CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
KADEN
I’d had a hole burning in my gut since we left Terravin. I didn’t expect her to be pleasant with me after what I had done. How could she understand? But I didn’t have the choices of the nobly bred. My choices were few, and loyalty was paramount to them all. It was all that had ever kept me alive.
Even if I’d been able to disregard loyalties and hadn’t brought her with us, someone else would have been sent to finish the job the way it was meant to be done. Someone more eager, like Eben. Or worse, someone like Malich.
And of course I would be dead—as I should be for my betrayal. No one lied to the Komizar.
Yet that’s exactly what I’d be doing when I told him she had the gift. She might be able to fool the others—Griz and Finch were from the old hill villages where spirits and the unseeable were still believed in—but the Komizar wasn’t a believer in magical thinking.
Unless he saw visible proof of the gift, he’d find her presence useless. She would have to up her game. Still, I was sure the Komizar would forgive me this one lapse in making the decision to bring her back instead of killing her. He knew of my beginnings and the role the unseeable had played in my life. He also understood the ways of so many Vendans who still believed. He could twist it to his purpose.
I rubbed my chest, feeling the scars anew now that she had seen them, thinking how they must look to someone like her. Maybe they just completed the image of an animal. I was afraid that was all I was to her now.