“Miss me?” the newcomer asked Brella with a smirk.
“I saw you two days ago.”
The woman batted her eyes coquettishly, taking a seat next to Leverett. “If I had my druthers, I would see you every day.”
Brella rewarded the woman with a two-fingered gesture, for which Leverett smacked her on the shoulder. Dale laughed. Vel whacked him on the back of the head.
“All right.” Mrs. Callin’s voice cut through the noise like scalding water in snow. “Everyone, shut it. Maisie is here. We have important business.”
“Hear, hear,” Dale cheered, while Hill gently rewound the thread around the spools on his fingers.
“Sorry I’m late.” Maisie lifted a scarf from around her neck and draped it on the back of her chair. “I was with Frances.”
Mrs. Callin raised an eyebrow. “Were you?”
Brella shifted on her seat. “Is she ready? Because if she—”
“Relax, Umbrella.” Maisie had a rakish, confident smile, the kind a dazzling swindler might take years to perfect. “She’s the most eager of all of us.”
“And she knows what’s ahead, right?” Vel’s mouth was tight with worry, “She knows how difficult it might be?”
Maisie sobered. “She’s known hardships, Vel. She’ll be fine.”
“Good.” Leverett clapped his hands together. “Everyone know their jobs?”
“Frances and I will leave in roughly—” Maisie glanced at the beat-up grandfather clock in the corner. “—twenty-six hours. After the feast.”
“The fate ball is spooled,” Leverett added. He snapped his fingers, and a discarded spool floated up from the floor to land delicately atop Dale’s last unoccupied finger. “Our contact says the king is entirely convinced not to knight Keyes. During the feast, the ball will pull her away.”
“And the other?” Hill asked.
“He’ll follow,” Vel assured him. “He always follows.”
Mrs. Callin nodded. “When they’re in the dungeon, Iris will take the path Frances laid out and retrieve the pair.”
“Where’s Iris?” Leverett whispered to Brella.
“Castle,” she murmured back. “Working.”
“Then Iris will lead Keyes and the other here, where Umbrella and Vel will be waiting to take them through. Any questions?”
Brella shrugged. “None from me.”
Leverett raised a finger. “If you run into Lollie?”
Brella waved a dismissing hand. “I doubt I will. I could barely find her when we were together. But if I do, I’ll cook up a cover with Keyes. Probably that she’s my lover and my Passenger.”
Maisie winced. “Ouch.”
Brella sucked her teeth. “What ‘ouch?’”
“You stop seeing Lollie six months ago, after years of telling her you’re not ready to show her the Between, and suddenly you have someone you’re willing to take through?” She shrugged. “Cold.”
“You don’t know anything about it.”
“You’re an absolute barnyard creature, Umbrella.” Maisie crossed her arms over her chest. “And I think I have a fairly good idea of how it would feel to have the woman I’m seeing—”
“Maisie, you’re nineteen.”
“Yeah, and my girlfriend is seventeen and the rightful leader of a nation—”
“Oh, and that makes you the expert on post-relationship etiquette, you jumped-up cowpat? Thank the God of Justice for you, Maisie.”
Maisie snarled like a stepped-on cat. “Oh, shut your self-righteous hole, you absurd—”
“Who are you calling—”
Dale clapped his hands over his head, spools unspooling while Vel fruitlessly tried to keep his brother steady. “This!” Clap. “Is!” Clap. “So!” Clap. “Stupid!” Clap.
“I’m so tired.” Hill dropped his head into his lap. “So tired.”
“Girls!” At the sound of Mrs. Callin’s voice, both women’s mouths snapped shut. “You are revolutionaries, not feral cats. Might I remind you that this is a matter of national importance? If you can’t put your differences aside, our entire plan will go right to the infinite hells, and the two of you along with it. I’ll see to that myself.”
Maisie and Brella lowered their heads like scolded children.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Callin,” Brella mumbled.
“Yeah.” Maisie sniffed. “Sorry.”
Dale elbowed a scowling Vel. “Callin’s better than Mum, eh? Quicker too. And nobody lost any hair this time.”
“I have a concern.” Hill raised a tentative hand. “What if she doesn’t want to go with you, Brella?”
Brella raised her eyes to him, cautious but no less murderous. “We’ve been through this, Hillary. She doesn’t have a choice.”
“I know she doesn’t, but she’s smart. She could easily figure out something’s going on. I just want to know what kind of plan you have in place to convince her not to ask too many questions.”
“Convince her?” Brella folded her arms over her chest. “All I have to do is keep the plan a secret, which I am perfectly capable of doing. Her only way of getting to Koravia is through me. I don’t need to convince that ridiculous, bloodthirsty imp of anything.”
“You have a point, Brella,” Leverett offered, forthcoming caveat written all over his shrewd face. “But consider, she has no way of knowing whether you’re lying about the Between and Koravia. If she thinks you’re a traitor—which, darling, you absolutely are—she’ll have no reason to go on with you. And besides, once you get into the Between with her, it will be a great deal harder to hide what’s under the surface.”
She pointed a deadly finger at Leverett. “I am not a traitor.”
Maisie groaned. “We know, Brella. You don’t have to do the whole . . .,” she waved her hands around, “thing.”
Brella ignored her, jaw set. “I am not a traitor. I love my country and its people. That’s why I’m doing any of this: to make a small difference in the fight to save this country from that idiot on the throne, his heinous Hand, and that tiny, little—”
“Murderous raisin?” Maisie supplied.
“Stabbing squirrel?” Dale offered.
“Woman who very badly needs a haircut?” Vel piped up.
“Sergeant Major,” Brella grumbled through gritted teeth.
Leverett nodded hesitant assent. “Sure. All right. You’re not a traitor. But that doesn’t mean our Sergeant Major Keyes won’t disagree.” He steepled his fingers, then brought his mouth down to meet them. “I have a proposal.”
Mrs. Callin acknowledged him with a wave of her hand. “Speak, Lev.”
“Seduce her?”
There was a second of silence. Then, the room exploded into laughter, claiming everyone but the stoic Mrs. Callin, the sour-faced Judah, and a stunned, openmouthed Brella.
“No,” Judah growled.
“Judah, I can speak for myself.” Brella stiffened her shoulders. “No.”
“It’s not a bad idea.” Dale stroked his chin with the remaining spools. “She’s gotta have a little incentive, and I know she drinks from the same pot as you do.”
Maisie shuddered. “Yuck.”
He shrugged. “All the same.”
“I’m sorry, is this some kind of joke?” Brella’s voice was dangerously high. “Do you think I want anything to do with that runt?” She cast a desperate glance around the circle. “Anyone want to chime in here, please?”
“It’s actually not the worst idea.”
Her shoulders drooped. She looked, if only for a moment, betrayed. “I expected better from you, Hill.”
“I just—Velly, yes, I can see the thread is tangled, hang on—I just think you need some guarantee that she’ll believe you. You know, about the Between and Koravia. I mean, it does seem rather far-fetched, and I’ve been through.”
Brella had the hounded look of an animal backed into a corner. “Why are you bringing all this up now? We’ve been planning this for months. If you were concerned about my ability to
get Keyes to Koravia, why didn’t you mention something earlier?”
“To be honest, Brelly, you’ve gotten rather . . .” Dale drew back preemptively. “Angrier?”
Brella’s nostrils flared. Apparently remembering herself, she closed her eyes and took a steadying breath. “I am not angry.”
Maisie reached out a hand towards Brella’s shoulder, which Brella promptly flicked away. “You rather are, Brella. For the past month, you’ve been particularly zealous, waving that little book around.”
“Zealous?” Brella flushed, mouth pursing. “I’ve been doing the necessary work on the ground. I’ve been reaching people.”
“So what’s one more?” Dale winked. “Reach her.”
Maisie groaned. “Again, yuck.”
“Do you know why I’ve been angry?” Brella demanded.
Dale shrugged. “The cheese merchant is out of Stuffed Walder?”
“It’s because she took the Wilds in a day. Because the king was going to knight her. That’s why.” She took a long, slow breath. “She was able to take Kraal nearly singlehandedly when she was just a Sergeant Major. Imagine what she’d be able to do in charge.”
“She’s just a person, Brella.” Hill favored her with a gentle smile. “Flesh and blood.”
“And we can’t jeopardize this.” Maisie bent low in her chair, hands clasped between her spread knees. “We’ve been planning for months. We need to deal with the threat she poses, and the only way is to get her to Koravia. If that means you need to, you know, open your legs for Ivinscont—”
“Yuck!” Dale cheered.
“Then I agree with Leverett on the matter.”
Brella shook her head vigorously. “No, no. I can make her trust me without sleeping with her. There has to be a better . . .”
“No!” A voice slammed into Scratch’s back, making her teeth shake.
“I wouldn’t touch her with a . . .”
“Scratch! Wake up, please!”
“Besides, if I did plan to trick her, I could . . .”
“No, no! You need to wake up!”
The room began to fog at the edges, great clouds swallowing up the glowing, orange light, the people in their chairs. Hill and Dale grew faint, along with the threads, the spools, the colors melting into the fading warmth. Vel and Maisie evaporated into whiteness, then Mrs. Callin and Judah and Leverett until no one was left but Brella, sitting alone in her chair, ranting about how she would never, ever, as long as she lived, lay a hand on Scratch in anything other than violence.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Scratch gasped into alertness. The night was still dark, the heavy moon hanging in a warm sky. Still she shivered. Her heart pounded in her chest and her ears rang. Her whole body was filled with freezing water, sharp chips of ice cutting into her bone.
“Scratch, please. Let me explain.” Brella crouched beside her, an animal at the ready. Her eyes were desperate, imploring in the dark. She shook terribly. Freckles stood dark in her ashen face, and her words sounded like choking, or drowning. “Please. It isn’t what it looks like.”
“It looks like you’re part of a plot to abduct me.” She was amazed by how level and emotionless she sounded. It made a sick sort of sense. She was beyond feeling, a hole of swallowing blankness opening up inside of her. “That you planned this whole thing. That you think I’m, what was it, a bloodthirsty imp?”
“No, Scratch. No.” Brella’s eyes widened even further. “That isn’t what I—”
“They wanted you to seduce me.” Her lips felt numb, her tongue a foreign thing. “Is that why you’ve been looking at me? Holding my hand?” The words sizzled on her lips like acid. “They convinced you?”
“No. I was never planning to do that. You and I, we . . .”
“What were you going to do with me?”
“Nothing, I—”
Scratch held up a hand. “Not like that. I mean, in Koravia. Why did you need me to go to Koravia?”
Brella swallowed, her throat clicking. “You’re too dangerous.”
“Dangerous.”
“Frances has been trying to stop her father from invading any other lands. We thought we had time with the Wilds. We thought we could get him to pull the troops back. And then—”
“The octagon.” Victory after one day. Victory that should have been rewarded. “The king was going to knight me. I was going to be a commander.”
Brella stood, breathing. Her face was twisted, pained, but she couldn’t deny it. “Yes.”
“Until your people got to him.” She stared at Brella through a haze of stinging blur, her details fading into splotches of dimmed color. “Your group convinced him not to knight me.” Suddenly, the yawning hole inside her was full of fierce, sweltering anger. “Wasn’t that enough for you? Why rip me away, ruin any chance I had at a future, when you could have just—”
“Because you did it as a Sergeant Major!” Brella cried. Her voice was raspy, echoing messily off the trees. “It was only a matter of time until he changed his mind again, gave you a command. Imagine what you could have done!”
“Lived!” she cried, something cracking inside of her. “Succeeded. Did the one thing I know how to do.”
“You’re wrong, Scratch.” Brella was openly sobbing now, bent and pleading. Pathetic, and yet Scratch and her twisted hope felt the traitorous urge to go to her. Hold her, calm her. This liar. “You c-can do so much more. You can.”
“What were you going to do with me in Koravia? Kill me?” Brella shook her head ferociously. “Tell me.”
“Frances is getting help from Koravia. She’s been corresponding with the king when she can. We’d been planning to get her there for months. But we knew . . .” She gulped, wiping her face. “We knew they didn’t trust her. Not completely. You were—”
“A gift,” Scratch snarled. “A price.”
“We need to win, Scratch. We’d been looking for a way to earn Koravia’s trust, and then you took the Western Wilds. You’re the best strategist in Ivinscont. Getting you out of there was t-twofold: an easier win for us and a w-way for Frances to prove herself. To convince the king he should back her against her father.”
“And ruining my life wasn’t a problem for you?”
“You’ve ruined lives, Scratch!” The forest was still. Barely any bugs chirped. No bats swooped. It was only the two of them standing apart in a clearing under scrambled stars. Brella’s breathing was loud and ragged, but Scratch could barely hear it over the raw thump of her blood rushing through her tight and throbbing veins.
“What lives?” she demanded.
“We talked about this, Scratch.” Brella’s braids were disheveled, little strands coming loose from each plait. “The Western Wilds are under Ivinscont now.”
“And their lives are better.”
“They’re not citizens. Their trees are going to be felled for the mills.”
“Their trees?” It was as though a stream of ice water shot through her, turning molten anger hard and sharp-edged. “They live in trees.”
“Not anymore. They live like Ivinscontians now.”
She pressed down the confusion. The anger was better, crisper, brightening her vision like daytime. “They would have been annexed anyway. If I hadn’t come up with a strategy, someone else would.”
“Frances nearly got the king to retreat,” Brella cried, wiping her eyes.
“Well, she didn’t, Brella.” The name was sticky hot in her mouth. “I can’t apologize for being good at what I do.”
“You are good.” Brella pressed her lips together, inhaling a steady breath through her nose. “You are. Come be good for Frances.”
That knocked her back. Her knees wobbled. “What?”
“You know what he did. I told you. Kyria and the Western Wilds didn’t want to be part of Ivinscont. He’s going to take more and more. You know what it’s like for them, now. You can’t pretend you don’t.”
“I don’t know why it should matter to me,” she said, feeling
the lie cauterize whatever was open and bleeding inside her until it was nothing but numbness.
Brella stumbled back. “What?”
“You’re clearly not a soldier. You just gave up your whole plan. I can go back now. Sure, I’ll be thrown in a dungeon, but the king will free me once I tell him that his daughter left to build an army against him. That there’s a maid in his castle who is working for the resistance. That he should prepare for a Koravian invasion.
“Scratch,” Brella croaked. “No.”
“Pity I didn’t figure out who the contact inside the castle is. But at least I can tell the king to watch out for one.”
“Scratch, please. You’re angry. I get it. But this isn’t you.”
“How the hells would you know who I am?” Brella didn’t know her at all. How could she, when Scratch wasn’t even sure anymore who she was? Everything she had thought before the banquet, before the princess disappeared, before she had seen the end of her life on the executioner’s block—she had been right. If it hadn’t been for this small, insidious resistance group, Scratch could have had everything she wanted. A command. A life. Everything.
Everything she still wanted. Didn’t she?
Brella shifted, her eyes going cool. “You’re right,” she sneered. “I don’t know who you are. Here I thought you had realized what you’d done. How many deaths you’ve caused. But I was right all along, wasn’t I? Soldiers are cruel and mercenary and selfish. How could I have thought differently?”
Scratch could barely breathe. “I’m going back.” She made sure her knife was strapped in its sheath. “I won’t take you in. I’ll show you that mercy. But I’m going.”
“What about James?”
Scratch froze. “What about him?” she snarled, bluffing away the fear. James, James, James. She saw him in her mind’s eye, terrified and confused, long eyelashes wet with tears.
“He and Vel are meeting us at the blood gate tomorrow. Are you going to let him go on without you?”
“He’ll know s-something is wrong.” She stumbled over the words. “He’ll look for me.”
“Will he?” Brella’s face clouded over, and Scratch was transported back to that first night, freed from the dungeons and thrown before a woman who wore her distrust as plainly as her dirtied apron. “I could tell him anything. That you’ve run off and died.”
Walk Between Worlds Page 15