“You’ve got to leave, now,” she pleaded. “You’ve crossed the line. Go—before it’s too late. Leave. Pavek’s alive; no one will stop you. The guardian won’t stop you. But you intended murder. You can’t stay here any longer. Renounce your grove, Ru—it’s the only way.”
“Renounce it… so a damned templar can trample through it?” Ruari challenged, defiant even in defeat.
The sound of stumbling and staggering intruded before she shaped an answer. Yohan raised a finger to his lips and dropped into a crouch. Another few heavy, flat-footed steps and a seedy-looking Pavek was among them.
“Trample through what?” he demanded, steadying himself against the wall above Ruari’s head, looking down and making it clear that only Ruari could give him a satisfactory answer.
Which Ruari would not do.
“This is no concern of yours, Pavek,” she said into the lengthening silence, trying to sound confident and in command. “Ruari’s done wrong. He—he’s the one who tried to murder you with poison. He’s got to leave Quraite. He’s got to leave now, before—”
“Before Telhami starts asking questions?” Pavek asked—seedy or not, he was the one in command of the situation. Grandmother must have suspected Ruari and shared her suspicions with her patient. Yohan, apparently, approved, because he straightened his legs and folded his arms over his chest again.
“Druids don’t murder,” she said, feeling that she was the one under attack. “Quraite doesn’t shelter murderers. The guardian won’t tolerate it.”
Pavek shrugged. “That’s for your guardian to decide, isn’t it? If there was a murder, I wouldn’t be standing here, would I? If there’d been murder done tonight…”
“He meant to murder you. It’s the same thing.”
The ex-templar smiled, a cold and frightening smile. “Not where I come from. Seems to me a druid wouldn’t make foolish mistakes measuring out his poisons. If some druid wanted me dead, some druid would have used enough poison so some other druid couldn’t haul me back from death’s door long before it swung shut. Some half-wit druid, with a grove where everyone knew he kept kivits and collected their musk, couldn’t have been so foolish. So, some half-wit druid must have known what he was doing, must have been sending me a warning. That’s what I think. That’s what I’d swear—”
“Mind your words,” Yohan interjected, deep-throated and meaningful.
“That’s what I’d swear before a Urik court. My word against his. My warning against his murder. And my word would prevail, because there’s been warning, but no murder. In Urik, by King Hamanu’s infinitesimal mercy, what a man does is all that matters. What he thinks is spit in the wind—or every man, woman, and child would die each sundown for what he’d intended to do each sunrise. It’s a sorry state, I think, when the Beast of Urik has more mercy than a Quraite druid.”
Akashia laced her fingers together. She could see now, for the first time, what Ruari saw when he looked at that scarred face, and she couldn’t imagine why Grandmother had shared her suspicions with him, as she must have done.
Pavek was shaking. Vomit stained his tunic; the stench reached her nostrils five paces away. He was crude and disgusting, and he wore both traits like armor. Pavek was broken, all right. He was a templar to the very bone.
And, once again, this templar was giving Ruari’s life back to him.
“Ru—?”
The coppery face swiveled up toward Pavek, not her. “I intended murder. My only mistake was that I failed.”
“Your word against mine, scum,” Pavek replied, as cold as a human voice could be. “I heard a warning. You won’t get a second chance.”
Chapter Eleven
The ground between the guarded Quraite groves was as hard as any of Urik’s cobblestone streets. Pavek’s sandals made a reassuringly familiar sound as he walked) quick-pace, toward the distant stand of tall trees that was Telhami’s grove. He was grateful for the cool wind that continued to blow from that grove—or Akashia’s grove when he was determined to go there, the two druids having decided that they would conduct his lessons on alternating days—but he no longer relied upon the wind to guide him.
Hard as the ground was, generations of druid feet marching from village to grove and back again had left their mark on it. With nothing better to do as he walked, he’d learned to see the difference in color and texture that defined a path through the wilderness. He could even distinguish the more subtle distinctions that marked the lesser paths between the groves themselves. His lessons hadn’t