by Ari Marmell
The woman pushed off him as he fell, coming to rest facing Cyrille. She held in her right fist a rapier with a brass bell guard; stood planted in a stance that would've gotten Cyrille reprimanded by his instructors—and which, he had no doubt, would get him dead if she wanted it to. His own rapier hung limp at his side, and the young Delacroix scion offered the insightful and most pertinent observation he could manage.
“Did you know the jewel's missing from your pommel?”
And then he could only laugh, albeit somewhat hysterically, at the utterly bemused expression flitting across her face. Then she was running again, the other two guards in pursuit, and Cyrille was left staring, largely unawares, at the whimpering Jourdain.
Briefly. Sucking in his breath, struggling to bring his laughter and his shock under control, he turned to follow.
Only once did he stumble in the dim light of the moon, foot catching on Cevora knew what, but he was up and running again with only dirty breeches and a slightly skinned palm to show for it.
It took him no time at all to catch up; pursuers and pursued had gotten only as far as where Cyrille and the guards had left the horses. In those mere moments, however, the woman had already dropped one of the two guards. He lay on the hard earth, moaning and clutching at an arm that gleamed wetly in the ambient luminescence.
As far as the other…
Again Cyrille could only stare in unabashed awe. The woman tumbled backward out of the path of the armsman's swinging blade, leaping so that she rolled on her back across the saddle of a skittish, nervously prancing horse. He saw the beast's eyes go wide, but it was too well trained to bolt. She cleared the saddle completely, vanishing briefly behind the animal's flank.
And reappeared from beneath it, daring its hooves as only a lunatic might, snagging the guard by the knees before he'd taken two steps. A swift jerk and he was on his back with a grunt, lying supine beneath the stirrup.
Once more she vanished into the shadows, once more reappearing, this time leaping clear over the horse, not so much as touching it, flipping in midair. A single slash with her rapier as she hung upside down at the apex of her flight, and the heavy canvas saddlebag dropped from the horse to land square on the guard's upturned face.
Everything from that point was basically a formality. After sheathing her blade, she casually strode to the dazed armsman, yanked the saddlebag down so it wrapped his head, chest, and arms. She cinched it tight, then kicked his sword away into the darkness of the field. She knelt by the wounded man next, ripped a length of fabric off his tabard to stanch the bleeding from his arm, then tied his hands with a length of bridle.
Finally, just as casually, she strode over to Cyrille himself.
“Sword.”
“I—what?”
She rolled her eyes, an expression he couldn't help but find strangely endearing. “Your sword. Give.”
Cyrille looked down, surprised to find the weapon still in his hand; he'd utterly forgotten about it. But…
“No.”
“Did he say no?” Cyrille hadn't the first notion to whom she might be speaking, but it clearly wasn't him. “I'm sure I heard him say no. Did you hear him say no?”
“I…” What in the gods’ names…? “This blade was entrusted to me by my family. I cannot hand it over to just anyone.”
“I'm not just anyone,” she insisted. “I'm anyone, and a bunch of other stuff, too!”
A long pause. “What?”
“Do they teach all upper-class children that wit, or are you gifted?”
Another long pause. “What?”
The woman's sigh was very much how Cyrille might have imagined a deflating ox might sound, had he ever had occasion to imagine deflating oxen. “Sheathe it,” she ordered him. “Just…You understand that if I see even a mouse tail's width of steel, you're going to lose so much more than your sword, yes?”
“Um…” His rapier slid home with a dull slither and thump. “Yes.”
“Good.” She turned, idly rubbing her chin, to examine the two bound men. “There's nothing out here that's going to eat them any time soon, is there?”
“I don't think so. Maybe wolves, if we left them long enough, but probably not even then.”
“We'll try not to leave them long enough, then. Now let's go talk to your man with the itchy trigger finger, so I can pointedly note that if I was the bad guy, he wouldn't still be alive enough to hear me deny being the bad guy.”
“I'm a little bit worried that I followed that,” he offered with a shy smile.
“I don't care if you followed that. Just follow me.”
Still pondering the labyrinthine twists of the stranger's logic, and thoughts, and speech, he rather eagerly did precisely that.
“Olgun?” Widdershins's throat and lips scarcely budged, so deep beneath her breath did she speak, so that the upper-class whelp trudging along behind her wouldn't hear. “Why do half the people I meet try to hit me with something?
“Yeah, yeah, I know, you don't even have to say it. ‘Because the other half don't know me that well yet.’ Ha, ha, flapping ha. Remind me to leave you in a basket on the stoop of an orphanage somewhere.” She halted so abruptly, the man behind her had to draw up short with a gasp or risk stumbling into her. As though it were the most urgent question asked in human history, she whispered, “Come to think of it, do gods even have parents? And if you never did, are you still considered an orphan for not having them now?”
Olgun's empathic response clearly carried the image of patting Widdershins patronizingly on the head, then sternly pointing in the direction ahead of them.
“Fine!” she humphed. “See if I answer any of your theological questions!”
A couple more steps, and something else occurred to her. “Hey, you! Um…What's your name?”
“Cyrille Delacroix, of House Delacroix,” the aristocrat told her.
“Do you realize how redundant that is?”
“…What?”
“Never mind. Your other guard, the older one. What's his name?”
“Jourdain.”
“All right. Olgun?”
A faint tingle of power, a crawling in the air, and Shins knew her voice would carry well ahead of her, without sounding clear across the open field.
“Hey, Jourdain! I'm coming your way. Cyrille's with me. He's fine.
“You won't believe me. You won't believe when I tell you your men are fine, too. Cyrille will back me up. You'll assume I've threatened him. I'll send him over to stand beside you, well away from me. He's still going to back me up. You're going to grumble, and doubt, and look for an excuse, but you're going to be just convinced enough to listen to what I have to say, especially when he orders you to stand down! So can we just skip all that and talk like civilized people, or at least Galicians?”
“What makes you so sure I'd order him to stand down?” Cyrille asked from behind her.
“You want to hear what I have to say,” she told him.
“Yes, but what makes you so sure of that?”
“The fact that you were going to tell Jourdain to stand down, obviously.”
That, at least, shut him up again.
Dirt crunched and Jourdain appeared from the darkness, flintlock in one hand, sword in the other, and—for some reason—walking with short, almost squeamish steps. “Master Cyrille?”
“Everything she said is true, Jourdain. I'm fairly certain she's not the enemy, at this point.”
“I wouldn't be so quick to—”
“And I am instructing you to stand down, as she anticipated.”
Widdershins smirked, openly smug, while Jourdain—despite looking as though he wanted to chew through his lip until he could brush his teeth with his mustache—lowered his weapons.
“You realize,” he growled, “that the blight has spread farther than it would have, thanks to your interference.”
“I'm not the one who pointed a pistol at me and chased me.” Rather than letting the nascent argument mature into adu
lthood, she continued, “So what do you know about this gunk?”
Cyrille opened his mouth to answer, but the guard beat him to it. “You say you're not our enemy, why don't you start with what you know about it?”
“Hmm. I know it's not natural….”
“Stunning deduction,” Jourdain muttered. Cyrille shushed him.
“But it's not…” She paused, casting about for words. “It's not normal magic,” she told them, wincing internally at how stupid a statement that actually was.
It was also the best she could do, though. Although not precisely an expert, she'd encountered a few unnatural effects and entities—the latter, mostly—in her time. From the moment they'd encountered this “blight,” Olgun had been insistent that this was nothing like the others.
He had been rather less able to convey to Widdershins what it was. All she'd gotten was a mixture of confusion and frustration; he didn't fully understand it, and what he did comprehend, apparently, simply couldn't be rendered effectively in imagery and emotion.
“Look,” she snapped, his own frustration feeding hers, “I know what that sounds like. Just trust me, it's magic, but it's not like other magic. That I've seen. Or heard of.”
Cyrille's gaze flickered, albeit only briefly, from her to Jourdain. “The Thousand Crows?”
The guard made a brief scoffing noise. When Widdershins just stood waiting, however, arms crossed and foot tapping the soil, he sighed and said, “Local gang of thugs and criminals in Aubier. Rumor has it they've a sorcerer among their ranks. It's nonsense, of course.”
“Oh, of course.” Absently, directed mostly to Olgun and herself but loud enough for the others to hear, “Six months from home, and I still can't get away from these hopping thieves’ guilds!”
Jourdain's snort was even more contemptuous. “Why am I unsurprised? But calling the Thousand Crows a ‘guild’ would be a joke. They're not big enough or organized enough, and frankly the city's probably too small to support such a thing.”
“You'd be surprised,” she muttered. “But assuming it's not nonsense, they'd have to have a reason for coming after House Delacroix in particular, right?”
This time, it was Cyrille shaking his head. “I don't see why—or how, for that matter. Ever since this started, we've had guards patrolling our lands day and night. The blight's hit us only in our textile-related fields—flax, grazing for sheep—not any of the food crops, so we've been particularly focused there. Nobody could have slipped past our people that many times!”
“I could.” Then, at Jourdain's narrowed glare, “I didn't. Well, I mean, other than tonight, to take a look. Just saying I could. I'm here, after all.”
“One person, one time. Not the same thing. My men are better than that, and they haven't even seen any trace of trespassers.”
“Except the big blotches of diseased soil, yes?”
“At any rate,” the young aristocrat broke in, seemingly trying to head off another conflict, “even if they could, the Thousand Crows would have no reason to target us. We've received no demands; we devote no more of our household guard to peacekeeping and law enforcement than any other house in Aubier—”
“They could be working with House Carnot, couldn't they?”
The sheer disbelief wafting from the two men was nearly enough to sweep Olgun away in into nonexistence.
“Why in Cevora's name would you think that?!” Cyrille finally forced out.
“Uh…Rival House? Taking steps to cripple Delacroix influence? Some of this must sound familiar, yes?”
“I don't know what House politics look like where you're from, uh…You never gave us your name?”
“Widdershins,” she mumbled absently, and immediately cursed herself (or at least called herself all manner of animals and fruit). She'd had every intention of going by “Madeleine” here—as a name, it would stand out a lot less—but she'd been so distracted….
If Cyrille was thrown, however, it took no form she could spot in the gloom or hear in his voice. “All right, Widdershins. The situation may be different where you're from, but here? House Carnot's presence in Aubier is minimal, and they hold no real power. They're not a rival; they're barely noticeable. And we'd certainly have noticed if they brought in the sort of manpower or resources a major move would require.”
Shins really, really wanted to sit down. “Olgun?”
His response was, emotionally, a bewildered shrug.
It made no sense. None. She'd spent days in Lourveaux, looking into House Carnot after Maurice's contact had dropped their name as enemies of House Delacroix. She'd learned they had moved against their rivals fiercely, not just in Lourveaux but elsewhere. She'd learned that the Delacroix who lived in Lourveaux had left, heading for the Outer Hespelene region and Aubier in particular, perhaps the last city in which the Delacroix held any real influence.
And she'd learned that Lazare Carnot, patriarch of the House in Lourveaux, and the bulk of his people, had left on a journey of “family business” not long afterward, leaving only a few cousins and a handful of servants to maintain the estate until their return.
They must have been on their way here, to finish the task. They must!
Mustn't they?
“I don't understand,” she admitted finally. “Didn't they at least tell you what was going on with the Carnots?”
“They?”
“The Lourveaux Delacroix bloodline!” she all but shouted. Were they all idiots out here in the Outer Hespelene, or…?
“Widdershins,” Cyrille said gently, “we haven't hosted anyone from other branches of the family in a couple of years, now.”
“Oh, figs…” They hadn't made it…. None of them had made it….
The first shouts and hoofbeats of the approaching Delacroix field hands echoed out of the darkness. In that one heartbeat when Cyrille and Jourdain both looked away, Shins all but fell back into the shadows, vanishing from their sight. Normally, she'd have relished imagining, or even watching, the expressions on their faces, would have laughed inside, and Olgun with her.
Tonight, she and Olgun both had too much to think about, new information and old, and not a bit of it remotely good.
She didn't look precisely “matriarchal,” at least as popular archetype would have it.
She was neither gaunt and hatchet-like, nor rotund and imposing. Her hair had only just begun to gray at the temples, leaving the bulk of it her original rose-tinged blonde. Her height, her features, even—as she was not currently out and about in public—her attire…All were remarkably mundane. She was a woman who, in all physical respects, could enter a crowded room and attract the attention of absolutely nobody.
Until she turned her shriveling gaze or iron-laced voice on someone. Then, then there could be no doubt that Calanthe Delacroix, matron of House Delacroix in Aubier and the entirety of the Outer Hespelene, was a woman accustomed to being obeyed.
At the moment, clad in somber blues and violets barely a step away from mourning garb, she sat in a high-backed chair of plush cushions and red velvet, her fingers laced together in her lap, her eyes unblinking. Bookshelves, small doors, and portraits in gilded frames occupied two of the chamber's walls; a great curtained window, a sprawling fireplace, a banner boasting the leonine symbol of Cevora, and a suit of old armor, the third; the heavier door and a pair of statue-still servants, the last.
Cyrille and Jourdain stood before her—both clad in new outfits, unbesmirched by the dirt and sweat of their recent endeavors—slightly breathless and parched from talking. And around them—standing, sitting, or sprawling throughout the library, attentions fixed either on the speakers or the matriarch, depending on their inclination—were most of the other Delacroix scions.
Malgier, arms crossed and back ramrod straight, standing at his mother's side as was his wont. Arluin, slowly stroking his thick and almost-untamed beard, the only facial hair to be seen in the room beyond Jourdain's mustache. Anouska, the spitting image of her mother as a young woman, taking
in every word and every gesture with eyes as cold and as flat as ice, scarcely blinking. Josephine, her tight curls bobbing and casting shadows in the light of a tiny glass lantern with lenses of various hues—a toy to which she apparently paid far more attention than she did the goings-on around her. The twins Chandler and Helaine, sitting beside one another on a futon, absently rolling glass marbles across and between their knuckles, perfectly synchronized.
Only Marjolaine, the sole sibling younger than Cyrille himself, was absent, a fact that surprised none of them whatsoever.
Marbles clacked together. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked its rhythm. The fire crackled, occasionally popped as a bit more wood gave up the ghost. And for long breaths, these were the room's only sounds.
Calanthe raised a hand, up and back. Instantly, one of the servants was beside her, placing a long-stemmed goblet in her fingers. Two delicate sips, which somehow managed to drain every drop of wine from the vessel, and she handed it back to the servant, who promptly returned to his spot against the wall. All without a word spoken; all without once lifting the weight of her regard from Cyrille's cringing, tensing shoulders.
“I had hoped,” she finally intoned, “that my son had finally outgrown his foolish years. Clearly we have a few birthdays ahead of us yet, before that blessed day arrives.”
Malgier sneered, the twins both chortled openly, and Josephine looked up from her shiny lenses long enough to ask, “Wait, whose birthday is it?”
“Nobody's, Fifi.” This from bearded Arluin, his voice gentle. “Go back to playing.”
“And leave the conversation to the adults,” Malgier added through his grimace.
“Hey! I am an adult!”