Da’ru’s memories, unable to break the link the circle had created between them, and the veil carried her back through time, letting Kate witness firsthand what Da’ru had done.
Her life was filled with blood and anger, torture and death. Kate saw the glass dagger and the faces of those whose lives it had claimed. She saw Edgar as a boy, half-drowned in the testing room water tank as she tested him for signs of the Skill, and then a barred door slamming shut as she locked him in an underground cell. Then she was outside Fume, joining the wardens in their harvests as she hunted the Skilled just as she had tried to hunt Kate. In every town Da’ru left her own trail of death. Informants and whisperers fell to her blade. The Skilled she discovered died within days, and then there was Kalen. . . .
Kate saw Kalen in one of Da’ru’s tower rooms, retreating from her as she raged about Wintercraft, ordering him to find the book and punish those who had stolen it from him. Da’ru had been with him on the night Kate’s parents were taken away, watching from the other side of the street as they were forced into a warden’s cage. She had searched the bookshop herself, desperate to find Wintercraft and unaware of the girl hiding in the cellar beneath her feet.When she could not find it, Kalen was the one to suffer next. A poisoned blade tainted with bloodbane gave him the scar across his face that Kate had seen, along with a dose of the poison large enough to drive him into madness forever.
Kate watched the experiment Da’ru had conducted upon Silas through her own eyes, and she saw the dozens more who had died before him in the museum’s listening circle. She witnessed the moment Da’ru found Wintercraft, reaching down to lift it out of an open grave, and then the years rolled back even further, to a meeting Da’ru had with the Skilled, long before her time with the High Council. The Skilled had offered to help her and protect her as one of their own, but Da’ru had no intention of living her life below ground, hiding from the world. She had turned them away and chosen to experiment upon the veil herself.
Finally, the memories carried Kate to a time when Da’ru was only a few years younger than Kate was now, to the moment she first recognized that she had the Skill. She was in a sunlit room, lifting a dead mouse from the claws of a black cat.When the little creature squirmed back to life within her hands Kate heard Da’ru laugh as if she had found a new toy. The mouse tried to wriggle its way to freedom, but Da’ru threw it back into the cat’s jaws, waiting for it to die so she could revive it again.
Silas may have been a killer, but Da’ru was something worse. Kate could feel something dark inside that woman. She did not care about Albion or anything else. She enjoyed the destruction and uncertainty of endless war. She wanted to damage people. She wanted to see them suffer, using her position on the High Council to wield the ultimate power of life and death.
Kate broke from Da’ru’s memories, not wanting to see any more. It had all happened in an instant. Da’ru had felt nothing, and she twisted Kate’s arm cruelly, dragging her out of the safety of the central circle, deep into the wall of churning mist.
Silas watched the two of them cross into the veil as he ended a warden’s life, then another, and another. He watched the shades move apart to let the two women pass through and then close behind them, swallowing them completely into the darkness of the veil.
With the last man lying dead at his feet, Silas turned to the councilmen, blood smeared across his skin and dripping from his blade. “This is what you all deserve,” he said, his words breaking a little as a handful of damaged ribs cracked suddenly back into place. “You let this happen. This night rests on your heads, not mine.”
Silas fell to his knees, all energy spent, but slowly and steadily his body healed. His wounds sealed themselves, his bones reset and his torn muscles knitted together again. The effort of it exhausted him. Pain clouded his mind and so he did not notice a trickle of strange blood creeping slowly down his injured chest.
The