by Ari Marmell
And why not? Everything of import was occurring on the ground floor, after all.
Cyrille and Shins reached the top of the flight, then made their way along the balcony overlooking the banquet hall. The Delacroix scion stopped and gestured at the first door they came to; Shins shrugged and nodded.
The room itself might once have been almost anything: storage, guest bedchamber, gods knew what. Today, like most of Pauvril, it was stone walls, a stubborn wooden door swollen slightly in its frame, and musty emptiness.
“If I have to answer one more question,” Shins burst out before the door was even shut behind them, “I just might scream. Or hit someone. Or hit someone while screaming.”
“Widdershins—”
“We haven't even gotten to the hearing yet! I'm going to be testifying to all this! Why can't they all just shut up and leave me alone and wait?”
“Shins—”
“I swear most of them are going to make up their minds based on three words they heard strung together, secondhand, by a drunk whose half-deaf cousin thought he heard me from across the room!”
“If you could just—”
She realized she was actually waving her hands in the air like a lunatic but couldn't bring herself to stop. “Did you know that Lazare Carnot has already confessed? To targeting the Delacroix, hiring the Crows, all of it! But oh, no, he's a patriarch, still needs a full-on formal trial, and we can't tie in the local Carnots without finding Josce first, and I'm just so sick and tired of this whole—”
Cyrille sighed, threw his own hands briefly over his head in exasperation, then stepped in, took Widdershins firmly by the shoulders, and pressed his lips to hers in a passionate, if clumsy, kiss.
For an instant, she utterly froze; it took a hundred years for the following few seconds to pass. She couldn't breathe, couldn't think. And for that instant, a part of her wanted to respond in kind. Olgun notwithstanding, she'd been so alone for so long, since Davillon…
Renard. Robin. Julien.
She planted a palm on Cyrille's chest and pushed him away. Not hard, really, but he staggered as though he'd been shoved by an ox.
“Shins?” A single syllable, it sounded like rippling water.
Oh, gods. He looks like I just told him the family dog has leprosy.
But at least she knew, now, finally knew, what Calanthe had meant; what Olgun had found so funny; why Cyrille had done, well, pretty much all of what he'd done.
Also, I am an idiot. I mean, even for an idiot, I'm an idiot. I have the brain of a parsnip.
A parsnip who is also an idiot.
“Cyrille, I don't…I think you've misunderstood. I—”
“Misunderstood? Shins…Everything we've done together, everything we…You came to my room, you came to me! For help!”
“Because I could trust you. And I'm glad I could, but—”
“Oh, you can trust me. Bloody fucking fantastic. I'm trusted.”
Widdershins felt her fist clench, her jaw tighten. “There aren't a lot of people I do trust, Cyrille. You have no idea how hard it was to make that leap, but I did. And I was right. We saved your family together.”
“And that's all? We were, what, partners? Coworkers?”
“And friends.”
In a fit of adolescent melodrama of the sort that bridges all castes and all cultures, he spun and pounded the base of his fist against the wall, abrading the skin and leaving a void in the dust. “That's not enough.”
“It's what we are. I'm sorry.”
“You're sorry. Well, praise Cevora.”
“Cyrille—”
“Gods dammit, Shins, please, couldn't you at least try—?”
“Cyrille, please don't make this more awkward than it—”
Only Widdershins heard Olgun's cry of warning, but she and Cyrille both clearly heard the abrupt chaos from the floor below.
The screams.
The guns.
And the deafening, echoing slam of the castle doors.
“My lords and ladies, your attentions, if you would.”
Ivon Maline, looking even larger and oiler and generally meaner than Widdershins remembered him, strode across the room to stand beside one of the food-laden tables. Around him, a dozen of the Thousand Crows held flintlocks and gape-barreled blunderbusses on the various clusters of suddenly horrified guests and on the surviving guards who had been watching the Carnots. A number of those guards were already dead, cut down in the fusillade that had announced the Crows’ presence. A few more of Ivon's thugs were placing heavy bars across the doors they had slammed shut.
“Where the hell did they come from?” Cyrille hissed in Widdershins's ear. The pair of them lay on their bellies at the edge of the second-floor balcony, peering at the havoc below.
Widdershins just shook her head, equally bewildered. “Not through the front door, that's for hopping sure. Not with a small forest of guards and constables outside.”
“Shins, Mother's down there.”
All she could do, for the moment, was lay a hand on his arm and squeeze.
“As I'm sure most of you have already figured out,” Ivon continued, voice not so much booming through the room as oozing, “you have all just volunteered to help me and my friends out with a little problem. Or, in plain terms, you're hostages.
“Do not misunderstand me. Every damn one of you is expendable; I have plenty of spares.” He drew a flintlock from his belt, waved it at the bleeding corpses of the armsmen. “Now, these men were soldiers. They expect to die—and you hoity-toity bastards expect them to die.”
Without pause, without so much as a change of expression, he raised the weapon and put a ball through the skull of a young noblewoman, barely older than Shins herself, who had been huddled, weeping, against a table.
The cries of horror and choked sobs were an almost-physical presence, pressing against the chamber walls and everyone within. They were also, thankfully, loud enough to drown out Cyrille's own outcry and Widdershins's ragged gasp. Her fingers tightened on Cyrille's arm, even as his other hand reached over to clutch hers.
“I trust,” Ivon said, studying the crowd as though he were thinking of buying them, “my message was not lost in translation?”
“I think we understand you just fine.”
Shins couldn't help but grin. It figured she'd be the first in the crowd to speak out.
“Why don't you tell us,” Calanthe Delacroix continued, each word an icicle, “what it is you want from us? So nobody else here has to die.”
“Lady Delacroix, human nature being what it is, I think we all know that other people are going to have to die before this is all over.” Mutters and whimpers from the crowd, then. “I—”
Someone appeared from one of the archways—Shins couldn't see which, from her angle—and approached Ivon, whispering something in his ear. Widdershins's brow furrowed; she wasn't entirely positive, as she'd seen the man only twice, but…
“Is that Josce Tremont?” she whispered.
Cyrille leaned a bit farther out, then nodded.
“Olgun? Any chance we can hear what he's saying?”
Whether the god could have managed that level of enhancement or not proved a moot point, however, as Josce finished whatever report he was making and stepped away. The leader of the Thousand Crows turned his attention back to the gathered hostages.
“To answer your question, for now, I just want you all to gather in small groups. You'll be told where to wait, either in this hall or one of the adjoining rooms. If you run, if you protest, if you move too slowly, if you talk to one another out of turn, if I decide I don't care for your bloody fashion sense, you'll be shot. Any more questions?”
One of the surviving guards raised a hand in the air. “Can we—?”
Ivon drew a second, smaller flintlock and pulled the trigger. Again the crowd gasped, and several aristocrats screamed as the armsman's blood, and worse, spattered over them.
“I don't like questions, either.” His gaze f
ixed not on the man he'd just murdered, but on Calanthe, as he said it. “Get a move on.”
Shins took a breath, preparing to make some suggestion or other, when Olgun shouted in her head once more. She saw one of the Crows happen to glance their way, grabbed Cyrille by the collar, and rolled back from the edge of the balcony, her other hand over his mouth to stifle his startled yelp.
“Olgun? Did he see us?”
Uncertainty, tinged with deep fretting and the same simmering anger she felt in her own gut.
“Don't move!” she whispered to Cyrille, then scurried along on knees and elbows so she might peek over the edge from a different vantage. Her crawl kicked up substantial amounts of dust—again, the cleaning staff had been far less thorough here than downstairs—but a quick word with Olgun, and a tiny tingle of power, prevented a sneeze that might have given her away.
Sliding just near enough to see over, she spotted the man who'd looked up, standing beside Maline and talking low. After a moment, as his boss turned back to the hostages, the Crow tapped one of his companions on the shoulder, and the two of them headed for the stairs.
“All right,” she breathed. “He thinks he might have seen something, but he's nowhere near sure. Probably figured it was just some stray servant, even if he did. He and his bird of a feather are coming to check, just to make certain.”
Then, at a questioning surge from Olgun, “Because of how they're moving. Their guns are drawn, but they're walking casually, yes? They don't look worried. Ready for trouble, but not expecting it.”
She twisted around on her belly, started crawling her way back, then halted once more as an idea settled on her like dislodged cobweb. She scuttled sideways, a particularly stealthy and oddly brunette crab, and pressed herself against the wall. In the feeble lighting up here, she knew the shadows provided more than sufficient camouflage.
“Yeah, it's mean,” she told Olgun, once she'd explained her plan and he'd protested in no uncertain imagery. “But it's also the best way to make sure the wrong people don't get all full of holes and dead and all that. You know…How can something actually be ‘full of holes’? Isn't a hole an absence? Wouldn't it be ‘empty with holes,’ or maybe—
“Yes, I hear them coming! You don't have to sound so relieved about it!”
It happened fast, and roughly as she'd anticipated. The two Crows appeared at the top of the stairs, began their search, and immediately discovered Cyrille. The boy'd been wise enough to try to hide, presumably when he'd heard them climbing the stairs, but Widdershins he wasn't.
Eyes widened. Flintlocks rose. Lungs filled, ready to shout challenges or threats.
The first of the Crows was toppling backward, feet knocked from under him by Widdershins's leg sweep before he had the slightest hint she was there. She came out of her spin, straightening up and lashing out with her rapier, guided by her own keen eye and Olgun's divine influence. The flat of the blade sent the gun hurtling from the man's fist and away down the hall. She knew that the powder would spill from the flashpan so the weapon wouldn't discharge when it hit; her unseen partner would see to it.
The fallen thug's partner, however, proved a bit trickier. He'd shuffled a quick step back even as the first Crow fell, putting himself beyond easy reach. His flintlock was already almost in line, ready to fire. Even if it wasn't too late for Shins and Olgun to pull their early-discharge trick, the noise would certainly summon more Crows from below.
All of which meant, even with her Olgun-boosted reactions, she had only one way to stop him before the weapon fired.
Inwardly she winced, felt her stomach roil. Externally, she displayed no sign of her distress save for a brief quivering at the corner of her eyes and lips, as she launched herself into a textbook-perfect lunge and slid the tip of her blade between the man's ribs and into his heart.
It couldn't actually have been minutes, couldn't really have been seconds—but it felt to Shins as though it were at least that long before he tore his stunned and accusing stare away and slid from her rapier in a limb, bleeding heap.
“Yes,” she snipped at Olgun's tentative caress of comfort. “I've killed before, when we had to. It's not a big deal.”
Which was, of course, a lie almost too big to have fit within the banquet hall downstairs, let alone the hallway overlook. It was a lie she clung to with brutal stubbornness, though she'd have been pressed to say why. Was it because killing the Crow did bother her, as such things always had?
Or because it didn't bother her quite as much as she'd expected it would?
She turned back to the man she'd first taken down. He gasped like a fish—a surprised fish who'd just run a footrace—only now recovering the wind that she had knocked out of him. Widdershins studied, then almost casually stomped on his crotch.
Something that might have been a sound—she'd have needed the hearing of a dog to be certain—passed through his abruptly pallid lips.
“Where were you?!”
She jumped at the sudden rasp, and only then remembered Cyrille, who was now standing beside her. “What if you hadn't been in time?”
“I was.” She knelt, biting her lip long enough to clean the streaks from her blade on the fallen man's pants, then stood once more. “So what's the problem?”
“What if you hadn't? It took you a lot longer than I'd expected—”
“I had to make sure they were fully distracted, yes?”
Cyrille's lips kept moving, but his store of sounds and syllables seemed to have run low. “You used me as bait?!” he finally squeaked out.
“If it helps, you did a marvelous job at it. Now,” she continued over his unintelligible sputtering, “help me drag these men somewhere not quite so much in the middle of everything.”
“I…You…Gah! Fine.”
Manhandling the two bodies, living and dead, into the room from which Shins and Cyrille had just come wasn't terribly difficult. They could do precious little about the bloodstains, but hopefully the poor illumination up here would cloak that, at least for a while.
“Help me find something to tie this guy with,” Shins instructed, casting futilely about the empty room.
“We should kill him.”
Shins froze, so sudden and stiff her neck began to ache. “What? No!”
“Why?” Cyrille sounded genuinely puzzled. “You already killed one of them.”
“That's different! I was defending myself! Defending you!”
“We still are.” Cyrille thrust an arm out, pointing toward the door and the balcony. “Look what's going on down there, what they've already done! If he recovers, if he's able to slip his bonds, or cry for attention? We're dead before we can stop these people!”
We? Stop? But that was for later; at the moment…
“Cyrille…” A part of her, a large part, wondered if he was right, if she was being foolish. It would be easier, now. Now that she'd seen what the Crows were capable of, now that killing the first man hadn't twisted her up as she'd expected.
Now that she and Olgun were so angry all the time.
“I can't. Cyrille, I just can't.”
“You're being a fool!”
I was just wondering about that.
Shins stepped toward him, paused, then turned. The Crow was staring widely at both of them, for which Widdershins couldn't blame him. She stepped over him, to the corner where they'd temporarily tossed the fallen men's weapons.
“Here.” One of the Crow's sword belts sailed through the air, sheathed rapier included, to land perfectly in the boy's clumsy catch. “You want him dead? You do it.”
He nodded, drew the rapier, and swung through a few practice slashes. Cyrille crossed the room in three paces, lay the tip of the blade against the man's throat. The crow gurgled something, squeezed his eyes shut.
A long minute passed. A minute more.
Cyrille sighed, sheathed the weapon once more, and stepped back. He grinned shyly at Shin's bright, genuine smile and began fiddling with the buckles on the belt.
“Olgun?”
He responded with an emotional nod.
Widdershins stepped around the wounded man, dropped to her knees, and wrapped an arm around his throat. He barely had the strength or energy to thrash before he was completely out cold—hopefully, thanks to Olgun's aid and guidance, without much in the way of long-term damage.
Then, just to be sure, and again being careful not to overdo it, she rammed a backhanded fist into the Crow's throat.
She shrugged in answer to her companion's startled gasp. “Even if he wakes up sooner than I expect, he won't be calling out any time soon. Might not be able to speak clearly at all for a day or three.
“Would you bring me that belt back so I can tie…Why are you wearing that?”
Cyrille adjusted the last of the buckles so the belt hung comfortably but securely across his waist. “Um, so I have somewhere to carry this?” He tapped the hilt of the thug's rapier. “And this,” he added, moving across the chamber to collect one of the flintlocks and powder bags.
“You don't need to carry those, Cyrille, because you're not going anywhere.”
“Uh, no. I'm going with you.”
“Uh, also no. You're going to find a place to hide, you're going to lock the door behind you, and—”
She winced as Cyrille shoved the flintlock hard through a loop in his “borrowed” belt. “That's my family down there. And friends. My odds of success—and survival—are a lot higher with you than alone, but I'll go it alone if you make me. I am going.”
“This isn't a game, you turkey!”
“I'm aware.”
Widdershins's teeth were clenched so tightly, she could probably have bitten Olgun and made it hurt. Is this what I was like to deal with for Alexandre or Julien? I might've died to get away from me, too.
She and Olgun jolted in unison. Where in the wide and wiggly world had that thought come from?!
No time to worry about it now, though. Not when she had a stubborn young aristocrat to talk out of suicide.