by Barb Hendee
“I know what to do.”
He seemed ready to leave, and Mari was about to back away before she was spotted.
But Raylan headed toward the building’s far side instead. Appearing satisfied, Sabine pushed in the back door and disappeared into the tavern.
Mari crouched in the dark in thinking on all she’d just heard—and what to do about it. All of this had more than answered her own suspicions.
Sabine wasn’t clever or skilled enough for a scheme using herbs, suggestion, and poison. She was nothing but a street wench hiring some thug to cut up Elora’s face. And she didn’t seem to know anything about what had become of Brianne.
If the barracks killer in Soladran was someone still living, as opposed to a spirit, it wasn’t Sabine.
Mari found this disappointing in more than one way. She’d found someone with a motive, and it had all come to nothing. For both learning more about Tris and finding the barracks killer, she’d have to go back and start searching for a new lead. But Sabine’s malicious prod stuck in her head.
Not just a slash or two. I want her face ruined.
Elora had done nothing except be taken in by Bródy’s charm. If anything, he was the one who deserved a bit of slashing. And yet this girl would suffer just the same—maybe for the rest of her life.
It wasn’t Mari’s problem. But as she slipped from the alley toward the street, intent on heading back to the barracks, her frustration began to seep to guilt—which grew into anger—until she turned the other way and began tracking Raylan.
—
Tris shadowed Cotillard through the barracks passages, trying not to be heard or noticed. He was somewhat gratified that one of his suspects had gone off alone, and it was fortunate the man had not left the barracks. Following someone in the dark of a city he did not know would have been far more difficult.
Tris hoped the sergeant would do exactly as he’d claimed and head for his bunk. In this, he might learn of any nearby personal storage to later search. It had almost pained him to learn there might be no spirit to vanquish at the end of this hunt.
His one purpose was to rid the living realm of spirits of the dead—which in turn might lead him to something more for his own need: to finish or banish forever that other half of himself.
A foolish hope, for he did not know what that might cost him, maybe his own life.
Up ahead, Cotillard turned a corner, still heading toward the first bunk room. Upon reaching the corner, Tris stopped out of sight, for the next passage was short.
He might be seen.
A moment later, he heard a door open and close.
He remembered from his earlier walk through the barracks that there were two doors at the end of this short passage. One led straight ahead to the first bunk room; a second door on the left wall led out back of the barracks. He leaned out just enough to peek around with one eye.
The short passage was empty, and both doors were closed.
As this was the same path that led to his given quarters, he stepped out, walked openly and slowly to the bunk room door, and opened it. Inside were a few men getting undressed, lounging in bunks, or chatting. A few glanced his way, some puzzled or surprised.
Cotillard was not in the bunk room.
Tris asked, “Has Guardsman Cotillard come through here?”
The closest man on a top bunk leaned on an elbow. “Haven’t seen him, m’lord.”
Tris suppressed a flinch at the title. With a curt nod, he backstepped and pulled the door closed. Quickly and quietly, he stepped to the other door and opened it. At a squeal from weather-beaten hinges, he clenched his jaw, pushed the door wide, and stepped out, having lost any semblance of stealth.
The high city wall was no more than two arms’ lengths away. He looked left and then right. Halfway down toward the northern gate he saw the bulge of a rounded barbican with an open stairwell.
Footfalls echoed out of the opening in the night. Someone had entered to climb to the top of the great wall.
Tris followed, pausing once to listen before entering the barbican.
—
Mari had no trouble at all tracking Raylan; his strong scent made it easy. He was also careless—maybe too self-certain—and never once looked back. Not that he’d have seen her.
Under the streetlamps, his clothing looked even dirtier. About five streets up, he stopped.
Mari sidestepped in under a shop’s awning and flattened against the shop’s front. The number of other people walking up and down the street helped to mask any noise of her movements.
Raylan turned his head toward a building on the left.
Mari shifted just enough to sharpen her hearing even more. She heard voices, laughter, a clink of glass and then tin, and then the slop of liquids being poured. This must be another tavern, and there were four men out front, three of them crouched while tossing dice.
“Brace!” Raylan barked.
He walked a few paces closer to the four. Only the one still standing turned, startled, and then folded his arms and spit.
“Never thought you’d show your face here again.”
One of the others spun while still crouched. Spotting Raylan, he rose and gripped the hilt of a large dagger sheathed in his belt.
Raylan shook his head and spoke to the first man. “I’ve got your money, so leash your dogs.”
“Never thought I’d see that either,” Brace drawled.
Raylan held up the pouch Sabine had given him. “Take it.” He tossed the pouch.
Brace caught the pouch, emptied it into a hand, and counted the coins. “Betting you didn’t earn this, so you must have gotten lucky for once.” He gestured toward the dice on the ground. “Still feeling lucky?”
Raylan was already backing away. “Keep your crooked dice, and keep your dogs off sniffing after me . . . if you want to play those dice on any other fool.”
Brace chuckled at the veiled threat. Raylan kept backing away, not turning to speed off until he’d nearly reached the street’s far side—Mari’s side.
She was stuck in place, until Brace turned back to watching over his game. By the time she soft-stepped through the shop-front shadows and caught up to Raylan, he’d crossed three side streets and veered toward a bulky shingle-walled place with a rain-bleached wooden sign hanging out over the street’s edge.
Mari lost her fix on Raylan for an instant.
The wooden sign for the Gray Dove was gray all over. This was the place where Bródy and Elora had planned to meet tomorrow. Was she a regular in there, or was it just somewhere little-known that he met up with her?
Raylan had come straight here after paying off his debt, so he seemed to know right where to go. Perhaps Elora was a serving girl who worked in the Gray Dove, since Bródy would not be visiting tonight.
It seemed Raylan planned on earning his coin right away. That said something more about Sabine, if he hadn’t thought to cross her. Glancing around, he slipped into the nearer cutway toward the place’s rear.
Mari had no idea how he planned to catch Elora alone. But she couldn’t wait any longer and ducked back the way she’d come, heading for the alley. When she neared it, she slowed and peeked around the back of another building. A stack of crates along with an old barrel up the dark alley was close enough to the Gray Dove’s rear.
And there he was.
Raylan crept in upon the tavern’s rear door.
Skulking along silently, Mari crouched to strip off her clothes. She’d already felt the shift coming as she pulled her tunic over her head. And the pain came.
The first time, she’d been barely past her sixth year. She’d been hungry, for making camp had come late that night after the family’s wagon had broken a wheel. It took an afternoon for Papa to replace the wheel from the nearest town with help from Uncle Tavio and Cousin Brita. As Mari wandered in the
nearby woods feeling hungry, a tufted squirrel ran right across her path.
It was both painful and shocking when she fell and writhed in the dirt.
With some of her pretty clothes having been torn in the change, she lay gasping, whimpering, unable to move. Every sight seemed too bright, every sound too loud, every smell too strong, until she was overwhelmed and couldn’t even scream.
She just huddled on the ground.
And it was so long before Mama came searching and found her in the dark. That was all she ever remembered of that night.
“It’s hard the first time,” Mama whispered the next morning. “Horrible, from what I know. But you’re all right now, safe, my mahkai-tah . . . my little kitten.”
Mari began shaking, even wrapped up in Gran-mama’s musty quilt of faded maroons, teals, and ambers. Mama pulled her close in the bigger bed in the back of their warm, wagon home.
“And it won’t get better,” Mama said. “But you’ll get better at getting through it, knowing it for what it means, like your great-uncle Shy’nann.”
The two of them lay there most of that day, with Papa peeking inside several times to check on them. And no, the pain never got better, though she learned it meant something better.
It meant power, freedom, and survival in a life she’d never imagined as a child.
Yai-morchi.
Mari once might’ve wept in remembering that first night and the next morning, but not anymore. In the alley, the instant her dropped pullover hit the alley’s soiled cobble, her other flesh took her in less than two breaths.
Bones warped and shifted. Fingers shrank as her nails changed into claws. Skin became downy fur. She crouched on all fours as flesh and muscle bulked and rippled. Her face elongated, her mouth reshaping around her teeth. Though the act still hurt, now the pain was nothing but joy.
Night brightened and sharpened in her sight. Sounds grew and mounted on others not heard until now—like her prey’s shallow breaths in the dark.
Mari was on all fours when she charged. He never heard her until the last instant.
Raylan stopped and looked back over a shoulder . . .
Mari slammed into him, flattening him.
They both slid on the cobble. Even before they skidded into a pile of empty crates, his stench filled her muzzle, nose and mouth, clogging her head. She flexed her fore claws into his chest, cutting off his first scream in a suck of breath with pain. A hissing snarl through widened jaws and fangs silenced him the second time.
Mari slammed a paw down on his right cheekbone, wrenching his head to the side and pinning it. She cocked her rear legs in to shred out his guts. His panicked pants came fast, and the one eye of his that she could see locked wide on hers in terror.
She froze there with him pinned down.
Dead or maimed prey meant some constable or even the city guard would investigate. Evidence of a wild animal in the city would make it harder to get about. But she had to stop him from hurting the girl, Elora—stop him marking her, cutting up her face.
Mari flexed her paw upon the side of his head.
Claws distended, pressing into skin.
If only she could speak like this . . . I’ll shred your face instead!
She remained for a while, panting into his face through bared teeth. The scent of urine filled her nose when he wet himself, and she hopped off him in disgust.
Raylan scrambled away, tripping, falling, and breaking the crates, making a good deal of noise. Then he ran down that alley without looking back.
Mari wheeled around the barrel for her clothes; she wasn’t done with him yet. As she changed flesh again, the pain stalled her for a moment as she heard the tavern’s back door swing open. Still naked, she ducked low behind the barrel and peeked around it with one eye.
One step out the open back door stood a young woman with bright blond hair backlit by yellow-orange light spilling out of the tavern. Over her sky blue dress she wore a soiled and stained canvas apron.
Elora looked both ways along the alley, frowned, shook her head, and went back in. The instant Mari heard the door close, she hurried to pull on her clothes, pants and then boots. Then she went running up the alley while struggling to get the jerkin over her head.
It wasn’t that hard to track a terror-stricken man fleeing through the night streets. He didn’t even hear her coming as she drew her narrow dagger and simply dropped her cloak.
Mari kicked in the back of Raylan’s right knee at a run. He crumpled and tumbled across the cobble, and she was on him as he rolled over on his back. When she slapped the blade flat against his throat, she thought he might piss himself again.
His mouth gaped more than his eyes, but his breath caught before he could scream.
“Shut it!” she hissed in his face, pressing the blade until his skin bulged over its edges.
Raylan’s mouth snapped shut.
She leaned in, snatching him by his hair with her other hand. “That cat is mine, and it does whatever I say . . . to whoever I don’t like.”
His breathing quickened.
“Touch the girl, or go near her again,” she whispered, “and you’ll never even see my little kitty as it comes at you for the last time. Understand?”
Still breathing hard, he finally nodded once.
She eased back, about to hop up, but all her fury and heat just wouldn’t go.
Mari dropped down on him again, catching his jaw with her free hand and sliding the flattened blade up across his cheek.
“And when Kitty’s done, I’ll take your face off!” she rasped. “And nobody will know you when they find your carcass.”
She slammed his head aside to stun him. Lunging backward off him, she spun and grabbed up her cloak as she ran off. After weaving through the streets, she made a final turn and spun in against a building to peek back the way she’d come.
She didn’t see him, which meant he’d run off some other way.
Mari turned onward, sheathed her dagger, and whirled the cloak over her shoulders. Still, she couldn’t help regretting that the barracks murderer was not Sabine. Mari had solved nothing tonight, and too many pieces of this puzzle were missing. This thought brought her back to what had really happened to Brianne here in Soladran.
It was time to speak to Cameron Bródy.
—
Tris climbed the barbican’s stairwell as quietly as possible. Near the top step, he paused upon seeing a pair of boots left there, exposed by a little flickering from a distant brazier. Someone who had come up here did not wish to be heard or spotted.
Tris remained in the barbican long enough to remove his own boots.
He emerged atop the north wall, its stone still chill, even through his socks. Braziers burning along the wall’s top did little to illuminate much of anything, even the walkway itself. On such a dark night, he wondered how far out there lay the forest’s edge of the Warlands. The border stream was barely visible, though he heard it if he held his breath. And then he looked both left and right.
To the right, a man walked away, though his footfalls on stone made no sound. Moonlight glinted off his shaved head. Farther beyond him, and nearing the north gate, someone else in a helmet walked away.
Tris fixed on Cotillard again, who had left his boots behind to follow the other figure. What was happening here? He followed Cotillard but maintained a distance.
Whenever the far figure slowed or paused, so did Cotillard, who moved on only when the other man did so.
Tris’s intuition and reason both told him to stop whatever was about to happen. But if the sergeant was here to do something illicit or deadly, he needed to be caught in trying to do so. Suspicion would not help if Tris was mistaken in . . . whatever Cotillard had come here for, boots or not.
The other guardsman never looked back in his casual stride along the way. He had likely w
alked this path so many times that he knew each step, even in the dark, and had little need to look down at his steps or back along this way.
Tris waited for Cotillard to act—to do something. The man only continued his silent stalking, now and then shifting in between the wall’s top crenels. Tris decided to close the gap as quickly as he could without being spotted, and then one more detail caught his attention. Out the bottom of the farther guardsman’s helmet, a long tail of brown hair hung down his back.
The man Cotillard stalked was the other sergeant—Kreenan.
Cotillard raised both hands, palms out for a final charge.
Tris almost cursed aloud for his stupidity.
Cotillard might be clever to a point, but not with herbs and poisons and the ruse of spirits. He was about to push his rival off the wall’s end over the north gate. Why here, with other guardsmen below on duty? Perhaps because it was easier than wrestling an opponent over the wall’s outer crenellations, somewhere unseen, or knocking him off to the wall’s city side.
A scream or shout at night during the fall would still attract attention. A death in a remote location would draw three times the suspicion. But a fall over the gate within the sight of others—scream or not—would more quickly be ruled an accident.
Tris charged along the wall’s top. “Kreenan!”
At that shout, the other sergeant turned. Both he and Cotillard froze in surprise, the first in seeing the second, and the second in suddenly being revealed by Tris.
Kreenan backstepped, reaching for his sword. His left foot faltered as its heel crossed the wall walkway’s end. Cotillard rushed in, dropped low, and kicked Kreenan’s other leg.
Kreenan’s feet slid off the wall’s end. His chest and head hit the walkway, and his sword clattered out of his hold. Even though he’d been caught by surprise, for a trained soldier, his actions appeared clumsy. Though both men had been drinking earlier, perhaps Kreenan had consumed too much. As he fell, he barely caught hold of the walkway’s edge.
Someone below started shouting.
Cotillard spun, reaching for his own sword.