"No, that is not the point," Gareth replied. "But in my private conversation with Artemis Entreri, he was correct in that neither blood nor a disconnected deed is the true measure of leadership. My actions now, and now alone, can justify this title I hold dear… and it is an empty title unless it is one that truly represents the hopes, dreams, and betterment of the people of the kingdom—of all the people of the kingdom."

"Artemis Entreri told you that?" Christine asked, not attempting to mask the doubt in her voice.

"I'm uncertain that he understood what he was asking," said Gareth. "But in essence, yes, that is exactly what he told—what he taught—to me. I rule Damara, and wish to bring Vaasa under my fold in the single Kingdom of Bloodstone. But that decision must be one that serves the betterment of the folk of Vaasa, else I am no more worthy to claim this title than—"

"Than Entreri, Jarlaxle, or Zhengyi?"

"Yes," said Gareth, and he nodded as he looked at her, his eyes set with determination, his lips showing that optimistic and hopeful grin that so endeared him to almost everyone who had ever looked upon him. Against that sincere expression, Lady Christine could not maintain her resentment.

"Then let the image of Artemis Entreri linger in your thoughts, my love, for the good of Damara and Vaasa," she said. "And let the man be far gone from here, his dark elf friend beside him."

"For the good of Damara and Vaasa," said Gareth. Christine went to her husband, the man she loved.

She barely felt the dagger tip connect with his skin before she retracted her arm and stabbed him again, and again. In a wild, crying frenzy, Calihye struck at the helpless man. She felt the warmth of blood under her thigh and pumped her arm even more furiously, her eyes closed, tears streaming down her cheeks and crying for Parissus all the while.

Her anger, her frustration, her sadness, her remorse, her explosion of desperation all played out, leaving her in a great physical weariness, and she looked down at the man who had been her lover.

He lay on his back, arms out wide and making no move to defend against her. He stared at her, his jaw clenched, his expression a mask of disappointment.

He didn't have a scratch on him. The blood on her thigh was her own, caused by a cut she had inflicted on one retraction of the blade.

"So predictable, these weak human creatures," Kimmuriel Oblodra remarked as he and Jarlaxle watched the spectacle playing out on Entreri's bed from an extra-dimensional pocket from which had opened a gate to the side of the room.

"She was so convincing," Jarlaxle said. "I never would have believed…"

"Then you have been around these fools too long," Kimmuriel said. "Are your judgments so impaired that I should not welcome you back to Bregan D'aerthe when you at last abandon this folly and return to Menzoberranzan?"

Jarlaxle glanced at the psionicist, a frozen look, a murderer's look, that reminded Kimmuriel in no uncertain terms who he was addressing.

But Jarlaxle didn't hold to the threatening stare, as he was drawn back to the spectacle on the bed. Calihye's expression had turned more to terror by that point, and she struck again, at Entreri's eye, as if she wanted so desperately to stop him from looking at her with his accusing gaze.

Entreri did flinch, but so remotely that Jarlaxle marveled at the sheer discipline of the man. He had ordered Kimmuriel to enact the psionic kinetic barrier, of course, for the psionicist had learned of Calihye's desperate plan. But Entreri could not have known that he was so protected, and yet he had not in any way tried to fend off the attacks.

Had Calihye coaxed him to a point of such vulnerability? Had her actions and soothing words so put Artemis Entreri off his guard?

Or did he simply not care?

"Fascinating," Jarlaxle whispered.

"It reminds you of your own birth, no doubt," said Kimmuriel, catching him off balance. He looked at his companion.

"No doubt," Jarlaxle replied, and since his companion had mentioned it, he could indeed picture a terrified and frustrated Matron Baenre plunging her spider-shaped dagger at his newborn breast. He imagined that her look must have been somewhat similar to Calihye's at that very moment, such a delicious mixture of a dozen conflicting emotions.

"You never did get the opportunity to thank my House's matron mother," Kimmuriel remarked.

"Oh, but I did," Jarlaxle assured him.

"When Baenre's Secondboy scooped you from the altar and all of the kinetic energy bound within your infant frame exploded into him and tore his chest apart," Kimmuriel agreed, recalling the stories of that distant time, tales that had been told and retold in House Oblodra over the centuries. "My grandmatron did have a way of removing her sworn enemies."

"Few could so fluster Matron Baenre as the matron mothers of House Oblodra," said Jarlaxle. "I am certain that Baenre keenly considered such insults as the power of Lolth flowed through her and offered her the power to tumble House Oblodra into the Clawrift."

Kimmuriel, ever so in control, did wince at that, and Jarlaxle smiled. For only a few short years before, Jarlaxle's mother had obliterated Kimmuriel's House in one devastating burst of power.

The two exchanged looks of mutual surrender, then turned their attention back to the room, where the stubborn and terrified Calihye lifted the dagger before her in both hands, clutched it tightly, and drove it at Entreri's heart yet again. He reached up and stopped her, and as she struggled to push through his powerful grasp, his other hand came up and slapped her hard. As he did that, he turned his hips and sent her tumbling off the far side of the bed.

"He knows what happened," Kimmuriel remarked. He led Jarlaxle's gaze behind them, to the brutish orc warrior patiently awaiting its orders.

"End the dweomer," Jarlaxle instructed, and he grabbed the orc's tether and pulled the creature behind him into the room. As Entreri jumped up from the bed to face them, Jarlaxle tugged the orc close and whispered, "Kill him," into its ear, then shoved it forward at Entreri.

The sight of a naked human, his right side red with blood from chest to hip, was all the encouragement the brutish beast needed. It charged Entreri and leaped for him.

With hardly an effort, only simple instinct, Entreri's hand came out hard to grasp the orc by the throat, and all of the energy that had been bound up kinetically within his frame, every one of Calihye's vicious strokes and stabs, flowed through that connection.

The orc's chest exploded with garish wounds; its left eye drove into its brain, blood spurting from the wound.

It spasmed and jerked, and tried to cry out in stunned horror.

But all it could do was gurgle on its own blood, and Entreri unceremoniously dropped the dead thing down to the ground.

He stood there on the edge of disaster, covered in blood, breathing deeply as if fighting for control.

Jarlaxle knew that the furious man wanted nothing more than to spring forward and strike at him, then. He also held faith that Artemis Entreri was too disciplined to do such a stupid thing.

Behind Entreri, Calihye rose and gasped at the sight of the dead orc and the two dark elves. Her arms went limp at her sides and the dagger fell to the floor.

"I am sorry," Jarlaxle said to Entreri.

The assassin didn't blink.

"It is not the way I wanted it to be," Jarlaxle said.

Entreri's look told him clearly that the man considered it none of Jarlaxle's business.

"I could not let her kill you, even if you seemed resigned to that fate," Jarlaxle explained.

Kimmuriel's fingers flashed disapproval in the air. You spend too much time justifying yourself to your inferiors, the psionicist scolded.