“And I believe you,” he said calmly. “Is that the only reason you’re here? To satisfy your curiosity about your good luck?”
It wasn’t. Yet Kyra was reluctant to give the reason James was waiting for, to admit that there might have been some truth to his words all along. The wallhuggers aren’t your friends. James wasn’t either, but she would hear him out.
She rubbed her forearms, trying to scrub the dungeon’s stink from her skin. “A lass was beaten by three noblemen.” She couldn’t bring herself to say Idalee. “Lord Agan’s sons.”
James leaned his head against the wall and stretched his arms within the confines of his chains. “They’ve been a problem for a while now.” Kyra supposed she shouldn’t be surprised that he knew their reputation. James had long maintained informants in the Palace, and she suspected she only knew a tiny fraction of what he had done as leader of the Assassins Guild. “And then what happened?” he asked.
“The magistrate pardoned them,” she said, her fury returning as she spoke. “There was a courtyard full of witnesses, yet the magistrate said there wasn’t enough evidence for a trial.” She paused. “It’s wrong.”
“Are you surprised?”
Kyra didn’t answer, and there was clear understanding in James’s eyes at her silence.
“You think I’m evil,” James finally said. “You cringe at the fact that I’d spill the blood of innocents to take down my enemies. But what you’ve refused to understand, and what you’re resisting even now, is that there’s no other way. The powerful do not let go of their positions so easily. Change doesn’t occur without blood.”
Blood. James had made sure there was plenty of that. “I won’t become like you,” said Kyra. “Burning down half the city to save it marks you just as guilty as the wallhuggers.”
“Then why are you still here?”
To that, she had no answer.
James shifted his position. Pain flashed across his face, and it was a few more moments before he could speak again. “I didn’t start out trying to destroy the city,” he said. “I don’t take pleasure in the pain of others.”
In that, at least, Kyra believed him. There were some in the Guild who enjoyed violence—Bacchus, for one. Kyra had seen it on the few jobs they’d taken together. He’d smiled as he beat his victims, and it had frightened Kyra to the core. James was different. He was ruthless, and he tolerated people like Bacchus, but everything he did, he did for a reason.
“After Thalia died,” he said, “I took possession of the Guild. It took me a year to weed out those who weren’t loyal to me. I solidified my control, and then I considered what I wanted to do. For a long time, the Guild had become another tool of the wallhuggers. I put an end to that and thought, Why not go further? Who was it, after all, who decreed that the fatpurses should keep their positions? Why should they dictate how we live and how we die?”
“And that was when you started infiltrating the Palace,” said Kyra.
“The wallhuggers don’t pay attention to their servants nearly as well as they should. I learned much about the upper levels of Forge simply with careful bribes.”
He’d learned much, but there had still been things he couldn’t get to, like secret documents, trade schedules, and guard assignments. For that, he’d needed a thief who could get deep into the compound. He’d needed Kyra.
James continued. “At first I thought I would only go after the bad ones. The first wallhugger I targeted was named Hamel. He was the lowest kind of worm, and few people considered his death a loss to Forge. Yet folk suffered nonetheless when I killed him. Those who’d been in his employ went hungry that winter, and the political gaps left by Hamel’s death were soon filled by another.”