It was plainly spoken, but the words were enough to set him reeling. It was Usuri who had brought Kana and Anelie to him, was it not? Charlotte had wished them dead. Dead!
A great thunder shook the room, and he twisted back, to see that even as a space was opening in the door, Essa had shoved a cabinet across the breach and slammed it over onto its side. She was huffing back to him fast.
Something passed between Usuri and Charlotte. He was certain of it, though he knew not its shape. Then Charlotte barked the phrase that brought them all up short.
“It is done, Aurinth. Let it be.”
And as a dog trained, he stopped. Only Chigenda’s spear kept going, but this he wove around, and caught at the shaft, leaving them for a moment staring one another down—he, cool despite the sweat upon his brow, Chigenda fuming, rage incarnate. Rowan cast back and forth between the groups, clearly uncertain. “Blood boiled is not easily cooled,” he shouted back. “And that one owes us a great deal of reparation.”
The assassin’s eyes never left Chigenda, but the words were for the swordsman:
“Death is a flower
it is fragrant memories
breaths once sowed.”
Then he barked with laughter like a black dog, chill as winter’s deepest snows. Yet between Chigenda and he there was a stillness, a searching for bearing that encompassed many emotions and none of them—appraisal, humor, contempt, respect. Recognition, perhaps.
“Your people treat mine as equals,” that one said to the Zuti. “Perhaps the only ones. Gratitude is this one’s pleasure to give, for this and much else.”
The Zuti’s browless forehead furrowed and his lips smacked as if tasting the words. “Men is men. And you.”
Another bout of laughter as the assassin loosed his hold on the spear and let his sword drift aside. He stepped back, turning his eyes at last to the mistress who had beckoned. His face was worked obsidian—smooth, without purchase.
“If you do not go now, much will be undone. There will be…” Usuri shuddered, touching the bruise upon her neck. “There will be more than mere scars.”
Sullenly, Charlotte asked, “Are my people alive?”
Essa, appearing at Rurik’s side and snaring his wrist, took the moment to turn back at the petulant questioner. “Some. Including your dog.”
“Dartrek?” She looked startled, but something lit there. It frazzled him, to see that look for one such as Pescha.
“Is that what he calls himself now?” Essa said below the other woman’s hearing.
The door shuddered, and an axe went clean through. Shouting on the other side intensified and bodies heaved against the frame. It was enough to rock the cabinet. Rurik cast about, his hold tightening on Essa’s hand, but he could see nothing of use.
“Need I remind everyone that we are in a tower?” Rowan said with a hint of incredulousness. “Unless, the stories of witches are…”
Usuri glowered at him. “I cannot fly, but you are welcome to try.”
“Ah. Pity.” He lowered his sword and scurried to the window. The motion took him nowhere near the assassin, though, and a few ill-struck glances kept drifting back that way.
“Iruwen, how did you get in?” Charlotte asked. Rurik had assumed he had been there all along.
That one’s eyebrows waggled. “Wind and weather are a killer’s friend. They bore the rock and wear the walls, and handholds come and go…”
“You climbed?” Essa’s eyes drew wide.
“There is a rope now,” the assassin added.
It was all going too quick. Rurik nearly asked where, but before he could, Essa made a despairing sound and Charlotte paled. The place their eyes met was by the bedframe, where Anelie now stood with her cowering charge at her back, a crossbow in her hands. It was pointed straight at Charlotte’s heart, and for her young years, Anelie did not waver under its weight. She was her father’s daughter. Pride and horror warred in Rurik then.
“Child, do not do this,” Usuri cautioned before the rest of them might.
Anelie grimaced as if Usuri had slapped her. “She killed papa. She locked us up. She sent Isaak away.” Her eyes narrowed to a squint, and Rurik knew she was taking aim. “Death would welcome her.”
A flicker of motion at the edge of his vision dragged him to the assassin. His arm pulled back to throw a dagger and Rurik felt his stomach drop out from under him. He pulled for one of Essa’s daggers, for anything, and—
“Aurinth. Stop.”
It was Charlotte who spoke, voice barbed, and the assassin went still. The blade did not fall, but Chigenda reached out and gripped that hand at the wrist.
Why was it that death so often formed the crossroads of lives to be lived? Charlotte could not put up a fight against that bow. She watched it warily, as a cat might consider a rival. Some people—the assassin, Rurik suspected—drew pleasure in such moments, arousal even, in killing.
Rurik had killed. It had changed him to do it, and time after time, it became horribly easier to do—he had tried, time after time, not to think much about it. Sometimes that was easier than others. Death was not his goal. At best it was a means, a necessary evil, to a cherished goal. He had never quite managed to be cold to it. There was never any righteousness in it, even to things he thought were righteously done. He knew he was not a good person.
Yet looking into his sister’s eyes, watching a girl flush in the beginnings of her womanhood with her fingers on a trigger and death in her eyes, was probably the worst experience of his life. Rurik had not watched his father die. In a way that was worse. In a way that was a blessing. He did not know if she had been forced to watch, but what he did know was that this was an irreversible course. If she took it, the Anelie he knew would never be the same. It would be a scar on her, and though that scar might heal or fester, its fact would be irreparable.
He put the hammering behind him. He put the assassin behind him. He put hatred and fear and all the rest behind him, such that his bedeviled eyes had room but for that frightened little girl alone, and they were not at the crossroads of something stark and terrible, but just brother and sister, and the world around them be damned. He spread his hands and met her eye.
“Anelie. Lower the bow.”
Her tiny arms shook, as they had on so many nights of brotherly cruelties, or laments for a mother lost. They did not fall. “She killed papa.” It was not a justification. It was fact, as she saw it.
For an instant, his gaze drifted to Usuri, found her looking back at him. She entered their world, but only as an observer, and he wondered if she had gambled and guessed right, or if all this madness would now go on, take new shape, and worsen because he had listened to a madwoman. Yet he had to be resolute. Making his own decisions…well, he had seen where that got them.
“Did she raise the blade?”
“Words kill as easy,” Anelie hissed.
Clever girl. For once, he wished it was not so. Essa’s grip on him tightened, but he could not relent. “Were they hers, or her father’s?”
That struck something, and the girl hesitated.
“They made your sins fall on papa. Is this any different?”
He closed his eyes, for that struck home. Gods, but how that girl he knew had grown! And where had he been, when all that growing had been done?
Careful were his words. “Do you want to be the same as them?”
They were the right words. For a long moment she held the crossbow still, the silence punctuated only from the nearing men beyond. Kana cast between them, her bottom lip jutted out against her show of strength, and she clutched warily at her aunt’s arm. “I don’t want to be here anymore,” she said, and Anelie pulled her close.
The door heaved and Essa pulled ahead of him, shouting for the others to move. They were moving, all of them, toward something inexorable. Rurik hesitated on that threshold, looking back one final time at the menagerie of villains his life had earned, and the one girl he thought he had come to save from them. Usuri was
not watching him, though. She had turned to Charlotte, and in her eyes he beheld a connection he had thought lost to her. Something human. Something deep. A piece of something clicked there that had evaded him before, and just like that, he knew. Usuri chose as she did, because the heart would let her choose no other way.
He trusted her heart more than he trusted any prophecy. It let him turn away from the rest and scurry toward freedom, ignoring the assassin’s bow which made mockery of his flight.
Chapter 16
Lord Carstoff was not what anyone would have called a “good” man. Yet he was a steady hand, good with a blade, and just with his people. It was more than most could ask in this age of war and rebellion and religious zealots. Military bearing flexed his shoulders, and he rolled his eyes to the sky in defiance—defiance of his circumstances, of the men about who had failed him, of the squawks of the gryphons he had stolen from Matair’s own land. It might have been any of these. True to his masters to the bitter end, but not so true to his friends.
Then Isaak watched his body jerk and writhe as one of the man’s own farmers pulled hard on the rope that would choke him to his end. Carstoff swayed with the force of his own kicks, but his arms were bound, useless. Beside him, his son followed him into death, along with a half a dozen knights not quick enough or wise enough to have left to Witold’s summons.
Most of these men Isaak had known at least in passing for the better part of his life. Part of him, in turn, wondered why he felt so little at their end, wondered if perhaps he was not so human as he masqueraded. Then the kicking stopped, and laughing men let the bodies drop, one by one, and Isaak turned from them toward the tightknit camp.
Every week, they hung nobles who could not run fast enough, but that was nothing compared to the fate that awaited the unnamed. Strangulation was cruel, but to bury a man alive, or worse yet, to bury men en masse, such that their ashes should never again know the taste of the wind? Wanton madness, unbecoming of even the cruelest. Few better ways to make a message or leave a mark, though. He closed his eyes, shook the bias out. He could not say it was ineffective.
Most men learned. Most submitted when they saw the banners coming. It was only the stubborn, or the faithful, who refused to bend. And like iron, they shattered for it.
Assal help him, he thought of Ivon and he thought of Rurik, and further still he thought of his wife and his little girl, and in his mind he went over each and every one, pondering who would bend and who would break, who could crack or shatter. The mind did these things, if allowed to roam. He clamped those thoughts down swift, would not give them room to grow.
Around them, the leaves were beginning to turn. As the men broke their tents for another day’s march, Isaak stood looking around him at the land, and the unrelenting march of time. This time last year, his father had been alive. He had a home, a future, a wife and child. He had been ignorant, in his way, and war had been a distant, notable if unremarkable, thing. How swift the wheels turned, when all began to slick downhill.
When he spied a soldier drinking, he slapped the mug from his hand and kicked him to the earth hard enough he hoped he left his head spinning. Like a dog upon its kill, he snarled, “You’ve a duty, soldier. I’d be to it if I were you.” At first, bewilderment had crossed the line to rage, and Isaak thought this might actually be a man to raise a dagger against him. Instead, on realizing who berated him, the soldier went stiff, an addled puppy, and scurried off with his tail between his legs as soon as Isaak let him.
It was a foolish thing to do, but he had a part to play, and the heat was in his blood. Isaak breathed, steadied himself. Sometimes the world moved too quick, even for a mind such as his.
Jaritz colors had been spotted in the western wood. Less than half a hundred men, from the sounds of it, but that only made them sound all the more tempting to the Bastard. The capture of bands smaller than that were what had finally led Isaak from his role as mole to Berric, rat to a rat, to a sergeant, then an attaché. Advisor. The captain, like most others, believed wholly his story of capture in the woods, of a man struggling from old-minded oppressors. In truth, it was an easy sell. Ivon had seen to that.
He had come to them with a clear mind for the steel and the wood, but in clothes so bedraggled, he could not have been their enemy. So many scars, alongside those rope burned wrists, and no one, no one could have believed that an act. The rest was mere words, and these he was long practiced in.
Only one man had been fool enough to recognize him. Isaak had seen it in the man’s eyes from the moment they met. A professional soldier from his own town, one who had since turned his colors truly, given up on Ivon and the Matairs and gone fully to the Bastard’s keep. In the same conversation, the man had slyly sought to extort Isaak for coin. Isaak had played that part too, desperate in another way, and when the time came to meet the man in private, he slit the throats of the man’s lurking fellows first, so they would not fall on him later, then killed the fool where he stood. A night’s dirty work. He scattered the bodies through the woods and made them appear more casualties from Ivon’s harassments.
He came to an arching tangle of branches, one of many looping above their heads, which enclosed the more loosely clustered area about Tessel’s own tent. Normally, such a place would be swarming with officers, but Tessel was not a normal man. He preferred men who led from the thick of it, that much was clear. He did not keep his officers clustered about him, here; they were scattered amongst their respective soldiers. Men came to Tessel when they needed something. The man seemed loathe to accept people’s loitering simply for the sake of it.
Berric stood nearby, arguing with a handful of other rebels. A hairy sheep of a man, one of the few knights Tessel had to his name, was gesticulating angrily, a contrast to Berric’s own removed, but no less heated engagement. Another at the knight’s shoulder looked more battered and dusty than Isaak might have expected for so early a morning, but that one kept his quiet, while the last, rounding out their party, was the man to notice Isaak’s coming, and gave him a nod of recognition. His eyes said he was desperate for an escape.
“How are we supposed to see if our outriders keep getting picked off?” Berric was saying.
“There will be none of that, ser. There’s no time.”
“There will be, damn it. Your people were supposed to report any movement by the enemy body, and shield us from their deceit. We do not know how many of them there are, what is happening out there…”
“They are rabble. That is why they are able to come and go as they please, and hit numbers only likewise.”
“Is that professional opinion? A guess? Arrogance?”
“Ser! I will not allow my honor—”
“And I won’t allow your honor to damn our men. You’re our eyes, you twit.”
“We’ll increase our numbers, then. Ride in force. Give us some of the local youths—we can use them as runners between us.”
“A distraction to hunt and find such willing.”
“You cannot have it both ways, ser.”
It was a battle of increasing ferocity, into which Isaak inserted himself with practiced poise. “Benji,” one of the attending captains called to him, to break up the debacle. “What are your views on these lofty matters?” This, at last, turned the others, gained acknowledgement of his presence. He put up his hands, palms out, grinned his most sheepish grin.
“Me? I’m but a soldier, friends. I’m for whatever man gets us quickest to some dead whoresons.”
“Sellsword, I thought,” one of the men jabbed.
Isaak spread his palms before him with a wily grin. “Well unless you’d prefer it’s your pockets I rifle through…”
He had cultivated a reputation for action, Isaak had, and there were a few echoing smiles on the attendant faces. The principal arguers were not among them. Berric still liked him, of course, but that one was too practiced a hand to give away anything in public. He was a micromanager, in an army of micromanagers. It had to be terribly
frustrating. Isaak had found the best way to their undoing was to step one’s own views aside, dismissed for simplicity, and play up each individual’s with a knowing, seemingly sympathetic ear.
Some, like Berric’s counterpoint here, didn’t entirely believe him. The trick was to treat one’s enemies beneath the same banner with as much careless swagger was one greeted the rest of the world. A man without cares was a man without plots. A man without plots was a man to be used by them, without fear of countersuit.
“We need to turn back,” Berric said sullenly.
Isaak watched him, to see if there was a bluff in there. Not the slightest bit of tension. It was thrown as careless as a child might flail a limb. This was his point, his whole point, and he would not be dissuaded from it. Coincidentally, it was the one opinion Isaak could not brook gaining any strength within their army.
Fortunately, few of the others were so sensible. “Retreat, you mean,” one of the others yawped.
“A superior force, superior arms, plenty of fresh supply. You’re daft,” Berric’s challenger said.
“Do we really need to be reminded how many of those surprise negates?” Berric queried.
A good argument, several of the men grudgingly acceded. Yet it was a debate out of time to be tested. Trumpets sounded, and the men split with the coming day, wandering toward their horses, their men, waiting for the orders from Tessel to be handed down. Everything that wasn’t to be carried with them was to be burned, to deny their enemies any scraps.
He expected Berric to stay him, but the man went on with a purpose, and he found himself ignored. They were moving out. Several hundred men, mayhaps as many as a thousand, were gathering themselves for another day’s march. They had a whiff of something, a notion. More oft, it seemed they were chasing after ghosts. Isaak liked it that way. It told him Ivon was doing his job well.
Unlike some of the men, Isaak had not earned himself a steed. He walked with the mass of men, bore a pike because they had no long guns to spare. Truthfully, that did not so much bother him. Pikes lacked the tendency to burst in one’s hand. He shuddered, resisted the urge to touch his face. Some burns went deeper than skin. He wondered how his brother dealt with that.
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