by Morgan Rice
“Me too,” a general said. “I want them to know that the New Army is stronger.”
A chorus of assent followed, each man seeming to strive harder than the last to show how committed he was to making up for the failures of the assault on the Dowager’s kingdom. Maybe that was the point. Maybe each wanted to show that they could do better. Maybe they thought that their hides were at stake if they failed again.
They weren’t entirely wrong in that guess. Even so, the Master of Crows held up a hand for calm. “Be patient. Return to your men and your ships. Ensure that all is ready for an attack. I will tell you the moment for it.”
They left as a group, each hurrying to prepare. The Master of Crows let them go. For now, his attention was on the blood red of the sunset and what it portended. There would be blood aplenty in the morning, he had no doubt. Thanks to his creatures’ efforts, there would be carnage on a scale that would make Ashton’s river run red. His creatures would feast.
“And when they are done,” he said, “we will add what’s left to our empire.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The assassin who went by Rose waited for full dark before she rowed out toward the ships waiting in the harbor, her oars muffled by cloth in the rowlocks. It helped that the moon was bright, and that she’d always seen well in the dark when she needed to. It meant that she didn’t have to risk even a thief’s lantern. Even so, fear ran through her with every stroke, pushed down only with an effort.
“This will be fine,” she said. “You’ve done this a hundred times before.”
Perhaps not a hundred. Even the finest of her profession who ever lived had never killed so many. She was not some butcher’s cleaver, sent to cut down as many in a war as she could. She was a gardener’s knife, sheering only what was necessary from the stem.
“Half the soldiers there will have killed more than me,” she whispered, as if that justified it.
There was always fear as she did it. Fear of discovery. Fear that something would go wrong. Fear that she might acquire the kind of conscience that stopped her from doing what she was best at.
“Not so far,” Rose whispered.
Gently, she guided her boat through the waiting boats. She wasn’t surprised to hear a voice call out into the night.
“Oi, who goes down there? What are you up to?”
Rose saw a soldier leaning over the prow of a nearby ship, a bow in his hands. Perhaps someone stupid would have tried to row to safety, and gotten an arrow in their back for their trouble. Instead, she took a moment to think. Accents were a skill she’d taken the time to work on, so now Rose selected a suitable one, not Ishjemme itself, but the rougher burr of one of the islands between there and the kingdom’s coast. That was better. The soldiers from Ishjemme might know one another. They couldn’t expect to know all their allies.
“Getting ready for a battle, you idiot. What are you doing? Trying to wake up all of Ashton?”
“Aye, well, you could be anyone!” the soldier called out. “It could have been a boat full of the enemy, for all I knew.”
“Do I look like a boat full of the enemy?” Rose shot back. “Now, can I get on with delivering the reports I’m supposed to? I’ve been scouting that excuse for a city for hours now. Can’t even find the flagship.”
She saw the man point.
“Over there,” he said.
“Thanks.”
Rose was good at pretending to be people she wasn’t. Some thought that assassins should be people who could fight their way through an army, or fire an arrow from further than a man could see. She liked stories like that. It meant that they weren’t looking at the innocuous figure next to them who had just put something in their wine.
“No chance of doing that this time though,” she said to herself.
She wasn’t sure that Milady d’Angelica had understood what she was asking when she’d sent her to do this. Frankly, she doubted the noblewoman cared. Yet there was a big difference between poisoning some rival in Ashton and sneaking onto a ship in the middle of a battle fleet.
Especially one where those who led it were rumored to have magic.
That was the part that terrified her in all of this. How was someone supposed to slip aboard a ship when people could read the murderous thoughts in her heart? When they could sense her coming and probably send phantasms shrieking after her soul? It meant that her usual strategy of disguise and lying was out, for one thing.
“I should just row all the way to the continent,” Rose muttered. What kind of idiot put herself in the middle of a battle like this by choice? She kept going in the direction of the flagship, though, for three reasons.
One was that she was being paid well for this. Too well to ignore it. Another was that, whatever her skills with a knife and a poisoned dart, she suspected that Milady d’Angelica would be a dangerous enemy to have. The third… well, the third was simple:
She was good at this.
Rose stopped the small boat well short of the flagship, in the space where it was just one more shadow against the dark. Taking off her Ishjemme colors to reveal black clothes beneath, she slipped into the waters of the bay.
The cold leached heat from her body, while she tried not to think of all the filth that spilled from Ashton’s gutters into its river and then the sea. She ignored the idea of the other things that might be in the waters too, the sharks and other predators that would be gathering to scavenge in the wake of a battle. Maybe their presence would even be a good thing, disguising her murderous intent with their own to any prying minds.
Rose crept forward with silent strokes through the water, ducking her head whenever she thought someone might be glancing in her direction, ignoring the foul taste of the seawater. It seemed to take forever to get close to the flagship, the roll of it pushing out a faint wash that buffeted her as she closed on it.
Finally, her fingers found the wood of the hull, searching for handholds the way someone else might have clambered their way up a rock face. Rose moved slowly, determined not to make any sound, even trying to still her thoughts so that they would not give her away to any of those there with magic.
She raised her head up enough to see a watchman moving along the deck. She ducked down, listening to the rhythm of his steps, letting him pass. Still, she didn’t move. Instead, she waited until he passed twice more, learning the pattern of it. Someone more foolish might have rushed out onto the deck the first time, and been caught for it. Rose had learned when to be patient.
The third time the watcher went past, she slipped into his wake, a length of garroting wire dropping from her sleeve. The man was taller than her, but Rose was used to that. She had the wire around his throat in an instant, jerking it tight and driving her knee into his back to bring him down. There was no time for him to scream as the wire cut deep, only for a brief gasp to escape.
Rose dumped the guard’s body in the water, trying to do it as quietly as possible. It was a shame to have to kill someone who was not her target, but the man’s watch had too few spaces in it, too few gaps into which she might slip when the time came to make her escape. She put her garrote away. She would not be using it for what came next.
“Quietly now,” she whispered to herself as she scurried below decks.
She might not have the magic that those here were said to have, to ferret out the thoughts of others, but she had eyes to pick out the shadows of coiled ropes and stacked weapons in the near dark, ears to seek out the breathing of sleeping men, differentiating carefully between those who were deeply asleep and those who might wake if she got too close. She moved on the balls of her feet, keeping to the shadows as she moved past the spaces where the ordinary soldiers lay, heading for the space where her target would be.
Rose opened doors in silence in the dark, looking at the sleeping figures there, watching for the one she’d been sent for. She found her target in a room marked with Ishjemme’s colors: the room of a leader, the room of a ruler. She pushed open the door in silence.
Ahead of her, a candle flickered into being, revealing Lars Skyddar, sitting on a sea chair, a sword across his lap.
“You’ve come for me,” he said.
Rose considered her options. Could she run? Could she get clear of this ship before this man brought a whole crew to face her?
“How did you know I was coming?” she demanded. “I know I made no sound.”
“A long time ago, I was told that I would face death on the night before our greatest battle, and that I must face it alone. I’ve known this moment was coming since my nieces arrived.”
“Are you going to call for them?” Rose asked, her hands moving down almost imperceptibly to her belt, considering which of the poisoned darts there might do the job best. Their deaths weren’t the plan for tonight, but Milady d’Angelica would probably reward her well if she managed it.
“I will not risk their lives,” Lars Skyddar said. “Yours, on the other hand…”
He leapt forward, almost fast enough that Rose couldn’t do anything. If he’d been twenty years younger, perhaps she wouldn’t have been able to do anything, and the sword would have hacked deep into her. As it was, it still caught her flesh as she dove aside, still left a smear of blood as she rolled back to her feet.
Ishjemme’s duke was already turning to attack her again, but Rose’s hand came up from her belt, flinging a handful of darts without caring which poison was on them, only caring that some, enough, would strike home.
Her foe gasped as they hit him. The darts held everything from sleeping poisons to the quickest of killers, and even the assassin had no clue what so many would do at once. It was enough that they were doing something. Even as she watched, the sword went clattering to the ground.
She slipped in close, drawing a dagger, not wanting to leave it to an uncertain combination of alchemy to finish the job. She pulled back her arm to deliver the fatal thrust…
And Lars Skyddar pulled her close, dragging one of the darts from his flesh and into hers.
Rose stabbed him on reflex, thrusting up into the man’s heart before abandoning her grip on the blade. She stared down at him, then at the dart sticking from her flesh, unable to contain her shock. He’d poisoned her with her own weapon!
Rose all but staggered from the cabin, trying to stay quiet but having no time for it. She didn’t know which poison had been on the weapon, but already she thought she could feel a sluggishness invading her limbs, numbness reaching into her fingertips.
She grabbed an antidote vial from her belt, not knowing if it was the right one, or if it would make things worse. She slipped up onto the deck, moving with graceless steps now, not even sure which way her small boat lay for her escape. She staggered to the railing, turning back briefly, glimpsing sailors looking in other directions, none seeing her.
She toppled from the ship, no art to it, no skill. She imagined that the splash of it would be enough to draw attention from all around if it weren’t for the press of so many ships in such a small space.
As the water closed over her, she had one thought: she’d done what was required of her. She’d killed the leader of the invasion, leaving only the untested and the young to do the job. She’d cleared the way for other plots too, the ones that Milady d’Angelica thought she didn’t know about.
She’d done all of that, and not one piece of it helped as the water swallowed her up.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The wedding was not what Angelica would have hoped for from her nuptials. She stood at the entrance to the church of the Masked Goddess, only recently scrubbed clean of the evidence of the funeral, and trying to ignore all the imperfections. When she had dreamed of this day as a girl, imagining the triumph of it, it had not looked like this.
There had been no time to organize things as they should be. The wedding was too hasty for that, reusing elements from previous celebrations to make ends meet. Angelica was sure that the flowers set around the walls were the same ones that had been there for the Dowager’s disposal. It was an insult in its way.
“And not the only one,” Angelica whispered to herself, her wedding mask stealing away the sound of it. Her dress was one she’d had prepared, but so much of the rest of it had been thrown together: the paltry feast to follow at the palace, the fact that her family had no time to travel to Ashton to see it all…
They weren’t the only ones. In spite of Rupert’s threats that anyone who was absent would mark themselves as a traitor, there were still plenty of empty seats. Some would not have been able to make it to the city, while others would have sought to escape before the battle that might be approaching the city. Others would have chosen to be absent, in disapproval at the choice, as a protest that the Assembly had not been consulted, or simply because they weren’t ready for such a swift wedding.
It didn’t matter. It was enough that some of the city’s nobles were there, and that Angelica was going to marry Rupert for all of them to see. It was enough that people would know that she was his wife, and their queen.
“The prince looks very handsome, my lady,” one of her attendants said to her.
“Yes,” Angelica agreed, “he does.”
A moment like this was what Rupert was made for. A moment when he could stand in front of a crowd by a masked priestess, resplendent in silk and velvet, gold embroidery shining in the candlelight. As long as he didn’t have to organize anything, or make good decisions, or show any kind of compassion, Rupert was the perfect prince.
Angelica made her way to him, the sound of harps floating along with every step. The gardeners had not been able to secure the finest red rose petals in such a short space of time, so Angelica’s attendants threw a mixture of petals instead, taking from whatever flowers could be scavenged.
She stopped in front of the altar, and it was hard in that moment not to think about the last time that she’d done this, with Sebastian there, refusing to declare his love for her. She pushed that thought away. This marriage had nothing to do with love, whatever she would say in the next few minutes.
The thing it did have to do with sat on the altar: a lightweight crown, obviously taken out of the palace’s treasury, sitting on a velvet cushion for the occasion.
“We stand in the sight of the Masked Goddess,” the high priestess said. “Unmask one another, see the truth of one another, and declare your love if you intend to marry.”
Rupert reached up for Angelica’s wedding mask, removing it and tossing it aside. Angelica took his with more grace, passing it to a waiting servant.
“Milady d’Angelica,” the high priestess said. “Do you declare your love for King Rupert of the House of Flamberg? Will you be his wife?”
“I do,” Angelica said, “and I will.”
She could feign love as easily as anything else, at least for as long as it was necessary. She would feign anything she needed to for this. She took Rupert’s hands.
“I will love you until the end of our days,” she said.
“And you, King Rupert—” the high priestess began.
“Yes, yes, I want her for my wife,” Rupert snapped. “I’m not my brother, to run out on his wedding.”
Angelica had to work hard not to let any of the anger she felt in that moment show on her face. Instead, she managed a brief laugh.
“And do you love me, my king?” she asked.
Rupert stared at her as if finding the question surprising. No, as if finding the answer to it a surprise.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do.”
There, Angelica thought as she reached out her hand and Rupert’s, letting the priestess bind them together. That satisfied what was formally required, at least. No one could say that the wedding hadn’t been properly conducted; that it wasn’t legal.
“I declare the blessing of the Masked Goddess upon you both,” the high priestess said. “May she bring you success and happiness in your endeavors, and the fruitfulness of children.”
Ah, children. It would be necessary to consummate the mar
riage, of course, and if she could get with Rupert’s child, then so much the better. Or perhaps not. Perhaps she could find a more suitable man for that task. Still, Angelica could tell that Rupert was growing impatient. The high priestess didn’t seem to understand that, though.
“Before we move to the next stage of the ceremony, I would like to say a few—”
“Enough,” Rupert said. “I want to crown my wife as my queen, not listen to you prattle on.”
“Rupert—” Angelica began, in a careful tone, but Rupert was already pulling free of the strip of cloth that bound them both together.
“Your majesty,” the high priestess said as he went to the crown. “Traditionally, it is my role to place the crown on your beloved’s head.”
“It’s only a tradition since my family declared it one,” Rupert snapped back. He took the crown, lifting it.
Angelica bowed her head, feeling the crown settle into place as Rupert placed it there with surprising delicacy. She could feel the faint tremble in his fingers, or maybe that was in her from the excitement of it.
“Angelica is my queen,” Rupert said, looking out at the room as if daring any man to disagree. “She is my queen because I say that she is. She speaks with my voice, and if you disobey her, you disobey me!”
He turned back to her, taking her hands.
“I know it isn’t the wedding you should have had,” he said.
Angelica shook her head. “I’m married to you. I have everything I want from my wedding.”
Rupert seemed almost as surprised by that as he had been declaring his love. It was the truth though. Angelica was the queen of the kingdom. She had all she’d worked for. There was only one more thing that was needed before this could be hers alone.
***
Angelica lay beside Rupert in the royal chambers of the palace, listening to his pants of exhaustion and trying her best to feign happiness.
“You were wonderful, my darling,” she said. “My husband.”