8 FLAMERULE (DAWN)

EDEN SAT IN HER PERSONAL ALTAR CHAMBER, IN THE CENTER of the floor. She had bashed the divan to shards, overturned the altar, and dashed her scrying bowl to pieces. Her platinum coin lay on the floor by the corner, where she had thrown it.

How? How could the goddess have chosen the girl?

The goddess had abandoned her. Her goddess—her mother—had abandoned her all over again. All because of that damned Kalen.

Tears leaked down from her eyes, salty water from her good eye, blood from her empty socket. She’d only ever wanted her goddess—her mother—to love her. She …

She heard a snap from outside, followed by the sharp swish of a metal blade. Someone had tripped one of her snares. That gave her a small burst of pleasure. At least she still had the foolishness of men—that would never fail to amuse her.

A second trap went off—this a series of darts clicking off stone. So the intruder had brought a second, had he? How amusing.

A third trap went off, and a fourth, and a fifth—clicks, pops, and the occasional loud blast—with increasing frequency.

Someone was setting off all her traps, she realized. Gods.

She crossed to the door, where she kept a spyhole for just such an occasion. She peered out and gasped at the golden figure walking toward her. He chose a random path, his every step setting off a trap—each of which miraculously missed him.

“No,” she said. “No, no—goddess!”

She closed the spyhole and ran back to search desperately for her platinum coin. The goddess would save her—she must!

There! Eden put her trembling hands around the coin, but it slipped from her grasp and rolled under the broken table. She peered in, with her one good eye, and saw that Beshaba’s visage stared up at her.

The door swung open behind her and Eden froze.

“Left the door unlocked, did you? What terrible luck,” the Horned One said. “Almost as awful as misplacing your symbol. Tsk.”

She made a mad grab for her coin and got it.

Eden threw herself aside and cried out to the Lady. She held the coin forth at the Horned One where he stood not four paces away. She could not miss.

Light flared, but it burst not toward the golden man. Instead, it burst in the opposite direction: right into Eden’s face. As the goddess’s paralysis gripped her, she stared at the visage of Beshaba facing her on the coin. The wrong side—the goddess she had chosen.

“What rotten luck you have.” He stepped forward and plucked the two-faced coin from her fingers. It disappeared into his sleeve. “I asked for one simple thing—just one.”

“Why?” Eden managed to whisper through lips that fought against her.

“The Darkdance girl,” he said. “Not that I have any particular affection for her, but she’s terribly important to my present plans. If you’d left well enough alone, I wouldn’t have had to give her the orb before its time … ah, but you don’t want to hear all this.”

Eden wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing her beg. “You’ll … pay …” she said. “I am … queen … of Luskan …”

“Oh, a new power is rising in Luskan, indeed,” he said. “It might have been you, but alas. I’d choose your enemies more carefully in the future you don’t have.”

Eden felt the paralysis fading—enough that she could move her lips. If she could just speak in the proper cadence … She murmured the first words on the scroll he had given her.

“Are you certain that’s a good idea?” he asked. “You might want to think this through.”

“Tluin you!” she shouted. She finished the chant.

At first, nothing happened. Then she heard the chittering and clicking that heralded its coming. “Let us see which of us is the stronger in this place of the Lady,” Eden said. “Her chosen priestess, or a turncloak like you!”

“Hmm,” he said. “This is awkward.”

Beetles and spiders crept up through the walls—not the fiends of Scour, just normal vermin. Rats flitted from holes, drawn toward her casting. Locusts, called from marauding in the fields, tapped against the clear skylight, cracking the glass.

“What is this?” The creatures scrabbled at Eden’s robes and she could not fight them off. “But I am warded! The demon cannot touch me!”

“These are not demons,” the Horned One said. “Scour is gone from this place—perhaps destroyed, perhaps not, but certainly slumbering once again. These are merely his creatures and they are, for lack of a better word, hungry.” He bowed. “Good day.”

“My lord!” Eden cried. “My Lord Horned One! Save me!”

“Unlikely,” he said. “And please, call me Lilten.”

As they crawled up her body, burrowing through her imported robe, Eden shouted hysterically. “It won’t matter!” she cried. “You heard the halfling—his final prophecy!” Rats clung to her hair, spiders burrowed into her underclothes. “Dren will fall into darkness and destroy all he loves! Defend the little slut as you like, you will lose. You will lose!”

“My dear,” Lilten paused at the door and looked back at her, “whoever said he was talking about your brother?”

Kalen perched at the edge of the Drowned Rat’s roof as the sun rose, chasing darkness from the world. He stared not at the sunrise, but rather to the west, where the darkness fled. Myrin didn’t understood what he was doing, but it seemed to comfort him and that was the important thing.

“There was nothing you could have done,” Myrin said. She had bundled up against the cold night, but as the sun hit Luskan, sweat emerged on her skin.

Kalen nodded.

“She was my friend, too, you know,” Myrin said. “Not that I knew her as well as you did.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Did you? I mean—?”

Kalen shook his head. “I loved her after a fashion. As much as she wanted.”

Myrin wasn’t sure what to make of that, but she accepted it all the same. Kalen Dren was not an easy man to understand.

“Kalen, I share your grief, but we need to move on. There are things—”

“No,” Kalen said. “This is not grief, but anger.”

“Oh.” Myrin felt her fingers turn cold. “You know Sithe’s death was not your fault.”

“Sithe’s was not my fault, no,” Kalen said. “She left this world as she willed—destroying her enemy. But Rhett …”

“Rhett.” Myrin looked down at her hands.

Silence stretched between them. She joined him at the crenellations between the roof and open space. The Drowned Rat overlooked the bay, whose black waters seemed remarkably calm this dawn—almost like glass. Almost like Vindicator.

Myrin looked down at the sword, which lay on the edge of the roof. With the slightest push, it would dance through the air and scythe into the bay, to be lost forever. Would their lives be lessened or improved by such an accident?

The blade, now cleansed of blood, no longer glowed as it had in Kalen’s hand. The growing sunlight, however, danced off it in a particular way. She reached out and could feel the power in the sword—the source of such power she had not even dreamed of.

“Will you take the sword?” she asked. “I mean, wherever you go next?”

“If I never touch that blade again,” Kalen said, “it will be too soon.”

“Now that is royally stupid,” Myrin said sharply. Kalen looked over at her. “That sword has chosen you, whether you like it or not. You cannot simply ignore it.”

“Don’t I know it,” Kalen said.

Words trailed off again between them and they listened to the gulls ringing in the dawn. Myrin turned, her arms crossed, and leaned back against the wall, looking toward the east. There, outside the city, the Waterdhavians would be hearing that the plague had ended and they would lift the quarantine.

“Looks like Luskan survives another plague summer,” Myrin observed.

“More’s the pity,” Kalen replied, stepping away.

Finally, frustrated, Myrin seized Vindicator by the hilt—awkwardly, since it was too heavy for her—and rounded on Kalen. “Is that all?” she asked. “You’ll just give up? And—”

She stopped, seeing Kalen standing near the packs, fully dressed in his gray-black travel clothes. “We’re not giving up. At least—assuming you’re with me.” He leaned Sithe’s axe against his shoulder. “Ready to go?”

Myrin blinked, startled. Then she smiled.

Something deep inside her kindled and burned with blue fire.

Several blocks away, in a forgotten graveyard called Yewblood, a block off Aldever’s, a small, cloaked figure sought shelter from the burning sun as it rose over the eastern mountains.

“Feh, death,” he said. “But at least it be but temporary.”

He looked down at his wound, which gaped but did not bleed. The flesh had turned to thick purple crystal laced with silvery veins and golden flecks. Flesh that was not that of a halfling. He thought that with enough blood, it would heal entirely.

Time to feed.

A rat scurried past his feet. Quick as a snake, he caught it in his crystal-coated hand. “A new power be rising in Luskan-town, no?” he said to his captive audience. “And we best be about that. But first—” His crystalline eyes twinkled. “Feed.”

He sank his fangs into the rat and sighed contentedly.

At least he had his morningfeast.