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The stew didn’t taste as good as it looked. She picked out the chunks of meat but left the colorless, tasteless, soft vegetables. She sopped up some of the juice with the hard bread. She gave her ale to Sebastian and drank water instead. She wasn’t used to drinking ale. To her the ale smelled as unpleasant as the lamp oil. Sebastian seemed to like it.
When she had finished eating, Jennsen paced in the confining room the way Betty paced in her pen. Sebastian threw a leg to each side of the bench and leaned back against the wall. His blue eyes followed her from the bed to the wall hung with linen and back again, as she began wearing a path in the plank floor.
“Why don’t you lie down and get some sleep,” he said in a soft voice. “I’ll watch over you.”
She felt like a trapped animal. She watched him take a long draft of ale from his mug. “And what will we do tomorrow?”
It wasn’t only her dislike of the inn, of the room. Her conscience was eating at her. She didn’t let him answer.
“Sebastian, I have to tell you who I am. You were honest with me. I can’t stay with you and endanger your mission. I don’t know anything about the important things you do, but being with me will only put you at great risk. You’ve already helped me more than I could have hoped, more than I ever could have asked.”
“Jennsen, I’m already at risk being here. I am in the land of my enemy.”
“And you’re someone of high rank. An important man.” She rubbed her hands together, trying to bring some warmth to her icy fingers. “If they captured you because you were with me…well, I couldn’t bear it.”
“I took the risk of coming here.”
“But I haven’t been honest with you—I haven’t lied to you, but I haven’t told you what I should have long ago. You’re too important a man to chance being with me when you don’t even know why I’m hunted, or what that attack back at my house was about.” She swallowed at the painful lump in her throat. “Why my mother lost her life.”
He said nothing, but simply gave her the time to gather herself and tell him in her own way. From the first moment she had met him, and he hadn’t come close when she had been afraid, he always gave her the room she needed in order to feel safe. He deserved more than she gave him in return.
Jennsen finally brought a halt to her pacing and looked down at him, at his blue eyes, blue eyes like hers, like her father’s.
“Sebastian, Lord Rahl—the last Lord Rahl, Darken Rahl—was my father.”
He took the news without any outward reaction. She couldn’t know what he was thinking. As he gazed up at her, as calmly as he did when she wasn’t telling him terrible news, she felt safe in his company.
“My mother worked at the People’s Palace. She was part of the palace staff. Darken Rahl…he noticed her. It is the Lord Rahl’s prerogative to have any woman he wants.”
“Jennsen, you don’t—”
She lifted a hand, silencing him. She wanted the whole thing out before she lost her nerve. Having always been with her mother, she feared being alone now. She feared he would abandon her, but she had to tell him what she knew.
“She was fourteen,” Jennsen said, beginning the story as calmly as she could. “Too young to really understand about the ways of the world, of men. You saw how beautiful she was. At that young age, she was already pretty as could be, growing into a woman sooner than many her age. She had a bright smile and an innocent exuberance for life.
“She was a nobody, though, and to an extent excited to be noticed—desired—by a man of such power, a man who could have any woman he wanted. That was foolish, of course, but at her age and station it was flattering, and, in her innocence, I suppose it might have even seemed glamorous.
“She was bathed and pampered by older women on the palace staff. Her hair done up like a real lady. She was dressed in a beautiful gown for her meeting with the great man himself. When she was brought to him, he bowed and gently kissed the back of her hand—her, a servant in his great palace, and he kissed her hand. From all accounts, he was so handsome that he shamed the finest marble statues.
“She had dinner with him, in a great hall, and ate rare and exotic foods she had never tasted before. Just the two of them at a long dining table with people serving her for the first time in her life.
“He was charming. He complemented her on her beauty, her grace. He poured wine for her—the Lord Rahl himself.
“When she was at last alone with him, she was confronted with the reality of why she was there. She was too frightened to resist. Of course, had she not meekly submitted, he would have done what he wished anyway. Darken Rahl was a powerful wizard. He was easily as cruel as he was charming. He could have handled any woman without the slightest difficulty. He had but to command it, and those who resisted his will were tortured to death.
“But she never gave any thought to resisting. For a brief time, despite her apprehension, that world, at the center of such splendor, such power, had probably seemed exciting. When it turned to terror for her, she bore it silently.
“It wasn’t rape in the meaning of being taken against her will, with a knife held to her throat, but it was a crime nonetheless. A savage crime.”
Jennsen looked away from Sebastian’s blue eyes. “He took my mother to his bed for a period of time before he tired of her and moved on to other women. There were as many women as he could want. Even at that age, my mother didn’t hold any foolish illusion that she meant something to him. She knew he was simply taking what he wanted, for as long as he wanted, and that when he was finished with her she would soon be forgotten. She was doing as a servant did. A flattered servant, perhaps, but still a frightened, innocent young servant who knew better than to resist a man above any law but his own.”
She couldn’t bear to look at Sebastian. In a small voice, she added the last bit to the tale.
“I was the result of that brief ordeal in her life, and the beginning of a far greater one.”
Jennsen had never before told anyone the awful story, the terrible truth. She felt cold and dirty. She felt sick. Most of all, she felt deep anguish for what her mother must have gone through, for her young life spoiled.
Her mother never told the story all out as Jennsen had just done. Jennsen had pieced snippets and snatches of it together over her whole life, until it was finally a whole picture in her mind. She wasn’t telling Sebastian all the snippets, either—the true extent of the horror of the way her mother had been treated by Darken Rahl. Jennsen felt burning shame that she had to be born to remind her mother every day of that terrible memory she could never tell in whole.
When Jennsen looked up through tears, Sebastian was standing close before her. His fingertips gently touched the side of her face. It was as tender a thing as she had ever felt.
Jennsen wiped the tears from under her eyes. “The women and their children mean nothing to him. The Lord Rahl eliminates all those offspring who are not gifted. Since he takes many women, children of these couplings are not uncommon. He covets only one, his heir, the single child born of his seed who carries the gift.”
“Richard Rahl,” Sebastian said.
“Richard Rahl,” she confirmed. “My half brother.”
Richard Rahl, her half brother, who hunted her as his father before him had hunted her. Richard Rahl, her half brother, who sent the quads to kill her. Richard Rahl, her half brother, who had sent the quads that had murdered her mother.
But why? She could have been no threat to Darken Rahl, and even less of a threat to the new Lord Rahl. He was a powerful wizard who commanded armies, legions of the gifted, and countless other loyal supporters. And she? She was nothing but one lone woman who knew few people and wanted only to live her own simple life in peace. She was hardly a threat to his rule.
Even the truth of her story would not so much as raise an eyebrow. Everyone knew that any Lord Rahl lived by his own laws. No one was even remotely likely to disbelieve her story
, but no one would really care, either. At most, they might wink or give one another a knowing elbow at the lives of powerful men, and Darken Rahl had been the most powerful man alive.
Jennsen’s whole life seemed suddenly to come down to that central question: Why would her father, a man she never knew, have wanted so desperately to kill her? And why would his son, Richard Rahl, her own half brother and now the Lord Rahl, also be so intent on killing her? It made no sense.
What could she possibly do that could harm either of them? What threat could she possibly constitute to such power?
Jennsen checked that the knife at her belt—her knife displaying the emblem of the House of Rahl—was secure. She lifted the blade to be sure it was free in its scabbard. The steel made a pleasing metallic click as she pushed it home. She scooped her cloak off the bed and threw it around her shoulders.
Sebastian swiped a hand back across his white spikes of hair as he watched her quickly tie the cloak shut. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I’ll be back in a while. I’m going out.”
He reached for his weapons and cloak. “All right, I’ll—”
“No. Leave me to it, Sebastian. You’ve put yourself at risk enough on my behalf. I wish to go alone. I’ll be back when I’ve finished.”
“Finished what?”
She hurried to the door. “What I have to do.”
He stood in the center of the room, fists at his sides, apparently hesitant to go against her explicit wishes. Jennsen quickly pulled the door shut tight behind herself, closing off her view of him. She took the steps two at a time, intent on being quickly out of the inn and gone before he changed his mind and followed.
The crowd downstairs was as rowdy as they had been before. She ignored the men, their gambling, their dancing, their laughter, and headed for the door. Before she made it, though, a bearded man hooked his arm around her middle and jerked her back into the press of people. She let out a small cry that was lost in the gale of revelry. Her left arm was pinned against her waist. He swung her around, catching her right hand, dancing her across the floor.
