Keely felt for the key without ever breaking gaze with the inquisitrix. As her fingers closed around it, Cosima turned to Keely with a pleasant smile, pointed broadly out the window in the direction of the gathering, and said, “Remember that’s the fate worse than death everyone talks about, should you find yourself with a choice between the two. Now go, and Goddess guide you.”
Keely nodded obediently as she took a step back, then turned and started off down the hallway, quickly breaking into a run. Rather than risk getting lost, she headed right back the way she’d come—down the steps, across the courtyard, and into the garden beside the library.
She was nearing the outer wall at a dead run when the side door to the library (that had been so inconveniently locked earlier) flew open, and a postulant with a massive armload of poorly balanced books came rushing out. They saw each other in time to avoid a collision, but when the girl came to a sudden stop, the upper half of her stack of books kept right on going, and Keely found herself pelted by a deluge of literature.
“Sorry! Sorry!” the girl stammered, setting down what was left of her load on a garden bench and turning to help Keely up—but Keely was already back on her feet and flinging a book over the garden wall. “I…Here now!”
“Oopsie! Lost my temper. Let me go get that for you.” Keely smiled, patting the girl on the cheek. Without waiting for a response, she darted over to where an old fountain provided a few handy steps up, then pulled herself the rest of the way up and over to land neatly in the alley outside.
“Hey! This really is your book!” she called back indignantly, picking the thing up off the cobbles and scowling at it. “Where’s my book?!”
“What?!” the confused girl called back.
“Heads up!”
The postulant ducked in alarm as a large book came sailing past her head, then went back to gathering the others from where they lay in the dust. A few moments later, breathing hard from the effort of crawling back over the wall without a convenient step up, Keely dropped back into the garden.
“There it is!” Keely said, scooping up the book from the ground and patting the lioness on the cover to reassure herself she wouldn’t make the same stupid mistake twice. “Sorry for the mix-up.” She tossed the book back into the alley and scrambled after it.
Landing beside it, she reached to pick it up again, and blinked. “What? No!” She rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand. “Now I know you are not the book I just tossed out here.” She groaned, shook her head to clear it, and looked around, but there was clearly only one book out here, and it wasn’t the one she wanted. She left the book lying where it was and pulled herself laboriously back up and over the wall.
“You know, that’s harder than it looks,” she puffed to the postulant, who had finished re-stacking the books and was just trying to balance them again. Keely took a moment to peer out into the courtyard and make sure no one obviously attached to the Inquisition was headed this way, before catching the girl by the sleeve. “You’ve got a heretical book in there.”
“I do not!” the postulant stammered, going wide-eyed as she tried to back away.
“Really. You don’t want to get caught with…”
“You’re with the Inquisition!” the girl gasped. “That’s why I haven’t seen you before!”
“Nnnn…yesss.” Keely choked off the reflexive response and aborted the headshake she’d started, turning it into a nod. “Now…”
“This is just a pile we set aside to burn!” the postulant whimpered. “They found them in the cellars and…and…”
“Hush!” Keely laid a quieting finger on the girl’s lips. “You swear you were just going to get rid of them?”
The terrified postulant nodded vigorously.
Keely gave her a glare of very convincingly feigned suspicion, then slowly allowed her expression to soften. “All right. I’ll make them disappear before the High Inquisitrix sees them, but you owe me a big favor, right?”
“Right!” the postulant squeaked.
“Just help me toss them all over the wall, right here, and I’ll go over and get them sorted out.”
A short while later, when the last of the books sailed over the wall and into the alley, Keely crawled over one last time herself to land heavily on the dusty cobbles. She sat down and leaned back heavily against the abbey wall, breathing a sigh of relief, then began going through the books one by one.
“No. No. No,” she said to herself, crawling over to the nearest one any time she’d gone through every book within reach. “No. No…Yes!” She hopped excitedly to her feet, only to let out a strangled, “Urk!” as someone grabbed her by the back of the collar.
By the time Keely could sort out what was happening, there was a massive hand clutched about her throat, pinning her to the wall, and she was staring into the menacing eyes of the knight she’d seen earlier in the front courtyard.
Keely clawed ineffectually at Riordan’s gauntleted wrist, struggling simply to breathe. Then her blood tried to freeze in her veins as a slender figure in flame-red robes stepped into view from around the knight’s eclipsing bulk. Jane Carver spared Keely a single impassive glance before returning to the business of slowly walking among the scattered books, kicking at them to examine their titles without ever bending down.
The High Inquisitrix clucked her tongue while shaking her head sadly. “I was going to ask who you are, girl,” she said, finally turning her attention back to Keely, “but I’d say this is answer enough: You’re someone whose screams I’m going to savor.”
Keely launched a swift kick toward where she hoped Riordan’s groin was, but never found out if that’s what she really connected with, because the next moment he’d slammed her head back into the stone wall. Keely struggled momentarily in a disoriented sort of half-consciousness, in which the brilliant red robes of the woman beyond Riordan’s shoulder seemed to take up the entire world—then she blacked out.
CHAPTER FIVE
En Memorium
Through the blackness of memory, Jenilee fled. Icy water splashed around her ankles and soaked the lower half of her skirts. Even with her arms thrown up protectively ahead of her, unseen branches scratched her face and tangled painfully in her hair. Her feet sank into the muck with each step. Things unknown squirmed or slithered away more than once beneath her feet. She could hear the others splashing through the mire ahead of her, breathing heavily, no more daring to slow their pace than she was to slow hers. Behind them, driving them on, came the screams of the dying and of those even less fortunate.
Then out of nowhere a woman came looming from the darkness ahead of them, all cape and cowl of such dazzling blood red that they seemed to light up the night with a fire of their own. For one brief, eternal heartbeat, Jenilee could see the girl ahead of her frozen in silhouette against that terrible red, then the woman’s arm swung out like a scythe. The girl screamed.
Jenilee stumbled and fell, banging her knee on the tavern’s hardwood floor.
“Jenny?” The dark-haired girl standing over Jenilee extended a concerned hand to help her up.
“Ow,” Jenilee moaned half-heartedly as she accepted the hand, more disoriented and confused than in pain. The muck had gone. The trees had gone. Her skirts would now have been bone-dry were it not for the traces of sweat. Her scratches, blood, and bruises already felt like a half-remembered dream. Even the screams had faded into the raucous song and laughter of the sailors who frequented the tavern, and of their companions of the moment.
“Don’t tell me you’ve got drunk just off the fumes in here,” Jenilee’s friend said wryly, dusting her off. “Are you okay? Can you stand?”
“I…” Jenilee bit her lip and tried to shake the fog from her head. “I’m fine, Keely. Just the creepiest feeling—like someone walked on my grave…maybe did a little dance…started hacking at it with pick and shovel. My skin’s still crawling.”
“Ah,” the older girl said knowingly. “Nerves. Here.” She grabbed a mug off a passing
tray, replacing it with a couple of coins before the girl holding it could do more than offer her a dirty look, and shoved the beer into Jenilee’s shaking hands. “Buck up before you embarrass us. We’re hardened criminals, remember?”
“Right. Sorry,” Jenilee apologized in her best emulation of a hardened criminal who was absolutely not a fourteen-year-old who’d always led a basically law-abiding life. She sipped at the beer and immediately wrinkled her nose in disgust, trying to inconspicuously spit it back out. She’d never much cared for the taste of what little beer she’d had in her life, but this particular mug of the stuff stood out as the uncontested worst of her experience. At least, she supposed, that helped it take her mind off of the nightmare vision.
“You’re hopeless, you know.” Keely chuckled, tousling Jenilee’s hair before dragging her on through the crowded tavern. Jenilee bore the gesture with embarrassed good grace, though it reinforced how babyish and unsophisticated she already felt next to the lean and graceful fifteen-year-old with her mysterious dark eyes, elegant black curls, and curves that routinely got Keely mistaken for seventeen or eighteen.
Jenilee, by contrast, was lucky if she didn’t get mistaken for twelve or thirteen, and on days when she was feeling particularly insecure, the voices in her head would try to convince Jenilee that Keely only kept her around as a sort of fashion accessory.
Her own silver-white hair did—according to a friend who would know about such things—offset Keely’s raven curls nicely, enhancing the “femme fatale” aura she had going. Keely even made the ragged ensemble she’d pulled together for the occasion look like fashionably tailored pirate chic. Jenilee had the distinct impression that her own outfit simply said, “outdated ragamuffin”.
Shouts at a corner table drew Jenilee’s attention just in time for her to duck under the mostly empty mug that came flying from it, and the thing merely doused her with a splash of cheap beer rather than connecting with the side of her head. She stayed down, waiting for a fight to erupt in the corner, but whatever had caused the outburst quickly quieted down instead. When Jenilee got back up, she’d nearly lost sight of Keely through the crowd, and she hastened to catch up.
A tall, muscular youth stepped in front of Keely, blocking her way. His well-worn mariner’s outfit looked like it had actually seen genuine labor of questionable honesty, splitting the fashion-difference between what the two girls wore. “How much,” he was asking Keely salaciously as he brushed a long, unruly lock of dark hair out of his eyes, “for the whole night?”
Keely snorted at the young man, unperturbed. “You couldn’t afford me for fifteen minutes, hero.”
“Guess I’ll have to settle for stealing a kiss then,” he laughed, wrapping his arms around Keely’s shoulders to draw her to him. She only objected inasmuch as a small laugh of her own could count as an objection and melted into a kiss that Jenilee was sure would be steaming up glassware halfway across the room.
“Hey, Jenny.” The young man smiled warmly at Jenilee when they finally came up for air, and he tousled Jenilee’s hair in a perfect echo of Keely’s earlier patronizing affection. “Sure you’re up for this, kiddo?” A current of genuine concern ran beneath his otherwise light-hearted tone.
“Of course,” Jenilee assured him, though the butterflies in her stomach had been dancing such a lively hornpipe all day that she barely managed to take a bite of food, much less keep it down. “I’ve got to do this, Axy,” she told him. “It’s page one.” It was also the only option left to her that she could even contemplate.
Axy nodded his sober understanding. He always made the effort to at least act like he was taking her seriously, whether he actually did or not, and she could have kissed him for it. Only, she couldn’t have kissed him for it. Even thinking about being that forward nearly sent her into a panic. And it would have ticked off Keely and made things totally weird between the three of them. Cold, hard realities aside, though, she could have kissed him.
“Come on, hero,” Keely said grabbing Axy gently by the ear and pulling him into step beside her. “Let’s do this.”
A door at the back of the taproom opened onto a sort of a sunken courtyard at the back of the Drunken Squid, where the more serious revelry seemed to be taking place. A rickety wooden fence stood as the only guard between one side of the yard and a forty-foot drop down a rocky cliff into Lake Etherea, while a crude wooden deck along the back of the tavern embraced the other three sides.
A few tables, weathered and mismatched, lined the edge of the yard, but the rest of it had been left open—save for one pink-veined marble statue the size of a horse, perched on a tall, stone pedestal at the center of it all. Though this was the first time Jenilee had laid eyes on the thing, she knew it by reputation.
Everyone in Hart Cove knew about the tentacled monstrosity of a statue that old Captain Hobbs had brought back from his days on the salt seas. He claimed it had been an idol worshiped by cannibals on one of those exotic islands where people wore leaves and feathers for clothes, when they wore anything at all. Now it sat looking out over their freshwater sea, every bit as disturbing as people said, though its tentacles now clutched an assortment of rusting tankards instead of the skulls and stone knives that Hobbs claimed he’d found it with.
The priestess of the local church had given him grief over it, but that was back when there’d been a priestess at the local church. Even at the time, her threats had been empty ones. Hart Cove faithfully served the church of Seriena in the same way that it faithfully served the king of Atiopryae: by saying nice things about it, sending it enough money to keep it mollified, and maintaining a low profile.
The real power in the town was currently carousing in the courtyard down below, the chaos of the scene swirling around her as if around the eye of a storm. Unlike the squid statue, Jenilee knew Blackwater Molly by sight as well as by reputation, and she would have been hard-pressed to say which of the two was the more flamboyant thing about the woman.
Molly moved through the crowd not merely like she owned the place, but as if she owned every soul in it. Dressed in a fine silk shirt of lemon yellow, tawny boots and breeches, and countless golden bangles that chimed as she moved, the pirate queen shone like a sun amid the more mundane persons of dubious profession who surrounded her.
As her long blond hair flew out in a corona about her, she swung laughing from arm to arm in time with the piper and fiddler who perched in windows above the courtyard, and she left a wake of dancing bodies in orbit around her. Not one of her rapidly changing partners—man or woman—passed through Molly’s arms without an unchaste kiss, and not one—man or woman—seemed less than pleased by it.
Neither did any barmaid get within ten feet of Molly without the woman snatching a mug or a bottle from her and downing half of its contents—the other half invariably sloshing across the ground and her companion of the moment.
Jenilee had never seen Blackwater Molly in full revel before, but apparently the rumors were true that she could school a satyr in how to cut loose and live in the now. Perhaps, Jenilee reflected, it was only this expertise that held Molly back from becoming a more conventional sort of queen. Certainly no one in Hart Cove would have traded her de-facto rule for any actual interest from the man who wore the crown. She kept order up and down the coast, she levied fewer taxes than either king or church, and she made a body feel somehow like her companion off on a secret, magical adventure by the simple act of smiling when she passed on the street.
She could also stare down a belligerent drunk twice her weight, as Jenilee had seen for herself. The man had been itching for a fight, but whatever he’d seen staring into Molly’s eyes for those few heartbeats had turned him white as snow and sent him stumbling over himself to get away from her.
If even a fraction of the stories circulating about Molly were true, the man had just been lucky she hadn’t wanted to be bothered with him at that moment. Estimates of the number of men she’d killed never dropped below a couple dozen and ranged int
o the hundreds. Stories about how she’d killed them often featured in Jenilee’s nightmares, even if Jenilee’s imagination couldn’t actually cast the lively and lovely Molly as the monster committing those atrocities. Whatever the truth of it, Molly’s reputation carried such weight that no sober and sane person living on the shores of Lake Etherea would put it to the test without an army at his back. Reputedly, anyone who’d proved an exception could no longer be counted among the living, though, so that made sense—in a circular logic sort of way.
“Hey!” A gruff voice snapped Jenilee far enough out of her star-struck reverie to notice that Keely and Axy had started for the stairs down to the courtyard, only to be intercepted by a wall of scar-covered muscle. “Private party,” the man growled. “I don’t know you, you don’t come in.”
“You don’t know me?” Keely replied archly without missing a beat. Her eyebrow arched. Her eyes narrowed. Her hands went to her hips. “You don’t know me?” she repeated, her voice dripping incredulity. “Mister ‘Do that thing with your tongue again’ doesn’t know me? How into your cups were you?” she demanded.
“Very…?” the man ventured, suddenly uncertain. “What thing with your tongue?”
Keely rolled her eyes but stepped up to the man on tiptoe. One hand snaked up the back of his neck to twine in his hair, pulling his head back, baring his throat. Jenilee was so busy gaping at what she couldn’t quite see Keely doing with her face nuzzled up against the man’s neck that she nearly missed Keely’s unoccupied hand surreptitiously waving them on. Jenilee scurried down the steps, grabbed the hand of the still stunned Axy, and dragged him on down into the crowded courtyard without looking back.
Keely joined them a minute later, wiping her mouth on the back of her sleeve and making a little face of disgust. “First one of you to make a smart remark gets to bluff us past the next pirate,” she said preemptively.
Lethal Red Riding Hood (Dark Goddess Chronicles Book 1) Page 5