58. THE BABYSITTING SERVICE

Kalindra’s story

The D’Lorus town house, the Academy at Alavel

The morning after Vol Karoth’s escape

“I must admit, I find myself a bit taken aback by the idea that the empress has a child,” Jira Milligreest said as she handed Kalindra a cup of morning tea. “But with those eyes, I suppose he’d have to be hers, wouldn’t he?”

The child in question was currently siting in the middle of a fortress made out of ink sticks, along with Kalindra’s son, Nikali. She wasn’t certain where the ink sticks had come from, but it made a certain amount of sense that a house owned by the D’Lorus family would have a truly excessive, decadent supply.

They’d wanted to use books, but Kalindra had put her foot down. If a column of ink sticks fell over, no one would be hurt. The same couldn’t be said of many of the tomes kept at the D’Lorus house.

As if to prove her point, her son grabbed several cloth belts he’d pulled from her bag earlier and began spinning them at the impromptu fort. When that failed to give the desired destructive result, he pouted and then shoved to knock the blocks over.

Kalindra felt a chill as she realized her son was reenacting the Lash’s attack on Devors.

“Dear?”

Kalindra turned owl eyes on her mother-in-law. “What was that?”

Jira sighed and rubbed the side of her head. “Oh, I don’t know, dear. Just commenting on how odd it was that the empress would suddenly reveal out of nowhere that she has a son.” The woman squinted at the contents of her teacup before apparently finding the idea of tea wholly inadequate and setting the cup aside.

“Are you all right?” Kalindra took the opportunity to ignore the question and Tyentso and her so-called son.

Because it was bullshit. Kalindra knew it was bullshit. Yes, technically, her tenure on Ynisthana in the service of the Black Brotherhood had only overlapped with Tyentso’s by around six months or so, but that was enough time that if Tyentso had come to the island already pregnant, Kalindra would have known. Since there wasn’t a single soul on the island who hadn’t been meticulous about preventing unplanned pregnancies, it was extraordinarily unlikely that Tyentso could have become accidentally pregnant while there. Finally, since Tyentso had returned to Quur along with Teraeth and Kihrin, just a few months previously, the only possible way she could have pulled off a surprise child was if she’d taken a quick vacation over at the Lighthouse at Shadrag Gor so she could birth and raise a toddler. Which seemed logistically impossible for many reasons, not least of which was that she’d have run out of food long before the boy’s first birthday.

So yes, it was bullshit. And yet the woman in charge of the entire damn empire had shown up at the D’Lorus estate at some gods-awful hour of the morning with a still-sleeping baby in her arms. Whom she then proclaimed to be her son, Tyrin, and all but begged Jira to take care of the boy while Tyentso was away on march because she didn’t trust any of the servants.

Kalindra hadn’t said a word in protest, even though the lie was so obvious it was all but lit up in mage-light with a big shiny ribbon tied around it.

She didn’t think anyone would blame her for wanting to know what game Tyentso was playing, though. Besides wanting to know the answers to such other questions as: Where did you find the child? What happened to his parents? And her personal favorite: What the fuck is wrong with you?

In Kalindra’s opinion, when the professional assassins started giving someone judgmental stares, that person really needed to take a long, hard look to whatever the hell they were doing, because it had crossed a damn line. She knew from experience.

She was zoning out again. Kalindra snapped herself back in time to realize her mother-in-law was still in the middle of answering her question.

“—and I feel completely dried out, and I didn’t even have anything to drink last night. I must be coming down with something.” Jira inhaled deeply. “Although I must say, I’d forgotten how calming Alavel is. So at least that’s nice.”

Eledore was apparently feeling the same way, to the point where she’d decided to skip breakfast and just stay in bed.

A burst of sun-bright laughter echoed through the room as the two boys fell to the ground giggling uncontrollably, presumably because of the way Nikali had sprayed spit everywhere when he was pretending to be the rainstorm over Devors.

At least the children were having a good time.

“It is pretty here,” Kalindra agreed. “But I can’t help feeling some sympathy with Eledore. I wish we were down in Khorvesh fighting.”

“If it weren’t for the children, we would be,” Jira said after a thoughtful pause. “I haven’t missed repelling a morgage incursion in over twenty years, and then only because I was in labor with…” Her face started to twist, started to turn haunted. Jira closed her eyes and sat very still, as though she were a cracked cup that would finish shattering if she moved so much as an inch.

“With Jarith,” she finished in a much softer voice.

Kalindra reached over and covered her mother-in-law’s hand with hers. She wished she could explain about Jarith. She could only imagine—but she could imagine very easily—how painful it would be to lose one’s child. And Jarith had been … Jarith had been everything, hadn’t he? It had never been difficult to tell how loved he’d been by his family and how much he’d loved them in return. They’d loved him so much that they’d only made the most token of protests when he’d announced he was marrying a nobody commoner from Khorvesh. Even those protests had been promptly revoked once Kalindra demonstrated how well she could fight.

“He’s not … he’s not really gone.” Kalindra’s throat was so dry, speaking those words felt like the rasp of sandpaper. She hated that Jira would take those words as metaphor, that she was telling the truth but not in a way that was honest.

Your son’s still here. He still loves you. He still loves us. He’s just … different now.

Please don’t hate him because he’s not your perfect boy anymore.

“Sometimes…” Jira’s voice cracked. “Sometimes I feel like he’s still in the room.” Her lower lip quivered.

Kalindra knew those moments hadn’t been Jira’s imagination.

But she couldn’t say anything. She only hoped there would be time to explain and that the Milligreests could forgive her for letting them all suffer like this.

“It’s not fair,” Jira whispered.

Kalindra felt the words like a stiletto to the lungs, leaving her gasping and unable to draw in a breath. It didn’t matter that she knew Jarith wasn’t dead—or at least, wasn’t gone—because no matter what else, Jira had spoken true. It wasn’t fair.

Jarith hadn’t deserved what had happened to him, what Xaltorath had done to him. He’d been so young and so beautiful and so breathtakingly good. The wrongness of it coated her mouth, poisonous and sticky, acid at the back of her tongue. The guilt she felt at the emotion—grieving for a man not dead—wasn’t as strong as the bitter knowledge that things could never be as they were. Jarith still loved her, for which she was eternally grateful, but he couldn’t return to being a normal husband, a normal son, a normal human. He might learn to cope, to compensate, but …

Kalindra didn’t want to think of him as broken. That was the wrong metaphor. Broken swords could be reforged, broken pottery repaired. He’d been attacked, infected, defiled, and there could be no return to innocence. No fixing this.

And it wasn’t fair.

She squeezed her mother-in-law’s hand. Neither woman moved as one of the estate servants entered the room with a new pot of tea, carrying off the old one.

The old man didn’t say a word to either of the women. He didn’t even ask if they wanted a new pot of tea. He just set the new pot down with fingers so withered they were shaking and took the emptied pot as its replacement. He bowed, shakily, at the door, eyes flicking down to the children once before backing out of the room.

Still, Kalindra was grateful. The servants were weird and standoffish, forgotten holdovers from days when the D’Lorus family hadn’t been all but extinct. She wasn’t sure she’d heard more than a dozen words out of any of them since they’d arrived.

But they were attentive. And the tea was a good distraction.

“Here. Yours has grown cold.” Kalindra poured new cups for both of them.

“Thank you,” Jira murmured, her thoughts so obviously miles away. Or more likely, years away. Imagining better times.

Across the room, the two boys started chasing each other, Nikali flapping his arms while Tyrin giggled. Jira wiped her eyes even as she chuckled, smiling softly.

Kalindra thought it would have been impossible not to smile. Certainly, she hadn’t managed it.

Jira shook her head. “Honesty compels me to admit that what I really want to do right now is take my sword and kill … someone. Morgage, demons? Just someone. Anyone.” She drank her cup of tea. “I was being far too hard on Eledore.”

“She wasn’t making it easy,” Kalindra murmured. Something about the situation had started to bother her. It was subtle. What was it? The servants? The old man was just … old. And, honestly, had probably seen some shit. The fact that he’d even survived in the D’Lorus household meant he had to be an absolute expert in the art of not becoming a convenient human sacrifice. But still, something felt off.

The moment she tasted the tea, she knew what it was.

“Jira, don’t drink that!” Kalindra snapped, but it was too late.

The older woman looked down at her cup. “What’s—” She glanced back up at Kalindra with fear in her eyes. She didn’t finish asking what was the matter. Jira wasn’t stupid.

Kalindra grabbed a bowl that had been filled with fruit and almonds, dumped the contents onto the table, and then poured the contents of the teapot into the bowl. She looked over the dregs. Nothing obvious. No riscoria weed or dalmarik, no foxglove or other easy “throw some herbs in the pot and stand back” sort of poisons. But the aftertaste—that she recognized as potentially one of several different poisons. None of which were inhalants or acids likely to cause even worse damage if inhaled or regurgitated a second time.

Fine. So vomiting was unlikely to make the situation worse.

There was a small, covered bowl of salt on a sideboard, which she grabbed and added to a glass of water.

“I don’t feel—” Jira leaned back on the couch. “I do feel a little tired. Whatever this is, it’s acting quickly.”

Kalindra handed her the glass of salted water. “I need you to drink this and then purge yourself all over the fucking D’Lorus rugs, okay? And then I’m going to start carving my way through the staff until someone talks.”

“I would prefer you didn’t. These particular servants weren’t easy to train.”

Kalindra raised her head.

A man stood in the doorway; she hadn’t heard him enter. That alone was enough to make her concerned, but the man’s appearance raised all the hairs on her arms.

Black hair, blacker eyes, pallid skin. Dressed in D’Lorus robes. He didn’t look dead exactly, but Xivan didn’t look dead when she’d recently fed either.

Probably for the same reason.

Kalindra may never have had the unique pleasure of meeting the man, but she still knew what Gadrith D’Lorus was supposed to look like. Kalindra also knew he was supposed to be dead, but honestly, when had that ever stopped him? In hindsight, she should also have realized that Jira was of the right generation to have actually met the man.

“Gadrith!” Jira snarled as she drew her sword. She tried to close with the wizard, but halfway there, she teetered. She fell to her knees and then to the ground.

Unconscious, Kalindra thought. Not dead.

“Don’t be alarmed,” Gadrith said. “The tea wasn’t laced with anything fatal, although I am impressed you were able to identify the threat. Unexpected.” He didn’t look impressed. He also didn’t look unimpressed. His face was blank of any identifiable emotion. “But not insurmountable. Throw your weapons over there.” His black glare intensified when Kalindra hesitated. “Think of the children. Don’t make me prove my sincerity.”

Kalindra couldn’t help herself; she glanced over at Nikali. The boys had both stopped laughing and stopped playing, and both had gone perfectly still. Rather like baby gazelle hoping the lion wouldn’t see them. She repressed a shudder.

It couldn’t be a fucking coincidence that Tyentso had dropped off a child who was, at least in theory, the D’Lorus lord heir, just a few hours before Gadrith the fucking Twisted decided to show up. Especially not with Gadrith’s reputation for killing everyone around him, but most especially family members.

Tyentso had all but put a bull’s-eye on the poor boy’s chest.

Kalindra wordlessly pulled her scabbard off, gracefully stepping a tiny bit to the side as she did. Enough to block line of sight to the boy. There was no point trying to conceal Nikali. Gadrith obviously knew who he was.

“What do you want?” Kalindra asked carefully.

“Nothing more from you than your cooperation,” Gadrith told her. “Do so and there’s no reason any of you need to come to an unpleasant end.” He did something complicated with his hand, and several pieces of paper along with a quill appeared on a nearby table. “I want you to write your father-in-law a letter. I’ll tell you what to say.”