“I’d be the first to succeed.”
“You’re awfully full of braggadocio about the things you’d do if you only had the time.”
“Fair enough, Sister Ariel. I accept your correction—until the day Cenaria has a king. Now if you’ll excuse me?”
“One moment,” she said as he stood. “I’m going to draw the power, but I swear by the White Seraph that I won’t touch you with it. If you must kill me, I won’t try to stop you.”
She didn’t wait for him to respond. He saw a pale iridescent nimbus surround her. It shifted quickly through every color in the rainbow in deliberate succession, though some colors seemed somehow thicker than others. Was that an indication of her strength in the various disciplines of magic? He readied the ka’kari to devour whatever magic she threw at him—hoping he remembered what he had done before, and not sure that he did—but he didn’t strike.
The nimbus didn’t move. Sister Ariel Wyant merely inhaled deeply through her nose. The nimbus disappeared. She nodded her head, as if satisfied. “Dogs find you very odd, don’t they?”
“What?” he asked. It was true, but he’d never thought much of it.
“Maybe you can tell me,” she said, “why, after days of hard riding, don’t you smell of sweat and dirt and horse? Indeed, you have no scent whatsoever.”
“You’re imagining things,” he said, backing away. “Goodbye, Sister.”
“Until we meet again, Kylar Stern.”
33
Momma K stood on a landing overlooking the warehouse floor. Agon’s Dogs, as they’d taken to calling themselves, were training under his watchful eye. The force had shrunk to a hundred men, and Momma K was sure that by now its existence was well-known. “Do you think they’re ready?” she asked as Agon labored up the stairs on a cane.
“More training would make them better. Battle will make them better faster. But it will cost lives,” he said.
“And your wytch hunters?”
“They’re no Ymmuri. Ymmuri can riddle a man with arrows from a hundred paces while galloping away from him. The best I can hope for is ten men who will get in range, stop, shoot, and move on before the fireballs get to them. My hunters aren’t worthy of the bows they carry—but they’re a damn sight better than anything else we have.”
Momma K smiled. He was underplaying his men’s capabilities. She’d seen those men shoot.
“What about your rent girls?” Agon asked. “This mission will cost lives. Are they ready for that?” He stood close beside her as they watched his men spar.
“You would have been amazed if you could have seen their faces, Brant. It was like I gave them their souls back. They’d been dying inside, and now they’ve come back to life, all at once.”
“No word yet from Jarl?” Agon’s voice was tense and Momma K could tell that, for all that he had clashed with the young man, Agon was worried for him.
“There wouldn’t be. Not yet.” She put her hands on the rail and accidentally brushed his fingers.
Brant looked at her hand and then in her eyes and quickly away.
She winced and pulled her hand away. Decades ago, Agon had been arrogant, not obnoxious with it but merely full of youthful confidence that he could do pretty much anything better than pretty much anyone else. That was gone now, replaced by a sober understanding of his own strengths and weaknesses. He was a man well tempered by the years. Gwinvere had known men ruined by their wives. Small women who felt so threatened they undercut their husbands for so many years that those men no longer trusted themselves. Such women had made Momma K wealthy. She knew men with perfectly good wives who were regulars, men addicted to the brothels as others were addicted to wine, but much of her business came from men desperate to be considered manly, strong, good lovers, noble.
It was one of the many ironies of the business that they came to a brothel for that.
Men, Momma K believed, were too simple to ever be truly safe from the temptations of a house of pleasure. It had been her business to make sure those temptations were multifaceted, and she’d been good at her business. Her establishments weren’t just whorehouses. She had meeting rooms, smoking rooms, dignified parlors, lecturers on all the topics men love. The food and drink were always finer than her competitors’ and priced lower. At her best establishments, she brought in chefs and wine masters from all over Midcyru. As a restaurateur, she would have been a dismal failure. The food side of her business operated at a loss every year. But at her houses, men who came for the food stayed to spend their coin other ways.
The few Brant Agons of the world didn’t bang her girls for two reasons: they were happy at home, and they didn’t walk through the doors in the first place. She was sure Agon had been derided for that. Men who didn’t frequent the houses of pleasure were always mocked by those who did.
Brant had conviction, integrity. He reminded her of Durzo.
The thought sent a lance through her stomach. Durzo had been dead three months. Gods, how she missed him! She’d been helplessly in love with Durzo. Durzo was the only man in her life who would ever understand her. She’d been too terrified of that to let love grow. She’d been a coward. She’d starved their relationship of honesty, and like a plant potted in a shallow bowl, the relationship had been stunted. Durzo was the father of her child. He’d only found out a few days before he died.
Momma K was fifty now, almost fifty-one. The years had been kind to her, at least most days they seemed so. She usually looked fifteen years younger than she was. Well, at least ten. If she tried, she thought she still had what it would take to seduce Brant.
Once a whore, always a whore, huh, Gwin? She used to despise old women who clung to their lost youth by their lacquered fingernails. Now she was one. Part of her wanted to seduce Brant just to prove to herself that she still could. But she didn’t want to seduce Brant. It had been years since she’d taken a man to her bed. For all the thousands of times it had been work, there had been times she’d liked or admired her lover of the moment. And there had been Durzo. The night they conceived Uly, he’d been so blasted on mushrooms that he hadn’t been much of a lover, but to have the man she loved share her bed had filled her to overflowing. She was so shot through with love and grief that she’d wept during their lovemaking. Even in his drugged state, Durzo had stopped and asked if he was hurting her. After that, it had taken all her skill to bring him to completion. Durzo had been a tender man when it came to taking his pleasure.
Now their child was being raised by Kylar and Elene. It was the only deception she didn’t regret. With those two, Uly would do well.
But she was tired of deceit. Tired of taking and never giving. She didn’t want to seduce Brant. She knew he wanted her, and his wife was probably dead. Probably, but he couldn’t know. Wouldn’t know. Ever. How long would a man like Brant Agon wait for the woman he loved?
Forever. That’s the kind of man he is.
Thirty-some years ago, they’d met at a party, her first ever at a noble’s home. He’d fallen instantly in love with her and she’d allowed him to court her, never telling him what she did, what she was. He’d been gallant, confident, determined to make his mark on the world, and so sweetly careful in his courting that he hadn’t asked her for a kiss for a month.