Lethal Red Riding Hood (Dark Goddess Chronicles Book 1)

by Leonard Wilson

  “The High Inquisitrix threatened to kill a miracle woman?” Violet asked incredulously. Her shell of composure had developed some serious cracks at this point.

  “I don’t know if Carver wants the book for herself,” Keely said, “or if she just wants to burn it before anyone else can read it, but the woman is obsessed.”

  “So if we were to find it before she did, and—say—track down a printer willing to publish it…?”

  Keely nodded. “You’d be able to hear Jane Carver cursing a blue streak from any corner of the kingdoms.”

  “Well, this isn’t the least bit odd or suspicious.” The young noblewoman brushed back her long, dark-auburn hair and looked down appraisingly from the back of her sturdy, sure-footed, chestnut pony. Perhaps it was just a trick of the forest terrain, but she somehow seemed to be looking down quite a bit farther than she had any right to from the back of such a small mount.

  Like her companions—two men and a woman of about her age—she wore hunting leathers. She also cradled a fine wheel-lock hunting rifle in her arms. Every surface polished and gleaming, the gun screamed craftsmanship of a sort Tobias couldn’t recall seeing outside of the heartland before, and perhaps not even there. Across the back of her pony hung the gray carcass of a recently deceased wolf, the victim of a single clean shot to the head. “Should I start by asking who you are, or by asking what you’re doing here?”

  While Tobias was still mustering his response, the local huntsman that Baldassare had brought along stepped forward. “I brought them, your ladyship.” He made a broad gesture toward the trio of nobles and the squire behind him. “They were on their way to make their introductions at court, but their companion ran off into the woods and seems to have gotten herself lost.”

  “And with that witch the…” Tobias began.

  “Do not talk to me about witches.” The woman fixed Tobias with a cold glare, ice clinging to every word. “Just be out of the forest by nightfall or you’ll be lost yourselves. And do find the courtesy to present yourselves at the castle, with or without your friend. If she’s still lost, we’ll see what we can do to help look for her in the morning.”

  “Thank you,” Tobias said, but the woman only nodded curtly in response before turning and riding away with her companions.

  “Lady Minda,” the huntsman explained after they’d gone, “Earl Haywood’s oldest girl. And I’d listen to her about the forest. She knows it as well as anyone.”

  It dawned on Tobias then that he’d probably jumped to conclusions in taking Baldassare and Evadne for locals, and that in all the excitement they’d made only the most cursory of introductions to each other. Then the thought slipped away as quickly as it had come when Conrad announced, “She rested here.” Crouched next to a nearby fallen log, the boy nodded at the soft earth in front of the log, and the footprints Sabina had left in it.

  As Tobias and the huntsman stepped in to join Conrad in examining the ground, and Baldassare looked on hopefully from behind them, Evadne quietly shifted the matched set of daggers she’d drawn under her cloak when Minda had appeared, and she slid them back into their sheaths.

  Leaving the others to their task, the towering woman devoted her attention instead to scanning the ancient forest around them for any sign of Sabina or…well, anything that might be dangerous, though the possibility of lurking wolves had pushed its way to the front of her mind after the encounter with the hunting party. As a true child of the city, she didn’t know what else to expect from a forest, but one always heard stories about the wolves.

  The proof that there were indeed wolves out here redoubled her concern for Sabina, and Evadne cursed herself for not running after when her friend had bolted. Sabina being useless in fight was the whole reason Evadne had managed to escape the wretched slum where she’d been born. The rich girl had come to relish having a streetwise friend to literally watch her back.

  The years and Sabina’s generosity may have replaced the backstreet tomboy with a refined young gentlewoman, but it was a refined young gentlewoman who knew all the most telling places to bury a knife in a human body, and all the best ways to get one there.

  “But which way did she leave?” Evadne asked impatiently.

  It was Tobias who finally pointed the way, and they set off through the woods again, tracing Sabina’s footsteps until they emerged into the late afternoon sunlight and something that passed for a meadow, so choked in thick brambles that a body could hardly cross it without first descending into the dry, stony stream bed that wound its way between the thorns. In the midst of it all stood an abandoned old hovel, clutched in the thorny embrace of the briers and collapsing in on itself from many years of neglect.

  They paused while the three hunters spread out around the edge of the brambles, looking for signs of Sabina’s passage. “Nothing,” Tobias said at last. “Which means she followed the stream bed. It’s the only way to get through this mess without leaving a trace.”

  “We’ve got to check the old cottage,” Evadne said firmly.

  “If you want to wade through those brambles, be my guest,” Tobias answered her dismissively, “but she didn’t. Anything bigger than a wildcat would have to force its way through, and nothing has for weeks.”

  “Stop being clever for a moment and think,” Evadne said. “You’re chasing a witch who turns people into animals. I assume she counts as a ‘people’ herself? This place may be a bit run-down for even a witch to call home, but it’d be an excellent spot to rest her head without fear of being taken unawares. And if she was here when Sabina showed up…”

  “Here now!” the huntsman said crossly. “That wasn’t just Inquisition-scare-talk about a witch you started to prattle at Lady Minda? You’re actually chasing some’n who changes decent folk into actual animals? And she might be out here anywhere?”

  “Yes!” Tobias said. “No one told you?”

  “No, no one bloody told me!” The huntsman glowered. “His man showed up,” he said, pointing accusingly at Baldassare, “pounding on my door and offering to pay me to help find a lass lost in the woods! No one said a whisper about no witches!”

  “If you’re that worried about witches,” Baldassare said with menacing calm, “you might want to stop shouting to them that we’re here.”

  “I’m not here. I am not here!” the huntsman said, rounding on Baldassare. “You may be here, but I am already on my way back home to a stiff drink.”

  “Even if I double your pay?” Baldassare asked with a cocked eyebrow. “We’ve got other trackers now, but I’ll admit your knowledge of the woods is worth something beyond that.”

  “My knowledge of these woods tells me this is no ‘woods’, lad. This is a forest—big and deep and dark and old, full of things no man living understands. I’m sorry about the lass, but she was a fool to be runnin’ off into it. You’re welcome to follow me out, but I’m leavin’, and I’m doin’ it now.”

  “At least my dear sister will have the comfort that I’m not wasting money on her,” Baldassare said as he watched the man stride off back through the trees, but the others were already forcing their way carefully through the brambles toward the hovel.

  When at last they reached it and stepped inside, what became immediately apparent was that “inside” seemed an overly generous term. Barely enough of the roof remained to call it a roof, and the walls were all rotting and falling in. With space limited and the whole business looking unsafe, Baldassare didn’t bother pushing in after the others, but stood peering about outside while Evadne poked around the collapsed remnants of furnishings that had been humble in their prime, and Tobias and Conrad studied the dirt floor for any signs of passage.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Evadne caught a sudden, sinuous movement at her shoulder where there should have been none. Without a thought, she spun with the speed of a serpent, small silvery blade flashing in her hand. The blade sunk deep into decaying wood, but not before trapping an actual serpent against the wall and beheading it.


  Big around as an ordinary woman’s arm if not Evadne’s, the body of the beast flopped down from the beam it had been coiled around to lay writhing on the floor in a macabre and disturbing dance of death amidst a shower of rotting debris that had been shaken loose by the force of the giantesss’ planting her dagger in the wall. Evadne wrenched the blade free and was backing toward the door, away from the snake, when they heard the structure creak and saw the support beams begin to shift.

  “Out!” Baldassare shouted, though the others hardly needed the warning. Evadne dove for the door. Conrad squirmed quickly through one of the larger holes in the wall. Tobias simply threw himself at a rotting wall with as much running start as he could manage. All three rolled clear as the aging structure fell in on itself in a cloud of dust and mold.

  “I hope condolences are not in order,” Tobias said, brushing himself off and plucking gingerly at the thorns he’d acquired in his landing. “Dame Evadne was right: someone was in that house very recently—probably more than one someone—even though there was no way they could have gotten in. Pray that the witch didn’t turn your sister into a snake.”

  “No,” Baldassare whispered, waving them to silence with a hand. “That’s her over there. That’s got to be her.” At the tree line behind where the old hovel had been, a small-but-regal, snow-white doe stood watching them.

  “I found something!” Nolan’s shout echoed through the tunnels beneath the Wolf’s Tooth, bringing everyone within earshot hurrying to join him. The younger—but the larger—of the two guardsmen who’d been assigned to babysit Keely and Elissa, he sported the medium-red shade of hair so common among the locals—closely cropped, but making a fair effort at appearing unkempt given the meager length it had to work with.

  They’d been joined by half a dozen other guardsmen, who’d been trusted with no more than the knowledge, “We’re looking for a book in here somewhere. No one goes home until we find it,” and the search party had fanned out through tunnels that ranged from ancient to merely very old, in hopes they’d return with a legend.

  Keely had eyed the waters at the bottom of the shaft nervously when they’d first come back down from the peak, but whatever had stirred in their depths had since settled, and their surface had returned so completely to its original mirror calm that Keely began wondering if she’d imagined the whole thing. Perhaps she’d even imagined the dead she’d seen sleeping beneath.

  It was a tempting story to tell herself, but a much harder one to believe than the one about imagining the unsettled waters. For now, she simply held onto the hope that they’d find the book somewhere in the upper reaches of the tunnels.

  Many of the little and not-so-little chambers that Keely discovered by flickering lamp light had probably been re-purposed multiple times over the centuries. A handful still seemed in active use as storerooms or armories, and one had been set up as some sort of council chamber. The room where she found Nolan and Elissa—whom he still dutifully refused to allow out of his sight—had been stocked with barrels marked “gun powder” and with a few racks of cannon balls, reminding Keely of young Addie’s story about the castle blowing up.

  By Keely’s guess, the Haywoods had decided after that last visit from the Inquisition they’d best be ready for a siege. Not that the one little county could ever weather a serious siege driven by the Inquisition, but she could understand the appeal of going down fighting instead of getting dragged off begging for a mercy that would reputedly never come.

  “A book?” Violet asked hopefully, appearing at Keely’s shoulder with her own lantern.

  “Sorry, no.” Nolan shook his head, extending a single torn and muddy page. “But isn’t that an ‘A’ this was sealed with?”

  “Lady A?” Violet grabbed the page quickly and unfolded it, her brow furrowing as she smoothed it out and inspected it.

  “It was wedged in-between the wall and one of the crates,” Nolan said. “Looks like Sister Petra must have hidden it in a hurry the night she died.”

  Violet just shook her head dismissively, tucking the page away in her bodice as she waved the searchers back to work. As the others filed out, though, she quietly grabbed Elissa, Keely, and their escorts, and led the way back up the stairs to the peak.

  “I’m accepting notions on what to make of this,” she said, pulling out the page again once they were safely out of earshot of any men whose lives might yet be spared by not knowing what they were up to. “I read tolerably well, but I can’t make head or tails of this.” She extended the page to Elissa, who studied it as the others peered over her shoulder.

  “I shouldn’t wonder!” Elissa exclaimed. “These are bilge glyphs.”

  “Bilge glyphs?” The countess raised a questioning eyebrow.

  “A code of symbols developed during the Crusade of the Sea Lords. Actually, there were three or four codes that used similar techniques, but they developed a reputation for being easily decoded, so they fell out of use as trash—bilge glyphs.”

  “Can you decipher them?” Violet asked.

  “Maybe,” Elissa said. “Probably, if I had my library. Not sure without it, but I can try.”

  “All right. You stay here with Nolan and work on that.” Violet nodded. “The rest of us will get back to searching for the book.”

  “Actually,” Keely said, ”I’ve been doing that too long already. We need more time. With the Inquisition on the hunt down there, they’re going to find this place sooner or later. My guess is it will be sooner, and the only thing that’s going to stop them is if they stop searching around the Tooth.”

  Lady Violet nodded slowly. “And what do you propose?”

  “They’re searching for two things: me and this book. We have to convince them that both are someplace else.”

  “And we would do this by…?” Violet prompted.

  “I lead them away while the rest of you keep searching.”

  “You lead them away?” Violet asked with an arched eyebrow. “You’re not some expendable pawn in this game, girl. You may be able to forget that if anything happens to you or Elissa it’s check and mate for my entire family, but I can’t.”

  “I’ll go with her,” Ulric said.

  Violet frowned. “Ulric, this isn’t protecting her against two or three thugs, this is protecting her against twenty knights of the Inquisition and…”

  “And sometimes the most dangerous thing you can do, milady, is fight defensively,” Ulric insisted. “Don’t forget how hard even putting together a plan to deal with the vandals has been with the Inquisition on our backs. We can win the battle of keeping our guests safe and still lose the war. We have to get the Inquisition out of here, this is the woman who can do it, and I’ll be right there with my last breath saved just for getting her back to you alive. I’m a marked man anyway.”

  Violet’s scowl deepened.

  “It’s a good plan,” Elissa said quietly. “If I’ve learned anything traveling with Keely, it’s that she knows how to make a quick getaway and how to play a good shell game.”

  “That is not the most reassuring thing you could have said.” Violet turned her dark look briefly on Elissa, then back to Keely before finally sighing. “All right! You’re right. Getting the Inquisition out of the equation would change our situation from impossible to merely precarious. We have to do it, but if you aren’t back with us safe and sound before the pontifine returns, I will personally hunt you to the ends of the earth. If I find you alive, I will introduce you to tortures that would give Jane Carver nightmares. If I find you dead, I’ll invent ways to make you wish I’d found you alive. Do we understand each other?”

  “Perfectly.” Keely nodded. “Now to do this con right, we’re going to have to break into two teams. Ulric, if you’re with me, this is going to graduate you from ‘marked man’ status to painting a big bullseye on your chest for the whole Inquisition. Are you really up for that?”

  Ulric answered with a curt nod. “I hear that dying of old age is over-rated.”

 
; CHAPTER TWENTY

  A Tragedy of Errors

  Minda stared down the muzzle of her long hunting rifle, watching carefully as the wolves sniffed among the trees. She’d counted seven of them, about two hundred yards upwind, and suspected more. The Crimson Forest was by no means generous when it came to clearings or clean lines of sight for any distance to speak of, but she knew it well enough to have learned a few rocky outcroppings that commanded a reasonable view, and she lay stretched out on one of them now.

  A few yards away, Doryne Pendleton—daughter to one of the local barons—crouched patiently behind a rock, cradling a loaded crossbow. Their other companions had either spread out along the low ridge or remained behind with the horses once they’d spotted the fresh set of tracks.

  “That’s not the same pack, is it?” Doryne whispered.

  Minda shook her head. “Definitely seeing different alphas.” This also definitely marked the first time she’d seen two distinct packs in a single day. It was rare enough to encounter one pack this close to the forest’s edge, and those usually came at night in the late winter months, looking for an unnoticed break in the hedge and some farmer’s untended flock. This just served as one more reminder that they lived in strange, unsettled times.

  Then the wolf she’d been waiting for wandered back out into view: big, black, shaggy, and scarred, at least a quarter again as tall at the shoulder as the next largest wolf in the pack. Much as Minda loved her hunting rifle, it would give her exactly one shot at the wolves, then they’d disappear back into the forest before she could even start to reload.

  Her back-up rifle lay on the ground within easy reach, but even that would only afford her a second shot if the wolves hesitated in confusion before deciding which way to bolt. And her friends might bring down one or two of the animals, but in Doryne’s case, it would take a lucky shot from this distance, and Minda couldn’t be sure any of the others would have line of sight to try. Not a farmer in the county would thank them for leaving that overgrown beast alive to come looking for livestock, and Minda had to assume it was up to her to take it down in one clean shot.