Van would shoot someone, under the order of the bond. Someone would die in the guise of racks escaping a theft, and then Van Gast would hang on Oku’s wall.
“Come on.”
“Holden, wait. Ilsa—she was there too. With Rillen.” Skrymir wouldn’t look at him as he said it.
“I know. I’ll deal with that later, if I can. First we need to get Van out.”
Skrymir nodded miserably and they caught up with Josie and Tallia. Now that he knew about Van, Holden could see it in her—a tenseness, a sense of her being coiled like a spring and ready to go off. A hint of fear in her eyes, where he’d rarely seen fear before. He didn’t know what to say, if there was anything he could say, and he couldn’t bear the look of her, of confident, sassy Josie with a lost air. Yet still, despite that, maybe because of it, she looked more ready than ever to kill someone.
Instead he kept his eyes on Tallia. “The reception—if someone was coming from that way, someone important, which way would they come? Where would Rillen hide an assassin?”
She didn’t need more than three heartbeats to work it out. “That way.”
Josie ran, almost before Tallia had pointed, her bells rattling furiously, her mouth grim and her hand tight on a pistol she’d stolen from the guards.
“Wait!” Holden called, but there was no staying her. Skrymir ran after, stumbling and leaving spots of blood in his wake, Haban ghosting after him, silent and gray. Holden had no choice but to follow. Tallia’s hand stopped him, and he looked down at her, at the irrepressible nature of her, even now.
“You were telling me the truth,” he said. “Ilsa…” He couldn’t finish that thought.
She reached up on tiptoe, brushed her lips on his cheek and said, “It’s all right. As long as we make it right.”
What was it about her that made him feel like this, like he was a better man when she was there? He couldn’t be sure, but it didn’t matter—it only mattered that she did. Ilsa was gone, left him and done this to those he cared about. His duty to Ilsa was done.
He took Tallia’s hand and they ran after Josie and Skrymir in a jingle of bells.
* * *
Van Gast struggled to keep his feet as Rillen dragged him along. He’d tried to fight it, tried to dig in his heels, tried to raise the gun to shoot Rillen and maybe give Josie and Skrymir some time. All he’d got for his efforts was pain enough to blank his mind, make his muscles turn to water, bring a scream out from the depths of him. He could barely stand on his own, and so Rillen dragged him.
Ilsa walked with them, a curious look on her face as she watched him, like a hawk watching a mouse—interested in a detached sort of way.
They reached an archway that looked much like any other, except it was hung with beaded strands like a curtain so that movement was obscured unless you looked closely.
“Here.”
Rillen shoved him into a wall, and Van Gast sank against it. He tried to ignore the throb of his wrist, the burn of the black lines of poison that worked their insidious way up his arm every time he tried to stop, to fight, to go against the bond. At his elbow already. If he gave into it, let the bond take him, they would fade, and so would he, become a hollow shell with the face of Van Gast. Fuck that. If he fought much more, if they reached his heart, he was a dead man.
Dead man—that rang faint bells in his head, but Rillen didn’t give him a chance to follow the thought.
“Here he comes,” Rillen said, the flat shine of his eyes like looking into a mirror. “Here he comes, and you’ll shoot him, kill him for me. Bring me all Estovan and a host of stolen gold too. Look, the fat one.”
Van Gast didn’t turn to look, or raise the gun, despite what his muscles tried, what the silver pulse of pain told him. Sweat coursed down his face, soaked him, stuck him to the stucco wall. “Josie.”
Rillen pursed his lips in irritation. “Will be free, just so long as you shoot him. Now.”
Van Gast didn’t believe him, but he had no choice. He had to take the chance. Rillen slipped back so that he couldn’t be seen through the