Little could be seen as they walked quietly along amidst the trunks of the towering trees, but the bitter smell of smoke from the fire already hung heavy in the air, mingling with the earthy aroma of decaying leaves and the damp scent of rain on a wind that had begun to rustle through the branches. In that wind, in those shadows, those ancient trees seemed to crouch together, whispering conspiracies to each other in the night, and Keely found a personal appreciation for how the forest could inspire ghost stories.
“Won’t this be a really bad place to be if that fire spreads?” Shoshona asked, still trying to sound cavalier, though her voice had finally taken on its first hint of nervousness—either from actual concern over the fire, or because night in the forest was working on her imagination as it was on Keely’s.
“If you’d rather, we could climb the Wolf’s Tooth or head for the castle,” Ulric said without looking back. “But if we run into any of your people, I’ll kill you on the spot. Think we can make either one without that happening?” When Shoshona offered no answer, he went on. “There are no ‘safe’ places to be right now, but this is the least un-safe of them. Just stay close, because you will get lost in the dark without me. Then if the fire jumps the road and reaches the forest before morning comes, you will die—if you haven’t already been torn apart by wolves.”
They were perhaps twenty minutes back into the forest when the path opened out into a clearing. At first the only thing visible there was the lack of trees, but as they crossed, the lantern light fell on a curious little building nestled up against a natural rock wall at the far side. Half-obscured as it was by a particularly ancient and gnarled oak that embraced a corner of the two-story cottage, one had to wonder at the age of the building itself, given that the tree couldn’t have been there at all when the foundations were laid.
By all rights, the cottage should have cracked and collapsed long ago, as the tree intruded on its space, but it seemed to have undergone a major restoration sometime within the last century, orchestrated by someone who had gone to great trouble to leave the tree intact. While the place didn’t seem much used, neither did it look entirely neglected.
“Come on, then,” Ulric said, opening the door and leading them into a comfortably appointed sitting room. “We’ll be good here while I settle on the best way around the fire. I should probably…”
“Ulric?” a perplexed female voice called from up the stairs at the back of the room. “What are you even doing here? Don’t my parents…” Minda Haywood stopped halfway down the steps, casually holding the hunting rifle she’d obviously grabbed out of caution before she’d identified Ulric’s voice. Everyone in the room stared at everyone else in the room in various states of surprise and alarm.
“It’s okay!” Keely said hastily before anyone else could recover, noticing that Minda’s grip on the gun was tightening. “Ulric, be a dear and tell her it’s okay.”
“Who are you?” Minda snapped suspiciously, bringing her rifle to the ready—pointing the weapon toward Shoshona, even though her gaze and question had been directed straight at Keely.
“Minda, it’s okay,” Ulric said. He could have done a more convincing job of it, though, and Minda showed little sign of being reassured.
“Who are you?” Minda repeated.
“She’s a witch,” Shoshona volunteered. Her shock having come from the sudden belief that Earl Haywood’s family had masterminded her kidnapping, she recovered swiftly now that Minda had dispelled that notion. “You might want to point the gun at her, not me.”
“She’s not a witch,” Ulric said reassuringly, as he moved to join Minda.
“I am so a witch!” Keely protested hotly.
“Maybe she’s a witch,” Ulric conceded with a shrug.
“And that’s…Sister Shoshona, isn’t it?” Minda gaped, her own shock not dissipating so quickly. “And she’s…tied up? Ulric, what…?!”
“Who else is here?” Ulric brushed off the question.
“Just Doryne.”
“Come on,” he said, pushing past her and up the stairs, despite the arm she held out trying to block him. “I only want to tell this story once.”
“But you’re holding an inquisitrix prisoner!” Minda shouted, chasing up the stairs after him.
“And she’s not happy about it!” Shoshona yelled after them.
“Ah, well. Maybe he can still sort things where we don’t have to kill you,” Keely sighed wistfully. “Looks iffy, though, don’t you think?”
Shoshona glowered at Keely, who responded by whistling idly while the seconds passed, until without warning, a shot rang out upstairs. A woman screamed. Another shot followed, then silence. As the heavy thud of boots started down the stairs, Keely realized she’d been standing, gaping, and began edging back toward the door to the cottage. The inquisitrix was still gaping when Ulric came into view—a smoking hunting rifle in each hand, and streaks of blood on his shirt and hands.
“All sorted,” he said grimly, tossing the rifles to the floor as he arrived at the bottom of the stairs. “Now it’s your turn.” He fixed his gaze on Shoshona as he advanced, and the priestess’ demeanor finally broke. She shrieked and flinched away as he grabbed her by the collar and threw her face down to the floor.
By this point, Keely had reached the door and quietly cracked it open. She swallowed hard as she stood contemplating how insane the man had gone, and whether it was time to bolt and forget her entire scheme. Then Ulric, with his foot on Shoshona’s back, keeping her pinned, turned his gaze on Keely. With a strange little smile, he mouthed the words, “It’s okay,” and pulled up a sleeve, gesturing first at the bloody gash on his arm, then sweepingly at the blood on his clothes. “They’re fine,” he mouthed.
“The other girl had a crossbow,” he said gruffly. “Go upstairs and get it so you can keep an eye on this one,” he gestured to the hyperventilating priestess, “while I search around to make sure there was no one else.”
With one wary eye still on Ulric, Keely swung wide around him and scurried up the stairs to find the two young women sitting on the bed there, biting their knuckles to suppress an impulse to laugh. The rifle blasts had damaged one of the walls, but the scene seemed otherwise intact.
Keely gave a long, involuntary whistle. “Quite a mess you made up here!” she shouted down to cover for it. “You’d better not be thinking I’ll clean it up!”
“Just leave it!” Ulric shouted back.
“Wow,” Keely whispered appreciatively to Minda. “He’s good. Where’s the crossbow?”
Doryne hefted the weapon but waved Keely off from taking it. “I’ll take guard duty. Just give me that cloak in case she catches a glimpse.”
As Doryne headed downstairs, Minda grabbed a lantern and tugged Keely toward a door at the back of the room. As they passed the bed, Keely noticed a single black boot sticking out from under a blanket. It caught her eye not for its own sake—it was certainly a reasonable cut and quality for a young noblewoman to be wearing out into the forest—but because it looked to currently have a foot in it, as well as a similarly occupied mate somewhere under the blanket, and probably an entire person attached as well.
Keely looked up from noticing all this to find Minda noticing she’d noticed all this, and that all trace of merriment at Shoshona’s predicament had vanished. Keely began to form a question, but it died unasked as she read on Minda’s face that there would be no answers forthcoming.
The two women stepped out into the forest, this time at the top of the little cliff the cottage had been built against. Down below, Ulric appeared, carrying his own lantern, and Minda waved down to him. Through nods and hand-signals, the two agreed to head further on down the cliff until, about a hundred yards later, an easy climb presented itself. Ulric joined them at the top, where he returned Minda’s prized hunting rifle to her.
“Oh, you scuffed her,” Minda said with a little pout, examining the weapon. “Now what the blazes is going on?!” she demanded of Ulric. Her voice torn betwe
en the need for quiet and the urge to shout, it came out as a furious whisper.
“With all respect, milady,” Ulric said, “I should be asking the same. Can we please start with the dead woman, and then move on to the captive one?”
Minda looked suspiciously at Keely. “I don’t think…”
“Right. Okay. Lady Minda, this is Keely, the postulant for the new priestess. Remember?”
“Hi,” Keely said with a friendly little wave. “You might have heard me called ‘Chloe’.”
“Oh, uh…” Minda peered at Keely in the lantern light. “Yeah,” she said noncommittally, looking more puzzled than ever. “Your hair wasn’t silver, though. Was it?”
“I really shouldn’t tell you anything about what’s going on,” Ulric began, cutting off Minda’s protestations with a raised hand, “but I’m still going to. Your parents will probably have my head, if I can keep it long enough for them to find out. This is a lose-lose situation for me, but I’m starting to get used to those. As of today, we are at war with the Inquisition.”
“Yes!” Minda responded so exultantly that she barely managed to choke it off from becoming a shout. “Yes!” she repeated with more composure. “It’s about bloody time.”
“But this is not a game,” Ulric hissed fiercely. “People are going to die. People are already dying,” he corrected himself, thinking back to the corpse of the inquisitrix he’d stumbled on when he’d barged upstairs in the cottage. “Now tell me why they’re already dying, or that’s all you get, milady.”
“It was a hunting accident!” Minda blurted. “She just ran out between me and a charging wolf from out of nowhere. Doryne saw it. She’s the only one who saw it. But you know the Inquisition isn’t going to care how it happened.”
“A charging wolf?” Ulric interrupted.
“Yes! I know. It’s crazy. The thing wasn’t even rabid. I shot its mate, and it charged right at us.”
“What was an inquisitrix doing in the forest?” Keely asked, perplexed.
“None of it makes sense,” Minda said, clearly flustered. “But it happened, and I shot her, and she’s dead.” She took a deep breath before continuing. “We’d also met a group of strangers out here earlier—foreign nobles. Said they were looking for a woman who got herself lost in the forest, so I sent the others to take the wolf pelts back, and tell my parents we were out looking for the lost woman, to buy us time to figure out what to do. When I said we’d hole up at the old hunting lodge for the night if we took too long, I never thought anyone would actually come looking for us.”
“And what did you figure out?” Ulric asked.
“I didn’t want to leave the body there, in case someone knew where she was and came looking, and it was getting late fast. I figured we’d go in the morning to find a ravine back in the forest to bury her in.”
“We may want to give her a funeral pyre instead, if they don’t bring the fire Sir Riordan’s sparked under control quick,” Keely said.
“That’s a thought.” Ulric nodded, then pressed on before Minda could ask what they were talking about. “I’ll help you clean up your mess, milady, but the less you know about my mess, the better, unless—and let me be very clear on this—you just sign on as a marksman in the war effort, and don’t go pulling rank on me. You could be a huge help, but I can’t be responsible for your safety if you’re trying to be in charge.”
“Ulric, if there’s a war against the Inquisition going on, you cannot keep me out,” Minda said. “But, yeah, I’ve been trusting you to look out for me since I barely came up to your belt, and up ‘til right now I’ve been a hunter, not a warrior. If you want to call my shots, the job’s yours. Now, spill. What is up with your captive? And why are you dragging around a postulant dressed up like a scarecrow?”
“I’m not a scarecrow,” Keely protested. “I’m Bloody Scarlet!”
Elissa looked at her askance. “You do know that Bloody Scarlet’s a nursery story, right?”
“I sure hope so,” Keely said. “I’d hate for her to really exist and decide I was mocking her. The point is she’s got a mystique I can borrow to spook the Inquisition. They’ve already decided I’m a witch. Might as well ham it up for all it’s worth.”
“Are you a witch?” Minda asked.
“I don’t think so,” Keely answered, biting her lip thoughtfully. “Kind of a complicated question.”
“She’s a witch,” Ulric assured Minda.
“Wow. Really?” Minda smiled, abruptly looking at Keely as something other than a ragamuffin being dragged into her presence. “That is so excellent.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
So Not Good
“We’ll catch up with her in the morning,” Tobias assured Baldassare, leaning back against a tree to watch the dancing flames of their campfire.
“I still can’t believe she didn’t know me,” Baldassare sighed, rubbing his eyes.
“I still can’t believe you’re so blasted certain it’s her,” Evadne muttered. “What if it’s not? What if…”
“Then we don’t have a clue where she is, is what,” Baldassare snapped. “You were the one so quick to remind us the witch changes people to animals.”
“What if the deer is the witch?” she asked him, pulling her cloak up about her shoulders and turning to step away from the fire.
Although the doe had been bold by most standards, it had bolted before Baldassare could get halfway across the clearing to it, and they’d spent hours tracking it before the shadows of night took the forest very quickly. Even had they been paying closer attention to the time, and even had they been willing to abandon the pursuit, they would have been hard-pressed to retrace their steps to safety before the light completely failed them. Now, with the ground so rocky and uneven, pressing on through the forest in the dark would have been an invitation to fall and break something.
It hadn’t helped matters that even the most experienced huntsman among them thought of exploring the woods as a “day trip” sort of thing. Not that Tobias had never spent a night in the wilderness, but he’d never met a wood so thick or dense he couldn’t leave just by walking in the same direction for a couple of hours. He’d set out to find the lost woman confident that, whatever the outcome, he’d be back under the open sky before nightfall—back with his horses and all the traveling gear they carried.
Though the local ponies that hunting party were riding had seemed sure-footed and confident, Tobias hadn’t been about to trust his own good horses to this treacherous terrain. He had made sure Conrad brought enough food and drink along that they weren’t going hungry, but they’d brought no light, and bedding down for the night would mean looking for the least uncomfortable patch of ground by the fire.
“What is that awful screeching?” Evadne asked as the sound pierced the night yet again. She shivered slightly at the encroaching chill of the evening.
“You mean the owl call?” Tobias asked.
“No, right after the owl.”
“Pretty sure they’re both owls.” He shrugged. “The screech answers the hoot.”
“I don’t like this place.” Evadne sighed. “I don’t trust this place. Deer or human, I really hate to think of Sabina out there alone in the middle of this, without even a fire for comfort.”
“Wait,” Tobias said, pieces finally clicking into place inside his head. “Sabina…Marini? You’re the Denecia Marini’s?” He kicked himself for not placing the accent earlier.
Baldassare nodded, eying Tobias a little warily.
“She dragged you all this way chasing after that silly book, didn’t she?”
“Which book?” Baldassare asked with poorly affected innocence.
Tobias snorted. “Look, it’s okay. I’ve got three older brothers and a father all playing the politics game, but that makes it way too crowded in there for me. And even if old Amberford wasn’t delusional, and even if the Grimm Truth is full of dead-on accurate prophecies, I don’t care what happens to it. Have you ever heard a story with a
prophecy where the prophecy actually helped anyone? They all have some naive lad or lass running around blessed with the luck of ignorance, fulfilling their glorious destiny by simply following the dictates of a pure heart, while the powerful lord or lady who knows exactly what’s going on sows the seeds of his own destruction out of fear, trying to keep the prophecy from ever coming to pass. Prophets rush in where even demons fear to tread.”
“You know about the Grimm Truth…and you’re following the Grimm Truth…but you don’t want it?” Baldassare asked, arching an eyebrow.
“All I want is a girl who happens to be mixed up with it somehow,” Tobias said levelly. “Or to avenge her if she’s past help. I’m after the witch. You can keep the book.”
“You do realize,” Evadne said, returning to tower over the fire with a wicked grin, “that makes you the pure-hearted lad naively fulfilling his glorious destiny?”
“Oh…my…go’ss,” Elissa gasped, almost forgetting the weight of the old woman leaning on her shoulder as she stood gaping at the devastation spread out below her.
Nolan lowered the littlest of the woman’s grandchildren to the ground and shooed the family on back from the edge of the trail to where they might find a rock worth sitting on, and he stood behind Elissa, muttering something unintelligible under his breath. Things had been looking rather grim from two switchbacks further down the Wolf’s Tooth, where they’d come upon the woman and children struggling with the climb. By Nolan’s best guess, he was seeing half a dozen farms ablaze. After that, the trail had taken them away from the side of the Tooth with the fires, and they’d lost sight of the flames for perhaps half an hour, slowed as they were. They couldn’t be sure how much looked different now because of the added height, and how much had actually changed in that half hour, but right here and now it looked to Elissa like half the world was on fire.
Lethal Red Riding Hood (Dark Goddess Chronicles Book 1) Page 24
