, he saw Kestrel standing beside him. A tear sparkled on her cheek.
