“You talked to a Thorn’s puppet.” Brys sat on the bed and ran a hand through his black hair. It was getting long; the front threatened to fall over his eyes. He didn’t seem to notice. Odosse heard anger in his voice, and fear, and something she couldn’t quite place. “The boy’s name was Caedric Alsarring. I saw him die at Willowfield. He was the first one they killed. You talked to a dead man, girl, and we need to get out of this town.”
“Isn’t it safer here? There are guards—”
“Guards won’t stop her. Walls won’t stop her. You can’t wall out mist, and the strongest shield forged won’t stop a spell. The Thorn can’t be more than a day behind her puppet, and she either knows or suspects we’re here. So thank the Bright Lady that the Thornlady tried a glamour on an ugly girl, and let’s get out of here now.”
“But what about Wistan?” Odosse asked, too flustered to care about the insult. “He’s so frail, and it’s so cold. He’ll die, Brys.”
“He might. But if we don’t go, we all will. Risk the baby or die yourself, it’s your choice. I’m leaving before dawn either way.”
The intensity she saw in the sellsword’s green eyes convinced her as much as anything he said. “All right,” Odosse said, defeated. “Give me an hour to pack and ready the babies.”
“Meet me by the south gate. An hour, not more. Or I leave without you.”
It was well into the afternoon when Odosse returned to the bakery. Mathas was sleeping, as was his custom; he’d wake around midnight to begin the next morning’s bread. She wished she could leave a note for the baker, thanking him for his kindness and apologizing for her sudden departure. The days she’d spent working for him were the happiest she’d had since leaving Willowfield, and better than some she’d had there. This could have been a life for her, and a good one: stable, warm, welcoming. She felt real regret at having to leave it behind. But she didn’t know her letters, and Brys would have scoffed if she’d asked him to write it for her, and there was no time left for the luxury of sorrow.
She passed through the empty kitchen quietly, and went upstairs to gather the children.
12
The trouble with dead men, Albric decided, was that their brains were dead too. Whatever magic animated their bodies and put breath back in their lungs did nothing at all to revive their wits. That was the only reason—the only reason—that he sat out here on a bare wagon bed, freezing his balls off and waiting for the gods-cursed baker to leave his shop.
They’d had the girl. They’d had the girl, the false knight, and the child—that helpless, defenseless, deadly child. All three of them unsuspecting and ripe for the taking.
It had taken weeks to get this close. Weeks of greasing palms and buying drinks and feigning interest in idiots bragging about their “bravery” across the border, when none of them had done more than knife an unarmed crofter and burn down his hut. Weeks during which Albric had wondered if the Thornlady intended to do anything but stand back and watch him do the work that his lord had paid her for.
But, finally, he’d found their quarry: a black-haired freesword with a baby, his identity confirmed by the girl with the Langmyrne accent who was said to be caring for that child. Most of Albric’s sources thought the girl was a doxy who’d been cast aside when her soldier-lover got bored—and the real wonder, they said, was that he’d bedded such an ugly wench in the first place.
Albric knew better. He knew what she was, if not precisely who, and he knew who that baby had to be. Wistan. The closeness of it galled him.
The girl had been right here, living inside this bakery, walking to the same doors with the same baskets every day. It would have been the simplest thing in the world to swoop in and spirit her away. They wouldn’t even have had to hurt her; they could have snatched the baby while she was gone and left her unharmed. She’d been a baker. Bakers started their rounds early, more in night than morning. There wouldn’t have been a soul awake to see the deed, nor a candle’s worth of light to show it. A half-wit could have done the job.
But the gods had ordained that nothing in Albric’s life should be easy, and so instead of executing a clean little snatch-and-grab on the baker’s girl and the baby, Severine’s rotwit hound had spooked her out of Tarne Crossing.
He knew why it had happened, although that did nothing to lessen his annoyance that it had. Tarne Crossing lay in Leferic’s domain, and the embattled Lord of Bulls’ March could scarcely afford to have his most trusted servant kidnapping and killing his own subjects at whim. Leferic had issued strict instructions that they should minimize casualties—and, given the Thornlady’s predilection for making them, that was a wise rule. So they had decided not to seize the baker’s girl until they were certain that she was the right baker’s girl, and that was what had landed them in this pigslop mess.
That was the reason he chose to believe. It was also possible that the Thornlady had tipped her hand deliberately to flush them out of the town’s safety. One couldn’t very well bloodmist the entirety of Tarne Crossing or set ghoul-hounds on an inn full of people. But out on the road, with nobody watching … out there, they might have to kill all three, instead of removing the child alone. And it would be like her to orchestrate three murders where one would have done. It would be very like her.
Albric spat onto the frozen ground, cursing the night and the cold and the day he’d first heard of Willowfield.
The girl, whoever she was, meant nothing to him or his lord. She was probably some poor, ignorant village girl that Brys had hired as a wet nurse. Most likely she had no idea what she’d stumbled into. Albric didn’t particularly care about Brys Tarnell, either. The man was a wandering mercenary with no family, no armsmen, and scarcely any social standing. He was a landless knight who’d been given spurs by a dead man, and there was nothing he could do to hurt Albric’s lord.
Neither of them needed to die to keep Leferic’s reign safe. Only the child. Only Wistan.
And yet the blood of all three was likely to be on his hands before long, and probably the damn stupid baker’s too. He spat again, adding Severine to his list of curses. He was a knight. His duty was to protect his lord’s people, not murder them. Not when it wasn’t necessary. Not for her sake.
As if in answer to Albric’s oaths, the bakery door finally swung open. Light and warmth poured out to the night: the warmth of hot brick ovens, the light of lanterns to illumine the scoring of raw loaves and the crackly golden-brown of their freshly baked crusts. A peg-legged man hobbled out, sticking his wooden leg in the doorway to prop it open as he eased himself down the step with two big baskets in his arms. He had the belly of a man who enjoyed his own wares, and he mumbled curses at his wooden leg constantly as he walked.
Intent as he was on manuevering his burden, and likely dazzled by the sudden transition from bright to dark, the baker never looked up as Albric got off the wagon bed and walked over.
“Morning, friend,” Albric said. He stayed in the shadows, keeping his face shielded from the light. On the off chance that this encounter went well, he didn’t want to have to kill the man for having seen him.
“It’s morning all right. I’m not so sure about that next part,” the baker replied. He set his baskets down and squinted into the darkness, propping his fists on his hips and rolling his shoulders forward to show his muscle. Despite his great belly, there was little fat on the rest of him, and his arms were thick as a smith’s. “Might be you should just move on.”
“Might be I will,” Albric said. “Be happy to do just that, if you’ll answer a few questions.”
“What questions?”
“You had a girl working for you not long ago. Plain, brown hair, liked to wear a white band over it. Sometimes she carried a baby while making her rounds. Looks like she might have wandered off. Any idea where she’d have gone?”
The baker’s jaw clenched under his bristly beard, hard enough that Albric could see it, although the man’s back was to the light. “Leave her alone. Whatever she was tangled up in, she’
s a good girl, and you ought to leave her be.”
“Only trying to help her,” Albric said, willing the man to believe him. It was truer than he could know.
“That might be. Friend. But helpful people don’t generally accost a man in the dead of dark, so I hope you don’t mind me being a little skeptical. Now it seems to me you should be on your way. I’ve got work to do.”
“That’s a shame.” Albric slid up behind him, smooth as silk, and clapped one hand over the baker’s mouth while he crushed the man’s throat in the crook of his other arm. Giving him a good rap on the head with a cosh might have been faster, but Albric had never been able to do that without braining a man, and this wasn’t the best time for experiments. Cutting off blood to the head was fast enough, as Maol’s stranglers knew too well. It wasn’t the air that had to be stopped, it was the great heart-vein on the side of the neck.
He counted to fifteen. Thirty. Forty-five. The baker slumped limp shortly after Albric finished the first count, but he didn’t relax the chokehold until he finished the last. He hoisted the man up with an effort—the baker weighed near as much as he did—bound and gagged him with the rope he’d carried under his cloak, and shoved him into the bed of his own wagon. Albric covered the unconscious man with baskets of loaves hot from his oven and led the donkey north through the sleeping streets. Just a carter making his morning rounds.
He wondered how long it would take the real carter to notice that his rig was missing and his employer gone. An hour, maybe a little less, if this morning went like the ones before. Plenty of time.
It would have been just as easy to snatch the girl before she’d been frightened off. No, easier; she was smaller, so Albric wouldn’t have had to bother with the donkey-cart. Bright Lady burn the blundering of the ghoul-hound and the hubris of the Thornlady who’d sent a deadwit dead man to do a thinking person’s job.
Albric let the rankling unfairness of it all carry him to the north gate. It was easier than thinking about what would happen when he got through.
The gate itself was eerily silent. The only movement was the flicker of the torches that were burning out at night’s end; the only sound was the soft crackle of burning pitch. There was no mumbled conversation from guards trying to ward off sleep, no barking from their dogs at a stranger’s approach. A crow perched on the wall ruffled its wings and shifted its stance as the cart creaked near, and Albric grimaced as he passed beneath its gaze.
That crow was dead. Distance hid its ragged feathers and gaping eye sockets; darkness veiled the bone that peeped through its balding skull and the dry sinew that roped its legs under cracking scales. But Albric had seen the thing before without the blessing of night’s concealment, and he knew what it was. He knew, too, that the guards and their dogs were sleeping—only sleeping, if the gods were good; they didn’t need more deaths—and that there was no need to be quiet.
He unloaded the wagon two streets away, leaving the donkey in harness and the loaves in the cart bed. They’d likely be stolen before the sun came up, not that it mattered. The thefts would confuse the trail a little, and the odds that the baker would be back to complain were growing slimmer by the moment.
The baker was awake when Albric came to take him. His eyes promised murder, but the ropes held strong.
“You should have answered my questions,” Albric told him, not unkindly, and hoisted him out of the cart.
They left through the small postern gate. Albric closed it quietly behind them and picked his way down the embankment to the ditch inside the ring of stakes that circled Tarne Crossing. The weight of the baker leaning on his shoulder pushed him off balance so that he staggered down the slope too fast, cracking through the thin ice that covered the ditch’s water. His boots were soaked before he came up the other side, and Albric cursed the Thornlady for that too.
Then he was through the stakes and out, and he circled east around the town to where Severine waited in the woods.
She glowed in the dark between last starlight and dawn. Glowed like a ghost, Albric would have said, before he’d seen the ghosts she made and realized the truth of them. Her silver hair shone like a crest of false stars down her neck, and the blue crystal of her eye was so radiant that he wondered why they couldn’t see it from the walls. Two of her ghoul-hounds skulked behind her, their crouched forms nearly eclipsed by her unearthly glow. No glamour covered these; their ragged talons and mist-filled eyes were plain for all to see, and saliva dribbled between their teeth in thick silvery strings as they saw living men come near.
The baker stiffened when he saw the Thornlady. Albric had to drag the man the last few steps of the way; his foot and peg leg drew furrows through the dead leaves. The front of his breeches steamed and stank of urine by the time they reached Severine.
“Here.” Albric pulled the baker upright, yanked the coiled rope from his mouth, and gave him a shove that sent him sprawling face-first at Severine’s feet. “This is the baker that the girl was working for. He wouldn’t tell me where she went. Maybe you can make him talk.”
“I don’t know,” the baker moaned through a mouthful of dirt and leaves. His face was shiny with the tracks of tears or sweat; the moisture glistened in Severine’s aura. “I don’t, I swear, I’ve nothing to tell you. I don’t know where she’s gone.”
Albric believed him, but that didn’t matter anymore. The baker had sealed his own fate by resisting. He’d have to die, and because he was now in the Thornlady’s hands, he’d have to suffer first. And possibly after.
“We shall see,” Severine replied. “Silence him again, please.”
Masking his disbelief, Albric did as he was told, stuffing the spit-slimed gag back into the man’s mouth. He stepped away as soon as it was done.
The Thornlady smiled down at the man. The crystal in her eye twinkled. For an instant all was still. Then the ghoul-hounds leapt out from behind her to seize hold of her captive, one on each side. Their claws ripped through his skin as they hoisted him up, and they leaned forward to lap at the blood with curling purple tongues. They pulled him away, deep into the trees. Albric sat down on a stump after they had gone and tried to shut his ears to the muffled screams.
An impossible time passed. The eastern horizon softened to gray and gentle blue. He watched as a sea of clouds parted to reveal the full glory of the sunrise. A bird trilled over the delicate tapestry of frost that glittered on the browning leaves.
None of it touched Albric’s soul. He had heard from a wandering sellsword that there were warriors in Kai Amur who could find such loveliness in a sunrise that they could kill or be killed thinking of it, and never flinch from the blade either way. Albric doubted that story was true, but he wished he could share in that strange brave madness. Anything to blind himself to the ugliness he had caused.
They weren’t even Celestians in Kai Amur. To them a sunrise was only a thing of beauty, not a call to prayer. Albric was a Celestian, a knight anointed to the sun, and yet he found no comfort under the Bright Lady’s sky. He was unworthy of her light.
Every day he spent in Severine’s company, he betrayed his oaths again. The priest in Willowfield was the beginning, but there at least he’d been able to persuade himself that the solaros was a traitor who deserved his fate. The priest had only agreed to betray Galefrid when they’d threatened to eradicate his village, true, but he had agreed and he should have known better than to trust the word of a Thorn.
So Albric told himself when he couldn’t sleep without seeing the solaros’ crushed face swimming up at him in the dark. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes.
But the other priest? The pilgrims? He had no defense to that. Those deaths, and the ghoulish, shrieking thing that the solaros in Bayarn Wood had become, haunted his nightmares. He couldn’t close his eyes to pray without hearing that awful, reedy cry, seeing the veined white fingers tearing at anguished eyes. The solaros was a holy man on pilgrimage, performing the vensolles to honor Celestia, and Albric had killed him. As surely as if he’d p
lunged a knife into the man’s chest with his own hands, he was guilty of that murder. Worse than murder: he’d led the Thornlady to them, and she had desecrated the pilgrims beyond mere death.
She might well do the same to this baker, a man whose only crime was trying to protect a girl who’d worked for him.
It was necessary. Albric clenched his fists in his lap, staring at the sky. It still is. I must do my duty. A knight was nothing without duty. Stripped of his oaths and his lord, he was just a man with a sword, a masquerading mercenary like that pretender Brys Tarnell.
But what was his duty, in the end? Albric had no doubt that his oaths and his lord deserved obedience, but he wondered whether Leferic fully understood what he had done in hiring Severine. Had he known what she was? What she would make Albric do?
Surely not. Surely Leferic believed he was simply bargaining for a mercenary. One with unusual skills, to be sure; one who used spells rather than blades to do her killing, and had no qualms about hiring on for a child’s death. But still a mercenary. Not this mad, sadistic horror. He couldn’t have known about that.
The Thornlady wasn’t even efficient. She’d been lethal in Willowfield, but since then she seemed to have lost interest in the hunt. Her dead crows circled the skies day and night, but they never seemed to find anything useful.
Was she really that ineffective? Or was she planning some treachery of her own?
The thought soured Albric’s stomach. They should never have allied with Ang’arta. Never. His failure to talk Leferic out of this folly was his greatest mistake. If only he’d been a better counselor—more forceful, nimbler with his words …
He looked up as Severine returned. Blood darkened her right sleeve and streaked her face in a diagonal trail of fine droplets. The bones of her maimed hand were wet and crimson, the color just visible in the rising light. She licked the blood from those sharpened bones, favoring Albric with a coy little smile. “He wasn’t lying. He truly didn’t know where she went.”
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