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He slowed, then shook his head and continued his circuit. “If you are not ready by now, nothing I do tonight will change that.”
It was fair, and probably true. She knew she'd gained skill, though that hadn't been hard, since she'd known nothing when they began. Now she could hold her own in one-on-one combat, though the few times Rilion and Gaius had teamed up against her, she'd struggled. She thought that reasonable. Gaius could track and manage a seemingly endless number of opponents at once, but not everyone was him. No matter how much training she'd had, she was still a seamstress, a Threadmancer, a noblewoman whose hands had scarcely touched a weapon before this ordeal.
When he did not stop pacing, she finished spreading her bedroll. “Come sit with me?”
Gaius slowed again. This time, he considered the request. No objections came to mind, Thea supposed, for he strode over to sit at her side.
Satisfied, she leaned her head against his shoulder.
Rilion watched as he worked to start the fire. He'd witnessed affection between them enough since they'd left Danesse; nothing improper, only kisses and embraces that rarely lingered. There was speculation in the way he studied them, though, and Thea didn't think she'd seen that before.
She shut her eyes so she wouldn't have to ponder it. “You're worried. About tomorrow? That we won't find what you're looking for?”
“That we won't find him,” Gaius said, “Or perhaps that we will.”
He sat stiff, his shoulder still as stone beneath her head. She inched closer. “After all this time, you've still never told me who exactly it is we're looking for.”
“I don't know, and therein lies part of the problem.”
“Oh.” That would be a problem.
“I've always told myself I would know when I see him, but perhaps that isn't true. I may know him. Or it may take time for me to be sure.” Gaius rubbed the back of his neck. “If I am to be truthful, I never saw him. But I have seen what he has done to my family, and he will answer for it.”
Thea rubbed his arm. “I'm sorry.”
“After all these years, we still don't even know why.” Rilion held out his hands before the tiny fire as the flames took hold.
“Rilion has been aiding me since my father's death,” Gaius said. “For a long time, he has been the only one to help. Calem cared, as did Aleron. Lucan...”
“Lucan cared,” Rilion said. “In his own way.”
Gaius stared at the ground and Thea rubbed his arm again. She didn't know how to comfort him; not in this. She'd known people who suffered loss, had suffered loss of her own, but this was different. His whole family. The stability of the kingdom he was supposed to rule. All gone.
Eventually, he drew a breath to speak again. “Calem could have been a threat to many countries in this part of the world. He was well-liked. It made sense for an assassin to target him, but I never found any trace, no signs anyone had breached our defenses. It was worse than chasing a ghost. At least ghosts have sightings.”
Thea nodded. That was, she assumed, part of why everyone believed it was the plague. The king had died so swiftly during the plague, an illness that took its toll within a matter of days. The palace had been closed against disease, and only a madman would have passed through the city at that time. The revelation it had been poison still shook her.
“For all that I mourned Calem as a friend, as well as a brother, Aleron was harder. You know what they said. An accident. Ill luck on the hunt.” He snorted softly. “It was in the shelter of his own quarters. I was the one who found him. I'd just come back from searching. I was to offer a report. Had I arrived only a few hours earlier, I could have been there. I could have stopped the assassin. I know I could.”
“You don't,” Rilion put in. “You have no way to know that. You could have been asleep in your chambers and it would have happened, all the same.”
Gaius frowned so deep, Thea thought the furrows in his brow might never smooth out. “Or I could have been there. I was Aleron's blade. As I was Calem's, as I was my father's. I failed them all.”
“You've done all you could.” Thea hugged his arm. It would have been too difficult to get her arms around him from the side. “But what about Lucan? All these deaths are so different, I don't know if...” If she had the right story? By now, she expected not, and she shouldn't have asked.
But he didn't seem to mind, and he laid a hand atop one of hers. “Lucan was... difficult. He was already paranoid after Calem's death. After Aleron, it became unbearable. He began sequestering himself in his quarters, refusing to see anyone, even... no, especially me. He feared me. He accused me of having killed Aleron, at one point. I swore my loyalty to him a thousand times. I swore it on the Light, I swore it on our blood, I swore it on anything he asked. But it was never enough, and in the end, he...”
Her hands tightened on his arm.
He swallowed and closed his eyes. “He could bear his fear no longer. In the end, that was what killed him. And to an extent, it was my fault.”
“You've been saying that for months,” Rilion said. “It's still not true.”
Thea cast him a frown, then looked to Gaius. The lines of the face she'd given her didn't match the shadows cast by the fire, not quite. It gave him an unsettling look. “Why do you think that? Just because he was afraid of you?”
“Because I gave him reason to be afraid. He gave me orders I didn't agree with. My role was to be the king's blade, a weapon with which he could strike. I wasn't supposed to refuse. But his paranoia went too far. I tried to reason with him, to convince him the people he wanted me to kill had done no wrong. That harming people who were supposed to be on our side would destabilize Kentoria and its alliances. But he insisted, and I felt I had no choice. I was sworn to him a thousand times over.”
Her heart twisted. She knew the cost of Lucan's paranoia all too well. “You can't blame yourself for his actions. We all know he was...” Mad? She couldn't bring herself to say it, even if she was sure the word fit. Even if it was a milder word by far than the curses that first sprang to mind. By the Light, would it ever get easier to think of her brother? She cleared her throat lightly and continued without fitting any word to the former king at all. “He arrested many innocent people throughout Samara. Executed people who didn't deserve it. No one was safe, but that wasn't your fault.”
