no man, is there? Do you want to know why you’re the perfect whore? For the same reason there’s no man. Because you don’t have the capacity for love. You’re all cunt. You suck everyone dry and make them pay you for the pleasure. So don’t give me that bleeding heart, I-did-it-to-save-my-sister horseshit. It’s always been power for you. Oh sure, there are women who whore for money or for fame or because they don’t have any other options. But then there are whores. You might not fuck anymore, Gwin, but you will always be a whore. Now. What. Is. Her. Name?” He bit off each word like moldy bread.
“Uly,” Gwinvere said quietly. “Ulyssandra. She lives with a nurse in the castle.”
She looked at the beer she was holding in her hand. She didn’t even remember filling it. Was this what Durzo reduced her to? A submissive little. . . . She didn’t even know. She felt like she’d been eviscerated, that if she looked down, she’d see ropes of her own intestines coiled around her feet.
It took all of her strength to spit in the beer and set it on the counter with even a shadow of nonchalance.
“Well, it’s tough to be a victim of circumstance,” Durzo said. His voice had that killing edge on it.
“You aren’t. . . . You wouldn’t kill your own child.” Not even Durzo could do that, could he?
“I won’t have to,” Durzo said. “They’ll kill her for me.”
He picked up the beer, smiled at Gwinvere over the spit, and drank. He finished half the beer at a gulp and said, “I’m leaving. It smells like old whore in here.” He poured the rest of his beer onto the floor and set the glass carefully on the bar.
Kylar woke two hours before dawn and briefly wondered if death would be too high a price to pay for a full night’s sleep. The correct answer, however, was unavoidable, so after a few minutes, he dragged himself out of bed. He dressed quietly in the dark, reaching into his third drawer where his wetboy grays were folded as always and reaching into his ash jar to smear his features black.
In the past nine years, he’d learned to compensate for not having the Talent. When Blint was in an optimistic mood, which was increasingly rare, he praised Kylar for it. He said that too many wetboys relied on their Talent for everything and that he kept his mundane talents honed for unpredictable situations. In the bitter business, unpredictable situations were the norm. Besides, Blint said, if there’s almost no noise of a footstep to cover in the first place, you don’t have to use as much of your Talent to muffle it.
Sometimes Kylar’s adaptability showed itself in more spectacular ways, but mostly it was in these little things, like putting his grays in the same dresser, the same way every time he washed them. At least, he hoped it was his adaptability and not Blint’s mania for organization infecting him. Seriously, what was it with the man’s locking locks three times and spinning knives and the garlic and the Night Angel this and Night Angel that?
The window opened silently and Kylar crept across the roof. Years of practice taught him where he could walk and where he had to crawl to be unheard by those below. He slipped over the edge of the house, dropped onto the flagstones in the courtyard, and vaulted off a rock to grab the edge of the wall. He raised himself to peek over the edge, saw no one, pulled himself over the wall, and then moved stealthily up the street.
He probably could have just walked; sneaking wasn’t really necessary once he got out of sight of the Drake’s home and until he got within sight of the herbiary, but it was a bad habit to get into. A job is a job, it isn’t done till it’s done. Another of Blint’s pearls, there. Thanks.
Tonight, it wasn’t just Blint’s ingrained discipline that kept him creeping from shadows to shadow, making the two-mile walk to the herbiary take almost an hour. Tonight, Jarl’s words kept going through his head. “You have enemies. You have enemies.”
Maybe it was time he moved out of the Drakes’ house. For their safety. He was twenty years old, and though of course he didn’t have the income of a noble, Blint was more than generous with his wages. In fact, Blint didn’t really care about money. He didn’t