give you hope. I see a little girl crying over your body. She’s trying to pull you away but you’re too heavy. Away from what? I don’t know.”
Kylar felt a chill. “A girl? When?” Was it Ilena Drake?
“I can’t tell. Wait.” Dorian blinked and his face went rigid. “Go, go now. Ask Momma K!”
Feir threw open the front door. Kylar stared from one mage to the other, stunned at the abruptness of his dismissal.
“Go,” Feir said. “Go!”
Kylar ran into the night.
For a long moment, Feir stared after him. He spat. Still staring into the depths of the night, he said, “What didn’t you tell him?”
Dorian let out a shaky breath. “He’s going to die. No matter what.”
“How does that fit?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s not what we hoped.”
35
K ylar ran, but Doubt ran faster. The sky was lightening in the east, and the city was showing its first signs of life. The odds of running into a patrol were small, especially because Kylar knew better than to run on the roads past the rich shops that somehow saw patrols more frequently than roads with poor shops, but if he did run into guards, what would he say? I was just out for a morning walk with dark gray clothes, illegal plants, a small arsenal, and my face smudged with ash. Right.
He slowed to a walk. Momma K’s wasn’t far now, anyway. What was he doing? Obeying a madman and a giant? He could almost see the vir rising from Dorian’s arms, and it turned his stomach. Maybe not a madman. But what was their piece? The only people Kylar knew who did things just because they should were the Drakes, and he figured that they were the exception to the rule. In the Sa’kagé, in the court, in the real world, people did what was best for themselves.
Feir and Dorian hadn’t denied that they had other motives for coming to Cenaria, but they certainly acted like he was the most important thing. They’d acted like they really believed he would change the course of the kingdom! It was madness. But he had believed them.
If they were just liars, wouldn’t they try to tell him how great things would be if he killed Blint? Or were they just that much cleverer than most liars? It seemed that by what Dorian had said that Kylar was going lose everything no matter what he did. What kind of fortune-teller told you that?
Still, Kylar found himself jogging again, and then running, startling a laundress filling her buckets with water. He stopped at Momma K’s door and suddenly felt uneasy again. Momma K stayed up late and woke early every day, but if there was one time of the day that he could be sure she’d be in bed, it was right now. It was the only time of day that the door would be locked. Dammit, would you just make a decision?
Kylar rapped on the door quietly, berating himself for being a coward, yet deciding all the same that he would leave if no one answered it.
The door opened almost immediately. Momma K’s maid looked almost as surprised as Kylar was. She was an old woman, wearing a shift, with a shawl around her shoulders. “Well, good morning, my lord. If you aren’t a sight. I couldn’t sleep, I just kept on thinking that we’d run out of flour for some reason, though I checked it just last night, for some reason I couldn’t get it out of my mind that it was all gone. I was just walking past the door to check it when you knocked—oh by the twelve nipples of Arixula, I’m chattering like a daft old ninny.”
Kylar opened his mouth, but a word wouldn’t fit in the cracks of the ex-prostitute’s rambling, edgewise or any other way.
“‘Time for a swift blow to the head, and a heave into the river, mistress,’ I tell her, and she just laughs at me. I do wish I were young, if only so I could see the look on your face like I used to get. Once these old sacks would make men stand up and take notice. You’d walk right into a wall because you couldn’t take your eyes off. It used to be that the sight of me in my night clothes—of course, I didn’t wear old lady’s rags like this, neither, but if I wore the kind of stuff I used to, I’m afraid I’d scare the children. It does make