She watched his hand. His fist relaxed around the hilt. He frowned. “Then I need to speak to Roderigo,” he said. “What is this about our Jan?”
She lowered her gaze as a demure and slightly frightened young woman might, looking at him through her lashes. “We… I know we both love him, my Hirzg, and I know how much he respects and admires you. Even more than his own vatarh.”
Fynn’s hand had left the sword hilt; she took a step closer to him. “You know that he’s asked the A’Hirzg to speak to my family?” she asked him. Fynn nodded and stood erect, turning his back to the weapon on the bed. That made her smile genuine as she took a step toward him. “Jan has tremendous gratitude for your friendship,” she told him. Another step. “He wished me to give you a… a gift in appreciation.”
Another. She was within arm’s length of him now.
“A gift?” Fynn’s gaze slid from her face to her body. He laughed as she took a final step, her tashta brushing against him. “Perhaps Jan doesn’t know me as well as he might think. What gift is this?”
“Let me show you,” she said. With that she put her left arm around him, pulling him tight to her. With the same motion, she reached to the belt of her tashta and took the long dagger from its sheath in the small of her back. She plunged the blade between his ribs and twisted it. His mouth opened in pain and shock, and she stifled his shout with her open mouth. His arms pushed at her, but she was too close and his muscles were already weakening.
It was already over, though it took his body a few breaths to realize it.
When he stopped struggling and went limp in her arms, she laid him on his bed. His eyes were open, staring at the ceiling. She shook two small stones from a pouch tucked in her bosom and placed them over the eyes: the pale one that Allesandra had given her over the left, her own stone-the one she’d carried for so long-over the right. She let them stay there: as she stripped the bloodied tashta from her body and flung it into the fireplace, as she washed his blood from her hands and arms in his own basin, as she dressed herself quickly in the tashta she’d left in the other room. Finally, she plucked the stone from his right eye and placed it back in its pouch, tucking its familiar weight under the low collar of the tashta. She thought she could already hear Fynn, wailing as the others welcomed him…
Then, silent except for the voices in her head, she fled the way she’d come.
She heard poor Hamlin’s terrified scream just as she reached the main corridors, and the shouts of hurried orders from the gardai offiziers as they rushed to the Hirzg’s chambers.
She turned her back on them and hurried from the palais.
MOTIONS
Allesandra ca’Vorl
“ The White Stone…”
“It must have been the Kraljiki who hired him…”
“The Numetodo hired him…”
“The Tennshah hired him…”
“I heard that the A’Hirzg has been targeted herself, and her son. ..”
Allesandra heard the rumors. They were inescapable, choking Firenzcia like the fog that rose every evening from the woods around Stag Fall Palais, where Starkkapitan Armen ca’Damont and Commandant Helmad cu’Gottering of the Garde Hirzg had ordered the family be taken after the assassination. “The Commandant and I can protect you best there, A’Hirzg,” ca’Damont had said. She’d nodded stone-faced to him.
Pretense… She had to keep up the proper face. She had to make the ca’-and-cu’ believe that she grieved. She had to make them believe what she would ask of them.
Soon. Even if there was little hope now.
Security was visible everywhere around the palais, with gardai seemingly at every corner. Allesandra stood on the high balcony of the palais now, staring down to the tops of the fir trees below her on the steep flanks of the mountains, and to the gray-white strands of mist that wound between them, lifting as the sun set. She rubbed a pale-colored, flat pebble between her fingers.
She heard the door to the balcony open, followed by the murmuring of male voices. She turned to see Semini approaching her like a green-clad and sober-faced bear. He said nothing, padding softly toward her and stopping an arm’s length away-there were gardai to either side of them, a careful several strides away. He put his arms on the railing of the balcony and stared off into the mist coiling like sinewed arms around the trees, as if ghosts were tending a garden, reaching down to pull the weeds from between the wanted plants. Occasionally, a wisp would reach the level of the balcony, and cold, damp air would slide around Allesandra’s ankles as if trying to pull her down into the gathering dark.
“So…” The word sounded like a low wind through the pine needles. “Will the White Stone be coming for me, now?” She saw his gaze flick down to the stone she held in her fingers.
“I didn’t hire him, Semini,” Allesandra said. Him… She wondered about that now. Elissa had seemingly vanished the same day Fynn had died, devastating Jan with another emotional hammer blow atop the death of his Onczio Fynn. Two days later, a frantic message came from Jablunkov saying that Elissa, daughter of Elissa and Josef (nee ca’Evelii) ca’Karina had died six years ago and could the A’Hirzg possibly have made some mistake.
Allesandra wondered. It was possible that ‘Elissa’ had fled only because she knew that Allesandra had sent a letter to the ca’Karina family. It was possible that she’d run only because she knew her deception would be exposed. It was possible there was no connection between her disappearance and Fynn’s death. Still, being close to Jan meant that Elissa had also had access to Fynn, and in Allesandra’s experience it was dangerous to believe in coincidence. It was safer to see instead the knife-edge of conspiracy under coincidence’s veil.
The White Stone’s voice… Could it have been a woman’s, pitched low?
Semini was nodding as he glanced at the pebble in her hand. “Is that…?”
She lifted the stone so he could see it. “Yes,” she said. “This was what the White Stone left behind. It… reminds me of Fynn, and it reminds me that I will find who hired the White Stone and punish them.”
Another nod. Semini was staring down again into the trees. “The Council of Ca’ will be unanimous in naming you Hirzgin. Congratulations.” His voice was flat. “But you could have had that weeks ago, if you hadn’t sent Jan to save Fynn.”
“I’m glad someone remembers that. But… I have no intention of being Hirzgin, Semini.”
That brought his face around to her again. A hand rubbed the silver-flecked beard as his dark eyes searched hers. “You’re serious.”
“I am.”
“I thought-”
“You think entirely too much, Semini,” she told him, then softened her rebuke with a smile. The garda behind was looking the other way, and her body shielded the one behind her. She reached out to stroke his arm, once. “I intend to renounce my title of A’Hirzg. After all, too many people will be thinking just as you’re thinking right now. There would always be whispers that I had Fynn killed so that I might take the throne in Brezno. If I step down, that gossip will die with my abdication. I will leave it to the Council of Ca’ to name a new Hirzg for Firenzcia.”
One thick eyebrow curved high on Semini’s forehead. “Have you spoken to Pauli?”
The mention of his name threw a cold barrier between them, or perhaps it was the fog. She withdrew her hand. “It’s not my husband’s decision to make,” Allesandra told him sharply, then smiled again. “But it will be interesting to watch his face when I stand up in front of the Council and say this-and I expect it to be entirely a surprise to him, Semini. I also expect that he’ll be rushing back to West Magyaria in a rage the next day, complaining to Gyula Karvella how the wife that he and Hirzg Jan handpicked for him has ruined him.”