The Disappearance of Winter's Daughter (Riyria Chronicles #4)(101)
Grunting as he engaged stiff muscles, he rolled to his side, his elbow and hip hurting where they pressed against the floor. He had lain down on a blanket, one of the blue-dyed ones that Mercator had stacked all over. Should have used more than one. Should have used all of them, made a thick comfortable cocoon. He’d learned never to run a golem while standing or even sitting. Too easy to become disoriented and fall. When in the golem and on the hunt, the experience was so vivid it was easy to forget it wasn’t his body running, jumping, and fighting. Everything was so real.
Villar didn’t know his safety point—how long he could maintain the connection without going too far. Griswold had warned him never to remain for more than two chimes of Grom Galimus, but that was only a rough estimate; he didn’t think the dwarf really knew. Villar speculated that the cutoff point would be different for each person. Not everyone’s strength of will was the same. It stood to reason that an individual with a strong sense of himself could maintain the golem longer. The real concern, as Villar saw it—and perhaps this tied in to the idea of losing one’s soul—was that in the heat of things, it was easy to miss the passage of time, and everything else. Still, Villar was confident he hadn’t gotten anywhere near two chimes. And for the first time, it wasn’t he who had severed the connection. The connection had vanished all by itself.
No, not by itself. The golem had been destroyed, and I was nearly killed. That’s what happened, but how?
When he possessed a golem, he wasn’t actually there. The golem acted on his commands, but no matter what happened to the creature, Villar was safe because he was miles away. The whole process worked much like a dream. Dreams, no matter how awful, were safe; they had no power to penetrate the real world. He thought hard. Trying to remember. Then it came to him. The gargoyle had fallen off the cathedral and hit the plaza. The moment it struck the ground, the connection snapped, releasing whatever demon he’d trapped in the stone, but because the gargoyle fell rather than Villar, that was all that should have happened.
Then why do I have this pain in my chest?
Thinking perhaps the pain was imaginary, a lingering, vivid memory, Villar reached up and touched the spot that hurt. Running fingertips lightly, he found that his shirt was stiff, stuck painfully to his skin. Gritting his teeth and emitting a pained grunt, he pulled the tunic off. With the agony of ripping off a scab, he tore the cloth free of his skin. Thank Ferrol, I don’t have hair on my chest. On the shirt, a large rusty-red stain radiated out in a circle from a small slice in the garment. Touching his bare chest, he felt a very real wound.
I was stabbed. I was stabbed? How could that have happened?
The wound wasn’t deep. It had cut the skin but was stopped by the sternum. Judging by his shirt, however, the injury had caused more than its fair amount of bleeding.
After the two strangers had broken into the meeting, Villar had left and waited outside. He’d watched as the hooded foreigner and Mercator set off together. The two had a plan to contact the duke. If they succeeded, everything could unravel. If they convinced Leo to intercede, no one would support the revolt. He couldn’t allow that. When the two went separate ways, he considered killing the foreigner but wasn’t certain he could. The prior chase across the rooftops had made him second-guess his chances. Instead, Villar came up with a better plan, an easier and ultimately far more enjoyable one. He would use a golem.
He’d followed Mercator back to the temple and waited for her to leave again. The ancient ruin had been the perfect place to keep the duchess. It existed at the three-way intersection of the remote, the secluded, and the inaccessible. No one ever went up there—too much trouble and too many brambles along the way. This had long been Mercator’s secret craft shop, and all her dyed cloth was worth a small fortune. She’d used this place as a safe haven and wisely never told anyone about it.
The ruins made an excellent place for him to store his supplies as well. Over the previous months, Griswold had provided him several boxes of gravel, keys to various statues stationed around the city. He had plenty to choose from. And of course, he had his hearts, a reagent he had to provide for himself. They were not nearly as plentiful as the gravel. He had been down to his last two, but that problem could be easily rectified. He’d have the golem collect several more before breaking the connection. It was worth risking a heart to stop the foreigner and Mercator from reaching the Estate.
Once Mercator left, he entered. In his haste, he didn’t bother with his usual safeguards. This wasn’t the main event, merely a brief interlude. He’d be safe enough; only he and Mercator knew about the ruin, and she wouldn’t be coming back. He made the bed and began the ritual.
Originally, he had only planned to stop Mercator. Yes, he would kill the foreigner, but Sikara need not die. Keeping them from reaching the duke was the important thing. But then she figured out he’d been working against peaceful solutions since the beginning. If she told the others, they would turn on him—all his hard work ruined. And of course, the mir didn’t need two leaders; he could be both the duke and the representative for the mir people. Besides, her Calian blood made her an abomination.
He’d borrowed the term from the bishop, but it fit. The mixing of elven and human blood was bad enough. Somewhere in his own distant past, one of Villar’s ancestors had made that mistake, but the Sikara family hadn’t merely succumbed to a necessity—they wallowed in the deep end. Villar’s great-grandfather Hanis Orphe traveled to Alburnia with Sadarshakar Sikara after the fall of Merredydd. The two had a falling-out when Sadarshakar chose to marry a dark-skinned Calian. The tribes diverged at that point, the Orphe being more steadfast and the Sikara more accommodating. Further relations with the Calians led to the dilution of the Sikara bloodline, and Mercator was the obvious result of this weakening. She was more Calian than anything else. She lacked dignity, and commitment, and barely looked like a mir.