Page 69 of Earl of Darkness (Heirs of Kilronan Trilogy 1)

Aidan gaped stupidly. “What are you saying?”

Daz’s grip tightened on Aidan’s shoulders until he wondered if he were the only thing holding the old man upright. His fingers convulsed, grief softening his face, dimming his eyes. “It was Brendan who set the Amhas-draoi onto the Nine. Who condemned your father and the others to death. Arthur had been his idea, but he knew it would fail. And knew even in its failure it would cost the lives of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of innocents. He’d had too much of the blood. Of the killing. Of the soul-crushing guilt.”

“How do you know all this?”

He released Aidan with a painful wrench before falling into a chair. Shading his eyes with a trembling hand. “Because I agreed with him. We both cracked beneath our burdens. Brendan chose an honorable way out. He sacrificed everything to try and right what he’d wronged.”

“And you, Daz?”

“I chose the coward’s way.”

“You said Brendan was betrayed. What happened?”

Daz looked up, the ghosts of those days clear in the bloodshot gaze. “He chose to confess all to the Amhas-draoi. He wanted to go himself, but the others—perhaps suspecting something—kept him close. He couldn’t get away long enough to deliver his information. So he sent it to me. Asked me to go in his stead.”

“And did you?”

“Aye. I fell upon Scathach’s mercy. Told her everything I knew and more.”

“And?” Aidan felt he knew where this tale was going. Knew it and dreaded it.

“And afraid for my life amidst the raised swords of the brotherhood, claimed the information as my own. They spared me.”

“But executed the Nine.” Aidan’s voice held a steely note not lost on Daz.

“Brendan escaped,” he whispered. “He survives. You said it yourself.”

“As a hunted man.”

“Yet while there’s life, there’s hope.” The eagerness of someone grasping at straws in the wind.

Aidan swallowed the urge to strike the earnest expression from the old man’s face. He’d put him through hell. Had smashed every image and corrupted every memory Aidan held of his brother. And now the truth came out. A truth almost as gut wrenching as the falsehood.

Brendan betrayed. Brendan hunted. Brendan an innocent victim of Amhas-draoi zeal.

He fisted his hands at his sides to keep them from snaking around Daz’s neck. The icy tingle deep in his chest spread to become a tightness in his brain. A violent anger seething just below the surface. “Do you know what you’ve done? They seek him even now. They think he’s behind this creature Lazarus. That he’s trying to restart the Nine and its network of the disaffected,” he snarled between gritted teeth. “If they find him before we do, they’ll kill him first and ask questions later.”

Daz crumpled, his body folding in upon itself with guilty sorrow. “My fault. All of it my fault. The Nine are no more. The Nine are gone.”

Damn. He’d pushed him too far and lost him. “Daz!”

No use. From crumpled to rocking, accompanied by a steady, keening murmur. “The Nine are gone. No more. All of it over. All of it destroyed. The King will never return.”

Aidan paced the room, tapping his thigh nervously. Wheels grinding. “If Brendan betrayed the Nine, it couldn’t be him seeking the diary.”

No answer from Daz. Not that he’d expected one. The wheels kept turning as he talked it through. “Someone else must be after it. Someone else who knows what secrets it’s keeping. And someone with the ability to decipher it.”

It was there. At the edge of his mind. An impression. A glimpse of the answer.

“The High King’s glorious return is for naught.” Daz kept up his rocking and muttering. “The blood was too much. Always the blood. The death.”

Aidan ignored Daz. The solution was there somewhere. Locked in a fuzzy corner of his mind. “Someone with the ability to decipher Father’s language.” Frustration. Irritation. It was there if only he were clearheaded enough to remember.

Daz pressed his hands to his ears. “Brendan knew. Brendan tried. Keep them safe, he said. And so I did. Safe until he returns for them.”

That was it. A letter. A farewell. Written in the same headache-inducing language as the diary.

Of course. The answer hit him l

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