“I’ve got a contract,” he said at last. “Special tools.”
He tried to explain, but Ranger wouldn’t listen. He stood, knocking over his drink, and it took all of Glaive’s dominance to make the poor man sit down again.
“You can’t.” Ranger’s eyes were dark with hurt. “You can’t do this.”
“It’s my job. I can’t put personal feelings into it.”
“Youhavethem?” Ranger asked, and that did hurt, for all that Glaive didn’t show it.
“I do.” He lowered his voice, thinking of Ranger sobbing over Marius, of Death coming for his old apprentice’s noble lover, of rain washing the blood from a broken, tortured body. “Wish I didn’t, sometimes.” Maybe it was just that Glaive was too tired to care, or maybe it was seeing Nyx’s old grief in Ranger’s face, but something loosened his tongue further. When Ranger tried again to stop him, Glaive held up a hand. “You know why I like you, Ranger?”
Ranger hesitated, a frown creasing his brow.I like you because you’re what I could have been. What Tyr could have been. Because love makes a fool of you, but you’ll never burn down the world for it.
“That stone you wear around your neck,” Glaive said. “It’s the symbol of Death. Not death like the thing that gets us when our hearts stop working and we go back to the earth. Death. Him.” Azaiah. “Every few hundred years, a Thalassan like you seeks him out, wearing a stone like that. Sacrifices, all of you. You throw yourselves at Death, and sometimes, sure, he spits you out again. Sometimes he doesn’t. I thought maybe I could show you what Death looks like, and you could go home.”
Ranger was quiet. Glaive had never revealed his age to anyone before. Not once. And now that he had, he wanted to let it all spill out—who he’d been, what he’d done, what Ranger could become if he wasn’t careful. Instead, he waited while Ranger caught his breath. “You’re… talking like you’ve seen them. The others.”
“Seen a few.”
“But you said they were around hundreds of years ago.”
“Last one was around three hundred, I think.” Glaive sighed as Ranger drew back, alarmed. “You aren’t the first one to seek him, and you won’t be the last. Some spend lifetimes trying to get a glimpse of him.”
“Have you?” Ranger looked at him keenly, finally seeing him, and Glaive wondered how monstrous he seemed.
He looked down, unable to bear Ranger’s gaze. “Go home, kid. Like I said, put the stone away, and try to forget about Marius Chastain.”
“I love him,” Ranger said, and Glaive took a steadying breath.
And for the first time in hundreds of years, he gave in.
He gave Ranger a head start—something he never gave his quarries, because he wasn’t a cat toying with its prey. Just enough for a clever, resourceful Misthotos who’d learned from the best. Two days, and a clause that his employers hadn’t put in their contract: that if Ranger got Marius to the sea in Thalassa, Glaive would leave them alone. He would end the contract, find the nobles who purchased it, and ensure they didn’t try again. Not that he told Ranger the last part. He didn’t want Ranger thinking he could talk his way out of it.
Ranger fled, and Glaive sat in the bar, holding his drink, listening to his old apprentice’s footsteps fade down the hall.
He waited until the bar closed, then went to stock up on his supplies. He sat in a rented room for a night, listening to voices in the other alcoves around him, and wondered whether Ranger was thinking clearly enough to hide his tracks. He thought of Nyx, fifteen and crouching in the grasses of Iperios while Tyr tried to teach him how to hunt.
“You have to be persistent,” Tyr had said, drawing his bow. “And you have to keep calm. Find a place inside you that’s peaceful, and go to it.”
“Easy for you to say.” Nyx had grinned as Tyr loosed the arrow, striking the deer cleanly through the throat. “Wow. Can I borrow your peaceful place for a while?”
Tyr had laughed. “You already know it, Nyx. It’s when everyone goes to bed after the fires are banked, and you read to me. That’s my place.”
Glaive tried to remember the books they’d read together, but all he could think of were the stories he’d told Andor and Kelta, watered-down tales of his time in the army. And he thought of a Winter board, glass beads moving around a circle, cards laid out as Azaiah and Nyx whispered secrets to each other. Glaive found the three remaining Winter beads on his bracelet and rolled them between his fingers, and for a fleeting instant, he felt… quiet. Not cold and distant, as he’d been since he crushed Lamont’s throat. Quiet. Still, like the flower fields beneath the Needle, like the way time slowed when Azaiah pushed down his hood and smiled sweet and soft.
He hadn’t felt quiet in so very long.
The second day came and went, and when the last morning dawned, Glaive stepped out into the light and began the hunt for Ranger and Marius Chastain.
* * *
Azaiah left Arktos with the river restored, his successor secured, and the promise that someone would carry him across when it was time.
The mess with the cult reminded him unpleasantly of those years he’d gone down into the grotto beneath a Katoikos lake, listening to the murmurs of ecstatic revelers and inhaling the sweet incense smoke trapped in the small crypt. This cult had been less interested in revering Death and more in controlling him, but the worst of it was how it had kept the souls of Arkoudai dead from passing over. Azaiah was distraught that it had taken him so long to notice, and he knew that was yet another side effect of his corruption.
The river in Arktos had always been strange, thanks to the destruction he and his siblings had brought down on the old seat of the Iperian empire. It was the source of the eventual rot, and it had changed along with Azaiah until souls had been trapped and wailing and hehadn’t noticed.
Aleks, with his perpetual kindness and bright warmth, had brought an end to the cult and restored the river’s flow. Fixing the river did wonders for Azaiah. He no longer saw his dark mirror in the water or heard his whispered enticements. The rain didn’t fall when he walked, and he could feel again the kindness that he’d lost, caught up in his own misery over Nyx. If he did not go near Glaive, if he did not think too much about what it might have been like to have a companion as his brother Arwyn had Declan, he could stay himself until it was time to move on.
