With Herald on my back and Onur in my arms, I flew fast and low above the fields surrounding the Parvions’ estate. They were bare after the late second harvest, churned into deep mud by weeks of heavy rain, and offered no cover. Not that I particularly needed any; it was a moonless night, distance would take care of any noise, and Onur had been cooking in my shadows for a few minutes. But there was some pageantry to good intimidation, and getting the target alone and cut off from any help was part of that.

  I didn’t land until we reached the edge of the forest, then continued shuffling north until I couldn’t see the fields anymore. There. Nice and alone.

  I waited for Herald to get off and Shift back before I released Onur. There was a decent chance that he had some kind of Advancement that would let him resist the dominating effect of my shadows, so I kept a hand on his chest, putting just enough pressure on him to make sure he wouldn’t be able to wriggle loose. Then I dropped the coat of shadows around him and let him take in the situation.

  “Well,” he said breathlessly. “Shit.”

  “Good evening, Onur,” I said. He wasn’t struggling, so I took some of the pressure off him, instead letting my claws come out just enough for him to feel them. “Tell me: do you know why you’re here?”

  He didn’t answer immediately. He tried not to answer at all, then frowned, took a sharp breath, and spat, “Yes.”

  I relaxed. The way he’d answered, unwilling but unable to refuse, told me almost everything I needed to know. “Very good! You may sit up, but don’t try to run,” I said and released him. He did as I’d told him, sitting up, knees before him with his arms resting on them.

  I had him. He was different from what I was used to. He didn’t stink of fear, and he was surly instead of terrified or awestruck, but that was fine. Perhaps this was just what happened when someone was strong enough, or when they were fearless thanks to training or Advancements or some other factor. Perhaps I could have done the same with Tark, if I’d cared to — and knowing what I now did, about how much I cared about those I’d claimed, I was glad that I hadn’t. Having Tark properly subjugated, caring one whit about his well being, would have been a nightmare. Worrying about Zabra and Tammy was bad enough.

  Now I’d added this geezer, but at least I didn’t hate him. Of course, that might just be because I didn’t know how much of the blame he carried for the attack on our inn. We’d see how much unpleasantness he actually deserved in just a moment.

  “Do you know who I am?” I asked, and he nodded once. “Tell me.”

  He sighed. “You are the city’s very own dragon. Lady Draka.”

  “Very good. And you’re Onur, the man in charge of household security for House Parvion?”

  “I am.”

  “You will have understood by now that you cannot lie to me, or refuse to answer me. So, tell me: does House Parvion want to go to war with House Drakonum?”

  His eyebrows dropped just a tiny bit, his eyes narrowing, before he relaxed his face. The man was fighting me, trying not to give anything away, and I considered giving him another few minutes in the shadow realm. It proved unnecessary as he said, “No.”

  I considered doing it anyway.

  “Then why would you go and tell someone like Vestel to send his thugs after them?”

  His lips set in a tight line, nostrils flaring as he made a futile attempt to keep his mouth shut.

  “Onur, there are degrees to what I can do to you. Right now, your mind is still mostly your own. That can change. All it takes is another touch of my magic, and you’ll live the rest of your life consumed by one thought: ‘How can I best serve my lady?’ If you don’t want that, speak.”

  “It wasn’t personal,” he finally said, the words forced out of him one by one. “Lord Parvion wasn’t involved. He owed someone a favor, they approached me, I arranged it without bothering his lordship.”

  “Details, man,” I said. “Give us details!” Beside me, Herald frowned and crossed her arms, looking away from me to him. Which was good, really; I didn’t like to see her upset in any way, but I’d expected something more like a shrug and an, “Oh, well.”

  “He gave me some instructions and items that I passed along. Directions to Her Lady’s Favor, an inn in the Merchants’ Quarter. Keys to the front door and several rooms. Descriptions of five people to be taken alive if convenient, killed if not, and one to be taken alive if at all possible. This girl,” he gestured to Herald without looking at her, “was among the first group.”

  “Do you have any idea how lucky you are?” Herald asked.

  “Answer her,” I commanded when he stubbornly remained silent. “And look at her when she’s talking to you.”

  Onur’s face turned toward her, his neck so tense that I could imagine I heard his vertebrae creaking. “I don’t consider myself lucky at all at the moment,” he said, then added, “No. I have no idea.”

  “None of ours were seriously hurt,” she said, then crouched in front of him. “Kira has a thin scar, right here.” She drew her thumbnail across the side of his throat, hard enough to make him grimace. “Barely visible, unless you know what to look for. And one of the maids was stabbed, but she’s recovered. Happily, Draka wasn’t there, so she never saw either of them hurt. Do you know what happened the last time House Parvion hurt one of us, Onur?”

  That confused him, a genuine confusion that he tried to hide from us, but not quickly enough. And whether he knew it or not, that confusion was another point in his favor. At least he had no idea about the connection between us and Tark. Or at least he hadn’t, until Herald kept talking.

  “Do you remember Lord Parvion’s house on Cloud Street?” she asked, not giving him time to answer. “The one Tarkarran used? I remember it very well. Do you remember what happened there? I do. I still have nightmares about it, sometimes.”

  “There… was an attack,” Onur said, and his eyes shifted from Herald to me as I saw the pieces fall into place. “Our best guess was that someone had released a pair of large cats, or a bear, but…”

  “Do you know that there’s a little prison hidden under that house, Onur?” Herald asked after he trailed off. “Do you know what Tark liked to do to young women down there? Let me give you a hint: it involved pliers, and knives. My sister and I had the misfortune of being his guests in that house, and… I will not dwell on what happened. Where is Tarkarran now, Onur?”

  “He hasn’t been seen for months,” Onur said with dawning comprehension.

  “Just so. Nor will he ever be. Now, imagine that one of us had been killed in this ill advised attack you organized last week. Imagine that Draka went and found out that one of Lord Parvion’s men had arranged the whole thing, considering our history with his boy.”

  She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t need to; in the photonegative of shadowsight, Onur turned noticeably darker as he blanched, his imagination doing the rest of the work for her. “I swear,” he said. “Tarkarran… he came out to the estate frequently, but… No one would say so to his face, but he was not well liked. He was practically estranged. That house on Cloud Street was to keep him away from the rest of the family as much as possible. And Lord Parvion and the rest of the family had nothing to do with the attack. That was me. Perhaps I overstepped, but I saw an opportunity to rid his lordship of a severe debt, and I took it. The House is innocent, on my life!”

  “Who?” I asked. “Who did Lord Parvion owe so much to that you were willing to have six good, law-abiding people killed or taken?”

  Herald suppressed a laugh at my description of them as “law-abiding,” but I ignored her.

  “They were described as a threat to the city,” he said quickly, his voice strained as he prevaricated. “Criminals that the justices could not or would not touch. If they are innocent of wrongdoing, as you say…” He winced when he expressed doubt in my words. “I wouldn’t have agreed if I’d known. But I swear, neither Lord Parvion nor anyone else in his family were involved!”

  “Who?” I said again, and Instinct angrily sent out a tendril to wrap around him. I didn’t stop her.

  “Soandel!” he gasped. “Lord Exchequer Soandel!”

  It took a good while before we returned Onur to his room at the Parvions’ estate. Most of that time was occupied with Herald talking me down from immediately going to murder that traitorous little shit of a lord exchequer. You can’t just kill a councillor, she said. Sure I can, I told her. I’m very good at killing. You don’t know where he lives, she said, and no, you can’t just fly around and invade every well appointed house in the city. And besides, we need to know if anyone else is involved, and why he did this, and we need to know it before he disappears. And no, she told me, we can’t get the justices involved. Not when the only people who could give testimony in our favor were a woman whom we’d illegally imprisoned for nearly a week, and a man whose only role was to talk to another man, whom Mak had murdered after brutalizing his employees.

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  Finally she pointed out, being very careful not to let Onur hear, that it would be much better if I could just dominate the lord exchequer. Then we’d have a man on the Council, which would be hard to accomplish if he died in a random dragon attack.

  I begrudgingly accepted her reasoning.

  I left Onur with strict orders to never speak to anyone about me, Herald, the night’s events, or what we’d discussed. As far as he was concerned, it might all have been a bad dream, never to come up until I called on him again. And speaking of dreams, I made a mental note to visit him, and soon. I intended to make full use of my new double agent.

  Despite his assertions that no one in House Parvion cared one whit about us, I also did my damnedest to make it abundantly clear that if he ever heard anything about anyone trying to do something so stupid as to try and hurt the House Drakonum, their people, or their property in any way, the best thing he could do to keep everyone alive and suffering minimal trauma was to inform us or stop them himself before things went too far. He seemed to take that to heart, especially after I reminded him of the harbour incident.

  Scaring an aging man didn’t do much for my anger. I desperately wanted to hurt someone when we returned to the inn, to the point where I had to force myself not to look at the guards in the square. They had no connection to Soandel as far as I knew, but we had no idea if more of the Council were involved, and at that moment my anger extended to the entire government of this damned city. Except, perhaps, Sempralia. She always seemed terribly embarrassed when they didn’t treat me well. And the lord speaker. He’d seemed nice.

  The lord commander… I wasn’t sure about him. I kind of had him lumped in with the lord exchequer in my mind. It probably wasn’t at all fair, but I was pissed off, and it was hard not to tar him with the same brush.

  Could I trust any of them, though? Even Sempralia, who’d admitted to manipulating me? She’d had good reasons for it, but what was to say that she didn’t feel the same now? Could we send her a note, saying that we know who was behind the attacks?

  No, I decided. It was too risky. Even if she wasn’t involved, she’d want to know who. If we didn’t tell her, I had no doubt that she’d try to find out — if she wasn’t already, which was a possibility. And while we could accuse Soandel openly, that would make his change in behavior once I claimed him far too suspicious. Sempralia would just have to remain in the dark for the time being.

  When we returned to the inn, Mak was waiting. She had her armor and her weapons ready, though she wasn’t wearing them, and seemed almost disappointed when I told her that we weren’t killing anyone tonight.

  “You can go back to bed,” I told her. “You need your sleep.”

  “Very well,” Mak said, “but can you tell me what happened? I’ve felt you angrier before, but not often.”

  “In the morning,” Herald said, beginning to lead Mak toward the stairs. “Like she said, you need your sleep. Knowing will not help.”

  “As though telling me that won’t keep me awake?” Mak said incredulously, letting herself be slowly taken upstairs. “You realize I’ll lay awake and wonder now, don’t you?”

  “Mak!” I said firmly. “Go to bed and sleep!”

  The change in her demeanor was almost instant. The way she relaxed when I commanded her, giving me a nod and a satisfied smile as Herald brought her the rest of the way up the stairs, would have been scary if I didn’t know what was going on. As it was, getting her to relax and sleep properly was one of the few areas where I didn’t feel the least bit guilty about abusing my power over her. Left to herself, Mak would wear herself out, worrying herself into sleeplessness, a series of ulcers, and possibly an early grave. She’d be surly and miserable, and if that was allowed to go on long enough, I wouldn’t be surprised if she started “self-medicating” again with the only anti-anxiety drug available.

  She’d been very good for months, now, but she lived at an inn, and they had barrels and barrels of wine. And while Mak hadn’t been a drunk, as such, she’d definitely had an unhealthy relationship with the stuff.

  The morning proved that Herald had been entirely correct. When I told the assembled gang about the lord exchequer’s involvement, Mak worked herself into a fury to rival one of my own, to the point where the door upstairs opened and closed more than once as the staff decided that coming down to get whatever it was they needed was either unwelcome, unwise, or possibly unsafe.

  I let her rage for a while. I knew what she was capable of by that point, but I didn’t get worried until her hot anger was replaced by an icy calm. “There’s an open session at three hours past midday,” she said. “I can get him then.”

  The idea was so utterly reckless, so insane, that it took me a moment to understand what she meant. Something that hadn’t even occurred to me during my own rage the previous night. “Mak,” I said. “You can’t attack a councilor during a session. Especially not you!”

  “He betrayed you!” Mak’s eyes were wide, her tone incredulous, almost pleading. “He tried to keep your gold from you, and now we find that he tried to take your family from you, too! And assuming that he was behind Vakkal, he tried to take me to get to you! We can’t let him do this to you!”

  From the way everyone looked at Mak, and at me, no one had missed the way Mak spoke about the attacks. What was important to her was that Soandel had betrayed me. He’d sent thugs to kidnap her to get to me. He’d arranged an attack on the inn to get to me. Not that we could be sure about the motive for the last one, but it seemed a fair bet.

  Not a word about the risk to their lives, or the girl who’d been stabbed in the attack. All she thought about was me. And she was so earnest and upset that nobody had the heart to call her on it.

  “Still,” I said. I didn’t like the look Mak was getting. I didn’t like to see what I’d done to her. She should have been worried about her siblings first, her wards and staff second, and me, the near-invulnerable magical creature, a distant third. But hearing her now, seeing the pain on her face, I had a terrible feeling that if everyone except Mak had been killed in that attack, her biggest concern would have been how much that would have hurt me.

  I kept coming back to that. Worrying about how I’d affected my sisters. I’d had a painful talk with Herald about it only two nights before — the closest we’d been to a fight for… I didn’t even know. But with Herald nothing was clear. I couldn’t truly say how much was me directly affecting her mind and how much was just a young woman being influenced by her circumstances, and taking after those she loved and respected. Mak? I had broken Mak. I hadn’t known what I was doing when I wrapped my claws around her throat, but that was what I’d done. I’d shattered her and left her to put herself back together, and she loved me for it. Her whole world revolved around me, her happiness depended on me, and everything she did, she did considering how it would affect me and my perception of her.

  Sometimes I wished I could just let go, and bask in her adoration without guilt. Without letting Conscience have her say. Just tell Mak to do whatever she thought best, and revel as she brought me gold and useful people for me to bend to my will.

  I was strong. It would be so easy to just let it happen. It would be so easy to just let myself become a tyrant. What had that elf lady said in one of the Lord of the Rings movies? “All will love me, and despair?”

  It would be so damned easy.

  Some part of me became aware that the looks had shifted from Mak to me, and I shook myself out of my self-indulgent little daydream. “Hey,” Herald said gently. “Where did you go?”

  “Nowhere good.” I looked down at Mak. She looked absolutely miserable. She’d always been someone who acted on her problems. She’d just shifted much of the decision making to me, and now all I’d told her was to do nothing.

  So, I put them all to work.

  “All right,” I said, and I felt a sudden urge to rub my palms together. “Here’s what we do. Mak, I want you to send a message to Sempralia. Nothing about Soandel. Just tell her that I appreciate her support and value our working relationship, but that while I’m committed to protecting this city, I hope she understands that I don’t want to talk to any of them for a while. Send another to the lord commander telling him pretty much the same. Tam, Val, start looking into a place in the city that you six could bolt to. That Barlean woman’s house could do for now, the one with the tunnel to the drains, but we need somewhere better. A place you could own in someone else’s name — someone not really connected to us.

  “Ardek, I want you to recruit some guards. Fighters, people you can trust enough to turn your back on them. Not too young, please. Run them past Val to make sure they’re worth their pay. And we need to know everything we can about the lord exchequer, without arousing suspicion. Where he lives, what his House looks like, who his friends are, things like that. We need to find a way for me to get him alone. That’s the plan. Mak, we’re not letting him get away with anything, alright? I promise. No, I’m taking him.”

  Her worry melted away at that, and she gave me a satisfied nod.

  “Anyone have a problem with that?” I asked, looking around the room.

  “Better than killing him,” Tam said. “And it’s not like he doesn’t deserve it.”

  The others nodded or muttered their agreement.

  “Good. Less treasonously, we need to prepare for the people from Lady’s Rest. None of these people have been to the city before or anything larger than a village. They’ll need someone to show them around, help them find what they need. Someone who’ll be discreet, since they’re technically outlaws, not that I know if anyone cares. If you all will be too busy, then we’ll need to hire someone we can trust to take care of that.”

  “Barro,” Val said. “He is trustworthy, good in a fight, and knows much about the city. There is much he could help with. And he already respects you, Draka; he has told me as much.”

  “Honestly, we should just add him to the ‘staff’,” Tam said. “Hire him as head of security for the House, or as a guard for the inn, or anything, really. He comes around a couple of times a week to see if you want anything, anyway. I think he’d be willing.”

  “Barro?” I nodded slowly, liking the idea. “Great idea! Let him know I want to talk to him, next time he comes around, yeah?”

  I hadn’t spoken to the man much lately; It had been over two weeks since I’d last seen him. But Val and Tam were both entirely correct. He’d been very useful and trustworthy so far, having known about me for months before I came out in the open. And besides being generally competent, Barro was also enough under my sway to come looking for me, and for me to be able to peek into his dreams. Which I didn’t, because the first time had been pretty damn embarrassing, but the fact that I could automatically made him far more trustworthy than most.

  “So what will you be doing, great and wise leader?” Herald asked. I couldn’t tell if she was mocking me playfully or not, but I didn’t like that I even questioned it. Our friendship wasn’t that fragile, was it? It couldn’t be? It quite literally couldn’t, which was part of the problem, but… no. Was it me, then? Was I that fragile?

  And now they were looking at me again. I immediately tried to switch to looking thoughtful instead of whatever they were seeing. “I…” I said slowly, trying to sell the illusion — Mak didn’t buy it, because of course she didn’t. “I will be doing public relations.”

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