Therin said, “Even if you could prove Darzin faked the evidence, I have already accepted you into the House—so it does little good to try to find proof of Darzin’s lies except to embarrass us. And you can’t go back to the Lower Circle. You know how the Shadowdancers deal with those who murder their own.”
Kihrin nearly stood from his chair. “What!? But I didn’t kill anyone—”
“A Collectors Guild pawnshop owner with the adorable and no doubt accurate nickname of ‘Butterbelly’ was found dead, with two knives stuck in him. Your knives. A cutthroat named Faris is swearing to anyone who will listen he witnessed a fight between the two of you over a necklace you stole. The Shadowdancers will likely stab first and never bother to ask questions at all if they find you. Fortunately it’s unlikely the Shadowdancers will ever come looking for Rook in the Upper Circle.”
“What did you say?” Kihrin stood, only the most extreme self-control keeping him from fleeing the room.
Therin smiled. “Your ‘on-the-job’ name, your street name. Publicly you were a singer, the assistant of a blind musician named Surdyeh, now deceased. Your parentage was unknown but everyone assumed, quite laughably, that you were from south of the Manol, from Doltar. I suppose that proves vané are so rare people have forgotten what they look like. You were recruited into the Shadowdancers by Ola Nathera, called Raven, who originally used you as bait in a number of successful con schemes. Eventually someone realized that you’d figured out how to perceive magic and had learned your first spell—”
“I don’t know any spells,” Kihrin protested. “I can see past the Veil, but that’s it—”
Therin waved the argument away with his fingers. “The trick you do to pass unseen. It’s not just wishful thinking that the guards never notice you. We call self-taught students of magic ‘witches,’ but it’s a dirty little secret that almost all of us figure out at least one spell before we’ve had formal training. Everyone who learns magic has a witch gift—the first spell, the first map—that unlocks all the others.* For most wild talents, it never goes beyond that first spell, but had Mouse lived longer she would have handled more advanced training. You were too good to leave wild. The spells that Keys learn are all focused, of course—ways to open different kinds of locks, how to recognize the tenyé signatures of materials commonly used for gates and lockboxes, how to remove wards put up by the Watchmen. That sort of thing.”
Kihrin blinked and looked away. The world tilted crazily. The room suffocated. His mouth was a dusty, white, Capital street in the middle of summertime. Seconds ago, escape had been possible.
Now it was not.
He closed his eyes for a moment, fighting his sense of despair. “I thought the Junk Boys controlled the Shadowdancers.”
“Everyone does, including, amusingly enough, the Junk Boys—although you should cultivate the habit of referring to them by their proper name: House D’Evelin.” He smiled. “I took control of the Shadowdancers over twenty years ago. An indiscretion of youth.”
“So that’s how he knew,” Kihrin muttered.
“Excuse me?”
“Your son. That’s how he found me so easily. He’s a Shadowdancer. You’re all Shadowdancers.”? He cursed. “Taja! All these years I’ve been working for you.”
“No one is more embarrassed than I am. All these years I’ve been looking for you, and you were hidden right in front of me, right out in the open. I owned Ola Nathera. She was freed years before your birth, so it never occurred to me that she would know anything about what had happened to you.” He sighed.
“Where is she?” Kihrin asked, his stomach still crawling on the floor.
“No one seems to know. Ola disappeared the same night Surdyeh was killed. I think she ran. She’s always had a healthy sense of self-preservation. She was smart enough to realize we would have hard questions for her as soon as we found out she’d been hiding you. There would be no way she could have claimed ignorance.”
“You’ve been looking for me for years?”
Therin’s expression was unreadable. “Yes.”
Kihrin felt sick. Now he understood why Ola had been so set against him meeting the General, why she had been willing to go so far as to drug him. What he didn’t understand is why she had lied in the first place. Had she planned on using him as a piece of blackmail?
He wished he believed her only motive had been to protect him from a family she had apparently known all too well.
“Was it just personal between you and Faris? A friendship soured?”
Kihrin looked away. “No.”
“What was it then?”
He ground his teeth. “He and his friends murdered Mouse, but I couldn’t pin him for it. It would have been my word against all of theirs.”
“I understood she was killed while committing a burglary.” Therin raised an eyebrow.
“You call it what you like.”
Therin chewed on that piece of news. “Then I’ll assume the little accident that Faris ran into a few years back, the one where the Watchmen ended up taking a hand, was not an accident.”
“I was hoping he’d end up in the mines,” Kihrin said, as close as he’d ever come to admitting he’d framed another Shadowdancer.
The corner of Therin’s mouth twitched. “Something tells me you’re going to fit in very well here.”
The room settled into an awkward silence.
“You didn’t have to kill him,” Kihrin finally accused in a heated whisper. If Therin D’Mon was Master of the Shadowdancers, he could have ordered Butterbelly to tell him what he needed to know. That death, at least, had been unnecessary.
The High Lord looked up, surprised. “Kill who? Surdyeh? I didn’t.”
“Butterbelly. You didn’t have to have Butterbelly killed.” Kihrin turned back to the High Lord. “You had a meeting with Butterbelly to buy the tsali stone he was selling. Later that same evening, he’s dead and the tsali stone’s gone. You’re telling me you didn’t do that?”
The High Lord stared. “If I had known he had a tsali stone for sale, yes, I’d have met with him. But I wouldn’t have killed him afterward.” Therin sighed. “He was a really good fence.”
“Then who did?”
“One of Darzin’s agents.” Therin tapped his fingers on the edge of the desk. “I believe my son ordered it to cover up a murder he committed. What bothers me is that I don’t know why he committed the murder in the first place.”
“Does Darzin need a reason?”
Therin shrugged with one shoulder. “Everyone has reasons for their actions, even if they do not make any immediate sense. As you so eloquently put it, we don’t do anything unless there’s something to gain.”
“So what do you want me to do about it? I can’t even beat Darzin when he’s unarmed.”