The Disappearance of Winter's Daughter (Riyria Chronicles #4)(78)

Was Jade a mir, too? Thinking back, he couldn’t help wondering. Not all mir have elven features.

Since meeting Hadrian, he’d recognized that the man was unnaturally lucky, but that thought, that excuse, was too consistent an occurrence. It had become less a rationalization and more of a truism, which irked Royce.

If it had been me, if I had saved her life, Seton would have spent the last seven years training to kill, and one by one she would have seen to it that each of the duke’s soldiers who took part in that raid died a horrible death. Then, when I showed up, she’d be overjoyed to find the one guy that got away. My reward would have been a vivisection.

But it had been Hadrian, and he received a tear-filled oratory of appreciation and an advocate for his defense.

That was the problem with life; it often failed to be consistent. Nothing could be relied on. Royce was positive that if he dropped a rock enough times, he’d eventually see it fall upward. He was also certain that this event would coincide with the worst possible moment for it to occur. What others saw as miracles, Royce perceived as dumb luck. Still, there was a problem with that, and its name was Hadrian Blackwater.

By all accounts, the man shouldn’t have survived childhood. Maybe he had caring parents who watched over their son—yet another example of the universe showing preferential treatment. Still, after he left home, he should have died within a week, a month at best. Ridiculous skill with a sword can protect someone from only so much.

Tonight is a good example. We both should have died, but we didn’t. Why?

This was the puzzle that frustrated Royce, the embodiment of the sliver. It challenged his very clear and proven worldview.

Aside from Hadrian’s professional soldiering, during which he apparently killed the equivalent of a small county’s worth of men, he was unusually kind, empathetic, and forgiving. Everything in Royce’s life had convinced him that those three idiosyncrasies were synonymous with swallowing brews of arsenic, cyanide, and hemlock all in a single gulp. Even if the result wasn’t suicide, such attributes should result in massive handicaps when trying to survive in a world that claimed to value such qualities but in reality punished people who possessed them.

Except in Hadrian’s case, it hadn’t, and by virtue of being with him, Royce had been rewarded. The worst part was that Royce couldn’t pass it off as a rock falling up. This wasn’t the freak singular occurrence. Four years earlier, the idiot had made the worst mistake of his life by staying to save Royce when they were on top of the Crown Tower. Hadrian had the opportunity to escape, but he had stayed, performing a suicidal defense on behalf of a man he hated. Anyone else would have paid for such an error with their life. Not Hadrian Blackwater, and again, by virtue of being with him, Royce had lived, too. Then there was Scarlett Dodge. She was another person Royce would have killed if Hadrian hadn’t been with him, another example of a good deed rewarded. Royce and Scarlett had once laughed at Hadrian’s na?veté, his moronic integrity. But given how things turned out in Dulgath, Royce didn’t find it funny anymore.

Once could be explained as a fluke. Twice was a coincidence. But three times? Three times was a pattern, wasn’t it?And if it is, what does that pattern reveal?

Royce pushed the thought away. It didn’t expose anything. Weird stuff happens all the time, doesn’t prove or disprove anything. Even a rock will eventually fall upward, right?

He was making too much out of nothing. Something he criticized others for doing. People spot a goose heading south in early fall, and they expect an early winter. They see a squirrel amassing nuts and convince themselves the winter’s snows will be deep. All this from an overeager goose and a greedy rodent. One thing doesn’t dictate the other. Hadrian was lucky, that was all. Except . . .

I don’t believe in luck.

Luck, as it was understood by most people, was some supernatural force that benefited one person more than another. An incomprehensible, impetuous power that blessed certain people without reason, and would abandon them just as inexplicably. What a load of nonsense. Luck was a word insecure or envious people used to explain events they didn’t understand. What they didn’t realize was that everything had a certain probability. Those people described as lucky were merely individuals who increased their odds of success either by their actions or lack thereof. A man who lives on a mountaintop but isn’t hit by lightning isn’t lucky, he simply didn’t go outside in a storm. People made their own luck. This, too, had been an axiom that Royce had believed. Now these two established principles were slammed against each other, and he didn’t care for the new landscape the collision left behind. The pattern was wholly strange, an alien thing that challenged all he knew to be true, everything he’d learned. If Royce didn’t know better, he would almost conclude that—

Mercator appeared, moving through the crowded plaza. She had added a blue shawl to her attire and dropped part of it over her head. Does she own anything that isn’t blue?

She entered from Vintage Avenue, but that didn’t mean anything. Royce had known Mercator for only an hour and already he knew she wasn’t stupid enough to travel in a straight line from where Genny Winter was being held. The best he could determine was that the Duchess of Rochelle was somewhere in the city or on the outskirts—somewhere Mercator could have gotten to and back in less time than it took Grom Galimus to chime twice.

It took her several minutes to cross the plaza. Because this was the night before the big feast, it seemed everyone was out. Royce watched as Mercator threaded her way through the crowd, looking for anyone who might be following. She seemed unobserved, and Royce met her in front of the cathedral.