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and skittered across the tile floor between Bero’s legs.
She’d been a fool, but sadly, even fools were entitled to their pride.
She’d confessed the affair to him. One of Hilo’s men had seen her entering an apartment building with her lover, and knowing her secret was lost, Eyni had gone straight back to the house before the news could make its way through the Horn back to Lan. “Please don’t kill him,” she’d begged
The shock and disbelief he’d seen on Anden’s face filled his memory. So did the shame Lan had felt that day, knowing he’d profoundly damaged the young man’s admiration and trust in him.
Fate worked in mysterious and beautiful ways.
“Lan’s dead.”
The Horn placed his hands on her shoulders, and pulled her close, and laid his cheek against hers. “Heaven help me, Shae,” he whispered into her ear. “I’m going to kill them all.”
“Can you hear me? I’m ready to die. The clan is my blood, and the Pillar is its master.”
This will be the end, she thought. This will be the end of the No Peak clan.
You’re no Pillar, it would say. I was born for it, trained for it, and look at how it killed me. You think you can do any better? Grandda always said you were good for nothing but thuggery.
“I can’t swear on my jade any longer,” Doru said with bitter humor, “but you have my word. I know my position, Shae-se. I did my best to steer toward a better outcome for us all, but I failed. Lan is dead, and Hilo is Pillar. I live only on his mercy, and yours I see, and if I can be of simple company to Kaul-jen for the short time we both have left, that is more than enough. You’ve nothing to worry about from me.”
It took murder and war to bring you back, but do you remember? I always said to your grandfather that someday you would replace me as Weather Man.”
There’s a way to discipline a man so he hates you forever, and another way to do it so he loves you all the more for it. To know what it is, you have to know the man. What do you know about your friend back there?”
Any old horse will run when it’s whipped, but only fast enough to avoid the whipping,” Hilo said. “Racehorses, though, they run because they look at the horse on their left, they look at the one on their right, and they think, No way am I second to these fuckers.”
But for the most part, you give a man something to live up to, you tell him he can be more than he is now, more than other people think he’ll ever be, and he’ll try his godsdamned best to make it true.”
She’d squirmed while trying to fall asleep at night, struggling to block out Perception of the blazing energy spill from her brother’s lovemaking down the hall.
“Expectations are a funny thing,” Wen said. “When you’re born with them, you resent them, fight against them. When you’ve never been given any, you feel the lack of them your whole life.”
A smile crept to Hilo’s face upon hearing his younger sister cite such a hidebound clan adage, reminding him that a good Pillar did not question his Weather Man’s methods or sources too closely. Like a duck to water, as he’d always suspected.
Now, he thought after some time, I can plan for death.
And you, looking lovely with your hair done up and walking with your hand on my arm, in a long green dress. Or red, I like red just as well.
From this moment until the last one of my life.
whenever he crested toward climax, he denied himself and turned his attention to Wen instead, until she was spent with pleasure and whispering sweetly for him to give in. At last, with fierce desperation and quivering reluctance, he found release, and afterward tried to stay awake long enough to burn the merciful moment so indelibly into his mind that he could be certain it would be the last thing he would remember.
I’m a married man.
Hilo spat in Gont’s face. “Did you think I’d offer you my neck like a duck on a fucking chopping block? I’m going to take you with me!”
Anden’s world exploded in a rush of pure energy.
Anden registered their fear of him and heard himself give an odd giggle.
