What the Dark Keeps

Chapter 2

Etienne

He had stood at the edges of dying cities and felt nothing.

He had watched wars end not the clean ending of stories, but the real kind, the kind that smelled like mud and copper and men who had forgotten what they were fighting for and felt nothing. He had carried out Morthane’s judgements for three centuries with the precision of a instrument made for exactly that purpose, because that was what he was. What he had chosen to be, once, in a moment of grief so total it had simply calcified into purpose.

He was not supposed to feel anything standing at a woman’s door in the old quarter of Solmere.

And yet.

The moment she opened it, something happened in his chest that he had no immediate name for. Not attraction or not only that, though she was striking in the way of women who do not know it, dark-eyed and slightly disheveled and looking at him with a wariness so finely tuned it was almost its own kind of power. It was something beneath attraction. Something older and more inconvenient.

Recognition.

Her blood spoke to him the way Duskholm spoke to him — in frequencies below language, in the register of stone and deep water and the particular silence that lives at the bottom of things. She smelled of the threshold. Of old covenants and dark earth and something that was almost his world’s name spoken in a voice he had never heard before.

He had known, intellectually, that she would be of the Veldrath line. Morthane had told him that much. He had not known it would feel like this like standing in a place you have dreamed of before you had any reason to dream of it.

He kept his face still. He was very good at that.

“Xanthe Voss,” he said. “My name is Etienne. I’ve been sent by Morthane.”

The kettle behind her screamed.

She didn’t flinch. He noted that filed it away with the other things he was already noting: the steadiness of her hands, the way her weight had shifted almost imperceptibly backward when she opened the door, not retreat but assessment, like a woman deciding whether a room had more than one exit. The faint mark visible on her inner forearm, dark and branching, that had not been there a week ago and would become something else entirely if they didn’t move quickly.

She looked at him for a long moment with those careful dark eyes and said, flatly, “I don’t make bargains.”

He hadn’t expected that. Not the words he had expected resistance, had been briefed for it. But the delivery. Dry as chalk, with the exhausted precision of someone who had said it before in a hundred smaller ways and had never once been believed.

Something that was not quite amusement moved through him.

“I’m not here to offer one,” he said.

“Then why are you here?”

“To keep you alive.”

Her expression shifted just slightly, a fractional tightening around the eyes that she controlled almost immediately. Almost. He was old enough and still enough to catch what other people missed, and what he caught was not fear exactly. It was the particular look of someone receiving news they had been dreading long enough that the dread had become a kind of companion. She had known, on some level, that something was coming. She had just been hoping it would give her more time.

He understood that. He had spent centuries hoping things would give him more time.

“More alive than I currently am?” she said. Still dry. Still steady. Behind her, the kettle continued its hysterics.

“Considerably,” he said. “If you’ll let me in.”

She let him in.

He stood in the middle of her flat while she dealt with the kettle, and he looked at her life the way he looked at everything — with the patient, cataloguing attention of a creature that had learned long ago that details were the difference between surviving and not. The books first: floor-to-ceiling in places, stacked in columns elsewhere, spines creased and pages flagged and several lying open face-down in the particular way of readers who intend to return immediately and often don’t. She read widely. Poetry next to herbology next to something on Solmere’s civic water systems that she was apparently three-quarters through. A mind that moved in unexpected directions. He filed that too.

The plants mostly surviving, a few dramatically not. The small strange objects arranged without apparent system across windowsills and shelves. The bird skull, pale and precise, sitting beside a piece of sea glass the color of a bruise. The sealed clay jar that smelled, faintly, unmistakeably, of Duskholm.

He stared at that last one for a long moment.

She returned from the kitchen with two cups of tea. She held one out to him. He looked at it.

“I don’t—”

“I know you don’t need it,” she said. “I do. Stand there holding it so I don’t feel like I’m drinking alone.”

He took the cup.

She sat in the chair nearest the window, tucked one leg beneath her with the automatic ease of someone in their own territory, and looked at him over the rim of her cup with that measuring look he was already beginning to recognise.

“Tell me what’s hunting me,” she said. Not is something hunting me. She had already decided to believe him or rather, she had already known, and she was simply skipping the part where she pretended otherwise. He revised his assessment of her upward in ways he chose not to examine too closely.

He sat. Not because he needed to, but because he was standing in her space and she was already working to maintain the appearance of ease and he understood, in some peripheral way he didn’t typically engage, that he was already a great deal to manage. He settled into the chair across from her. Set the untouched tea on the table between them.

“Something old,” he said. “Older than Morthane. Older than the covenant your bloodline held.” He watched her face. “Something that was imprisoned in Duskholm when the Veldrath Coven was at their height, by a bargain that required the willing sacrifice of your ancestor’s power and her line’s place in the order of things.”

“She gave it up,” Xanthe said. Quiet. “That’s why we were exiled.”

“She gave it up to lock something away,” he said. “And that bargain held for six generations. But bargains tied to bloodlines—”

“End with the bloodline.” She set her cup down very carefully. “Or fray when the blood changes.”

He looked at her.

“My grandmother,” she said, not quite to him, her gaze somewhere in the middle distance. “She used to say the blood was thinning. That whatever we’d been was almost gone.” A pause. The mark on her arm caught the fading light. “She said it like it was a relief.”

Etienne said nothing. He had known women of her line, once had known of them, more accurately, had stood at the threshold of the Greyfen and felt the particular quality of their magic as they worked, the way you feel heat from a fire you cannot see. There had been nothing thin about any of them. And there was nothing thin about Xanthe. Whatever her grandmother had felt receding was not the power fading.

It was the power learning patience.

He did not say this yet. There would be time he intended to make time and she was already holding more than most people could hold in a single evening.

“The thing in Duskholm,” she said. “The one my ancestor locked away. It’s getting out.”

“It’s already partially out,” he said. “It has been reaching through the Greyfen for some months. Feeling for the frayed end of the bargain.” A pause. “Feeling for you.”

She absorbed this with a steadiness that he found, unexpectedly, almost painful to witness. The particular steadiness of someone who has never had the luxury of falling apart.

“And Morthane sent you,” she said. “His Blade.”

She knew what he was. Of course she did she was Veldrath blood, raised on the old knowledge even if it had been handed down in fragments and half-silences. He didn’t ask how.

“Yes,” he said.

“Because he needs the bargain to hold.”

“Because the balance requires it.”

She looked at him for a long moment. Outside the window, Solmere’s evening was beginning lights winking on across the old quarter, the distant sound of the night market setting up, the world cycling through its ordinary business entirely unaware that the floor beneath it had a c***k running through it and the c***k was shaped like a woman sitting in a threadbare chair holding a cooling cup of tea.

“And you,” she said finally. “What do you need?”

The question caught him somewhere unguarded. Not the content of it a reasonable question, a smart question, the question of a woman determining who exactly had walked into her home. But the directness. The way she asked it like she genuinely intended to know the answer, like she was extending something careful across the space between them.

He had been sent here as a weapon in service of a god.

No one had asked him what he needed in a very long time.

“Right now,” he said, and his voice came out lower than he intended, “I need you to trust me enough to leave with me before morning.”

She looked at him. He looked at her.

The sealed clay jar on the shelf breathed faintly of Duskholm between them.

“That,” she said, “is going to take more than one cup of tea.”