Fifth Quarter (15 page)

"I'm sorry." To her surprise, Gyhard actually looked as if he meant it. "I hadn't intended to cause a fight between you."

She raised a hand to both accept his apology and cut off any further discussion. As silence could too easily be broken by dangerous subjects, she asked questions about the meal until they'd emptied every dish on the table. Gyhard was amusing, articulate, and not only knew what they were eating but also how it had been prepared and how it could've been prepared differently. Vree actually found herself laughing at a story of sheep's eyes and Aralt's old chamberlain. When she noticed she was enjoying his company, she almost choked on the guilt.

"I'm afraid I've been monopolizing the conversation," he said as they stood. "So I'll apologize up front. It's been a long time since there's been someone I could be myself with." And then he paused as though he'd just realized what he'd said. He looked almost startled.

Vree rose as well, wishing she hadn't eaten quite so much. An overfull stomach brought with it a dangerous loss of control. "Don't try and convince me you've been living in a tragedy, 'cause I'm not buying."

"I wouldn't dream of it." He inclined his head, as he would to an equal. "We'll be leaving early in the morning. Sleep well."

She watched him pick up a lamp and disappear into his bedroom, strangely unwilling to move until he was out of sight.

A spill of brilliant moonlight lay diagonally across the bed. Beyond it, the room was dark and so quiet she could hear the rustle of the blanket against her body as she breathed. What had awakened her? Slowly, silently, she closed her fingers around the hilt of the dagger lying on the mattress beside her.

Instinct, training—both told her she was no longer alone.

Closer now, almost at the bed. Moving with an assassin's stealth.

Muscles tensed, she waited. Whoever it was, in order to strike a killing blow, would have to bend into the moonlight. When they did, they'd die.

A heartbeat. Another. A shadow at the edge of the illumination.

"Bannon?"

The sudden realization delayed her long enough for him to shove the pillow he carried down over her face. She twisted and fought while her lungs screamed for air and finally got both hands against his chest and pushed with all her remaining strength.

"I didn't mean it." All at once, her legs couldn't hold her and she sank to her knees. "It was a dream. I didn't mean it. I didn't mean it." Her hand came up to clutch the onyx pendant that hung between her breasts. But there was no strength there. This was not a battlefield Jiir ruled.

The door opened, and she whirled to stare into the soft light of a shielded lamp.

"I heard you cry out…" Gyhard's voice trailed off as she turned and laid her head on her knees, exposing the vulnerable curve of her spine.

"Go away." She forced her voice to carry as far as the door. When she heard him leave, when she heard the door close, she started to tremble.

"Vree?"

"I didn't mean it."

Never like that. Never so obvious. Assassins examined their dreams for messages from the goddess, warnings of weaknesses or fears that could rise up to defeat them as they moved alone in the darkness. But to learn that Bannon was her weakness was merely to relearn something she'd known most of her life.

"Slaughter it, Vree, it's perfectly normal for you to want me out of your head. Just don't do it again and stop flogging yourself over it." Bannon, once his terror had calmed, had found his balance with practiced ease. As usual, he'd placed himself at the center of the problem and looked no deeper.

Deeper. Vree had glanced once into the shadowed depths of her heart where dark desire hid and refused to look again.

Gyhard watched the tiny movements of muscles beneath the surprisingly delicate angle of her jaw and found the answer to his question.
So
her sleep is not entirely peaceful
. Somehow he doubted that the lives she'd taken over the years haunted her. "Still sane?"

At noon, they stopped in a small village that seemed to have grown up merely because it was exactly half a day's leisurely travel from Kiaz. Oblivious to Gyhard's indulgent smile and pig noises made by her brother, Vree devoured a bowl of honeyed figs and felt her mood lift a little. Perhaps there'd be a way out after all.

When the sun had moved a safe distance past its zenith, they remounted and continued toward the Capital. The South Road was deserted, and Vree actually found herself relaxing into the movement of the horse. For a glorious moment, they became one creature, not two, and she began to understand what Gyhard saw in this method of transportation.

And then she saw the rider, hidden by a sharp bend in the road until he was too close to avoid.

"What is it?" Gyhard demanded as she stiffened.

"Army courier," Vree snapped, squinting to bring the sunbursts on the flapping pennant into focus. "I can't tell which army."

The eyes under the crested helm flicked toward them as the courier passed, then widened with sudden recognition. "Bannon?"

"Avor," said the Bannon in her head, not the one wrongly identified beside her.

Avor put his heels to his horse just a heartbeat too late.

Gyhard had never seen anyone move so quickly. One moment Vree sat stiffly beside him, the next instant she launched herself from the saddle, slammed into the startled courier and rode him to the ground, landing almost impossibly in a crouch straddling the body.

No, not a body. Not yet. He had the breath knocked out of him by the fall but appeared to be unhurt. Before he could move, a dagger pressed against his throat.

"They think you're dead, both of you. You were killed getting out of Ghoti!" By the time Avor's brain caught up with his mouth, the damage had been done. The information he'd just blurted out had been the only thing keeping him alive. "I won't tell!" His heels dug impotent trenches in the dust.

Vree nodded. "I know."

Avor paled, wet his lips, and somehow found the courage to face the inevitable with dignity. "Don't leave me for the crows," he said softly.

Slitting a throat does not bring instant death. Consciousness can linger as the heart pumps blood out onto the ground and the lungs fill with scarlet froth. The razor edge of Vree's dagger flashed through soft tissue too quickly for pain, found the spine, slipped between two ridges of bone, and ended it. There was, at that moment, no separation between herself and her brother. It made it easier.

"Blood shared, sister-mine."

She felt Gyhard's eyes on her as she stood. "Get the horses." Sheathing her dagger, she bent to drag the body farther off the road.

"What are you going to do?" The curve of her back as she'd bent over the messenger had been almost identical to the curve that haunted him—except this time, there had been nothing at all vulnerable about it.

Vree didn't answer. A grove of trees up ahead would provide both shelter from prying eyes along the road and dirt deep enough to bury Avor and the gear they'd stripped from his horse.

"We leave the mare outside the next village we come to. I'll give good odds that whoever finds it will keep their mouth shut."

"Your commanders will still know he's disappeared."

Vree shrugged. "Nothing to connect him to us." With a silent prayer that the goddess would take the courier into her company, even though he hadn't exactly died in battle, she lifted the onyx pendant over her head and dropped it onto the crimson gap at Avor's throat. Her life had been Bannon and the army. Now there was only Bannon. "And they're not my commanders anymore."

Her hand lifted to where the pendant had hung for so many years. She clutched at nothing, then spread her fingers and began to smooth the grave, blurring the edges into the surrounding dirt.

Working across from her, Gyhard frowned. He would give a great deal to know what Vree and her brother were discussing.

"Why, when as far as he knew he was facing a pair of deserting assassins and had every right—or even obligation under the law—to kill us, didn't our young messenger go for his crossbow?" he asked when they were once again on the road.

Gyhard couldn't quite identify the new tone in her voice. It sounded almost melancholy. "Does it bother you that you killed a comrade?"

Her profile tilted enough to fix him in a scornful glare. "Having my throat slit in the dark would bother me a lot more. If Avor told the garrison that he saw us, they'd send out comrades harder to kill."

"We're not so very different, then, you and I. I also kill to stay alive."

If he'd hoped to provoke a reaction, he was doomed to disappointment. "Everyone kills to stay alive. Even if it's only meat for the table."

Gyhard considered the question. It felt strange to be talking about it. Strange, but not unpleasant. "Counting the life I was born into, and not counting this borrowed one, six."

"I beg your pardon," Gyhard graciously inclined his head. "Can I assume by this condemnation that a pair of military assassins have never taken an innocent life? What of poor old Governor Aralt? He was no threat to you." He lifted a hand to cut short his protest. "Oh, wait, I forget, he had to die for the sake of the Empire. Well, I consider myself to be of at least as much worth as your Empire."