Page 4 of A Tower of Half-Truths
“I told you, I’m fine,” Fennick gasped. “Just leave me here for a minute. I’ll catch up.”
His skin was whiter than the patch of snow at his feet, his eyes were ringed with darkness. He wasn’t remotely in the realm of “fine.”
“Nonsense,” Mavery said. “You’ll get torn apart by wolves out here, if you don’t bleed out first.”
“Leave him,” Neldren said.
She blinked, mouth agape. “You can’t be serious.”
“Just look at him, Mave. He’s beyond saving.”
“If we could get him to a healer—”
“And then what? We’ll strut up to the nearest temple and hope they don’t ask too many questions? For starters: How did he get mauled by a hellhound at half-past midnight?”
“We’re not leaving him,” Mavery said. “He’s—”
“The reason we almost got caught, or did you already forget?” Neldren scowled. “He didn’t want this job in the first place. He fought me on it every step of the way, told me anything involving the Rovens wasn’t worth any amount of money.”
“So, this is how you deal with those who disagree with you? You just leave them to die?”
Mavery gestured to Fennick, who was breathing heavily, mouth hanging open. A moan and a trickle of blood were the only things that escaped it. Neldren’s eyes narrowed as he looked to Fennick, then to Mavery.
“You’re right,” he said in a low voice. “We shouldn’t leave him to die.”
Mavery began to breathe a sigh of relief, until an eerily unfamiliar look crossed Neldren’s expression. His hand inched toward his blade.
“Wait!” she cried.
A metallic tang hit her tongue as she pushed her palms outward, creating a translucent blue barrier between the two men. The scent of ash filled the air again as Neldren vanished, thenreappeared on the other side of her protective ward a heartbeat later. With neither a word nor hesitation, he unsheathed his knife and swiped it across Fennick’s throat.
Fennick reached for the wound, but his fingers could find no purchase amid the gushing blood. His gaze flicked to Mavery, and she swore she could see the slightest glimmer of fear behind his eyes. He then turned to Neldren. Nostrils flaring, he flashed the crew’s leader a cold, hard glare. As the final embers of his life extinguished, Fennick’s body slid down the tree trunk and into the brambles.
A deafening silence fell across the forest.
Mavery looked to Ellice and Itri, who silently stared at Fennick’s corpse. She hoped their lack of reaction was due to disbelief, not indifference.
“Neldren!” Mavery yelled. “Why would you—”
“No point in delaying the inevitable,” he said flatly. He cleaned his blade on Fennick’s shirt, then wiped a spatter of blood from his own face.
“But—”
“Quiet down before you wake the whole province.” He sheathed his blade and continued onward. “No time for a funeral. Let’s go get paid.”
Two
While Mavery gazed into the depths of her tankard, the rest of the crew was in high spirits, celebrating their payout. Odd, how a bit of money could make them forget all about what had transpired not even an hour ago.
Then again, none of them were strangers to death. That was especially true for Mavery. She’d been a member of everything from well-oiled mercenary organizations, to fly-by-night crews like this current group. Over her nearly twenty-year career, she’d lost more colleagues than she could count. She’d lost count well before she’d learned to stop counting altogether.
This most recent death stung, but it wasn’t as if Mavery and Fennick had been particularly close; they’d only known each other for a month. But that had been long enough to learn how he’d once been a nobleman’s bodyguard, until his heavy drinking and gambling left him with no job—only debts and divorce papers. He’d traded his once comfortable life for one that was far less savory, where he soon fell in with Neldren.
Fennick’s story was one Mavery had heard dozens of times. Though the details differed, they all led to the same place. Very few people chose this life. More often than not, it was the only viable path after they’d burned every bridge.
Despite his shortcomings, Fennick had deserved a better death.Would Mavery face a similar fate? Had she been the one bleeding out in the woods, she couldn’t say for certain whether Neldren would have acted any differently. And now he sat beside her, drinking and laughing with Ellice, as though he hadn’t killed his own crewmate. Even Itri was now three tankards deep and plunking out a tune on the taproom’s poorly tuned piano.
Mavery, taking a page from their book, tried to focus on the wad of potins in her pack. This had been her biggest payout in over a year, and her firstjob in weeks. Now that practically everyone in Osperland was carrying a pistol in their back pocket, there was little need for mercenaries’ protection these days. After months of attempting to strike out on her own as a mage for hire, only to come up short, Mavery had had no choice but to fall back in with Neldren.
