Shadow's Edge - Brent Weeks [210]
“Who are you?” Kylar asked.
“I’m one of the good guys. At least as much as I can be.” His golden eyes danced. “But I want you to understand something Acaelus never did: I’m not a man,” he paused, grinning, and Kylar did indeed wonder how much humanity was behind those lupine eyes, “to cross lightly.”
“I figured.”
“Are you in?”
“That’s odd,” the Godking said, coming to stand over Kylar’s corpse. “Where’s the ka’kari? I sense… it’s in his body?”
“Yes,” Vi said, unable to stop herself.
“Fascinating. I don’t suppose you know what all it does?”
To her horror, Vi found herself answering. It hadn’t been a direct question, so she veered as hard as she could. “No. I know it makes him invisible.” She’d tried to say “made,” but she couldn’t force the past tense into the sentence. She hoped he didn’t notice.
“Well, regardless, your lover will have to wait. I have a massacre to attend.”
Vi screamed and grabbed Kylar’s sword. Garoth watched her curiously. The sword swung in an arc—and stopped. She stopped it herself. She couldn’t do it.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” he said. “Funny thing is, I learned compulsion from one of your southron mating rituals—ringing—but you people completely misunderstood its true power. Anyway, feel free to watch the battle—and stop grunting, dear. It’s unbecoming.”
Abruptly, his eyes went vacant. Vi tried to move the sword, but it was impossible. The compulsion was undeniable.
As the wytches released the ferali, Vi sat on the steps before the throne to watch. But even that terrible spectacle couldn’t hold her attention.
She should have given up long ago. All her fighting was a farce. She’d done everything the Godking had wanted her to do. She’d killed Jarl and she’d killed Kylar. In the years to come, she’d doubtless kill hundreds more. Thousands. It wouldn’t matter. No one else could ever mean what Jarl and Kylar had meant to her. Jarl, her only friend, dead by her hand. Kylar, a man who had somehow stirred… what? Passion? Maybe just warmth, in a cold dead heart. A man who could have been… more.
She hated every man she’d ever known. It was man’s nature to kill, to destroy, to tear down. Woman was the giver of life, the nurturer. And yet… Kylar.
He stood athwart her suppositions like a colossus. Kylar, the legendary wetboy who should have been the very quintessence of destruction, had saved a little girl, adopted her, saved a woman, saved nobles who didn’t deserve saving, and tried to leave the bitter business. Would have left it, too, if not for me.
If not for Vi, Kylar would be in Caernarvon, leading some sort of daylight life that Vi couldn’t even imagine. And what was it with Elene? Kylar could have had any woman he wanted, and he’d chosen a girl covered with scars. In her experience, men went for the hottest bitch they could get their cock in. If the bitch was hot, they didn’t care that she was a bitch. Kylar wasn’t like that.
Vi had an awful flash of intuition. She saw Elene—a woman she’d never met—as her twin and opposite. Elene had scars an inch deep, but beneath that she was all beauty and grace and love. Vi was all ugliness except for the thin veil of her skin. Kylar’s love was a mystery no more. The man who could see past Jarl’s murder could easily see past a few scars. Of course he loved Elene. Or had, before Vi killed him.
Kylar had said he would come back. But he wouldn’t come back. The Godking had won.
Vi pulled her knife out of Kylar’s back and rolled him over. His eyes were open, blank, dead. She closed those accusing eyes, pulled his head into her lap and turned to watch the Godking massacre Cenaria’s last hope.
70
All pretense of scholastic detachment was gone. At first, the magi had to strain to see the ferali. It entered the battle virtually unnoticed.
Within a minute, one of the mages said, “McHalkin was right. I thought he made it up.”
“We all thought he made it up. What does this mean about all those other creatures in his writings?”
“Gods, it’s just like he said. It’s being ridden, possessed.”
On the battlefield, the beast’s