The Warlord's Legacy (30 page)

Unsure of what else to say, he rose to his feet. Irrial and Tyannon followed.

“Tyannon, I …” He shook his head. “You won’t even tell the kids I was here, will you?”

“No,” she said softly. “I don’t think so.”

“If you change your mind …” His voice cracked, and he swallowed hard. The room was starting to blur. “If you change your mind, tell them I love them. And tell them—tell them I really thought I was making the world better for them.”

He spun, chair clattering to the floor in his wake, and was gone.

T
YANNON WATCHED
the man she’d loved—or the man she’d thought had become a man she could love—flee the room. The house quivered as he threw the front door open. The other woman, Irrial, bowed swiftly, offered what Tyannon assumed was meant to be a kindly smile, and followed.

Only when she heard the door click shut did Tyannon collapse to the table. Her entire body shook, her shoulders heaved, but now that she finally needed them, the tears wouldn’t come.

She’d trained them too well, these past five years.

“Mom?”

She jolted upright. Lilander stood beside her, one hand reaching out as though he didn’t really know what to do with it.

“I thought I told you to wait in your room,” she said without much weight. She couldn’t bring herself to be angry, not now, not with him.

“I couldn’t.” He sat beside her, not even trying to dissemble—truly a strange state of affairs for a boy his age. “It was all I could do not to come in, Mom. But I had to listen. I had to hear his voice again.”

Tyannon’s brow creased in worry. Eventually, he’d ask about what he heard, and she’d need an explanation. Eventually—but not now.

“Why didn’t you tell him about Mellorin? Maybe he could have gone looking for her.”

“That wouldn’t have been a good idea, sweetheart.”

“Why?”

Because I know damn well she’s gone with my brother. And as long as she’s with him, I don’t want Jassion and your father anywhere
near
each other
.

Tyannon took her son’s hands in hers, squeezing as though she’d never let go, and said nothing at all.

I
T TOOK
I
RRIAL TWO BLOCKS
to catch up with Corvis, who moved with a stiff-legged pace that chewed up distance at a startling rate. Clearly he wanted nothing more than to leave that house behind.

“We could have stayed,” she told him, dodging a small cluster of workmen in the street and falling into step beside him. “At least long enough for you to see your children.”

“They weren’t there.” He refused to look at her. “And Tyannon wouldn’t have let me stay until they got back.”

“I think maybe they were,” Irrial argued. “Did you notice she always called you
Cerris
?”

He shrugged. “Doesn’t mean anything. She called me that as often as she did Corvis. And especially now …” Another shrug.

Irrial’s expression clouded. Clearly she wasn’t sure she believed him—but just as clearly, she knew that now wasn’t the time to press it. “I’m sorry,” she told him gently, and anyone watching would have been hard pressed to decide which of them looked more surprised that she’d said it.

Through the day’s moderate traffic, and the occasional squad of soldiers moving to join the eastern nobles’ haphazard mobilization, they wound their way, each lost in very different thoughts. And so they might have continued, had it not been for a soft, high-pitched cry from off to the left.

“Corvis!”

He froze in the center of the road, and his neck ached as he fought the panicked instinct to glance about him. Nobody here should have known to call him by that name! If he’d been recognized, it was only a matter of instants before …

But no. A few people glared at him for blocking traffic, but it
appeared nobody else had heard the call. Even Irrial, who’d continued several steps before noticing that he’d stopped, seemed bewildered.

“Corvis! Over here!”

He focused on a narrow gap between a winery and a baker’s. Irrial must have heard it, too, this time, for she was peering intently the same way.

“Trap?” she whispered.

“Maybe, but I think we’d better find out.”

They approached warily, hands on hilt and haft. Their eyes watered and noses stung at the miasma of uncontrolled and unintended fermentation, an indication that both neighboring establishments thought nothing of dumping their dregs in the alley. Beetles, roaches, and rats scurried through the detritus. One particularly large, mangy rat approached them with a peculiar stagger, and Corvis almost chuckled, wondering if it had gotten itself drunk on the rotting sludge.

Then the rat looked up at him and said, “Hello, Corvis,” in that same high tone, and he started to wonder if
he
was the one who’d somehow gotten accidentally drunk.

Irrial gulped loudly beside him, her jaw hanging open, and Corvis actually felt better. It meant he wasn’t going insane.

‘
Not about that, anyway.
’

On the heels of that realization, a second swiftly followed, and he knew, with an abrupt certainty, what was happening. An enormous grin split his beard as he knelt to meet the rodent’s beady eyes.

“Why, hello, Seilloah.”

The rat blinked and appeared to notice Irrial for the first time. Whiskers and tail twitched in agitation. “So, uh,
Cerris
 …” it—she—began nervously.

“It’s all right, Seilloah. She knows pretty much everything.”

Another blink. “Was that wise?”

Corvis shrugged. “I’ll let you know. Seilloah, this is Baroness Irrial. Irrial, Seilloah.”

“Charmed,” the rat said.

“She’s a rat” was Irrial’s brilliant reply.

“She’s a witch, actually,” Corvis told her. “She’s just
inhabiting
a rat.”

“But it’s talking. How can she make it talk?”

He couldn’t help but smile, remembering the first time he and Seilloah had held a similar conversation. Echoing what she’d told him then, he asked, “Are you telling me that you’ve no problem accepting the fact that she can mind-control a rat, but it bothers you that she can make it speak?”

Seilloah snickered. Irrial just shook her head. “I don’t think I’ll ever really understand magic.”

“That’s why it’s magic.” Corvis turned back to his smaller companion. “Not that I’m not glad to see you, Seilloah, but surely there was an easier way. Where are you actually …?” Without really thinking about it, he focused, casting his mind along the mystic tethers he’d fastened to all his lieutenants, the same spell he’d used to keep track of Tyannon. And he found …

Nothing.

“Um, Seilloah? I’m not getting any sense of—um, of you.”

Somehow, she twisted the tiny snout into an approximation of a sad smile. “That’s because this is all that’s left of me, Corvis. I’m—well, I’m dead.”

Corvis felt the alleyway tilting. He fell back against the wall, slid to sit in a sludgy heap of refuse. “My gods, Seilloah. What …?”

“Jassion came to Theaghl-gohlatch.”

“I’ll kill him.” Corvis felt blood pounding in his temples, saw the bricks of the opposite wall waver in and out. He’d lost friends, lost family, but Seilloah? He’d always thought of the graceful witch as eternal. “I don’t bloody
care
whose brother he is, I’ll gods damn kill him!”

“Well, I should certainly
expect
so,” Seilloah said primly.

“Corvis,” Irrial said, kneeling at his side, “keep it down.” She tilted her head toward the street. “So far, we’re just getting the occasional odd look for sitting in this filthy alley, but if you start raving …”

Fists clenched, he rose to his feet, pausing just long enough to lift the rat from the ground—and this close, the creature looked sickly indeed—and place it on his shoulder. Lips pressed tight, he stepped from the alley, glaring at anyone who looked his way, daring them to say a word.

“T
HE SPELL WAS NEVER MEANT TO WORK
this way,” Seilloah explained some time later, as they sat huddled in a cramped, dusty room on the second floor of an inn so cheap that even the bedbugs were obviously slumming. On the way, they’d explained to the witch everything they knew about what was happening, what
wasn’t
happening, and why. Once they’d arrived, Irrial had claimed the room’s only chair, brushing aside the cobwebs before she sat, while Corvis perched on the edge of the sagging mattress. The witch herself was holding court from the center of a rickety table.

“But I was desperate,” she continued. “I didn’t know what else to do, and I had to warn you.”

“Thank you,” he told her, his voice rough with repressed emotion. “How long …?”

“I don’t know, Corvis. It’s so hard … My mind keeps drifting. And these poor creatures, they can’t contain a human soul for long. This is my—I don’t know, I’ve lost count. At
least
my sixth or seventh body since I left Theaghl-gohlatch, and I can feel it dying. Sooner or later, one of them will die around me, and I won’t have the strength to move on.” The tip of her tail twitched, drawing patterns on the dusty tabletop. “But I’ll stay with you for as long as I have left, Corvis. And I’ll help where I can.”

He nodded, swallowing hard. “Can you work your magics?”

“It’s harder than it was, sometimes a lot. But yes. That’s how I found you, actually. I just traced back the spell you’d cast on me.”

“But that spell was cast on your body. If it’s—you’re—dead, how …?”

“I’m a better magician than you are.” Again she managed a faint smile. “Even as a rat.”

“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation,” Irrial muttered. Then, “Who’s Jassion? You never gave me the chance to ask when Tyannon mentioned him.”

“The baron of a seaside province called Braetlyn,” he told her, biting each word in two as it emerged. “He’s a cruel-minded, vicious bastard with a piss-boiling temper and a chip on his shoulder the size of hell’s own gate. Which is where I should have sent him a long bloody time ago.”

‘
Finally! We agree on something.
’

“Corvis,” the witch said seriously, “have you horribly irritated any powerful wizards lately?”

“Not that I know of. Why?”

“Jassion’s companion. Kaleb.”

Irrial and Corvis exchanged glances. “We’ve heard the name,” he told her, “but I don’t know him.”

“Well, he knows you. And he’s a bad one. Maybe even as strong as Rheah Vhoune was.”

Corvis pursed his lips, remembering the woman who’d been one of his most potent foes before the threat of Audriss the Serpent had forced them into an uneasy alliance. “There aren’t supposed to
be
any sorcerers that powerful anymore. Well, not in Imphallion, anyway.”

“Somebody should have told Kaleb that.”

“Maybe he’s not Imphallian,” Irrial suggested, determined to contribute despite understanding only half the conversation. “Could he be Cephiran?”

“He didn’t have a Cephiran accent,” Seilloah said thoughtfully, “but that doesn’t prove anything. Hell, he could be Tharsuuli for all I know.” She paused, snout tilting as she examined Corvis. “Could he be?” she asked. “After what happened to you up north, could the Dragon Kings have sent him?”

Corvis shuddered. “Gods, I hope not. That’s all we need.” Then, at Irrial’s puzzled expression, “Before I came to Rahariem. It’s a long story, for some other time.”