Lethal Red Riding Hood (Dark Goddess Chronicles Book 1)

by Leonard Wilson

  “That would be these ledgers, Your Grace,” Elissa said, holding them forward. “Some man down at the market shoved them at us and insisted we bring them up to the castle. I’m guessing now that he mistook us for part of your entourage, but he rode off before I could question him. We’re actually just passing through on pilgrimage to Meissi.” The ad lib caught Keely by surprise. Up to now they’d been telling everyone that it was Aeladia they were headed for, and by Elissa’s own suggestion. Of course, she’d also been introducing herself as “Sister Alice”. There was no question the girl was more nervous than showed on her face.

  “Ah, there’s a good lass.” Augusta finally smiled as she stepped up, flipping open one of the proffered books and glancing inside. She nodded with satisfaction and gestured for Elissa to lay them on the head table nearby, then began pacing about, leaning heavily on her walking stick. “I started my own pilgrimage to Meissi the day after my ordination. Too many people put it off. Too, too many. Then they get to be old and hobbledy like me, and the next thing they know, they’re begging their children to drag them there in a donkey cart. Or else the plague comes and, well…It’s a fine, fine place, Meissi. Well worth the trip, even without its spiritual benefits.”

  “So I’ve heard, your Grace,” Elissa said.

  “Now what’s holding up dinner, Haywood?” Augusta demanded. “Our pilgrims must be as famished as I am.”

  “I’ll inquire after preparations at once, Your Grace,” Darby said with forced politeness.

  “Now, then,” Augusta said, settling at the head table. “Sit! Sit! You must tell me everything. Where have you come from? What adventures have you had this far?”

  “Well, uh…” Elissa glanced pleadingly to Keely—her supply of cleverness apparently wearing thin—and Keely replied with an accepting nod. “Postulant Chloe’s quite a bit more eloquent than I am, and she really inspired me to take up the pilgrimage. Perhaps she should be telling the story.”

  “Certainly. Certainly,” Augusta said agreeably. “I do love the enthusiasm of youth.”

  “Actually, I have to give credit to the Miraculata Cosima for inspiring the journey,” Keely began.

  “Oh? Do you know her?” Augusta asked.

  “We met just the once. I’m sure she doesn’t remember my name, but she entreated me to travel far. ‘Go, and Goddess guide you,’ she said.”

  “Lovely, dear woman, Miraculata Cosima,” Augusta nodded. “And wise beyond her years. You did well heeding her advice.”

  “Of course, I wouldn’t have got far on my own,” Keely went on, “so I harangued the Sister into leading me on a proper pilgrimage, and she’d always sung the praises of…” Keely took her turn at coughing to buy a moment to search her memory. “Sorry. Sung the praises of the place,” she bulled onward, having entirely failed to recall the name Meissi, “so before long, there we were on the road, without the slightest clue how very far we were getting in over our heads…”

  Keely wove the rambling tale of a natural storyteller concerned more about keeping her audience engaged than in sounding plausible. She threw in mention of the now notorious witch “from far off Sabracar”, of course, and of the enigmatic “Lady A” who seemed to be chasing her across the continent, but they featured alongside such other highlights as a narrow escape from highwaymen in a desolate swamp, an encounter with a once-holy inquisitrix gone mad, a bloodthirsty ogre, some pirates, and a terrible flood.

  The timeline did begin to wander and grow fuzzy after a while, and it became increasingly difficult to tell which bit happened when in relation to what, or even if—perhaps—several of them mightn’t have happened simultaneously. Still, what she lost in coherence she made up for in raw energy. She also stitched the whole thing together with a thread made of pious determination and of good fortune visited by the grace of Seriena, which appealed to the current audience most thoroughly, and kept the narrative from falling apart into irredeemable silliness.

  “My, my,” Augusta chuckled when Keely had finished the epic fabrication. “With a glib tongue like that, you’re going to make a fine priestess, child. I suspect this is one of those tales that grows larger with each re-telling,” she said with a sideways glance at Elissa, who answered with a little grin and a tiny nod of confirmation, “but you re-tell it well. I’ve half a mind to put you on the pulpit preaching the joys of the pilgrimage, only I’m afraid you’d make it sound too adventurous.

  “You know, I do believe I sense Seriena’s hand in our meeting,” Augusta went on, addressing her comments once more to Elissa. “This weary old body has a favor to ask, and you’ll find she can be most appreciative of those who come to the aid of her diocese.”

  “We’ll do what we can, of course, Your Grace,” Elissa said, “though I hope it won’t keep us long from our pilgrimage.”

  “Of course, of course, dear. Service to the Goddess can be most inconvenient at times. No one knows that better than I. But I must insist you stay on for a couple of months as a spiritual guide for the locals while they’re working on my cathedral. The woman I had installed in the position met a rather foolhardy end, I’m afraid, trying to fend off the ruffians who sabotaged our progress. It was a noble gesture, but one that should have been made by someone else entirely.” Augusta cast a dark look across the hall in the direction of their host.

  “Anyway, you’re smarter than that, and I dare say that Haywood shan’t make the same mistake twice, or his whole family will pay for it. All it will take is two months for me to line up a suitable replacement and return. The you’re off again on your merry pilgrimage, and with a very handsome position waiting for you in my diocese when you’re done.”

  “Well, I don’t know…” Elissa began.

  “How to thank me? No need, child. Just do your duty,” she punctuated each word of the sentence by rapping her walking stick lightly on Elissa’s shoulder, “and perhaps bring me back a trinket from Meissi.

  “Haywood?!” she bellowed. “I just saw that man. Now where has he gotten to? Ah, there you are. Haywood, Sister Jenny and her postulant here will be ministering to the area in my absence. I will not find them dead when I return. I will not find them mysteriously missing. They will be right here, alive and well, and smilingly showing me the intact progress that’s been made on my cathedral, or I shall have a trophy room built, just so I can hang your head in it. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, Your Grace.” It was the most polite growl either Keely or Elissa had ever heard.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  In Seriena's Eyes

  The eyes of Seriena looked out reflectively over every congregation in every chapel throughout the kingdoms. That was, in fact, how you knew it was a chapel: her gaze manifested as a matched pair of large mirrors behind the altar. In the early days of her church, Seriena had only kept one eye on each chapel (or so it seemed to Elissa from her studies): one grand and perfectly circular mirror of reverently polished copper, from which the Goddess was said to look out from behind the altar, and in which pious worshipers would occasionally claim to catch some glimpse of the Goddess herself.

  As the centuries passed, the metaphor of the mirror as the eyes of Seriena evolved into a more literal translation, which eventually resulted in the current custom of the paired mirrors in the stylized shape of a woman's eyes. In a modern grand cathedral, the mirrors would be huge and baroquely ornate, framed in precious stones and metals, with polished marble for the whites of the eyes; glass backed in gold-leaf for the irises; and polished onyx for the pupils. Perhaps the only thing that hadn't changed about the mirrors was the reported sightings of Seriena within them.

  The chapel in Castle Haywood was no grand cathedral, and the mirrors behind the sturdy wooden altar could have been centuries old, hearkening back to the simplistic style of the earliest paired mirrors: just two slightly distorted and skewed ellipses of bright, unadorned copper, smooth as glass and mounted on a wooden backing carved with decorative scrollwork. A pair of fancy iron candelabras and a seri
es of tapestries depicting the lives of miraculatas—many of whom not even Elissa could recognize—finished the trappings of the boxy, spartan room that had been the domain of the recently departed Sister Petra.

  Behind one of the tapestries lay the alcove where Sister Petra had slept, and it was there that Keely and Elissa found themselves now, getting settled in as they pointedly failed to say anything meaningful about the situation that had befallen them. Though there was much to be discussed, they had already agreed—through a dozen different non-verbal signals—that an unfamiliar old castle like this was no place to go saying anything they shouldn’t care to have public knowledge.

  There was no guessing what odd acoustics might carry their voices where, nor what secret spy holes might have been left by centuries of courtly intrigue. Their own eavesdropping back at Belgrimm Abbey had left them keenly aware of that possibility, so they wordlessly resolved to maintain their charade as if under surveillance the whole time they were in Castle Haywood. Tomorrow, they would go out and “minister”, as they had been charged to do, and they would sort the whole thing out then.

  Most of Sister Petra’s personal effects had long since been removed, but Elissa did inherit her cot, and they’d also been given a straw-filled pallet for Keely to sleep on. As Keely laid that out on the floor near the cot, Elissa busied herself by going through what had been left behind in Petra’s writing desk and on the alcove’s one little shelf. It didn’t amount to much.

  “Looks like I was wrong about the parchment here,” Elissa said. “Sister Petra, at least, was using paper.”

  “Is that going to be a problem?” Keely asked.

  Elissa bit her lip thoughtfully as she shook her head. “Parchment would be better for…some purposes, but either one should get the job done.” Catching a shadow of movement out in the chapel, beyond the tapestry, she quickly added, “The point is simply having something to write on.” She paused expectantly, but whoever it was out in the chapel seemed to be neither sneaking around nor approaching closer, so Elissa finally brushed the tapestry aside herself and peered out. A brown-robed girl of ten or so, with pinned-up, curly red hair and ears that looked like they were waiting for her to grow into them, sat in the corner with a wooden tablet in her lap and a look of intense concentration on her face. The tip of her tongue peeked out from the corner of her mouth as she slowly etched meticulous lines into the wax on the surface of the tablet.

  Her curiosity satisfied for the moment, Elissa turned her attention back to going through the desk, but Keely slipped on out past the tapestry and approached the girl. "And what are we doing here?" Keely asked, peering down at the girl's tablet.

  "Practicing my letters," the girl answered without looking up. "The church won't take a postulant who doesn't know her letters."

  "Well, you're doing a fine, fine job," Keely assured her. "Your letters already look better than mine do."

  "Do they really?" the girl asked, engaged enough by the compliment to make eye contact—after she'd finished out the letter she'd been working on, of course.

  "They really do. Though it's fair to warn you, I managed to get into these robes despite my penmanship, not because of it. Safest to keep practicing, in case they're stricter with you than they were with me. I'm Keely, by the way."

  "Addie," the girl said simply, returning to her letters. "I'm the chapel attendant."

  "So you worked for Sister Petra, then?"

  “Yes. And she was a good woman, no matter what you hear anyone else say.” Addie looked up from her work again, defiantly this time. “The ghost shouldn’t’ve killed her.”

  "Is someone saying it should have?" Keely asked, not having to work too hard at sounding aghast.

  "A lot of folk didn't like her," Addie said, not exactly answering the question. "She didn't always understand the way we do things here, and she got into some real rows with our own priestesses. But she took an interest in me when no one else cared, so don't go bad-mouthing her to me."

  "Of course not," Keely assured the girl readily. "Not a local woman, then?"

  "Sent by Pontifine Augusta, just like the sister in there," Addie said, nodding toward Elissa in the alcove, "and don't expect to be winning any friends for it. It seems we don't care for strangers much here."

  "Then it's an excellent thing," Keely said, grinning conspiratorially, "that I've never been a stranger anywhere. And Sister Jenny's all right; certainly more interested in her books than in butting heads with anybody."

  "Oh, we're used to butting heads, Miss," Addie said. "Course there was plenty of grumbling about it with Sister Petra, but it wouldn't have got her killed. It was her books that did that."

  "Her books got her killed?!" Elissa asked, suddenly appearing at the edge of the tapestry.

  "Books are bad luck," Addie said. "Cursed. Everybody knows that."

  "And tablets aren't?" Elissa asked, staring pointedly at the girl's work-in-progress.

  "Not if you smudge out the writing when you're done," Addie said.

  "Then what's the point of writing at all?!" Elissa asked in exasperation. “Look, I thought you said it was the ghost that killed her, anyway.”

  “Bloody Scarlet killed her. The books got her killed,” Addie clarified, with the exaggerated patience of someone who wasn’t really showing any. “Like falling under the wheels of a carriage’d kill you, but you never would’ve fallen if you hadn’t broke that mirror last week. Books are bad luck.”

  “Why is everybody rushing to tell me this now? Wouldn’t it have made sense to bring it up before I accepted a post at the abbey library? Just once?” Elissa withdrew back into the alcove behind the tapestry with a growl of frustration.

  Keely gave Addie an apologetic smile before following after Elissa, to find her face down on the cot, her arms splayed carelessly to the side as if she’d simply collapsed there and couldn’t be bothered even about making herself comfortable. Keely started to speak, but Elissa interrupted her before she could get a word out.

  “I have never traveled so far,” she said, her voice muffled by the bedding. “I have never walked so far. Every day we do things that keep me wound like a spring. Every night I’m too on edge or in too much pain or we have too little time for me to sleep right. You run off and do whatever you want. I’m going to lie here and try to find the energy to care which horrible death will catch up to me first. With any luck, I’ll fall into a coma before I manage it. Good night.”

  Leaving Elissa to lie in bed, Keely persuaded Addie to take her on a tour of the castle, and to get her up to speed on the area and its inhabitants. Remaining in one spot for two months was putting down some serious roots, as far as Keely was concerned, and she would really need to do her homework if she was going to pull it off. The circumstance would have been challenging even if she hadn’t been sending out all those open invitations to follow her here.

  The thought of cutting and running certainly held its appeal, but she would have to plan that carefully if she wanted to keep Pontifine Augusta from taking out her anger on the Haywood family. Leaving them to their fate without first being sure they warranted it would be a serious violation of the Rules.

  She’d seen for herself, in a very close and personal way, just what became of people who tried to live without rules. For one thing, it couldn’t really be done. For another, the closer you got to achieving that goal, the less human you became, until you were nothing more than some feral beast that no sane person would have anything to do with—one that society would eventually hunt down and rid itself of.

  To the casual observer, it might seem as if Keely lived without rules, but that’s just because she was rigorously selective about which ones she would follow. Those she kept all bound up together in the well-worn mental scrapbook that she’d pieced together from fragments of thought that she’d collected over the years. She couldn’t actually recall the business of starting it, but page one offered its own hint as to why she had every time she opened the book.

  The page h
ad been given over to an audio clip of a woman’s voice sternly demanding, “Do not spend your life playing someone else’s game. You make your own rules, and you enforce them.” She’d no other memory of her mother to corroborate who that voice belonged to, but it had to be her. Nothing else made sense.

  So to stay true to her mother, she’d begun recording the Rules for herself. And to stay true to her mother, she’d rejected the petty little life Hart Cove had planned for her and…gone…That was, Jenilee had gone…

  Keely slammed the book shut on that thought and bit her lip hard as she began singing a bawdy drinking song in her head at the top of her mental lungs. Thinking too hard about Hart Cove always got her confused, and always brought on the nightmares. She could hardly remember it anyway—couldn’t even remember how the three of them had escaped. The nightmares about not escaping had burned themselves into her brain over and over until that’s the only way she could recall it. Yet here she was.

  “Are you okay?” Addie asked, looking up with concern on her face.

  “Couldn’t be better,” Keely answered with reflexive sincerity, banishing her introspection. “So that’s where they’re building the cathedral?” she asked, pointing up to the construction on the Wolf’s Tooth.

  “Yeah,” Addie confirmed. The tour had taken them up to the top of one of the castle towers, and it offered an excellent vantage point from which to take stock of the surrounding countryside.

  “It looks like a better place for a castle than a cathedral,” Keely observed. “In fact, it begs for a castle. I can’t imagine why anyone would put one down here when they could have put it up there instead.”

  “Someone did,” Addie said.

  “Oh?” Keely asked. “That sounds like a story begging to be told.”