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Father, brother, lover—he’d never really declared himself any of them. Certainly not the lover part, though if Celaena had been another sort of girl, and if Arobynn had raised her differently, perhaps it might have come to that. He loved her like family, yet he put her in the most dangerous positions. He nurtured and educated her, yet he’d obliterated her innocence the first time he’d made her end a life. He’d given her everything, but he’d also taken everything away. She could no sooner sort out her feelings toward the King of the Assassins than she could count the stars in the sky.
“Benzo Doneval is coming to Rifthold,” Arobynn said. Celaena cocked her head. She’d heard of Doneval—he was an immensely powerful businessman from Melisande, a country far to the southwest, and one of Adarlan’s newer conquests.
Leighfer is good friends with the former Queen of Melisande, who asked her to come here to plead their case before the King of Adarlan.” Melisande, Celaena recalled, was one of the few kingdoms whose royal family had not been executed. Instead, they’d handed over their crowns and sworn loyalty to the King of Adarlan and his conquering legions.
“Doneval wants to set up a slave-trade business between himself and someone in Rifthold. If the road is approved and built, he wants to be the first in Melisande to profit off the import and export of slaves. The documents, apparently, contain proof that certain influential Melisanders in Adarlan are opposed to the slave trade. Considering the lengths the King of Adarlan has already gone to punish those who speak against his policies … Well, knowing who stands against him regarding the slaves—especially when it seems like they’re taking steps to help free the slaves from his grasp—is
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“What’s Bardingale’s stake in this?” she asked carefully. “Why hire us to kill him?” “Because Leighfer doesn’t believe in slavery, and she wants to protect the people on that list—people who are preparing to take the necessary steps to soften the blow of slavery in Melisande. And possibly even smuggle captured slaves to safety.”
“Leighfer doesn’t know; her sources haven’t been able to find a name in Doneval’s coded correspondences with his partner. All she’s gleaned is that Doneval will exchange the documents with his new business partner six days from now at his rented house, at some point in the day. She’s uncertain what documents his partner is bringing to the table, but she’s betting that it’s a list of important people opposed to slavery in Adarlan.
The Mute Master had told her that people dealt with their pain in different ways—that some chose to drown it, some chose to love it, and some chose to let it turn into rage.
She’d met Lysandra when they were both ten,
Arobynn had spent a good deal of money assisting Lysandra in her rise from street orphan to one of the most anticipated courtesans in Rifthold’s history.
Lysandra and her madam remained the only courtesans aware that the girl Arobynn called his “niece” was actually his protégée.
Sam. He’d always been kind to the courtesans, and they all adored him. His mother had been one of them, and had asked Arobynn—a patron of hers—to look after her son. Sam had only been six when she was murdered by a jealous client.
few young courtesans go through the Bidding process—girls trained until they were seventeen, when their virginity was sold to the highest bidder.
I were to give you a piece of Spidersilk, could you incorporate it into one of these uniforms? It’s small, so I’d just want it placed around the heart.” She used her hands to show the size of the material that she’d been given by the merchant in the desert city of Xandria.
Spidersilk was a near-mythical material made by horse-sized stygian spiders—so rare that you had to brave the spiders yourself to get it. And they didn’t trade in gold. No, they coveted things like dreams and memories and souls. The merchant she’d met had traded twenty years of his youth for two hundred yards of it. And after a long, strange conversation with him, he’d given her a few square inches of Spidersilk. As a reminder, he’d said. That everything has a price.
“My price was his oath that he’d never lay a hand on you again. I told him I’d forgive him in exchange for that.”
“Leighfer Bardingale,” Arobynn murmured, following her gaze. Doneval’s former wife—and the one who’d hired her. “It was an arranged marriage. She wanted his wealth, and he wanted her youth. But when they failed to have children and some of his less … desirable behavior was revealed, she managed to get out of the marriage, still young, but far richer.”
She leaned close. “My name is Wind,” she whispered. “And Rain. And Bone and Dust. My name is a snippet of a half-remembered song.”
“I have no name,” she purred. “I am whoever the keepers of my fate tell me to be.”
She’d never given much thought to how she’d die, but drowning somehow felt fitting. It was a river in her native country of Terrasen that had almost claimed her life nine years ago—and now it seemed that whatever bargain she’d struck with the gods that night was finally over.
“Take my body home to Terrasen, Sam,”
The man who poisoned himself—he hadn’t been there to trade documents to sell out those opposed to slavery. He and Doneval had been working to— Doneval loves his country, Philip had said. Doneval had been working to set up a system of safe houses and form an alliance of people against slavery across the empire. Doneval, bad habits or not, had been working to help the slaves. And she’d killed him. Worse than that, she’d given the documents over to Bardingale—who didn’t want to stop slavery at all. No, she wanted to profit from it and use her new road to do it. And she and Arobynn had concocted
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