children whispered to one another at bedtime, no subterranean horrors came crawling out from beneath. The prison chamber was, like the rest of the quarters at Jadaren Hold, hewn out of the living rock. The walls down here were rough, not smooth and finished, and the room was ten paces wide in either direction.
A woman sat against the wall, her hair hanging over her face, her hands folded on her tattered skirt. From a small subchamber to the side came a smell that showed it served as a privy.
Lakini stood in the middle of the room, waiting for Kestrel to notice her. When the woman made no movement, she finally spoke.
“Kestrel.”
Kestrel looked up. Lakini started in shock. Kestrel’s gentle brown eyes looked at her from a ruined face that was torn all over with scratches and gouges. In the witchlight that hung from the ceiling, she could see that her arms were similarly marked.
Lakini felt a flare of anger. No prisoner, no matter his or her sins, should be treated like this. It would be better to kill the individual and have it over.
Then she saw Kestrel’s nails, broken and stained, and the dark semicircles of dried blood and tissue beneath the nails. She had done it to herself.
“Have you come to kill me?” croaked Kestrel hoarsely.
“No,” said Lakini, and crouched down so the woman wouldn’t have to strain her neck looking up.
“Why don’t you kill me, Lakini? I should have died.
“Who?”
“The woman who did it. Who opened the wards, who took the Key, who killed”-she swallowed painfully-“who murdered my children. She was in me, so how else could you kill her but by killing me?”
Lakini crossed her legs in the posture of meditation. “Can you tell me what happened?”
There was another long pause, while Kestrel looked down, rocking back and forth slightly. The silence stretched out, and Lakini waited patiently, without moving a muscle.
“It was as if I were imprisoned in a glass chamber, while an alien creature possessed my body,” Kestrel began, her red-rimmed eyes staring at the wall past Lakini’s shoulder as if she saw the dreadful scene reenacted as a lantern show. “At first I didn’t understand. I thought it was one of those dreams, those half-awake dreams, where you lie paralyzed while shadowy figures creep about the room. But I realized I was watching myself, my own body, from a place just outside of it. I couldn’t stop it. But I could see everything. I-” Kestrel stopped and shook her head as if to clear it. “It was a gift from my uncle Sanwar, that knife. He was so very angry about my marriage. He’s one of those Beguines who hate anything to do with the Jadarens. But for my birthday this year, he sent me a box. It was a puzzle box, he said, and I’d have to figure out the solution-or smash it open. I laughed, and promised him I’d never break it apart.”
Kestrel looked at Lakini suddenly, hard, the intensity of her gaze like a blow.
“Where were you? You had sworn to protect me, and you left me helpless. Against
“I am sorry,” said the deva, and meant it. Sorry for that. Sorry for Jonhan Smith. Even sorry for lying to Lusk.
“The knife was in the box,” said Kestrel. “Why would Uncle Sanwar send me a box?”
“The Key,” continued Kestrel. “Something told me to find and take the Key, and give it to the other, the deva with the tiger stripes. Lusk. But I didn’t, did I?” Her ravaged, bloody face looked suddenly panicked. “Where’s the Key? Do you know? I mustn’t lose it. Niema told me, before she died, that I must know where it was, always.”
“It’s safe,” Lakini told her. “You gave it to me.”
Kestrel shut her eyes.
“I remember you there, and giving you the Key. And then I was very tired and just wanted to lie down with Arna. He was very still, and cold, but I lay with him, anyway.”
“Kestrel, you said your uncle Sanwar gave you the knife. Did he give you anything else?”
Kestrel looked puzzled. “No.”
“Anything? Ever? A wedding gift.”
“I remember now. He gave me a charm. A charm against harmful magic. My mother made me promise to wear it always.”
Kestrel looked away. “Uncle Sanwar married my mother, did you know that?”
“Where is the charm?”
Kestrel reached for something at her breast, then screamed.
“It burned,” she said, gasping. “Something searing over my heart, liquid fire. It hurt, but a pain like a hunger, distracting.”
Her torn, bloodstained gown was fastened up the front with simple bone buttons, and she pulled at the closure, tearing two of them away. Beneath the cambric, the smooth skin of her breast was fearsomely scarred. Either glass or metal so hot as to be liquid had poured on her. Embedded in her skin were blue and green fragments of glass. The charm had melted into her as it fulfilled its true, diabolical purpose.
“Sanwar,” said Lakini. “He gave you that and saw that you would wear it always, until it suited his purposes to activate the trigger. He planted you as an innocent weapon in the heart of his enemy’s fastness. But there’s something behind him. He didn’t know it, but he was being used himself, by a being that considers us nothing but puppets. It’s using Lusk, too.”
Kestrel blinked.
“Yes, I know. It was …” She shut her eyes tight like a child trying to remember a lesson. “Fandour.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t know. It’s a name that’s come to me, an echo from the magic of the Key. I know it sounds strange, but I don’t think that even the Key knows who Fandour is.”
The chain around Lakini’s neck stirred and unwound from her. Lakini grabbed at it, but it dodged through her fingers, stretching still thinner as it went. Completely animate now, it landed on the stone floor and wound its way to Kestrel’s feet. By the time it reached her, it had thinned to the diameter of a bowstring, and the links were gone. It was as if a child had taken a figure made of soft clay and rolled it thinner and thinner between his palms, until it had lost all shape and feature. The three red gems along its length winked dully in the grass, spaced unevenly.
The Rhythanko strand, no longer any kind of bracelet or armband, coiled around Kestrel’s ankle and ascended whip-quick up her body, beneath her shift, and emerged at the neck. Kestrel smiled at Lakini, her thin face resembling a death mask. The now-threadlike strands of the Rhythanko nosed at the raw skin around the base of her neck.
To the deva’s horror, the gem-studded thread reared back and stabbed into one of the wounds Kestrel had carved into her flesh. She reached out and tried to grab it, but Kestrel pushed her away, staggering back against the wall.
“It will kill you, Kestrel!” Lakini lunged toward Kestrel again, with the vague thought of throwing her down underfoot and winding the cursed threads inch by inch out of her body.
“It’s not killing me,” Kestrel gasped, wrapping her arms around her body. “It’s becoming a part of me.”
She threw her head back, as if in pleasure, as the last of the Rhythanko and the third gem forced its way into her body. She stretched out her arms. Lakini could see the tiny threads writhing under the skin of her neck, shoulders, and arms, burrowing like worms, and leaving bruised flesh in their wake.
Kestrel relaxed and lifted her arm, watching the Rhythanko move under the dead white, blue-veined skin of her forearm, marred by the scratches she had inflicted and the pool of red and purple-brown where the insistent metal threads were tearing the fascia. She lifted her head and smiled at Lakini with her hollowed eyes. The deva flexed her hands, feeling helpless. She couldn’t get the Rhythanko out without tearing off Kestrel’s skin.
“They can’t take it now,” said Kestrel. “Not without ripping me apart.” Her gouged face looked lost again. “Do I still have a daughter?”
“Yes,” said Lakini.
“Sometimes I think I killed them all. Lakini?”
“Yes?”
“Have you ever killed the innocent?”
