The Warlord's Legacy (20 page)

“It’s all right, Jass,” Tyannon told him. “I understand. We all do.” Her eyes had not, in truth, remained entirely free of tears, either.

He nodded and stood, then bowed toward the young woman at the door. She returned a stiff curtsy.

“I’m delighted,” he said, and behind the formal tone he might even have meant it, “to meet you both.” He extended a hand to Lilander, and his lips even twitched in a brief smile at the boy’s deeply sincere expression as he took it.

“It’s nice to meet you, Uncle Jassion,” his niece told him, though her
attention was fixed mostly on her mother. Her voice carried a surprising weight, given her slight frame. “Even if it should have happened much sooner.”

“Mellorin!” Tyannon snapped at her.

“It’s all right,” Jassion said. “Perhaps I should have looked for you before—”

“It’s not you, Jass,” his sister told him. “Don’t worry about it. Just an—old family squabble.”

Mellorin rolled her eyes, and Kaleb coughed into a fist—probably to keep from snickering at the lot of them.

But Jassion’s stare had gone flinty as he began to understand Mellorin’s meaning. “She may have a point there, too, Tyannon.”

“Jass—”

“You never came back.”

“Jass, please—”

“You
never came back!
” Mead sloshed over the edge of the mug. Jassion glanced down, as though it had moved on its own, then once more at Tyannon. “
Twenty-three years!
How
could
you? How could you stay with that
creature
? How—”

Tyannon shot to her feet, chair toppling out from beneath her. “You didn’t
know
him, Jassion. There was so much more to him, I really believed …” She sighed, brushing her hair from her face. “I loved him, Jassion.”

“
No!
” He, too, was standing now, leaning over the table as though preparing to scramble over it.

“Mom?” Lilander whispered. His eyes were wide, but he stepped forward, putting his spindly, twelve-year-old frame between Tyannon and his uncle.

And in those eyes, Jassion saw reflected a figure in black armor snatching his sister away. He swallowed once, hard, and sat down, intertwining his fingers to keep his hands from shaking.

“Don’t say that to me,” he demanded, though far more softly. “Not ever. Not about—”

“Cerris,” Tyannon interrupted, with perhaps the slightest emphasis on the name, “was not the man you think he was.”

Jassion frowned, puzzled, failing for a moment to understand the fear, the
pleading
, in his sister’s voice.

But only for a moment.

The children didn’t know
.

And Jassion would
not
be the one to tear their innocence from them. “Perhaps,” he conceded, “we ought to speak alone.”

“Lilander, go play outside.” Her tone hadn’t changed, but her shoulders slumped in obvious relief.

“I don’t—”

“Please don’t argue with me, Lilander. Not now. Mellorin, go keep an eye on him.”

“Mother, come
on!
I’m not stupid, I—”

“Mom, I don’t need—”

“I said
don’t argue with me!
Please,” she added softly, putting a hand on Lilander’s face, turning her own face toward her daughter. “Please.”

With that sigh of aggravation known to teens all over creation, Mellorin stomped from the room. Lilander trailed after, watching over his shoulder until the door shut behind them.

“Well,” Kaleb said brightly, “that ought to keep the neighbors in gossip for a few more days.”

The glares cast his way pretty well cemented the family resemblance.

“Thank you,” Tyannon said, sitting across from her brother once more.

“I wasn’t about to do that to them. Everyone deserves a childhood.” The accusation was unmistakable.

“I did it to save
you!
”

“I know why you
went
with him, Tyannon. But you
stayed
with him. You weren’t a prisoner, not after a while, anyway. He told me. You could have left anytime you wanted.”

“Oh, he told you, did he? Would that have been when you had him chained up and beaten like a dog? Is
that
who I saved, Jassion? A monster who tortures helpless victims?”

“He
was
a dog, and I did what I had to do.” The baron’s face was flushed, his teeth grinding. “I should have
killed
him!”

“He saved us, Jass. He beat Audriss, and he saved us all.”

“It doesn’t excuse what else he did. And you, you …” He literally sputtered, unable to put words to her betrayal.

“I loved him,” she said simply. And again, even as he flinched away, “I loved him. I saw more in him than you ever did. I saw the man he
could
be, and I helped him get there.”

“You left me alone to do it,” Jassion whispered. “And for what? Where’s your ‘new Corvis’ now, Tyannon?”

This time, it was she who looked away.

“He’s not here,” Jassion said. “From the looks of things, he hasn’t been for a while.”

“He’s never been in this house,” she admitted, voice catching. “We left him a long time ago.”

“Because you knew he hadn’t changed after all, didn’t you? You saw it when he came back from the Serpent’s War.”

“Oh, Jassion, I thought … I really thought he …”

He sat, staring at his hands while his sister cried, and wished he dared comfort her.

“I hate to interrupt this little family moment,” Kaleb said in a tone that fooled nobody at all, “but the reason we’re here …?”

Jassion nodded, took a deep breath. “Tyannon, it’s not over.”

She nodded, dashing away her tears with the back of her hand. “I’ve heard rumors. I think everyone has. Duke Halmon?”

“Among many others. He has to be stopped. For good.”

“I don’t understand.” She was mumbling, face turned toward the table. “Even at his worst … He always believed he was doing what was best for Imphallion. Why would he do this?”

Jassion’s body tensed at her words, but he only shook his head. “I don’t know. And it doesn’t really matter, does it? If we don’t deal with him—and fast, before Cephira advances any farther—there may not
be
much of an Imphallion left.”

“I think …” Tyannon shuddered as the implications of her words overcame her, but she forged ahead. “I think I’d help you, if I could.”

The air vanished from Jassion’s lungs. “
If
you …?”

“We used to live in Chelenshire, but I don’t think he’s there
anymore.” She sighed, reached out a hand to take his. “I’m sorry, Jassion. I know you’ve come all this way, and finding us couldn’t have been easy. But I can’t help you. I truly don’t know where he is.”

Kaleb muttered an ugly curse while Jassion stared down at the fingers that overlay his own, saying nothing at all.

T
HEY REMAINED FOR SOME HOURS
, Jassion and Tyannon telling each other—haltingly, and without much detail—of the years they’d spent apart, while Kaleb sat across the room and fidgeted. But all too soon, or perhaps not soon enough, neither had anything left to say.

“We have to go,” Jassion told her finally, rising from his chair. “Even if you can’t help, we have to find him.”

“I understand. Jass?”

“Hmm?”

“I know how you feel about him, and maybe you’re right. But … Take him alive, if you can? For me?”

The baron’s lips pressed tight, but he nodded. “If I can, Tyannon.” Then, haltingly, “And perhaps, when this is over … Maybe you and the children might come to Braetlyn? I know you’ve no interest in being baroness, and I wouldn’t foist it on you, but … It’d be nice not to be alone.”

“I don’t know, Jass. I’ll think on it.”

And that—along with a timid, tentative hug and the soft thud of a closing door—was that. Jassion stood on the walkway outside, staring out over the vegetable garden, and for once Kaleb was wise enough to hold his comments.

It was Jassion himself who finally broke the silence. “What now? We didn’t really have a backup plan.”

“Now? We wait. It’ll be dark in a few hours. They’ll all be asleep by then.”

Jassion stiffened. “So?”

“So Lilander’s too young to put up a fight. We can take him without much of a fuss, and with his blood—”

“
Have you lost your godsdamn mind
?”

“No, but if you keep shouting like that, I may lose my godsdamn hearing.” He actually stuck a finger in his ear, wiggled it about a bit. “What’s your problem?”

In a slightly lower voice, “Do you truly believe, for one single instant, that I’m going to let you abduct my nephew?”

“I won’t hurt him, old boy. We just need—”

“No. Absolutely not. I told you, I don’t care what sort of magic you have—”

“Yes, yes, you’ll find some way to kill me. I’ve heard it before.”

“You may not be around to hear it again. Besides, you said you couldn’t find Rebaine even with familial blood, that he had spells to block you.”

“From a distance, yes. But his magics aren’t that powerful. If I can get near enough, I can break through his defenses.
If
I have a relative’s blood. It’s not much, but it’s far better than nothing. You know, nothing? Like what we have now?”

They faced off in the middle of the yard, two men each as unyielding as oaks.

“Don’t you have other means?” Jassion asked eventually. “Other magics we might use?”

“Oh, plenty. There are a dozen spells I could use to try to locate Rebaine.”

“Then why—?”

“Because none of them would work. Even
his
magics are potent enough to completely block most lesser divinations. Neither of us has seen him personally in the past few months, and we don’t have any of his hair or skin, so that rules out the more powerful options.”

“Tyannon might have something.”

“Oh, sure. She abandoned him with kids in tow because he’d betrayed everything she thought he was, but she kept a tuft of his beard as a keepsake.”

Jassion grumbled something under his breath.

“Look, it’s the only way—”

“No.” The baron glared at Kaleb once more, but he wasn’t seeing the sorcerer. Again he saw the black armor dragging his sister from him, again he saw the guards approaching, felt the warm blood and the
flopping limbs as the corpses piled up around him. He saw, in his mind’s eye, the pimply face of his nephew twisted in sudden fear.

And in that moment, he swore to himself:
I will do almost anything to stop Rebaine—but I will not
become
him to do it
.

Perhaps Kaleb saw some of that in Jassion’s expression, because he simply nodded and turned to go, wandering back down the walk toward the posts at which they’d tied their mounts. Startled by his abrupt acquiescence, but unwilling to broach the subject further, Jassion scurried after.

For more than an hour they rode in silence, passing once more through Abtheum’s gate and back onto the open highway. The
clop-clop
of the hooves seemed to tick away not merely distance but time itself.

“So what,” Jassion asked again when it grew too heavy to bear, “do we do now?”

“We wait.”

“It seems to me that we’ve had this conversation before. What, exactly, are we waiting for this time?”

“For our other option.” Kaleb grinned smugly, steadfastly refusing to elaborate.

That option caught up with them in the early evening, moments after they’d made their nightly camp. Jassion stood by a tree off in the shadows, checking the tethers on the horses, while Kaleb crouched by a crackling fire he’d lit without benefit of flint or tinder, preparing a haunch of heavily salted beef they’d acquired in Abtheum’s market. Both looked up as one, heads cocked at the soft whinny and faint jingling of an approaching mount.

“Right on schedule,” Kaleb muttered, dusting his hands off and rising to his feet. Jassion’s hand strayed toward Talon’s hilt as he moved to join his companion, but the sorcerer shook his head. “That won’t be necessary, O master swordsman.”

A small palfrey rounded the bend, clearly a beast of burden rather than war. The slender figure atop the saddle wore undyed tunic and leggings. Face and chest were concealed by a hooded cloak that might have been described as “pearl” if it were of higher quality but, as it was, could only be called “off-white.”

Horse and rider drew to a halt, faces turned to study the men by the fire. Small hands lifted the hood, dropped it back, revealing slim features and dark hair.

“Good evening, Mellorin,” Kaleb said.

Jassion just cursed. A lot.

The daughter of Corvis Rebaine slid from her saddle, landing softly on her feet and striding toward them as though she had every right and expectation of being there. As she approached, Jassion whispered to Kaleb, “How did you know?”

“I saw a rather familiar look on her face during our conversation.”

“Familiar?”

“Just like one of yours, actually. The one you get when you’re about to be idiotically pigheaded about something. I’ve seen it a
lot
, actually.”

“Gentlemen,” she greeted them, halting some feet away. Her voice was steady, confident, but the flickering of her eyes in the firelight betrayed an underlying unease.

“What are you doing here, Mellorin?” Jassion asked. “Is something wrong?” A sudden twitch of fear touched his face. “Did something happen back home?”