Vile

by Keith Crawford

  “You may as well try to do as she asks,” Nathaniel said. “If you’re the ones that hurt Tannyr’s boy, we will have to take you in anyway.”

  The mercenaries went for their weapons. Nathaniel was faster. There was something wrong about his movement. It should not have been possible to move so swiftly from a standing start. He struck the first mercenary with the hilt of his sword before the man had raised his own weapon.

  “Don’t kill them!”

  Nathaniel turned his blade at the last moment, knocking the second mercenary down just as the first hit the ground. Elianor left him to fight. Haf fled back up the stairs but was slowed by her long crimson dress. Elianor caught Citizeness Garn’s arm just as she pulled out the long, sharp pin that held her hair in place. It was a stiletto; a slender-bladed dagger. With a sharp twist, Elianor dragged her back. Haf shrieked and tried to pull away. Elianor punched her in the face. As Haf collapsed, Elianor took the weight through her wrist, turned, and released, so that she fell down the stairs, her hands on her nose. The hairpin stiletto dropped to the ground floor after her.

  Elianor walked down the steps. From out back, she heard a sharp cry of surprise. Rees must have caught someone trying to escape. Haf struggled but was too dazed to get to her feet. Nathaniel stood with his sword at the throat of the last mercenary.

  “Do you want to question this one?”

  “Not especially,” Elianor said. She crouched next to Haf and picked up the fallen hairpin.

  “Where is Derec?” She said.

  “I’m here,” said a voice from the back door. “Please stop.”

  Elianor pointed the hairpin stiletto at Haf.

  “Don’t move,” she said, and got to her feet. “Where is my rifle, Citizen Garn?”

  Derec stumbled into the cantina, pushed by Rees who followed with a wolfish smile. The young man had changed his clothes since the ride from Durançon, and now he dressed like the son of a rich man rather than a cart-driver. Except this time, he had not shaved.

  “I don’t know where your rifle is,” Derec said. “After I left the cart, my father sent me straight here. I didn’t touch your things. If you go to the mines, you’ll find them there.”

  So Haf and Derec thought the rifle was at the mines, but Gwyion, who had been at the mines all along, had somehow lost it, and failed to get a messenger here in time. Messy. Deceitful. But people told more lies when they were in trouble. That didn’t make them guilty. Up on the balcony above the cantina, a door opened. Olwen, Haf’s daughter, who Elianor had seen at The Last Chance, came out of a bedroom. She had a blue-eyed infant in her arms.

  “Will you surrender yourself peacefully?” Elianor said to Derec.

  “If you let my mother go.”

  Elianor couldn’t stop looking at the child in Olwen’s arms. When Nathaniel lifted his sword and took a step towards the balcony, Elianor noticed that they had the same eyes, the eyes of every Vile child, brilliant blue, too blue, a biological sickness. She felt as though she had stumbled through a jigsaw and scattered the pieces with no sensible way to know the picture. What was it that Nathaniel had said, in his chambers? Anton had built the mine so he could sleep with Gwyion’s daughter? Was the root of the trouble between mountain and town as mundane as a little Vile bastard?

  In this moment of distraction, the youngest mercenary lunged at Nathaniel. He was fit and strong, on his feet before Nathaniel had turned away from the child; he grabbed Nathaniel’s sword arm and took his shirt in his fist. Nathaniel twisted, trying to throw the mercenary but taking them both together over the table. His shirt ripped. Buttons cascaded. The chair smashed. Nathaniel turned in the tumble and came up with his legs wrapped in a choke hold around the mercenary’s neck. The child at the top of the stairs screamed.

  Before Haf could move, Elianor pointed the stiletto at her throat.

  “Offering money for the death of a Magistrate is a capital offense,” Elianor said, just loud enough to hear over the grunts of the strangled mercenary. It was tempting. All these insects, running around between the word of the law with no idea of its greater purpose. “But I will assume you weren’t in your right mind. Find your husband and tell him that time is running out. The rifle is a symbol of my office. I want it back.”

  Elianor tossed the hairpin stiletto to the floor.

  “What are you going to do with my son?” Haf said once back on her feet.

  Rees held Derec in place, his arm tight up against his back. Elianor did up her jacket.

  “Catrin in the month of Frumaire, Alaw and Dynwen in Nivotia, followed by Fianna, Bethelie, and Sara at the beginning of this month. Seren, two days ago. Your son knew these women, through you and your husband’s business.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Personally?”

  “Lots of people knew them personally.”

  Elianor secured the collar of her jacket.

  “I will take Citizen Garn to Shadowgate Manor. There’s no theft without intent, which is hard to demonstrate if the items are returned. So how I judge him will depend on the extent of his co-operation, and yours. After that, it will be for Lord Vile to determine if your son is to be punished for any local crimes. Good enough?”

  Haf glanced at her grandchild on the balcony and nodded. Then she limped up the stairs, her back straight and strained in a visible effort not to look back. Olwen, from up on the balcony, called down to her brother.

  “Anton will protect you!”

  Haf hissed her quiet and took her by the shoulder. Mother, daughter, and grandson went back into the bedroom. Nathaniel finished choking the last mercenary into unconsciousness. All three foreign soldiers lay crashed out across the cantina floor. Nathaniel gave one a quick kick on the way past, like a terribly disappointed cat grown bored with a once promising mouse.

  “I see you managed not to kill anybody,” Rees said.

  Nathaniel shrugged, and started patting down Derec.

  “He was showing off,” Elianor said. Nathaniel’s ripped shirt had fallen away from his shoulder.

  “If I don’t humiliate them, they’ll only come back to try it again,” he said, turning to face her.

  Elianor didn’t reply. Right there, at the point where Nathaniel’s bare chest met his shoulder, was a tattooed number 3. It was in the exact place she had seen the number 1 on the Black Dog.

  Chapter 28

  Elianor sat on the porch of Tannyr Brek’s farmhouse. The fading light made it difficult to read her father’s dossier. She knew they couldn’t have made it back to the castle before dark. Even Rees had kept his peace when Nathaniel suggested they spend the night at the farm. Now Elianor was stuck outside, pretending she was too busy to disturb, while Ifanna prepared food, Eira prepared a bed, and Rees dealt with the prisoner. Elianor didn’t want to listen to more lies, or half lies, or truths that made the lies almost palatable. Tannyr Brek had won, and he was not attractive in victory.

  The dossier in Elianor’s hands was the one Genevieve Grime had passed her through the bars beneath the Bridge of Headless Women. The case notes appeared worthless, no matter how many times she read them. In 1661, the year before Elianor was born, the Magistry had sent Sebaraton Paine to Shadowgate to investigate reports of missing women. Unusual, even then, to send an Advocate Magistrate on the business of the Combat Magistry. It was unclear how similar these crimes were to those Elianor investigated today, but the political subtext of Sebaraton’s mission was impossible to miss. King Lascalles had been only a year in his grave and the great purges of the second revolution were just about to begin. The Republic Senate wanted to be sure of Senator Vile’s loyalty.

  Sebaraton Paine, however, managed the impossible and ignored the politics. The dossier was a meticulously mediocre investigation of the disappearances. Page after page of notes on peasants long dead and never important. No bodies found. Some losses explained as accident, a farm labourer from out-of-town blamed for others, a missing woman’s husband convicted in her absence. Elianor’s father had
dismantled a murky conspiracy into a huddle of sordid little mistakes, murders, and misadventures; he had made the mysterious mundane then signed off his victory with the flair of a receivables clerk.

  There was nothing about a Black Dog. Only the last page mentioned the Viles. A short note stated that the best way the Republic could serve this hero of the revolution was to leave him and his young children in peace to grieve the loss of Lady Vile.

  Elianor wondered if maybe she spread out the pages, she would see some pattern in the minutiae; but she suspected she would have ended up doing the same as she was now: staring blankly through the words, thinking about the fight at Nana Haf’s and the tattoo on Nathaniel’s chest. A number 3, inked in the same place she had seen the number 1 on the Black Dog. It had only been a flash, before he pulled shut his shirt. Elianor had to be sure. Find out what it meant. She tucked the dossier into her satchel and got to her feet. A walk along the river might clear her thoughts, before it got too dark to be safe.

  She followed the worn path around the house, pulled her hood over her head, and stayed away from the windows. The path sloped, then was swallowed by reeds. The river burbled beneath the endless clack of the waterwheel and the orange light of the setting sun. Insects foolish enough to wake this early in the spring sang songs of death and rebirth, as the fish snatched them one at a time from above the surface of the water.

  In the Dead Garden, Senator Vile had told her to recover her rifle, implicate the Garns, and re-evaluate her opinions on equality. The arrest of their son would motivate Gwyion and Haf Garn to return the rifle by morning. That would win enough time that she might find some way to turn the tables on Vile. He had refused to come to the capital himself, which suited her fine, and, as for his bilious notions on blood and family, well, he could go fuck himself. But she still needed a Vile to vote in the Senate. And no matter what he had said, she couldn’t believe that the legendary White Feather—the man she had seen throw down mercenaries like they were children—would turn his back on the Republic.

  “Would you like an apple?”

  Nathaniel sat by the waterwheel, three metres farther along the path from where the earth dropped into reeds, his feet dangled over the river. He had replaced his torn shirt and wrapped himself in a thick woollen cardigan. He took one of the small round red apples from between his legs and devoured it in two bites, core and all.

  “They’re from Tannyr’s barrels, but they’re still good.”

  She was famished.

  “Thank you.”

  Elianor walked over to him, careful of the bank, the grass that bled over rocky falls, the reeds that hid the water’s edge. He tossed her an apple. She plucked it out of the air and sank her teeth into the flesh.

  “We put Derec in the barn,” he said. “Do you want to speak to him?”

  She shook her head and sat next to him on the grass. The apple was wrinkled, fermented with age, but sweet and finished too soon.

  “Why is Gwyion Garn hiring mercenaries?”

  “Security for the mines? Protection against the Black Dog?” Nathaniel shrugged. “Haf sounded like she was telling the truth to me.”

  Elianor nodded, which was easier than explaining that some truths tell you less than others. “So why is Citizen Brek so worried?”

  “The Mayor isn’t so bad.” Nathaniel said. “But he loathes Gwyion Garn. Tannyr thinks everyone should keep to his place, so he’s obsequious with his betters and odious to his inferiors.”

  “That isn’t so bad?”

  “Once you know how he moves, you can keep the pieces out of his way.”

  Nathaniel stopped eating. He flickered his eyes back and forth across her face, as though he was trying to absorb each detail. They sat together for a while, he watching her, she kicking the reeds with her right foot. Then she reached into his lap and took another apple.

  “Why did you send the letter to Lord Carada? Asking him to send a Magistrate?”

  She took a bite. The juice rose to her lips.

  “I thought you’d ask how I managed to lie to you.”

  “I figured that out for myself,” she lied. “What started all this?”

  “I had a fight with my father,” Nathaniel said. “Four months ago. A week later, Catrin, one of the barmaids from The Last Chance, went missing. And she was only the first. You’ve seen the list. Once I saw the pattern, I had to do something.”

  “What pattern? What did you argue about?”

  “I told him I wanted to leave. To study in the capital, or travel, or join a pirate ship and sail the archipelagos—whatever. But I’m a prisoner. He won’t even let me go to the monastery to see my mother’s grave.”

  “If you want to leave, leave. What’s stopping you?”

  “Answers. He’s hiding something—something important.” He gazed beyond the river, where the sky turned black and the first stars came out. “I mostly said it to provoke him, which I guess was pretty successful. He’s the great Arbalest Vile. Where can I go far enough away from him?”

  She finished her apple and tossed the core into the river.

  “What did he say when you told him you wanted to leave?”

  “It wasn’t much of a conversation. He picked up a chair from the long table and smashed it across my back then, when he saw the chair was broken, beat me with the leg.”

  Elianor had seen Nathaniel fight. He remembered him complaining how unalike he was from his twin, Persephone, and yet she found it difficult to imagine either submitting to anyone. But then she remembered the shadow of her own father, banging his fist at the head of the breakfast table.

  “Why was he so angry? Did you fight back?”

  “I think he was mostly upset that I’d broken the chair. And no, I didn’t fight back. I let him hit me. I don’t know why. Afterwards he looked at me as if I were something he had found under his boot. Like something he had decided to replace.”

  She sat close enough that their knees touched. He looked up at the stars and even beneath the night sky his eyes were as blue as a child’s. She thought about the tattoo on his chest, hidden by his shirt.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You didn’t want to hear all that.”

  She kissed him.

  He pushed her hood back and pulled her closer, his right hand in her hair. She slid one hand up his back and with the other, unbuttoned his cardigan. The apples tumbled as she swung her knee over and sat on his lap, chest to his chest.

  “Take off your shirt,” she said.

  He froze, his hand on her nape.

  “Fine,” she said, kissing him again, smiling with her lips touching his. “I’ll go first.”

  She shucked off her coat, tossing it up the bank so it wouldn’t float away on the river, then pulled off his cardigan. The dressing dragged at her injured side. He was breathing hard. She undid the top buttons of her blouse and placed his left hand just beneath her collar bone, leaning in closer and encouraging him to run his fingers down, just as she slid her own between the top buttons of his shirt.

  “Stop,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She undid another button.

  “Did you ask Derec?” he said.

  “Ask him what?”

  He took his hand from her chest.

  “So that’s it,” he said. “You don’t want to have to lie if he’s innocent.”

  “Innocent of what?”

  The third and fourth buttons of his shirt were open, and she could so nearly see inside, so nearly see the hidden spot. He caught her fingers in his hands.

  “In Nana Haf’s, you said Derec was connected to all the missing women. So why not ask him if he killed them?”

  She sat on her heels, the backs of her thighs still pressed on the front of his, so she could see his eyes. His breath still clouded against the exposed skin of her cleavage.

  “If I ask, I’ll know. When you know the truth, you have a responsibility.”

  “You can’t deny responsibility just by failing to ask
. That’s…that’s ridiculous.”

  She sighed and brushed a hair from his forehead.

  “At the moment, I can negotiate with the Garns, I can negotiate with the Breks. Ignorance gives me a measure of flexibility. Once I know the truth, I must prosecute. It’s not just asking the questions; it’s knowing the right moment to ask the questions.”

  But Elianor began to doubt. The circumstantial evidence around Derec Garn might be enough to satisfy Arbalest Vile, and she didn’t have to intervene if she didn’t know he wasn’t guilty. Was she prepared to sacrifice Derec Garn because it was convenient? She ran her hand across Nathaniel’s cheek and put her fingers through his thick blond hair. Even so, the questioning voice in her head found its way to her lips.

  “You don’t think Derec killed them,” she said. “You think it was your father.”

  “When you want to know what I think,” he said, “you’ll ask me.”

  From the barn, a man screamed.

  Day 3

  20 Ventros 1682

  To return to the capital in time, Elianor must complete her mission and leave Shadowgate within 4 days.

  Chapter 29

  Arbalest Vile stood in the courtyard and fiddled with the hoist that held the fluttering banner. Time, wet, and cold had worn the rope and the knot had jammed. Each time the wind blew, the slack banged against the Manor wall and the flag dipped into the guttering around the roof.

  “I’m too old to start again,” he said.

  “It was a waste of time sending Anton and Persephone to see Hodri.” Lena sat behind him, cracking walnuts in her fist then scattering the shells on the Manor step. She dropped the fleshy nuts one by one into the bowl on her lap. “He’ll only get upset.”

  “Hodri has been upset since 1663,” Arbalest said. “He deserves everything he gets.”

  “What happened in 1663?”

  “His wedding, remember? It was the last day anyone saw his wife happy. Tannyr held the ceremony by the river, and you wore that blue dress you used to wear when… What? Why are you looking at me like that?”