Two sets of eyes, one sun-golden and the other the black of a moonless night, gazed down on the estate nestled at the bottom of the valley.
"So Oparu has gone to ground, eh? Going to hunt him down?"
"No. He's hiding with Carunirian. I'll take them both later." Marron's horse whickered and its rider reached out, absently, to stroke its neck, soothing it into silence.
Mirufi glanced over at him, reading the telltale signs; he frowned. "You don't look like you slept well."
"I slept well enough."
"Dreams again?"
Marron's eyes flicked over at him; he said nothing for a moment. "Nothing I can't handle."
"Of that I have no doubt." Mirufi examined his companion's expression with narrowed eyes. The utter lack thereof was nothing new. The evasiveness was. "Another visitation?"
Marron's eyes flicked toward the valley again, dismissively. "You insist upon calling them that."
"That's what they are, whether you want to believe it or not." Softer, now, carefully--- "We had agreed you would tell me, if it happened again."
"It happened again."
Mirufi sighed and looked down into the valley as well. "You asked me to help you, Marron."
"You have. Thank you."
Marron spurred his horse forward then, catching Mirufi off-guard. The younger man was thirty paces down the trail before Mirufi could get his own, more recalcitrant, horse to start after him. Mirufi scowled, reaching up to brush his unruly hair from his face, and cursed his horse for being a lazy sod. Marron was pulling away from him. In more ways than one.
The damned plan had better work.
A trio of milk-maids passed on the other side of the road, and Carrot swung around in his saddle to watch them. Chocora snorted, and he looked back at her with a rueful smile. "Tira and I agreed that it was okay to look," he explained. "But no touching, no catcalls, no propositions. And the look can be no more than ten seconds total." He grinned, rubbing the back of his head sheepishly. "I guess I should be grateful she lets me do that much."
"Yes, you should be." Chocora smiled sweetly. "If I'd gotten you, I wouldn't have even let you look."
Her gaze was both teasing and wistful, and he met it for a moment, thinking of things that might have been. Then he blushed and looked down at his horse's neck, quelling those thoughts before they could get too far.
"Saa," he began awkwardly, to fill the sudden silence that had descended between them. "You think Oparu's next."
She nodded, her smile fading. It bothered him, how serious she was, now.
"If it's really Marron... then yes, I think so."
Carrot sighed. "I can't believe he'd do something like that. I just can't. He was always so... gentle."
"Except whenever you were hurt," she reminded him. "You remember how he got sometimes. There were plenty of times when Marron's anger scared the hell out of me. Thank the gods it took a lot to get him mad. I think if you had ever been killed... he might have reacted the same way he's acting now."
"What---killing people in cold blood? Torturing them to death? Killing innocents?" Carrot scowled. "No. I refuse to believe that. There's nothing like that in Marron. I know my little brother, damn it. He's not a monster."
Chocora was silent for a long moment, gazing ahead down the road, before answering. "I don't think he's a monster, either. But I think maybe Gateau was right. That man you saw, the one the Conclave killed, he was special to Marron somehow. Maybe---" she glanced at him, "---maybe even his lover, like Gateau thought. Maybe just a mentor. In either case, I don't think it's so far-fetched that Marron would want revenge."
Carrot scowled, his jaw tightening. "They weren't lovers."
Chocora looked at him again, her gaze unreadable, but refrained from comment. Her silence was a louder rebuke than anything she could have said. Sullenly, resentfully, Carrot fell silent as well. Neither of them really needed to acknowledge what by now had become obvious. None of them had really known Marron as well as they'd thought.
Except perhaps Gateau.
Carrot suppressed seething anger. He'd always resented Gateau, from the very beginning. Ever since he'd realized that Gateau was serious about his attraction to Marron, beneath the posturing and the foolish antics. Ever since he'd suspected, with a painful and terrible combination of concern and disgust, that Marron was concealing a similar attraction to Gateau.
He sighed heavily, looking away from the monotony of the road, out over the long fields of grain. They'd been so close, once, he and Marron. Time and fate had not been kind to either of them. Things had been so different, ever since their childhood years. Ever since Marron had come back from the school.
"What are you thinking about?" Chocora asked quietly, and he glanced at her, startled from his reverie.
"What else? Marron." He shifted in his saddle and decided to change the subject. "All right. Why Oparu?" She glanced at him, reading his expression, and he scowled. "Go ahead and say whatever you have to say, damn it. I might not agree with you, but I'll listen."
She nodded. "Either him or Topaza. I can't guess which. But I think he'll save Viscount Carunirian for last. Because Carunirian was the one who killed Marron's... friend." She shrugged. "If I were him, that's what I'd do. Save the best for last."
Carrot sighed again and rubbed his eyes. "I just can't accept that. I can't believe---"
She interrupted him with a sharp wave of one hand. "Marron wasn't just the sweet, quiet little shadow you wanted him to be, Carrot. I've seen him hunt down and destroy anyone who hurt his loved ones. Without a scrap of mercy or a second's hesitation. And the only thing that's ever stopped him, before, has been you." She looked hard at him as he stared back in surprise and consternation. "You have to stop him now. And the only way you're going to be able to do that is if you finally face the fact that he grew up a long time ago."
"I've never---" He started to protest automatically, but then faltered, unable to think of anything more to say. Chocora looked ahead again and fell silent. After a moment, so did he.
The road stretched on, seemingly endless, before them.
It had been three days, and Kei still wasn't speaking to him.
Gateau sighed and twitched aside the heavy velvet curtain of the drawing room, watching the courtyard of Topaza's castle down below. Topaza's children---a boy and a girl, six and nine years old, respectively---shouted and ran about, playing. They were well-dressed but filthy in the way that playing children so often were, with dirt smudged on their faces and hands and even over the triangular Sorcerers' mark tattooed on their foreheads. A servant stood unobtrusively nearby, keeping watch, but not interfering with the children's play.
So many people believed that being born into privilege was wonderful. Gateau had seen too many Sorcerer younglings with the light of childhood stamped out of their eyes, far earlier than it should have been. Topaza, it seemed, intended for his children to be simply children, at least for a while.
Huh. Almost makes him human in my book. Almost.
He sighed again, and only then sensed that he was being watched. Frowning, he turned to glance over his shoulder and saw Kei standing in the doorway, watching him silently. For a long, painful moment they simply looked at each other, and then Kei crossed the room to stand beside him, looking down himself at the courtyard.
"They seem so carefree," he remarked mildly, and Gateau glanced at him again, trying to gauge his lover's mood. Kei's face was solemn. He'd tied his long black hair back in an unruly tail. "Have they been told?"
"That there's an assassin coming to kill their father? No." Gateau looked down at the children and watched them chase each other around the hedges. "Topaza didn't want to darken what might be their last days as a family together."
Kei glanced at him. "You think he'll kill Topaza, then. Even with you here to... intervene?"
Gateau looked up at Kei and saw the telltale guarded look in the other man's green eyes. So. Kei might have broken his silence at last, but the anger was still there.
"I don't know. I don't really care." Gateau glanced around the empty room and sighed. "I'm not here to protect him, whatever his wife says."
"And I don't want your protection."
They both turned, startled, to see Rimon Topaza standing in the doorway. The Sorcerer was still clad in his morning robe, a rich concoction of velvet and silk, and it was clear that if he'd slept the night before, it had not been restful. The dark circles under his eyes belied his cool hauteur.
He stepped into the room, folding his arms. "I will never forgive my wife for this. I deal with my own problems."
Gateau folded his as well. "If you don't want me here, Lord Topaza, just say so, and I'll leave. You can take your chances alone against this killer, whoever he is. It's all the same to me whether I meet him before he kills you or after."
Topaza glared at him in pure loathing, but then sighed and looked away. "If it were only me, I'd have already thrown you out. I'd face him alone and die fighting, if necessary. But it's not just me." Topaza smiled, a small, bitter, humorless smile. "We exploit one another well, don't you think?"
"Aa." Gateau turned back to the window.
Topaza was silent for a long moment behind Gateau, and then he came to stand at the other window, sighing as he gazed out at his children. "Merrine will not leave. She refuses to take the children away. I think she believes that your friend, if he's the one that's after me, won't be able to kill me with my family present and looking on. What do you think?"
Gateau shrugged, aware of Kei's eyes on him. He kept his on the children in the courtyard below. "I don't know what to think. If it's... my friend... then I can't guess at what he'll do. Even in the old days, I could never predict his actions." Yes. That had been half of Marron's allure. Those dark eyes of his had always been full of mysteries.
He wrenched his mind back to the present, lest Kei sense his nostalgia.
"But honestly---I don't think he'll give a damn if your kids are around." Gateau felt a humorless smile touch his lips. "You didn't give much of a damn when you tortured his lover to death in front of him."
Topaza's jaw tightened for a moment in profile. "I told you. I never condoned what Carunirian did that night."
"You let it happen. If that's not condoning it, what is?"
"I don't have to explain myself to you."
"Then don't. I don't think Marron will want to hear your excuses, either." Gateau shrugged, watching as Topaza's son fell, skinned his knee, and howled for the servant, who came hastening over.
Topaza turned to glare at Gateau---and then slumped. He sighed and gazed down at the courtyard again, his eyes suddenly bleak. After a moment, he turned and left, without another word.
Kei watched him leave, then turned to smile cheerfully at Gateau. "I just love the way any mention of Marron's name seems to unilaterally fuck up everyone who hears it."
Gateau scowled and looked back down at the courtyard.
He had no chance to try and find some tactful reply to Kei's taunt. Something had changed, down below.
Another figure stood now in the center of the garden, and the children had stopped playing, drawing near their guardian and watching the newcomer with wide, frightened eyes. And in that moment all of Gateau's half-formed hopes and barely-acknowledged fears sprang to instant, savage life.
"Kei," he said softly, hearing his own voice echo back to him, soft and inflectionless. Kei started at his tone, narrowed his eyes, then looked down into the courtyard; the younger man's green eyes widened in surprise. "Stay here." He turned, swiftly, and headed out of the chamber.
Behind him he heard silence for all of three seconds. And then--- "Like hell I will."
Together, they went to find Topaza.
Children. He debated whether or not he should kill them.
They gazed back at him, eyes wide with mingled fright and fascination. He had teleported into the garden, and the method of his entrance was intriguing enough to them to override caution, to a degree. The servant who hovered over them, at once cowering and protective, was more certain of his feelings; naked terror shone in the man's eyes. Marron ignored him and examined the children again.
Topaza's, without a doubt. They both bore their sire's haughty stamp on their features. And no other children on the estate would have the Sorcerers' mark.
Innocent of their father's crime, of course---but marked by his guilt nevertheless. Topaza had been perfectly willing to slaughter the children of the Mizu school for the sake of his own cause. For the sake of vengeance, it would be fitting to kill Topaza's children, so that their father would feel the pain of retribution all the more personally. He had chosen righteousness over mercy before. This was no different.
The boy apparently overcame his fear enough to speak, startling Marron out of his ruminations. "Who're you?"
Marron regarded him for a long moment in silence. "My name is Marron."
"Did you come to see our father?" the girl asked, not to be outdone by her brother. She smiled shyly.
He gazed at her for a long moment, and visualized her body sprawled across the grass, bright eyes open and unseeing.
"Yes," he said softly.
He turned, then, without another word, and walked toward the door that led into the castle itself.
When the door closed behind him he walked on, scanning about him for guards or potential ambushes. He sensed no one in the hallways around him, which surprised him somewhat. News of Torumarin's death should certainly have spread to this part of the continent by now. Topaza should, logically, have gone into hiding like Oparu, or at least prepared for Marron's visit with additional security. Not that either would have stopped Marron from killing him.
But then, the smile of a child had stopped him, just a moment ago.
He scowled to himself, stopping at an intersection of hallways, turning his head slowly as he scanned for Topaza's lifeforce. He should have killed the children. Killed them and thrown their bodies at Topaza's feet, so that the Sorcerer might know true misery and loss before he died. He should go back and kill them now.
The halls were silent. Topaza's lifeforce was up ahead. After a moment, he moved on toward it.
A throne room: remnant of the days when Topaza's family had ruled the local region. Now Topaza's title was more honorary than geniune, but the trappings of royalty still adorned his castle, and this chamber was only the grandest of them. The throne itself---a tasteful thing of mahogany and gilt---sat on a raised dais positioned against one wall, beneath a wall-sized relief of the Topaza family crest. Very elegant, very beautiful.
He focused on the current occupant of the throne, who stood calmly and stepped down from the dais as he entered the room.
"I've been expecting you," Topaza said, his soft words carrying well in the excellent acoustics of the room. The Sorcerer was composed but tense. Marron stopped a few feet away from him and wondered what the man was up to. Not that he truly cared.
"One would not know it by your security, Lord Topaza."
"I decided to try and minimize the loss of life. Mere guards couldn't stop you, or you wouldn't have managed to kill the others so easily."
How interesting. Marron lifted a hand and made a gesture. Topaza flew backward into the throne he'd just vacated, pinned to the seat by unseen bonds which held his waist and limbs in place.
The Sorcerer's eyes flew wide, but he stopped resisting after a moment's struggle. Marron waited; no guards materialized to attack, and there was no sound in the vaulted chamber save Topaza's quickened, uneven breath. Satisfied, he focused again on Topaza. "I wouldn't have expected to find a fatalist among the Conclave's members."
Topaza was sweating, his voice unsteady with fear, but to his credit he stammered only a little. "I'm hoping to earn something for my good behavior, actually."
"Oh?" Marron walked up the steps of the dais, taking his time. That he could sense no guards did not preclude danger. He would be cautious.
"My family's life." Topaza looked up at Marron as he reached the top of the platform and stopped, standing over the throne. The Sorcerer was pale and trembling a little. "Can I beg that, at least? A dying man's last request?"
"You and your comrades destroyed a great man's body, his honor, and his dream. If I recall, your only concern was that a dead man could give you no useful information." Topaza's pallor increased, but he said nothing. He was too proud a man to beg in earnest. "I owe you nothing."
The Sorcerer gazed back at him for a long moment, then sighed and bowed his head. "It was worth a try." He slumped in his invisible bonds. "For what it's worth, I regret your mentor's death. Not just because you're here now."
Marron shrugged. Regrets wouldn't bring Zeii back.
He lifted a hand and summoned his power to begin, then paused, cocking his head. Footsteps---running through the corridors, approaching rapidly. He sighed and shook his head. Guards, most likely, finally gathering the courage to attack.
He lowered his hand and looked at Topaza. "You should have done a better job of warning them off, if you wanted to save their lives." The Sorcerer blinked in confusion. Marron turned to meet his attackers, as the footsteps entered the chamber.
For a moment, he didn't recognize the feeling of shock within himself, so long had it been since he'd felt it. It also took him a moment to recognize the man standing before him, not because the face or the body or the manner had changed so greatly, but because he simply had expected never to see that face again.
"Gateau," he said, mildly.
Gateau stood at the foot of the dais, for a moment unable to do anything but stare in dumb wonder. Kei stared as well, beside him, but Kei didn't move, and after a moment Gateau forgot he was there.
The face was the same, beautiful and perfect, as was the body, slender and straight, grace in even its most causal movement. The hair was longer, caught up in a neat tail at the end of the mass, its tip brushing the backs of his thighs. The same recalcitrant locks were loose, however, to fall into his face when not safely tucked behind his ears. But there the similarity to the Marron Gateau had known ended.
He wore black now. But the worst change was in his eyes.
"Marron," he managed, after a moment, his mind drawing a blank. He'd thought about what to say, if this moment ever came, but all of his well-rehearsed phrases were gone now, blown away in a quick, sharp blast of reality. "You're alive."
Marron said nothing and did not move, simply gazing at him for a long moment with those cold, hard eyes of his. Finally, when Gateau had recovered enough self-awareness to realize just how foolish he'd been to state the obvious, the other man nodded, once, his hair shimmering. "Aa." He was quiet for a moment more. "What are you doing here?"
Gateau swallowed back a hard lump in his throat, forcing himself to relax as much as he could. "That's obvious, ne? I heard a rumor that you were alive. I came to see if it was true."
Marron continued to stare at him for a long moment, and then a shudder passed through him. It was subtle, a sea-change; in a gradual, indeterminate moment the cold look faded from his eyes and something else flickered across his features. Something fleeting and pained. Gateau had only a moment's glimpse before Marron turned away, facing Topaza again, his back to them.
"You shouldn't have come."
Gateau frowned. "I had to, Marron. I had to know if you were alive. Why didn't you tell us? Carrot thinks you're dead, the others all do too---"
Marron made a quick, slight gesture with a hand, cutting him off. "It doesn't matter."
"Doesn't matter? Marron, we thought you were dead. It's been three years. What in hell---"
"It does not matter." The other man's voice cracked, suddenly, more sharply and harshly than Gateau had ever heard him speak. Gateau fell silent in surprise and consternation.
Marron looked down at the Sorcerer, still pinned to the throne in front of him; Topaza looked up, warily. "Very good, Lord Topaza. You chose an excellent weapon."
"It wasn't his choice that I come here," Gateau said sharply, mounting the first step up to the dais. Suddenly it was powerfully, inexplicably important to him that Marron look at him, acknowledge his presence. He took another step up, to one side, putting himself in range of Marron's peripheral vision. Marron's head was bowed; in profile, his expression was tightly unreadable. "I came here of my own volition."
No response. Gateau set his jaw. "I came here to stop you."
Marron looked up at him then, finally. His eyes were darker than usual, and---something else. The coldness had slipped aside, in a sudden and undeniable transition, and underneath lay sadness. Such terrible sadness that Gateau stopped where he was, close enough to reach out and touch Marron, staring at that sadness and utterly transfixed by it.
"You can't stop me, Gateau. Nothing and no one can stop this until it's done." He sighed, finally and slowly, a pillar of onyx cracking to take a breath. "I wish to all the gods that you hadn't come here."
After all this time, after everything, it still hurt. Gateau felt his jaw tighten and he cursed himself inwardly for a fool, for allowing the old yearnings to retain any hold on him when they should have rightly been discarded long ago.
But his self-beration ceased, abruptly, when Marron lifted a hand. His fingers, just the tips, touched Gateau's cheek. Something inside Gateau leaped, despite his best efforts to hold it down.
"Don't follow me again," Marron said softly, and then he spoke another word, something Gateau didn't understand. He had only a moment to wonder at its meaning before darkness overwhelmed him.
The sleep-spell took hold immediately, and Gateau crumpled to the steps, rolling down the few he'd climbed to sprawl in a heavy, ungainly heap at the foot of the dais.
"Gateau---" The other man who had come with Gateau gasped and dropped to his knees beside him, gathering Gateau's head into his arms and fearfully checking his pulse. Marron watched the man for a moment, understanding much from that single gesture.
"He'll wake in a few hours," he said, and the man looked up, glaring at Marron with eyes the color of fine jade.
"What did you do to him?"
"A simple spell." He turned back toward Topaza, whose face had fallen with Gateau, as had his hopes.
Suddenly it was pathetic: a frightened man pinned to a chair, awaiting certain death and using any weapon in his arsenal---his honor, his life, an emotional attack---to try and protect his family, at the last. Marron tried, and failed, to resurrect the rage that had vanished at the sight of Gateau's face. He tried to remember Zeii's body strapped to the rack, Topaza's anger over a wasted opportunity rather than a wasted life... to no avail. The rage was gone.
He raised a hand, fingers splayed, palm facing Topaza. The man's eyes flew wide. "Your family will live," Marron said softly. And he unleashed a blast of magical energy that seared through the Sorcerer's head, the throne behind him, and several walls before eventually driving into the ground, far beyond the castle's perimeter.
When the last thundercrack of sound had faded, leaving only the twitching thumps of Topaza's corpse and the faint crackle of seared wood to echo faintly in the throne-chamber, Marron turned, gazing down at Gateau again. And Gateau's lover.
The latter hovered over Gateau, tensed and ready to defend him, although Marron could sense no magic about the man and he didn't have the look of a fighter. The man's eyes were wide with shock and fear at Marron's display of power, but he did not loosen his hold on Gateau, and his fear did not eclipse the fierce protectiveness in his aura.
Good. Gateau had found someone worthy of his love, at last.
He could think of nothing more to say. So he left, teleporting out of the castle and back to the hillock where Mirufi waited, with their horses. He materialized to one side of his horse and stood there, looking down at the ground. Mirufi looked up from his hunter's crouch, lifting an eyebrow in mild surprise. "That was quick. Is it done?"
"Aa." He stared down into the valley at the castle, and then turned swiftly to his horse, swinging himself up into its saddle quickly. His hands shook on the reins and he willed them to stop, before Mirufi could see the involuntary movement.
Mirufi stood and stretched, watching him. "Something wrong?"
"No," he snapped, more sharply than he should have. He winced as Mirufi's eyes narrowed. "Let's go."
Mirufi frowned at him for a moment longer, but finally nodded and pulled himself up into his own horse's saddle, thankfully without any further questions. Marron wheeled his own mount about and spurred it, and together they rode away from Topaza's lands, as swiftly as if pursued.
**End Ch. 12