“I told you. My profound sense of honour forbade me—”
“Try again,” Rose told him. “One more lie and you go swimming in the goblin pit.”
The captain swallowed nervously. “Fine,” he huffed. “We’re surrounded! The sky around the city is swarming with fiends. I couldn’t escape if I wanted to. And believe me, I wanted to.”
Lady Jain barged up beside Rose. “So why aren’t they attacking?”
Doshi looked twice at Jain, then self-consciously adjusted the goggles on his forehead. “I, ah … Who are you?”
“You were saying,” Rose prompted, before Jain could introduce herself.
The captain cleared his throat. “Well, my guess is that the Widow—or the Winter-whatever-the-fuck-it-is-we’re-calling- her-now—is setting a trap.”
Rose scowled. “A trap for who?”
“You,” said Tam. “Obviously.”
Fable’s leader flashed her an irritated glare, but Brune leapt to Tam’s defense.
“She holds you partly responsible for Lastleaf’s death,” the shaman reminded her.
“And you killed the Dragoneater once already,” said Cura. “She’s afraid of you, Rose.”
“She’d better be.” Rose turned back to Doshi. “Where’s the Old Glory now?”
The captain pointed up. “The roof. I may or may not have crash-landed in the pool up there.” The others stared at him a moment. “Okay, yes, I crash-landed in the pool. And listen”—Doshi cleared his throat—“Roderick told me about what happened to your father. I’m sorry, Rose. Truly. If I hadn’t left …”
“It doesn’t matter,” Rose told him. “If you hadn’t left, you might be dead. Hawkshaw would’ve still been waiting for us, and my father would have died just the same.”
“Where’s Freecloud?” Cura wondered aloud, more to change the subject than out of genuine curiosity.
“He’s staying with Wren.”
The Inkwitch and Brune shared a troubled glance, but tactfully opted to lay off questions for the time being.
Roderick, however, possessed the tact of a battering ram to the groin. “What, like forever? Why? Doesn’t he—”
“Forget your godsdamned Queen!” bellowed Slowhand from across the room. He slammed the table before him with both hands. Cups toppled like drunks, vomiting whiskey, wine, and beer onto the weathered oak. “Lilith isn’t here, Lokan. You are. This is your call to make.”
“And I’ve made it,” said a handsome, hook-nosed northerner who, judging by his lavish armour and general haughtiness, must have been the Agrian commander. “Which is why I’m taking the army back to Brycliffe. If my queen orders us to return and lift the siege, so be it—but I’m not risking ten thousand soldiers—”
“There won’t be a siege!” roared Slowhand. “This isn’t Castia! We don’t have warded walls or lightning turrets. Unless we stop them, the Horde will roll over this place like …” He paused, groping for a suitable metaphor. “Moog, help me out here.”
“Purple!” shouted the wizard. “Wait, no, fishcakes!”
Clay scowled. “You weren’t listening.”
“I wasn’t listening,” Moog admitted. “Sorry.”
“Piss on Agria,” said a Cartean with raven’s wings tattooed across his broad chest. “And fuck its queen. My han has no wish to fight alongside these craven bushlanders anyway!”
The Agrian commander drew his sword. “Insult my queen again, horsefucker.”
“I fucked one horse,” said the Cartean. “And who even told you that? Nazreth?” he turned an accusing eye on a fellow clansman, who shook his head emphatically.
A profoundly uncomfortable silence followed, broken by a dull scrape as Rose dragged a chair to the table and settled into it.
The northerner returned his sword to its scabbard and fixed her with a haughty stare. “And you are?”
“You know who I am,” said Rose. Her voice was calm, commanding, cool as a sword sheathed in a snowdrift. Her eyes roamed the table. “Who are you?”
One by one Conthas’s would-be defenders introduced themselves, beginning with Lokan—the northerner in charge of Agria’s army—and Kurin, First Feather of the High Han’s personal bodyguard.
There were a dozen or so bands in the room, most of which had a representative at the table. They didn’t bother introducing themselves to Rose, but the bard recognized more than a few. Mad Mackie led a band called Flashbang, who were famous for hunting ghosts, wights, wraiths, and any other incorporeal thing with a bad attitude. Jeramyn Cain, who she’d seen in the yard outside Slowhand’s, was the frontman for the Screaming Eagles.
A few of Kaskar’s favoured sons were present as well, including Garland (of Garland and the Bats) and Alkain Tor. The frontman for Giantsbane, who’d slain hundreds of monsters during his long and illustrious careeer, wore a leather patch over the eye he’d lost to the chicken back in Ardburg’s arena.
Next to present themselves were the self-styled Robber Barons of Conthas. Tain Starkwood, the Baron of Rockbottom, was built like Brune—except Brune had a neck, whereas Tain had a pile of muscles that appeared to be cutting off circulation to his head. He was missing most of his teeth and half of every finger on his left hand.
The Baron of Knight’s Landing was an arachnian named K’tuo who only spoke Narmeeri and offered Rose (through a translator) a marriage proposal along with his name.
“No thanks,” she said dryly, already turning her attention to the man beside him, an obese Phantran wearing enough silk to make tents for a whole army of foppish noblemen.
“Tabano, the Baron of Saltkettle,” the man introduced himself with an accent thicker than Doshi’s but half as charming. He made a flourish that sent a wave of sickly sweet perfume billowing across the table. “I believe my associates had the pleasure of meeting you at the city gate.”
Tam recalled with a smile the sight of Rose bashing a man’s face in with his own helmet.
Next up were the twin baronesses, Ios and Alektra. The former was wearing black fighting leathers and ruled a part of the city called Telltale, while the latter dressed like a highborn lady and governed a ward known as the Paper Court. The sisters very obviously hated one another, and while Alektra pledged five hundred swords to Rose’s cause, Ios promised fifty assassins who were worth, by her own estimation, twice what her sister could supply.
Moog introduced a pair of curiosities he and Cura had dug up in Sinkwell. The first was a garishly clad summoner named Roga who was carrying a statuette of something round and pink in the crook of one arm.
“Is that a … pig?” Tam asked under her breath.
“Elephant,” said Cura. “Don’t look at me—they’re Moog’s friends. Sinkwell is full of nuts like these two.”
Moog’s other “friend” was Kaliax Kur, a rough-looking woman with a shorn skull and a mess of vicious scars marring a face that probably hadn’t been all that pretty to begin with. She wore a suit of scorched wood armour inlaid with metal plates. What appeared to be the ring of a tidal engine was strapped to her back, attached by looping copper wire to a lance she leaned on like a staff.
“What’s her deal?” Tam asked.
“I’m guessing ‘orc-shit crazy’ is her deal,” Cura muttered.
The last member of Slowhand’s council was, without a doubt, the most beautiful woman Tam had ever seen, and the only one who needed no introduction.
Larkspur, the world’s most notorious bounty hunter, had straight black hair, eyes like starlit pools, and beestung lips that seemed fixed in a permanent snarl. She wore a black steel breastplate and taloned gauntlets—one of which was curled round the haft of a wicked-looking scythe. Her most remarkable feature, however, was a pair of black-feathered wings draped over her shoulders.
There was a boy standing beside her. He was tall for his age, which Tam supposed was a year or two older than Wren. His almond-shaped eyes, arched nose, and fierce scowl marked him as the woman’s son, but his skin was several shades darker, suggesting hi
s father was a southerner.
And a damn big one, she guessed, assessing the boy’s broad shoulders.
With Larkspur present, the bard was feeling decidedly better about the city’s chances of surviving the battle to come, at least until the bounty hunter opened her mouth.
“I’m leaving, too,” she said.
Slowhand deflated visibly. “What? Why?”
“You know why. If you don’t stop Astra here—”
“We will stop her here. We have to. Besides, you’ll never make it back in time.”
“I know that,” she said. “But if Conthas falls … Well, then the rest of the world will need him, Clay. More than it ever has.”
“Him?” Tam whispered, but Cura only shook her head.
Slowhand and Larkspur locked eyes for a long moment. “Good luck,” he said finally.
The Agrian commander wore a satisfied smirk. “Perhaps you should consider abandoning the city as well,” he said to Clay.
“We’re not abandoning the city,” Rose told him. “Every person Astra kills becomes another foot soldier in her army. Assuming she can raise most of the Brumal Horde, she has maybe eighty thousand monsters under her command, along with every merc they managed to kill at Grey Vale.”
“We beat the Horde once,” boasted Kurin, crossing his arms over the wings inked on his chest. “We will beat it again.”
Didn’t Freecloud say the same thing? Tam mused. The difference was, this horse-fucking fool actually believed it.
“They were panicked,” Rose argued. “Confused. Desperate to escape a burning forest, and more than likely being attacked by their own dead. This time they’ll be relentless, bound to obey Astra’s commands. She won’t let them run. She won’t even let them die. We beat the Horde at Castia because we broke their will, but the Winter Queen’s army has no will to break.”
“She can’t control all of them at once,” said the summoner with the elephant in her arm. He looked at Moog. “Can she?”
The old wizard smoothed his white beard against the front of his robe. “I, uh … maybe?” he said. “Necromancers draw on their own life force to animate the dead. That is, most of them do. But the Winter Queen … well, she’s dead herself, or something like it. However it is she’s doing what it is she’s doing, Astra believes herself capable of enslaving every soul in Grandual.” Moog wrung his bony fingers. “I don’t see that we have any choice but to take her at her word, or risk the consequences.”
“And those consequences …” mused the Baron of Saltkettle.
“Well, death,” said the wizard, as though the answer was evident. “The utter annihilation of every living creature in the world.”
Tam saw Clay Cooper’s keg-sized chest rise and fall in a long sigh. “This again,” he grumbled.
Rose stood, addressing the room. “We have to stop her. We need to do it here and now, before it’s too late. And we can only do that if we work together.” She looked from face to face around the table. “Carteans, Agrians, mercenaries, soldiers, sorcerers, thugs—it doesn’t matter what you are, so long as you’re willing to fight. The rest of Grandual may not know it—hell, they probably won’t believe us if we live to tell them—but we may be all that stands between them and oblivion.” She levelled a pointed stare at the Agrian commander. “If we fight this war separately, we die. So either stand with us now, or flee and face us on the battlefield once we’re dead.”
An ominous silence followed, and then the Baron of Saltkettle cleared his throat. “I don’t suppose you have a plan, then? Some miraculous scheme to kill the Winter Queen and dispel her Horde in one fell swoop?”
Rose’s teeth flashed like a naked blade in the lamplight. “As a matter of fact, I do.”
Chapter Fifty
Eve of Annihilation
The Agrians left in the night. Tam and the others saw them go from the Starwood’s rooftop patio. The band was loitering around a sizzling oil brazier, alone but for a dozen iced-over tables, a few frozen hedgerows, and Moog, who was scavenging some items from the Old Glory before relinquishing it to Doshi in the morning. The skyship was half-submerged in the shallow pool behind them, but the captain had assured Rose he’d have it battle-ready by the time Astra and her Horde showed up.
“Fucking cowards,” Rose muttered. She drew a lungful of smoke from the pipe in her mouth as she watched the Agrians depart.
“It’s better that cowards flee before a battle than during one,” said Brune.
Cura passed him the bottle of cheap red wine they were sharing between them. “That’s insightful. I’m impressed.”
“Thanks,” said the shaman. “I read it on a beermat at the Shattered Shield.”
“You can read?” She grinned. “Now I’m really impressed.”
“He’s right, though,” said Roderick. The satyr was sitting with his hooves dangling over the side of the building. “Fleeing soldiers are notoriously bad for morale.”
Tam had retrieved Hiraeth from the skyship earlier and braced the sealskin case against her side as she peered over the ledge. “I don’t think morale is going to be a problem.”
The street below was a strip of pure bedlam, a riotous river teeming with two sorts of people: those far too drunk to worry about the Winter Queen, and those hell-bent on catching up to the former. The air was filled with shouting and laughter; a hundred bards played a hundred songs on everything from drums and mandolins to reedy pipes and chiming brass bells. It was hard to tell the dance circles from the fighting rings, and difficult to discern either from the orgies springing up despite the cold.
Tam had lost count of counterfeit Roses roaming the crowd. There were hucknell-red heads everywhere, and a few of them looked more like Rose than Rose, since Fable’s frontwoman hadn’t died her hair since the end of the tour and her golden roots (along with Tam’s plain brown ones) were growing out.
Tam was also surprised to see Oscar the merman, who’d been dredged from the city’s moat, bobbing along on a sea of hands. His foul mood had given way to wine-fuelled glee, as evidenced by the bottle clutched in his webbed fingers.
One of the skyships that Tam had seen earlier—a potbellied carrack called the Barracuda—was drifting over the thoroughfare. Revellers on board were pouring streams of sloshing booze into the open mouths and raised cups of the thirsty masses. The ship’s captain was nowhere in sight; instead, a queue of scantily clad women were taking turns at the steering console.
Speaking of captains … Tam spotted Daon Doshi’s yellow robe and striped skullcap outside a tavern across the street. He was sucking face with a woman Tam couldn’t make out until the two of them finally decided that breathing was more important than swapping saliva.
Cura had been watching the pair as well. “Wait, is that …?”
“Jain,” Tam finished. “Those two … makes a lot of sense, actually.”
The summoner laughed. “They kind of do.”
“They can wear each other’s clothes,” Tam suggested.
“And rob people blind.”
“Gods,” the bard said through a smile, “they’re made for each other.”
“Agreed.” Cura’s mirth melted away. “It’s too bad …” She left the rest unsaid, but the implication was tacit nonetheless.
“You should go, too,” Rose said, eventually.
All of them glanced at one another.
“Who?” asked Roderick.
Rose put her pipe out on the snow-mantled ledge. “All of you. Astra may have us surrounded, but I’m sure a small party could slip the noose. Go east. Or wherever.”
“You mean run?” Brune sounded incredulous.
“Run. Live. For a little while longer, anyway.”
Cura said, “You’re joking, right? You just called what’s-his-nuts a coward for leaving.”
“Lokan,” Rose supplied.
“Whatever. And now you want us to follow him? To abandon you here so we can die a few weeks after you?”
“It could take years—” Rose be
gan.
“Fuck that,” Cura cut her off. “And fuck you for suggesting it.”
Rose laughed, a sound Tam hadn’t ever expected to hear again, considering what she’d lost, and what she stood to lose in the days to come. “I had to try,” she said.
The Inkwitch regarded her warily, like a startled cat summoned back to its master’s lap. “No you didn’t. You’ve got a family to defend, yeah? People you love that need protecting? Well, so do I.”
“So do I,” Brune echoed.
“Me too,” Tam said.
Rose was about to reply when someone called out from the stairwell behind them.
“Rosie! Love! I’ve been looking everywhere for you!” The voice belonged to a scrawny man with a patchy beard and a black smile. He was wearing a longcoat several sizes too big for him that dragged in the snow as he sauntered forward.
Tam didn’t know the man, but Cura and Brune were less than enthused to see him, so she decided on a whim that she hated his guts.
Rose eyed him narrowly. “What do you want, Pryne?”
The man spread his hands, which, Tam noted, were stained the same dark colour as his teeth. “I heard you’d come to play hero, so I came to help.”
“Go away.”
“Now, now,” said Pryne, “is that any way to speak to an old friend? Let alone one who comes bearing gifts …” He withdrew a cloth from his coat pocket and unfolded it, careful to keep the contents sheltered from the snow.
Tam couldn’t see what it was, but between the man’s smarmy demeanor and the way Rose recoiled from his offering, she could hazard a guess. Pryne was a dealer.
“Look at these beauties,” he cooed. “There’s enough Leaf here to take on a dozen Hordes!”
“Not interested,” Rose told him.
“Sure you are,” he said. His voice was slimy and sibilant. He struck Tam as a man well practiced at convincing addicts they wanted what they didn’t need.
Tam saw Cura fingering one of several knives strapped to her frame. Brune was pondering the wine bottle in his hand, likely debating whether to drink from it or to smash it over the dealer’s head.
Bloody Rose Page 39
