They reached the sunken gate to the Maw an hour after midnight. There was no one guarding it.
Kylar tried the latch. It wasn’t locked. He looked at Vi. Obviously, he liked that as much as she did. Still, how could the Godking know they were coming? He moved to open the door when Vi touched his arm. She pointed to the rusty hinges, motioning for him to wait.
She touched each of the hinges in turn, murmuring, then nodded to him.
He tried the rusty door. It opened silently.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Vi said. “So it doesn’t just work on little girls.”
Kylar eased the door shut and stared at her. “Why don’t you try it on yourself?” he asked.
“I already did,” she said. “Anyone further than five feet away can’t hear me.”
“That’s not what I meant. Anyway, how can you be sure it works?”
“You didn’t hear what I just called you.”
“Which was?”
“True, but not clever enough to repeat.”
He hesitated. “Vi, before we go in, I need to ask you something.”
“Shoot.”
“I got into wet work because of a child named Rat. He was Garoth Ursuul’s son, and it was to please Garoth that Rat cut up Elene’s face and raped Jarl and tried to rape me.”
“I didn’t know,” Vi said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not important,” Kylar said gruffly. “I got away.”
“I didn’t,” Vi said quietly. She sank into herself, into those years of nightmare. “For me it was my mother’s lovers. She knew what they did, but she never stopped them. She always hated me for what I cost her. As if I was the one who fucked some stranger and got pregnant and made her run away. I don’t know if she wanted me at first or if she was just too much of a coward to take ergot or tansy tea.”
Vi knew it was a reasonable fear. A sufficient dose to induce an abortion was a hairsbreadth from a lethal dose. Every year, Hu claimed, thousands of girls who “took sick and died” had actually taken too much poison. Others took too little and bore maimed children.
“After she ran away, my mother had nothing to survive on but her looks. She was too proud to be a whore outright, so she attached herself to one bastard after another. She could never do what had to be done.”
“And that’s how you’re different from her?”
“Yes,” she said softly. Then she came to herself. Why had she been talking so much? She’d never told anyone about that shit. She’d never had anyone who would have cared. “Sorry, you didn’t need to hear that. You had a question?”
Kylar didn’t answer. He was looking at her in a way no one had ever looked at her before. It was the look a mother gave her child when she fell and bloodied her knees. It was compassion, and it went right through her, past her sarcasm and her bravado. It knifed through the ice and dead flesh that were all she thought she had inside and found something small and alive and bathed it in warm light. He was seeing all the putrefying yuck that she’d walled up, and he wasn’t recoiling from her the way he should have.
“Hu Gibbet made you kill her, didn’t he?”
She looked down, unable to face the open warmth any more. She didn’t trust her voice.
“Second kill? One of the boyfriends first?”
She nodded.
This was ridiculous. They were having this conversation outside the Maw? “What was your question?” she asked.
“When I quit wet work, I couldn’t let it go, and it’s only now that I know why. When Jarl showed up at my door, part of me was relieved. I had what I’d wanted for my whole life, but I still wasn’t happy. Have you ever had someone look at you and understand you and totally accept you? And for some reason, you just couldn’t accept that acceptance?”
Vi swallowed. Her heart filled with longing.
“That’s what Elene was for me. I mean, is for me. I promised her that I’d never kill again, but I can’t be happy if I don’t finish this. When I left, I left her a pair of wedding rings so that she’d know I still love her and want to be with her forever, but I’m sure she’s furious with me.”
The weight in Vi’s pocket burned. She told her tongue to move, to tell him, but it was lead in her mouth.
“If it were any hit but this, she’d never forgive me. If I do this, the Khalidorans will lose, Logan will be king, the Warrens will be different forever, and Jarl won’t have died in vain. If there is a One God, like Elene always says there is, he made me for this kill.”
Jarl? How can he talk so calmly about Jarl to me? “So what was your question?” She sounded a bit militant, even to her own ears—Jarl! Gods! Her emotions were so out of control she couldn’t even identify them—but Kylar answered gently.
“I needed to know if you were in this with me. All the way to the Godking. All the way to death, if it takes that. But I think you’ve already answered me.”
“I’m with you,” Vi said. Her whole heart swore it.
“I know. I trust you.” Looking in his eyes, Vi knew he was telling the truth. But the words made no sense. Trust? After what she’d done?
He turned back to the door.
“Kylar,” she said. Her heart was pounding. She’d tell him about Jarl first, then the note and the earrings, everything. She’d throw herself at his feet and dare him to accept all of it. “I’m sorry. About Jarl. I never meant—”
“I know,” he said. “I don’t see his murder in you.”
“Huh?”
“Vi …” he said softly. As he put a hand on her shoulder, tingles shot through her whole body. She looked at his lips and he was stepping close and her head was tilting of its own accord, her lips parting slightly, and he was so close she could feel his presence like a caress on her exposed skin, and her eyes closed, and his lips touched her—forehead.
Vi blinked.
Kylar dropped his hand as if her shoulder was on fire. Something black flitted across the surface of his eyes.
“What the fuck was that?” Vi demanded.
“Sorry. I almost—you mean my eyes? I was checking if you were using a glamour. I mean, I’m sorry. I was just— Uh, let’s get this done, huh?”
Now she was totally confused. He’d thought she’d used her glamour? Did that mean he’d wanted to—he almost what?—no, surely not.
What were you thinking, Vi? “Sorry I killed your best friend, Kylar, wanna fuck?”
Kylar opened the door and Vi saw the gaping mouth for which the Maw was named for the first time. The Maw looked like a dragon opening its mouth to swallow her. Red glass eyes with torches behind them glowed with evil intent. Everything else was carved from black fireglass: the black tongue they walked on, the black fangs poised overhead. Once they stepped into the mouth, there was no light.
“This is wrong,” Kylar said. He stopped. “This is totally different.”
When Kylar had saved Elene and Uly, the ramp into the Maw had led down a short tunnel and then forked. The nobles’ cells had been to the right, and the rest to the left. The ceilings had been about seven feet high everywhere, giving a claustrophobic feeling to the Maw.