Seeds of Betrayal Read Online Free PDF

Brienne was just a girl when she died. When he killed her.
    “It pays handsomely, my lady,” he explained, as if she were simple.
    “Of course it does,” she said. “I’m not asking why you do it now. I want to know how you started down this path. Certainly you didn’t go to your Determining hoping that the stone would show you as a hired blade.”
    He felt his mouth twitch. Perhaps she wasn’t such a child after all.
    “It started when he killed me,” came a voice from among the other wraiths.
    Another man came forward. A boy actually; the young court lad who had been his rival for Venya’s love. His name was Eben. Cadel killed him with a blow to the head. The assassin didn’t need to see the matted blood behind the wraith’s ear to remind him of that. He could still feel his fingers gripping the rock. He could even hear the sound the stone made against the boy’s skull.
    “Is it true?” Brienne asked, as Eben halted beside her. “Was he the first?”
    “Yes, he was.”
    “Did you kill him for gold as well?”
    Cadel shook his head, a thin smile springing to his lips. “No, my lady. I killed him for love. Or at least what I thought at the time was love.”
    “We were suitors for the same girl,” Eben said icily. “He surprised me on the farming lane west of Castle Nistaad, a lonely, desolate stretch of road. Few venture there, and I thought I was alone. I never even saw him.”
    Brienne narrowed her glowing eyes. “And you enjoyed it? You decided to make it your life’s work?”
    It was all I could do
, he wanted to say.
The only skill I had. I had fled my father’s court rather than face judgment for my crime. I needed gold to make my way in the world. What else was there other than filling
? But he had never told any of this to another soul, and he wasn’t about to now, not even to this wraith standing before him, so deserving of answers.
    “Why does this matter?” Cadel said instead, looking away. “What possible reason-?”
    “I want to understand!” the wraith said, her voice rising like a gale. “I’m dead, and I want to know why.”
    “You’re dead because someone hired me to kill you. Isn’t that enough?”
    “No, it’s not! Who was it? Whose gold bought my blood?”
    Cadel faltered. “Why would you want to know that? ”
    “I already told you. I want to understand why you did this to me.”
    “But surely-”
    “Answer me!” the wraith said, the words seeming to echo off the walls and ceiling of the shrine, though among the living only Cadel could hear her.
    “No,” he said. His hands were trembling abruptly, and he thrust them into his pockets. “I won’t tell you. Someone gave me gold and I killed you. That’s all you need to know.”
    “Did they want a war? Is that why they wanted you to do it? So that Tavis’s father and my father would go to war?”
    “I don’t really know. Perhaps.”
    “Were they Qirsi?”
    Cadel felt his face color. She was a wraith, a servant of Bian. Yes, she was crying, and her face was lovely, almost flawless. But this was no girl standing before him. He had to force himself to remember that.
    “I won’t tell you any more.”
    The light in her eyes danced like fire demons and she grinned, as did the other luminous figures standing with her. Some of them even laughed.
    “You already have,” she said. “And I intend to tell my father, and Tavis, and every other living person who can hear me.”
    He shook his head. “It won’t matter.”
    She stared at him a moment. “The way you say it, one might think that this saddens you, that you’d like me to stop them.”
    “I take their gold. That’s all. It doesn’t mean that I share their cause.”
    “But you protect them. Why?”
    “You wouldn’t understand.”
    “You don’t know that,” the wraith said gently. “Explain it to me.”
    “No,” he said again, his voice resounding through the shrine much as hers had a few moments before. He shook his head. “No,” he