The Wrath of a Shipless Pirate (The Godlanders War)

by Aaron Pogue

  Corin’s lip curled. “You’ve learned their language well.”

  “I’ve had some time to practice.”

  “Stop trying to convince me, and listen for a moment. I hope you’ve made higher friends than Giuliano. Because he won’t be around for long.”

  She touched a finger to her chin, considering. “Such confidence. You always were a brash one, but this…this speaks of something deeper.”

  It was nothing but his anger, pain, betrayal, but if she would see it for some hidden card, he’d play the bluff. “I’ve come to bring him justice. I won’t fail.”

  She blinked. “You said you had a higher patron. I…I took that to mean this mad memory of Oberon.”

  That was all he’d meant, but Iryana seemed to suspect he meant someone else. He put on his cleverest expression and gave her a theatric shrug. “I have lots of friends.”

  To his surprise, she answered with a look of perfect pity. “It is the princess, isn’t it? You’ve staked your hopes on the princess.”

  Corin couldn’t guess where she was going, but he played it out. “Sera and I have spoken.”

  Iryana shook her head. “Oh, you poor thing. You must have thought you held some precious opportunity when you met with her, but I’ve gauged Sera myself. She doesn’t have the spine to play the family game.”

  “She has found a new mentor,” Corin said.

  Iryana shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. She’s finished. She’s no longer in the picture.”

  “A minor setback—”

  Iryana leaned forward again, frustration hissing in her voice. “Stop playing games and listen to me! You have nothing! The princess will be dead by dawn.”

  A fist of ice closed hard around Corin’s spine. He shuddered and shook his head in mute denial. “He…he wouldn’t dare. Even Blake wouldn’t dare.”

  “I never thought you were naïve, Corin.”

  Corin shook his head. “I don’t mistake him for a decent man, but he’s not stupid. He’s ambitious. He can’t hope to get away with something like that—”

  “He has a letter Sera wrote to the wretched farmboy. In her hand and with her seal. She promised she would run away with him, and the family would never know where she had gone.”

  “Gods’ blood,” Corin breathed. “That’s why he killed Auric. That’s why he abducted her.”

  Iryana nodded. “He plans to share the letter with the king tonight, and the princess will be dead by dawn. Everyone will think she ran away to live with her Raentzman commoner.”

  “And no one will much bother looking for her.”

  Iryana nodded, grinning. “And Ethan Blake will have earned the favor of the king.”

  Corin leaned back in his chair, considering the desert woman for a while. She had a cruel spirit in her, a violence barely restrained. He’d found it alluring once, but now it just seemed wild. Unpredictable. As frightening as dwarven powder.

  “Why would you tell me all this? If you have cast your lot with Blake, why would you tell me of his secret plans?”

  She smirked. “It will do you little good to know he has a letter. There are many pieces to his plan, and I have revealed only enough to show you that you can’t defeat him. Your princess is a shadow, and your patron god is long forgotten. You cannot face the Vestossi.”

  “So you taunt me?”

  “No!” she snapped, exasperated. “From the moment you’ve arrived, my only desire has been to convince you that you must leave town. You are a proud man, Corin Hugh, but I have some hope that you’ll see reason.”

  “Your concern does warm my heart,” he said, his tone as cold as ice.

  “But you will go?”

  “I’ll make sure you learn what I decide.”

  He rose and swept his cloak around his shoulders, but before he could stomp off, she stopped him with a gentle touch on his elbow. “Corin?”

  “Aye?”

  “You are too clever a man to die in some Vestossi trap. The ones that you lament were weak or dumb. Do not follow in their footsteps.”

  He offered her a smile. “That I won’t, Iryana. That I won’t.”

  He left by the back hallway, out the side door, and down the narrow alley. He’d found out what he needed. He had Blake’s plan. But he’d paid a dear price to get it. Now the princess’s fate hung in the balance, and if she fell, it would be on Corin’s head. He went two blocks as stealthy as a shadow and then, confident no one was watching, he broke into a run back to the Nimble Fingers tavern.

  His heart was pounding hard, his hands clenched into fists. He barely slowed when he reached the tavern’s door. He bulled his way across the common room’s floor, shouting, “Tavern keeper! Tavern keeper!” as he went.

  His path brought him to Ben Strunk’s table, where the dwarf was still engaged at cards. Corin jerked his head toward the door. “Settle up, Ben. We’re leaving.”

  “What? I can’t leave. I haven’t quite lost all my money yet!”

  Corin turned to the other men at the table. “My apologies, gentlemen, and your next round’s on me. But I require this good dwarf’s assistance.”

  “Oh, very well,” Ben grumbled. “Can anyone make change for uncut diamonds?”

  Corin turned away as the tavern keeper arrived. “My lord?”

  Corin stepped close to him and lowered his voice. “You must find the princess. Her life is in danger. Send word to Signor della Porta. I’ll do what I can to…resolve the issue. But if she has any friends at all within the city, it is time to rouse them.”

  “My cousin is out with a dozen brilliant Nimble Fingers. They have a lead and, last I heard, they were making plans to rescue her.”

  Corin clapped the tavern keeper on the shoulder. “Good man! You didn’t let me down.” He started toward his room, then turned back. “One more thing! Can you summon me a carriage.”

  “A carriage? At this hour?”

  “Aye! Think you could get me Princess Sera’s?”

  The tavern keeper barked a laugh, but when Corin didn’t even smile, he considered it a moment and gave a nod. “Not her proper cab, but I can supply one a Vestossi might use in a pinch.”

  “That’ll do,” Corin said. “Make it happen.”

  He snapped his fingers at Ben Strunk and dashed away toward the stairs. He slammed into his room, and Aemilia screamed in shock. She sprang up from the bed and dove across the room, both dartguns trained on Corin’s chest.

  Corin almost grinned. “And you thought I would be worried about you.”

  She knelt there panting, flushed, and he saw her hands were shaking. “I’m not…” she said. “I’m not…a hero. I’m just…”

  “You are a druid of the Council of King Oberon,” he said. “You remember things this world has never known. For a thousand years you’ve fought a shadow battle against tyrant gods.”

  Still she panted, but a smile touched her face. “When you put it like that…”

  “You almost seem like one.”

  “I…I almost do.”

  “Good,” he said. “Because tonight you go to war.”

  “I…what?” she said. “I cannot go to war! What would I wear?”

  “A fancy dress and a careful glamour.”

  “Corin…what do you intend?”

  Before he answered, a knock came at the door, followed shortly by Ben Strunk. He poked his head into the room and looked around. “Are we decent?”

  “Come in,” Corin said. “You need to hear this.”

  “Who’s the lady?”

  “Tonight, she will be a highborn lady of no particular name or nation.”

  The dwarf looked Aemilia up and down and nodded thoughtfully. “Fancy trick, that.”

  “Trust me,” Corin said. “We’re going to Giuliano’s gala.”

  “You found the house, then?” Ben asked.

  “Aye. And I found Iryana there.”

  Aemilia said nothing, but something in her expression caught Corin’s attention. She seemed terribly alert. And
none too happy.

  Corin cleared his throat. “I found Iryana,” he repeated. “And I learned that she is Giuliano’s woman.”

  “I could have told you that,” Ben said.

  Aemilia didn’t meet his eyes, but she spoke up. “Not his slave?”

  “Not as such,” Corin said.

  “Isn’t…isn’t that good news?”

  “It is. For that part.”

  “Then there’s no need for heroes here. We can leave them—”

  “No!” Corin snapped. “I’ve said before, and it has always been as true: This is more than Iryana. This is justice. Ethan Blake must be put down.”

  Aemilia touched his arm, and it was like the shock of frigid water.

  He blinked down at her and shivered. “Aemilia…”

  “You cannot fix Hurope by killing Blake. And we will drown before you spill the blood of all the wicked lords and ladies.”

  “I cannot fix Hurope,” Corin said. “But I can fix the things that I have wrought.”

  “You? What have you done?”

  “I gave him a command. I gave him his first taste of ambition. And in the Wildlands, I helped him catch and kill a noble man.”

  “That was not your doing!”

  “But I played my part. And now I’ve given him Princess Sera. I tried to use her for my own ends, and now he has her in his power. He means to kill her, Aemilia.”

  Ben Strunk grunted. “Honor from the king or not, he’s just a middling lord. I doubt he’d have the nerve to kill a princess.”

  “He has letters from her to a secret lover. A lowborn Raentzman. She was conspiring to sneak away. He means to make it look like she succeeded.”

  “Ah.” Ben Strunk bobbed his head. “I suspect that might just do the job.”

  “But what can we do?” Aemilia asked.

  “That letter is the anchor to his plan. If I can find it, if I can take it from him, he won’t dare to kill her. Then we can rescue Princess Sera and chase him out of town.”

  “Will it work?”

  Corin licked his lips. “It’s all I’ve got. But if we don’t act tonight, it will be too late. I’ll have her death as well as Auric’s on my conscience. I don’t think I could bear that.”

  Aemilia looked down at the dartguns in her hands. She thought a moment. Then she met his eyes. “Can I bring these?”

  “You should,” he said. “You really, really should.” He turned to Ben. “I’ve heard you’re a retainer for King Ipolito.”

  “Aye, well, a man has to earn a living—”

  Corin waved away the explanation. “Could that justify your attending tonight’s gala?”

  “I’d already planned to go.”

  “With an exotic foreign lady on your arm?”

  “I…am the Captain of the Mint.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes. Aemilia, can you work the glamour?”

  “I should be able to, though I’ve never tried to play royalty before.”

  “Not royalty. Just someone interesting and lovely. You’re qualified for that, I’ll swear.”

  She blushed and looked away. Ben Strunk laughed.

  Aemilia asked, “Are we…are we really going to do this?”

  Corin nodded. “We must.”

  “But…now?”

  “Right now. Come!”

  The carriage waited for them in the piazza. Corin helped them both inside; then he closed the door and took his place on the footman’s stair. Aemilia twitched the curtain aside and leaned down to him as the horses clopped across the cobblestones.

  “What are we doing? What’s the plan?”

  “When we arrive, you and Ben make a grand entrance. Circulate among the guests, and see what you can learn about Blake’s plans for the evening.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “I know that he intends to share this letter with the king. It won’t be a public thing—that makes no sense—but if you can discover when he plans to meet the king, or where, that might point me in the right direction.”

  “And you? What will you do?”

  “I’ll take advantage of the distraction you provide. I’ll slip inside the house unseen, and try to find this letter.”

  She shook her head. “One piece of paper? In a mansion? How?”

  Corin smiled. “People are predictable in ways. Once you’ve seen the structure of a house, you can often make a reasoned guess where they might try to secure a precious object of a known size and nature.”

  “I can almost believe that.”

  Corin chuckled. “I spent most of a decade studying the nuance of it. What do you think the Nimble Fingers really is?”

  “I…”

  “And that’s just guessing from architecture. It’s even easier if you know something of the nature of the person living there. I know Blake’s ambitions and his fears. I’m pretty confident that I can find his secrets.”

  “But if you can’t?”

  “We’ll manufacture something. If you can’t find any news, you and Ben can at least distract him and buy me time.”

  “And if that doesn’t work?”

  Corin held her gaze a moment before he answered. “If gray skies turn to storms, we’ll get clear of there. I won’t risk you or Ben on this adventure. But if we don’t succeed tonight, the princess dies.”

  She rode in silence for a moment, gripping the wooden windowsill and staring out into the night. Then she pressed her face close to his again and whispered, “This is how you live?”

  He grinned. “It’s exciting, isn’t it?”

  “It’s terrifying. I can hardly breathe.”

  He glanced ahead and spotted the bonfire glow of all the torches atop the hill, approaching quickly now. He kissed the druid’s cheek and spoke over her gasp.

  “Don’t slow down. Don’t hesitate. If you just keep going fast enough, sometimes you can outrun the fear.”

  He dropped from his perch, rolled twice across the cobblestones, then bounded up and disappeared among the shadows.

  Blake’s father’s house bespoke the Vestossi reputation—twisting, cold, and sinister even with a party going on out front. Hired guards still kept to their patrols down dark corridors, and every room seemed to have open doors in all directions. Downstairs, anyway, there was no privacy. Every corner could be easily observed.

  It mattered little. Nothing of any genuine worth would be trusted to such rooms. There were ancient suits of armor, priceless paintings, even a bronze-work bust that had to be Ben Strunk’s own handiwork. But there were no precious treasures here. Still, it took him twenty minutes to confirm that, and then ten more to discover that there were no hidden closets, no stairs down to a cellar. Everything was up.

  He hated going up.

  The second floor was given over to the servants’ quarters. Corin didn’t even glance that way. It would never cross a Vestossi’s mind to hide anything of worth among the help. That forced him up to the third floor, far from any easy exits and where it would be much harder to justify his presence. He told himself he’d seen worse spots, and he pressed on.

  There were guards here too, of course—two men in rotation, their lanterns bobbing down the darkened corridor like will-o’-the-wisps. Corin watched them from the shadows of the stairwell, mesmerized, until one passed close enough for Corin to catch the stench of him. He exhaled through his nose, then glided like a whisper forward to fall in step behind the man, two paces back. He followed the guard right down the corridor, observing each of the rooms by the guard’s lantern light as he went by.

  There was a library, its shelves packed with a thousand books no one would ever read. There was a sitting room. The master’s bedroom. The linen closet, locked. Another room, and he guessed this one to be Blake’s. A sitting room. An office.

  He’d nearly passed the office by when he saw the battered cutlass in its sheath, mounted above the fireplace. It was no antique relic, no bejeweled trinket, just a hard-worn weapon recently retired. Its edge might still be staine
d with some of Corin’s blood.

  Only Blake would consider such a thing a trophy. It was a memory of an adventure. Corin licked his lips as the guard advanced to the end of the hall, timed his steps so they would not be heard, and slipped into the spacious office.

  Coals glowed in the fireplace, but there was no other light within the room. Corin knew how to search a room in darkness, but it could well take hours, and he’d hoped to do it more quickly. The guards would notice if he lit a candle or a lamp, but he soon saw a risk worth taking. He stole across to the outer wall and drew aside a curtain on the window there.

  The window ledge was wide and empty, no glass separating the room from the three-story drop outside. But there was light enough, by moon and stars, to aid Corin in his quest. He saw papers, loose on the writing desk, a leather envelope, a locking drawer. But then he spotted the battered footlocker tucked into a corner, and he dismissed the rest.

  It was all of iron, and Corin felt a sudden grim recognition. Three exquisite locks stood side by side in its top. It was the same model Dave Taker had used to firebomb the smuggler’s ship with Auric trapped below.

  Corin cursed. He couldn’t break those locks. Not in any useful time. Not with Blake downstairs and guards out in the hall. But in his heart he knew—he knew—this would be the chest that Blake trusted to preserve Sera’s letter. Corin knelt over it, running his fingers over the locks, but it was no use. He’d tried when it was Auric’s life in the balance, and nothing he had learned since then would aid him here.

  While he was kneeling there, a new light, warm and golden, washed across the surface of the chest. Too late he spun around, raised a hand to shade his eyes, and stared past a glowing candle at Aemilia. Corin heaved a grateful sigh. “Praise Fortune,” he whispered, “it’s only you.”

  She came forward, lowering the candle and shaking her head. “It’s so unsettling the way you do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “See through my glamours. My heart stops every time.”

  “You near enough stopped mine. What are you doing here?”

  “Ben sent me. He charmed a serving girl into sharing her secrets. Somehow. I didn’t ask.”