Making Peace, page 27
This was news to me, but apparently not to Sarenna. The corner of her mouth crooked into the smallest of smirks, and I caught her eyes twinkling before she lowered her darkened lids halfway. “Say what you need to say, Keeper. I would have it in the open so we can begin the negotiations in earnest.”
Ugly stood up straighter, his hands resting at his sides. His eyes burned into Sarenna’s. “I suspect you hired the assassin from the Dancing Cadaver organization to instigate trouble with the First House. That you also trained and directed the killer Ina, former servant of the First House. That you purposely left fringe members of your House out unprotected in the streets as bait for mercenaries from the First House, whom you also paid to volunteer to the Hegemon as secret foot soldiers. In fact, that you conspired to begin a House war by putting a dozen pieces into place right where you knew someone would come along and knock them over. All so you could appear the victim and encourage the Hegemon to step out of bounds, thereby leading to the destruction of his House, and the ascension of yours.”
Sarenna raised one hand and made a turning gesture with her fingers. “And?”
Ugly narrowed his eyes at her, confused.
She stopped moving her fingers and pointed directly at me.
“Me?” I asked, surprised.
Sarenna’s hand returned to rest in her lap. “Who paid your editor to send you here? To document this entire series of events? I wonder.”
Ugly’s mouth was a hard line, but otherwise he gave no sign of how he felt at this revelation. His eyes stayed locked on her face.
I took the revelation like a punch to the gut. “You brought me here? You’re the mysterious patron who thought this would be a good financial market for our publisher?”
She looked at me impassively, then gave me a small smile. “When you do write it, make sure you’re completely accurate and honest. I won’t punish you for it. I’d prefer it.”
My head was reeling. I walked forward to grip the edge of the sofa she’d offered us. My legs threatened to give out and I decided I’d better sit while I could still do it with some grace. I cast about the floor for answers but, finding none, returned to her face, which watched me with that same smile. “But… why? Why bring me here to write about all that’s happened? People will know what you’ve done.”
She gave me a wider smile, with more teeth. “People will read a romanticized account based on unsubstantiated events from an author known for romance and embellishment.” A gentler smile this time. “Don’t take that harshly, darling. Your writing is quite good, and your skill was a major factor in choosing you. But no, people won’t know whether it’s true or not. They’ll have to wonder. My enemies will scour the pages looking for clues to use against me but will only find an author’s account of savage things suspected with the result being the rising of my House. So, in the end, this book you’re writing will serve to protect my House more than any crime I might have, allegedly, committed.” Her eyes shifted back to Ugly, who had walked forward to stand silently beside me.
My head was still spinning but a lot of things were starting to fall into place. I needed to hear more. “You manipulated Ina. She’s broken into pieces and doesn’t want to live after what you and you husband turned her into. How could you turn a girl into a murderer?”
Her smile ran away from her face, leaving only cold hard eyes which bored into me. “That girl wasn’t broken by my hands. A woman’s children are her reason for living. Creating those children should be by choice, but she was used and discarded. If she decided to take revenge, then I say good for her.”
“But… you used her, too,” I said.
Sarenna’s eyes continued to drill into me, but she didn’t seem to have anything to say to that, so I continued.
“Ina said you shared your pain with her, that you had also lost a child. How much of that was real, and how much did you fake so you could manipulate her?”
“Yes,” she whispered, “I lost a child. I knew how she felt.”
Ugly spoke up. “So, this is about children. Your children, Sarenna. You sacrificed your own husband for a chance to raise your House and advance the prosperity of your children.”
Sarenna tossed her head defiantly, her eyes blazing, but still said nothing, giving no confession.
“Did you ever love Andre?” Ugly asked.
Sarenna’s eyes softened, if only for a moment. “Before he became reckless and a danger to my children, yes. Before he got drunk at a party and provoked the Fourth House into sending someone in the night, someone with a knife. A knife which sank into my little Marco. We buried him in the smallest casket you can imagine.” She closed her eyes and drew a breath to regain her composure before opening them again, flames smoldering there. “Fathers serve their families, one way or another.”
“That’s such a horribly brutal thing to say.” I looked to Ugly for support and he nodded to encourage me, a sad smile on his lips. I looked back at her. “What did that mean, you sacrificed your husband? You knew Tavel would kill him?”
She smiled tightly, the expression not touching her eyes, and looked at Ugly. “I actually had expected it would be you, from your reputation.”
My mind was reeling with these revelations, though she was carefully admitting to no actual deeds. “You killed people, Sarenna. Really killed them. And worse than that, you allowed so many more to be killed. All of our friends…” I thought of Cora and Maren, killed in the attack by the Hegemon’s troops. But they were really Sarenna’s troops, weren’t they? Where did the blame lie: with the madman who swung the sword, or with the person who put the sword in the madman’s hand and started the fight?
“You orchestrated this web to put the Keepers out of commission,” I said, “to stay their hand while you worked. The Hegemon is your enemy, but he also wants us out of the way. An unanswered attack on the Keepers will mean any House is free to kill Keepers as they choose. And now, because of Tavel killing Andre and destroying our credibility, we can’t answer the Hegemon’s cruelty.”
“No,” she agreed, “you can’t. Not on your own.” She looked at Ugly. “Join your people to mine.”
Ugly smirked at her response. “What are you proposing?”
“Marry me,” she said.
My mouth went dry. Ugly’s eyes widened.
“Marry me,” Sarenna repeated. “Become my consort. Join the Keepers to the Second House, and use our resources to destroy the First House. I will become Hegemon, and your cell will have every resource you can possibly imagine to ensure peace and order reign on this planet for the next hundred years.”
Ugly slid down to sit beside me, his jaw working. At last, he finally found his voice. “Setting aside that I’ve seen what happens to your husbands…” She gave him a patient smile. “I’m not sure I can go along with a plan like that. The Keepers would become your personal instrument, no matter what I did to prevent it. It wouldn’t be a balance anymore. That would be an absolute authoritarian dictatorship.”
She flicked one gloved hand in the air. “And?”
“And… Sarenna, you’re a murderer. I can’t turn that kind of power over to you.”
Her eyes hardened again. “If people have died, it’s been to achieve the sort of stability this rock has never known. Endless secret wars, killings, murder, slavery. Look around you, Keeper. Rulers rape their servants with impunity and discard them after beating the children out of them. The poor are murdered in the streets when they steal food. The majority of daughters in this town grow up to live as maidens, as tragic a name as one could possibly imagine. Even children of wealth live under the threat of a rival House murdering them for a small boost in market sales.”
She drew in a tense breath as she pulled herself upright. “Would a mother, a loving ruler, spend her husband and a few dozen lives to secure lasting stability and peace for her children and her people? I ask you then, which is worse: a person willing to bear the stain of spending a few lives to save millions, or a coward who leaves millions suffering and dying for a lost cause? While your pretty ideals take hundreds of years to come to fruition, others feel driven to act to save those who are bleeding right now, right in front of them.” She let out a heavy breath, glaring at Ugly. “So I will offer one more time: marry me.”
Ugly studied his boots. I could see the wheels turning in his head. At last he looked up, meeting her steady gaze. “I propose a counter offer. This one time, Sarenna, we will join you, our cell to your House. Help us destroy the First House. In return, we will turn a blind eye to everything that’s been done. It would be challenging for us to investigate, but we could make life hard for you, nonetheless. Help us destroy the First House, which is what you really want anyway. You find someone else to marry. And return our captain to us. Pardon him.”
Her shoulders lowered at this last proposition. “Your captain is being held in the dungeon under the Hegemon’s residence. But the rest of it, I accept. I will work to free him as best as I can, I give you my word. I will also pardon your cell for any wrongdoing in my husband’s death.”
“The Hegemon has our captain?” I asked, surprised.
Sarenna turned her eyes to me and nodded. “The Hegemon demanded your captain be turned over to the First House as an unbiased third party in the dispute between the Second House and the Keepers, and we had very little recourse for refusal.” She turned back to Ugly. “I am sorry, genuinely.”
He searched her face, and then nodded, seeming to accept her words. “Sarenna. I do understand the temptation to take life, to remake the world as you believe it should be. Saints know I’ve killed hundreds of people, more people than you have in this little project of yours.”
Still admitting nothing, she cocked her head ever so slightly to one side in an almost-acknowledgement, waiting for him to continue.
“Taking life is easy, so easy it becomes addictive,” Ugly said. “You take the first one and you ask what kind of person you’ve become. You take your tenth one and you no longer wonder. After your hundredth life, you don’t even register killing someone as a significant act, more of an afterthought to achieve your objective. You become numb in your mind, the conscious part of you. But the strain builds inside like a cancer. You feel it in your deepest places, the parts that still want to be good.”
Ugly took one of her hands into his and she allowed it. She gazed at him impassively, her eyelids half-lowered. “I know you still have those good places inside you, Sarenna. And maybe when you do get married, it will be to someone who can find those places and make you whole again. I can’t marry you, but I will join my Keepers to your House for one day to dismantle the First House, which is what you’re really after. After that, you and I go back to being opponents. I will do everything in my power to impede you at every step. Not one accident or assassination will go uninvestigated. I will hound you until the day I die. I cannot peacefully leave a murderer seated on the throne.”
She smiled at him sadly. “Does this lecture mean you will renounce killing, and never take another life?”
Ugly smiled back, looking just as sad. “You never know. I just might.”
They shared the strangest moment, two killers holding hands in a sun-warmed drawing room, plotting the destruction of a planetary regime. Then Sarenna nodded. “I accept your terms. I will secure the necessary warrant from the Council.”
Ugly stood up from the couch and released her hand. “Then we’ve got some preparations to make. Send for us when your forces are ready, we’ll meet here and march on the First House.”
Sarenna nodded up at him, giving another one of her sad little smiles. She looked so vulnerable, this woman who had orchestrated so much killing in the memory of her little child, sitting in a black dress with sunlight sparkling in her black widow’s veil.
Ugly walked to the door with no further words, stopping to wait as if summoning me. Sarenna turned from watching him to catch me staring at her. She cocked her head and gave me a questioning look. I said exactly what I was thinking.
“How well do you sleep at night, Sarenna?”
She looked as though I’d slapped her, eyes wide with pain. I supposed that was all the answer I needed. I could feel her eyes following me as I passed Ugly on the way out the door.
CHAPTER 38
UGLY, SHIELD, VAPOR, Sen, and I packed into a room in the Keepers’ makeshift headquarters to discuss our strategy. The room was crammed with crates and baskets holding supplies and salvage from the original Keeper lodge. One amazing thing about the fire was how much of the Keepers’ belongings had ultimately survived. We stood by flickering candlelight among the packed salvage of our former home and plotted the ruin of the man who had taken so much we held dear.
“I say we set fire to his whole damn place. Just whoosh!” Sen swept his hands up into a tower of flame, grinning.
Vapor’s earrings rattled as she shook her head. “His Gifted servant is heavy into fire. He’ll just put it out. Or, worse, use it against us.”
Sen looked crestfallen, but quickly moved to plotting his next major destruction.
Shield jumped down from her crate, enjoying her newly solid legs, and walked to the center of our makeshift office. Her finger thumped down on the blueprint of the First House we’d lain out on one of the few tables we’d managed to salvage. “What about an aerial insertion? Instead of the front door, we come in from the side a few floors up?”
Ugly rubbed one hand across the stubble on his chin. “That idea has some merit.” He swept one finger around the perimeter of the building. “An aerial insertion would avoid all the guards they’ve got forming a barricade against us. As soon as we start marching, their spies will report back and the whole ground level will turn into a blockade of muscle and Sivernite. If we could bypass that and let the Second House troops take on the bulk of the force downstairs, our team could operate as an infiltration force and capture the Hegemon.”
Shield cocked her head at Ugly. “Are four of us enough for that?”
“Five,” I said.
Ugly rubbed his stubbly chin. “Four is a bit lighter than we should be.” He grinned at me as he said it.
“Five,” I said, raising my hand.
“There is not much we can do about that,” Shield said. The other cells won’t want anything to do with us until the legal question of Tavel and Andre is resolved. We can’t even contact them right now without hunting them down.” Shield tapped her lips with one finger. “Yes, four will have to do.” She covered a smile with her hand as she said “four”.
“Five,” I said, waving my hand. “Five, you guys.”
“Not necessarily.” Ugly pretended to ignore my waving hand. “We have a potential Keeper locked away downstairs.”
That stopped everyone. My hand froze, the rude gesture I’d been aiming at Ugly only half completed. Sen was the first one to speak. “You don’t mean…”
Ugly nodded. “She hates them as much as we do. And she’s handy with a blade.” He turned to me, finally acknowledging me. I tried not to seethe as he patted me on the shoulder with one enormous paw. “And Scribbler tells me she may be open to working off some sort of atonement.”
Everyone looked at me, so I nodded. “Yeah, I guess she seemed like… maybe that’s a possibility, sure.”
Sen shook his head. “Bad idea. That girl’s crazy. She’s done some horrible things.”
Ugly met Sen’s gaze evenly. “So have I.”
Sen’s expression went flat. Something passed between the two of them, and Sen looked away. Vapor looked stricken, but she raised her hand hesitantly. “I think I agree with Sen.”
Ugly looked surprised, but hardly shocked, and he gestured for her to go on.
“I just think, I mean, we don’t know what she’ll do. Ina could kill one of us and run off.”
Ugly shrugged. “That’s possible.”
“I don’t think she will.” I felt the need to speak up for Ina, though Saints knew why. Maybe because she was a broken girl crying in a jail cell because she missed her baby. I really didn’t know. “I left the door open, and she didn’t try to run. She had to take intense drugs to do what she was doing, and when she sobered up she wanted to die because of the memories of what she’d done. I don’t think she’s gonna kill us and make her escape.”
“But then, like you said,” Vapor absently tossed her hair back over her shoulder with one hand, thinking hard, “if she’s only faced violence with heavy drugs, is she even gonna be useful? What if she cracks? I mean, cracks more.” She frowned and raised one eyebrow as I considered her words. “She might make it worse, Bel. She could get in our way.”
“Well… she could stick with me. Be my battle partner,” I suggested.
Sen punched my shoulder. “Sick of me already, huh? Just because I show you up.”
“Vapor is gonna need someone to watch her,” I pointed out.
Vapor feigned a scandalized expression, covering her body with her hands. “Not sure I like the idea of Sen watching any part of me.”
Everyone had a good laugh, then we turned to look at Shield, the only person who hadn’t made a decision. She looked at the floor, cocking her head this way and that as she listened to some internal discussion. Then she looked at Ugly. “Are we this desperate?” she asked.
“Yeah, we are,” Ugly said.
“Is there enough here to believe she’ll be an asset rather than a hindrance?”
“I believe so, yes.”
Shield drew a breath, then nodded. “I trust you. I trust your judgement. If you say we need her and can use her, I’ll agree.” She looked at Sen. “I’m as horrified of her crimes as you are. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to be comfortable around her, or even speak to her. But our mission is to get Captain back and to destroy the First House. We are up against a high-level Gifted, we need every resource we can get. Don’t forget how many people the Hegemon has slain in duels. He won’t be easy, either. Surrounded by his elite guards…” She trailed off, letting the dire situation speak for itself.
