“Idiots,” the man barked when it was done.
Never a man who could resist a barb, her father.
Essa had rubbed her wrists bloody and all but torn her shoulder from its socket trying to wrench a hand free from the ropes binding her wrists. The problem was, for all else he might have been, Pescha of Verdan was a hunter, and he knew all the knots and tricks that went with it. He had taught her everything she knew, meaning that he knew to make it harder on her.
Though her body ached from the strain, it was the gnawing shock, the frigid, lacerating horror which unmade her. They had been so close, only to have a ghost from the past step out of the shadows and destroy them. It seemed they would die here, and all because she hadn’t had the good sense to end a single life all those years ago, when a drunk man had poured himself into a stupor and lay senseless on the cabin floor.
She tried to force the calm on her. Keep working, she told herself. As long as you’re alive, there is still a fight to be won.
Escape was unlikely for all this. Pescha and his cohorts had pressed them back down the stairs and out back ways from the keep, across the yard to a second tower. Then they had thoroughly incapacitated, trussed and borne them up the flight of stairs to private apartments higher up. There they were unceremoniously discarded, with the guardsmen left to watch them as Pescha scurried back into the shadows from whence he had come. Even if they somehow managed to shake their bonds, they were still trapped between the men guarding the door and a several story drop to the hard earth below.
Keep thinking. Stop making excuses. Quit thinking of the bad to come and focus on what you know.
“Up to our arses in it,” Rurik muttered beside her.
When she could start to process, it became clear that something was off. It hadn’t taken Pescha long to disarm them, but why hadn’t he bound them straight away? She paused, thinking of how he had rushed through the hall, out the back ways—they looked more like a purposeful force than one capturing the other. Silent rage had unmanned her, but the more she looked at it, the more she saw in the bizarre nature of their imprisonment. They weren’t in a cell. They had been taken somewhere specific and he had been trying not to alarm anyone else in the process…
Admittedly, it didn’t make much sense. Then again, this was her father she was talking about.
“I thought he was dead,” she admitted as they lay against the cobblestones.
“I’d kill him myself, for what he did to you,” Rurik said.
She could feel her cousin shift to face her, then inch like a worm across the cold ground. When she twisted, she could get a look at him, his wide eyes slick with concern. He wanted to hold her, to take care of her. Like a child, she thought, but she was no longer that scared child his family had taken in so many years ago. They had saved her from that lout already.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“You’re not fine,” Rowan countered. “None of us are, unless you’re into this sort of thing.” He frowned with distaste and wriggled pointedly. “And he did not look like the Pescha I used to know.”
“When he stopped coming to your parents’ house, I thought he had given up.”
“On us? I think he did.”
She flushed, looked away. “On life, I mean.”
Rowan looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “I don’t see how he could have gotten on here, though. He’s no man-at-arms, and he’s no noble. Sure as hell no soldier.”
“Mercenary?” Rurik chimed in helpfully. “He was always after coin.”
Like father like daughter, she mused bitterly. He certainly couldn’t have gotten on as a hunter: Kasamir had seen to that, had spread word throughout Jaritz of the disgraced master of the hunt.
“Shut it over there,” one of the guardsmen snapped. “Or we’ll shut it for you.”
For once, they did what they were told. Silence made the moments more torturous, allowed more time still for Essa to reflect on what her father was, what he had done—and the fact that he had chosen now to reassert himself. The more she thought about it, the more she realized there was an utter absence of fear in her over the fact. She was too old for fear of him any longer. The part of her that feared him was a child, and the child was long gone. What remained was anger, and bitterness—the latter she suppressed, but the former could be useful.
If only I could get these blasted ropes off.
Before a solution revealed itself, her father returned as the shadow of a woman who strode into the room as though she owned the place. Essa strained her head to take her in, every inch of this woman who could command men like so much chattel—but she did not have to get a very good look to reckon who she was. Her bowels clamped and Essa felt as so much ice within a breath.
For years, she had heard of the spoiled runt who ruined Rurik’s life. Or rather, with whom he had ruined his own life. That was the key difference. She found herself scowling despite herself, picking the woman to pieces—oh, she was physical perfection, the sort of thing men salivated about the world over; the sort of woman who turned men to dogs. Given the haughty way she strutted about, she knew precisely the effect she had, at that.
As if her father wasn’t enough. The Maker had to test her with a whore.
“My brother sends his regards,” Rurik grunted from behind her.
That startled her, but if it startled Charlotte, she certainly didn’t show it. The woman seemed to analyze the person speaking more than the words themselves, then discarded both.
“Fool enough coming here would make you. Knowing that, and coming anyway? By all that is good, boy, you are an insufferable idiot.”
She felt Rurik grow still, no doubt fuming. Essa shifted her own weight, trying to tell herself she was the serpent coiling to strike.
“Let me be clear,” the woman continued, “this is not your moment. You are not entitled here. If I nod to any of these messars beside me, they will slit your throats and I will feed the three of you to the dogs. It would be as easy as that.”
For all the harshness of her words, Charlotte Cullick folded her hands demurely against her gown, and her cold eyes analyzed them shrewdly. Despite her rage, it was the lack of heat to it which unsettled.
“I will ask once: why are you here?”
Essa looked past the woman, to her father. His eyes were glazed, distant. He would not look at her, or Rowan—he scarcely seemed to be present at all. She wanted to force him, to at least make him meet her eyes as he killed her. It was the least she had earned, after all he had put her through.
“Why do you think we’re here?” Rurik said.
Charlotte remained silent, delicate as a reed. And as easily snapped.
Finally, Rurik relented, saying, “You killed my father.”
“I believe you’ll find that you killed your father,” Charlotte countered without pause. “You walk through two wars for…what? Vengeance? This is not the way of the world, and that world is moving in rungs well above your broken little head.”
“You imprisoned my family.”
The bitch smiled. Smiled. “Which is, coincidentally, the real reason I thought you came. Telling, that you come to that second. I thought you might be something else. Pity.”
Which was about all Essa could take of the woman’s smugness.
“Hey, noble-born cunt? Spare us, would you? While you were holed up in your tower playing the game of inbreeding, we were paying the price and hoofing it across a damn continent. And it’s one thing to kill someone, but it’s quite another to go on prattling before you do, so if you’d kindly…?”
Silence. First the shock settled in. Then the rage. She watched it bridle in the woman’s eyes, nearly brim to the surface before she curtailed it behind an intricate lockbox of political machination. She was good, but Assal help her, she was human like anyone else. It was a petty victory, but Essa felt it all the same. She was pulling herself to her knees when the woman crossed the floor, however, and seized her by the hair. Essa snarled and snapped at her lik
e a cornered wolf, but the woman was a little stronger than she looked, and kept a firm footing.
This was the problem with long hair. Charlotte yanked her upright by it, drawing it back from the sides of her face. They could not have been more different, the pair of them, but Charlotte didn’t seem to mind that. Her eyes held that determined quality that told Essa she was looking for something, rather than torturing for a thrill. The guards had moved with her, for though startled by the suddenness of the action, they did not fail to keep Rowan and Rurik down.
“You must be the half-breed.” She was so close, Essa could have spit in her eye, but the words sucked the moisture from her mouth. She tightened despite herself, knew then that the woman was looking at her ears. “Quaint. You know, it’s unbecoming to get so upset over a man.”
The thing Charlotte didn’t realize was that Essa was stronger than she looked, as well. She felt some of her hair tear away with the motion, but she managed to bash her skull into Charlotte’s, heard the girl squeak like a mouse as she lost her grip and fell away. Essa dropped to the floor, ready to spring, but the sight of her father rushing forward to catch the bitch captivated her long enough for one of the guards to kick her square in the back. She lost her balance and went down hard, with a fist not far behind.
“Dartrek, bring the Matair!” Charlotte fumed from behind a shielding hand. “Dump the others’ bodies out the window for all I care!”
Which was progress, at least. It meant no more having to listen to her talk. Meanwhile her father, who had remained silent through the whole affair, ushered Charlotte out and left the doing to the other guards. One of them hefted a kicking Rurik off his feet and slugged him in the gut when he wouldn’t shut his mouth. Rurik was roaring, trying to get at him, and she inched on her aching side to try to catch one final look at him as he was dragged screaming out the door.
So. She turned to look at the second man, still looming over her. He had pulled a dagger from his belt which was long as her forearm—more of a short sword than a knife, really. This is it. Essa spat at the man, saying, “Where’s your balls, man?” even as Rowan begged to be first behind her, begged the man for some sort of belated mercy—he had always said that pride was nothing before survival. Love was what mattered most to him, and love would not bid him see her dead. Not that she could bear to see the same.
She glowered up at the man, waiting for the knife to fall.
Then the door slammed open again and her father stepped back into the room, barking orders as a general full in the throes of war. “Belay that!” he snapped. “Out. On the door.”
The man’s anger had turned to bemusement. “But the lady said—”
“The lady changed her mind. Better things.” At which point he cracked the knuckles of his right hand and nodded to them. “My leave.”
Their ward looked as though he could not have left quicker. “As you will, ser.”
Then he was gone, and they were alone with the man that had ruined the first part of Essa’s life. It somehow seemed appropriate that he would be the end of the second as well.
“You know,” Rowan said bitterly, “You’re a real bastard, Pescha. Why is it never the bastards what get stuck?”
Pescha shriveled the man with a look and crossed the rest of the room without delay. He stooped over Essa, finally met her gaze without a flinch or uncertainty, and held her there, across the bounds of time and space, a father and daughter, kith and kin, enemies of circumstance. Yet, he did not raise his fists again.
“Who is Dartrek?” she whispered.
He grunted, bent over her and took her wrists in hand. “You should not have spoken to Charlotte like that. She is better than you know.”
“She is a killer and a whore.”
“And a little narcissistic, I think,” Rowan added.
It was as subtle as a flex of his wrist, but it has the effect of making her arms feel as though they would wrench from their sockets. She was bent low by then, face almost into the tile. She gritted her teeth, but inwardly, she screamed. This was more like the father she knew. It stopped as suddenly, though he did not release her.
Twist the knife. “She your whore? That it?”
The grip tightened, and her body instinctively braced for pain. None came. “A good woman. Not for me.”
“Mother would be so proud.”
A frown hunched deep into what once had been flabby skin, and the man’s irritated gaze flicked to Rowan. “My family are well?”
“Begging your pardon,” Rowan clucked, “And though it tends to be well beyond me to prod the man with a knife, it must be said: calling either her, or I, or my parents your kin is…rather tasteless.”
The old hunter sucked at his lip a moment. Then he nodded, as one might settle a bet. His gaze flicked back to Essa, then down. At first she thought he could not meet her gaze. Then she realized he was eying her bonds.
“Leave. Whatever you came to do here is nothing. I’m giving you life for the second time.”
“Why? This changes nothing. Makes up for nothing. I don’t—”
He held up a hand to cut her off. “Not time. Is what it is. Which is what…” For a fleeting moment, she thought the large man looked in danger of showing emotion. It passed. “Take this. Leave. Servants won’t stop you. These here…they’re the only ones know who you are.”
A clatter behind her stirred her attention, and when she scooted back, she found a knife left there. Pescha had already pulled back though, out of range of anything but a throw, and was starting toward the door.
“We might have to kill that one to get out,” Essa said, trying to think of something that might draw him back.
Her father paused and seemed to toy with the notion. Then his thick shoulders shrugged—a child’s gesture—he yanked the door open and was gone with a snarl at the man outside. His footfalls were thunder on the stairs, growing fainter with the passing seconds.
There and back again. She had to sit for a moment just to recollect her thoughts, to form a bulwark against what had just happened. Her wrists ached. Her ankles ached. Her head throbbed. She closed her eyes, tried to settle herself and focus on the things she could solve. A person went only so far as what the world let them riddle out.
“If you’d kindly?” Rowan said after a moment.
Belatedly, she took the knife to his bonds and set him free—a gesture for which he immediately embraced her. “Essa, I know…” he started to say, but she shook him off, and the words with him. Now was not the time. There was too much there, and none of it would do them any good in here.
“We need to get to Chigenda,” she said. But how?
Rowan took the knife from her, reluctantly, and rose to his feet. “Follow me,” he said, as he headed for the door. He held a finger to his lips as he leaned beside the door. Outside, they could hear the soldier belch. Her cousin pulled the door just after, and before the man could react Rowan had already put the knife to his throat. “Help,” he said thereafter, and they dragged the body inside together, plundering both the pistol and the dagger from his belt, as well as a sizeable boot knife.
Thus armed, they pressed into the halls and they took their luck into their hands. It was not so far back down to earth, but far longer than she would have liked.
* *
It was a long route to the top of the tower, but so removed, Rurik found himself inexplicably alone with the heir to House Cullick. Where they arrived was not the chamber he had expected, full of the instruments of torture, but rather, a spacious thing, with good light and fine upholstery, a pillowed haven where even the staunchest soul might retreat from the darkness of the world. It also radiated heat, care of the hearthfire and the dozen or so lanterns left burning in their sconces.
That heat was poor comfort on the swelling bruises of his cheeks, and did nothing to temper the fire burning in his own heart for what he had heard below. Yet the guards had left him, and her, and—he had thought to turn with a vicious rejoinder, but as he did his eyes
took in the full scope of the room and realized with some uncertainty that they were not truly alone.
A four post bed lay beside one of the room’s gold-lined sills, silk sheets weighted down by a downy blanket. Beneath both lay the wan shape of a woman, waxy in countenance, ill perhaps, but decidedly beautiful for all that. Between the cocoa-colored hair that matted her pillow and the battered, but pampered skin, she might have been a creature of fairy tale—which only served to remind him that such had been his first impressions of Charlotte as well.
The question thus became what this woman meant to Charlotte, and why she had taken him here. Surely it was not to attach a human face to her, not so soon after ordering his friends to death. A hard part of him twisted irrevocably, and he found himself rounding on her with a fury, without care to the rest. He didn’t care what this other woman meant to Charlotte. This woman had been the arbiter of his own life’s downfall many times over.
“The only thing, I think, which spares you in this life, woman, is the fact that you look as you do. Were your countenance to reflect your heart, you should have been strangled at birth,” he said icily.
Rubbing at her jaw, she nevertheless scowled. Gone was the grating calm of moments before, gone the commensurate politician.
“As your father’s name did for you. It certainly wasn’t brains that got you this far.”
“I could stomp the life from you before your guards get through that door,” he snapped.
She shrugged, letting her hand fall at last. Already, the skin was swelling where Essa had struck her. “Then your sister would die, and your niece would die, and I guarantee you the killing would go on until all that remained of your family were the gutted remnants of a fetid swamp.”
As Feathers Fall Page 38
