The Providence of Fire (41 page)

“Where are Rampuri and Ekhard?”

Kaden shook his head. “I am alone.”

“Good,” Kiel murmured after a moment. “You understood. You trusted me.”

“No,” Kaden cut in. “I do not trust you.”

Kiel paused. “And yet you are here.…”

“Because I was taught to look before judging. To listen.”

The prisoner made a sound that Kaden recognized, after a moment, as a chuckle. “I'm glad to learn that the Shin are still so rigorous. And Scial Nin? Is he still the abbot?”

“Scial Nin…” Kaden began, then paused. The fact that Kaden needed him, that they shared the same foe, didn't make the Csestriim any less dangerous. Kaden needed answers to his questions, not to spend time spinning yarns about a life long left behind.

“You know a way out?” Kaden asked.

Kiel nodded.

“How? Where?”

The Csestriim shook his head slowly. “Opening this door would be a generous gesture.”

“I'm not here to be generous,” Kaden said.

“Then perhaps you should not be here at all,” the man said. “The Malkeenians I knew understood the value of generosity. Of trust. Of mutual support.”

Kaden stared, dazed. “What Malkeenians?” He forced his heart to keep the same steady time, his lungs to rise and fall in deep, measured breaths.

“Your father, for one.”

Kaden shook his head. “Tan told me you would lie.”

Kiel raised an eyebrow. “As with all zealots, Rampuri Tan's zeal distorts his vision of the world. I have given him no reason to distrust me.”

“I've
seen
the reason,” Kaden said. “I've been to Assare, to the orphanage where the bones are piled up like wood.”

“Ah, Assare,” Kiel said, blowing out a long, slow breath. “What a mistake that was.”

“A
mistake
?” Kaden asked. “You murdered hundreds of children, an entire city of people, and it was a mistake?”

“I was not there,” Kiel replied, “but yes, I call it a mistake. How would you term it?”

Kaden searched for the word. “A massacre.” He shook his head. “An abomination.”

“Abomination,” Kiel said slowly, as though tasting the sounds. “It seems as though Scial Nin and his monks did not succeed with you. Not completely. Although,” he said, spreading his hands, “you passed the
kenta
to come here.”

Kaden nodded, realizing only as he did so that the statement was a trap, a trick. Kiel hadn't known how he arrived until Kaden himself nodded. Irritation pricked at him like a bluethorn.

“You said you knew my father,” Kaden said, trying to return the conversation to safer ground.

The Csestriim nodded. “We were … not friends, but something analogous.”

“Prove it.”

Kiel considered him awhile. “That will be difficult. You've been with the Shin since you were a child.”

“I remember him well enough,” Kaden said, suddenly resentful of the idea that this inhuman creature claimed to know Sanlitun better than he had himself.

“All right then,” Kiel said. “Do you remember what he used to say about ruling his empire?
The strongest leader is the one who does least.
”

Kaden had heard his father voice that idea or something similar dozens of times, but, after a moment, he shook his head. “All that shows is that you were in the Dawn Palace. Or that you knew someone who knew someone in the Dawn Palace.”

Kiel cocked his head to the side. “Fair enough. How about the formation that he kept on the
ko
board in his study whenever he wasn't playing. The Fool's Fortress.”

Kaden's mind filled with the tiny cluster of stones.

“He kept it there,” Kiel went on, “to remind him of the weakness built into any perception of strength, to remind him that confidence sows the seeds of its own destruction.”

“I never heard him say that,” Kaden said.

“You never heard him say a lot of things,” Kiel replied. “You couldn't have been more than ten when he sent you away.”

“It still doesn't prove anything, doesn't prove that he knew you, that he trusted you.”

For a long time the prisoner remained silent, staring out through the bars of the cage at a life Kaden could neither see nor comprehend. Finally, he focused on Kaden once more, a smile tugging the corners of his mouth.

“Your leg,” he said, “there is a small mark shaped like a crescent moon on the inside of your right thigh.”

Kaden resisted the urge to reach down and touch the small, dark spot.

“How do you know that?”

“I was there,” the prisoner replied. “At your birth. You burst from between your mother's thighs with plenty of vigor, but for a long time you were silent—you didn't cry, didn't scream, just stared at the world around you with those burning eyes.” He shook his head at the memory. “The midwives were terrified that you were going to die, but your father calmed them. ‘This child understands the road he must travel. He is already practicing silence.' And, in time, you began to cry in the way of all human children.”

Kaden stared, dumbfounded. He had never heard the story, not from his parents or his sister. Certainly not from the Shin. He had no way of knowing if it were true, but he did bear the crescent mark on his thigh. All his life it had been there.

“Why were you at the birth?”

“As historian,” Kiel replied. “It is what I do, what I am for. It is how I came to know your father in the first place.”

Kaden tried to make sense of the claim. All he had heard of the Csestriim involved war and slaughter, with a few vague references to their cities. “You were a historian?” he asked. “A Csestriim historian?”

Kiel nodded. “Your language is imprecise, but I believe you would say
The
Historian. I chronicled my people's age-long war with the Nevariim, then the war with your kind. I was there for the reign of the Atmani—both the brilliant beginning and the tragic end. And I've been there for the centuries during which your own family has ruled.”

For a while Kaden just stared, then shook his head. “Still not good enough. There must have been half a dozen people at my birth.”

“There were eight,” Kiel said.

“Any one of them could have spread the story of the mark on my leg.”

The prisoner shook his head quietly. “At some point, Kaden, you must trust. It is this ability that the Ishien have lost. You must have realized already that they are nothing like the monks among whom you were raised. They found a different path to the blankness, one that has broken them. We showed them how, of course, inadvertently, when this was still a prison and we were still testing your people. We showed them how, but they perfected the technique.”

Kaden's memory filled with Trant's account, the tale of men gouging eyes, cutting off fingers, ripping out teeth, all in the awful cold and darkness, all to achieve their twisted version of the
vaniate
. This was the place to which he had dragged Triste. The horror of it settled on him like ice while a distant part of his mind, one untouched by either Kiel or the Ishien, continued to count, measuring out the heartbeats, cataloging them, keeping the dark passage of time.

“Your way out,” Kaden said. “Can we take Triste?”

Kiel hesitated, then nodded. “If you can break her free. And me.”

Kaden took a deep breath and ordered his thoughts while the Csestriim watched, silent, through the thin slot in the door.

“And how do I do that?” Kaden asked finally.

“The guard has the key. You start by killing him.”

 

20

The heavy cloud shoved up out of the south, blackening the sky over the lake, hazing the horizon. A few small, broad-beamed lake boats raced in front of it, heeled over, sails filled with the wind, canvas bright with the lingering light. Fishermen, probably, trying to get back to port before the rain. Trying and failing. One by one, the storm overtook them.

Adare watched it from the deck of the crumbling building, the remnants of a once-proud palace, the cellar of which housed Lehav's war room. She stood in the full light of the sun, watching the storm come on like a wall, blackening the waves, stippling the dark waters. The morning sun shone on her face and shoulders, so warm she felt like she was looking at the painting of a storm, distant wind and fury a matter of clever brushstrokes and perspective. As she stared, though, it drew closer, closer, and then, in a moment, it was upon her, raindrops heavy as coins beating against her scalp, her shoulders, hammering the slate roof behind her. The air went limp and sodden. A wool blanket of muggy cloud blotted out the sun.

It drenched her clothes, whipped Adare's sodden hair against her cheeks, but the storm was still easier to face than what waited inside. She watched the lightning lance down, forking out in jagged inverted trunks to strike the waves, wondering for the hundredth time if there was a way out. Cloth clung to her skin. She started to shiver. If there was a way to avoid the killing to come, she couldn't see it.

They might be guilty,
she told herself, trying out the tired line once more.
They might be in league with il Tornja
. The words, words she'd been repeating all night long like a fragment of prayer, failed to convince. With a sick slosh in her stomach, she turned from the roiling darkness of the storm to the still, vacant darkness inside the building.

Her captured Aedolians were in the same building, although the Sons of Flame had them chained and locked in a deep basement. For two days, Adare had been forbidden to speak with them. She had railed against the restriction, but the horrible secret truth was that beneath the fury and indignation, she was relieved at the enforced separation. If she wasn't allowed to see the Aedolians, she wouldn't have to witness her own deceit in their eyes, wouldn't have to tell them what her allegiance with the Sons of Flame had cost. Wouldn't have to tell them that they would be the ones to pay. In the end, however, her own objections caught up with her. Just that morning, Lehav had agreed to let her see the two men. Adare wanted to vomit.

The commander of the Sons of Flame met her on the rain-soaked balcony, glanced out at the storm, then gestured her inside.

“It's time,” he said, when she stepped through the door. “Ivar will show you to their cell.”

She nodded, voiceless.

Lehav considered her for a moment. “A piece of advice,” he said finally.

Adare nodded uncertainly. She was shivering uncontrollably, the water from her soaked robes puddling on the floor.

“The less you talk,” Lehav said, “the easier it will be for everyone.”

“I owe them…”

“What?” He raised an eyebrow. “An explanation?”

“Yes.”

“You can explain a lot of things to a man. His own death is not one of them.”

*   *   *

Each Aedolian was wrapped in enough chain to hold a small bull, bound at the ankles, wrists, and throat, then locked to iron rings set into the stone. They looked as though they hadn't slept or changed clothes since the day Adare fled. Their long traveling cloaks, usually so immaculate, had turned brown with kicked-up dust and mud. Weeks of hard travel had scraped away any spare flesh, leaving their cheeks hollow, eyes sunken in their sockets. Birch's golden mane had gone brown and stringy, and Fulton must have lost twenty pounds. The room stank of spoiled food and rot. A small puddle that might have been groundwater or urine had collected in a lower corner of the chamber.

Birch blinked at the sudden light, then twisted against his chains to get a better look.

He managed an awkward nod.

“My lady,” he said after a moment, voice a weak rasp. “The yellow robe suits you. Brings out your eyes.”

And all at once, the grief and confusion that had stalked her for days on silent feet took her by the throat. She stood helplessly as the door swung shut behind her, staring at the two men who had watched over her since she was a child, horrified by what Lehav had done to them.
No,
a grim voice reminded her,
what
you
did to them
. Whatever role the Sons of Flame had played, it was Adare herself that had brought the two men to Olon. Tears mixed with rain on her cheeks.

“My lady,” Fulton began, then broke off with a hacking cough, body shuddering. When the fit passed, he spat onto the floor: phlegm or blood, it was hard to tell in the lamplight. “Pardon, my lady,” he said, “but just what in the sweet name of Intarra is going on?”

She had hoped, even prayed—though she was not given to prayer—that the two Aedolians were in league with il Tornja; it would be so much easier to see traitors fed to the flames. Facing them, however, the notion seemed ludicrous, petty, stupid. They weren't the
kenarang
's men, they were
her
men. Her guards. A part of her had known that even when she fled from them in the plaza by the Basin.

“You're not part of it,” she said, shaking her head hopelessly, voice little more than a whisper.

“Part of
what,
my lady?” Fulton demanded. “Are you in danger?”

It all spilled out then, il Tornja's treachery, Adare's terrified flight, her need for an alliance with the Sons of Light. She crossed to them as she spoke, tugging futilely at the chains in an effort to make them more comfortable.

“You should have told us,” Fulton said, when it was all finished, shaking his head.

“I know,” Adare said, slumping to the ground, the life vanished from her legs. “I know. I wasn't sure who to trust.”

“Although,” Birch said, raising his eyebrows weakly, “I've always wanted to visit Olon in the summer.”

“What now?” Fulton asked.

Adare trembled. The truth was a rusted dagger, but she owed them the truth. “Lehav, Ameredad—it's the same guy—he wants you dead. Justice for the Sons you killed trying to rescue me.”