Ghost Ascension – Episode 2

You climb out of the bed and begin looking for some clothing and weapons.

Right away you find your clothes, discarded as if in haste by the bed. It’s the washerwoman’s outfit you use when you need to infiltrate someplace unnoticed. You usually conceal eight slender throwing knives beneath the sleeves and belt, and two daggers in hidden sheaths in the boots.

Yet two of the knives are missing, and one of the daggers. As if you lost them during a fight.

A fight that you can’t remember. Your hands tremble a bit with fear and frustration, until you force them to stop.

Just as you pull the shift over your head, the bedroom door opens, and your hand flies to one of the throwing knives.

Lucan Maraeus enters the room, unshaven and his hair disheveled, and his clothes rumpled as if he just threw them on. He’s in his middle thirties, with the lean build and excellent balance of a master swordsman. Most people think of him as Lord Corbould Maraeus’s idle lecher of a youngest son, but you know better. Ten years ago the magi murdered his wife, and ever since then he has hunted outlaw magi and sorcerous predators. He’s rather good at it, and he’s saved your life a few times now, and you his.

He smiles and jokes a lot, but it never, ever seems to touch his eyes.

But now, though, he looks…happy.

With a start, you realize you must be in the Black Cuirass Inn, where you arranged for Lucan to take rooms after his father threw him out. Which means that you just woke up in Lucan’s bed.

“Good morning,” he says, and walks over and kisses you before you can untangle your mind. “You detest wine, I know, so I had the landlord make some of that vile tea you like.” He has a clay pot in one hand. “No honey, no milk, no sugar, and bitter as a widow’s tears. Just the way you prefer it.”

He looks at the knife in your hand for a moment, and then frowns.

“What’s wrong?”

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