Prodigal - Book III

A Two-Faced Man

The narrow, lined face that now hangs with running rivers of red in a lonely room just outside the reach of one young, naive girl, did not always look this way. Once it was smoother, fuller, though always sharp, pointed in whatever direction he turned.

And Abe Stirforge always had his head turned in the direction of the wind.

Not the true wind, the wind Prince Feuilles might pick out in the atmosphere; no this is a different wind, one forged not in gusts and gales, but tongues and glances. It's wind that blows bodies into dust and men into kings.

He learned the tools of the wind at a young age.

It's a careful art, the folding of a dinner napkin. It takes a certain precision, a clinical eye. A different fold for a different rank, a different fabric quality for each different species of man. Then there is the correct bearing of platters, the crisp smoothness of the uniform, the pleasant blankness of his expression. These are the tools of daylight.

Twilight tools are something else entirely. They first gave poison to the rats and he sat in their minds, feeling the slow damage like a second skin, learning how long each took. Then he learned the subtle sleight of a knife, the way to hold an acrid blade beneath the sleeve and stand, a ghost of manners and class, waiting to blow a gust.

Halften was not always an arbiter of peace; and so the crown posted him at Bristmarks, where he could learn the names and faces of all the entering pieces on the board of kings.

It had been a scandal when the Solveig prince went there instead of Fairfelles, the academy of his home country. But it was said the young man was brash and headstrong, and with him went the cream of young Solveig society, descending upon the lonely hills of Keesark, and Abe followed in their shadow, just as planned.

It was the short Solveig nobleman who disrupted his post.

A proffered apple started it, offered without much thought, as if it was an everyday occurrence for a lord to share food with a servant.

Abe didn't take it of course, but he remembered it.

The Halften crown told him not to interfere, no matter what. Abe was to be their eyes, concealed and unseen. A ghost in the wings. The particular companion of the crown prince of Solveig should not pay attention to a ghost. Abe learned to feign blindness and deafness when he was offered food.

Not that it stopped the man.

So months later, when Abe spied the crown prince set out with that same, strange man, Abe did as he was told.

He followed them.

His bird, flitting tree to tree, caught snippets of their conversation as they went; it was some kind of quarrel, the crown prince nursing some kind of bruised jealousy over the ascendant Chieftainess of Roften.

And then all hell broke loose.

Abe didn't need the bird to hear the first shout, nor did he need it to smell the blood. He caught, through its beady eyes, the crimson ruin of a clearing, of a man, hunched over, suddenly reaching out.

And then the screaming started.

It was like a flash when he laid his own eyes on the scene, like a light flickering on in a window, and all the lessons he learned, all the skills he carefully cultivated, seemed to click in place. It was that young man, the one with the apple, but there was no smile on his face this time; he was kneeling, twitching, hands clutching his face, blood oozing between his fingers, and Olcay, the son of one of the minor Keesark lords, looming over him.

And Abe made his first choice.

The knife hit the Keesark lordling in the shoulder, puncturing flesh, severing tendons, rendering his arm limp, and the dark eyes in that blood-stained face turned, flickering onto Abe.