Wolves of Empire [EPIC DARK FANTASY] [Book One Complete]

Twenty-Six

Endarion

A cell, somewhere

9th of Otanus

Time moved differently in the surreal confines of his cell. It staggered in much the same way he imagined he would if he could walk, and the lack of a window denied him the ability to count the hours by the passage of day into night. Meals were delivered infrequently, and in smaller portions each time. One of the guards, a scrawny figure who looked more like a malnourished rat than a man, made a point of spitting into the bowl before pushing it under the bars, then offering Endarion a gap-toothed grin. On those days he didn't eat, and he suspected he'd already been here a week because the signs of starvation began to show themselves in fatigue and protruding ribs. His hunger curled, a deep pain in his gut, but at least it was a pain he chose to inflict on himself.

He and his cell were washed regularly, though he knew this to be a method of prolonging his pain, rather than granting him the dignity of cleanliness. During his months trapped on Shaeviren, his captors had bathed him almost daily, an exercise he'd at first thought to be a mercy delivered to a captive they meant to ransom. He'd come to realise it was to prevent him from expiring from infection and thus deny them the joy of further torture. Not to mention, both the Shaeviren brutes and his current captors used the opportunity his bathing presented to roughen him further, either by scrubbing his skin hard enough to draw blood or letting him freeze naked in the aftermath for hours before dressing him in his rags again.

Sometimes, they'd even hold him head-first over the rusty metal tub and drown him by slow increments, relishing in the animal way he thrashed, laughing with cruel, genuine joy when he choked up mouthfuls of tepid water when finally allowed to surface. They never interrogated him, simply tormenting him for their own pleasure. Those episodes were worse than the freezing or the rough washing because he'd grown up on an island and so could hold his breath for long enough to turn the dunking into a twisted endurance sport.

The periods of tedium consuming his existence were broken by bouts of excruciation administered by Nazhira or Khian, or both together. They'd left Valerian's body chained to the wall, no doubt so Endarion could watch it decay, but had removed it two days ago when the guards complained about the smell. It made no difference to Endarion, who'd been too sleep-deprived to notice.

They fired the same questions at him—questions about Sudarium's Blade, and his agent in Empyria—and took their instruments to different parts of him when he failed to answer, focusing on his existing scars before making new ones of their own. In the past few days, though, he'd noticed a lessening of the pain in his battered body. In the strained peace before he drifted to sleep, he sometimes inspected his myriad fresh injuries, testing them, pushing his body until the pain almost felled him.

His wounds were healing. Most noticeably the first ones he'd been dealt: the flayed breastbone, the slice to his stomach, and his broken nose. Injuries that should've taken weeks to heal, then months to scar over properly, repaired themselves at a rate even he, in his tortured delirium, found strange. His most recent collection—the reopening of the scar on his cheek and the pulling of all the fingernails on his right hand—were already pleasantly numb, despite only being inflicted the previous day. Sometimes, when he woke from a fitful slumber and used the dim torchlight to assess himself, he saw blackness snaking through his veins, concentrated most keenly around his freshest wounds.

The only explanation? Whatever had driven him to tear the chair from the floor of his cell and almost free himself had accelerated his healing.

His vision of himself, black-eyed and ghastly, overseeing his own torture at Shaeviren, plagued his waking hours as well as his nightmares now. Whenever lucid enough to think, he found himself wondering if his Dhamara torturers had done something to him, something that caused the darkness invading his mind and body, something that allowed him to recover from his wounds faster than he should. Had he been experimented on? Was it related to the whispered promise of being made whole? Was it responsible for the resurgence of his madness?

It didn't matter, he supposed. Soon, Khian and Nazhira would tire of him, understanding they couldn't pluck Palla and Sephara's names from his broken mouth, and deliver him to the Caetoran. He'd be executed like his brother, and that would be that. A violent end to a violent life.

When the Warmaster and his mother arrived the morning after—or what he assumed was the morning after—the latest round of torture, Endarion was warily probing at his crippled kneecap, curious whether his improved healing could be applied to existing injuries.

"Is that a hint?" Khian asked with a malicious grin. "I can take that entire leg off, if you want."

"That wouldn't solve the problem," Endarion replied from his position slumped on the floor. He hadn't been provided with another chair after breaking the old one, and was reduced to sitting on the cold, damp stone. He hadn't even been given a mattress or blanket to sleep on; that usually wouldn't be the ordeal his tormentors believed, but his aging bones protested over these poor conditions far more than they had in the past. He was, he'd considered with a morbid chuckle, too old for torture.

"It would if I could procure you a decent prosthetic," the Warmaster said. "That way, when you walk to your execution, you won't have that pathetic limp."

Behind Nazhira, two guards dragged in a wooden seat. The larger of the two grabbed him beneath his arms and hauled him to his feet, the process made cumbersome by Endarion's height and his deliberate awkward limpness, then shoved him backwards into the chair. The smaller, the rat-faced man, set about securing Endarion's arms and legs with chains, making sure to knock his elbow hard against Endarion's crippled knee.

"I'm going to make you suffer when I get out of here," Endarion hissed under his breath. As empty as the threat was, he almost smiled when Ratface flinched.

When the guards departed, Nazhira approached with her tool bag in hand and looked down at him. "Are you ready to give me the name of your informant?"

He resisted the urge to roll his eyes at what was becoming a pointless routine. She would ask him a question, usually the same one, and even though they both knew he wouldn't answer, she'd still look aggrieved as she took a blade to his flesh in punishment.

"What about Sudarium's Blade?" she pressed.

"Why do you care about that?" he countered.

She raised the tool bag's flap and considered the contents with an upturned mouth. "I would like to share with Sudarium a similar relationship as the one you and I currently have."

"You want to seduce them and then, many years later, torture them?"

Though she said nothing else, he'd already gleaned enough to know he couldn't reveal Palla's identity as 'Sudarium's Blade', however far down into insanity Nazhira's ministrations submerged him.

Nazhira took out a wicked scalpel and held it up to the scant light, letting him get a good look at it. "Before we begin," he said. "One thing that's confused me: the Castrian League has stayed within its own borders for centuries. Why the sudden interest in the Imperium?"

"What makes you think the League is interested in the Imperium?"

"You orchestrated a war that would leave it vulnerable. You oversaw the assassinations, or attempted assassinations, of several key figures. You undermined the Caetoran's original aim with Kalduran." The last was a gambit, not something he knew for certain.

He remembered Dobran telling him, before he'd been forced into razing Dykumas, that the Imperium's designs on Kalduran had changed. Where before the Caetoran had wanted to conquer it to expand his borders and increase his nation's strength, now Janus wanted the province purged of Drasken's influence, its cities torn down, its inhabitants slaughtered, its farmland ravaged. It had struck Endarion as odd for Janus to be so quick to change his intent, and Endarion had long suspected someone else had made the decision for the Caetoran.

If Nazhira was involved with the Caesidi and its Arisen overseer, then why couldn't she be the one who steered Janus Tyrannus's hand as well?

Her lack of a denial seemed confirmation enough. "Perhaps I don't desire the Imperium for its own sake," she said.

Though she didn't seem to notice her misstep, Endarion marked the use of "I" and filed it away for later. It suggested, at the very least, that Nazhira didn't necessarily act for the Castrian League, but rather for herself. To have this one woman as an enemy, as opposed to her entire nation, would be preferable.

"Then why?"

"As if I would tell you." She skimmed the scalpel's sharp edge across the scar along his stomach, the first wound she'd dealt him. The fully healed line of scar tissue opened again beneath her instrument, but he was too accustomed to these smaller pains to give her the satisfaction of a wince. "If your broken body insists on repairing itself so quickly, I am only too happy to pull it apart again."

She hadn't expressed any surprise at the speed of his healing. The first time she'd been presented with a scar where there should've been a still-fresh slice, she'd grinned wolfishly and cut him open anew. He suspected she had an idea about what was happening to him. She knew, or was involved in, just about everything else, so why not that too?

"Why the Arisen, then?" he asked, gritting his teeth as she pulled the scalpel from his flesh and wiped the blood on his trousers, which were now just tattered scraps barely concealing his dignity. "I assume it's to resurrect the Theocracies, but what do you gain from an alliance with a godking?"

The Castrian woman regarded him with a frown. "Your informant has been busy indeed. Not many know an Arisen still lives."

Khian pushed himself away from the wall and approached. He held out his hand for his mother's tool bag and she handed it over. "Mendacium had his key stolen," Khian said. He glanced at Nazhira. "The one to your hideaway in your office in the Embassy."

"And?"

"He hadn't yet removed the correspondence between you. All the proof was in there."

Nazhira threw a pointed glance at Endarion, but her son waved her away and continued. "If his informant has those papers, then he already knows that our dear, beloved Mendacium is the Arisen." Khian's mouth twisted into a bloodthirsty sneer. "Besides, even if he didn't, he won't live long enough to tell anyone else."

"What's your point, son?"

The word 'son' fell heavily from Nazhira's mouth, as if she struggled to accept the young man as her child. It didn't surprise Endarion that they weren't close; Nazhira had only recently returned to the Imperium, having left her husband Dobran to raise their son alone for most of his childhood and adolescence. Endarion found himself wondering how united their cause was, and whether he could drive a wedge between Khian and his mother.

"Mendacium has been gallivanting around with a lover. A low-born bodyguard of Valerian Boratorren's." He fixed his gaze on Endarion. "Is she your informant? Who is she really, because I doubt your exalted brother deigned to have a commoner working for him?"

Endarion made a point of clamping his mouth, even as Khian toyed with the bag in his hands. The fact he'd asked in the first place meant he didn't know. It also meant he'd forgotten about the existence of Valerian's second child, as many were wont to do. That had been the point of having her trained in anonymity during her youth and keeping her away from the political stage for most of her life; even those who knew of her, as Khian would, forgot about her. If she could maintain her cover, she might just be the Caetoran's undoing.

"Does it matter who she is?" Nazhira interjected. "Just have her taken in and interrogated. Kill her after, as well."

The Warmaster shook his head. "Dexion has forbidden me from interfering," he said. "I think the bastard's fallen in love."

Nazhira snorted. "That creature is incapable of love," she said. "The girl is a fancy he will grow bored of. When he does, make sure you're there."

"In the meantime," Khian said, addressing Endarion again, "maybe you can satisfy our curiosity and tell us who this Silvia Barum is."

"I don't know the names of my brother's staff," he replied as calmly as he could. "If she's a commoner, she's beneath my notice."

Nazhira tutted, a condescending sound. "Now, now. Don't pretend you're a cold-hearted old dog. If this Barum is consorting with you, she'll be neither a commoner, nor beneath your notice."

"You know more than I do, then."

From the tool bag, Khian extracted a wicked pair of blood-rusted scissors. He cut away at the remains of Endarion's trousers, baring both legs to the knees. "I'll leave you with your dignity intact. How generous am I?" He flashed a smile.

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Endarion tried to shift his injured leg as Khian skimmed his hand across his scarred kneecap. "I thought you preferred me naked, Khian. Was that not why you had me stripped when your father whipped me? You've already publicly displayed my intactness, after all, so why the charade now?"

Khian scoffed. "If enough people think you unmanned, which they certainly do, you might as well be unmanned."

"Is that today's agenda, then?" he said, forcing false bravado into his words. Khian hadn't been shy in his threats about emasculating Endarion for real, loudly debating whether to leave that particular honour for the Caetoran.

As much as the thought of that particular injury galled, Endarion was dead anyway. If he was mutilated before death, it would make of him a slightly uglier corpse, but little more than that.

The younger man's classically handsome face pulled down into an unpleasant frown. "I'm not a monster, Endarion. I won't make a eunuch of you. Yet." He pulled two implements from the bag and presented them to him. "I was thinking about something just as permanent, though."

A small metal pick and a thuggish little hammer, the purpose of which Endarion knew intimately.

Nazhira saw the recognition in his eyes and nodded. "Your broken knee first, I think," she said, and Khian murmured his agreement. Seeing the eager cruelty warping Nazhira's flawless face, Endarion didn't know how he'd ever found her attractive.

The Warmaster crouched down before Endarion and held the end of the pick to his left knee. "Last chance, old man. Silvia Barum's real name, or the name of the Blade, and this stops."

Lest he find reason in Khian's offer and consider accepting, Endarion screwed his eyes shut, turned away, and tried to cleanse his mind of everything. Both his knees twitched in anticipation, and he was taunted by whispers of a pain he knew would soon assail him.

When his knee had first been capped, he'd been trapped in this same position. Still hale enough to believe he'd survive his ordeal unsullied, he'd watched as one of his inhuman tormentors had smashed a spiked hammer into his leg, convinced the beast would pull back at the last moment. He'd heard the crunch of cartilage, seen the way his knee caved in, felt the jolt in his hip, and sat in silent shock for ten full seconds before the pain had tackled him into oblivion. Almost worse than the pain had been the sight and the knowledge of what he was about to experience.

Looking away, it turned out, did nothing to lessen the agony. That it was a slender pick, and not a blunt hammer, didn't help either.

Khian drove the pick into his abused joint. The ripples of the hammer blow punched deep as bone and muscle and cartilage parted and tore beneath the metal. At first it was a cold, sharp sensation, as if someone had pricked his skin with an icicle. Marrow deep. No, deeper. As if the pick had impaled his mortal body and penetrated the soul beyond.

As Khian plucked the pick out with a horrid, wet crunch and hammered it into his joint an inch or so higher up, the first wave of agony arrived with all the grace of a faltering cavalry charge. His knee was a red-hot epicentre, an exploding starburst of torment that shot through his leg and up into his chest, where he felt his heart seize. When he opened his eyes, more out of desperation than the need to see, he was once again back in his cell in Shaeviren, and the creature crouched before him wasn't Khian, but a bullish, horned Dhamara. He looked down at his ravaged body, which wept freely from numerous fresh wounds, and his eyes snagged on his knee, crushed and pulped and gored by the hammer.

With the initial onslaught of agony, he'd realised, for the first time, that he'd die on Shaeviren's barren hellhole. His hopes had fled him as quickly as the blood shed from his injuries, and the despair had almost been worse than the kneecapping itself.

Only the detonation of his bellowing dragged him back to reality, to a different cell on a different planet, with different tormentors performing the same tortures on him. It was a feral scream, his throat ripped raw by it. It did nothing to alleviate his agony, nor did the way he thrashed against his bonds. He spat out the blood he'd shed by snapping at the inside of his cheek, though most of it splattered his face and chest.

A small flicker of blackness ignited in the base of his stomach, but he was too weak, too starved, too addled for the strange, unnatural strength to claim him again and set him free.

Whether it took minutes or hours for the pain to subside to manageable levels, he didn't know, but Nazhira and Khian still loomed over him. The former watched without expression, as if Endarion were so far beneath her as to be unworthy of even a raised brow. The latter stood now with the bloodied pick in his hands, fingers caressing it, a lazy smile softening his features. Endarion could see the sick cunt's visible arousal but didn't have the mental capacity to be disgusted by how brazenly Khian sported his depraved erection.

Endarion sucked in a ragged breath and let his gaze fall to his knee. Where before the joint had been ugly and scarred, now it looked malformed, bone glinting sickeningly from within split muscle. His horror at the sight wrestled with the insistent thrumming of the pain, though the latter was fast overcome by a familiar sensation of phantom numbness. The numbness of a missing limb, experienced once already with the first capping. Not exactly an absence of pain, more the smothering of it, and no better for it.

He shifted in his seat and tried to press his legs against their restraints. For a moment he was blinded and deafened as his exposed knee joint ground in its socket. In his fervour he almost bit the tip of his tongue off.

"It will be interesting to see how quickly you recover from that," Nazhira said.

"Next time," Khian added, still caressing the pick, "I'll cap your other knee. I want to see what the shock does to you."

They left him still chained to the chair, whimpering like a kicked dog, though he barely noticed their exit. His mind had fled elsewhere, four years in the past and many thousands of miles away. It wasn't the pain squatting at the forefront of his mind, because as intensely as it still flared, it had long been a near-constant companion in his life. Rather, hopelessness threatened to drag him under, and he willed himself to drift into unconsciousness if only so he wouldn't have to think of his impending death.

Because he was going to die soon.

Whether he succumbed to Nazhira and Khian here, in this dank cell, or expired bloodily before baying crowds back home in Empyria, it didn't matter. His life would certainly end, and he had nothing to show for it. Maybe the insurrection would march on without him, or maybe the Kaldurani would come to their senses and return north, leaving his allies to flounder in the field. He hoped Daria would go with Estrid. He hoped his children and their mothers extricated themselves from his legacy. He hoped Sephara remained safe at Dexion's side. He even hoped Kaeso escaped this foolish conflict, if only to carry the Boratorren name into the next generation.

Most of all, though, he hoped Estrid wouldn't be too angry at him, would be able to turn away and forget him. He recalled the words she'd spoken before he'd faced Khian at Aukruna. Don't you dare die. I've saved you too many times to watch you die now.

Though he'd wronged her many times over in the years and months leading up to his incarceration here, a small part of him had started to think they'd reconcile. Their conversation in Dykumas's gutted corpse, and then her gesture of helping him remove his leg brace before his duel, had given him cause to believe that, if nothing else, a friendship might be possible again. It had buoyed him, given him the motivation needed to continue along this path.

He'd wrong her a final time by dying. She'd curse his memory and he'd deserve it.

Please forget about me, Estrid. You're better than me.

"Fuck."

His head snapped up at the exclamation, his gaze locking onto a shadowed figure standing behind the bars to his cell.

"They went too far."

Dobran's voice, he realised with a jolt.

"I didn't know they had you here until this morning," his cousin continued. "Khian never returned to Empyria after arriving here more than a week ago, and I wasn't sure why. Now I know."

"Where's here?" he managed to reply.

Dobran wrapped his hands around the bars and pressed his forehead against them. Endarion had never seen the man in any state other than trimmed and clean-shaven, but Dobran now boasted a shallow dusting of stubble and wore his perfectly black hair in disarray, as if he'd frequently scoured his hands through it. "The Sentinel."

Had he the energy, Endarion would've laughed. He was exactly where he'd wanted to be, it seemed.

"Why are you here?"

The last time he'd seen his cousin, Dobran had just ordered him to destroy Estrid's army and capture her alive, to be returned to the capital for punishment. Though several previous encounters with Dobran had suggested he wasn't sympathetic to the Caetoran's cause, he'd overseen Endarion's public whipping and instigated the destruction of both Vadonis and Dykumas.

"Because my son finally informed me of your imprisonment." Dobran shook his head. "Really, man? You so stupidly allowed yourself to be snatched."

"I know." He let his head hang low. "How goes the war?"

"You want to know if your allies are still alive?" Dobran replied. "We retreated south and I'm sure they follow, but we won't meet them in the field as long as we have this stronghold. Can't say that displeases me." His eyes roamed along Endarion's battered body and halted at his knee. "Is that how they did it on Shaeviren?"

"No. Hammer, no pick." He stifled the urge to spit at the other man, knowing he wouldn't be able to reach. "Did you come to gloat?"

"Why would I gloat? What my wife and son have done to you is despicable."

"It's exactly what you allowed to happen to me at Shaeviren."

Dobran's hands gripped the bars tighter. "I didn't cut you open myself. I would never do this."

"But whipping me is fine?" Endarion hissed. "And letting your bastard beat my daughter? And razing two cities and who knows how many towns and villages? And commanding me to destroy the woman I love? Chasing her away in the first place?" He stopped to cough, throat still raw from his recent shouting.

Dobran spoke into his prolonged pause. "I only did as I was asked."

"Don't give me that."

It was, Endarion noted with a significant amount of shame, exactly how his own excuses sounded when he tried to defend his actions. How many times had he tried to justify himself to Estrid by claiming he acted as he did because the Caetoran threatened or coerced him? Listening to Dobran now made it clear how empty his words rang, how blatantly he tried to shift the blame and paint himself as the cornered victim when he was, and always would be, the exultant monster.

Dobran's eyes narrowed. "We all have our weaknesses, cousin."

"You are a man without love, without family, without reason. You have no weakness."

"One could almost say the same of you." Before Endarion could reply, the younger man raised a hand and sighed. "I didn't come here to argue, believe it or not. Nor to gloat."

"Then why?"

His royal cousin inhaled heavily and hunched his shoulders as if physically building himself up to speak. After a lengthy hesitation, Dobran said, "I don't know what my brother and wife are planning. I never did. Even my own son failed until recently to mention he'd captured and was torturing you."

Endarion nodded, already aware of this fact. One of the documents Sephara had secured from the Castrian Embassy had been a letter Dobran had written to Nazhira, outlining his frustrations at being kept in the dark. Whatever else the man was, he'd been kept ignorant of all this.

"I want to know what's going on," Dobran continued. "Whatever you might think of me, whatever anyone thinks of me, I didn't want to destroy Vadonis and Dykumas. I didn't want to hurt Estrid, not twelve years ago when she defected, and not a few weeks ago outside Varanos. I also didn't want to whip you, for what it's worth."

Endarion threw his head back and laughed, but the motion jolted his body and his newly capped knee smarted. "Poor abused Dobran! How tragic for him that he had to kill untold innocent thousands."

He meant to keep going, to throw all the man's crimes at him, but Dobran muttered, "It's Khian's mother," and he halted.

"What?"

"The thing my brother holds against me? It's Khian's mother."

"The woman you killed."

Dobran yanked at the bars and bared his teeth. "I didn't kill her. Those are just rumours."

"And I'm rumoured to be a castrate," Endarion retorted. "Doesn't feel too good, does it?"

The other man shook his head. "She's still alive, in Castrio. As long as I do what Janus wants, she's left alone. The more satisfied he is with me, the better her living conditions, I'm told." He snorted. "I'm allowed to see her once every few years, but with all the shit you started, I won't get a chance for a long time now."

Endarion opened his mouth to respond, to suggest a woman's life wasn't equal to all those Dobran had stolen in his pursuit of her safety. But then, wasn't that exactly what he'd done with Estrid? He'd followed the Caetoran's commands for years, sure, but when he'd defected outside Varanos, he'd lost some of his soldiers, and cost Arch-Generals Korzha Mazilu's and Byrria Dumerian's army numerous casualties. And wasn't this very campaign into the Imperium's heart prompted by his refusal to defeat Estrid when ordered?

Dobran's motives, then, were the same as his. It seemed they always had been. A humbling thought.

"What do you want me to say?" Endarion pressed. "You came here for something specific. What is it?"

"You know what my wife and brother are doing. I need to know as well. I can't fight this campaign blind."

"And what will you do with what I tell you?" he asked. "Why would I give the enemy an advantage?"

Dobran rocked on his heels, his hands still on the bars. It occurred to Endarion that his cousin hadn't been trusted with a key to his cell, otherwise he might've come in and had this conversation without the bars between them.

"You turned against me at Varanos because you knew it was the right thing to do. I knew what you would do even before I asked you to ruin Estrid." Dobran heaved in another breath. "If I know everything you know, everything you found out before you defected, I can make that choice, too."

The enormity of his words rendered Endarion speechless.

"I can't defect outright because I have worked too hard to keep Khian's mother safe to endanger her now," Dobran added. "But I can undermine my brother."

Endarion pulled ineffectually at the chains around his wrists and rolled shoulders stiff from their confinement. "I've hated you for a long time, Dobran."

The other man smiled. "A shared sentiment, have no doubt."

What did he have to lose? He would die here no matter what Dobran knew, and if there was an arch-general within the enemy ranks willing to sabotage the Caetoran's efforts, then what was the harm? If his final act in this life ensured a secret ally for Daria and Estrid, he could go to his death almost at peace with himself.

"Your wife and son oversaw the assassinations, starting with Novissa's," he said at length. "They hired the Caesidi, shadowmancers who used to personally serve Arisen godkings. The Caesidi are led by one of these Arisen, who's been in hiding the whole time, and they and your wife are certainly allied. The League might be involved, or it might be Nazhira alone. I don't yet know why they wanted a war between the Imperium and Kalduran."

"The Arisen, who is it?"

Endarion considered. Though Dobran seemed sincere, he couldn't trust him with information that would see Sephara unmasked as his informant. "Politically powerful. I have someone watching them. That's all I can say."

For a long moment Dobran chewed the words, his jaw working as if trying to eat something unpalatable. "I knew none of this," he said. "And my brother? How does he fit in?"

"He supplied a list of targets that your son refined. His role seems secondary at best."

There were many things Dobran wished to say; this was clear from the way he held himself, the way he wavered as if before a lethal drop, the way his eyes danced around. Finally, he seemed to find some resolve. "I'm sorry for what Khian and Nazhira have done to you. If I could free you, I would. That's the truth. No one deserves this treatment."

"Your words will comfort me as I sleep tonight," Endarion replied acidly.

"You are not the only wronged party here, cousin," Dobran shot back. "We are both monsters, shaped to the Caetoran's desires."

Monster. If only Dobran knew the truth of it.

"If the League and Arisen are involved, you know this war isn't won when one of yours sits the Invictum Throne."

"I know. But I'll be too dead to care."

"We both will, I'm sure," Dobran replied. "My wife isn't stupid; she'll know what I did, when it's done."

"When what's done?" Endarion asked.

"Haven't figured that out yet," was Dobran's quiet reply.

Dobran was about to turn away when his eyes flashed, as if struck by a thought. "Is there anything you want me to pass onto Elerius, should I have cause to speak with her?"

Endarion scoffed at the thought of any conversation between his cousin and Estrid that didn't end with her cutting Dobran's head off. Maybe he was madder than he thought, because he decided to humour the man. "Tell her I was right: it would've taken longer than I have left to redeem myself, in the end." He doubted she'd ever be told the words, but it echoed the conversation they'd shared inside Dykumas's sundered carcass, when Estrid had expressed a hope of redemption and he'd claimed he was beyond such fancies. If Dobran ever did relay what he'd said, she'd know it was him, for what it was worth.

"And," Endarion added, "tell her not to mourn me." He wanted to say more, to somehow articulate his complicated feelings for Estrid, to pack them down into a message Dobran might never have chance to pass on. But it felt criminally unfair to share those sentiments with her through his bastard of a cousin. Better to leave them unsaid, to allow her to move on, than to try to comfort himself in his dying days.

After a considered pause, the other man inclined his head to Endarion, neither an acknowledgement nor a farewell, but something in between. Endarion echoed the gesture, though it made his head ache. He watched as his cousin faded back into the shadows, the sight eerily alike to a shadowmantic assassin fading from view.