Evil for Evil Read Online Free

time for all this? Listening to me rambling on, I mean. It’s really self-indulgent of me, and you’re
     a busy man.”
    “It’s raining,” Valens said. “I’ve got plenty of time.”
    “Trust.” Orsea jumped up, still looking away. “Trust’s important, because if you can’t trust someone, there’s a risk he’ll
     do something to hurt you. So you take steps, if you’re a prudent man. You take steps to make sure he can’t hurt you, assuming
     he wants to. Isn’t that right?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, there you go. But it’s not as simple as that.” He seemed to be nerving himself to do something, and failing. “It’s
     not something you can predict, like the workings of a machine. I mean, it’s not simple cause and effect. Sometimes, someone
     you thought was your friend does something to breach your trust, but he’s still your friend really, in things that matter.
     And sometimes your enemy, the man you’ve never trusted, pops up out of nowhere and saves your life.” Now he turned, and looked
     Valens in the eye. “Stuff like that,” he said, “it sort of makes nonsense out of it all, doesn’t it?”
    Valens found that he’d taken a step back. Force of habit again. “I’ve always found,” he said quietly, “that if I can’t understand
     something, it’s because I don’t know all the facts.”
    “Ah well.” Orsea suddenly smiled. “That’s the difference between us, I guess. When I can’t understand something, it’s generally
     because I’m too stupid to get my head round it.”
    “You can believe that,” Valens replied, “if you want to.”
    Orsea nodded. “Did you know?” he said. “About Miel Ducas, and the letter?”
    “I knew there was a letter involved in it,” Valens said. “But not the details.”
    “Not all the facts, then.”
    Valens shrugged. “It was none of my business,” he said, “so I didn’t bother finding out.”
    (Valens thought: my father always told me that what’s wrong with lying is that it’s an admission of weakness. If you’re the
     strongest, you can afford to tell the truth.)
    “Good attitude,” Orsea said. “Wouldn’t you like to hear the inside story?”
    “Not particularly.”
    “Well.” Orsea relaxed a little, as if a fight he’d been expecting had been called off. “Like I said, you’re a busy man. No
     time for things that don’t concern you.”
    “Quite.”
    Orsea sighed. “And you’re right, of course,” he said. “There’s no point in me coming to meetings anymore, and you’re right,
     they do upset me. I felt I ought to keep coming along, just in case I could be useful. But since I can’t, there’s no point.”
    “No.”
    “Thanks.” Orsea took a few steps toward the door. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “I really am very grateful for everything
     you’ve done for me.”
    Valens let him go without saying anything else. When he’d gone, he sat down, took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Unearned
     gratitude, he thought, just what I always wanted. More cheating, of course. I wonder: do I like the hunt so much because it’s
     the one thing I do where it isn’t possible to cheat?
    He went back to the tower, changed out of his pretty clothes and put on something comfortable. Another thing his father had
     always told him:
If you cheat, sooner or later you’ll be punished for it.
That was no lie. Of course, to begin with they were just letters. It was only when he’d become dependent on them that the
     dishonesty began. It was perfectly simple. She was married — to Orsea, of all people, Duke of Eremia, his people’s traditional
     enemy. But because he knew they could never be together, there could never be anything except letters between them, he’d carried
     on writing and reading them, until he’d reached the point where he was little more than a foreign correspondent reporting
     back on his own life to a readership living far away, in a country he could never go to. And — of course —