Kushiel's Chosen

heartbeats I waited, and finally asked it, quietly. "Why did you?"
    For a short eternity, he only glared, and then the anger went out of him with a shuddering sigh and he sat on the edge of the bed, burying his face in his hands. I could barely make out the muffled words. "It was an accident."
    Naamah's arts are not only for love, although ignorant people think so. I drew the story out of him that night like a thorn, piecing it together. The Atrabiades line was an old one and noble in Illyria; his father had been a captain in the Ban's Guard, with estates in Epidauro. A gently-bred wife, he had, and two sons; Kazan the warrior, his father's pride, and Daroslav the scholar, his mother's favorite. When he died in a skirmish, Kazan resigned his commission in the Epidauran navy to follow in his father's footsteps and join the Guard.
    All of this was some ten years ago, and he but twenty-two or three years of age, a fierce, bright young warrior, rising quickly in rank until he had a unit of his own to command. It was the time of Cesare Stregazza's last great effort as the Doge of La Serenissima to subdue Illyria entirely and place a regent in Epidauro to rule it.
    And it was a time when Kazan's brother Daroslav was home on leave from his studies at the University of Tiberium, much against his mother's wishes.
    "He begged and begged, he," Kazan told me, staring open-eyed at his memories. "He had been studying the great battles, eh, the great generals. Always, he wanted to be like me, you know? To carry a sword, and be a soldier, to fight for Illyria like our father. Since he was a boy, he has this wish, to be something from the tales he studies. And our mother is so proud, she, to have a scholar-son; a great statesman, eh, this is what she sees for Daroslav, not to die on the end of a spear, like his father, like his brother will, she thinks."
    I poured him water from the pitcher on the bedstand; he drank it at a gulp and told me the rest: How the Ban's Guard had ridden down a Serenissiman contingent in the foothills, and learned of an assault to be launched on the armory in Epidauro in two days' time; how they had planned to conceal themselves within, ambushing their attackers. And how Kazan had relented, and told Daroslav of their plan, that he might observe it from a safe distance.
    It had not been enough for Daroslav Atrabiades, who had drawn on the cunning of the great generals he had studied to conceive a brilliant rear-guard attack. Armed with his elder brother's second-best sword, he rallied a handful of young men disgruntled at having no post in the Ban's Guard. When the trap was sprung, they fell on the Serenissiman rear.
    By all accounts, Daroslav fought very well indeed, wresting a Serenissiman helmet and a full-body shield with the Stregazza arms from the first man he killed. Thus armored, he broke through the Serenissiman line and burst into the arsenal in the flush of first triumph, racing to take his place fighting at his vaunted brother's side.
    "He opened his arms, he," Kazan said. "He opened his guard, and said my name, eh? And I saw only the helmet and the shield, I, the arms of Serenissima. I stabbed him in the heart."
    I had thought... I don't know what I had thought. Something else-a quarrel, a woman, something. Kazan was hot-tempered; 'twas easy to cast him as the villain. Not this awful, tragic dupe of fate. "I am sorry," I said at length. "Truly, my lord, I am."
    He stirred; I nearly think he'd forgotten me, telling it. "No matter," he said, his voice hardening. "It is done, and I am blood-cursed, I, with my mother's bitter words to make it stick, eh? So she spoke them, when we carried him home, and I followed the bier, I, with Daroslav's blood on my hands. No more to have a home, no more to go to Epidauro, or the kríavbhog will swallow my soul. Always it waits and watches, yes, but it will not have me yet!" And he stared fiercely into the darkness in the corners of the room, as if daring it to defy him.
    Well and so; that was the story of Kazan Atrabiades, who slew the brother he loved. I got him to sleep in time, and the ghost of Daroslav troubled him no more that night, nor in the nights that followed.

FIFTY-FIVE
    A light rain was falling the day that Nikanor's ship returned.
    I was sitting on a bench in the arcade with Glaukos, enjoying the coolness in the air and practicing my Illyrian when the runner came from the summit, panting and barefoot. Someone ran to fetch him a dipperful of water