by Sarah Remy
The tinker would take her for a noblewoman—cotton was a luxury and her boots, while scuffed, were made of fine leather—but he had no reason to believe her anything other than she appeared, had no reason to know she kept the king’s counsel and could, if provoked, let loose her magic and char a person near to death in the process.
“You’re very kind,” she thanked the man. “But I prefer to walk.” If she climbed onto his cart, she would have to explain the maggots and she couldn’t be certain of her welcome after that. “Now that the weather is turning.”
“Mabon threatens,” he agreed, accepting her refusal with good grace. “And I’ll not miss the heat. Good day, my lady.” He touched his forehead with the butt of his whip in cheerful farewell. Avani stood in a rut between the road and a sagging clapboard hut and watched him go.
Mabon threatens. The tinker, like most of the people traversing the highway, looked ahead only as far as the change in seasons.
Avani had lost that comfort the day Stonehill fell.
“Disgusting,” Cleena said when Avani stopped at her tent. She wasn’t sure whether the beekeeper meant the maggots or Avani herself. The Fair was busier than she had seen it in weeks, customers coaxed out of chamber by the pleasant weather. “You’re scaring away my clients.”
A string of patrons lingered over Cleena’s wares, sampling honey, exchanging coin for sweets. Cleena flirted with them all, from the grizzled nan with a basket of bread on her arm to the young footman with Worm scars on his face and neck, and everyone in between. She was doing fine business and the exchange of coin didn’t slacken even when Avani set her bowl down with a thump amongst a display of honey sticks and lavender sachets.
Cleena refrained from showing her teeth in threat but Avani caught the enraged flex of her delicate hands.
“Honestly,” the beekeeper said, sotto voce, “I’m not above spelling you into salt and stone.”
“Ai, I misdoubt you could,” retorted Avani smoothly. “As far as I can tell your talents lie in creeping and sneaking and seduction.”
“Sex,” Cleena confirmed, making the footman blush over his shopping. He did a double take when he saw the contents of Avani’s bowl.
“Are the grubs for sale?” he wondered aloud, blinking bemusedly Cleena’s way.
“Nay, love. Not the grubs.” The sidheog petted his arm before walking around her table and grabbing Avani by the elbow. With her other hand she removed the bowl of maggots from her display.
“Get away from my place, witch,” she said, steering Avani backward into the crowd. “Get away and stay away.”
“You’re hurting me.” Avani tried to wrench her arm from Cleena’s grasp, but the beekeeper was inhumanly strong and she couldn’t break free. So she stepped hard with the heel of her boot on Cleena’s instep, grinding past slipper to bone. Cleena swore and let go, jerking away. The bowl fell from her hands. It broke into pieces when it hit the ground, sprinkling maggots.
Both women stared down at shattered crockery and writhing grubs. The Fair bustled about them, unaware. Avani rubbed her smarting flesh. Cleena took a deep breath then sighed it out.
“Oh, that’s hard luck,” she said in flat tones. “The bowl’s lost but the crawlers might still be saved. Let me get a pot.”
She spun in a flurry of colorful skirts and was back in an instant, crouching to pick the fallen maggots one by one from between Avani’s feet.
“They’ll survive my temper,” she promised as she worked, then cajoled: “Dipped in honey they’ll be a sweet treat.”
“They’re not for eating.” Avani chose her next words carefully. “That was unfair of me. Your business is not my concern.”
Cleena wrinkled her nose. “The sex, you mean? I’ll take my pleasure when and where I like.” She rose and restored the maggots, motionless now in the bottom of her jug, to Avani. “But you’ve no reason for jealousy. Malachi Doyle is not a customer. Nor would I have him. And I’ll not apologize for hurting you. Not after the damage you and yours did Halwn’s kin. To think mortals call us monsters.”
“It wasn’t us who took a cleaver to the barrowman’s fingers—”
“Not its hands.” Cleena leaned in until her breath warmed Avani’s collarbone. It was not flirtation: it was threat. Avani did not doubt a few inches more and the sidhe might rip out her throat. “Its mind. Smashed like your bowl, turned over until there’s nothing left worth saving. At least we kill your people cleanly.”
Avani stood her ground. “I want to speak to Faolan. I have questions, just as he supposed.”
“Oh, is that why you’ve come sniffing about my tent? Faolan’s busy trying to undo your damage. Go away.” Flapping a hand, Cleena returned to her wares. Her patrons, patient and devoted, bloomed under her increased attention.
Avani rubbed at the back of her neck to soothe prickles of unease.
“You’ll tell Faolan,” she said. Andrew’s ring under her salwar flickered amber inevitability. “You gave him your word.”
“Go away,” Cleena repeated, her back still to Avani, “before I set Thomas on you for disturbing my peace. You’ll make her go away, won’t you, Thomas?”
The footman, lips sticky with traces of sampled sweets, turned a baffled stare in Avani’s direction. He was not a big man, but he was young, strong, and heavily muscled.
“My lady magus,” he said. Unlike the tinker, he knew well who Avani was but did not care. “You’re not welcome here. Please go.” The tendons in his neck corded as if he struggled to make the words come. “I don’t want to compel you, but I will, if Cleena asks. Go. Take your little grubs and go.”
Avani went.
She returned the maggots to their small chest on a shelf in the back of Mal’s cold room. The chest was half filled with cornmeal but in the chill environment the larva were more likely to sleep than eat. Eventually they would die and Mal would replenish his store. She knew he used the maggots for stripping flesh from corpses more often than for healing; he preferred to leave physicking to the priests whenever possible. For all his reputation as a sophisticate, Mal fraternized with the dead more easily than he did the living.
A corpse was laid out on Mal’s worktable: a middle-aged, sparsely bearded man. He was naked but for a modest sheet pulled up and under his armpits. Avani couldn’t tell from a cursory look what had killed him. His flesh was very white, Mal’s neat stitching where he’d opened the body up and then sewn flesh back together was very black.
The man’s ghost was not there. The empty laboratory and the lone corpse made Avani shiver; it was a lonely place.
Avani closed the door firmly on the way out, resisting the increasingly invariable urge to reach out and find Mal. She hadn’t seen him since he’d given her permission to use his maggots on the desert woman, and while he’d watched with honest interest as she’d packed and bound the prisoner’s wounds, he’d hurried off without explanation soon after.
It would be a matter of little effort to unfurl a finger of magic and find him across their link. But Mal had been reticent since his encounter with the phantom magus on Holder’s farm, shocked small and quiet, his presence a vague chill one didn’t dare examine too closely for fear of a blossoming fever. But she longed to turn toward him for comfort, and give comfort in return. The knowledge that he was there, an antidote to isolation, was as enticing as whatever sidhe glamour Cleena used to lure and keep her patrons.
Avani thought it possible the executed magus, whoever he was, might have relied on a similar solace. Had he died for that indulgence?
So as she climbed the stairs out of the palace depths and onto more lively levels, she distracted herself from temptation by reaching instead for an old friend.
Jacob was also there, as he always was, but lodged in her heart instead of between her ears. Jacob belonged to the Goddess as much as he belonged to himself. He’d tolerated Avani from the beginning because the Goddess had willed it. Years of partnership had shaped forbearance into love. Avani and Jacob were family. For
quite some time after she’d first begun to live as a flatlander and was still mourning parents and siblings lost to cataclysm, the raven had been the only family Avani could tolerate, the Goddess’s grace given wings.
But for all Jacob was goddess-blessed, he was also a bird, a wild thing, more at home beneath the sky than between four walls. As of late he’d been spending as much time indoors as without, but Avani had not been surprised when he’d gone missing from his usual perch above Renault’s throne. Jacob had a finite tolerance for human idiocy.
He was never away for very long, and she was glad of it, because she missed Jacob when he was gone even as she understood his bid for independence.
Above the stairs the palace teemed with life and color. Avani idled against a tapestried wall as she sought Jacob behind closed eyes, letting the sound and scents of a late summer Court soothe away the chill she’d carried with her from below. Through windows open overhead she heard the ring of a blacksmith’s hammer, the bored bleat of a goat, and the rise and fall of Brother Tillion’s preaching. Closer by a housemaid carrying a dusting rag whistled a pretty tune as she navigated the crowded corridors. The rag smelled lightly of lemon juice and pine oil.
But, nay. The scent of pine was fresh as needles recently crushed beneath reckless hands, needles that tickled the bottom of her feet where she stood balanced precariously. Her wings were spread in appreciation of pleasant breezes, but the right did not want to work as it should. Her shoulder ached with the wrongness of bones wrenched. Far below a dog barked excitedly. She’d spent the morning pelting the animal with walnuts and stones from her hidden cache but was growing bored of that small amusement.
“Jacob,” Avani said, dismayed. “What are you up to?” She could see the Royal Gardens through the raven’s eyes, and the top of the barracks’ towers. “You’re hurt. Come home.”
He was not pleased by her invasion. She felt his affront, sharp as if she’d given insult. It was not his usual fractiousness. She could feel his repugnance as her own; he wanted her gone.
“Come home,” she said, but Jacob chased her out by force of will. His indignation stung. Thrown back into her own body, Avani sagged against tapestry, pressing her thumb to the new tenderness between her eyes. “Ai, you bastard.”
“Lady Avani.” A firm hand kept Avani from falling. She opened her eyes, blinking to clear away a double image of orange needles and blue sky over palace rugs and gray stone walls.
“Lady Avani,” the king’s constable repeated, concerned. Avani recognized the other woman from her increasing presence in Renault’s council chambers, and from the marked resemblance she bore to her son, the young earl of Wythe. “Are you ill?”
“Nay.” Avani straightened. The Countess Wythe took a step away, smiling affably. She was dressed for riding, her leathers polished to shining. She wore the silver-and-onyx starburst, a sign of the king’s favor, on her breast and rare black Shellshale pearls in her ears.
“It looked as though you were caught short of breath,” explained the countess. “It’s always close in these corridors, not matter the weather. Walk with me?”
It was more command than request. Avani hesitated.
“Your lad mentors mine own Morgan in the barracks,” the king’s constable explained. “Morgan’s a good boy, but his head is often in the clouds. There are so few of our children left. I lost my eldest boy to the Worm. Morgan’s all I have left. I worry.”
Avani, prepared to dislike Wythe for Renault’s sake, suffered a pang of sympathy. The woman, for all her stiff posture and proper uniform, seemed genuinely concerned.
“It’s been difficult, letting him go.” Wythe glanced everywhere but at Avani. “He’s striving toward manhood and I have responsibilities of my own. I should not interfere. But it seems only yesterday Morgan learned to walk in his brother’s footsteps. Impossible that he lives now in the barracks and trains for war. That was meant to be Michael’s role, before we lost him. I worry Morgan’s not suited to soldiering.”
“I used to think the same about Liam.” Avani schooled her face to friendliness. The ache between her eyes throbbed protest. “I’m headed for my chambers, Countess. But you’re welcome to walk with me along the way, if you like. Liam’s a good man. He’ll take fine care of your Morgan and better yet, teach Morgan how to take fine care of himself.”
Wythe walked as though she were heading into battle: upright and forward. Her leathers creaked with every step. The pommel of her sword sparkled. The silver spurs on her boots jingled. Avani, who preferred to walk in quiet contemplation, nevertheless thought her gallant in a stern, overly forthright way.
“Liam was an orphan,” she began, as they made their way forward toward the gathering court. Nobles adorned with dyed pheasant plumage in celebration of summer’s end mingled with men and women in farmer’s kit and merchants with samples of their wares in hand. The throne room’s double portals were closed to audience, but a line of supplicants nevertheless twined back and forth on the edge of the great hall in anticipation of Renault’s reappearance.
“Abandoned on the Downs,” Avani continued, picking her way through the crowd. “He was too proud even then to let me take him into my house, but I kept his belly filled when I could and gave him the castoffs from my loom, and in return he gave me his trust.”
“Possibly more valuable even than a full belly,” the constable mused. “But let us cut to the chase. Tell me, Lady Avani, do you believe the lad retains human sensibilities despite his sidhe background? Or need I warn Morgan to be on guard?”
Avani stopped and swung around. They’d walked beneath one of many great arches, and into the main hall. The low rumble of many voices quieted as the court took notice. A vagabond tinker might not know Avani in a crowd, but her days of anonymity in the palace were past. And the king’s constable in her stark leather and silver was a shining blade in a forest of gaudy silk and fringe. Heads turned as courtiers took notice.
“Liam is a good man,” Avani repeated coldly, deciding it was easy to dislike Wythe after all. “Morgan is lucky to know him. I’m sure you don’t wish to imply otherwise.” She could hear the room begin to buzz again in anticipation. Renault’s court would take entertainment where they could find it.
The countess’s stare was thoughtful. She did not appear to notice or care that they had become the center of attention. She said, “You’re an islander.”
“Aye. I was.”
Wythe nodded. She knocked her heels together in another precise bow. “My condolences. My sister worked aboard a Knotcreek trawler before she married. She said on the day the islands sank, they brought up so many bodies with the fish in their nets that the ropes snapped.”
“I was only a child. I clung to a piece of flotsam and was washed free of the maelstrom. The flatland ships arrived not long after, and I was pulled, scarcely alive, from the sea.” Avani didn’t care to dwell on that long night in the roiling water.
“This world is full of unforeseen dangers. My sister, and my father—they were drawn to the sea. My grandmother and my great-grandsire—they had a talent for horseflesh. They rode together with the Aug against the sidhe. They also had stories, of barrowman coming from nowhere out of forest and rock, crippling the cavalry with claw and fang until our own fell down dead in the dirt. They said that so many Kingsmen were lost that the flatland springs were fouled by rotting corpses and the king’s necromancers could not lay all of their spirits to rest.
“Your orphan may now be a good man—” Wythe held up a sympathetic finger, forestalling Avani’s protest “—and I do not doubt he is, if you say it’s so. But he cannot change his past any more than I can change mine or you can change your own. So you will understand, I think, if I warn Morgan to keep watch.”
Chapter 8
Avani slammed the door to her bedchambers closed behind her. She stripped off her boots and sword. She left the boots where she dropped them just inside the door but took care to lay her sword in its place before the Goddess.
The idol did not reply, nor did she expect it to. Avani snatched up a washrag and used it to blot dry her cheeks. The spot between her eyes still hurt but when she checked her brow in the square of mirror she kept on hand for vanity’s sake, she saw no sign of injury.
“And that one’s no better. Playing hide-and-seek when it’s obvious he’s in need of care. What were you thinking with him?”
She sighed. She’d seen Jacob’s roost from his point of view. He was holed up very near the barracks; she thought she could find him without much difficulty. But would he forgive her the interference, when he so obviously intended to be left alone?
She dressed as efficiently as she’d undressed, choosing soft red silk and a pair of open-toed slippers. Both were gifts from her friend Deval and brought her happiness. But it was a bittersweet comfort. Wythe’s tale of island bodies in Knotcreek fishing nets threatened to wake buried sorrow.
She twisted her long hair atop her head and pinned it into place, then looped Kate’s string of rubies twice around her neck. That was another sorrow, more recent; a new-made friend murdered for the barrow maps she’d hidden in her herb garden. Kate’s loss was still raw. In the short time Avani had known the king’s beloved, Kate had always extended her sincere kindness.
“And you know there’s not enough of that to go about in this city,” Avani said pointedly before stomping again out of her room.