The Talon & the Blade

by Jasmine Silvera

  “Aren’t you even going to loosen your tie?” She sighed as he tucked the tail between two buttons in his shirt.

  He fastidiously extracted one of the waxed-paper-wrapped arrangements of bread and meat, holding it between his knees to avoid a drip as he found a napkin. “This is ground meat and a pathetic excuse for a salad between two slices of bread.”

  “Says he of the land of sausage and bread,” she said in her best Teutonic accent.

  Whatever had happened in the car lay dormant between them, easing some immutable tension of their circumstances.

  He shook his head, chewing. “Blegh.”

  Ana had already wolfed down half of hers and plucked a fried potato from the box with her free hand. “Try the fries, they’re incredible.”

  The potatoes weren’t half bad. They had been coated in an incredible layer of salt. Before he could ask, Ana held out a condensation-coated paper cup, the straw of her own between her plump lips.

  Whatever her cup contained needed a good deal of persuasion to make it up the straw. Blood, recently returned from its sojourn, decided to go south again and left him glad he was wearing his sunglasses so she wouldn’t catch him staring at her mouth like a hungry dog.

  “Milkshake,” she said between sips.

  He forced his attention back to the fries.

  “Chocolate,” he grumbled after a sip.

  She held out her own. “Strawberry?”

  Too sweet for his taste, but it went a long way to relieve the salty coating on his tongue.

  “How long has it been?” she asked.

  Gregor coughed, patting his mouth with the napkin. “Excuse me?”

  “Since you’ve been to the States.” She laughed. “The good old US of A.”

  “Colonies,” he said. “They were colonies then.”

  She guffawed. “A lot’s changed.”

  “The food’s still terrible.”

  She stuck out her tongue, leaving a smudge of milkshake at the corner of her mouth. Taking his life in his hands, he reached up with his thumb and swiped it away.

  “Feeling brave with my blades in the car?” Her brow rose.

  He took another mouthful of strawberries and cream and wondered if the heat was making him lose his mind.

  “They’re not part of your bargain your daishō.”

  She sucked her teeth. “Those are two of the finest blades ever crafted. Not even a necromancer could improve on that.”

  “Yes, but you have to leave them in the car,” he said, gesturing to his back and allowing the air to coalesce just enough to form the hilt between his shoulders.

  “You think I can’t handle myself without a sword?”

  “I have no idea what you’re capable of, Ana Gozen.”

  She went back to chewing for a long moment. He let her have the silence.

  “Yet you trust me with your back in this hunt?”

  Cornered, he paused. The temptation to retreat, to deflect and pick another angle of attack, rose. Instead, he held his ground.

  “You owe me one,” he said dryly, and she laughed. Then, with a touch of seriousness, he continued, “I do.”

  He contented himself sucking the rest of the paper cup dry in her silence. He picked up the carton, plucked a few of the crispiest remaining fries for himself, and offered her the rest.

  “Why?” She wasn’t talking about the contents of the box.

  “Your reputation precedes you.”

  “Says the Black Blade of Azrael.” She snagged the last two fries and grinned at him, sliding off the table.

  He rolled his eyes skyward. When they reached the car he paused, bouncing the key fob on his palm a few times as he considered his next words. “You got too close to the answer. That’s why he called you back. Which means you’re capable of tracking and hunting this thing alone. Raymond called in a favor to ease his own mind. That suggests he knows much more than he’s letting on, which troubles me. But you don’t need me, that’s clear.”

  “Glad you recognized that… Sticks.” Something bright lit her voice for the first time.

  It had been an honest assessment of her skill. Azrael might not have been effusive in his praise—and he wouldn’t hesitate to use force in a reprimand—but Gregor knew he had the necromancer’s regard and his trust. It gave him confidence to walk in a world full of mystery. Ana, it seemed, enjoyed neither.

  And yet she ventured into the unknown without hesitation.

  He brought the car to life again, the throaty rumble attracting the attention of the patrons not already sneaking curious glances. Of course Raymond’s workshop had given it an artificial exhaust. What was it with Americans and their penchant for noisy automobiles?

  “Sticks.”

  “Arms, legs,” she said. “I’m amazed you can fold yourself into this machine.”

  On the autobahn—highway, he corrected himself—he eased the car into low flying speeds. He considered possible responses but went with a truth. “My height has always called attention to itself. In the army the quartermaster had a devil of a time finding a uniform that fit.”

  “Which one?”

  He made a questioning noise.

  “Army?”

  “I was part of a regiment sent to the colonies to quell the sedition.”

  The memory rose as the air-conditioning cooled his skin, a pale substitute for the feel of wind off the Atlantic. He’d come for the land—for the challenge of exploring new territory, learning new forests and mountains so unlike his home. And to forget. He’d disembarked with the others, startled to find the great resistance to the crown of England little more than a shabby collection of buildings scraped out of the forests and bare earth of this new land.

  “I thought Hessians sent to the Revolutionary War had been press-ganged into service.”

  “True often of the lower classes, those without families. Wanderers often wound up ‘enlisted’ in the general ranks.” He shrugged. “But my father was a contemporary of Frederik. His ideal was a state of young men ready for service. German Sparta.”

  “That sounds redundant,” she quipped. “You were a jäger.”

  He nodded. “Many were sons of game- and groundskeepers, seeking some sort of name or glory. Each man brought his own weapon, and we had the skills to maintain and use them. My rifle was beautiful—the latest in technology for the day.” He paused in memory. “The pay was decent.”

  “Mercenaries.” She made a sound of disapproval.

  “That offends you?”

  “Your father had the ear of a German prince and you needed money?”

  “My parents’ union was quite productive in every way. I was the youngest of seven surviving children, too far down the list to be preserved even as a spare. My oldest nephews were my contemporaries, all on their way to land and titles. I had a small but sufficient income, and a generous, if somewhat removed, amount of property settled on me.”

  “You were bored.”

  It was easy to give her the unadorned truth. “The young woman I set my sights on was not interested in a life of obscurity on a country estate no matter how impractical and grand. She craved upward mobility, a life of regard. She married one of my nephews. He outranked me.”

  “You joined a war over a broken heart,” she said, but it lacked the bite of her previous words. “It’s not the most asinine reason I’ve heard.”

  His mouth quirked of its own accord.

  She looked up at the road signs. “Exit here. We’ll be taking a little detour.”

  “Sight-seeing?”

  “Thought you might appreciate the opportunity to get this beast of yours on some curves.”

  He couldn’t hide his pleasure at the thought. Any monkey could jam his foot on a pedal. Real driving required corners. But they were due in Seattle in less than two days, and he still hadn’t figured out why she’d wanted to drive and not fly.

  “There’s someone we should talk to,” she said at his hesitation. “An asylum seeker, if you will. Raymond
gave him protection because he’s old and well-traveled enough to make him a resource. Maybe he can help us narrow down a list of suspects.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement,” Gregor said but took the exit.

  “I don’t trust him,” Ana said. “He’s no necromancer, just an old grace blood. But I’ve always felt like he was biding his time.”

  Once they’d wound through the tangled sprawl of Redding, the road narrowed to a thin strip of pavement hugging the hills over gorges. He turned off the AC and cracked a window, letting the scent of heat and dust and pine drift into the car. It brought him back to now—a continent away from the snowdrifts and bitter cold of a war tearing an empire apart. He thought he’d known love when he’d wrapped his heart in a uniform and set off to kill or be killed in a new land.

  He’d had no idea. The foolish youth who stepped on the boat had been replaced by a young man who’d lost more than the boy could have ever dreamed.

  He remembered dying on the frozen ground in the wilderness—or at least wanting to.

  At seventeen, he’d spent much of his life hunting the forest of his home. He could sight, track, or shoot anything that moved. But he hadn’t learned the trick of camaraderie.

  Gregor’s commanding officer had worked his way up through the ranks, and his unit was loyal to him, but he was the son of a groundsman. And Gregor never let the others forget that he himself had been born to privilege. He hunted and read whatever books he could get his hands on and avoided the other men in his unit. Still, the higher-ups took note of him—his height and his bearing and his reputation as the best shot in his unit preceded him. They called for him, deferred to his opinion over his commander’s, and Gregor preened under the attention. In short, he was an arrogant prick.

  When his commander sent him with two others on a scouting mission in late December, he should have been wary. It wasn’t until they turned on him, deep in the mountains of the Carolinas, that he understood he’d never been meant to go back. He had never excelled in hand-to-hand combat, but desperation proved a powerful motivator. He killed both, but not before one good blow left him bleeding out.

  He didn’t know he was cold until warm fingers pressed against his brow, lifted his hair, and peeled open his eyelids. He tried and failed to turn his head, speak.

  Callused hands made thorough exploration of his uniform coat. Anything of any value was pulled free, tossed aside. He could hear the others turning over the bodies of the two soldiers, the scrape of cold metal and undoing of buckles as the scavengers stripped anything of worth. He tried to muster an objection to their corpses being picked apart, but they had tried to kill him, after all.

  “This one’s still alive,” a woman’s voice called out, all honey and whiskey and resonance enough to command attention.

  “I can take care of that.” A Scottish brogue accompanied the flash of a blade, dull silver in the cold light.

  Her hands parted the heavy coat and the woolens beneath. When they plunged into the sticky damp closest to his skin to inspect the wound beneath, she made a contemplative sound.

  “Hold on.” Fingers pressing against his throat, the touch firm but not rough. She spoke again. “His blood is strong.”

  “Ah lass, you can’t mean?”

  “This one won’t die today.” The hands withdrew and the cold returned, creeping into his bones. “Let’s pack the wound and get him ready to move.”

  Whoever she was, she commanded respect. In spite of initial protests, everyone moved at her order. She kept her word. He didn’t die that day. Or the next. Fever set in and snatches of the conversations around him were indistinguishable from dreams of his old life and nightmares of war.

  “Let me die,” he begged once.

  “Not until you’ve served my purpose, soldier,” she said, an order laced with something like humor.

  Her voice anchored him to the world when he would have let go. That and a vile series of pastes and bandaging that followed the agony of the needle and thread. Other voices came and went, questions asked that she answered, consultations requested that she gave. Orders and arguments went back and forth, ended by the bark that he recognized as her final word on whatever the matter at hand.

  Gradually the blur of lost days and endless waves of pain receded. Awake, weaker than he’d been at the moment of his birth, and feeling more animal than man, he took in the hanging herbs and the ordered items on shelves by the fireplace. His own rifle stood in the corner behind the door. He wore rough homespun beneath the blankets, his chest bare except for the thick bandages.

  Unable to resist, he tugged at the bandages, trying to get a look.

  “I wouldn’t do that.” The door closed behind her.

  He started at the first glimpse of her face: narrow and dark, dense brows lowered over eyes hazel with dark brown edges as she peered into his. Searching, intense, unafraid. Backlit by fire, she glowed with light. “Welcome back.”

  Tutored in English since childhood, his command of the language had improved in months at the colonies, but injury and blood loss robbed him of it. “Wo bin ich?”

  A voice spoke from beside the door. “Told you he was one of those damned mercenaries.”

  Her gaze lifted to someone beyond his line of sight. The dark mass of her hair was twisted away from her face in a complex arrangement of plaits save a few curls springing free at her temple and before her ears. “You owe me a bar of that fine French soap you’ve been hoarding since our last raid, Iain. Get Heinrich.”

  She assessed Gregor’s wound and departed without another word, taking the jäger rifle—his rifle—on her way. He opened his mouth to protest but shut it immediately, realizing the futility of trying to talk her out of it. He imagined she would sell it to cover the cost of his convalescence. He was at their mercy.

  A towheaded boy of about nine took charge of him. His small fierce face locked in determination to obey his mandate as interpreter, translator, and guard.

  “Ich bin Henry.” A Palatine, by the accent, the German immigrants lured to the New World with the promise of abundant farmlands.

  “Where am I?” he asked again in German.

  “This is Haven.”

  The name meant nothing to Gregor. His unit had been sent south to the Carolinas to scout potential for overland troop movement. They’d taken mountain routes to avoid detection by the militias and chanced on a few hardscrabble settlements in the lower lands. He’d seen what passed for order in the larger towns occupied by the colonists. He’d heard of no place by that name.

  Gregor raised his brows. “That… woman.”

  Henry nodded, firm and quick. “Lark.”

  “Is she a runaway, a freedwoman?”

  “Ask her yourself, sir,” Henry said, hesitating for the first time. “Lark abides no gossip.”

  Not even a common language could endear Gregor to the boy. His loyalty, like everyone Gregor met, belonged to her.

  Henry warned him the first night. “Her heart isn’t soft. She suffers no liars, no fools or charlatans either. She’s part ’risha or spirit-touched or just plain crazy, depending on who you ask. Sees clear through to your soul. Doesn’t like what she finds—she may have saved your life, but she’ll take it with her own hands.”

  When Gregor could sit up and care for his own needs, Henry began to take him out for walks in the settlement. He expected a ramshackle collection of lean shelters populated by rowdy, unkempt people. Instead, it was sparse but orderly and clean.

  The cabin was one of a dozen or more mixed buildings, each nestled in the trees with cozy trails of smoke emerging from their chimneys. More snow blanketed the ground here than lower in the mountains. And there were many more people about than he expected—women and children as well as men. They were dressed simply but well in clothes clean and warm against the weather. If there had been more buildings, it might have even warranted being called a town.

  Lark joined him every supper with questions. She was backed by two of
her lieutenants—the Scot, Iain; and Gray Rabbit, a man a few shades darker than she with the long hair kept in the style of the Cheraw.

  She asked about his time in the colonies, the places he’d been. Then about his gun and the weapons his unit carried. Troop life and organization—she seemed particularly interested in morale. Every time he thought he would remain vague, she withdrew the line of questioning, pausing to feed him or make sure he got a chance to relieve himself while the other men were present to help him. Eventually she would circle back around, and he found himself telling everything he knew and speculating when he did not. He’d fought his own men for his life; there was no going home after this.

  Their interviews lasted longer each day. Sometimes she was shadowed by men from other Native bands he didn’t recognize, and their conversations took longer as she translated between multiple tongues. He had begun to regain English, though he often slipped back when the subject grew more complex. One afternoon, Gregor realized they had conducted a conversation in German in which she had understood every word.

  “How is it that you…?”

  Her mouth canted in one of those sideways smiles and she replied in his native tongue. “You’ll have chores to build up your strength.”

  “She speaks six languages, to my count,” Henry told him the following day as he accompanied Gregor on his assigned tasks. Gregor was winded in a matter of steps. “English, French, German, two of the slave languages—and Cheraw. A bit of Cherokee. And the trade language.” The boy looked at him sideways. “She just wanted you to be comfortable here. ‘In a strange land, people trust their own.’”

  “But she’s understood me all along?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked at her in a new light when she returned.

  “Am I a prisoner?”

  Lark’s laugh filled the cabin, rough and sweet. “Do we look like jailers to you?”

  “Why did you help me?”

  “You seemed to want to live.”

  “Not just because I could give you information about troop movements?”