It ended with cheers, and tears, and not a single accusation that this person or that was disloyal or heretical or dangerous. Somehow it ended with a hundred and twenty will-casters, two hundred thirty Cwn y Wawr, and two hundred civilians swearing fealty to Kip.

And Kip’s fool dream that he might destroy the White King was like a babe stillborn, lying pallid and cold in his hands—taking sudden breath, stirring, squalling; thus was born his army.

Chapter 47

There was nothing special about the basement where Teia would commit her first murder. Other than, naturally, the four iron rings anchored in one wall, and the old man shackled spread-eagled between them.

Teia set down her candelabrum. If only it were so easy to lay aside her conscience. The old man was wearing slaves’ white. He was gagged, but he didn’t appear to have been beaten. Most importantly, he wasn’t blindfolded.

They didn’t care that he saw her face. Her last, dim hope had been that this was just a test to see if she’d do it—maybe this ‘slave’ was in fact a plant from the Order itself whose assignment was to see if she broke and tried to free him.

But that hope, like all hopes, drained away.

Master Sharp had left. He didn’t care. He’d given her no deadline at all, though obviously some lackey of the Order or someone hired by it was coming at some point to dispose of the body.

If there was no body here, Teia would be exposed as either disobedient or incapable of the work the Order had for her to do. Either would be a death sentence for her.

This was literally his life or hers.

The man looked at her with a slave’s hooded wariness. You tried not to betray too much as a slave, lest your fear or hatred or disgust or longing earn you a beating.

‘Earn.’ Orholam damn us all.

She could see him trying to place her so that he might guess what to expect: Traders’ clothes, perhaps? Young—she had always looked young for her age, which was made worse by her short hair and what looked like mere skinniness when her clothes covered her arms and shoulders. She probably didn’t look too frightening to him, though. Just a slip of a girl, she was.

No, old man, I am death come for you.

“This shouldn’t hurt,” Teia said.

Slaves had superstitions about who was the most likely to be brutal to them. Insecure wives, drunkards, slave owners barely rich enough to own slaves but desperate to do so to prove their status, the youngest children in wealthy households, and that particular breed of rich luxiat that strained under the hypocrisy of keeping slaves while Orholam taught that all men were brothers. Where did Teia fit? this man was wondering. Sometimes a very young girl didn’t see a slave as a slave. He might be a playmate, an adult kinder than others because he gave her his time.

Sooner or later, they learned.

“Not until the end, anyway,” she said.

That was another evil of slavery, wasn’t it? How it twisted not only the enslaved, but their owners as well. Teia had seen the worst impulses of her onetime playmate Sarai not only tolerated but encouraged as far as slaves were concerned. Surely every child has terrible impulses. Surely every mother says, ‘No, child, don’t hit!’ Except a slaveholder says, ‘No, child, you may only hit Kallas or Elpis!’

And Kallas was twisted by accepting the blows of his mistress’s brats. And Elpis was twisted by her weekly rapes at her master’s hands. And her master was twisted by thinking it was natural and moral, his right.

This is why Orholam hates slavery, as he hates divorce and war. But he tolerates them. They are his compromises with humanity, with the hardness of our hearts. For who could imagine a world without any of those?

She let loose a cloud of paryl from her palm, and then, given the darkness of the room, she remembered her dark spectacles, and took them off.

The slave shuddered at the sight of her irisless black eyes, monstrously agape, swallowing all light.

He bucked against his shackles. He tried to scream, but whoever had gagged him had not just bound a rag around his mouth—which did little to nothing. They’d filled his mouth with a rock and then bound it in place. Poor bastard.

And old, and male. Because an old worker slave was cheap. An older woman could be put to work inside, watching children or knitting or doing simple tasks. Not all were, of course, but enough that they generally cost more than old men broken by long physical labor.

Teia felt far away from herself. As she streamed paryl through one of his arms, looking for the nerves, another part of her immediately started concocting schemes, each more impractical than the last. She could take the man out of here under the cover of her cloak—too small. She could wait until darkness—and what if someone came before then? She could find a dead body about his age and size—where? She could kill the Order’s lackey who came to get the body—and who was to say that wouldn’t be just some innocent grave digger? Even if it was one of the Order’s people, killing them would tip her hand, wouldn’t it?

It was already too late to go after Murder Sharp and try to kill him and then pretend she’d never gotten the orders. She hadn’t even thought of it when he’d left.

“Mmm! Mmm!” His eyes rolled back in his head and he bucked again, making her lose the paryl stream, dammit.

He thrashed, tearing the skin at his wrists, blood trickling down his bare arms.

She could simply disobey—and show that she wasn’t loyal. That was death. But perhaps she could disobey for some excellent reason—she refused to kill slaves because she’d been a slave, or, or…

It wouldn’t matter. Not to the Order. Not in wartime. Disobedience was death. Their secrecy was more important to them than having another assassin.

She’d have to run away, far, far from here, to some city or village where they would never find her.

She found a thick tendon and pulled the paryl tight around it. His arm barely twitched before the paryl shattered. Apparently she wouldn’t be pulling anyone around like a marionette with paryl.

In the right place, though—say by making a finger twitch on a trigger—it could make all the difference, couldn’t it?

She was doing it. Exactly what the Order had commanded. She was using this slave like a practice dummy. A whetstone on which to hone her skills razor sharp. Not a human. Not an old man with fears and hopes and a history.

I’m a Blackguard. This is what I must do. I’m a soldier, under orders. This is war, and I am a soldier. I could have run away, but I chose this. I could run away now.