The Disappearance of Winter's Daughter (Riyria Chronicles #4)

Novron shook his head and addressed Venlin. Talk sense into him before I throw him out the window, will you?

Venlin sighed. It doesn’t matter if it’s a lie or not. If it helps you sleep, then wrap it around you each night and smile. If you had asked for consent, or even floated the idea past Saldur when he was here, you know he wouldn’t have liked it. Better to seek forgiveness than ask for permission. What you count on is that the world will come to see the truth in time. At first, it sounds crazy; worse, it sounds conceited and self-centered. But you were granted the choice to anoint whomever you saw fit, and Oswal, you’re going to do just that. There isn’t anyone in the running who isn’t a shortsighted, self-centered idiot. And, of course, all the candidates will be dead.

Novron parroted back Saldur’s words, Well, whoever you pick, best keep in mind that he actually has to rule a kingdom, you know?

That was why he had to pick himself, but Saldur wouldn’t see it that way, and Maurice Saldur was typical of the church. Oswal was the Bishop of Alburn, but somehow Maurice Saldur was more influential. How that was possible was hard to determine. Perhaps it was location. He was Bishop of Medford, and that was but a short carriage ride to Ervanon.

I didn’t actually chat with the patriarch. I’ve never seen the man.

Oswal was certain this had to be a lie. While he was busy writing letters, Saldur was handling affairs like the disappearance of the Eternal Empire. Even after botching his own efforts to replace the ruling family of Melengar, Nilnev had given Saldur another chance. He hadn’t even trusted Oswal to take care of his own king.

They all have it better than you, Novron told him. And Saldur isn’t your problem. Garrick Gervaise, lord of Blythin Castle, is the ox you’ll need to yoke or slay.

Oswal nodded. He was about to defy the intent, if not the letter, of the patriarch’s orders while living in the shadow of the Seret’s base and ancestral home. Blythin Castle was less than a day’s ride up the coast to the east, and the castle commander wasn’t a philosophical man. Reason and logic, to Garrick Gervaise, were sinful things. Oswal knew that convincing the black knight to support him wouldn’t be easy. Garrick wouldn’t see Oswal’s initiative as a positive development. After all, Garrick saw his job as regulating the clergy, and crowning oneself king would certainly attract close scrutiny. Handling Gervaise would be his most dangerous battle.

If only he would attend the feast.

Oswal settled deeper into his chair and drained his cup. He felt exhausted, the sort of fatigue that hits only after all the work is finished.

“Is it finished?” he asked.

For now—your part at least, Novron said. All the pieces are in motion.

He got up and searched for the bottle to refill the chalice.

“I don’t want to kill them, the nobles, I mean, but it’s best to eliminate one’s competition.” He held his cup away from the desk as he poured so as not to spill on anything important. Although his hands had stopped shaking, his head felt a tad loose, and he had a vague sense of it floating like a bubble on his shoulders. This was only his second cup, but he had hardly touched the breakfast tray. He couldn’t eat then, but he thought he might now. I’d better, or at the rate I’m drinking I’ll pass out before the feast.

Would that be so bad? Novron asked.

You do need an excuse not to attend, Venlin said. You can’t trust Villar to contain his violence to only those dressed in blue.





Chapter Twenty-Five

Keys and Coins





By the time Villar woke up, the sun was high. Light streamed in through the drape that Mercator had hung in place of a door. The old one had likely rotted away centuries ago. The new drape was—like everything else Mercator touched—blue. The long dyed cloth fluttered lazily, letting in varying degrees of brilliant sunlight, changing the shadows in the room. For a long moment, Villar lay on the floor, feeling the pleasant flower-scented breeze and watching the light war with the darkness. Sunbeams ricocheted up the wall, exposing the dye-stained pots and dust motes. Then the breeze exhausted itself, the cloth fell flat, and the room returned to its dull darkness. Outside, birds sang and bees hummed. A perfect spring day, he thought with detached judgment, as if he weren’t part of it but rather some distant observer.

That aloof perception lasted no more than a minute. It took that long for the pain to catch up with his sleep-muddled mind. When it did, the observer became the tortured. Villar felt terrible. He always did the morning after. His head throbbed, his body ached, and his muscles were drained. He continued to lie there, breathing slowly, letting the blood bang at his temples. It would subside in a little while, always had in the past. That’s when he realized this wasn’t like the other times. He’d stayed with the golem longer than usual because the little hooded foreigner was fast and agile and saw him coming. That was odd. No one had ever seen him before. But that wasn’t all that made this time different. Villar felt pain in his chest. It, too, throbbed, but it also burned, and that didn’t make any sense at all.

Grunting as he engaged stiff muscles, he rolled to his side, his elbow and hip hurting where they pressed against the floor. He had lain down on a blanket, one of the blue-dyed ones that Mercator had stacked all over. Should have used more than one. Should have used all of them, made a thick comfortable cocoon. He’d learned never to run a golem while standing or even sitting. Too easy to become disoriented and fall. When in the golem and on the hunt, the experience was so vivid it was easy to forget it wasn’t his body running, jumping, and fighting. Everything was so real.

Villar didn’t know his safety point—how long he could maintain the connection without going too far. Griswold had warned him never to remain for more than two chimes of Grom Galimus, but that was only a rough estimate; he didn’t think the dwarf really knew. Villar speculated that the cutoff point would be different for each person. Not everyone’s strength of will was the same. It stood to reason that an individual with a strong sense of himself could maintain the golem longer. The real concern, as Villar saw it—and perhaps this tied in to the idea of losing one’s soul—was that in the heat of things, it was easy to miss the passage of time, and everything else. Still, Villar was confident he hadn’t gotten anywhere near two chimes. And for the first time, it wasn’t he who had severed the connection. The connection had vanished all by itself.

No, not by itself. The golem had been destroyed, and I was nearly killed. That’s what happened, but how?

When he possessed a golem, he wasn’t actually there. The golem acted on his commands, but no matter what happened to the creature, Villar was safe because he was miles away. The whole process worked much like a dream. Dreams, no matter how awful, were safe; they had no power to penetrate the real world. He thought hard. Trying to remember. Then it came to him. The gargoyle had fallen off the cathedral and hit the plaza. The moment it struck the ground, the connection snapped, releasing whatever demon he’d trapped in the stone, but because the gargoyle fell rather than Villar, that was all that should have happened.

Then why do I have this pain in my chest?

Thinking perhaps the pain was imaginary, a lingering, vivid memory, Villar reached up and touched the spot that hurt. Running fingertips lightly, he found that his shirt was stiff, stuck painfully to his skin. Gritting his teeth and emitting a pained grunt, he pulled the tunic off. With the agony of ripping off a scab, he tore the cloth free of his skin. Thank Ferrol, I don’t have hair on my chest. On the shirt, a large rusty-red stain radiated out in a circle from a small slice in the garment. Touching his bare chest, he felt a very real wound.