Sworn in Steel (36 page)

I could fix that with one quick trip to the stables, but I knew better than to offer. Not now. Not yet.

“Fowler knows you’re here?” I said. Above me, I could hear the rafters creak as the inn settled in for the day’s heat.

“She wouldn’t be much of an Oak Mistress if she didn’t.”

“And she didn’t tell me, why?”

Degan shrugged and turned back to his plate, pausing to brush a small fall of dust from his knee. “You’d have to a—”

“Wait,” I said. I looked up at the ceiling. Another creak, another fall of dust.

Dammit.

“Fowler!” I shouted. “Get your ass out of the attic and stop listening in!”

Silence.

“Angels help me,” I said, “I’ll start poking holes through the ceiling with my sword if you don’t move.”

More silence.

“Now, Fowler.”

Fowler’s voice came drifting down from somewhere above Degan. “You couldn’t reach the ceiling if you tried.”

I began to clear my steel, making sure to scrape the blade along the lip of the scabbard. “You want to risk it?”

Another pause, then, “Fine!” The ceiling creaked and rained small falls of dust as she made her way among the rafters.

I waited until the last drift of plaster had settled to the floor before I turned my attention away from the ceiling and to the hallway. “And if there’s anyone else listening at
doors,” I yelled, “I’ll find out and gut you as well!”

Doors began opening on my right and left, releasing actors in various states of dress, embarrassment, and amusement. They muttered and joked their way down the stairs, with Degan gathering at
least a few winks from the female members of the troupe along the way.

When the hallway was empty, I looked back toward Degan. There was a reluctant smile on his face. “It can never be easy with you, can it?” he said.

“Why didn’t Fowler tell me?” I said again.

Degan’s smile left altogether. “Because I asked her not to.”

I nodded: I could see that. It didn’t mean I liked it, but I could understand it. Even Fowler didn’t know all of what had fallen out between Degan and me, but she knew enough to
respect Degan’s wishes when it came to me.

“All right,” I said. I walked the rest of the way down the hall and stopped beside Degan. “Congratulations, you’ve caught me by surprise and put me off balance: What
next?”

“Normally, I’d press the advantage and thrust home as soon as I was able, but this isn’t that kind of a conversation.”

“What kind is it?” I said.

“It’s the kind where I tell you to get the hell out of Djan and mind your own business.”

“And how well do you think that’s going to work?”

Degan set his plate on the floor and stood up. “Better than you seem to.”

I stared up at him. “I think you may be misjudging the nature of this conversation,” I said.

Degan clenched his jaw, along with his fists, and ran a hard eye over me. It was a look I’d seen before: the look of a degan weighing not just options, but his points of attack, the
geometry of the conflict, the measure of his opponent. It was a cold, bloodless look, and one I wasn’t used to being on the receiving end of. It scared the hell out of me.

Then he turned away and let out a sigh. I almost joined him.

“Why Djan?” he said, not looking back. “Why now?”

“Why the hell do you think?” I said.

“Well, I’m fairly certain it’s not to keep your Oath,” he said. “We both know better than to expect that.”

I stared at his back. I’d expected as much—and, honestly, deserved as much—but it still stung. No, it did more than that: a hell of a lot more.

“I explained that,” I said.

“I recall,” said Degan, “although it was hard to grasp all the subtleties of your argument: You’d just clipped me in the back of the head with a glimmered rope, after
all, and my hair was smoldering. That can be a bit distracting. Something about your ass and the empire, wasn’t it?”

“You know why I did what I did,” I said. “It wasn’t just about me or you or the empire or that damn journal: It was about Christiana and Kells and the rest of the Kin. It
was about keeping them all alive
despite
the emperor and Shadow, about keeping my hands on the one thing that gave me any hope of bringing them out of that mess in one piece.”

“I know,” said Degan.

“And?”

“And at first, I thought your argument was enough, that it could be enough to let me let it go,” said Degan. He turned back to face me, and his eyes were hard: hard like a
soldier’s, hard like a broken promise, hard like the truth. “But I was wrong.”

“Wrong?” I said, my guilt flaring, turning into anger. “Wrong how? Wrong in that you didn’t leave me a good choice? Wrong in that I didn’t know what the hell was
going on with you and your Order until it was too late? Wrong in that I not only bent over backward to cover your involvement, but lied to your ‘brothers’ when they came asking
questions with their fists?” I stepped forward, putting myself inches from Degan. “What part of that is so fucking ‘wrong’ that you can’t see past what either of
us—what
both
of us—did?”

“The part,” said Degan, glaring down at me, “where only one of us kept his word.”

I held my ground under his gaze, even though part of me wanted to throw pride and pretense aside and ask for forgiveness, to say, fuck it, we both were wrong, let’s start over. But there
was too much history between us to start fresh, just as there was too much spine in either of us to bend. Both of our trades had trained us to equate giving ground with weakness, and neither of us
was in the habit of appearing weak.

This was going to be even harder than I’d expected, for any number of reasons.

“You could have told me about the Oath,” I said. “Told me that by taking it, you were going against the laws of your Order. If I’d known what it meant for
you—”

“Angels!” said Degan. “It’s not about the Oath! Don’t you understand that? If this were only about you breaking your word to a degan, I might be able to look past
it, but it isn’t. It’s about you breaking your word to
me
. I took your Oath because of who we were, Drothe, because I didn’t want to see you cut down by Iron or Solitude
or anyone else. Even if I ended up going against the Order, I knew I’d be doing it for two good reasons: you, and my duty to the empire. If everything else collapsed, I’d still be able
to hold on to those things.

“But then you swung your rope, and I fell, and both promises were broken.” Degan sighed and leaned his head back against the wall. “My failure is for me to bear, but I
won’t carry yours as well: That’s your concern. Nor am I going to absolve you. You have to realize that knowing the ‘why’ behind something isn’t always enough,
especially when it comes to things like this. Being able to talk your way out of a dilemma doesn’t mean it goes away.”

He reached down to let his hand rest on his sword guard, then hesitated, steel untouched. “I have to remind myself what I am every day now,” he said, looking down as his fingers
hovered over the chain-wrapped handle. “Every time I buckle this on in the morning, every time I take it off at night, every time my hand brushes against the guard, I stop and realize
I’m no longer a degan. I remember that my word doesn’t carry any more weight than a mercenary’s, that my blade doesn’t serve any higher purpose than the one it’s been
paid to enforce. My steel is just steel.” He lowered his hand and looked at me. “All the excuses and reasons in the world aren’t going to change that.”

Just like all my pondering wasn’t going to change my being a Gray Prince, I thought. But that was different: I’d moved up the chain, not been cast from it. I might have lost friends
and my ability to work the street as I once had, but Degan had lost everything that defined him. There was no way I could make a comparison between where he’d ended up and where I
was—there wasn’t any, and I wasn’t going to insult him by trying.

I sighed and sat down in Degan’s chair, suddenly tired. I could feel the spot where Aribah had tapped me on the back of the head starting to throb again, feel the aches and fatigue of
earlier fights begin to reassert themselves. At fault or no, I was still a Gray Prince, and I still had a job to do and people to protect. If I wanted to make my case with Degan, I was going to
need to do it quickly, before my brain decided to follow my body’s slide toward exhaustion.

I looked down at the plate of food on the floor: A leg and thigh of chicken, braised in a reduced wine sauce that smelled of rosemary and tart cherries, sat alongside a small charcoal-roasted
turnip, the outside dark with ash, the inside smooth and buttery to the eye. Degan had hardly touched it, and it looked as if the inn’s cockroaches hadn’t found the bounty yet. My
stomach rumbled. I licked my lips.

Degan sighed. “Help yourself.”

I did. The chicken had cooled and the sauce congealed, but there was an undercurrent of pepper that stood out nicely against the sweet-bitterness of the liquid. The turnip was still warm in the
center, touched with a hint of olive oil, and delicious.

Degan stood, watching and waiting. I knew he was going to start back in the moment I was done, so I decided to strike first.

“You know,” I said, still chewing, “I could always help.”

A harsh bark of a laugh. I winced. “The last thing I need—”

“How long have you been down here?” I said.

Degan frowned. “A little over two months.”

I nodded, scooped the last bit of turnip into my mouth, and wiped my mustache and beard with my other hand. “I’ve been here less than two weeks,” I said. “And in the Old
City maybe that many days. Want to know what I’ve found out in that time?”

“Not really, no.”

“But you get my point?”

“I get it,” said Degan, “and I don’t care. I don’t want your help. What I want is for you to leave.”

“Why?”

“Because what I’m doing down here has nothing to do with you or the Kin, and I don’t want it to have anything to do with you or the Kin. It’s personal.”

I took up the chicken’s thighbone and examined it for any remaining meat. No, I’d picked it clean. Oh well. I put it down on the plate, set the plate on the floor, and stood.

“Fine,” I said.

Degan took a small step back. “Fine? Just like that?”

“Just like that. All I ask is that you answer me one question.”

Degan’s brow furrowed. “All riiight.”

“What’s so damn important about a bunch of ivory and papers that you had to come all the way to el-Qaddice?” I asked.

The question was a gamble. It was one of the few consistent rumors I’d heard about Degan up to this point, but that wasn’t saying much. But I needed something, anything, to catch him
off guard.

Luckily for me, my play worked. Degan’s eyes went wide and, after a moment, he shook his head in disgust. “Damn Noses.”

I suppressed a smile and pressed forward instead, keeping up the assault.

“What are they?” I said. “Relics? Notes? Something you can use to protect yourself from the Order?”
Something that might help me talk you into going back to Ildrecca
with me?

“Something like that.”

“What kind of something?”

Degan shook his head.

“Dammit, Degan, I don’t have time for this!”

“No, you don’t,” he said. “And neither do I.” And he began to turn away.

Crap. I’d been hoping to figure out what Degan was after before I told him why I was here, before I told him there was another degan in el-Qaddice. I hadn’t wanted to admit I’d
come down here for any reason other than our lost friendship. It was stupid, I knew—there was no way to tell him about Wolf’s side of the deal without mentioning the threat to my own
organization—but it made it sound more mercenary than it felt. And the last thing I wanted Degan to think was that I was using him as a means to help myself—again.

Except that I was, to a degree. And I didn’t have much of a choice.

“If your being here is about the Order of the Degans and getting back in,” I said, “I can help.”

“Blackmail won’t work on them, Drothe,” he said as he walked down the hall. “And even you can’t cut a deal with the Order when it comes to fixing what I
did.”

I took a deep breath, let it out, and steadied myself with a hand against the wall.

“I didn’t come down here alone,” I said.

“I don’t care if you tied your sister in a sack and brought her along kicking and screaming, I’m not about to—”

“Silver Degan is here, too,” I said, barely keeping myself from calling him “Wolf.” “We came to el-Qaddice together.”

Degan stopped in his tracks. I saw his hand go to his sword. “Silver’s here?” he said, turning partway around so he could see the entire length of the hallway. He took a small
step backward, putting himself up against the wall. “With you?”

“Not here in the inn, no. And not so much with me as . . . pushing me along.”

Degan shot a sharp look my way. “Pushing how?”

“Blackmail may not work against degans,” I said, “but it operates just fine when it comes to newer Gray Princes.”

Degan lowered his hand and cocked his head. “Silver blackmailed
you
?”

“He set me up as the finger for another Gray Prince’s death, made it look like I dusted the prince when he was under the protection of my peace. It was all just whispers when I left
Ildrecca, but if enough Kin start to believe it, or if Silver decides to up the stakes by laying a few more bodies at my door, all hell will break loose. Nijjan Red Nails has already brushed her
hands of me, and I might’ve lost others in the last month. I don’t know. All I do know is that, if the rumor takes hold, it’s a perfect excuse for a couple of the other Gray
Princes to get rid of me.”

“That’s a bit extreme for Silver, but I suppose I can see him doing it. Especially now.” Degan considered a moment. “And he wanted to use you to find me?”

I nodded. “He says the Order’s falling in on itself since Iron was dusted. From what I can tell, no one is saying directly that you did it, but it’s common knowledge among the
degans. I tried to convince them Shadow killed Iron instead of you, but—”