Iyn Ro was not some victim of little account. She’d been a senior Fist of No Peak, one of the few women to ever reach such a high rank. She was known by everyone and looked up to by other women on the greener side of the clan. Hilo had taken notice of Iyn long ago when he’d been Horn, for being especially hardworking, and she’d been Juen’s leading candidate to become First Fist when Vuay retired. Few men could match her intensity, or would want to, which was why she kept coming back to Maik Tar. And she had not died easily—the destroyed apartment and Tar’s multiple wounds made that apparent.
It was the worst crime within No Peak that Hilo could remember. It would send shock waves through the clan. Iyn’s relatives would demand justice.
When he arrived at the house, Anden and Lott were waiting on the front steps. They were standing together but not talking, both of them grave. Seeing them side by side, Hilo remembered that the two men were of the same age. They’d been classmates in the Academy, friends even, but they had turned out so differently.
Lott said, “We put him in the study, Hilo-jen. He hasn’t tried to leave.”
Under the orange glow of the house’s front lights, Anden’s face was pale. He was wearing his physician’s jade and his aura was thin and weary; he’d been expending his energy. “His injuries won’t kill him,” he said in answer to Hilo’s silent question. “One of them punctured his spleen, but I shut down the bleeding and got some fluids into him. I wasn’t sure whether to do much more, since . . .” He trailed off unnecessarily. Hilo put a hand on his cousin’s shoulder in thanks, then went into the house.
Lott had posted a total of three Fists around Tar—two in the room with him and one outside the door. It was a wise precaution; even injured, Maik Tar was one of the clan’s best fighters and if he was out of his mind, there was no telling what he was capable of. When Hilo came into the room, however, he found his brother-in-law sitting quietly on the sofa, elbows on knees, his hands laced over the back of his lowered head, as if he were folding himself into the brace position for an airplane crash. His wounds had been bandaged and he was in fresh clothes brought down from Hilo’s own closet.
Hilo motioned for the guards to leave the room and close the door behind them. Tar raised his head and looked up with the most wretched and pitiful expression Hilo had ever seen. “She’s dead, isn’t she?” When Hilo nodded, Tar began to sob—long, hard, soulwracking sounds that Hilo had only heard from him once before, when he’d learned that Kehn had been killed.
He went to the man he thought of as a brother and sat down beside him, putting an arm around his shoulder and giving him some comfort as he wept. “I don’t know what happened,” Tar managed to choke out. “It started like any other fight, but it got so much worse. She was going to leave me, Hilo-jen. She said hurtful things . . .” Tar’s jade aura was like broken glass, all shattered edges. More words pushed themselves out in the spaces between sobs. “I didn’t mean to hurt her, I swear to the gods. I love her. I was going to fucking marry her. Sure, we can both get emotional sometimes. We fought too much in the past, but we were done with all that, we were finally going to make it work. But tonight after we got home, she said she was calling off the wedding and leaving me for good. She was sleeping with someone else, I know she was, she said as much. She was drunk, and I’d had a few drinks too . . . I don’t know how we ended up drawing talon knives, I don’t remember that part at all.”
Hilo let Tar talk and cry himself out. None of what he said really mattered. There was no excuse for what he’d done, no explanation that could change the fact that a Fist of the clan was dead by his hand. But if Tar needed to say these things, to get them out, then the least Hilo could do was listen. When at last Tar fell silent, Hilo pulled out a packet of cigarettes. He offered his Pillarman a smoke and lit it for him, then lit one for himself; he needed to calm his nerves. He was not sure he could face what had to come next.
He saw now that he was responsible for the night’s tragedy. He’d sent his Pillarman to do the clan’s darkest work, had given him all the jobs that were the most difficult, the most sensitive, the most brutal and violent. During the clan war, he’d remade the Pillarman’s role to take advantage of Maik Tar’s nature: completely loyal, ferocious, dependable, and discreet. A man doing that kind of work needed an anchor, a counterpoint, some other force to maintain him as a human being and not simply a pointed instrument. Kehn had been that anchor, but Kehn had been gone for years, and Hilo and Wen had been sunk into their own rift, not paying close enough attention. Clinging to someone as fiery as Iyn Ro had been a mistake; she was bound to move on from him and Tar could not handle more abandonment.