by Ari Marmell
Otherwise, unremarkable. Taller than average, perhaps. Hair, beard, eyes, all of darker shades largely undefinable in the dimness of the common room.
He reminded her, she realized, a little of Renard, her friend and former mentor back in Davillon. If, that is, Renard were about a third taller and at least a third less flamboyant.
“If I'd known you were bringing a companion,” he began, “I'd have recommended a slightly higher-class establishment.” Had his voice been any more carefully and deliberately cultured, it would have thickened into yogurt. Still, there was something behind it, beneath it, a flinty tone that Widdershins recognized from her own life on the streets. Though she kept her expression neutral, even bland, her attention had drifted subtly toward his blade; even Olgun's not-quite-murmurs in her head sounded abruptly mistrustful.
“Are there any higher-class establishments that'll let you in?” Maurice snipped.
The man's only response was a soft chuckle. “And you, my dear?” He offered Widdershins a shallow bow. “What do I call you? Besides lovely?”
Shins suddenly felt like she needed a bath. Shins suddenly felt like Olgun needed a bath. “Madeleine,” she said stiffly. “And just Madeleine. Not dear. Not lovely.”
“You wound me.”
“Oh, no. Trust me. When that happens, you'll know it.”
The newcomer drew himself up, his smile slipping for the first time. “Were you both planning to be this rude for our entire meeting?”
“No plan,” she told him. “It just seems to come quite by instinct.” A pause, then, “Or, at least, I didn't plan to be rude. Maurice, did you plan to be rude?”
“Umm…No?”
“There, see?” Shins waved a hand dismissively. “Maurice didn't plan to be rude, either. You must just bring it out of people, yes?”
Two sets of jaws worked soundlessly as two men gawped at the young woman beside them. Until, finally, the stranger chuckled again and pulled up a seat. “I could get to like you,” he admitted to her.
“Oh, I could never ask you to trouble yourself.”
Another chuckle, a faint sniff at a nearby ale followed by an upturned lip, and Maurice's contact was abruptly all business. “So…What does our beloved Church of the Hallowed Pact require of me now?”
A lifetime of deception allowed Widdershins to keep any trace of expression off her face, but internally, her startled gasp was as genuine as the one she felt from her divine companion.
It made sense, certainly. This man wasn't likely to have gone out of his way to do a lone monk a favor; if Maurice had implied that this meeting was Church business, well, that was just the smart way to go about it.
She just wouldn't have expected William's old assistant to even think of something like that, much less be willing to act on it. Perhaps the archbishop wasn't the only one about whom she was more ignorant than she thought.
“…be required,” Maurice was telling their guest when she focused once more on the discussion. “Today, all we really need is someone with an ear to the goings-on of Lourveaux. The, um, less overt, less legitimate goings-on.”
“Crimes, schemes, conspiracies, intrigue,” Widdershins clarified jauntily. “You know, the stuff the Church has to pretend it's not involved in.”
If looks could kill, Maurice's would have…well, been a moderately severe flesh wound, at worst. Coming from him, however, that was vicious enough.
Their guest raised an imaginary goblet in toast to Shins's comment, lips bent in a crooked and oddly mischievous smile. “All right, that should be simple enough.”
“Mm. Right. So, Wid—uh, Madeleine has been in the city less than three days, yet she seems to have enemies here.”
“Shocking,” the other man murmured—and then seemed genuinely shocked in turn when Widdershins's response was to stick her tongue out at him.
“It's true that she does have a penchant for attracting hostile intent,” Maurice said, earning his own stuck-out tongue in turn, “but in this case, these men were watching for her long before she turned up. We've no idea how they knew she was coming, let alone why they want her.”
“I didn't know I was coming until recently,” Shins added. “And I didn't tell anybody.” Then, more softly, “You don't count as ‘anybody.’ Oh, you're not insulted. You do too know what I meant!”
Again she came back to the conversation halfway through a sentence. “…pretty sure I'd know if any of the underground guilds or major gangs had their eye out for someone in specific,” the fence was saying. “Obviously I can't be positive, and there are always freelancers and smaller bands whose doings remain secret simply because nobody's noticed them yet. But if I had to wager, it'd be that you're not looking for someone in the community of the extra-legally inclined. Or if you are, they're nothing more than hired watchers for someone else.”
Extra-legally inclined. Need to remember that one…. “So who, then?” Shins asked.
Something passed over the man's expression as he studied her, something invisible and yet nearly tangible enough to dislodge his hat. Something that looked an awful lot like understanding.
Oh, figs…“Olgun…” It wasn't even a breath, the syllables scarcely vocalized at all. “I think he just figured out we're not here on Church business.”
From somewhere just behind and to the left of her soul, she felt the god's reply; agreement, and acknowledgment that he was ready for whatever was about to happen.
Except that neither of them were. Without so much as the flicker of an eyelid, he resumed speaking, answering the question Shins had all but forgotten she'd asked.
“You may have noticed,” he suggested, “that the city's in a bit of an uproar at the moment?”
“In the same way this place is ‘a bit’ unappetizing, yes.” Why are you still helping us? Had she read his expression wrong? Was he planning some sort of double cross? Or had he simply decided that, as the request had come from a clergyman and he was here anyway, he might as well see it through?
“The craft guilds and the Houses have noticed, too. There's more political maneuvering, backbiting, intrigue, and manipulation going on in Lourveaux—and indeed, across Galice, so long as Church and government eyes are distracted—than there are diseases in a brothel.”
Charming.
“I've heard nothing of this!” Maurice protested. “The Church wouldn't—”
“Wouldn't tell just anyone even if they knew,” Shins interjected. “Not when they don't have the manpower to do anything about it.”
“Precisely!” Again the stranger offered an imaginary toast. “Assuming your ‘spies’ are anything more than the result of a personal vendetta, I find it far more likely that your enemy is political—House or guild—than criminal.”
“Same thing, aren't they?” Blandly as she spoke, her mind was racing. She'd accrued more than enough personal vendettas in her life—but all were local to Davillon. Even if one of her…misunderstandings…had been enough to inspire a hunt for her across Galice, she could think of nobody who had both the means and the slightest chance of knowing she might visit de Laurent's grave.
Then again, how the happy frog would any of the Houses have known to look for me here, or even wanted to?
She could just leave. Get out of Lourveaux and vanish once again into the back roads and small towns of Galice. Get so lost that it wouldn't matter who was looking for her.
And spend the rest of her life wondering who else was out to get her, and why.
Gods, I'm so tired of politics….
“I think,” she sighed, “that you'd better tell us what you've heard….”
The next hour was spent hunched over, so near the table they could smell the stains in the wood, engaged in low, raspy, sometimes nigh-inaudible conversation.
Nigh-inaudible, and definitely—at least for Widdershins—incomprehensible. House Blah had bribed a city council seat away from House Whatsis. Parties unknown were slowly buying out the properties and goods of the Someone Guild. This craft
sman was broke; that House was losing everything; and none of it meant the first thing to Widdershins, who was barely keeping awake, let alone following along. Surely none of this had the slightest thing to do with her….
A name, vaguely familiar, finally hooked her attention like a trout.
“I'm sorry, House What?”
Maurice and the fence both jumped, apparently having grown accustomed to the idea that they basically had the conversation to themselves. “Carnot,” the stranger repeated. “House Carnot.”
A shudder ran through thief and god both. House Carnot had bloodlines in almost every major city, Davillon included. Gaston Carnot, the marquis de Brielles, had died in the bloodbath that had forced Adrienne Satti to adopt a new name and had left her the final surviving worshipper of an obscure, foreign deity.
They'd never been close, Gaston and Widdershins, but she wasn't likely ever to forget—him or any of the others.
Still, the Carnots were spread far and wide. The fact that she recognized the House meant absolutely nothing.
“And they're doing what?”
“I was just getting to that. Using means both legitimate and il-, they've more or less been crushing a long-term rival into the dust. Buying out properties, hiring away workers, stripping city permits, cutting off access to government contacts, undercutting prices, and the like. They didn't have much presence left in Lourveaux, so it wasn't hard for the Carnots to drive them completely from influence—and from the city entirely, if rumor is to be believed.”
“Uh-huh.” Widdershins found her attention, and even consciousness, starting to wander once more. More out of obligation than interest, she forced the last question out. “And which rival House have they been stomping all over?”
“Um…That'd be House Delacroix, I believe.”
Widdershins knew, with absolute certainty, that she spoke for Olgun as well as herself when all she could say was, “Of course it is.”
But at least she wasn't sleepy anymore.
Mugs clinked, dishes clanked, servers bustled, customers babbled. Individual sounds, largely of contentment and satiation if not happiness; together, however, they became far more. This was the voice, the song, and the easy, relieved sigh of the Flippant Witch.
Stained but not filthy, worn but not dilapidated, old but not yet sickly, the tavern played host to several dozen patrons, lost in drink or conversation. They, like the establishment itself, were enjoying the best season Davillon had known in over a year. The displeasure of the Church and the interdiction on trade no longer weighed upon the citizens’ shoulders; trade and travel thrived; and if the custom at the Flippant Witch couldn't yet compare to its glory days under the late and lamented Genevieve Marguilles, then at least the tavern had regained its health.
Now that the city was in a better way—and now that she wasn't running the place.
That was the only way Robin allowed herself to contemplate her absent friend: as “she.” As “her.” Actually hearing that name, saying that name, thinking that name was enough to make her feel too much that she'd sworn to herself she'd never feel again.
It was a vow she renewed every time she cried herself to sleep, utterly determined that this time would be the last—but at least that was only once or twice a week, now, rather than nightly.
To most of her patrons and friends, Robin looked well enough. Although still painfully slender, still more girl than woman, she'd begun to truly shed the last vestiges of childhood: gawky becoming graceful; freckles lightening a bit, though surely they would never vanish against the pallor of her skin. She still chopped her hair raggedly but, either by choice or by inattention, had allowed it to grow longer than was her wont, so that it now hung just past her shoulders.
That, when added to her position of authority over the Flippant Witch, had begun attracting attention of boys and men that even the most drab, baggy, unflattering apparel couldn't deflect.
Gods, it's obnoxious!
“Pardon?”
Robin glanced up into the red-bearded face of Gerard, one of the Witch's oldest employees, slightly embarrassed. “Sorry. Didn't mean to say that out loud.”
He offered her a grin that she knew, from experience, was a friendly one—despite teeth so discolored and uneven he looked as though a mountain range sprouted from his gums.
“You did, though. So what's—oh, three more of those for the teamsters in the back—what's obnoxious?”
“Nosey employees,” she huffed in feigned exasperation, “who eavesdrop on conversations so private, they involve fewer than two people.” An exaggerated flounce carried her to the barrels stacked behind the counter; she returned with fistfuls of foaming tankards that she thrust at Gerard along with a mischievous wink. The beefy server chuckled, wiped an imaginary splash of ale from his faded blue tunic, and vanished amongst the tables with the drinks.
It was all an act, and they both well knew it. Robin pretended to be cheerful; Gerard, and the others, pretended to believe it. In truth, she'd had precious few reasons to be cheerful in half a year and more.
“Hey, Robin!”
Few. Not none.
The young woman's smile grew broader and far more genuine as she turned, recognizing that voice despite the distorting sounds of the semicrowded room. “Faustine!”
The newcomer—one of several, as customers continually came and went, passing through the Witch's doors—offered a bashful smile of her own in return. The flickering of the fire in the hearth across the chamber and the various smoking lamps cast flowing hair, normally only a slightly blonder hue than moonlight, in dancing shades of orange. Faustine slipped through the crowd, gracefully if not nearly as effortlessly as Wi—as she would have done, and slipped up to the bar. A quick flip of her skirts, long enough to be fashionable without keeping her from the constant running required of her, and she perched upon a rickety stool that had just been vacated by a staggering drunk.
Shoving a few more tankards out of the way, and ignoring the occasional call for drink or food, Robin sidled along behind the counter, then took Faustine's hands in her own. Faustine's face flushed, eyes darting to either side. She clearly started to pull away, and just as clearly stopped herself. Looking down at the countertop, she instead squeezed her own fingers tight around Robin's.
“I didn't expect to see you today,” the tavern keep told her, delight and excitement just audible in a voice no longer accustomed to conveying them.
“I…Oh…” Although Robin's elder by half a decade or more, it was the new arrival who continued to stammer, bashful as a schoolgirl. “I…didn't actually expect it. To be here, I mean. Tonight.” Then, at the younger woman's puzzled blink, she mustered up an apologetic smile. “I'm here working. Not…Not that I'm not glad to be here…”
Robin nodded, thoughtful…And then waited. And waited.
“Faustine?”
“Oh!” The courier laughed nervously, then released Robin's hands to dig into the small pouch all but hidden by her vest and skirts. The paper she handed over was thick, cheap, sealed in wax without the slightest hint of sigil or signature.
“Who'd be messaging me?”
It was a rhetorical question; one that—like her earlier outburst—she hadn't meant to speak aloud. Still, Faustine shrugged. “I don't know, Robin. Came home after a crosstown delivery and found it on the stoop, along with my standard fee and an open note that just said ‘Sorry I missed you.’ It's not really the sort of thing I usually courier, but…” Another shrug, another bashful smile.
Robin nodded, cracked the wax, flipped open the paper…And would almost certainly have sprouted icicles had she frozen any more thoroughly.
Genevieve's grave. Now. Please.
“Robin?”
The girl barely heard. All she could do was stare.
“Robin, what's wrong?”
Was that her handwriting? It didn't quite seem to be—and Robin had spent more than long enough staring at that damned note she'd left behind when she ran away—but it was c
lose. A little rough, a little sloppy…
Just the sort of difference one might expect in a missive dashed off in frightened haste.
“Please…Robin, you're scaring me!”
She finally looked up, and wondered what her own face must look like, to have Faustine's looking so stricken.
“I have to go.” Is that my voice? It sounds too hollow to be mine….
“Go where? What does it say?!”
“I'm sorry. I can't, I…have to go.”
Without another word to anyone, without a glance at the unserved customers, without so much as stopping to find her coat, Robin was out in the chill of the evening, skinny legs carrying her far faster than it appeared they ever should.
For the briefest instant, Faustine and Gerard caught one another's gaze. He knew Robin well enough; she had heard the stories more than frequently enough; neither had the slightest doubt who could inspire the girl to such haste.
Though her lips quivered ever so slightly and every muscle in her face went taut, Faustine bolted from her seat and followed.
Robin grew only vaguely aware that Faustine was following, could scarcely even register it as important. Nor did she attach any significance to the fact that the courier, who spent hours a day walking if not running across Davillon, struggled to keep up with her.
Her lungs burned with effort and chill; her breath steamed; people came and went in flashes of shocked or angry faces, shouting or cursing the girl who brushed past them or, in one or two cases, shoved them aside with a strength that belied her size.
None of it registered, none of it mattered. There was no world beyond her destination, the road she traveled, and the maelstrom of emotion that roiled around her mind, threatening to drag it under and drown it. Fear and anger and hurt and worry and more love than she wanted to admit and just maybe a tiny flickering ember of hate….
She knew she neared the cemetery by the smell, the scent of soil and growing things, otherwise alien to this time of year. The city and the Church made every effort to keep the various graveyards (or the wealthier ones, at any rate) lush or at least passable, regardless of season, though their efforts were often symbolic at best. It was another half minute before the gate itself hove into view.