by Ari Marmell
She moved as she groused, having scarcely stopped to look around before going straight to the window. She had only heartbeats before the room began to fill with pointy metal things, as well as men who wanted to stick her with them. A look outside and, yep, as she'd figured: Delacroix soldiers in the street. Not a lot—they had to be pretty spread out if they were surrounding the place—but enough to slow her down until the others arrived, should she attempt to challenge them.
All right. She'd give them a different sort of challenge.
Shins threw herself through the window, three limbs and head tucked into a ball, left hand outstretched. She grabbed the edge of the pane as she passed, swinging herself around rather than straight through it. Her legs and her other hand shot out, fingers and toes striking the wall just before her face would have.
Even for her, even with divine aid, it was tricky. The outer walls of the Second Home weren't especially smooth, but neither did they display many obvious flaws. Her fingers and toes scrabbled a bit before she found enough purchase. A quick, slapdash climb—she could only imagine how it looked from the ground, but she assumed it bore some resemblance to a drunken beetle trying to scale an icicle—and she vaulted onto the roof.
She'd definitely been spotted; several of the soldiers below were indeed pointing her way and shouting. Well, good. She'd have hated to pull a stunt like that and have had her audience miss it.
So where to…? Ah.
The nearest building to the Second Home was off to her right. The distance between the two structures, factoring in height, represented a jump Shins wouldn't have wanted to try by herself on her best day, and only marginally more with Olgun's help on his best day.
“Trusting you not to let me slip or otherwise go splat,” she said to him. “If I go, you go with me, and I'm pretty sure nobody around here wants to spend hours scraping god off the roadway.”
Widdershins knelt, swept Cyrille's cloak from her shoulders, scooped up some snow, and held the garment closed like a large sack. She ran, then, pushing up one side of the peaked roof to stand at the very pinnacle. From here, she could see much of Aubier, poking up through thin sheets of white. Shins couldn't help but remember the last building from which she'd had such a view, and wished bitterly that this roof had been as flat as the earlier. Would've made this a lot simpler. And safer.
And saner.
“Ready? Too bad.”
Taking enormous strides, each one a stretch, she started down the slope toward the eaves. Each step was taunting fate, a veritable death wish. With each one, her foot began to slide, her balance to fail, her body to topple forward where she would doubtless slide like a greased eel and shoot off the roof to her squishy doom.
Widdershins had lived by her agility for much of her life. Olgun could perform a great many unnatural feats. Still, the two of them together found it a struggle; by the time she reached the edge, the young thief was sweating despite the chill.
It had worked, though. Looking back, she saw a trail in the snow that very strongly suggested someone had run down the peaked roof, clearly in a desperate jump for freedom. Sure, any skilled tracker, or even a sharp-eyed guard, could probably tell the tracks weren't made by a runner, but Shins was counting on her pursuers being in a hurry. She just had to help them along a bit.
She spun the cloak-turned-sack over her head once, twice, and let fly. Carried by the extra weight of the snow packed within, it sailed over the gap and flattened out atop the opposite roof. A dozen signs revealed she hadn't actually made the leap and lost the cloak—the lack of other marks or tracks on that roof, the snow scattered atop the cloak—but with luck, they'd be on that roof (and off this one) before noticing any of them.
A few deep breaths, the chill air searing her lungs. They were exhausted, she and Olgun both, but they had one more impossible feat ahead.
Widdershins tensed and jumped. She felt the god's invisible touch under her heels, propelling her, bringing the impossible within reach.
She almost didn't make it. Had they both been stronger, fresher, she'd have landed cleanly atop the edge of the chimney, feet planted to either side for balance. As it was, she fell a bit short. Her thighs slammed into the edge of the stone with brutal force, and the resulting topple sent a sharp shock, and probably a deep bruise, across her upper ribs. For a moment she lay there, sprawled over the flue, ragged breaths and muffled sobs racking her body. The smoke—a thin tendril, thankfully, as the innkeepers would burn only so much firewood at a time—leaked past her to either side.
No time, no time… She didn't know if the hostel had stairs to the roof, or where they might be; or whether the soldiers would have to find a ladder. She knew only they couldn't be far, now. Need to get up. Move, you turkey!
Groaning despite every effort not to, she levered herself around and slid feetfirst into the chimney. Back pressed against one wall, feet against the other, knees tight against her chest, she waited. Her muscles, already fatigued, began to cramp. The heat of the fire three stories below would soon cross over from nicely warm to a slow broil, and even the fairly light flow of smoke would begin to choke her, as well as back up into the common room, if she remained too long.
Now that her slapdash escape plan was no longer in danger of being interrupted, Widdershins found herself wishing, hoping, even praying that the Delacroix soldiers would kindly hurry up—before said escape plan did the job of killing her for them.
Night descended. The waning moon hauled itself into the sky, frequently stopping to rest on the backs of passing clouds. Traffic throughout Aubier grew sparse as lanterns and hearths began to gleam through shuttered windows across the city. The snow let up, replaced by biting winds and the occasional finger of sleet.
And Widdershins, for the third time since she'd come to this godsforsaken place, crept carefully through the Delacroix fields, drawing ever nearer the main house.
She was scarcely recognizable as the same person she'd been the last time. She shivered in the cold, lacking any sort of cloak, warmed only by her leathers, her constant motion, and her searing, resentful fury. She was covered in chimney ash, her face and hands and clothes caked with the stuff. It had taken everything Olgun could do to keep her from leaving a trail when she'd crept off the Second Home's rooftop. (The soldiers might have left enough tracks, in their search, that her own prints wouldn't show, but regular clumps of flaking ash would have been another story altogether.) Her ribs and legs throbbed where they'd bruised; her chest ached and her throat burned from both the cold air and the choking smoke she'd had to endure for long minutes on end. She stank of sweat, wood smoke, and desperation.
Twice she'd dropped flat, hiding in the shadows and the rolling divots in the plain as Delacroix guards passed nearby on patrol. Both times, she'd had to squelch an urge to stand and draw their attention, just as an excuse to vent some frustration.
This place was poison to her. This family was poison. How could they possibly be related to the man she'd known, so long ago?
She knew the window she wanted this time and headed straight for it. Sure enough, there he was, asleep in his bed. She could see, from the redness in his cheeks and puffy eyes, that he'd been crying before he fell asleep. No doubt the matriarch's discipline had been harsh, perhaps even physical. But the point was, Cyrille was safe, or relatively so. He had, indeed, been grabbed by his own family, not by the enemy. He didn't need saving—at least not of any sort she could provide.
Which meant there was nothing left holding her here.
“Come on, Olgun. We're leaving.”
They were a few dozen yards from the house before Olgun realized she didn't just mean leaving the property. Multiple visions of Alexandre Delacroix, striking and intense, flickered across her vision.
“I don't care!” she snapped back. “I've tried as hard as he could ever have asked, even harder! They tried to kill me, for pastries’ sake!”
More imagery, more emotion.
“And do you know for sure it was just
Malgier being a raving idiot? That it wasn't on Mommy's orders? Because I don't! No. Leaving. Now.”
Then, “No. No! I don't care! Alexandre would understand. And even if he would be disappointed, I don't care! I don't!”
A final surge of emotion, sharp, stabbing.
“No, I…don't care if you're disappointed, either.” But she'd have had to be both unconscious and deaf to miss the quiver of doubt in her own protest.
She had, by then, gotten some slight distance from the house—and apparently at least a few yards beyond the boundaries of good fortune. Arguing too loudly with Olgun? Failure to pay attention, to drop into hiding at the first sound? Whatever the case, even the combined abilities of god and thief weren't infallible.
“Hold where you are, hands on your head!”
“Oh, figs.”
A trio of them, household guards, faintly glowing specters in the diluted moonlight. Shins couldn't tell in the gloom if these were men she'd run into before—though she couldn't imagine the Delacroix employed too many more armsmen than she'd already encountered—but she could make out the muskets pointed her way.
“I'm tired of this,” she growled, not bothering to keep her voice down.
“Then perhaps,” the first of the guards began as he neared, “you shouldn't go places you're not—”
Widdershins sidestepped and jumped, hurling herself at him while clearing his line of fire. The soldier, with an abortive sound that might have been distantly related to a yelp, swung his weapon around, struggling to bring it back on target.
Her hands closed on the barrel, yanked the musket from his grip, and then drove it back again, slamming the stock into his face. The guard screamed through split lips and missing teeth, gurgling horribly as he folded. Widdershins crouched, hurling the musket like a javelin and then catching the semiconscious soldier, interposing him between herself and the other two guns.
Or one gun, rather, as her makeshift projectile knocked one of the remaining guards reeling.
Recognizing that opening fire was a poor option, the nearer man charged, throwing his musket aside and pulling his rapier. Shins dropped the wounded man and met her attacker halfway, parrying a single thrust, pirouetting past him, and—as she'd done with the Thousand Crows in the foundry—focused instead on the more distant foe, the one clearly unprepared for her attack.
Her sword took him deep in the shoulder before his own blade had fully cleared its scabbard.
She heard a noise in the air, a vicious tremor, and realized she was literally snarling as she flung herself back at the middle guard. Steel kissed and sang, and the third man fell, crying out and clutching at a knee that had just been broken by an inhumanly powerful kick.
They'd live, all three of them. Shins sniffed, knelt to wipe her blade clean on one of their cloaks, thought about taking one to warm herself, began to reach for the clasp…
The guard spasmed, clutching, clawing at his mutilated knee. It seemed, in the faint light and against the uneven earth, to flex at angles no human limb should bend.
Three men who would live—but who would not soon, perhaps would not ever, live as they had. Whose bodies might never fully recover.
Widdershins felt her stomach lurch, her gorge rise. She doubled over, and only Olgun's calming touch in her gut, her mind, her soul kept her from dropping fully to her knees, vomiting profusely over the grass.
“What's happened to me?” She couldn't even cry; wanted to, felt as though she needed to, but the tears wouldn't come.
And Olgun had no answer she could comprehend.
It took a moment, but she finally brought herself under control and stood. “All right, we can't just leave them here. I could fire a shot from one of their muskets. That should bring someone running, yes? Another patrol, or maybe somebody from the house?”
She glanced that way even as she had the thought, watched the faint twinkle of firelight in many of the windows…
Something slipped into place in her mind, so abruptly it made her jump and dragged a startled squeak from Olgun.
I know how they did it. I know how the Crows and the Carnots pulled it all off.
Shins absently patted the pouch on her belt that still held the map she'd acquired from the unconscious thug some nights past. A map that showed the Delacroix properties, broken into numbered sections. She tapped, and she peered across the field at the house, a dull hulking shape with glinting windows, and tapped some more.
“I'm done with this,” she insisted.
Olgun said nothing.
“They'll figure it out for themselves. Or maybe they won't. I don't care.”
Nothing.
“I'm just going to draw some attention so these men get help, and then we are leaving.”
Still nothing—an emotional void, bereft of the slightest sensation or response.
“Oh, figs!”
Widdershins broke into a jog back toward the Delacroix house.
And Olgun smiled.
“All right, Cyrille.” The matriarch's voice was cold, flat, a thin sheet of ice over a bottomless, sunless lake. “We're here, as you requested. You do, of course, have something of such tremendous import that it absolutely could not wait for a more reasonable hour?” Her lack of expression, lack of tone, promised very unpleasant results if he did not.
Cyrille nodded, only half-listening. “As he requested” indeed! It had taken close to an hour of arguing, insisting, pleading, even shouting—and it had been, it seemed, the last that had convinced Calanthe, if only because it was so greatly out of character for her youngest son.
So here they were, gathered in the library as they had been the night Shins had come into his life. Or almost as they had been. Mother took the same central chair, a queen ruling her tiny domain from her tiny throne. Arluin stood nearby, his attentions on the bookshelves while waiting for someone to speak. Anouska, opposite her mother like a younger reflection; Josephine with her lantern, the twins with their coins. Marjolaine was absent, as always, but this time, so was Malgier. Apparently he was confined to his chambers until the matriarch decided on a fitting discipline. Cyrille had known Malgier was in serious trouble, but not for what. Not until—
“Did you drag us down here to spend what's left of the night gawping?” Anouska demanded of him.
A quick blink, and he was back in the moment. “No. First, though…Mother, would you permit me to dismiss the servants, please?”
Multiple scoffs, then, from his siblings. Chandler and Helaine asked, in unison, “Don't want to embarrass yourself in front of the help?” Several of the others rolled their eyes, and even Arluin looked skeptical. Hell, the servants by the door were, themselves, only scarcely managing to hide their entitled smirks.
“Don't be tiresome, Cyrille,” Calanthe scolded. “Nothing you could possibly have to say, no family business involving you in any way, is so sensitive as all that.”
“You might be surprised. Mother…Please.”
Calanthe studied him, much as though she were attempting to discern what strange species of being he was, and then waved a pair of fingers behind her without looking back. The two servants started a bit, as did several of the Delacroix, but they knew better than to argue. The heavy doors clacked together behind the departing attendants.
Cyrille earned himself even more scoffing and muttering from his siblings as he moved to the door and threw the heavy bolt, ensuring nobody could open it from the outside. He wandered to the other, smaller door, locked that one as well.
“If you're quite finished,” the matriarch began, no longer even pretending to conceal her impatience, “perhaps you could tell us what this is about before dawn begins to—”
She was staring at him, suddenly alert, and Cyrille had no doubt why. He'd seen his reflection in the window as he moved to the second door. His face was ghastly pale, his lip trembling despite his efforts to bite it still.
“What have you done?” she hissed at him. The rest of her children went still, their attentions sn
agged by her tone.
“I—”
“He hasn't done anything.” He didn't know precisely where she'd been hiding; in a chamber such as this, how she'd been hiding. He knew only that she seemed to appear from nowhere as she spoke. “All he did was arrange an opportunity for us to talk. So let's talk, yes?”
Shins had no idea how many blades or other weapons to expect. It was one of the details Cyrille hadn't been able to guess at, when she'd snuck into his room to plan. Thankfully, it appeared only two, as the two eldest children drew steel—Arluin a heavy dueling dagger; Anouska a wicked, fat-bladed stiletto. With Olgun's aid and aim, a quick crescent kick sent the latter weapon spinning across the library to land in the corner, while a series of quick thrusts and twists with her rapier yanked the larger blade from Arluin's hand. Shins stepped in, caught it, hurled it, in one smooth motion, her fingers alive with a touch of the divine.
It sank deep into the wood of the smaller door, just beside the latch, blocking the bolt from sliding back. A few quick sidesteps and she stood before the larger door, blocking the only other easy exit from the library.
“You could try shouting,” she said to the Delacroix, who thus far hadn't gotten much past the wide-eyed, slack-jawed gasping stage. “But even if your people heard you, they're not getting in anytime soon. If I wanted to hurt you, I'd have plenty of time to do it. Hopping hens, I could have done it just now.” She waved her sword idly at Anouska and Arluin. “Can we please, for just a moment, accept that I'm here for reasons that don't involve blood, pain, and the ruining of such fine outfits?”
Calanthe turned her head, not toward Widdershins but toward Cyrille. Her youngest son visibly quailed before whatever it was he saw, shrinking back, his lips trembling. Only then did the matriarch focus on Widdershins again.
The thief knew she wasn't exactly at her most presentable. Despite quick efforts to clean up in Cyrille's room, much of her face and neck were smeared with ash. Her clothes were spotted with it, her hair thickly dusted. Trails ran through the darker splotches, where her sweat had sluiced bits of it away before threatening to freeze in the cold. She didn't even want to know what she smelled like to other people, but was fairly certain she could turn wine to vinegar at thirty paces.