Dangerous Women

by Unknown

  The leg wasn’t as bad as Silence had feared. A few of the toes would be lost, but the foot itself was hale enough. The entire left side of William Ann’s body was blackened, as if burned. That would fade, with time, to grey.

  Everyone who saw her would know exactly what had happened. Many men would never touch her, fearing her taint. This might just doom her to a life alone.

  I know a little about such a life, Silence thought, dipping a cloth into the water bin and washing William Ann’s face. The youth would sleep through the day. She had come very close to death, to becoming a shade herself. The body did not recover quickly from that.

  Of course, Silence had been close to that, too. She, however, had been there before. Another of Grandmother’s preparations. Oh, how she hated that woman. Silence owed who she was to how that training toughened her. Could she be thankful for Grandmother and hateful, both at once?

  Silence finished washing William Ann, then dressed her in a soft nightgown and left her in her bunk. Sebruki still slept off the draught William Ann had given her.

  So she went downstairs to the kitchen to think difficult thoughts. She’d lost the bounty. The shades would have had at that body; the skin would be dust, the skull blackened and ruined. She had no way to prove that she’d taken Chesterton.

  She settled against the kitchen table and laced her hands before her. She wanted to have at the whiskey instead, to dull the horror of the night.

  She thought for hours. Could she pay Theopolis off some way? Borrow from someone else? Who? Maybe find another bounty. But so few people came through the waystop these days. Theopolis had already given her warning with his writ. He wouldn’t wait more than a day or two for payment before claiming the waystop as his own.

  Had she really gone through so much, still to lose?

  Sunlight fell on her face and a breeze from the broken window tickled her cheek, waking her from her slumber at the table. Silence blinked, stretching, limbs complaining. Then she sighed, moving to the kitchen counter. She’d left out all of the materials from the preparations last night, her clay bowls thick with glowpaste that still shone faintly. The silver-tipped crossbow bolt still lay by the back door. She’d need to clean up and get breakfast ready for her few guests. Then, think of some way to …

  The back door opened and someone stepped in.

  … to deal with Theopolis. She exhaled softly, looking at him in his clean clothing and condescending smile. He tracked mud onto her floor as he entered. “Silence Montane. Nice morning, hmmm?”

  Shadows, she thought. I don’t have the mental strength to deal with him right now.

  He moved to close the window shutters.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded.

  “Hmmm? Haven’t you warned me before that you loathe that people might see us together? That they might get a hint that you are turning in bounties to me? I’m just trying to protect you. Has something happened? You look awful, hmmm?”

  “I know what you did.”

  “You do? But, see, I do many things. About what do you speak?”

  Oh, how she’d like to cut that grin from his lips and cut out his throat, stomp out that annoying Lastport accent. She couldn’t. He was just so blasted good at acting. She had guesses, probably good ones. But no proof.

  Grandmother would have killed him right then. Was she so desperate to prove him wrong that she’d lose everything?

  “You were in the Forests,” Silence said. “When Red surprised me at the bridge, I assumed that the thing I’d heard—rustling in the darkness—had been him. It wasn’t. He implied he’d been waiting for us at the bridge. That thing in the darkness, it was you. You shot him with the crossbow to jostle him, make him draw blood. Why, Theopolis?”

  “Blood?” Theopolis said. “In the night? And you survived? You’re quite fortunate, I should say. Remarkable. What else happened?”

  She said nothing.

  “I have come for payment of debt,” Theopolis said. “You have no bounty to turn in, then, hmmm? Perhaps we will need my document after all. So kind of me to bring another copy. This really will be wonderful for us both. Do you not agree?”

  “Your feet are glowing.”

  Theopolis hesitated, then looked down. There the mud he’d tracked in shone very faintly blue in the light of the glowpaste remnants.

  “You followed me,” she said. “You were there last night.”

  He looked up at her with a slow, unconcerned expression. “And?” He took a step forward.

  Silence backed away, her heel hitting the wall behind her. She reached around, taking out the key and unlocking the door behind her. Theopolis grabbed her arm, yanking her away as she pulled open the door.

  “Going for one of your hidden weapons?” he asked with a sneer. “The crossbow you keep hidden on the pantry shelf? Yes, I know of that. I’m disappointed, Silence. Can’t we be civil?”

  “I will never sign your document, Theopolis,” she said, then spat at his feet. “I would sooner die, I would sooner be put out of house and home. You can take the waystop by force, but I will not serve you. You can be damned, for all I care, you bastard. You—”

  He slapped her across the face. A quick but unemotional gesture. “Oh, do shut up.”

  She stumbled back.

  “Such dramatics, Silence. I can’t be the only one to wish you lived up to your name, hmmm?”

  She licked her lip, feeling the pain of his slap. She lifted her hand to her face. A single drop of blood colored her fingertip when she pulled it away.

  “You expect me to be frightened?” Theopolis asked. “I know we are safe in here.”

  “City fool,” she whispered, then flipped the drop of blood at him. It hit him on the cheek. “Always follow the Simple Rules. Even when you think you don’t have to. And I wasn’t opening the pantry, as you thought.”

  Theopolis frowned, then glanced over at the door she had opened. The door into the small old shrine. Her grandmother’s shrine to the God Beyond.

  The bottom of the door was rimmed in silver.

  Red eyes opened in the air behind Theopolis, a jet-black form coalescing in the shadowed room. Theopolis hesitated, then turned.

  He didn’t get to scream as the shade took his head in its hands and drew his life away. It was a newer shade, its form still strong despite the writhing blackness of its clothing. A tall woman, hard of features, with curling hair. Theopolis opened his mouth, then his face withered away, eyes sinking into his head.

  “You should have run, Theopolis,” Silence said.

  His head began to crumble. His body collapsed to the floor.

  “Hide from the green eyes, run from the red,” Silence said, taking out her silver dagger. “Your rules, Grandmother.”

  The shade turned to her. Silence shivered, looking into those dead, glassy eyes of a matriarch she loathed and loved.

  “I hate you,” Silence said. “Thank you for making me hate you.” She retrieved the silver-tipped crossbow bolt and held it before her, but the shade did not strike. Silence edged around, forcing the shade back. It floated away from her, back into the shrine lined with silver at the bottom of its three walls, where Silence had trapped it years ago.

  Her heart pounding, Silence closed the door, completing the barrier, and locked it again. No matter what happened, that shade left Silence alone. Almost, she thought it remembered. And almost, Silence felt guilty for trapping that soul inside the small closet for all these years.

  Silence found Theopolis’s hidden cave after six hours of hunting.

  It was about where she’d expected it to be, in the hills not far from the Old Bridge. It included a silver barrier. She could harvest that. Good money there.

  Inside the small cavern, she found Chesterton’s corpse, which Theopolis had dragged to the cave while the Shades killed Red and then hunted Silence. I’m so glad, for once, you were a greedy man, Theopolis.

  She would have to find someone else to start turning in bounties for her. That would
be difficult, particularly on short notice. She dragged the corpse out and threw it over the back of Theopolis’s horse. A short hike took her back to the road, where she paused, then walked up and located Red’s fallen corpse, withered down to just bones and clothing.

  She fished out her grandmother’s dagger, scored and blackened from the fight. It fit back into the sheath at her side. She trudged, exhausted, back to the waystop and hid Chesterton’s corpse in the cold cellar out back of the stable, beside where she’d put Theopolis’s remains. She hiked back into the kitchen. Beside the shrine’s door where her grandmother’s dagger had once hung, she had placed the silver crossbow bolt that Sebruki had unknowingly sent her.

  What would the fort authorities say when she explained Theopolis’s death to them? Perhaps she could claim to have found him like that …

  She paused, then smiled.

  “Looks like you’re lucky, friend,” Daggon said, sipping at his beer. “The White Fox won’t be looking for you anytime soon.”

  The spindly man, who still insisted his name was Earnest, hunkered down a little farther in his seat.

  “How is it you’re still here?” Daggon asked. “I traveled all the way to Lastport. I hardly expected to find you here on my path back.”

  “I hired on at a homestead nearby,” said the slender-necked man. “Good work, mind you. Solid work.”

  “And you pay each night to stay here?”

  “I like it. It feels peaceful. The Homesteads don’t have good silver protection. They just … let the shades move about. Even inside.” The man shuddered.

  Daggon shrugged, lifting his drink as Silence Montane limped by. Yes, she was a healthy-looking woman. He really should court her, one of these days. She scowled at his smile and dumped his plate in front of him.

  “I think I’m wearing her down,” Daggon said, mostly to himself, as she left.

  “You will have to work hard,” Earnest said. “Seven men have proposed to her during the last month.”

  “What!”

  “The reward!” the spindly man said. “The one for bringing in Chesterton and his men. Lucky woman, Silence Montane, finding the White Fox’s lair like that.”

  Daggon dug into his meal. He didn’t much like how things had turned out. Theopolis, that dandy, had been the White Fox all along? Poor Silence. How had it been, stumbling upon his cave and finding him inside, all withered away?

  “They say that this Theopolis spent his last strength killing Chesterton,” Earnest said, “then dragging him into the hole. Theopolis withered before he could get to his silver powder. Very like the White Fox, always determined to get the bounty, no matter what. We won’t soon see a hunter like him again.”

  “I suppose not,” Daggon said, though he’d much rather that the man had kept his skin. Now who would Daggon tell his tales about? He didn’t fancy paying for his own beer.

  Nearby, a greasy-looking fellow rose from his meal and shuffled out of the front door, looking half-drunk already, though it was only noon.

  Some people. Daggon shook his head. “To the White Fox,” he said, raising his drink.

  Earnest clinked his mug to Daggon’s. “The White Fox, meanest bastard the Forests have ever known.”

  “May his soul know peace,” Daggon said, “and may the God Beyond be thanked that he never decided we were worth his time.”

  “Amen,” Earnest said.

  “Of course,” Daggon said, “there is still Bloody Kent. Now, he’s a right nasty fellow. You’d better hope he doesn’t get your number, friend. And don’t you give me that innocent look. These are the Forests. Everybody here has done something, now and then, that you don’t want others to know about …”

  Sharon Kay Penman

  New York Times bestseller Sharon Kay Penman has been acclaimed by Publishers Weekly as “an historical novelist of the first water.” Her debut novel, The Sunne in Splendour, about Richard III, was a worldwide hit, and her acclaimed Welsh Princes trilogy—Here Be Dragons, Falls the Shadow, and The Reckoning—was similarly successful. Her other books include a sequence about Eleanor of Aquitaine—When Christ and His Saints Slept, Time and Chance, and Devil’s Brood—and the Justin de Quincy series of historical mysteries, which include The Queen’s Man, Cruel as the Grave, Dragon’s Lair, and Prince of Darkness. Her most recent book is a novel about Richard, Coeur de Lion, Lionheart. She lives in Mays Landing, New Jersey, and maintains a website at sharonkaypenman.com.

  Here she takes us back to twelfth-century Sicily to show us that a queen in exile is still a queen—and a very dangerous woman indeed.

  A QUEEN IN EXILE

  DECEMBER 1189

  HAGUENAU, GERMANY

  Constance de Hauteville was shivering although she was standing as close to the hearth as she could get without scorching her skirts. Her fourth wedding anniversary was a month away, but she was still not acclimated to German winters. She did not often let herself dwell upon memories of her Sicilian homeland; why salt unhealed wounds? But on nights when sleet and ice-edged winds chilled her to the very marrow of her bones, she could not deny her yearning for the palm trees, olive groves, and sun-splashed warmth of Palermo, for the royal palaces that ringed the city like a necklace of gleaming pearls, with their marble floors, vivid mosaics, cascading fountains, lush gardens, and silver reflecting pools.

  “My lady?” One of her women was holding out a cup of hot mulled wine and Constance accepted it with a smile. But her unruly mind insisted upon slipping back in time, calling up the lavish entertainments of Christmas courts past, presided over by her nephew, William, and Joanna, his young English queen. Royal marriages were not love matches, of course, but dictated by matters of state. If a couple were lucky, though, they might develop a genuine respect and fondness for each other. William and Joanna’s marriage had seemed an affectionate one to Constance, and when she’d been wed to Heinrich von Hohenstaufen, King of Germany and heir to the Holy Roman Empire, she’d hoped to find some contentment in their union. It was true that he’d already earned a reputation at twenty-one for ruthlessness and inflexibility. But he was also an accomplished poet, fluent in several languages, and she’d sought to convince herself that he had a softer side he showed only to family. Instead, she’d found a man as cold and unyielding as the lands he ruled, a man utterly lacking in the passion and exuberance and joie de vivre that made Sicily such an earthly paradise.

  Finishing the wine, she turned reluctantly away from the fire. “I am ready for bed,” she said, shivering again when they unlaced her gown, exposing her skin to the cool chamber air. She sat on a stool, still in her chemise, a robe draped across her shoulders as they removed her wimple and veil and unpinned her hair. It reached to her waist, the moonlit pale gold so prized by troubadours. She’d been proud of it once, proud of her de Hauteville good looks and fair coloring. But as she gazed into an ivory hand mirror, the woman looking back at her was a wary stranger, too thin and too tired, showing every one of her thirty-five years.

  After brushing out her hair, one of her women began to braid it into a night plait. It was then that the door slammed open and Constance’s husband strode into the chamber. As her ladies sank down in submissive curtseys, Constance rose hastily. She’d not been expecting him, for he’d paid a visit to her bedchamber just two nights ago, for what he referred to as the “marital debt,” one of his rare jests, for if he had a sense of humor, he’d kept it well hidden so far. When they were first married, she’d been touched that he always came to her, rather than summoning her to his bedchamber, thinking it showed an unexpected sensitivity. Now she knew better. If they lay together in her bed, he could then return to his own chamber afterward, as he always did; she could count on one hand the times they’d awakened in the same bed.

  Heinrich did not even glance at her ladies. “Leave us,” he said, and they hastened to obey, so swiftly that their withdrawal seemed almost like flight.

  “My lord husband,” Constance murmured as the door closed behind the last of her a
ttendants. She could read nothing in his face; he’d long ago mastered the royal skill of concealing his inner thoughts behind an impassive court mask. As she studied him more closely, though, she saw subtle indicators of mood—the faintest curve at the corner of his mouth, his usual pallor warmed by a faint flush. He had the oddest eye color she’d ever seen, as grey and pale as a frigid winter sky, but they seemed to catch the candlelight now, shining with unusual brightness.

  “There has been word from Sicily. Their king is dead.”

  Constance stared at him, suddenly doubting her command of German. Surely she could not have heard correctly? “William?” she whispered, her voice husky with disbelief.

  Heinrich arched a brow. “Is there another King of Sicily that I do not know about? Of course I mean William.”

  “What … what happened? How …?”

  His shoulders twitched in a half shrug. “Some vile Sicilian pestilence, I suppose. God knows, the island is rife with enough fevers, plagues, and maladies to strike down half of Christendom. I know only that he died in November, a week after Martinmas, so his crown is ours for the taking.”

  Constance’s knees threatened to give way and she stumbled toward the bed. How could William be dead? There was just a year between them; they’d been more like brother and sister than nephew and aunt. Theirs had been an idyllic childhood, and later she’d taken his little bride under her wing, a homesick eleven-year-old not yet old enough to be a wife. Now Joanna was a widow at twenty-four. What would happen to her? What would happen to Sicily without William?

  Becoming aware of Heinrich’s presence, she looked up to find him standing by the bed, staring down at her. She drew a bracing breath and got to her feet; she was tall for a woman, as tall as Heinrich, and drew confidence from the fact that she could look directly into his eyes. His appearance was not regal. His blond hair was thin, his beard scanty, and his physique slight; in an unkind moment, she’d once decided he put her in mind of a mushroom that had never seen the light of day. He could not have been more unlike his charismatic, expansive, robust father, the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who swaggered through the imperial court like a colossus. And yet it was Heinrich who inspired fear in their subjects, not Frederick; those ice-color eyes could impale men as surely as any sword thrust. Even Constance was not immune to their piercing power, although she’d have moved heaven and earth to keep him from finding that out.