Sword Catcher (Sword Catcher, #1)

“He’s got more than that,” Jerrod said, and frowned, passing a hand across his face. He was starting to sweat. Kel could feel it, too, the first prickles of heat along his own skin.

“Well, what he has had better be an army and a navy, because that’s what Conor has,” said Kel.

Jerrod tapped the fingers of his free hand on the table. He had large, square hands, with bitten fingernails. “Prosper Beck has a good reason for doing what he does, and a better knowledge of his own position than you do.”

“I want to talk to Beck,” said Kel, setting his ladle down. There was a faint buzzing in his ears. “In person.”

“And I said you can’t.” Jerrod set down his ladle. He looked exasperated, and . . . in pain? Merren looked at him with a sudden puzzlement, followed by a shocked realization. “Besides. Why should I do you any favors?”

“Because I poisoned you,” said Kel. “The soup. Is poisoned.”

The ladle fell from Jerrod’s hand. “You what? But we shared the soup—”

“I know,” Kel said. “I poisoned myself, too.”

Both Merren and Jerrod looked equally stunned. “You what?” Jerrod demanded.

“I poisoned myself, too,” repeated Kel. “I told the chefs it was a spice I’d brought from home, asked them to add it to the soup. Not their fault. They didn’t know.” His stomach cramped, sending a bolt of pain through his abdomen. “Merren didn’t know, either. My fault—nobody else’s.”

“Kel.” Merren was white about the mouth. “Is it cantarella?”

Kel nodded. His mouth felt dry as sand.

“Ten minutes.” Merren’s voice was flat with fear. “You have about ten minutes before it’s too late.”

“Anjuman—” Jerrod gripped the edge of the table, fingers whitening. With an effort, he said, “If you poisoned yourself, there’s an antidote. If there’s an antidote, you have it with you.” He started to rise. “Give it to me or I’ll cut your fucking head off—”

“The more you move around, the faster the poison spreads through your system,” said Merren, almost automatically.

“Anjuman, you bastard,” Jerrod breathed, sitting back down. The collar of his shirt was dark with sweat. Kel could feel the same fever-sweat prickling his own spine, the back of his neck. There was a dull, metallic taste on his tongue. “You’re insane.”

“I can’t disagree with that,” Merren muttered.

“What,” Jerrod said, with tight control, “do you want, Anjuman?”

“A promise that you’ll set up a meeting for me with Prosper Beck.”

The vein in Jerrod’s neck was throbbing. “I can’t promise that. Beck might refuse.”

“It’s your job to convince him not to refuse. Not if you want the antidote.”

Jerrod looked at him; when he spoke, he sounded as if he were being slowly strangled. “Every minute you delay, you’re risking your own life. Why not take the antidote yourself? Make me beg for it?”

Kel didn’t feel like grinning, but he did it anyway. “You need to see how far I’ll go.” His hands were burning, his tongue numb. “That I’ll die for this.”

Jerrod’s face was pinched around the mask. He said, “You really would?”

Merren leaned across the table, white-faced. “He’s willing to die,” he said. “He might even want to. For Aigon’s sake, just agree.”

Jerrod looked at Merren. “All right,” he said, abruptly. “I’ll get you a meeting with Beck.”

His hand shaking, Kel drew one of the two phials of antidote Merren had given him out of his shirt pocket. Began to twist off the top. His throat was tightening. Soon he wouldn’t be able to swallow at all. He tipped the open phial of antidote down his throat—sweet, licorice, the taste of pastisson—and flipped the second across the table to Jerrod.

Almost immediately, the buzzing in Kel’s head, the pain between his shoulder blades, began to subside. He watched through blurred eyes as Jerrod, having emptied his own dose down his throat, slammed the empty phial down on the table, hard enough to crack the glass. He was breathing as if he had been running, his eyes fixed on Kel. When he spoke, it was a low growl.

“Many would say that a promise extracted under duress is no promise at all.”

Merren groaned faintly, but Kel met Jerrod’s gaze. “I know you work out of this shop.” He gestured at the mostly empty restaurant, the chefs behind the counter studiously ignoring them. “I know how to find you. I have the power of the Palace behind me. I could get Jolivet to shut the Maze down. I could follow you to every place you go after that, and shut every one of them down, too. I could follow you like death at your heels and ruin your hellspent life, do you understand me?” He was gripping the edge of the table, his fingers white, the metallic taste still bitter at the back of his throat. “Do you?”

Jerrod rose to his feet, flipping his hood up to cover his hair. He looked down at Kel, expressionless. Kel could see his own reflection, distorted, in Jerrod’s silver mask. “You could,” Jerrod said, “have just led with that.”

“But would that have been as much fun?”

Jerrod muttered something, likely a curse, and stalked out of the shop. After a long moment of utter silence, Merren scrambled to his feet, pushed past Kel, and walked out the door after him.

Kel followed. Merren hadn’t gone far; he was only a few steps ahead, striding angrily along the road. Jerrod was nowhere to be seen, which was no surprise; he’d doubtless vanished down one of the many side streets that branched off Yulan Road like veins off an artery.

Kel didn’t care. He had nearly died, but only nearly; everything was brighter, harder, sharper than it had been before he’d swallowed the cantarella. The world shone like the gloss of light on a diamond.

He had felt this before. He remembered the assassin at the Court in Valderan, how Kel had broken his neck, the small bones crunching under his fingers like flower stems. Afterward, he hadn’t been able to be still, but had paced back and forth across the tiled floor of Conor’s room, unable to slow down long enough for the Palace surgeon to bandage his shoulder. Later, when he’d taken off his shirt, he’d found that his blood had dried on his skin in a maze of spiderwebbed lines.

He caught hold of Merren’s arm. Merren looked at him, startled, blue eyes wide as Kel drew him around a corner, into the shadows of an alley. Kel pushed him up against a wall, not hard but firmly, his hands tangling in the fabric of Merren’s black coat.

Merren’s cheeks were flushed, his mouth downturned, and Kel again had the thought he’d had in Merren’s flat: that he could kiss him. Often when he was like this, when he was high on the exquisite agony of surviving, sex (and its auxiliary activities) could bring him back down to earth. Sometimes it was the only thing that could.