by Barb Hendee
Tris sat waiting, and Mari fixed solely on the captain.
“I tried to lift him,” the captain continued. “He babbled about something passing through him. He was in too much pain to say much, and he was already . . . withering. We tried to feed him, but whatever he could get down didn’t help. By morning he was gone, with his eyes still open.”
“And the deaths continued?” Tris asked.
“I’ve seen too many deaths, but nothing like these. There was another guard, and then the colonel, only his death was the worst because he lasted almost three days.” The captain closed his eyes. “I didn’t know about Brianne. Bródy has a number of lady friends.”
“You spoke with your colonel before he passed?” Tris pressed. “What of the other man? Did they both relate the same story as your Lieutenant Curran of something white appearing and passing through them?”
“Something like that,” Stàsiuo half whispered. “Or maybe in pain and fear they just repeated what they’d heard. Reason often fails before the last of life.”
When the captain fell silent, Mari’s attention once again fixed on Tris.
“Is this barracks still under quarantine?” Tris asked.
“To a point. I’ve tried to keep most people away, but without a sickness verified by physicians, it is difficult. Some of the men have families, sweethearts, and so on. The women sometimes visit in the evenings, and I cannot deny them any longer. The men are already on edge in having to live here full-time.”
“That may be the problem,” Tris said. “You are dealing with a malevolent spirit, not a disease.”
Stàsiuo scowled as if he might lose his temper. “You keep that talk to yourself! I don’t care about your rank when it comes to maintaining order here, and I don’t believe in any of that nonsense.”
Mari couldn’t stop herself. “Then how do you explain it?”
“It’s a ruse!” the captain answered. “Someone is trying to hurt us from within, to frighten the men and destroy morale. I don’t know who or why, but I’ll find him . . . or them!”
Tris studied the captain.
“I am here to stop this,” he said. “We require private quarters in the barracks, and I expect full cooperation, or the king will hear of it.”
For an instant, Mari thought the captain had had enough. Breathing too hard, he rose off his stool and then just stood there a moment.
“I’ll have my sergeant find you accommodations . . . my lord.”
Mari saw Tris flinch. How strange—confusing—that he so disliked wielding influence and power over the living, considering what he could do to the dead.
—
Shortly after this, Tris found himself following Sergeant Orlov and Mari out of the common room. Orlov led them through a door at the room’s back and into a much longer space with rows of double-stacked bunks to both sides of the center aisle. Only two city guards were present, both sitting on top bunks as they talked in low voices.
Both turned and looked. Both focused on Mari.
Tris barely held in his anger, which was mostly for himself. It revolted him that he had seen no recourse but to play upon his family name in remaining here until the cause of the deaths was uncovered.
He had no intention of ever taking his father’s title. That world was no longer his and never would be again. There were no ties between him and the house of Vishal. At least he had succeeded in this—or so he told himself, over and over.
Though somewhat troubled at the prospect of staying here at the barracks among all these soldiers, he held fast to his request for quarters. Finding lodging elsewhere would hamper his investigation and cut him off from events taking place here at night. This was when most spirits appeared of their own volition. The unimaginative captain might not believe in spirits, but some of the men here would think otherwise by now. That was also an advantage, for likely the captain would not be among the men at all times.
They might speak more freely without him present.
Tris had three things to learn: who the spirit had been in life, what it wanted, and why. All three were necessary before he could find the right place and time to catch and deal with it.
Sergeant Orlov led the way through the long room and through a door to another long room exactly like the first. Then out another farther door into a passage that turned left.
“We have a few private chambers for visiting officers,” Orlov explained, stopping before a door and glancing at Mari. “Do you need one room or two?”
This was obviously a polite way to inquire about the guests’ relationship.
Mari’s eyes narrowed.
“One,” Tris said.
She turned on him with a half-vicious, half-surprised expression, but she said nothing.
He added in Old Stravinan, “I’ll sleep on the floor if there is one bed, but we should not be separated. I cannot protect you if we are the next targets.”
She appeared to settle after that and nodded once, but with some reluctance. Though what he told her had been true, the fuller truth was that he did not like the way some men were looking at her. From those among his father’s men, he knew the ways of some soldiers—married, attached, or not. A pretty, exotic Móndyalítko might be more enticing than other women.
Tris flipped a hand toward the door.
“As you wish, my lord,” Orlov said, pushing open the door and then stepping aside.
Mari glanced at him with hard eyes as she stepped forward and slipped into the room.
Tris was well aware she could take care of herself. And for what these men here might not know about shifters—yai-morchi, as she would say—anyone bothering her would face much worse than a slap or a punch. Still . . . he would rather she not be bothered in the first place. If the men here believed she was with him, it might stave off unwanted advances.
He followed her inside. As he was about to turn and close the door, the sergeant did so from the outside. The sound of boots clomped away in the passage outside. And Tris was again alone with this woman.
Glancing around, he felt some relief; the room held two beds, one against each sidewall. A small window with actual glass, frosted outside at its edges, was centered in the far wall opposite the door. Before it stood a tiny table and two stools plus a pitcher with a basin and a single-candle lantern. At the foot of each bed, toward the door, were good-sized chests.
Mari stood off next to the one on the left, watching him. Her gaze was still hard, and her arms were crossed.
“It is wiser to share one room,” he said.
“No, it’s not. Not with you.”
He tried not to wince, thinking she must be angry about his recent revelation. “And who am I, a noble? No!”
She blinked twice, as if his explanation caused confusion.
“I left that world, that life, far behind,” he continued, “and regret returning even briefly.”
Turning to the left-side bed, he dropped his pack on the chest at its foot.
“It’s not that.”
At those words, he glanced back and found her still watching him. For an instant, those eyes were too much those of the lynx in her other “flesh.”
“You can’t change . . . what you are,” she added, breathy and low.
Was this a reference to him not being able to change his noble status?
A part of Tris regretted Mari’s company. They had saved each other twice—or one and a half times each, for at one time for both of them, they had not truly needed to be saved. He did not regret her help but rather that now of all times she was too close.
Others had been close when that other him came again into the living world. That was before he had met Heil, who had later calculated the black one’s future reappearances. The schedule was not precise to the day but close enough.
Tris did not want anyone near when this happened again. To
o many had already died for this—though not him, not yet. Exhausted and numb, with midafternoon light slanting through the window, he wanted the closest thing to privacy possible now.
“I will wait to question anyone until evening,” he said. “We should rest, for we may be up late.”
She nodded, dropped her pack on the other chest, and rounded to sit on the other bed’s edge. Scooting back, she lay down on her side, facing him, then reached back and ripped free the inside edges of the bedcover and blanket, pulling both loosely over herself, boots, cloak, and all.
He took off his boots and cloak and lay down, feeling some relief at the chance to rest. He needed to regain his strength. Whatever he’d be facing here, he had a feeling it would fight much harder than Brianne.
To his annoyance, it bothered him that Mari now knew the truth about his birth. He hadn’t wanted her to know. It would change the way she looked at him, and it shouldn’t. He was exactly as he’d represented himself to her: a traveler with a single purpose.
As he tried to rest, unwanted memories began to rise again, but this time, he didn’t fight them. He let them wash over and through him.
Closing his eyes, he was nineteen again, feeling trapped and smothered at home in the family’s manor. His father was away—as always—and his mother needed his company. In her early forties, she was still lovely without a single gray hair or line in her face.
The only sign of her mania and desperation was in her soft brown eyes.
She expected him every night at the dinner table, where she would grasp his hand and say again, “My darling boy.”
He was no longer a boy. He fell asleep every night thinking of the strange, silver-haired man he had met in Ceskú, who could make weapons to use against spirits. And Heil’s last words repeated over and over in Tris’s desperate thoughts.
You’ve a rare gift but no idea what you’re doing, not from what I’ve seen. I suppose you’d best come to Strîbrov with me, young baron.
Tris felt like a hangman’s noose, stretched tight and ready to snap by the weight of a condemned man’s corpse left dangling too long. He couldn’t leave his mother, with his father essentially having abandoned both of them. So, he stayed, night and day after night and day.
Then one evening when they dined once more together with only servants near at the ready, he noticed beads of sweat trickling down one of the faces of those servingwomen. What was her name? Matiya?
Normally, he would not notice such a thing, but the room was cool, and the woman appeared to waver slightly on her feet. His mother’s gaze followed his, and her brow wrinkled.
“Matiya?” she said with concern. “Are you unwell?”
The servingwoman crumpled to the floor stones; she was the first.
Other servants soon followed, and then some of the guards grew ill. Agnes, the family’s elder head of staff, called it “sweating sickness.” Nearly half who fell to it died.
Tris did not contract the illness, though he watched many others pass. Only then in the spread of death did he realize something else. He had never been sick even once that he remembered.
Another odd blessing of his cursed existence.
He watched his mother work night and day to care for those suffering. She sent a rider with a message to tell Tris’s father what was happening, but the baron did not answer. A week after Matiya had dropped, Tris noticed beads of sweat on his mother’s face.
His breathing slowed.
He dragged her to her room, insisting that she rest, and she was too weak to argue. By that night, she was so hot he had to sponge her face, and she barely recognized him. He was unskilled in caring for the sick, but he tried. Near the mid of that night, she grasped his hand. Her grip was weak.
“My darling boy,” she whispered again.
Those three words were the last she ever said to him. He was still sitting beside her the following morning, though she was long gone, and his guilt came from knowing he would not follow her.
The final tie with anyone who cared for him was broken.
It left him hollow, and yet it left him free.
He was still there beside his mother when Agnes patted his back.
“Your father will be home soon, my young lord. He must be home soon.”
Tris did not care. If anything, his spite only grew. His mother had been left in loneliness; but she was now beyond that and all else for which his father had abandoned her.
At the first light of the next day, Tris left. He took no money, no heirlooms, nothing that might belong to his family.
But he headed for Strîbrov.
—
Mari didn’t sleep. She lay listening to his quiet breaths.
He didn’t sleep either. She could tell.
Why had he been embarrassed by his noble status? Maybe she read him wrong in that, but not likely. So why? And if he’d hidden that much of himself, then he could certainly be hiding more.
And one day, no matter what he claimed now, he would take his father’s place—if she let him live.
He was more devious than she’d even suspected. Worse, she couldn’t shake off her reaction when he’d announced they’d stay in the same room. She’d been . . . relieved.
Some of that was having a private place to finish all of this without anyone watching, but there were other things. Certainly he needed her protection more than she needed his in this place. She still possessed her people’s instinctive need for safety in numbers, traveling in numbers and living in close quarters. But that wasn’t it, or at least not all of it.
She’d learned to be alone, and yet for some reason, he wanted her company. In some moments, he’d looked at her as if concerned—as if wanting to protect her? She’d seen it on his face when he’d ordered that sergeant to place them together in one room.
Why?
No one had behaved like that toward her since her papa.
Mari heard footsteps down the hallway outside and opened her eyes. The room was fully dark, though her eyes adjusted quickly. Tris still lay on his back with his eyes closed. She counted the footsteps coming.
Seventeen long strides later, a knock on the door followed.
Tris opened his eyes. He didn’t look at her, just at the ceiling beams.
“Yes?” he called.
“Supper’s in the common room, m’lord. Captain says if you want to eat, come feed yourselves.”
After a moment, Tris answered flatly, “Thank you.”
Mari sat up and swung her feet over the bedside, still in her boots. She sat there watching him until he finally rolled his head toward her.
And he looked at her, as if he could see her in the dark.
“If the guards gather to eat,” he said, “we will be able to talk to several of them, to piece together different versions of what happened. I need you to translate the full details that I cannot catch in their language.”
She said nothing, for there wasn’t anything to say. Her task was no different here from in the village.
Without warning, he swung his legs over the bed’s edge and sat up.
“I do not know if we will be compensated this time,” he said. “Rewards sometimes come of situations like this one, sometimes not. If nothing comes of this, I will pay you more out of the funds gained at Jesenik.”
Mari cared little about that. If she finally finished him, she’d take it all anyway, and she was more fixed on uncovering more secrets, now that he’d revealed one because he had to. Then again, if she didn’t act concerned about the money, he might get suspicious.
“Works for me,” she said. “Tell me what you want from them, and I’ll get them to talk, if they know something.”
Tris stood up, hesitated, and went to his pack upon the trunk at the end of his bed. Whatever he was looking for, he either didn’t find it or thought differently about retrieving it. In
a slow, deep breath, he turned for the door.
Mari took a step to follow.
He turned to look at her, and she froze.
“This spirit will not be like Brianne,” he said. “When I tell you to run, do so immediately, away from me. Do you understand?”
She had no intention of doing so. She had no intention of letting any spirit—let alone anyone—get him before she did, if it came to that. But she needed to see what else he could do, of what else he was capable.
“Just as you say,” she answered. “I’ve had enough of your ghosts anyway.”
He dropped his gaze, stood there a little longer, and nodded—maybe to her or not. And with more waiting and watching to come, Mari realized it had been too long since she’d last eaten.
Dinner waited.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Upon entering the common room, Mari paused, surprised to see three women present.
Then she remembered Captain Stàsiuo had mentioned letting his men decide if their wives or sweethearts could visit. It appeared a few of them weren’t worried about the safety of their women. Or perhaps they believed only soldiers were being targeted.
Stàsiuo also hadn’t known what happened to Brianne, so maybe no one else did. Hadn’t Guardsman Bródy said anything? Maybe he didn’t know she was dead. From what Mari had gained from Tris, Bródy must’ve been nearby and seen what attacked her.
Again, all of this was second- and thirdhand.
She braced for more questioning as Tris’s mouthpiece, but tantalizing scents in the air filled her nose. A table to the left was laden with food and bowls, and a portly man in a soiled apron set down a heavy cast-iron pan on a wooden plank table’s far end. At the near end were large pitchers and mugs and plates of sliced oat bread. In between were piled tin and wooden plates.
A number of people stopped eating, drinking, or chattering to stare at her and him.
None of the men wore their helmets, and somehow that made them look different—less like soldiers, more like people. Several picked up bowls and scooped spoonfuls of something out of the pan. And the closer Mari got to the table, the more saliva welled up in her mouth.