The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home

by Joseph Fink

  Once to Lora we all made eye contact, let a few breaths pass to sync ourselves, and then moved as one. Lora and I ran deeper into the cellar. The loss of her body weight from the door caused it to abruptly fling open, sending a group of red-faced and surprised soldiers tumbling in, where they ran headlong into Rebekah going the other way. She pulled André after her by the collar of his shirt. Her scarred face was twisted into a truly chilling snarl and she hollered at the soldiers: “I caught the bastards. But we need to run! A bomb!”

  She didn’t wait for a reaction. She pushed her and André through the jammed-up stairs, calling as she went, “It’s all going to blow! Run for your lives!” Which the soldiers all did, reversing course and surging back up into the clear and chilly night air. Lady Nora, who had come to see who was trying to rob her, screamed at them to “Head back down. Where are the thieves?” By that point Rebekah and André had slipped out of the torchlight in the confusion of soldiers and were already gone into the night.

  Meanwhile Lora and I made for one of those highly efficient ventilation shafts and began to furiously climb. I again considered the length of fuse I had cut and cursed myself for cutting it so short. What will it feel like, I wondered, to burn alive? The vents were well-protected by heavy grates at the top. Lora audibly strained, pushing upward with one hand while keeping herself stable with the other. I had no idea how much time we had left but knew we needed to be clear of the vents when the explosives ignited. The grate finally budged upward and popped open with a clang. We climbed up into the grassy hillside, landing on our backs and catching our breaths. The ground jumped, and the vent we had just come out of, and every other vent hidden about the hills, let out a great whoomf of fire. It was a far more spectacular show than the fireworks that had been planned.

  We scrambled to our meeting spot, a cliffside a quarter mile from the castle. André and Rebekah were already there. Rebekah appeared half the size she had been a few minutes before. I marveled at her ability to create the impression of weight merely through the way she shaped her body.

  The four of us looked down at all the people far below, sprinting around the castle and shouting at each other, everyone trying to outdo each other in looking like they were helping, and the Lady herself on her knees outside her ruined wine cellar, bent double by what we had done to her. The anger and terror in her posture gave me as much satisfaction as I had felt in some time. And we were just getting started.

  “All of her fortune,” I said. “Blasted apart and buried under stone.”

  André coughed. “Well, not all of it.” He pulled out a gold bar from his cloak and held it up. “I know you said, but it seemed tragic not to.”

  I laughed, and then we were all laughing. The cold air turned our laughter into a cloud between us.

  7

  We had taken Lady Nora’s wealth, but I wasn’t finished. To that end, over the next year, I visited three old friends.

  The first was in Barcelona. I nodded hello to Señora Bover, who was painting the door to the building.

  “Did it need repainting?” I asked her.

  “I needed the repainting,” she said. “We all need something to do.”

  Upstairs, Edmond was happy to see me safe. He had heard about the affair at the Lady’s feast, and he was worried.

  “My spies inform me that Lady Nora has reacted as one might expect her to,” he said. “I’m told she collected thirty of Luftnarp’s most well-known criminals and had them skinned alive. In front of her. I’m assured by trustworthy associates that she did some of the skinning herself.”

  I went a bit pale. I liked to think I was a hardened criminal, but I was also not yet twenty, and still approached the world with generally good intentions. For the first time I wondered if I was entering a world whose brutality exceeded my own limits. I smelled bile in the back of my sinuses.

  Edmond continued. “They all cried that they had nothing to do with the explosion at the feast, and she told them that she knew and she didn’t care. She looked them in their eyes as they slowly died.”

  “Well,” I managed through a dry throat, though it came out as an embarrassing squawk. “She is not yet done paying for what she does to people.”

  “Please listen to me,” he said. “She is a charming woman and deserves all that’s coming, I’m sure. But she is not to be fooled with. Be careful. My god,” I heard the repressed pain in his voice, memory and love manifesting as a wheeze in the lungs, “if I lost you, too.”

  I knew little of Edmond’s background. He often avoided talking about it. He was quite young when he began to work with my father, and while the subject of his family never came up, I knew that he had one and then had lost them. Through what painful circumstances he ended up an orphan on the street, he was never forthcoming, because he had no interest in being defined by pity. From the start, he wanted my father to see him as an equal, and my father had obliged. Still, the absence of a family, it seemed to me, would likely explain somewhat his fierce loyalty in keeping me safe, and in raising me to the adulthood that my father never lived to see. I resented it a little, as any daughter resents any father, but I was more glad than I was resentful.

  I assured him I would be safe, although there was no way for me to be sure of that, and then left him for the docks.

  I caught a boat from Spain around Britain to Edinburgh, an interminable matter of weeks watching gray water meet gray skies. Once in Scotland, I climbed Arthur’s Seat in the company of a man wearing fine clothes but with a constitution manifestly ill-suited for the outdoors. Probably a wealthy scholar at the university, more accustomed to books than fresh breezes.

  It was lovely seeing Rebekah again, in whatever guise she chose. There was no particular need for her to take on a costume in so remote a place. Our complete anonymity here was the reason we had, some months ago, arranged to meet there on that specific day. But I knew that she would be able to chat more easily this way. Rebekah was never comfortable unless she wasn’t herself.

  We sat near to the summit, and looked out over the city. It was a rainy, miserable day, as it often is in Edinburgh, but pillars of light pierced through the clouds onto the waters of the Firth of Forth. From our vantage, even with the dull slapping rain, we could hear the city, the steady clop of the horses, the bangs and shouts of men at work, the footsteps of students and of servants.

  “And what news from the Lady?” I asked.

  Rebekah had abandoned her soldier guise, the man who was now one of the prime suspects in the bombing of the wine cellar, and had re-entered Lady Nora’s employ as a soft-spoken maid so loyal and so dull that hardly anyone noticed she was there.

  “She’s moved into the guest rooms of King Torrid IV. Some excuses were made about repairs needed at her castle, but the truth is that being around other royalty has allowed her to hide the loss of her fortune. Since everyone assumes she still commands immense wealth, it is easy for her to casually borrow whatever it is she needs, on vague promises to someday give it back.”

  I nodded. “A game that would someday catch up with her, but I’m not that patient.”

  Rebekah smiled, and through the wan face of the scholarly gentleman I saw the young girl I had met when I too was a young girl. “No one has ever accused you of patience,” she said.

  I smiled back. The truth was that all of my patience was occupied by my lifelong vengeance against the Order of the Labyrinth, and I had little left for anything else. If I hadn’t developed a real instinct for the criminal life back on my childhood estate, picking those locks over and over and over, I would probably not be any good at all at this line of living, distracted as I always was.

  “The King marries soon, yes?” I said.

  “Yes. A princess from Svitz.” Svitz, a thin crescent of a country, just west of the Germanic regions. “The hope is to crush the Green and White Rebellion by combining the strength of the two royal families.”

  “They are still worried about that rebellion?” I heard a violin from the
city somewhere, a beautiful tune, played hesitantly, and occasionally restarting completely. Someone practicing what would someday be perfect.

  “Terrified,” said Rebekah. “King Torrid IV believes that there are even those in the court who are loyal to the Green and White. I would say that only Lord Fullbright is entirely above his suspicion, and that is only because without his closest advisor, the King is not much of a king.”

  “Lord Fullbright, the King’s conscience.”

  “Kindest man in all empires.”

  “Mmm,” I said. “Anything else?”

  Rebekah lay back in the wet grass, and the rain played softly against the false parts of her face. “As you asked, I looked for elements of intimacy between the King and Lady Nora. The points where their friendship was strongest.”

  “And what did you find?”

  “The King does not share much in the way of friendships, but he and the Lady spent their childhoods together, and so there is a history there. Specifically, there is a nickname.”

  “A nickname.”

  “A friendly one that she has for him. Strawhead. It seems his hair when he was a child . . .”

  “Who knows about this name?” I asked.

  “As far as I can tell, no one but the Lady and the King. She only uses it when no one else is around. Or at least when she thinks no one else is around.”

  “Rebekah, I couldn’t do this without you.”

  “No. You absolutely couldn’t.”

  I wanted to say something else. To express my gratitude for her friendship, and for her skills. But it was difficult to say these things out loud, and anyway she already knew. So I put my hand in her hand and we lay listening to the rain for a while longer. Then we parted, not to see each other again until the day of the job.

  One final visit to one final friend, before the real work began. Dubrovnik, on the coast of the Adriatic, was all red roofs and blue water. It was a fortress of a town, huddled up against the mountains. It would seem to be in a fairly defensible position, but you wouldn’t know it from how often it got conquered.

  Lora and I walked along the town’s wall, the top of which formed a fairly broad boulevard that allowed one to quickly circumnavigate the town. Below us, many of the buildings displayed, in defiance of the possibility of execution for treason, the banner of the Green and White. King Torrid IV would have been furious, and all of the gentle words of Lord Fullbright wouldn’t have quelled his rage. In fact, all of the royal houses were terribly afraid of the precedent the rebellion set. I smiled thinking about their fear as I looked at the flags over the city. Let the powerful tremble.

  “I don’t think I could ever live anywhere too far from the sea,” I said. “Once you grow up with it, it’s hard to let go.”

  “I could live anywhere,” Lora said. “I don’t suffer under the delusion that I have to like where I live.”

  “A fair, if cruel, point,” I conceded.

  “Am I not fair?” she said. “Am I not cruel?”

  I never learned Lora’s birth name, I only knew her by the name she had given herself: Lora the Giant.

  She reveled in her size, which God had bestowed upon her, and her knack for a fight, which she had bestowed upon herself. She was born a Spanish noblewoman in Madrid, big from birth. Her family had no idea what to do with a young noble girl built like so, and she showed neither interest nor aptitude in courtly manners or politics. A compromise was reached and she was quietly carted off to live in the family’s country estate. There, more or less raised by the staff, she came to love the work of her hands. She would go out with the hunters, and tend to the garden, and haul feed with the farmers. None of them wanted to be caught leading a girl of noble birth into a menial position, but also none of them could refuse her, and she soon had befriended them all. When her family would come to check on her, she would unconvincingly pretend at the life of a girl of means, and they would unconvincingly pretend to believe her, and then they would leave again and she could go back to kicking every stable hand’s ass in their weekly fights at which a good deal of wages were wagered on her reliable ability to win.

  This period of happiness reached the conclusion life brings to all happiness eventually. There was a shift in the politics of the court, and her family came under attack. Quite literally, men with weapons arrived at their door in Madrid. Hearing the news, Lora demanded to be let back to the city to defend her family. Certainly she would have been a formidable opponent, and might have given them time to flee. But her family wouldn’t hear of it. There was no part of any Spanish tradition that involved a teenager from a noble family getting in a brawl with soldiers. So her family surrendered, and were killed, each and all of them. The staff at the estate smuggled Lora off with one of the families working in the stables, so when the soldiers came she was already long gone.

  Soon after, she left behind the family that had saved her, wishing them well, and sought out The Duke’s Own. She knew that the Duke and his thieves and murderers wouldn’t give a second thought to tradition and to what she was supposed to be. They would see her strength, and they would be willing to use it. And they were. Lora made an oath to her God, being still a devoted Catholic, that she would never let tradition get in the way of using her size and abilities ever again.

  “You are fairly cruel,” I agreed, and Lora laughed.

  A small hut lay nestled in the rocks, just where the wall of Dubrovnik reached out from the harbor to the open sea. We entered blinking into its foul-smelling interior.

  “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon,” said the chemist, who went by “the Seagull,” because the only place in town he could do his work was right against the sea, where the foul vapors would drift out over the water. He was also only allowed, on pain of his neighbors showing up with torches, to work when the prevailing winds blew away from town.

  “The substance worked well,” I said.

  “Too well,” said Lora. “I lost half an eyebrow.”

  The Seagull cackled into the pot of a foul steaming sludge he was stirring. “I promise results. I never promise safety.” He put the spoon down, and I couldn’t help but notice that the spoon was starting to melt. I took a step back from the pot. “Don’t trust anyone in this world who promises you safety,” he said.

  “I’ve come with another job.”

  “And here I thought this might be a social call.” He sat in the one chair the hut could fit, and spread his hands. “What can I do for you?”

  “A chemically reactive cloth,” I said.

  “All cloth is chemically reactive in some way,” the Seagull said. “You’ll need to be more specific.”

  And so I was specific. As Lora kept her head half out the door to try to catch a breath of fresh air, I laid out exactly what I needed.

  “Is it possible?” I said.

  “Possible?” he said. “Yes. But expensive. Very expensive.”

  I pulled out the bar of gold that André had liberated from Lady Nora’s late vault. It seemed only fitting to use her ill-gotten gains to finance her own destruction. The Seagull’s eyebrows fluttered up when he saw the gold. “Will this do?” I asked.

  He wormed up from the chair, took the gold from me, cradling it like an infant and cooing slightly. Then he looked back at the two of us. “Give me two months.”

  We were happy to give him that and his fume-filled hut back. As we gratefully reentered the relaxed sunlight of a Dubrovnik afternoon, he called after us: “One more favor.”

  “What’s that?” I said, trying to keep my nerves out of my voice.

  “Never tell me what you’ll use it for.”

  8

  Five months later, the day of the King’s wedding finally arrived.

  The union between Luftnarp and Svitz was held on neutral ground, in the Sovereign Territory of Franchia. This was a strategic decision. No government claimed the land, so a ceremony in Franchia advantaged neither Luftnarp nor Svitz, while also not involving any other meddling royals. But it was a
n unsettling decision. Franchia was the only territory in the entire continent that had no population of any kind, and in fact, never had. Despite the lack of people, the land was filled with white stone arches, covering the plains and climbing the sides of the steepest mountains. From within the arches, sounds could be heard that the more rational promised was only the wind, but others knew was some sentience to the whole region, a jealous and xenophobic entity that wished no entrance into its realm. No one had ever successfully claimed Franchia for their own. Entire armies had been lost among the arches, the few survivors who found their way out swearing that the maze of arches went much farther than the small borders of the region would allow.

  Given all this, the guests were nervous. No one liked to spend the night in Franchia, and indeed the wedding feast had been set up just over the border, in the significantly less haunted region of Denmark.

  The ceremony had been set in the closest counterpart Franchia had to a grand square, a large oval break in the arches, the ground cobbled with huge slabs of stone that had been there since long before humans had first arrived in Europe. I sat in between two of the arches up a hillside, so that I could get a sense of the whole scene. From behind me, I could hear that soft warbling of the wind, and I felt the distinct sensation of being hunted. I hoped we wouldn’t have to be in Franchia for long.

  All of the planning that could be done was done, and now it was up to my crew to execute it. Lora was atop the biggest arch, directly above the wedding platform, having disposed of the guards who had been sent precisely to make sure no one could lurk up there. André mixed with the crowds of well-dressed guests, sprinkling smiles and winks as he went, sending hearts and hands fluttering. And Rebekah, in her disguise of the meek maid, stood behind her master, Lady Nora, upon the wedding platform. Lady Nora was radiant in a dress that her most loyal maid had chosen for her, made by a young and upcoming tailor who was willing to work cheap in order to get his work seen. Rebekah had really outdone herself, having to play two different people in the same story, sometimes frantically switching from one disguise to the other while walking between rooms, or shouting from the hall as the tailor while still dressed as the maid. But as always, Rebekah had found a way to make it all convincing, and Lady Nora wore the dress made from a pale blue cloth that the Seagull had treated for us. Now Rebekah stood next to her master, and concealed in her palm a small vial of clear liquid, the other half of the Seagull’s formula.