Chapter 18
Vayle was still sitting on the frozen fountain, but only after close inspection could I tell. The snowdrift that blew through had dumped a heaping of snow over her, and she didn’t so much as shake one flake of the white stuff off. Hopefully the cold hadn’t frozen the blood in her veins.
“Is my commander dead?” I asked.
A skin of wine rose from beneath the outcropping of snow like a paw of an animal trapped under an avalanche. That was a good sign.
“I will be soon,” she said, “if we stay in this kingdom much longer. It’s cold. Very cold. One of the many reasons I do not miss the North.”
I clapped my hands and rubbed them together diabolically. “I’ve got some news that’ll be sure to warm your bones. We get to hunt for an assassin.”
Vayle looked at me, and the snow perched upon her shoulder collapsed, cascading onto her thigh.
“You look ridiculous,” I told her. “You do realize that moving softens the cold, yes?”
“A paradox,” she remarked. “The cold makes it so that moving is a painful thought, but moving is the only way to stay warm.”
I blinked. “Right. About the hunt for the assassin…”
“Let’s get on with it,” she said, rising from her crudely made snow shelter.
“We’re assuming Mydia and possibly Chachant are going to keel over during or after the ceremony. Death requires an assassin. Unless he’s arriving on the wings of a phoenix, he’s already here. I say we start our hunt for him in the kitchen.”
She stared at me expectedly. “Explain.”
“The easiest way to make someone keel over is by adding a dash of poison to their drink or dinner. If we keep our eyes on the preparations of food and drink, particularly Chachant and Mydia’s plates, we can identify the assassin.”
“And what if the assassin is someone who wields a knife and isn’t afraid to plunge it into the belly of a king?”
“I’ve got that covered too,” I said, smiling as widely and annoyingly as I could. I pointed to the recently erected balcony curving across the center of the castle. “We’ll be up there with Sybil and Chachant.”
“I envision two problems. Wilhelm is bouncing around here like a demented bunny. He will pass us while we’re in the kitchen. I doubt he wants us there. Secondly, they will not let us on the balcony. Ceremonies are for the lords and ladies and those kind of people, not assassins.”
“Just wait,” I said.
“Wait? Wait for what?”
“Preferably a meteor to scorch the sky and suddenly plunge into the land of the conjurers. Failing that, we’re waiting for Wilhelm to come back around.”
Vayle pulled her undershirt up above her lips, protecting them from the cold. “Will you beg him to allow us entry to the wedding ceremony?”
I reeled back, quite offended at the suggestion that I would beg anyone for anything. She knew me better than that. “No begging necessary. He’ll find our presence up there quite comforting after I reveal some information to him. Oh, and look there, the man of the hour is passing through now.”
On second look, Wilhelm did resemble a demented rabbit looking for his next carrot fix. His head swiveled around as if the scent of orange, fibrous goodness surrounded him. He licked his lips in great anticipation and his eyes were narrow and focused. And he had quite the hop in his step.
“Commander Wilhelm,” I called out. He stopped before me. “I wasn’t entirely honest about the reason for our arrival. I’ve heard little chirps.” I put my arm around his armored shoulders. “Little warbles and a few trills. Some whispers, if you will, that an assassin lurks about in Edenvaile.”
Wilhelm’s shoulders rose with tension. “And where have you heard these whispers?” he asked, his voice muted.
“If I revealed my sources, then I wouldn’t have sources.”
He shrugged my arm off and faced me, with a scowl cutting down his chapped lips. “Twice now you have lied to me about your reason for being here. Why should I believe this?”
“My need to talk to Chachant wasn’t a lie, and we both knew I didn’t want to be here for a bloody wedding. That was hardly a lie, more a jest.”
Vayle stepped forward and rubbed her gloved hands together. “Hasn’t one assassination of a king already occurred on your watch?”
Wilhelm regarded her coolly. He said nothing.
“It would seem,” she suggested, “that it would reflect poorly on you if another assassin managed to fell another member of the court under your guard.”
“Remember the assassination of Enton Daniser’s son?” I asked. “I’d heard that the commander of the Watchmen’s Bay city guard was in turn brutally reprimanded. Eyes plucked out and fed to him, and then his tongue was riven from his mouth and he was thrown out to the sandy coast, left to dry by the sun like a fish.”
Wilhelm unfolded his arms and rested his palm on the balled hilt of his sword. “Is someone paying you to find this assassin, or has the Black Rot suddenly found the notion to play protectors of the world?”
“I want stability,” I said. “Not a world that’s plunged into chaos. What do you think the outcome of an assassination here tonight would be? Imagine if Mydia or Sybil get struck down. Chachant will lose his mind. He’ll march straight to the gates of Braddock Glannondil or Edmund Tath or wherever his crazed mind tells him to march. Do you want that?”
Wilhelm rubbed his mouth in contemplating fashion.
“I want access to this wedding,” I said. “Allow us to monitor the kitchen for any attempts at poisoning. Allow us access to the balcony where the wedding takes place. Notify your guards and tell them to keep watch.”
Wilhelm looked past me. He forced a heavy sigh through the corner of his creased mouth. “Fine. But understand me, Shepherd. If you fuck me over, I will do to you what Enton Daniser did to his city guard and worse. I don’t care what repercussions I face from the Black Rot. I’ll face them at the gate. I will make you suffer for making me a fool.”
I contained a smile that tried to consume my entire face. Wilhelm and his city guard wouldn’t face my Rots at the gate. No, my men would destroy them from the inside. But I had no intention of dishonor, so I simply shook the man’s hand and gave my thanks.
Vayle and I made way for the kitchen.
“If I may be entirely honest,” I told her, “I’m not sure where it is.”
“You’ve never been to the kitchen?”
“I’ve never set foot into any kitchen except the tiny hearths inside tiny homes in tiny villages.”
“I imagine this one is large.”
Once we finally discovered the location of the Edenvaile castle kitchen, I learned that large was not an apt description. The place was huge, massive, outright enormous. It featured several rooms, all of which specialized in a different mastery of cooking. They each had dirty stone walls and dusty stone floors, but that was where their similarities ended.
The front-facing wall of the first room had been converted into an immense hearth with iron hooks dangling from inside and menacing flames that licked at the iron bottom of one tremendously broad and deep-seated cauldron chained securely to two pairs of hooks.
There was a table upon which two cauldrons sat, servants pouring muddy broth inside both. It took two servants to heft each cauldron over to the hearth and chain it to the hooks. Once in place, they would add onions and celery and potatoes and various other vegetables, along with chunks of sliced beef, a large heaping of peppercorns, some spice that smelled similar to cinnamon, a dash of thyme and a host of other spices. There seemed to be one woman in particular who headed this fiasco of stew preparation.
She was angry. She stormed from the table, serrated knife in hand, and elbowed a young man out of the way. “Nononono,” she said, speaking so quickly each word came out joined to the other like twins that hadn’t separated from the womb. “Cinnamongoesinlater. Later!” she smacked him upside the head. “Dumb! Stupid! Howmanytimeshaveyoudonethis? Howmanytimesanswer
menow!”
Visibly shaken, the boy, who couldn’t have been a day over thirteen, stumbled back and spat out, “So—sorry, Miss Loeora.”
“Ah!” the woman hissed. She spun around and her thin slits for eyes narrowed at Vayle and me.
“Whoareyou? Whyareyouinmykitchen?”
“Hmm,” I said. “And what language are we speaking here?”
“Excuseme?”
Vayle stepped forward. “Commander Wilhelm sent us to oversee the feast preparations for today’s sumptuous exchange of vowels between Lord Chachant and Lady Sybil.”
I wished I had an inkwell and parchment so I could take notes on how I was supposed to behave around these people. Vayle had it easy; she grew up around nobles with sticks up their asses. Granted, she was their slave thing, so maybe easy isn’t the most accurate description.
“Oversee what?” the woman asked, her speech slowing down considerably.
“We won’t interfere with your duties,” Vayle said, smiling graciously. “I assure you.”
“Mm,” the woman said, dropping her head and slicing a carrot like she was attempting to grind it into the chop board.
I began walking toward the open doorway of a second room connecting the first. “We’ll have to watch all four pots,” I told Vayle.
“Astul…”
“What have we here?” I said, smacking my lips together. In the second room, the front-facing wall featured three separate unlit hearths. On several long wooden tables were chunks and joints of bloody meat, bones jutting out. There were boar haunches being basted with butter and stuck onto imposing iron spits. There was a whole pig being rolled over, its belly sliced open and stuffed with seasoned apples and spices such as sage and basil and garlic. A couple of servants stuck a hefty spit through its mouth, rammed it through the other side and left it on the table for now.
I mentioned to Vayle about ensuring both Chachant and Sybil received the same meat.
Her reply was, “Astul…” but I ignored her and continued onto the third room, which was the spicery. A man expertly wielded a mortar and pestle, grinding herbs into fine dust.
The fourth room consisted of a servant preparing sauces, and the fifth a scullery where servants washed tongs and basters and chopping boards.
“Astul,” Vayle said again, after I suggested the scullery could probably survive on its own without our intrusion.
“What?” I finally asked.
“We can’t keep watch over four rooms simultaneou—”
She paused. The stew lady unleashed a flurry of words from a few rooms over.
“Nonono! Impossible! Impossible! Itisallimpossible!”
There was a jangle of armor and then the walls trembled as something stiff collided into them.
“Make it possible,” a low-growling voice told her.
A few moments went by. The saucierer went to check on the hateur and returned with a wry smirk on his face. He shook his head and began slicing the crusts from a loaf of rye bread.
“Is there a problem?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing,” he remarked scornfully. “The Lady Sybil has simply moved the wedding from this evening to noon today.”
“That’s only a few hours away,” I said.
“Indeed,” the saucierer said, pouring a small spoonful of vinegar into a bowl. “Indeed.”
I tugged Vayle’s hand and hurried out of the kitchen and through a door that led to the edge of the castle courtyard, where a thin strip of grass would typically lie in the summer months, along with bedazzling flowers and bulbous shrubs. Now, there were bunches of dead wood and snow. Not a desirable place to congregate, which meant it served well as a venue to exchange words you wanted no one else to hear.
“She moved the time because we’re here,” I told Vayle. “She doesn’t want us to find whatever it is she’s hiding.”
“An assassin, you mean?”
“Or worse. You’re right. Monitoring the kitchen for poison is a fruitless endeavor. It’s much too large.”
“Tasters,” Vayle said. “They could help.”
“Tasters aren’t good for shit unless they’re tasting wine. A good assassin buries the poison deep within the meal, where only his victim would eat from.”
The heavy sound of crashing steel resonated through my bones. I turned to see the double-leaf keep doors open and a very familiar man step out.
“My Lord,” Wilhelm said from a concealed position.
“Commander,” Chachant said. “How are the wedding preparations coming?”
“Behind schedule, sir. We didn’t anticipate Lady Sybil moving the time.”
“I understand she’s a handful sometimes,” Chachant said. “But try to accommodate her, will you?”
“Of course, my Lord. Will that be all?”
Chachant bowed his head. “Yes.”
There was a scurrying of feet from where Wilhelm stood. Chachant had a relaxing look around his kingdom, drawing the glacial air deep into his lungs. He sat on the icy steps leading up to the keep, his arms woven around his knees. An old heavy wool coat consumed him, and a pelt tinged with orange fox fur sat upon his shoulders.
He had the face of a stable boy. Cheeks full of freckles, wispy pale hairs curling out from his chin and neck. His hair was matted around his ears and his bangs glistened with grease.
“I’m told you don’t make many appearances to the common folk anymore,” I bellowed, slugging through the thick, lumpy snow over to the boy king.
Chachant flashed me a lopsided smile. “There’s a voice and a face that I very much have wanted to hear and see.”
“Consider yourself one of the few,” Vayle said dryly.
“Commander Vayle,” Chachant said with a nod of his terrifyingly perfect spherical head, “how are you?”
Vayle traded glances with me. It was a glance of steadfast aggravation, one that said, “Why do these buffoons continue to ask me how I am when it’s quite clear how I am?”
“Cold,” Vayle answered.
“Better than being ill and cold,” Chachant said. “Malaise has kept me under the covers and inside my room for the better part of the last week. It is fortunate the fever broke yesterday.”
I patted down the snow next to Chachant into a stiff seat of sparkling white crystals and sat my tired ass on it.
“From the stories I was told,” I said, “I thought perhaps you fell victim to the avaricious nature of the crown and were locking yourself away, convinced there were thieves afoot who wanted to steal it all away from you.”
Chachant rubbed a small pill of snow between his thumb and forefinger and cast it into the market square. It disintegrated in midair. “Have I ever been one to succumb to greed?”
“Greed takes many forms. It’s not all about gold, you know? The annals of time are rich with those whose greed for knowledge undid them in the end. And greed for power. And respect. And pride.”
There’s a trick about broaching a dicey subject with someone who holds the power to have you dismembered at the time of their choosing, even if they used to be your friend and they still consider you theirs. You do not present the issue to them by taking it as if it were a wooden board and smacking it upside their head. You dilute it and serve it to them as if it were an abstract piece of art from which they can see the bends and turns you’re attempting to take them on. If they decide to join you on the path, fantastic. If not, you drop the subject altogether, or you don’t live long in this world.
Fortunately for me, Chachant wanted to tag along.
“It was strange, Astul,” he told me. “I’d never felt the kind of hatred I did when my father was assassinated. It — or something — drove me to declare Braddock Glannondil responsible. Something drove me to damn near beg for Dercy Daniser’s hand in the fight. I look back on it now, and—” His eyes cooled. They looked like dead steel that had been lying on the battlefield for centuries. “It was madness. I would never repeat my actions. The hatred then… it stole something from me. As a consequenc
e, the North has become a laughingstock. All the respect my father garnered? I obliterated it.”
I never imagined I’d have something in common with a king. But I knew the thief he spoke of. The one whose nails dig deep into the soft tissues beneath your skull. The one who picks apart your thoughts and infiltrates your mind. Sybil still had him in her grasp. She’d allowed him to think he had control again, but soon she’d reel him right back in.
“Hell,” he said, “I expected this wedding to be ignored. Dercy’s here, asleep. So is Edmund Tath. Nearly every lord of the North is here too. I hope to mend my careless gaffes of the past over spiced mulled wine.”
“And Braddock Glannondil?” I asked, wondering how much Chachant knew of his whereabouts.
He smiled. “Not here. Neither is my brother, but that…”
“Is hardly a surprise,” I said.
“Hardly a surprise,” he agreed. “But enough about me. What brought the Shepherd and his lovely commander here? Perhaps news of my father’s assassin?”
Vayle forced out an uneasy smile in response to Chachant’s compliment.
“Little progress on that front,” I said.
“I see.” Chachant’s demeanor shifted from warm and congenial to icy and inauspicious. He shoved his pale fingers into his knees and heaved himself off the steps. “The wedding comes soon. There is much to do. Forgive me.”
“Or perhaps even the king of the North isn’t so fond of his weather?” I put in.
“The cold does make leaving my bundles of linens and thick blankets difficult. But I ventured out here to see my father for the first time since his death. Sybil thought it better that I view him after the wedding, in case it would stoke the hatred in my heart once again.” He considered this proposition for a long while as the temperamental wind once again spewed forth a cheek-numbing blast of air. “I think she’s right.”
The boy king of Edenvaile tugged his yearning eyes away from the small mausoleum indicated by the statue of a sword-bearing king. It lay tucked away beyond the outcropping of rock and dirt the keep was built upon, far from the stable and market square. From our viewpoint, you could see only the tip of a masonic sword rising into the air.
An Assassin's Blade: The Complete Trilogy Page 20