Bloodfire Quest (The Dark Legacy of Shannara, #2)(40)

He felt her fingers working at the buttons of his tunic. “You could not be more clear, Mistress.”

She slid her hands inside his clothing and ran them up and down his chest. “You can stop calling me Mistress now,” she said. “Think of something a little less formal, will you?”

Then she took him to her bed.



When the assassin departed her chambers some hours later, the first rays of the sunrise were just beginning to show on the eastern horizon, the light silvery and muted. Stoon returned the same way he had come, alone and unseen, his mind on fire with memories of his time with her. Edinja was like no one he had ever been with, and he did not want their relationship to end. Even knowing that one day it would—that she would have it no other way and he would not be able to prevent it—he did not want it to happen. So he would make the most of it while it lasted, and he would not give himself cause to look back on this time with even the smallest of regrets.

For now, he had other business to attend to. He must send word to their spy in Arborlon. He must dispatch Edinja’s birds to seek out the Druid and her Elven protector. It would be their assignment to find the pair and then to track them to wherever they might be going, all the while sending messages back to him.

Messages he could carry to Edinja.

Messages of sufficient import that she would allow him to come to her and be with her as he had this night.

Stoon was a practical man with few vices and dependable instincts. But he was not perfect; he was not without weaknesses. He knew that she was one. But he also knew that for all her talk about serving a higher purpose and seeking a peaceful unification of the Four Lands, she was every bit as bloodthirsty as her former rivals. Why else had she allied herself with him? Why else had she been so keen to dispatch both Arodian and Drust Chazhul?

He slowed outside the walls of the compound, checking to make certain he had not been seen. Then he began navigating a complex network of alleyways that would take him to his quarters nearby. It was best, she had told him early on, if they were never seen together, not even by chance. It would increase his effectiveness and diminish the chances of them being connected even in the smallest of ways.

It would make their clandestine meetings just that much sweeter, she had insisted. Didn’t he agree?

Oh, yes, he agreed.

His thoughts drifted. He had come a long way since his days as the son of a blacksmith. His father had been a big, strong man with a mean temper and a penchant for taking out his anger on his son. Stoon had been badly beaten on more occasions than he cared to remember, frequently for no reason other than his father’s mood. The beatings had continued right up until the moment he took a hammer to his father’s head while he lay passed out after a bout of drinking. Then he dragged the body to the river in the dead of night and sank it with weights. A street boy after that, he had allied himself with an assassins’ guild and learned the trade well enough that eventually he was smarter and more skillful than any of them and had set out on his own.

Years of practicing his chosen trade had provided him with distance from his childhood and safety from any who might try to mistreat him ever again. It had provided him with everything that had led to his meeting with Drust Chazhul and now Edinja Orle.

His future seemed assured.

But there was a nagging concern, one that had been with him since the illfated assault on Paranor. Aphenglow Elessedil. He had almost caught up to her in the courtyard between the Outer and Inner walls of the Keep, but had he done so he would be as dead as Drust Chazhul. He knew that as surely as he knew he must face her again. There was a certainty to it he could not shake. She should have been his; she should have gone the way of all the others he had dispatched. Yet she had turned on him, and it was only by the slimmest of margins that he had managed to escape her. A step here, a turn there, a bit of smoke and ash, a momentary distraction—almost any of these could have changed the outcome of their meeting.

Now he would have her tracked along with the other Druids, and while he did not fear the Druids as an order or even their formidable magic, he did fear her. He could not help himself. The fear had attached itself to him and would not release its grip.



Deep within the Fangs, the new day crept like a predator from out of the eastern horizon. On the precipice where they had made their stand the previous night, Railing Ohmsford was sitting with Mirai Leah, looking out over the clusters of dead attackers to the dark and silent sweep of the forest wilderness. Nothing moved in the shadows of the jungle of rocks and trees below. No sounds broke the silence. The last attack had ended more than six hours earlier with the arrival of the Rover Austrum aboard his armored flit. The dead lay where they had fallen, and what was left of the defenders huddled together in hollow-eyed anticipation of what might happen next.

“They’ll come again,” Mirai said, as if reading his mind. She was ragged and covered in blood and dust and might have been a stranger for all that he recognized of her.

“Why did you let him kiss you like that?” he asked.

He had kept the question to himself all night, even though he could barely contain it. It ate at him in a way that was unbearable. Now it was out there, released just like that.

She gave him a look. “I didn’t have a chance to stop him. I was as surprised as you were.”

“But you didn’t even try. You let him kiss you twice.”

She started to say something and stopped. Then she looked away. “It isn’t your concern, Railing.”