“A life for a life. A child for a child. This was the offer, on honor stricken.”
The moment came, and briefly held itself upon her breath, only to pass. A child for a child. Already, she had held her suspicions. That it had left his wife’s cousin in grief, that it all but broke her mind to have it come to pass—it mattered not at all. Not to the ambitions of Walthere Cullick. Another woman might have winced. Might have turned aside. She forced herself to be resolute. Even in the face of this…infanticide.
Blood is blood, the man had once told her. They all share it, and all are guilty for it.
That there had to be limits, to be some sort of cap on that ambition, was less reality than her own interpretation. He had never said as much. Rosamine, Lothen, Sara, Karlene, they were all just…tools. One simply used them as they were to be used.
She could practically see it: something receding from her into the dark places of the night. To what horrors do even the best of us willfully blind ourselves, for the sake of sanity?
Even Walthere had limits. Even Walthere.
“He offered you coin, assassin.”
A softly-spread, sardonic smile. “Before its smell. This is so. Then did worlds align.”
She did not have to believe him to know what she needed to do next. Already the thoughts were racing ahead of her faster than horses on the plains, into necessity’s scope. It was her father that had taught her best, ever and always: Always look within to find your truth.
“You are dead, assassin, and so is she. Attempt to make it more than words, and so shall it be the same for you, and any of your people that ever deign to cross my path again.” She looked to the confusion in her men, in Dartrek, and grew sour. “We need to make them dead, they need to be dead, and when this is come to pass, any man that breathes word to the contrary shall be taking more than their lives into their hands.”
The question, of course: Can I trust you? It need not be spoken. Soldiers—they understood this better than many. She expected some uncertainty. Even in this, however, she saw a loyalty she had not expected. They looked at her as Dartrek looked at her. Admiration. Fear. And love. In all things, that.
“And I?” the assassin spoke softly.
“Every lion has its shadow. You will be mine, or my pride shall feast upon you.”
The smile wilted, turned. Its echoes would hang in her mind long after it kneeled again at her feet—long after one and all had taken their oaths and made their peace. There was much left to do, and she had no certainty of the rightness of all that had already come to pass.
That very morning, the burned, castrated, and generally mauled corpses of the three men responsible for the night’s events were strung up in the city streets and left there for the people to pelt with all the aggression the night had sired in them. Charlotte remained long enough to preside in solemnity over the rites of the dead for those caught up in the flames and the violence, for in times of great fear and pain, people turned to religion more than ever.
It was, Charlotte thought, splendidly done. Pure luck, of course, that they had found enough men among the night’s dead to pluck culprits from. After such a night, she would gladly take a bit of luck though.
Contentment did not follow the decision, however. It would not, could not until she looked her father dead in the eye and either found him fooled with all the rest, or possessed of the knowing rage she altogether expected. Even strong creatures feared. Often enough, it was that very edge that gave them what they needed to survive.
That thought stalked her all the way back to Vissering where, if appearances were to be believed, she had nothing to fear. The soldiers that had remained behind cheered at their approach, dubbed them heroes and victors and—for the men in her company at least—promised any number of drinks and rewards which might bring blush to her feminine visage. Yet as they cheered and her men basked, Charlotte honed her focus, until her father was all she could see.
Appearances were just wrapping. Wrapping that, in the case of her father, was well struck. There was none of the wrath of the night before. Stepping off the entry of his keep, he greeted his returning champions with arms literally spread, metaphor contained to the striking, open crimson delia finished with gryphon feathers, and the black velvet tunic that concealed his equally black rage alongside his girth. The flamboyant smile he turned on them might have swelled the hearts of the most undeserving, yet there was something—some flick of the eyes—that told her all of this was just a show, and she another mare paraded for its benefit.
There would be words. It just so happened, the show had to come first.
“Loyalty and duty,” came the principal actor’s voice. “There are no greater virtues. Fidelity to one’s own—to country, to city, to family.” This last, he notably flicked at her, the smile never once faltering. Yet his voice rose still greater as he cried, “These, I tell you all, are the backbone of what we fight for.”
She was astutely aware that she was still covered in others’ blood. As her father, for all the makeup that expertly smoothed him, bore little circles under his eyes. Perhaps it was the fate of all competent creatures to be overburdened.
The thought was denied its natural course when she spied Sara emerging from the crowd at the base of that same tower. Worry creased her otherwise smooth complexion, brought an unnecessarily satirical control to her fleeting looks. It did not match her. Not at all. Not the morning freshness, nor the expertly chosen silks of sky-lit blue that tumbled beside the shade of her dark hair and named her something more and something less than that wide, sunny expanse.
Belatedly, the rustle of run up banners caught her attention. She twisted in the saddle even as her father spoke, her eyes running up the surf-like roar of the banners’ ascension to settle on the rampant lion of Cullick, tawny on its bloody ground, which had been raised for her and bred in her, and was, even then, bearing up the crown of Idasia. Therein rode pride and glory generations could not steal away. Therein rode a myth of what it was to be—for anyone, anywhere, could change perception, if only they willed hard enough.
Steady were the breaths that guided her from her steed, steadier still those that took her to her father’s arms. “Father,” she whispered, as the goodly daughter should, and “Daughter,” was her answer, embraced and held as tight as conviction would allow, for on such a day as this she was not just her father’s daughter but, in its way, the daughter of all in attendance, and so it was accordingly that when she felt the arms pull her back again, the words that followed trumpeted: “Truly, now, you are the woman you were always meant to be.”
There was a thunder of noise that bid father guide his daughter back beneath the arches of their home, away from the prying eyes and chattering figures—figures that did not understand, that would never be made to understand. Sara brushed her—their eyes met, were swept away—and her father, shielded then from the poise of needful men, clutched her arm so hard it made her wince, and finally, as they came into his sitting room, flung her ahead of him. She stumbled, grasping a chair, and twisted at the moment the door wrenched shut.
Outside, she could hear the clamor of his bodyguards taking up position. No one—not even Dartrek—would dislodge them.
“You are lucky, child, and that is all,” he said by true way of greeting. Walthere was no longer smiling.
Woman in a breath. Girl by the next. If nature should be so fickle, we should none of us survive our blood.
That time, too, would be nearing. Women were, she had to admit, creatures of far more strength than any man. A man could flex. Could show his strength. Women stored it inside them, for every little moment that needed bearing.
She was the son he was supposed to have had. She was the lion.
Charlotte did not rub her wrist as she righted herself, to stand before him. “Luck had little to do with our night, father. Though I dare say luck is as useful a thing as any.”
“But those who rely on its appearance set the methodology for their destruction. Where does this b
rashness come from? Where, I ask? Not from me. Not from your mother.”
She smiled prettily then. “Why, father, you have ever said it: the looks of the mother, the mind of the father. Is not asking for more to second-guess the divine?”
“You deflect, child.”
“I engage, father.” She would not back down for this man. Not after the night she had borne. Even now, she did not know if the assassin would keep his word. If Usuri would survive another day. “Tell me what should have been gained by letting our own city burn?”
“Were you any less than my own family, I should have you flogged in the yard.” Walthere snorted, waved her off. “Were you any less than an empress-to-be, I should still grant it merit. You are not invincible. Nor so swelled of self that you should think yourself so. I know my place in this world. What is so intolerable of yours that you insist on risking it?”
What indeed. In recent days, she could point to a pond to which she had become much accustomed. Freedom in an hour of crystalline tranquility, just a woman and her gryphon, nestled along the banks of a silent shore. A hundred shades of self in every grain and every ripple. A name, cast like a marionette—soon to be Charlotte Durvalle, of House Usteroy, first of her name and in the Empire. Fleeting. Like the girl-child that had taken a boy—any boy—into her bed for the hopes of one night of the beyond. Just one night off script.
It had cost much. It always cost. For him and her and, in too many ways, a nation. It had played even into the heart of all things, where a lion’s wrath should not be denied, and beckoned lord and lady from lands far afield into his very den. So many things, all coalesced, all made to seem, even in these little acts of rebellion that none of it, any of it, was within her control.
The lioness hunted, while the lion plotted.
As in the death of another little girl in the confines of her bed—a gryphon queen that had done no wrong and no harm.
“Is all of this not risk?” she said, her voice swirling upwards.
“Diversion does not suit you. Not now. Focus. I do all of this for you. All of it. And those men in the city…” He hesitated, uncertain. Ask it, she bid him, but in his measure of her, she saw the conflict. Instead, he changed tacks. “Where is the witch?”
No hesitation. She said, “Dead,” and played it with all the thrust of a swordsman’s instrument. A pursuit of anger, and bitterness. A scathing pinch of her own dour regret. Appearance was all in how one made others view it.
And Walthere was a man that made exposing and mastering its cruelties his highest art. There was always a campaign. Always. Yet she let him see some shade of the love within so that he might mistake a campaign for a battle—a different battle on different soil. A feint in words.
He pressed accordingly. “The people do not maim her body, though the fires must surely have been her own.”
The past, she told herself, was where her anger lay, and she let it shake her shoulders as she clutched them tight, guarding herself. She had to honor him with her wrath, with just enough sincerity to be human, and just enough lies to be herself.
“We found her at death’s door. By virtue of her craft. By virtue of her blood.” She met his gaze and promised herself that he would look away first. “I made the choice, when all else was done. There was no place for her here any longer.”
For a moment, he said nothing. He watched her, drew a thumb along the base of his pointed beard. It was the roll of his jaw that told her his true feelings. “We might have saved her here.”
“Would you have wished to? You have already moved on to other assassins.”
The quick-step was admirable, but she could see his flat-footed stance danced through as smoothly as a dancer in silk. “Recognition is not the same as regret.”
She doubted he could read her eyes, but she hoped he caught the impatient motions of her head. “I never said you did. Had I thought that you regretted anything, I might have guessed the man in you should save it for the royal daughter that assassin struck.”
Even she was startled by its utterance, as though, merely in its delivery, the thing gained power over them all. It was a verbal blade. It took him somewhere above the thigh; she could see it, watch as the body reacted. A light blow, mayhaps. Its defender was too quick, too skilled. If only jousts were so elegant, she might have taken more joy in them. Yet in the pivot, in the fleeting second of a heart-to-heart, she saw a truer shade of her father’s being than any blade might have ousted.
It was a flicker of a candle—no more. Yet the words told all.
“It was not an hour after you left, Charlotte, as I stood here wondering if you might return, that message came from your uncle of an army breaching from the west. Mauritz’s banners. Several hundred strong. And still you think you know what diversion is? You speak of a child someone else murdered—someone I, not but a few weeks ago, tried to whisk from the bonds of that captivity and was, I might add, denounced a traitor for—to frame our name, and you, you who should know words as well as any of those that play the court, would accuse me of this? Charlotte, I bid you take your men and go. We are done here, you and I. I came to make you see reason. I can see it was a harder battle than I might have known.”
Truth was and would always be a war of observations. The enemy: the self. People saw precisely what they desired to confront; no more, no less. She saw. She chose not to confront.
Chapter 8
The rules of the hunt demanded a show of indifference.
Wind bumbled around them, spitting through chinks in the armor of cloth and leather that covered them. There was no chance for torchlight; the sorry lot of shadows that loomed about those plains would have swallowed any flame. They had only their eyes to rely on, only their dragging feet to pull them forward. Nothing thrived in this.
Rain was not the half of it. Even where caravans huddled around miserable, lamp-lit dens, one could not see thirty feet ahead of them. Still worse was the discordant drumming of the storm. It was a constant monotony for Rowan, but with her gift of hearing, it was a thunderous monotony, interspersed with real thunder, which served to clap and shake what little world she could make of it all. Already the road was underwater, three inches deep at least.
Essa was soaked to the bone, and as restless as she had ever been. But her determination for the hunt was stronger still. She would not, by man or beast, be denied.
For two days, they had stalked a boy they were assured moved but a half-day ahead of them. Taking into consideration the scope of his wounds, not to mention the pace at which Rurik tended to move—Assal bless him, but he had never been the earliest soul to rise—they should have caught him by now. Once, twice, half a dozen times. Yet something had changed. In the motions she spied time and time again in the water-logged trails and weary, unintentionally helpful faces of passersby, she encountered a sort of dire prophecy of newfound cunning.
This was to say: Rurik knew they were after him—or someone, at the least—and contrary to his own nature, he was making fools of them through escape, time and again.
Narrow escapes, but still escapes. At a small village at the edge of the Ulneberg, they had come close enough they had apparently bumbled an attempt of his to procure a horse. The rightful owner was still fuming when they arrived.
“And the boy,” she asked, unable to keep the urgency from her voice, “which way did the boy go?”
The man had grunted noncommittally, continued pacing and ranting. “I’ll have him dragged up before the magistrate in chains, I will. Stocks. Stocks and branding for a horse thief.”
“Which way?” she asked again, losing her patience.
“West, damn you,” the man snapped at last. “Not a one of you’s any respect. But that one, at least, he’ll think twice ‘fore he goes again.” Had he not held up a clump of all-too-familiar brown hair, Essa should have greeted that with skepticism. As it was, she took his point, and tried to ignore the worry it anchored in her gut.
A few good punches might be all it took to open
things too recently sewn.
“Think of it this way,” Rowan reasoned in the aftermath. “If he’s bald now, he should be even easier to find. It just might not be so easy on our eyes anymore to do so.”
West, the man said. So west they went.
She tried not to dwell on the fact that Usteroy was west. Cullick was west.
Everyone and their cats were heading west, racing into the arms of death. Whoever says to embrace cowardice is to embrace death forgets a key detail—to taste strawberries is not to taste fish. Sometimes she paused, looking back east, toward the forest and the hidden river. She might never see them again. Or taste another fish.
The world was a stranger place on the plains beyond the forest. Though she had spent years in wandering it, and months in the confines of that horde men called an army, Essa would never grow used to the openness of it. Men like Alviss had called it freeing. Open. Endless. Men like Rowan called it dull and empty.
It was the difference between sunrise and sunset. An old forest was a heady, eternally vibrant dusk, while the plains were fire-scorched giants, boundless, with nothing to put them into perspective. Even the sounds of animals were distant, echoing, though there was no hiding there—the ears deceived, but the eyes told true. Another lesson in opposites from the forest.
So too, like the forest, she thought of herself as having a certain measure of luck. She was one of the fortunate forest flowers to find light’s bounty, blossoming where others stunted, fell. She knew people—so many people—that would never leave Verdan, never see the world beyond. They would live and breathe and die without ever truly growing.
Voren had almost been one of those.
She glanced around the brush, parsing out signs where she could. For all the light in the world that beat down on these hard places, plants did not flourish here. There were no flushing bounties of fruit. Stunted grass flushed the wide earth, with only scrub to break the monotony.
Fortunately, that scrub could be as ruthless as a newborn’s nails. Berries were the one bounty of these places, but one had to be careful in their picking. They were about a half-mile outside the thick boundaries of ash and oak when they found that food—and the blood that flowered it.
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