The Assassin and the Underworld Read Online Free PDF Page A

never give Sam gifts.”
    Arobynn shrugged, picking at his manicured nails. “Oh, Sam will be paying for the suit. I can’t have my second-best completely vulnerable, can I?”
    She hid her shock better this time. A suit like this had to cost a small fortune. Materials aside, just the hours it must have taken the tinkerer to create it … Arobynn had to have commissioned them immediately after he’d sent her to the Red Desert. Perhaps he truly felt bad about what happened. But to force Sam to buy it …
    The clock chimed eleven, and Arobynn let out a long breath. “I have a meeting.” He waved a ringed hand to the tinkerer. “Give the bill to my manservant when you’re done.” The master tinkerer nodded, still measuring Celaena.
    Arobynn approached her, each step as graceful as a movement of a dance. He planted a kiss on the top of her head. “I’m glad to have you back,” he murmured onto her hair. With that, he strolled from the room, whistling to himself.
    The tinkerer knelt to measure the length between her knee and boot-tip, for whatever purpose that had. Celaena cleared her throat, waiting until she was sure Arobynn was out of earshot. “If I were to give you a piece of Spidersilk, could you incorporate it into one of these uniforms? It’s small, so I’d just want it placed around the heart.” She used her hands to show the size of the material that she’d been given by the merchant in the desert city of Xandria.
    Spidersilk was a near-mythical material made by horse-sized stygian spiders—so rare that you had to brave the spiders yourself to get it. And they didn’t trade in gold. No, they coveted things like dreams and memories and souls. The merchant she’d met had traded twenty years of his youth for two hundred yards of it. And after a long, strange conversation with him, he’d given her a few square inches of Spidersilk.
As a reminder
, he’d said.
That everything has a price
.
    The master tinkerer’s bushy brows rose. “I—I suppose. To the interior or the exterior? I think the interior,” he went on, answering his own question. “If I sewed it to the exterior, the iridescence might ruin the stealth of the black. But it’d turn any blade, and it’s just barely the right size to shield the heart. Oh, what I’d give for ten yards of Spidersilk! You’d be invincible, my dear.”
    She smiled slowly. “As long as it guards the heart.”
    She left the tinkerer in the hall. Her suit would be ready the day after tomorrow.
    It didn’t surprise her when she ran into Sam on her way out. She’d spotted the dummy that bore his own suit waiting for him in the training hall. Alone with her in the hallway, he examined hersuit. She still had to change quickly out of it and bring it back downstairs to the tinkerer before he left so he could make his final adjustments in whatever shop he’d set up while he was staying in Rifthold.
    â€œFancy,” Sam said. She made to put her hands on her hips, but stopped. Until she mastered the suit, she had to watch how she moved—or else she might skewer someone. “Another gift?”
    â€œIs there a problem if it is?”
    She hadn’t seen Sam at all yesterday, but, then again, she’d also made herself pretty scarce. It wasn’t that she was avoiding him; she just didn’t particularly want to see him if it meant running into Lysandra, too. But it seemed strange that he wasn’t on any mission. Most of the other assassins were away on various jobs or so busy they were hardly at home. But Sam just seemed to be hanging around the Keep, or helping Lysandra and her madam.
    Sam crossed his arms. His white shirt was tight enough that she could see the muscles shifting beneath. “Not at all. I’m just a little surprised that you’re accepting his gifts. How can you forgive him after what he