by G. A. Aiken
That last bit was kind of hard to get out, but she did it.
Kriegszorn stared at her from across the clearing; then she was suddenly charging Gemma.
“Uh-oh.”
“Gemma!” Quinn barked at her from the tree line. “Get out of there!”
But Gemma refused to run. Kriegszorn had traveled all this way to find her. She must remember her. She must still love her. Gemma forced herself to stand her ground.
Kriegszorn came closer and closer, hooves tearing up the soil between them. When she was inches away, Gemma shut her eyes and waited to end up the way many enemies had ended up during battle when Gemma and Kriegszorn had run them down. She heard Kriegszorn whinny loudly and opened her eyes to see the massive horse on her hind legs, front legs high in the air.
A few seconds later, she came down, the ground around them seeming to shake with the impact. Kriegszorn moved closer and rested her big head on Gemma’s shoulder. Just as she used to do when Gemma brushed her mane or stroked her neck.
She could feel blood from the open wounds on the right side dripping onto her chainmail-covered shoulder but it was the normal, left side that was pressed comfortably against Gemma’s ear and neck.
“Oh, Kriegszorn. How I’ve missed you, my beautiful girl.”
She stroked the horse’s neck and ran her fingers through her mane, telling her, “Don’t you worry. When this is all over, no matter what happens, you are going back home. My family will take care of you.”
“Have you lost your mind?” Quinn demanded, now standing behind her.
Before Gemma could tell him to fuck off, as she liked to do when he overstepped his bounds, Kriegszorn suddenly pushed her aside with her large body, opened her mouth to reveal the large number of fangs she now had. And she roared at Quinn. Something horses didn’t really do either.
That’s when Quinn shifted to his battle-ready centaur form, with full antlers and fangs. He pulled his sword and axe.
Her battle-cohorts came out of the trees to stare at Quinn with their mouths open, but Ragna simply smirked at Gemma and flatly asked, “So now you’re bringing centaurs to the monastery? What’s next, Brother Gemma? Legions from one of the hells?”
Keran chuckled. “Wait until ya meet her sister’s dogs—owwwww! What the rude-fuck was that for, ya evil bitch?”
* * *
“What do you think?” Thomassin asked his cohorts. The same men he’d trained with all those decades ago. They’d been through hell together, but hell hadn’t mattered because they always had one another’s backs. It was strange, though, planning all this without Joshua right by their side. Gods, how Thomassin missed him. But saving this order was the last thing he needed to do for his friend, and he’d make sure it was accomplished.
“He’s going to make a move on her,” Bartholemew guessed.
The three men watched Master General Ragna dismount from her horse and hand over the reins to her squire. She stopped to speak to several of her direct commands before sending them off.
“Joshua said he wasn’t afraid of her,” Brín reminded them.
Bartholemew shook his head. “Joshua lied. That woman is . . . that woman.”
“If she sides with Sprenger . . .”
“We won’t let her,” Thomassin decided. “We’ll go talk to her. Like calm, rational men.”
Nodding in agreement, they all set off after Ragna but she abruptly stopped and turned toward them. They immediately stopped too and began to look . . . anywhere. The sky. The ground. Thomassin found a reason to stare at a broken fence. She watched them for a moment, then disappeared into the stables where her horses were kept.
“Remember that time I had to battle an army of demons?” Bartholemew asked. “And I was all alone until you three could get to me. And it took you nearly an hour?”
“Yes,” Thomassin replied. “I remember.”
“Still less scary than dealing with that woman.”
* * *
Sprenger followed two of his guards into the stables. He knew Ragna was in here. She liked to wash off the grime of the day near her horses, so her army had set up a space for her within the stables. Then some dwarf engineer she knew had created an elaborate water system that with the assistance of a moving horse conducted water through tubing to spray down on her while she stood under it.
That’s exactly where Ragna was when one of his guards grabbed her shoulder to alert her to Sprenger’s presence. But before a word was spoken, Ragna’s wet hand reached out and grabbed the monk’s arm, twisting until the bone snapped at the shoulder. With her free hand, she grabbed the monk by the throat and lifted him off his feet, holding him high above her head.
“Master General Ragna!” Sprenger bellowed.
Unlike everyone else in the monastery, Ragna did not immediately drop her prey at Sprenger’s command. Instead, her gaze simply shifted to him while she continued to hold the screaming man with both hands.
“Oh,” she said in that calm voice of hers, “Grand Master. I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Release him this instant!”
“Why, of course. He just startled me.” She released the monk and the second guard ran to his side.
“Take him to the healer,” Sprenger ordered.
“But, Grand Master—”
“I’ll be fine.”
His protection detail quickly left and Sprenger moved closer to Ragna. But not too close. He knew better.
“I wanted to talk to you about Gemma Smythe.”
“Ahhh, yes,” she said, scrubbing her skin raw. “The return of the great Gemma Smythe. I really never thought she’d show her face here again.”
“I want her executed but the elders do not agree with me.”
“Why not? It sounds good to me.”
“Excellent. So I can expect your support when the time comes?”
“Absolutely.”
“Good.” He turned to go.
“Of course . . . she hasn’t actually done anything to warrant execution. Thus—”
“Thus?”
“—I would never feel right about her being executed. Is there another route we can go? You know . . . to get your point across?”
Sprenger turned back. “Well . . . is she even part of our order anymore? She doesn’t wear her tunic. She travels with Amichai. She’s a princess now, you know.”
“All excellent points, Grand Master. And you’re absolutely right. She comes in here with her hoity-toity ways, forgetting she’s made a commitment to this monastery.”
“Yes. But how can we demonstrate that she has greatly disappointed us without actually taking off her head or burning her at the stake?”
“Good question. Good question.” They were silent for a moment while Ragna scrubbed and scrubbed, as if she was attempting to remove her skin completely. Finally, she said, “I have an idea. Maybe she needs to be stripped of her rank and tunic. Let her know that you, Grand Master Sprenger, are now in charge. Show her exactly who you are. And don’t let her forget it for one damn second. How does that sound?”
He grinned. “Why, Master General, that’s a perfect idea. How smart of you to think of it all on your own.”
She nodded. “Yes, I knew you’d like that.”
* * *
Ragna’s second-in-command popped up from her own horse’s stall, where she’d been checking her stallion’s legs.
“What in all the hells are you doing?” she asked, laughing.
Grabbing a long linen cloth and wrapping it around her body, Ragna stepped away from the water.
“A long time ago, someone once said to me, ‘It seems that your entire goal in life, Ragna, is to be nothing but the dark, unholy nightmare of man.’” She stopped the horse’s movement and unbuckled him from the water system so she could return him to his stall. “Perhaps it’s time I prove that belief correct.”
“Did your father say that to you?”
“No. It was my mother that time. She sobbed when she said it. I laughed, which she
took rather personally. My father did once accuse me, though, of being the manifestation of true evil, which I felt was unnecessarily harsh.”
Ragna held the horse’s reins and asked, “Is everything ready?”
“Absolutely.” Bowing her head, Ragna’s second-in-command asked, “You sure it’s going to be tonight, Commander?”
“I’m positive. I feel it in my bones.” And her bones were never wrong. Not when it came to this sort of thing. “Make sure everyone is ready. We move on my orders. Understand?”
“Understood.”
“Tonight our god starts all this anew,” Ragna stated, leading the horse back to the safety of its stall. “And all we can do is announce his arrival with the blood of our brothers.”
CHAPTER 11
Gemma initially worried that Ragna would tell the elders about Kriegszorn. She still had no idea what had happened there. She had done nothing different with her spell to raise the dead. A short-term necromancer chant that should have worked for her as it had in the past: raising the freshly killed horse to do Gemma’s bidding, then twenty minutes later, releasing it to death. An hour or so after that, it would be nothing more than decrepit bones and decimated flesh. The spell had always gone that way and it continued so to this day.
Except for Kriegszorn.
The mare was the only one that had been unusual, but Gemma was positive she had done nothing different.
Except that . . . well, except that Kriegszorn had not been an enemy. She had been Gemma’s battle horse. As bound to her as one of her battle-cohorts.
Normally, Gemma would never have done such a thing as raise Kriegszorn, but she’d had little choice. They’d been in desperate straits. So she’d broken her own code and spoken the spell over the battle mare while tears had spilled from her eyes and her cohorts protected her back.
Could that be what made the difference? A broken heart and spilled tears?
It didn’t matter. If Sprenger found out, he would definitely use the mare’s existence to his advantage and have Gemma accused of witchery and unholy spell casting. And just the sight of the decaying but continually rejuvenating Kriegszorn might turn neutral monks firmly against Gemma.
But then Gemma remembered that in all this time, Ragna had not said one word about the horse to anyone but Joshua. Not even to Gemma’s battle-cohorts. Eventually she stopped worrying about Ragna revealing Kriegszorn’s existence and instead worried about her outing the centaurs. But that concern only lasted a few minutes. Ragna hadn’t seemed to care too much about them either. She’d simply sealed up the area where she kept Kriegszorn and made her way back to the monastery. She didn’t run back. She didn’t even look at any of the Amichais any differently. If she had any concerns, she didn’t show it.
And even after dismissing her main worries, Gemma couldn’t stop the feeling that something was amiss.
Which made the knock at her window late in the evening almost a relief.
Gemma opened the window and found Quinn hanging from a rope outside it. “I’m not even going to ask what you’re doing.”
“You should see something.”
She waited for him to climb back up and then followed him to the battlements on the monastery roof, where the rest of their group was waiting.
“There’s no one up here? No one keeping a lookout?” she asked. “Wait, you didn’t kill the lookouts, did you?”
Keran frowned. “Why are you looking at me?”
“You know why I’m looking at you.”
“There was no one here when I came up,” Quinn said. “Just needed some air. I find those tiny prison cells stifling.”
“They’re not prison cells.”
“Look around.”
“Look around at what?” Gemma asked.
“Everything.”
She did. Walking to one end of the battlements, she saw what had caught Quinn’s attention and what probably accounted for her having a hard time getting any sleep.
She gazed down at the amount of activity going on inside and outside the monastery walls. Everywhere, the monks were reinforcing what had stood for centuries.
Crossing the battlements, she watched the librarian monks—a special breed of fighting monks who would protect the monastery’s books and artifacts with their very lives—removing various items wrapped in plain white cloth. She wondered if those were weapons from the Chamber of Valor.
“Cyrus is coming,” she now realized.
“What?”
“Cyrus is coming. That’s why they’re taking out the artifacts. That’s what all this preparation is for.”
“Are you sure?”
“What else could it be?”
“Then why aren’t they leaving?”
Gemma shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Didn’t you say Sprenger has already accepted Beatrix’s help?”
“Yes, which means that if they’re leaving, they should just be heading off to her castle. I don’t know why they’re not.”
“Well, instead of standing around guessing, why don’t we simply go down and join in?” Laila asked, always the helpful one.
“No,” Gemma immediately replied.
“Why not?”
Gemma didn’t bother to answer. She simply pointed, and they all turned to see what she’d spotted moments before from the corner of her eye. Several monks waiting for her at the roof door to take her back inside to the grand master . . .
* * *
“What is the plan here?” Quinn asked as they all followed the silent monks down the stairs and through the barely lit passageways to wherever the grand master and the elders awaited them.
“Why do you sound so worried?”
“Because when it comes to this lowlife—that even I have to admit deserves a death of unmeasurable pain—you’re not the rational, calm Gemma I’ve come to respect and irritate. You’re more like your uncle Archie. Easily agitated and slightly hysterical.”
“I am not hysterical.”
“You are so hysterical. At least for you. And if that only meant you cried a lot, I would be okay with it. But you don’t cry. You’re not a crier. You are, instead, a crazy person who, like your uncle, does crazy things.”
“Such as?”
“That time you threw a fireball at your sister.”
“It was not a fireball. It was a slightly lit log from the firepit.”
“It set her clothes on fire.”
“Barely!”
“Could you two have this conversation later?” Laila asked softly. “I think you’re worrying the religious fanatics.”
“See what you did?” Quinn demanded of Gemma. “My sister never called monks religious fanatics before. But now she does. And it’s probably because of you.”
“The first firepit I find,” Gemma promised when they arrived at two large double doors deeply inscribed with her god’s rune, “I’m setting you on fire.”
“That is it!” Laila snapped. “I swear by the eight legs of Ofydd Naw, if you two don’t stop it right now—”
The two doors swung open to reveal three older monks standing inside. But they weren’t the only ones. The room was fairly stuffed with white tunic–clad monks. All waiting to see what would befall Gemma in the next few minutes.
“Brother Gemma,” one of the monks greeted as he smoothly moved up next to her.
“Brother Thomassin.”
“Starting shit as usual, I see,” he quietly teased.
“He started it.”
“I did not,” Quinn replied.
“Later, children.” He looked directly into Gemma’s face. “Listen to me. You say ‘yes’ to whatever is said to you. Understand? ‘Yes, yes, and more yes.’ We’ll take it from there. I promise it will work out for you in the end.”
“But—”
“What part of that did you not understand?”
“All of it.”
“For once, Gemma, follow directions.”
“Fine.”
“Good. Thank
you. And tell your friends to keep calm. If everyone is rational, this should go exactly as Joshua wanted it to. Now let’s go.”
It was clear that last mention of her old mentor had filled Gemma with questions, but she didn’t have a chance to ask anything before Brother Thomassin motioned her and the rest of them into the chamber. Monks lined the path that led to a five-pointed star in the middle of the floor. Gemma stood in the center, facing the raised dais and her nemesis. Grand Master Sprenger.
Quinn and the others moved off to the side. Laila stood on his right, her gaze searching the crowd for any signs of trouble. She trusted few humans, so this whole thing had her very uncomfortable. If she were in her natural form, her tail and ears would be constantly twitching with worry.
But while his sister studied everyone, Quinn studied Sprenger. He couldn’t help it. Amazing the damage one human male could do to so many. Although his tunic and chainmail hid any scars on his body, Quinn could see the scar on his face well enough. Gemma really had fucked up that jaw of his. A double-sided scar stretched from his right ear, down along his jaw and across to about three inches from his left ear. There were no mirrors in this monastery, so Sprenger couldn’t see that scar every day, but he must be able to feel it. Every time he touched his face. Every time he washed it. Every time he attempted to grow a beard and realized that hair wouldn’t grow along those scars. Maybe even worse, when he talked or chewed or when it was extremely cold and the bone hurt or didn’t sit right in the socket. Each time those things happened . . . he must remember what Gemma had done to him.
And the thought of his continued suffering did nothing but make Quinn smile.
* * *
Gemma didn’t know what was going to happen but she was ready. She was ready for manipulation or lies or an outright assassination attempt by Sprenger and his minions. She’d never been so ready before. Not only had her training as a war monk prepared her for anything that bastard had to throw at her, but also her training as a Smythe. She had one sister who’d attempted to kill the other just so she could wear a stupid crown. An uncle who kept telling the children to be ready to kill each other should they be invaded by the enemy. And another sister who insisted on frolicking with demon dogs.
