Kushiel's Dart

careless offer promised the kind of hard usage I craved.
    In the space of a breath, I thought these things and saw Hyacinthe eyeing the heavy purse.
    And then Delaunay's man Guy was there.
    "You cannot afford her virgin-price, my friend." His seldom-used voice was as mild as ever, but the point of his poniard rested below the lordling's chin and I caught glimpse of a second dagger poised at belly level. I had not even seen him enter the inn. The lordling stood with upraised chin and glaring eyes, pricked by steel into humiliating attentive-ness. "Go now, and rejoin your companions."
    The calm voice and cold steel were more convincing than brawn and volume could ever have been. I watched the lordling swallow, all arrogance leaving him. He turned without a word and retraced his steps. Guy sheathed his dagger without comment.
    "We will leave now," he said to me, pulling up the hood of my cloak and fastening it under my chin. I went obediently, able to spare only a quick wave of farewell in Hyacinthe's direction as Guy shepherded me out of the crowded inn. Hyacinthe, who was used from our earliest acquaintance to abrupt and forceful departures on my part, took it with aplomb.
    For me, it was a long coach ride home. I huddled silent in my cloak, until finally Guy began to speak. "It is not always for us to choose." It was dark in the carriage, and I could not see his face, only hear his flat voice. "My parents gave me to be reared by the Cassiline Brotherhood when I was but a babe, Phedre; and the Brotherhood cast me out when I was fourteen and broke my oath with a farmer's daughter. I made my way to the City and fell into a life of crime. Though I was good at it, I despised myself, and wished to die. One day when I thought I could fall no lower, I took a commission from an agent of someone very powerful to assassinate a nobleman on his way home from a party."
    " Delaunay ?" I gasped, astonished. Guy ignored the interruption.
    "I resolved to succeed or die, but the nobleman disarmed me. I waited for the killing blow, but he asked me instead, 'My friend, you fight like one trained by the Cassiline Brotherhood; how is it then that you come to be engaged in this least fraternal of acts?' And upon his query, I began to weep."
    I waited for more, but Guy fell silent a long while. There was no sound but the clopping hooves of the horses and the coachman's tuneless whistle.
    "We do not choose our debts," he said at length. "But indebted we are, both of us, to Anafiel Delaunay. Do not seek to betray him. Your debt may be discharged one day, but mine is unto the death, Phedre."
    The night was chilly and his words struck cold into my bones. I shivered in my thick cloak and thought about what he had said, wondering at the power in Delaunay to reach even a heart hardened by crime and despair.
    But if Guy was Delaunay's man unto death, he was not what I was: his pupil. The words of his speech-the most he'd ever spoken in my presence-fell into place in the vast puzzle in my mind, forming one important question.
    "Who wanted Delaunay dead?"
    In the darkness of the coach, I could feel him glance at me. "Isabel de la Courcel," came the flat reply. "The Princess Consort."
    The incident remained in my mind for it was the first of its kind, and the last, for that matter. In all the time I knew him, Guy never spoke again of his history nor our mutual debt to Delaunay. And yet his words had the effect he desired, for never did I attempt to betray my bond-debt.
    Delaunay's past and his long-standing enmity with the Princess Consort remained the central enigma in my life. For all that she was some seven years in the grave, as I well knew, their feud lived on where it touched on the strands of intelligence Delaunay gathered. To what end, I knew not, and spent long hours in fruitless speculation with Hyacinthe and Alcuin alike; for Alcuin was as fascinated as I with the mystery of Anafiel Delaunay, if not more so.
    Indeed, as Alcuin grew from boy to youth, steeped in the teaching of Cecilie Laveau-Perrin, I witnessed the nature of his regard for Delaunay change. The spontaneous affection that had been so charming in him as a child gave way to a different kind of adoration, at once tender and cunning.
    I envied him the luxury of this slow epiphany, and knew alarm at Delaunay's response, a careful distancing that spoke volumes. I don't think even Delaunay himself was aware of it; but I was.
    It was some few weeks prior to Alcuin's sixteenth birthday