The Rogue Guardian

Chapter 28: Returning

Nemia had been watching Xalva for several minutes and he'd yet to wake. She'd wondered a few times, with sudden feelings of deep cold, if maybe he was just dead, but each time he'd eventually move slightly in his sleep or let out a visible breath and she sank back into the warmth of her cloak, both relieved and a little guilty. Because maybe, she thought each time, Xalva dying would be for the best.

Though how many of her problems stemmed from Xalva she didn't really know. If you believed he had shaped who she was, maybe all of them. Or maybe she had only Tobias to blame. Or maybe just herself.

Finally, she leaned forward and rapped her knuckles on the bars of the cell. "Wake up," she whispered. The dungeon guards were never too far from his cell, though they tended to keep to their games and discrete drinking in the guard chamber close by. She kept quiet out of habit in any case.

"Back again?" he murmured, once he'd processed the shadows around him, the lump of darkness sitting on the other side of the bars. "Now would be a good time to get me out."

"Your leg is worse."

"Infected," he agreed, "And very painful."

"You should have traded for a salve last time I came. It would have been more useful that one of Morie's dreams." She still worried over that trade. Fretted over what Xalva could possibly want with it, whether or not she had betrayed Morie by agreeing, what had come over her to want to remember her own dreams so badly.

"I disagree." But he paled even more as he sat up, propping himself up on one arm and not moving his leg. "Come to trade some more?"

"What do you want with Morie's dreams?"

He smiled thinly. "Even that information has a price."

"What is it?"

"My freedom."

"No." She was looking at him steadily, but she still had no idea what came over her when she said, "You're going to die here."

That shocked him to silence for a moment, and then he laughed. "So serious! No, I am not going to die here. You're not a killer. All these years of training, yes, but still not."

Her heart tapped out an uneven rhythm against her chest. "I won't kill you. I'll just let these guards or that infection do the job for me."

"We both know there is no difference, whether you kill me yourself or leave me to die. Either way, you won't."

"You don't know what I've become."

Something disturbingly close to pity filled his expression. "Of course I do. I became it myself, long ago."

She wanted to take it back. She wanted to say she was nothing like him. But she'd given up on denying it. Tobias had wanted an Assassin. At long last, he was getting one.

Heir to the most feared assassin in the kingdom. She shuddered.

"Do you know why you're still alive?"

"Because I am too stubborn to leave this world without a fight?" He smiled without humor. "Because they keep me alive. When I die, it will be on their terms."

"There hasn't been a trial for the attempted assassination of the princess."

"Obviously not."

This was what she'd come for, and she knew he could tell because he had the look on his face that meant he'd found the upper hand.

"Why are they waiting?"

"Because, Nemia, they want you to execute me."

On some level she'd known that, but to hear him say it, to know he was right, pushed her to the verge of panic. "But-- but you'll die before that. If they haven't announced a trial date yet it won't be for a while."