by Ari Marmell
This time, she was fairly sure that Veroche meant every bit of the glare crinkling her face. “Go with her,” she ordered the guardsman, who had slunk back to the table in an apparent bid to be forgotten. “Escort her to the edge of town and make sure she keeps going.”
He nodded glumly, rose again from his chair, and moved to stand beside Widdershins. “Sorry.”
“Eh. Not your fault.” Shins pushed the door open, stepped out into the bright but blustery winter day. “What's your name?” she asked, more out of habit than real interest.
“Alexandre.”
“Of course it is.” Widdershins threw her hands over her head in exasperated surrender to the whims of a cruel world and started walking.
“Would ya quit bein’ such a ponce, already?!”
“I'm telling you, Treves, I saw something move!”
“Sure. It's called shadows, what with all them clouds in front of the moon.”
“But—”
“Shut up and get a move on! Wanna be back before supper's gone completely cold.”
“As if the others left any for us anyway…”
They were of different builds, these two men skulking across a property that wasn't theirs. Different heights, different hair, different complexions. Both were wrapped in loose clothes of blacks and grays, however, and both wore the cruel, sneering expression that made people the world over immediately think “thug.”
Which, given that they were both members in good standing of the Thousand Crows, was hardly an inaccurate assessment.
Treves's doubt in his companion's observations was understandable. Other than the tree line but a few dozen yards in front of them, and the manor house so far behind them it was barely a glimmer in the moonlight, the field was broad, open, and empty. Shadows did indeed glide overhead, the last surviving tufts of grass bowed to one another as they danced in the breeze, frost glinted on the dusky soil. Flickers and shades were everywhere, genuine movement utterly absent. Nobody was out here besides the two of them; that was the whole point.
Except, between one step and the next, they became three. The newcomer, so far as either Crow could tell in that split second before thought caught up with vision, simply materialized from within those shifting puddles of light and dark. He—she? it?—almost seemed to consist of those dappled patterns, light gray competing with dark gray on a gray that was somewhere in between.
Something nudged Treves's shoulder; not hard, just enough, when combined with his gasp of shock, to throw him off-balance. Before he could so much as begin to recover, to straighten or draw his blade or both, the figure dropped. Crouching, spinning, cloak flaring, it once again became a blur in the gloom. Something—a leg?—smashed hard into the back of the brigand's ankle. Already unsteady, Treves felt his feet fly out from under him, felt the ground reach up and punch him in the back. Very much as if it were getting even for the damage he and his partner had so recently inflicted upon it.
What he took at first to be a ringing in his ears resolved itself into a pained scream. Bleary, dazed, Treves turned his head, and only then realized that the same spin that had driven the stranger's leg against his own had also plunged the tip of a rapier into the other man's thigh.
Still she spun, never slowing—and it was a she, the Crow could just barely make that out, now—and all Treves could think was, Doesn't she ever get dizzy?
He saw her foot rise, knew he needed to roll aside and couldn't do it fast enough. The heel of her boot dropped like an executioner's axe, not into his throat but his gut. Agony roared through him, yanking him into a fetal curl as he vomited all over the hardened dirt.
He had just enough presence of mind to watch her sword whip around again, slapping against his partner's throat—with the flat of the blade, not the edge. The man's wail of pain disintegrated into ragged gasps, his eyes bulged, and he fell to his knees, clutching at his neck.
A few more steps, almost a pirouette, and then the woman was behind him. Treves watched as her arms snaked around the man's head and neck, and squeezed. He flopped and struggled for only a moment before his body went limp.
The stranger let him fall—the faint whump of breath when he toppled was Treves's only sign that he was still alive—and then slowly bent to retrieve the sword she'd dropped to perform the choke. She swished it through the air before her, almost idly; two times, then three. Then, with equal nonchalance, she strode his way….
Widdershins, as anyone who'd known her for over an hour would have anticipated, had wandered down the road precisely as far as it took to leave Alexandre's sight before cutting cross-country—traversing acres of barren, rolling hills—to approach Aubier from the other side. Once there, it'd been easy enough to wait until dark before setting out to once again trespass on Delacroix property.
Well, no, it'd been simple. Given Widdershins lack of patience—and Olgun's constant delighted poking at said impatience—“easy” was perhaps an inaccurate description.
Nor had she found it particularly enjoyable to slowly creep her way across the fields, crouching behind this hillock or slipping into that patch of shadow, relying on her divine partner's augmentation of hearing and night vision to ensure that she detected any approaching patrols before they detected her.
And there were a lot of those patrols. Whatever else one might say about her, Calanthe Delacroix was taking the protection of her House and family very seriously.
So when she'd spotted a pair of not-so-gentlemen sneaking their own way across the grounds, it had more than piqued her interest.
And when she recognized them for the criminals they were—and thus, almost certainly, Crows—it had piqued her, well, pique.
All of which, after a burst of violent exercise that might have proved greatly cathartic had it lasted longer, led her here.
Widdershins dropped into a squat beside the one man who remained conscious, her rapier balanced jauntily across her knees. “So, Thousand Crows, right?”
He flinched, then glowered at her—or tried to around the occasional dry heave.
“I'd really like to know,” she said, idly tapping her cheek, “how you made it this far onto the property, given that the guards are sprouting up like it was growing season.”
“Same way you did, bitch.”
“Hmm. No, it's taken me a while to get this far. It wasn't easy, and there's only one of me, yes? Also, I'm better than you.” Then, at his attempted scoff, “I'm sorry, did I misremember who snuck up on who?”
Another sneer. “I'm not tellin’ you anything.”
Shins dropped her hand, switching from tapping her cheek to tapping her blade.
“Naw, see…It's a bluff. You're not a killer, girl.”
“No?”
Treves, or so she thought she'd heard him called, jerked his head to indicate the other man.
“Maybe I just wanted to make sure he was alive to chat with if you turned out to be rude,” she suggested.
“Ha! You didn't kill the boys came after you at the smithy, either!”
Widdershins's grin sparkled in the moonlight. “So you are one of the Crows!”
After an unintelligible mutter, “Fine. Not saying another word.”
“I don't have to be a killer, you know. I could just hurt you. Done a pretty good job of that so far, yes?”
Treves, however, seemed determined to keep his tongue, and Shins couldn't honestly blame him. She wasn't the most intimidating figure to begin with, she knew, and it wasn't a stretch to imagine that Ivon Maline would scare his men a lot more than she did.
Instead, with a faint sigh and an even fainter request to Olgun to help ensure she got this just right, she leaned in and took hold of him just as she had his partner. He was out just as quickly—with, if she and Olgun had managed it properly, no real damage.
At least until one of the wandering Delacroix patrols stumbled across them, anyway.
“So what now, Olgun?” Shins frowned, nudging the unconscious thug with a toe. “How did they sneak in
here? Blind luck? Their own pet god? It's another god, isn't it? You'd tell me if there was another god, yes?”
As Olgun was too busy doing his best impression of an outraged sputter at the term pet, he offered no comprehensible answer. That, though, was answer enough.
“Yeah, figured. Blind luck, maybe?” Then, “No, they aren't good enough to have just ‘managed it’! Did you see them? They weren't really even trying! I…What? Oh. Well, of course I was going to search them before we left! It's the obvious thing to do, right? What kind of idiot do you take me for? Also, don't answer that.”
Rather desperately hoping that the god couldn't sense the flush in her cheeks, Shins bent down to check the pockets and pouches of first Treves, then the other thug whose name she'd never heard.
Both, oddly enough, were carrying small wineskins hanging from their belts—skins that were, to judge by a quick prod, empty of wine, water, or any other beverage. Out of idle curiosity more than anything, she brought the first of the vessels up to her nose for a quick sniff.
“Gghuuuurrljchkl!”
The wineskin hurtled over yards of field to land in a small clump of frost-stiffened dead grass. Widdershins staggered, hunched, hands on her knees, breathing deeply and struggling not to vomit hard enough to turn completely inside out. Her nostrils, tongue, and throat felt slick with undercooked fat, tasted as though she'd just taken a swig of “tea” brewed by steeping the disembodied finger of a week-old corpse.
“Oh, gods! What is…? Why…? What…? How…? What…? Why…?”
A faint warming touch of Olgun's power cleared the worst of the fume from her nose and throat, the extremes of queasiness from her gut. It was followed rapidly by a strong mental image of dying farmland.
“Well, yes, I know it's the source of the blight!” she groused at him. “Or I'd have figured it out, anyway, once my brain stopped flinging itself against the inside of my skull and trying to escape through my ears.”
After a few more minutes of panting, once Widdershins could make herself believe that the whole world didn't consist entirely of regurgitation, she straightened and shuffled over to the other Crow. Lifting his wineskin—keeping her arms rigidly straight and her face turned away—she carefully folded the leather, then slipped the skin inside one of her own pouches. Evidence, should she ever need it, and excuse to either buy or steal a new pouch, as she was never going to use this one for anything else, ever again.
Beyond that, her examination didn't turn up much, really. A few coins, which she pocketed. A few additional blades and other weapons, which she hurled as far as she could into the dark night. A tiny lantern with a bit of oil remaining.
And, just as she was about to quit in disgust, a sheet of folded paper in a pocket sewn into the lining of Treves's tunic.
“Oh, ha, ha,” she snorted in response to her partner's unspoken suggestion. “Why don't you sniff it, if you're curious?”
It briefly appeared, however, that smelling it might be her only option. Unfolding the paper revealed only that she lacked sufficient light, even with Olgun's assistance, to study whatever might be on it. Fortunately, the brigand's own lantern solved that little problem. Hunching over it, to minimize the chances of anyone seeing the glimmer from across the field, she glanced at her prize once more.
It took a moment, and several turns of the paper, before she recognized the patterns as a crude map of the Delacroix property. Yes, this was the main road here, that was the manor house there, which would put her roughly here…
Another minute, then, before she realized that the seemingly random hash marks scattered across the image were, in fact, a sequence of numbers written for the illiterate. Not a one of them repeated itself.
“What do you make of this?” she asked Olgun. “And if you say ‘a map,’ you're walking home.”
“A map” was, however, all he had. Neither thief nor god doubted that this diagram was at least partly how the two Crows had been able to cross the property undetected, but they still couldn't determine how it had helped them. It wasn't as though the patrol routes—assuming they weren't utterly random—were marked.
Ultimately, all she could do was fold it back up and store it away for later consideration. She'd come here for a reason, after all, and still had a great deal to do before dawn.
“Hey, Cyrille.”
The resulting sound wasn't quite a squawk, wasn't quite a yelp, wasn't quite a gasp. As best she could describe it, it sounded like an angry chicken slapping a puppy with a fish.
“Could you repeat that?” Widdershins asked. “Define it? Possibly spell it for me?”
The boy, who had been lying atop his quilts, fully dressed, brooding so intently at the ceiling that it had almost certainly begun to feel irritable, wore an expression very similar to the aforementioned hypothetical fish. “Widdershins?! How…How did you get in here?”
From her current seat on the corner of a writing desk—a large thing of cherrywood, carved with various designs to perfectly match the bed, the chair, the wardrobe, and even the wainscoting, silly aristocrats—Shins gestured over one shoulder with a quick jerk of the head. “Came in the window.”
“Came in the…I've been in this room all night!”
“So?”
“I didn't hear a thing!”
“So?”
“How…? What…? How…?”
“You know, I was just having a very similar conversation earlier this evening.”
Since Cyrille's expression, though highly amusing, didn't seem likely to change any time soon, Shins took the opportunity to look around. Other than the aforementioned furniture, any single piece of which was worth more than every apartment Widdershins had ever owned or stayed in back in Davillon, the room was…well, as equally ostentatious as the furniture. The carpet was thick enough to serve as armor, the water basin and toiletries on the bureau were genuine silver, the quilt was ermine, and the chamber was completely bare of the discarded clothes that were, in Widdershins's experience, common to all adolescent boys’ living spaces. (Thanks, she was certain, to the efforts of the servants, not Cyrille himself.)
“Sorry to see the family's doing so poorly,” she scoffed.
“I'm sorry, what?”
Widdershins swallowed a sigh. “Nothing. Never mind.”
The exchange, brief as it was, snapped Cyrille out of his shock. “How did you know which room was mine?”
“Um, I kept looking until I found you. Did you know that nobody in your family seems to actually sleep?”
Cyrille chuckled. “Oh, we do. Just not until morning. Sleeping at night is just so ‘common.’ So what's everyone up to, then?”
“Remarkably boring stuff, for the most part,” she said with a shrug. “At least, the ones with rooms on this side of the house. The twins seem to be practicing card tricks.”
“They do that,” Cyrille said with a nod. “Card tricks, coin flips, all that. I think they think it's creepier, or at least more impressive, if they perform all their little quirks and tricks in unison.”
“Fifi,” Shins continued, “whose room is a mess, by the way, is experimenting with hairstyles in the mirror and, believe it or not, not playing with that silly glass lantern of hers.”
“The miracles of the gods are many and strange.”
“And the one girl who wasn't at your family meeting the other night…” Widdershins trailed off abruptly, blushing.
“Marjolaine,” Cyrille offered with a half smile. “And yes, she does that. Frequently. Mostly because of how much it upsets Mother. You'd be surprised how many servants have been dismissed—or been beaten by Malgier—because of her. Why are you looking at me that way?”
“This is a really frog-hoppingly awful family you have, Cyrille.”
“‘Frog-hoppingly’?”
“Don't change the subject.”
“Shins…” Cyrille rose from the bed, then glanced back at it as if only just now realizing what it was. His gaze flickered to meet hers, and his face reddened,
but he kept speaking. “They're not all that bad. Well, I mean, Malgier, maybe, and a few of the others. But mostly we bring out the worst in each other. House politics, status. There aren't a lot of Delacroix bloodlines left in any positions of wealth.”
Fewer than you think. But even Widdershins, to whom tact meant little more than the past tense of tack, knew better than to say that just now.
“We've given a lot to Aubier,” he continued. “Provided for many of its poorer citizens. We're just…” His hands twitched as though literally groping for words.
“Rude and bad-tempered as badgers in the process,” she finished for him.
“Um…”
“Badgers with hemorrhoids,” she clarified.
“Shins…”
“Badgers with hemorrhoids and ingrown toenails.”
“Were you going to tell me why you sneaked in here?”
“Oh! Right. I need an extra set of eyes, and someone to tell me who's from Aubier and who's a stranger. You're elected. Let's go.”
“Wait, what? Go? I don't—”
“You believe I'm trying to help you and your family, yes?”
“Yes,” Cyrille answered without hesitation.
“Then trust me. I need your help to help me help.” And then, much more softly, “What? It made perfect sense, and he followed it just fine!”
Indeed, Cyrille didn't appear at all confused. If anything, the expression on his face suggested…
Disappointment? Hurt? Why the figs would he be hurt?
He stood, tense, arm rising as though he wanted to reach out to her. “Is that…the only reason You're here?” He sounded almost plaintive.
“I don't…. Why else would I be here?”
Cyrille's hand fell back to his side. “Never mind. Wait just a minute, let me get my boots and my sword. Then you can explain to me how you plan to get us both off the property.”
Shins leaned back, watching him gather his belongings, well and truly befuddled.
Nor could she quite figure out why Olgun was projecting the very distinct impression of rolling his eyes at her.