52: DARK STREAKS

(Talon’s story)

Fine, we can skip ahead. I enjoyed the next morning more anyway.

Darzin D’Mon was in a wonderful mood as he walked up the stairs of the southern tower of the Blue Palace. He whistled to himself and contemplated something he identified only through its absence: boredom.

Darzin D’Mon was never the most introspective of men. He was, even he admitted, poorly gifted in the arts of self-examination. In most cases, he found this to be more benefit than hindrance. For he was not the sort to whine about his situation or be moved into bouts of self-pity, reactions that weighed down his father with guilt and doubt. If he didn’t like his situation, he changed it, and if he couldn’t change it, he didn’t let it gnaw at him. But there were enemies even he found himself hard-pressed to challenge. Enemies who snuck up on him not by stealth or means of magic, but through success and wealth and prosperity.

Winning was fun, but after the winning . . . then what? So often too easy, too often so boring: the victories had tasted stale of late. Darzin found himself venturing further and further afield to find distractions capable of keeping his interest. His forays into his father’s underworld Shadowdancer cartel had stemmed from such a desire. He longed to fill his nights with something other than the same old pleasures and entertainments.

But this—ah, this was different. Darzin warmed at the thought of his young adopted “son.” A challenge indeed. Tricky. It would be easy enough to break the boy. Few had the fortitude to resist the malice and torture that Darzin could unleash if he chose to do so. No, Darzin didn’t doubt for a moment he could grind Kihrin’s will underfoot as thoroughly as a cut flower on hot cobblestones, leaving nothing but a faintly perfumed smear. But destroying the boy’s mind wasn’t the goal. It would, in fact, make the true goal impossible to obtain. If the boy could only give the necklace of his own free will, then he had to possess enough will, enough spirit, to make such a foolish choice.

So then, subtlety was the necessary ingredient, something to which Darzin was unaccustomed and therefore found unexpectedly, delightfully challenging. He needed to make Kihrin miserable, but not too miserable, desperate, but not so despairing that he wanted to end it all. Once Darzin had shown with painstaking clarity that there would be no shelter or happiness for Kihrin within House D’Mon; then and only then could Darzin offer the path of escape—

For the reasonable price of one sapphire necklace.

And after the boy gave up his only protection?

Darzin smiled to himself. It would be nice to kill the boy in front of his father. He’d enjoy the look on Therin’s face—just before Therin too saw the bloody end of Darzin’s sword.

He was still smiling when he turned the key in the lock and walked into Kihrin’s room, unannounced.

Then he stopped smiling.

For a moment, he forgot where he was. He forgot who he was. Most importantly though, he forgot who she was. For the span of a few seconds, not more than a few hammered, pounding heartbeats, Darzin looked at the scene with the eyes of any man who had just discovered his wife in the arms of another.

Those few seconds were nearly enough to ruin everything.

Darzin had entered the room quietly from force of habit. He found his “son” still asleep in that preposterous bed, but the boy wasn’t alone. Alshena lay next to him, the sheet partly covering her naked body. Her red hair spread out in ripples over the boy’s chest. One arm draped possessively over his abdomen.

A discarded bottle of wine lay next to the bed, along with clothes—Alshena’s agolé and undergarments, the boy’s boots, kef, and shirt. The boy’s necklace, that damned sapphire, rested uncovered in the hollow of his throat. There was no doubt, could be no doubt, of what had happened here.

The brat had bedded his wife.

Only when he redoubled the pressure of his clenched fist did he realize he had, unknowingly, drawn his sword. Darzin stepped forward, and raised his arm to strike down the appalling little bastard who would dare do something like this to him.

Then he saw the bruises on Alshena.

Her body was marked by the signs of a violent infidelity: scratch marks down her back, bruises on her thighs, even bite marks. These two had not made love, but battled, and Kihrin had proved a merciless opponent. Perhaps that explained why a ripped piece of embroidered blue silk had been used to tie one of the boy’s hands to a tree trunk, where it was still trapped, even in sleep.

But Talon can’t bruise . . .

And it was only then the Lord Heir remembered that it was not his wife in bed with the boy, and never had been. The real Alshena D’Mon had been dead for weeks now, her body and brain devoured by the ever-hungry mimic who had taken her place, her soul sacrificed to summon Xaltorath. The very same Xaltorath Darzin had used to track down the Stone of Shackles—and also its bearer.

Darzin knew Talon was skilled at improvisation. If she had seen an opportunity, she wouldn’t have waited for permission to take it. All the anger drained away as Darzin understood her intention: Talon was giving him a gift.

The mimic raised her head to look up at him. She smiled, those green eyes shining, large and luminous in the soft morning light. She nodded: Do it.

Darzin didn’t think he’d ever seen Talon look so beautiful.

He steeled himself and took a deep breath. Then he grabbed a fistful of her lovely red hair, and dragged her, screaming, out of the bed.

“HOW DARE YOU? YOU WHORE!” Darzin raged as he backhanded her across the face and sent her stumbling away from him. “You would cuckold me with my OWN SON?” He hit her again, hard enough to split her lip and splatter red blood across delicate skin.

Kihrin woke. “Leave her alone!” his “son” shouted.

“Please, darling, please, I can explain—” his “wife” sobbed.

Darzin hit her a third time, a punch to the face that bloodied his own knuckles and would have likely broken her jaw if she had been any mortal woman. Alshena fell to the floor, sobbing and gasping for breath. She pleaded, cried, begged for forgiveness.

Her performance was flawless.

“Stop it!” Kihrin screamed. “You want to hurt someone, hurt me. You like that well enough!” The boy twisted at the silk holding his wrist, but his anger and struggling bound the silk into a tighter, stronger twisted vine. The more he pulled, the harder the knot resisted.

“Time for your next lesson, son,” Darzin hissed. “No one takes what is mine. I’ll kill her before I see her in the arms of another man.” He raised his sword and hoped Kihrin would call his bluff. He could pretend to kill Talon easily enough, but he wasn’t ready.

“NO!” Kihrin screamed. “Please Father. It’s not her fault. It’s mine. I did this! I raped her.”

Darzin paused.

Kihrin repeated, “I raped her. I was drunk and I . . . got carried away.”

There was a long silence as both men focused on Kihrin’s wrist, still tied to the trunk of one of the trees. The Lord Heir raised an eyebrow and pointedly stared at Kihrin.

The room was quiet, even the sound of Alshena’s crying muffled by her hands.

Kihrin stared at his wrist and sighed. “That, uh . . . that would have gone better if I wasn’t still tied up, wouldn’t it?”

Darzin smiled. “Yes. Yes, probably.”

“Yeah. That’s what I thought too.”

“As bloodied as she is, there’s a good chance I would have believed you,” Darzin pointed out.

“Ah. Well, good to know if I ever feel like framing myself for rape.” The young man’s eyes were filled with self-loathing and pleading desperation. “Please don’t kill her, Father. I’ll do anything you want.”

Darzin stared at his so-called son. He contemplated asking for the necklace right there. It’s possible the boy might agree, just to save Alshena’s life. An even more delicious irony, since the boy was only here because of the real Alshena’s sacrifice to Xaltorath. But what was a one-night affair to a youth who had drunk deep from the cup of decadence? The boy had been so rough on her. His tastes were not those of a novice, but of the hardened libertine.

Kihrin was, like Darzin himself, hard on his toys.

He could not take the chance. When Darzin made his move, there could be no doubt and no options for Kihrin—no way out.

Darzin knelt over Alshena, who cringed away from him. “Get back to our rooms, bitch. If I ever catch you doing this again, or if anyone ever finds out about this, I’ll have my men sew shut that greedy cunt of yours for good.” He slapped her one more time to make sure she understood.

Alshena nodded her blood-smeared face and crawled to the door like an injured animal, whimpering and leaving bloody tracks in her wake. Darzin watched her for a moment, a slight smile on his lips, before he turned back to Kihrin. The boy was trying to untie the taut silk knot around his wrist.

“I used to know a nobleman who had the legs of his wife amputated. Said it was like clipping the wings from a parrot—it kept her from flying away.” Darzin walked over to the table and poured himself a glass of water. “Said she didn’t need to walk for what he wanted her for anyway.”

“That’s sick,” Kihrin hissed.

“No, it was stupid,” Darzin corrected. “He bled to death in bed one night when she bit off his testicles. Everyone has their limits. Break a slave, yes. Make sure they know their place, absolutely. But only a fool pushes a slave so far they have nothing to lose by killing their master—and then gives them opportunity to do just that.”

“I thought we were talking about wives.”

“Just between you and me, there’s not much difference.” Darzin sheathed his sword. He slid a dagger out of his boot and threw it. The blade sank into the wood of the tree, severing the silk scarf holding Kihrin tight.

The boy rubbed the skin of his wrist, scraped raw in the struggle to free himself. He looked at Darzin with suspicion in his eyes. “Why aren’t you angry with me?”

Darzin feigned surprise. “Angry at you? Gods above, boy, I’m proud of you.”

His “son” stared at him in horror.

Darzin bit down on the urge to laugh and continued with an expansive wave of his hand. “Why, this was very well done. Sleeping with another man’s wife is a mark of pride and distinction—for everyone but the other man, of course. You are finally starting to act like a royal. Any other woman and I would have been patting you on the back and complimenting your technique. You bypassed many of the common blunders—for instance, you weren’t in her rooms, thus greatly lessening the chance, under normal circumstances, that her husband would walk in. And those little love marks you left on her—even if her husband never found out who did it, he would know she had been raped or seduced. Either way it’s a black mark on his honor.” He paused. “The bondage was an odd choice. Was that my wife’s suggestion?”

Kihrin shook his head. “Mine.”

“Why?”

The boy shrugged. “I like it that way sometimes.”

“Huh. Everyone has their tastes, I suppose, but I recommend you stamp down on that fetish. It’s never a good idea to leave yourself vulnerable. Tie your partner up. Don’t let them do it to you.” Darzin sipped his water for a moment while his son picked himself out of bed. “Speaking of which, I see we run to similar tastes in our women. Not so surprising, but you should take some basic precautions.”

Kihrin’s eyes narrowed. “I’m not an idiot. I have a ring from a Blue House . . .”

Darzin rolled his eyes. “I meant about not killing them.”

The horror returned to the young man’s eyes. “Killing—!”

“I saw what you did to Alshena. Now, her tastes run rough herself, and I’m sure she was goading you on every inch of the way. But don’t try to deny you have a dark streak in you, that you don’t enjoy the pain as much as the pleasure.”

Kihrin turned away. “No! I—” But the denial seemed to stick in the boy’s throat.

“You can find yourself in trouble if you go too far,” Darzin told his son kindly. “I know. I’ve been there myself. It can be a real dilemma. Be gentle with other men’s wives and save your true passions for the slave girls. Nobody cares what happens to them. You know—I will even do you a favor. I have a batch of slaves I’m sending off to the Octagon for resale this afternoon. Most of them are a bit threadbare, but only by my standards—the girls are lovely and well trained. I’ll give you a couple. You can take your pick.”

The boy looked up at him with eyes so full of equal parts hope and despair Darzin almost laughed out loud. Really, the lad made it too easy.

Then those blue eyes hardened to ice, and Kihrin said: “Other men’s castoffs don’t interest me, Father. Only other men’s wives.”

Darzin was torn between the desire to laugh and the desire to hit him. Kihrin was such a little—

Such a D’Mon. So much like Darzin himself that he sometimes thought he was looking in a mirror. No, he corrected himself. Not like me. Like Pedron. Like Pedron reborn. For a moment, Darzin found himself chilled. He almost shuddered, and instead pushed dark memories from his mind.

Darzin smiled. “Suit yourself. You seem to prefer learning things the hard way.” Darzin walked to the door, sidestepping the small puddle of blood.^* “Oh,” he said as he paused at the door. “It should go without saying, but I’ll do so anyway: touch Alshena again and I won’t kill you, I’ll kill her.” He grinned. “It’s about time I traded in for a younger wife anyway, so I’d love the excuse.”

He left his son like that, looking after him with eyes as flat and cold as the still surface of a distant lake.

Just like Pedron. He would have to be careful with that boy.

Dark streak indeed.