Sat Aug 08, 2009 10:33 pm
The Legate fought the fire along the others.
Afterwards, she returns to the rooms she's rented in a small downtown boarding-house where they cared not for the wiles of Kaczmareks and did not bat an eye when she put down gold coins minted in a year that has not yet occurred.
I'll leave for Razasan in a few days, she said. After I've taken care of what needs to be taken care of around here.
The mirror in her rooms betrays a face that has seen wars that no longer happened -- wars that are in the future, wars that were only won because the bloody genius Anselm was on the throne, not dallying Chedwry.
There is something that hurts worse than the old wounds that the girl who left for Razasan did not have, that disfigures far more than the mage-scar running parallel to her jawline. People who used to support her call her 'ghoul,' for one. She snorts when she imagines what Ariane would say. And Constantine -- to Constantine, she's just a dead recruit for His Majesty's Own; the mission that would bring them together is still a year in the future. It tears at her stomach worse than death, to share the man's name and yet see nothing but a stranger in his eyes. They'd had conversations upon conversations about it; how, really, the only people that care a damn for her in Myrken Wood were the family that now lived quite palatially in Razasan --
Or did, for that matter --
If the death of the King was the thing that saved me, she thinks, there is only one thing to do.
Agnieszka Kostroma runs her fingers over the rings that mark her as Legate.
His Majesty's Mageranks, she thinks. We have killed channelers. Chedwry will be easy.