by Carol Berg
Perhaps Saverian’s summary description of my new talents had not included the required livery, for Voushanti’s startled visage hinted that he’d not expected me to emerge from the gap lacking all accoutrement save light-drawn rocks and sea creatures.
“Strange, are they not?” I tossed the bundle of wool and velvet atop the case and stretched out my arms. With every passing moment in this shadowed alley, my gards brightened and their color deepened. Somehow the sight of them…or perhaps the gards themselves…left me feeling stronger, less battered by the wretched day, and if not exactly warm, somewhat warmer than my state of undress would promise. “Can’t say I know what exactly they are. But they don’t work if I keep them hidden.”
His terrible eyes traveled up my body until they locked on my own. The red centers pulsed faintly, very like his blood as it had leaked out of him. “We are two of a kind,” he said, his mouth twisting in his grotesque semblance of amusement. “Neither here nor there.”
Squirming inside, I picked up my case and my clothes bundle. “We’d best move. Wouldn’t want to be late.” The ways in which I did not wish to resemble Voushanti were beyond numbering.
Shoving worries and plans aside, I stepped forward, my eyes on the stone walls and banks, on the overhanging trees, my ears on the dribbling conduit that piped water from the well yard. I inhaled the scents of the fortress cookfires and refuse heaps, and recalled the stink of fear as the ragged folk gathered on the hillside lane near the Cartamandua house. The air would be thicker in Palinur…and a wetter cold than here…with more snow on the ground—old, wet snow, freezing as the night approached.
We walked slowly along the alley. At a particular well-shadowed length of the wall, I threw my bundles over and climbed up the old stones…
…straight into the brushy, snow-clogged beech grove in Palinur where I had undressed on my way back to Renna earlier in the day. Voushanti topped the wall and immediately spun in his tracks, for the babble, clatter, and stink of the beggars’ encampment fell on our heads like a bludgeon. Fires had driven more people into the purebloods’ lane. Enchantments vibrated on every side of us, shielding the fine houses that stood back from the lane.
“I’ll be ready to go in just a moment.” As I bent down to retrieve my clothes, my foot broke through the crusted snow, scraping my ankle and shin. A youthful voice cried, “Mam, it’s the angel come back again!” And Saverian climbed over the wall.
“Gods’ teeth!” I said, as running feet crashed through the underbrush from farther down the lane, and bodies gathered just at the point we’d topped the wall—cutting off my return route. We had nowhere to run. This particular grove crowded between my family’s garden wall and the lane. I shoved Voushanti and my case behind the largest tree, then grabbed my cloak and Saverian and dived into the underbrush. “What the devil are you doing here?”
Saverian crawled on top of me, spreading her own cloak wide and enfolding me in her arms. “Just be still,” she whispered. “Your gards shine like a watch fire.” I drew my legs up under her, while she proceeded to tuck all the straggling bits of me and my distinctively colored cloak out of sight.
“Over there in the trees,” piped the child. “By the saints, I swear it. Knew he’d come back!”
“’Tis a sign! The god’s not forgotten us.” Murmurs swelled from the lane beyond the grove. “He sends his holy legion to drive out these Harrowers!”
“Blue fire, ye say, child?” said a man with a voice like gravel. “My gammy told me of those who wear naught but blue fire…”
“And wings, boy, did ye see wings or no?” Boots and bodies crashed through the dry brush.
Saverian hissed. “Do something, sorcerer. Move, else they’ll think we’re dead and not just preoccupied.”
The warm weight of her body pressed my bare backside into the twigs and snow. How like Saverian to lie close in a thorny bed…which thought led me to remember Elene in my bed, sunlight bathing her golden skin…which led me to recall Saverian’s capable hands, guiding me through my nivat madness…touching me everywhere…Of a sudden, fear and strangeness and this ridiculous situation, lustful memory and a barrage of sensations—earth and snow and woman and oncoming night—enveloped me in such a fever, I could not control it.
“Deunor’s mercy, mistress,” I choked, “I dare not move.”
But I did. Safely hidden beneath her cloak, I snaked my arm up her back. Fingering her neck, I pressed her head gently downward, until her face rested in the crook of my neck and shoulder. Her breath so warm…so inviting. Her bones so firm and straight. My alter hand stroked her rigid spine to yielding…then found its way to her backside, while my knee drew up between her legs and nudged them apart…
Her head popped up. “Villain madman!” A sharp blow stung my cheek…and waked me from my fog of lust to shuffling bodies and laughter all around our ungainly heap. “Get your hands off—”
I pulled her head downward, crushing her lips against mine. Her hands scratched and gouged my arms and pulled my hair as she tried to wrestle away. Scrabbling, wriggling, she drew her knee up sharply, and I shifted to preclude disaster, praying her cloak would not fall aside and display my glowing feet.
“No angel here, young Filp,” said the gravel-voiced man. “’Tis only ones searching for a bit of heaven fallen in the midst of hell.”
“Could ye not give a man a quat to ’imself?” I shouted, squeezing Saverian’s face to my shoulder before she bit my lips off. “Yea, laugh as ye will…get ye all to Magrog’s furnace and take all pinchy wives with ye!”
The men shoved the pale-haired child behind the women. Ribald comments all around and they decided the fun was over. Murmurs and laughter faded into the evening noises of the lane.
“I’m sorry,” I said, still muzzling the squirming physician. Torn between annoyance that she had intruded her peculiar self into an already precarious activity and a fear that I’d committed an unpardonable sin and forfeited her skillful and sensible aid, I couldn’t stop talking. “My head just went off…well, not my head exactly…but it’s been a long, weary autumn…yet I meant no ill to you. I would never—Well, I don’t think I would. I do appreciate your hiding me—damnably awkward to light up like this when I can’t afford attention. Though one might say you invited this problem by coming along where you were not expected—though certainly you did not invite my inappropriate reaction—but I’ve no idea what we’re going to do with you or how we’re going to keep you safe when you cannot possibly go with us. What the devil were you thinking?” Hoping she had enough fodder for conversation beyond withering my manhood, I released her.
She climbed to her feet without the least care where her elbows, knees, and fists found purchase. Were her discomfiture a bit more intense, her complexion might have lit sigils of its own in purest scarlet.
“I thought that the people who were most likely to need my care happened to be in Palinur—three men with somewhat specialized needs that no hedgerow leech or back-alley surgeon is capable of tending. I thought that you and I had come to some kind of mutual respect, untainted, for the most part, by the brutish instincts of those who prefer action to reason.”
“Well, of course, we—”
“As for my safety, you are most certainly not responsible for me. Nor is anyone but myself. After a discussion with Brother Victor, I decided that I might better be close by as you attempt this rescue, and that as long as I was here, I could bring news of these ventures to your sister, the Sinduria, who seems to care what becomes of you, though she’s not yet been informed that she is not your sister. And I brought these.” She pulled a vial and a scrap of stained canvas from her pocket and shoved them into my hand. “Elene told me that touching blood enabled you to track a person more easily—a detail that you failed to mention to me. While you and Mistress Moonhead exchanged your overwrought farewells, I was retrieving a sample of Prince Osriel’s blood, which I keep on hand to formulate his medicines. I also managed to acquire this scrap cut from one of
Thane Stearc’s old jupons, though I don’t know that dried blood has the same useful properties for pureblood magic.”
“Blood…gods, yes. It makes tracking much easier. I just never imagined anyone would have any.” Thickheaded and embarrassed, I brushed twigs and ice crystals from my skin. “And, yes, Thalassa should be told. All right…yes, that would be kind of you…”
Happily for me, Voushanti joined us before I could get too tangled up in words or recollections of the sensation of Saverian’s breath on my skin. The sun was sinking. I turned my back to her and donned my finery as quickly as I could. Nothing like the luxurious restriction of buttons and laces for taming lustful mania. Gods, Saverian…of all women in the world…
So do as she says, fool. Attempt to reason, instead of acting blindly. I fastened my cloak with the ivory-and-gold wolf brooch.
“You can’t traipse alone through Palinur, mistress physician,” I said, tugging the mask from my pocket. “No matter how easily you can ensorcel those who aim to harm you, it’s too dangerous. I wouldn’t let any friend of mine do so. I’ll come up with some explanation for Max, so Voushanti can deliver you to Thalassa.”
Voushanti, his own attire impeccable despite his sojourn in the shrubbery, glared at me as if I were a particularly stupid infant. “To change your arrangements this late risks the entire plan, such as it is. And I must follow you to the Harrower priestess, so we’ll know where you and the prince are held. I’ve no time to coddle foolish women.”
“I’m not an idiot,” said Saverian, her dignity regained though her skin retained a rosy hue. “I’ll wait here until Magnus is delivered and transferred. Once you know his location, Mardane, you can return here for me. I would welcome your escort on my brief visit to the Mother’s temple.”
“Leaving the scene will jeopardize the prince’s rescue,” snapped Voushanti. “You have blood-bound me to this man, but I cannot read his thoughts. With no means of contact between us, I must be available at whatever time he chooses.”
“No means of contact?” Saverian raised her eyebrows, quite smug. “You gentlemen really should have said something earlier. I can, of course, work a small enchantment…”
Stupid not to think of it. My sister Thalassa had once worked a word trigger with her favorite insults, so that anywhere within ten quellae, I could hear her address me as fiend heart or iron skull did she but feed magic to the words.
Voushanti and I left the beech grove tight bound with the names of dead man and bluejay and a few specific signals for special circumstances. If he didn’t hear from me in three days, he would force his way inside Fortress Torvo. As we picked our way through the crowded lane to our meeting with Max, my hearing picked Saverian’s laughter out of the noise. I smiled as I remembered the warmth of her breath and the feel of her firm flesh and slender bones crushed against my skin. What an extraordinary woman.
Chapter 21
“See the iron grate over the drainage canal? That’s where you’ll come out. You can still quicken a spell, yes?” Max spoke using only the half of his mouth beneath his mask. As protocol required refraining from conversation in the presence of ordinaries, every pureblood youth developed the skill early on.
“Yes.” I mimicked his trick. Though I stood slightly behind him, I was enough taller that I could easily be observed by either the spear-wielding Harrowers guarding Sila Diaglou’s gates, the bowmen on the barbican above the gate tunnel, or the five of Bayard’s warriors who surrounded us protectively, while their captain identified our party to the gate commander.
The knee-high grate to which Max referred blocked the only breach in the thick, ugly walls of Fortress Torvo. The canal had once drained water and sewage from the fortress, but that function had likely been relocated as the city grew up around the place. Weeds, dirty snow, and broken paving choked the old ditch, which disappeared into the squalid houses and snow-clogged ruins that crowded this miserable square. Riie Doloure. Last time I had been here, Harrowers had been throwing severed heads from the battlements down to their rioting fellows and fire had raged in the tenements. On that vile morning, men and women had been screaming from behind those walls, one of them Abbot Luviar, as his executioner exposed his bowels and set them afire.
Another wave of the sweats dampened my skin, my hands trembled in their bonds of silk and steel, and my own bowels threatened to betray me. What kind of idiot would broach Sila Diaglou’s fortress in shackles? And Gildas would be here. Gildas, who knew all my weaknesses.
The plan we had made over the past day had gone smoothly thus far. Max, Voushanti, and I had made a show of my resistance in front of Prince Bayard, enough to make Bayard think me cowardly and not worth keeping for himself. Sila Diaglou had accepted Bayard’s request for a meeting. Now it was up to Max to convince her of our story, and it was up to Max’s spy within Sila’s entourage to provide me a blade. With a weapon and a smattering of luck, I could get out of a warded cell. Outside of a cell, I could use magic to free the others. Somehow. That was the plan. As with most plans, it seemed far less plausible in daylight.
“Forward,” ordered Bayard’s captain upon his return from the gate. “Lower arms.”
He pivoted smartly. We marched briskly past the gate guards, under the raised portcullis, and into the gate tunnel. I resisted the urge to look back at the burned-out tenements where Voushanti and Saverian were to have set up their watchpost by now. Rather I gave thanks that my hands were silkbound and that Max’s hand gripped my arm to prevent my stumbling in the dark. I did not want to touch earth and sense the horrors that had gone on here.
The dark-stained gallows, the judges’ platform, and the prisoners’ cage stood vacant in the outer bailey, like the bones of some vicious monster left to rot in the weak sunlight. As we were hurried across the yard and through the inner gate, I noted the rubble-filled drainage channel. Another grate barred its passage through the inner wall. If I could find no promising venue to key my Danae shifting, I might be forced to use Max’s route to the outside. Naught of this executioner’s yard recalled enough of Renna’s baileys that I could take us from one to the other by Danae magic.
Sweat dribbled down my back. I could not retreat now. They were here—Stearc and Osriel at least. One touch of the blood samples that Saverian had brought had told me that much. But I could get no better sense of their exact location until I was inside.
We proceeded up a narrow ramp, overlooked by the inner wall walk, two flanking towers, and the arrow loops of the blocklike keep. What remained of Fortress Torvo’s conical roofs stated that this small fortress had been here long before the Aurellian invasion, long before Palinur had grown into a great city.
A barren courtyard awaited us, and more Harrower troops—some in the shabby cottes and braies of townsmen or the shapeless tunics of villeins, some in sturdier padded leather jaques with metal plates sewn on arms and breast. But all of them wore orange rags tied about their necks or arms or trailing from their hats. At the head of a wooden stair, two Harrowers opened the iron-bound doors of the keep.
Max released my arm and smoothed the wrinkles his fingers had made in my velvet sleeve. His dark eyes glittered. “Well done, little brother. I doubted you’d balls enough to make it so far without bolting. Are you ready?”
Who could be ready for the things Sila did? I ducked my head, rather than embarrassing myself by choking within his hearing. The priestess wanted me alive. She had some use for me. I had to believe that.
Max grinned and flicked a finger at one of his men, who quickly knelt in front of me with a weighty set of shackles. I lashed out at the soldier’s head with my bound hands and twisted away as if to bolt. But as Max and I had planned, a few wrenched muscles, bruising holds, and snarled curses later, I was well subdued and stumbling up the steps in chains.
Max gripped my arm with one hand. “After you.” Then he added so that none but I could hear, “May Serena Fortuna smile on our first fraternal venture. My spy will use the password brethren.”
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nbsp; Inhaling a last breath of the open air, I stepped inside.
No dais or grand chair marked Sila Diaglou’s barren hall. No tapestries covered the smoke-blackened walls. The old fortress was well suited to a temporary military headquarters—the best-fortified position in the city outside the royal compound itself, plenty of space for bedding down men and animals. Splintered remnants marked where wooden walls had once divided the long chamber into three. Where the roof had leaked at one end of the hall, the rotting roof beams sagged ominously. Harrower fighters drifted in and out of the hall, warming themselves at the cookfires scattered across the cracked stone floor. I doubted the drafty ruin ever got warm.
Leaving our escort at the door, Max led me confidently through the busy chamber, past five or six warriors arguing across a broad table propped up at one corner with stones. A troop of perhaps twenty—a mix of poorly turned out swordsmen, ragged townsmen, and several sturdy women—stood attentively as an officer gave them orders to raze a mill outside the city’s southern gates. Women and boys served out the steaming contents of copper cauldrons to the milling fighters.
At the far end of the hall, a group of ten or fifteen split and moved aside at our approach. Sila Diaglou stood in the center. Warrior’s garb of steel-reinforced leather rested as comfortably on her tall, slender frame as on any man’s, while her flaxen hair, cut short since I had seen her preside over Luviar’s execution, now curled about her pale, imperious face like the fair locks of painted cherubs. Here in the ruddy light of cookfires and torches, the murderous witch appeared little older than Elene.
A tall, elderly woman in shapeless brown leaned on Sila’s right arm. Though the wisps of white hair escaped from her wimple seemed oddly out of place in such a company, the old woman’s narrow eyes gleamed as sharp as an Aurellian poniard. Beside her stood a beardless man with a needle-sharp chin, a small, copper-skinned young woman with great brown eyes, and a soft-looking man with oiled black curls and an ear that was split, gnarled, and bulging like a chestnut canker—Sila’s accomplices in slaughter.