The erratic cries and fevered pace of their ride had the opposite effect on the hunter. Even through the roar, she heard her own lips choke out the scream as she beheld his shadow lunge. A horse loomed. A rider’s spear dipped. For an instant it seemed the pair might collide.
A flash begot a rasping cloud of foul air. It burned her eyes, even from such distance, but the fire seared quickly through, and the cry that followed it was not her own, for the pistol, she surmised, had done as such monstrosities were wont to do—ignited in its chamber, and burst upon itself. Where men should have lain at the heart of it was naught but sooty black smoke.
It riled the horses, set them to bone-jarring screams and puppet-like jerks that made them as dangerous to rider as to foe. In the confusion, she sought to breach the cavalcade, but she choked on the smoke as she reached its edge, and just where the path bent into its veil, a rider waited before her with a pistol leveled at her.
She came to a rearing halt. Desperation and defiance roared with her, and her dagger rose, but even she was not so foolish as that—not when she heard another horse enter behind her.
“Release your dagger. We will not speak with armed men,” the rider said with authority. One accustomed to it, no doubt.
She cast about, wild for a way out. Yet there was none, and that fact drew her answer out but bitterly: “And I am no man, so I’ll have you pluck it at your own peril.”
The man was broad and bulky and ill-suited for defiance. His dark face heated, and the friction wheel on the boggling monstrosity of his weapon began to inch toward devastation.
“Don’t be a waste, girl,” a harder voice demanded behind her. “And get you down your gun, Simon. She’s scared—and if a girl’ll stick you while you’re up there all high’n’mighty in your armors, you’d best just give her your horse any damn how.”
The gun lowered, but the rage did not go with it. Essa did not lower her own blade, but turned toward the second sound—only to find a wild-haired ghost sitting sidesaddle above her. Roswitte was paler than she remembered, and dirtier, but whatever the road had wrought on her, it had not dimmed the commanding figure of her gaze. That, and that alone, is what convinced Essa to finally lower her blade.
“And I’m no girl,” she muttered.
The little bear of Verdan tilted slightly, then snorted, and spat the result into the dust at her feet. “Suppose you aren’t,” Roswitte said with a hint of amusement.
By then the cloud was dissolving. Beyond her captors Essa could see feet, then legs, a body, and finally, a head. Rowan was the first to take shape, and it took all she had not to fling herself toward him. My last piece of family. He moved, still, coughing on the rancid air, but he paled. She could feel the wetness in her eyes but told herself it was only the smoke.
“Please,” she said, “he needs help. He was—he was…”
“We’ll help him. No worries. That’s what we’re here for.”
“Ser? What’s the word in there?” the dark man—Simon—called into the dark.
Gradually, as the light pierced the dark, so too did the rest come into its field. A boy lay in the dirt, holding a bloody hand up to the light. Beside him lay his would-be killer, writhing in that same dirt, but with a face blackened by soot and a body wrapped in a hunter’s net.
Above them all hung the final specter of that once noble family—the ser to these riders, and the apparent bearer of their salvation. Even beneath the dirtied iron upon his head, his long hair gave way to whatsoever his father’s looks could not.
Ivon. Three brothers, in one domain, all hunting, all bleeding, all dying for a war beyond their ken.
She should have sank to her knees, had she the sense to find them.
But Ivon, turning in his saddle, saw and heard none of this, for his eyes came to one soul and one soul alone, and it was the same soul that had stolen her light away not long before.
“Oh brother…” he whispered. “Oh Alviss, what happened to you?”
While behind them came the clamor of still more riders, and it was to these chance stole her gaze—and set her body to its bitterest of edges. For there, strung in ropes along one rider’s saddle, was another vestige of betrayal.
In a world where brother killed brother with wanton hate, she could but imagine no god would punish one that merely killed a friend. She raised her knife and started forward, but with a shout from Roswitte the dark man seized her by the neck and dragged her up, and cut the world off in a choking grip.
She clawed at him—hard enough to pull skin free—but he did not relent. As the world darkened, she promised herself she would not forget. Not what had changed. Not what needed to be done. Not a brother, trussed and bound, riding back into their broken little lives.
Chapter 3
Both moons were high, and in the sharp contrast of their light even the torchlight seemed eclipsed. Despite the late hour, a warm breeze flowered Fürlangen, for the scarlet blossoms of the feuerblüte trees coated the air with the promise of summer to come. Soon enough, the winds would roll off the coast from Ravonno and sweep steadily north until even Anscharde, settled as it was along the banks of the chilly Klein, would bake.
Ravonno and Anscharde.
Charlotte Cullick paced the halls of Vissering on such nights, with them on her mind. Little rest could breach her agitated thoughts, for spring had not only been filled with little fires, but with a wildfire that threatened to consume them all.
It was not merely dramatics. Nearly every morning was filled with the anticipatory dread of what might come next. Every step seemed to pull her further from the moonlight and deeper into apprehension’s dark embrace.
With the inevitable thaw, the imperial hold on the old blooded nobility of the south had gained an unfortunate ally. Word from the scattered villages and loyal bondsman the Cullicks held there spoke of Ravonnen priests flooding down from the mountains, bearing about their wrists the black steel rings of the innermost circle of the Visaji path: death. The Inquisition.
While their presence had been tolerated, previously, this swarm of them was like locusts, and they devoured whatever they laid hands upon. Already fifty some odd men and women had been stretched out on wheels and left to rot beneath the sun, and among them, a handful of her father’s informants. The crimes varied, but be it political or religious betrayal, it mattered little to the Inquisition—if the local lords allowed, any service to a heretic ruler was viewed in and of itself as heresy. And for those who would not repent, death was the only answer.
Retribution was not swift enough, in Charlotte‘s opinion. What battles they had managed to draw the loyalists into were decidedly in their favor, but these were few and far between and mattered little in the grand scheme.
Nor could they rely on the Empress Dowager to continue agitating in the south. Word of her daughter’s death in Anscharde may have earned the ire of many nobles who austensibly leant that place their loyalty and fanned flames among the hearts of the people for whom that little girl was much more than simply a child, but for Surelia, that death had been sanity’s last straw.
She had been brought back raving, far above and beyond the hysteria of even the most rabid dog. Sense no longer reached her, and more than once she had tried to take her own life. At last, for her own protection, and for that of her young son, Walthere had been forced to commit the poor woman to one of the castle’s towers, under careful watch and constant care. The physicians said she might never recover her wits.
No, spring would not cooperate with her family.
It was to the point that, when she looked out the window on the land her family had dominated for so long, Charlotte began to envision a ring of steel choking them out, inch by inch. It would only be a matter of time until the crown regained its footing, and then its armies would come for them. Their generals were no fools. She knew that much, and as long as the Bastard hacked his way through the eastern reaches, her family’s own allies in the north seemed unwilling to rush to their aid. They were
cut off and alone.
Increasingly, the situation was controlling their actions, rather than their actions directing the situation.
Yet there remained a glimmer of hope. Faint though it was, its promise should have rendered all other madnesses but pricks of the skin. In the same report that broke word of little Rosamine’s brutal murder, news arrived that someone had tried to kill the so-called Emperor.
No one yet knew if they had succeeded. For days after they heard nothing. Then in silence’s wake followed reports of a city in turmoil. Riots stalked the streets of the capital. It was said that, of the royal family, all but the Emperor’s dutiful wife had fled Anscharde, and with no Chancellor, there was no clear authority. No one knew who ruled. Likewise, no one knew who had brought that madness careening down.
Charlotte had her own theories, most of them revolving around her father. Yet the man was curiously perturbed throughout the long nights, even if he would not show it. In a moment when he should have perched atop his greatest triumph, he seemed racked by the possibilities of the event. For a man that existed in the spidery webs of a methodically planned existence, it was too indecisive. He was still working out how to react, and that meant it was not likely him.
Which left only one possibility.
Others turned their accusations on the Bastard, or on Mauritz. Based on the raw animalistic character of his actions for the one, while for the other, it was seen as the man who could most easily grab the reins. But Mauritz was more concerned with war; the reins meant little to him. She doubted the Bastard had the reach for such a thing. A frightening man, to be sure, but all his power rode around with him in the field. Away from a field, with a lance in hand, the man was but a feather in the wind.
Charlotte stood on a balcony and looked out toward the field that held so many unanswered questions. Her mind kept drifting back to that day, weeks before, when Usuri had gone wild and nearly burnt them all asunder. Something had spooked her. Something had gripped her. Something had torn her fragile sanity away.
She had her suspicions whom, though how was another matter entirely.
She ran her fingers nervously through the ringlets of her hair. Sanity. It was such a fragile thing. She herself might be titled insane for that night in the field. It was impulsive. It was destructive. It was wrong. And yet...
Some matters even she could not grasp. There was something there, and she could not put a name to the compulsion, but in the broken eyes of that woman, she had beheld something greater than herself. Something that pulled her beyond the constraint, and hate, and methodical logic of jurti. It was not, she thought, what she wanted. Certainly not what she needed.
And yet.
“There is only so long even such as we might claim to be putting up our dresses, Charlotte dear.”
Despite her anxiousness, Charlotte smiled to herself. Sara waited at her back, hands folded in the demure repose of one accustomed to waiting. When she turned, however, the princess’s docility spread into a wicked smile of her own and they shared a private laugh. Though they had their difficulties, this pair had found their own space in life. Each learned and drew from the other, and for women supposed to be above the menial disputes of life, they had found each filled some piece of the puzzle the other lacked. Sisters, truly, and soon in blood as well as word.
Charlotte snorted. “They should consider it lucky we do not grace them with funerary processions. It is in our ‘women’s’ rights, and I should doubt what news they bring should not have earned such grim reply.”
Yet they went. They always went. By day or by night, they travelled together, that all might see and remember: the bond between Durvalle and Cullick would soon run deep indeed. It would, Charlotte supposed, soon supplant even the sturdiest foundations of the former with a new form entirely.
So long as I give what little virtue I possess to a child but a quarter of my years.
She came down the stairs to the study where her father made his office, to find him gathered already with his captains of state. They were a grim lot, where one should have expected glory. Yet it was the young messenger, seated among them, whose face told her everything she needed to know.
“He lives, than,” she noted without a shred of pleasure or disgust, merely fact, as the boy squirmed beneath her gaze. It would, if so, serve to topple once more the tiny balancing act they had managed into a cluster of shattered hopes.
The messenger grimaced. Walthere waved him on, saying, “You can speak now, boy. Everyone is here.”
He was all but grey, that little boy, but he stammered through his news.
Leopold II of Idasia still lived.
“Lives, but in ill health, ma’am,” the boy sputtered. “They says a witch is what done him wrong. Had her dragged out in the streets and strung her up good. Didn’t burn her. Didn’t strangle her. Horses, they say—pulled her frail ol’ body to bits.”
The bastard Fitz, to the side of the assembly, raised a glass to the occasion. “One shall not suffer a witch to live. Or a madman, for all that. Or…”
“And what do they say of my sister, goodman?” Sara pressed.
“They point the finger ill at him, highness, and blame not some old woman with her boils. But the Emperor, says they, is dissolute. Wanders about the palace at all hours in a mad state, and is the laughing stock of the city. Lost the favor of god, they says, when he done stabbed up his little sis like that, blood or no. Pardon my saying so, highness.”
At the back of the room, Charlotte’s steady uncle Maynard hovered like a gargoyle over the proceedings. “This changes—” he began to say.
“Nothing,” Walthere finished for him. “Absolutely nothing. Except that now we know. My thanks, boy. Now out with you.”
The messenger bowed once, turned on his heels, and wisely fled the room. Still, Sara managed to lean out and catch him in his flight just long enough to press a silver shent into his hand and her thanks into his ear.
Ever the plotter, our Sara, Charlotte thought with an inward smile.
Outwardly, she asserted herself immediately on the matters at hand, pressing into the throng of traitors and planting herself firmly on Fitz’s outstretched knee. She patted the other, and gave him a smile of thanks, as she watched him wriggle like a cat in a cage. Already, she could feel her father’s hard look turned on him, and she ever so briefly despaired him the conversation that would follow. As a friend, however, it was her duty to confound.
Adding insult to injury, she plundered his cup of wine and raised it to the others. “Assal bless our insane monarch.”
“Amusing,” her father retorted drily. “Does anyone have anything substantial to contribute?”
A sharp series of coughs drew attention to Baron Koenraad, hunched over the sitting table, looking suitably miserable for all that he wished to speak. If spring had been cruel to the rest of them, it had been downright pitiless to that old man. A nod from Maynard, however, sent his own son, Amschel, scurrying out the door to fetch him tea.
When he had mastered himself, the old man drew up with a voice that had once mastered chambers of state. “We need a fight. A good one. Cannot keep paying soldiers without spoils, and it does our folk no good to have them eating up our fields as they grow. War’s not a thing of days. I don’t expect campaign’s end by winter, and if that’s the case, we will need every store we can muster.”
“Need I worry about our accounts as yet?” Maynard added, in an aside to his brother.
Walthere balked. “We have never been lavish fools. Generous, but not departed of our wits. Your men will have their coin, but I need you to draw these bastards into a fight we can use.”
“They are hesitant for a reason,” Maynard grunted. “Give me leave to cross the border and I will do so. But I cannot run a war from this castle; this will continue to be a war of shadows if you keep summoning me back here at every scrap of news.”
“Gentlemen!” Charlotte interjected, wary of her family’s pickings—no matter how much of a po
int her uncle had. “Boyce tells me ships have landed in the north. The fact is this: the longer we sit twiddling our thumbs, the more men they gather, while the less we seem to hold. Help, no matter how much you desire it, father, is cut off from us. Act now, before they consolidate their strength and besiege us in our homes.”
“A war destined to be fought from castle to castle is a war already lost,” Maynard added.
“I hardly need lectures from either of you,” Walthere all but snarled.
More softly, Fitz prodded Charlotte in the side at the same moment. “Thinking of donning arms, my lady? They say it is the lionesses that hunt, you know.”
Having avoided too much of a jerk at the none-too-gentle prodding, Charlotte resisted the urge to slap her dear friend. Instead, she patted his hand as might a conciliatory lover. From the frown he gave her, he knew exactly what she was up to.
“Oh, dear Fitz, I should not seek to unman you so.”
“But you might, my dear,” Sara whispered in her ear—though when the girl had approached, she could not say. “When you wish it, your femininity could put most women to shame, but in the pursuit of the sharpened word, I dare say most men should shrivel before your approach.” She curled a pinky for emphasis and set off a host of laughter between them.
“Ladies,” Maynard said coolly. It was enough to pull them all back with rosy cheeks.
Walthere, not letting his subject drop, rounded on Amschel as the boy returned. “Then send men with your boy, Maynard. He needs the experience anyhow—and you’ve taught him all he needs. If he’s killed a Blade in battle, by Assal, I think he can handle the field without you.”
Amschel, caught in the midst of a battle he had not anticipated, floundered, and looked to Charlotte for help. But all she could do for him was gesture at Koenraad, and remind him of the task at hand. It was, thankfully, enough—combined with her cousin’s wisdom. The boy bent his head to his task and wandered past, gentle as a fly, to bring the baron his tea, for which the sickened man appeared eminently grateful.
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