by Alex Bledsoe
I went to the windowsill and pulled on my now-dry tunic. “You were poisoned.”
She nodded and stretched, twining her hands together over her head. Her bare feet poked out the bottom of the sheet, toes spread wide. “Doug took me upstairs ‘just to talk.’ He got mad when I wouldn’t put out. I tried to fight him, but he made me drink something he said would make me ‘more agreeable.’ That’s the last I remember.”
“You weren’t that agreeable. He didn’t get what he wanted.”
She looked at me steadily for a long time. “Then I’m still . . . I mean, he didn’t . . . so . . .”
“Yes,” I said.
She sighed with relief, then winced as she sat up, holding the sheet against her. Her hair had dried in a frightening bird’s-nest tangle. “I can’t wait to see him again. Things will be very different.”
“You’re not in any condition for revenge,” I said firmly. I’d have to get started soon as well, to warn Bella Lou and Buddy that Candora was coming after them. I had no doubt they could protect themselves in a fair fight, but Candora had shown no indication that he played by the rules.
“He’s not getting out of my sight again,” she said with as much certainty as she could muster. “Not alive, at any rate.” She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and tried to stand, but ended up in an undignified pile on the floor. Oblivious to her nudity she snapped, “Don’t just stand there; help me up.”
I did not move. “I don’t think you—”
“Did I ask you to think?” she snarled. She pulled herself to her feet by clinging to the bed, but her legs still wouldn’t support her weight and she fell again. Fresh sweat gleamed on her skin.
I lifted her under her arms, sat her back on the edge of the bed and wrapped the blankets around her. “You should be a little more polite to us peasants,” I said.
She looked up sharply, her eyes flashing with new fury, but it faded quickly. She took a deep breath and said contritely, “I’m sorry, Eddie. You saved my life, and I start acting like I own you.”
“Yes,” I agreed. I sat down beside her. “Now, about this revenge thing—”
“He poisoned me, Eddie. I can’t just let that pass.”
“You’ll get your chance, I’m sure. In the meantime, I’m going after him now. Mother Mallory will be along shortly to check on you, and I suggest you listen to her. She was the one smart enough to save you, not me.”
She looked surprised. “Why are you going after him?”
“He did something I can’t let pass, either.”
“Do you know where he is?”
“No,” I lied. “And you need to rest until I get back.”
I expected a protest, but she nodded and yawned. “I can barely keep my eyes open anyway.”
I helped her lie down and covered her with the sheet. She may have planned to fake me out, but she was so tired she quickly fell asleep for real. When she was again peacefully snoring, I slipped out the door.
In the hall I met Mother Mallory. She said softly, “Since you’re leaving I assume the crisis has passed?”
“Seems to,” I agreed. “But could you do me a favor? She wants to find the man who poisoned her and teach him a lesson. He’s bad news, and I’d just as soon she stay here until he’s long gone.”
Mother Mallory nodded. “And will you search for him instead?”
“Me? Nah. I never look for trouble.”
“But it finds you.”
“Like it’s got my itinerary,” I agreed. “And one more thing. On the day she died, Mother Bennings left word with a friend that she was looking for me. I never had a chance to find out why. Do you know?”
“Yes. She’d put together some new herbs for your head. I think she wanted to give them to you.”
I could say nothing for a moment. “Well. I wish I’d had the chance to thank her.”
Mother Mallory smiled sadly. “Her loss touched us all.”
IT threatened to be another hot summer day, and I needed a bath almost as bad as Nicky had the night before. There would be no time for that, though. I was being generous in my assessment of Candora’s professionalism and assumed he was the kind of guy who slept late. Since here I was, on the move at sunrise, I should have no trouble getting out of town ahead of him. Except, of course, that I was on foot, my horse still tied at Long Billy’s tavern.
Neceda waited at the bottom of the hill, although the morning mist risen from the Gusay hid it. The fog would disperse once the sun cleared the top of the forest, but for now it was easy to imagine there was no town at all, just an empty little clear space along the river. No burned-down stable, no former whorehouse filled with dragon worshippers. No lying girlfriends.
I stepped off the road and went behind a tree to relieve myself. First, I had to retrieve Pansy, assuming no one had stolen the beast during the night. Then I’d have to feed and water her, hard to do with the stable gone. Then I should probably feed and water myself. I finished peeing, refastened my trousers and stepped back onto the road.
I’ve had some serious luck in my life, from surviving the massacre that ended my days as a mercenary to having Prince Frederick stumble out just in time to save my ass the night before. But the universe has a way of balancing things, and it’s easy to forget that. Which is why I was surprised, even though I shouldn’t have been, when I came around the tree and almost walked smack into Gordon Marantz.
His horse whinnied and backed up into the one behind it. At the same moment I recognized Marantz, the man behind him screamed, “That’s him! That’s the guy!”
I held up my hands. “Whoa, guys, I was just on my way to Neceda and got lost in this fog. Am I anywhere close?”
“That’s the guy who busted in and kicked me in the head!” the other guy insisted, pointing at me with a frantic waving finger. Well, that was even more luck.
I kept up the innocent act. “Buddy, maybe it’s the fog, but you’re mista—”
“Shut up,” Marantz said calmly, and I realized he had a small crossbow pointed casually in my direction. It wouldn’t be accurate for more than a short distance, but in this situation that was plenty. There seemed to be no other bodyguards with him, which was a small blessing at least. Guess Gordon wasn’t expecting a fight, although he certainly wasn’t thrown off by it. “Who are you?”
I smiled. “Lance Thrower.”
“Well, Mr. Thrower, you busted into an establishment owned by me and beat up an employee and one of my guests. Care to tell me why?”
God, I was too tired for this. No useful lie came to mind, so I just shrugged.
Marantz’s expression didn’t change. “Get his sword, Vinnie.”
Vinnie dismounted and strode over to me. A bruise roughly the size of my foot colored one cheek and temple. “You are going to so regret this,” he hissed, pointing his finger right in my face.
“I already do,” I assured him.
He drew my sword, gave me a smug your-ass-is-mine look and turned to Marantz. “Let’s take this guy and—”
When he turned the blade upright, the spikes shot from the hilt through his hand. They were two inches long, needle sharp and (because I’m devious that way) coated with dried lemon juice. Vinnie stared at the tips poking through the back of his hand for about five seconds before letting loose with a howl that was probably heard in Sevlow.
I didn’t wait for his scream. As soon as I heard the mechanism click, I jumped past him and grabbed a handful of Marantz’s clothes. The crossbow bolt shot harmlessly into the trunk of a nearby tree. I yanked him from the saddle and threw him to the ground. Before he knew it I had my knee on his chest and the dragon knife from my boot at his throat.
Vinnie reflexively opened his fingers, but the spikes held the sword in place. Without his grip to control it, though, the weight of the blade made it fall over suddenly, and I heard the crack of a wrist bone. Lockett had been right; the Shadow Slasher III was top-heavy, for just that reason. Vinnie howled again.
I saw none o
f this, though, because I wasn’t dumb enough to take my eyes off Marantz. He was completely unruffled. “Now what?” he asked calmly as he looked up at me.
“How about you tell me what you’re after here,” I said.
He laughed. “You gotta work a lot harder to scare things out of me, bucko.”
I put more weight on his sternum and he grunted. “Not that much harder,” I said, fighting to stay calm. Rage would do me no good.
“Oh, God,” Vinnie sobbed behind us. “My arm . . .”
“It’s a business investment,” Marantz said, his voice tight. “Tempcott controls Prince Frederick, and I control Tempcott.”
“And what’re your people looking for in the Black River Hills?”
He laughed again. “You do get around. My people are looking for a long shot. If they find it, then I’ll have something any king in the world would give his trea sury and firstborn daughter to obtain. If not . . . no harm done.”
“Boss . . . ,” Vinnie pleaded.
“I’m occupied!” Marantz snarled.
“No harm except for Laura Lesperitt,” I said. “What is it?” I knew, but I wanted to hear him say it, to have his words give it a tangible reality.
Instead he smiled. “The fire dreams are made of.”
“Are you suddenly a poet?” Now I grinned. “You think there’s no harm telling me about your setup because I’ll be dead before I can pass it on, don’t you?”
“Pretty sure,” he agreed.
I pulled my knife away, slipped it back in my boot and stood. Marantz stared at me, puzzled, but didn’t move. I went to Vinnie, took his limp hand and pressed the catch on my sword. The spikes retracted, and he moaned in both relief and fresh pain. He fell flat on his face as I put the sword back in its sheath.
Marantz slowly sat up. “What are you doing?”
“Walking away,” I said. “I have no real quarrel with you. You can send your boys after me if you want, and eventually I’m sure they’ll get me. But I’ll take a few of them down first, and word would get around that you’re wasting time and manpower trying to get revenge on someone who had a knife to your throat and didn’t slice it.”
Amused and bewildered, he said, “You’re counting on my sense of honor?”
“No, your vanity. You have a lot of pies on your fingers because you don’t make silly decisions. No one knows about this little run-in except you, me and Vinnie. I won’t tell anyone, and I don’t have any illusions about how you’ll deal with Vinnie. So unless you start talking, no one will ever know.”
He stood and brushed dirt from his clothes. “Who are you, soldier?”
I shook my head. “The less you know, the safer I am.”
He laughed again. He laughed a lot, for a guy with so much blood on his hands. “I can find out any time I want, you know. And every shadow you pass might have a knife with your name on it.”
I shrugged. “I could say the same thing to you. Except I already know who you are.” With that I turned and walked away into the mist; I couldn’t ask for a much more dramatic exit. Marantz’s chuckling followed me down the hill.
chapter
TWENTY-ONE
I
t’s hard to be nonchalant when you’re expecting a crossbow bolt in your back at any moment, but I managed it. Only time would tell if Marantz called my bluff, because bluff it surely was.
I’d gone quite a ways down the hill when wheels rattled in the mist behind me. I stopped and waited as a single-horse wagon came into view. It carried a farmer and his wife on the seat, and four children in the back. They were dressed up and looked very grim. The farmer reined up beside me and looked me over. “You hurt?” he asked with no urgency.
“No, just heading into town. Is this the right way? Hard to tell with this fog.”
“We’re going into Neceda for the hanging. We could give you a ride.”
Hanging? Who the hell was Gary hanging? “Thanks. I’d appreciate it.”
“Well, hop in. We don’t want to miss it.”
I climbed into the back. The four kids, three boys and a girl all under age ten, looked at me with the barest minimum of curiosity. “Who’s getting hanged?” I asked as I sat.
“Fella who killed one of the moon priestesses,” the farmer said as he snapped the reins on the horse’s rump. The wagon jumped forward. “Mother Bennings. She helped out Myrtle here when little Helene was breech. Can’t believe someone would just cut her up like that.”
“That’s why we don’t live in the city,” Myrtle said. “Too much violence.”
I said nothing, but my mind was racing. I couldn’t believe that weasely Gary Bunson had actually apprehended Mother Bennings’ murderer overnight. “Do you know who it is?”
The farmer shook his head. “Nope. But whoever it is, we want to see his face when the rope snaps tight. She didn’t deserve that; she was a good woman.”
The sunlight finally rose over the treetops and burned off the mist. Despite his ostensible urgency, the farmer seemed content with his horse’s idle walk. Other wagons, lone riders and even three unsupervised children on foot passed us on their way into town. “Break his neck, pay his check!” the kids gleefully called out, a gallows chant children everywhere seemed to know.
I settled into the back corner of the wagon bed, aware that the four children never took their eyes off me. They didn’t join in the chant, and all had the same dead eyes as their parents. Whatever they farmed to eke out a living apparently left no room for childhood joy.
I arranged my sword at my side so the hilt didn’t dig into me. The three boys watched, fascinated by the weapon. I stretched out my legs, forcing them to scoot over.
The little girl, Helene, just sat staring at me. I smiled at her and winked. The corners of her mouth turned up ever so slightly.
I closed my eyes in what I thought was a simple blink, and when I opened them again we were rattling into Neceda. Man, the way I kept nodding off it was a miracle I survived the last two days. I sat up, momentarily disoriented, and startled Helene, who’d curled up beside me under my arm. The three boys sat in a huddle at the front of the wagon bed.
We passed the remains of the stable, where a few wisps of smoke still rose from the rubble. People gathered at the far end of town, and a fresh rope hung from the gallows oak. Apparently everyone from the countryside had come to town for the event; word of a hanging typically spread fast. More kids ran loose, and hawkers sold ale, food and little souvenir hangman’s ropes. A good execution rivaled the excitement and economic boom of the annual harvest festival, and Neceda responded with new levels of spontaneous greed.
The cart that would bear the prisoner up the street to his demise was parked outside the jail, so we hadn’t missed the show. A smaller, rowdier and more inebriated group waited to pelt the condemned man with vegetables and eggs when he emerged. I climbed stiffly out of the wagon, thanked the family and looked around for someone I knew.
Angelina and Callie stood at the back of the more subdued crowd at the gallows. Both were dressed for work at the tavern, which by law would remain closed until after the execution. Callie bounced in place with excitement, and I spotted two teenage boys discreetly enraptured by the parts that bounced the most. “Ooh, do you think he’ll come when his neck breaks?” Callie asked Angelina. “I hear men do that. I wonder if women do?”
“One easy way to find out,” Angelina said, as usual looking vaguely bored. Like me, she’d seen enough hangings to be neither impressed nor curious about them. Her eyebrows went up as I approached.
Callie also did a double take. “Wow, Mr. LaCrosse. You look worse every time I see you lately.” She leaned close and whispered, “Or are you in disguise?”
Angelina ignored Callie, plucked some hay off my tunic and said, “If you came into my tavern like this, I’d throw you out.”
“No, you wouldn’t. So who are they hanging?”
“Some weird guy who lives out in the woods,” Callie said before Angelina could respond. “
He cut up one of those nice moon priestesses. They say he might have burned down Mr. Pinster’s barn, too. That’s his wife over there.”
Bella Lou, dressed in an old shawl, huddled protectively over her children. Even at this distance I saw their wide, terrified eyes as they clung to her. She had her back to the wall beneath the high, tiny cell window where, I assumed, Buddy was being held. Two men screamed drunkenly at Bella Lou, and one of them scooped up a handful of dirt from the ground and threw it at her. The others laughed.
“Makes you proud to be a Muscodian,” Angelina said flatly.
“She deserves it, I bet,” Callie said. “Maybe she even helped.”
“That’s probably it,” Angelina agreed. “Should hang those little babies, too.”
As always, Callie missed Angelina’s sarcasm. To me she said, “She’s been outside the jail all night, screaming that it’s all a conspiracy. If it was a conspiracy, they’d have killed him somewhere else and just told us about it. You taught me to think like that, Mr. LaCrosse.”
I shook my head, gave Callie a quick peck on the cheek and pushed my way to the jail door. Gary’s man Russell was on duty outside to make sure the taunting crowd didn’t become a lynch mob. They had splattered the wall around the small cell window with tomatoes, eggs and anything else that would stick and stain, and detritus also covered Bella Lou. She did not look my way.
Russell held his shield in front of his face. “No one’s allowed inside, sir,” he said in a voice that almost cracked from stress.
“Russell, I know the guy you’ve got locked up in there. I need to talk to Gary about him.”
Russell lowered the shield in surprise. “Oh! Sorry, Eddie, I didn’t recognize you with the haircut. Did you lose a bet?”
“Funny. Now let me in.”
“I can’t. I’ve got strict orders.”
“Strict orders from Gary?”
“No, from the guy from the capital, Argoset. Only his assistant, that big guy, can go in.”
I leaned close. “You know what I know about your sister.”