The savant continued with his scripted speech. “Sir Wilhelm, please bring me the Sword of Righteousness.”
Wilhelm emerged from the line of lords and ladies, his fingers wrapped around a leather-bound hilt from which a lengthy broad steel blade arose, pointing toward the silt sky.
Savant Lucas took the sword in his wrinkly hands and held it high above his head.
“Lord Chachant Verdan, kneel and bow your head.”
Chachant did as he was asked.
The sword in the savant’s hands swayed like a thin tree that had grown tall but hadn’t yet discovered how to branch out.
Savant Lucas spoke. “If you, Chachant Verdan, intend to take your betrothed as your companion for life, as a lover and a friend, as a partner to whom you are bound monogamously, and as a wife whom you will not taint with sin or wickedness, then you will stand tall before the Sword of Righteousness and you will grace it with the same dignity and respect as you would the Pantheon who demanded it be forged in their name, and you will uphold your promises. If you cannot uphold this matrimonial pledge, then remain kneeling and allow the Sword of Righteousness to grant you one last act of mercy, for the Pantheon will surely not.”
While these empty words were booming in my ears — in all my years, I’d heard of no one stupid enough to admit doubt crept into their heart as they knelt before a sword intended to lop off their head if they did so — I made faces at Vayle, parroting what I assumed the savant looked like in his righteous glory.
Chachant predictably rose to his feet, and the formality continued in painful fashion. He straightened his shoulders, looked the sword hard in its figurative eyes and announced, “I will uphold my matrimonial promises.”
The savant turned to Sybil and repeated the formalities with her. She stood at the end, looked the sword hard in its figurative eyes and announced, “I will uphold my matrimonial promises.”
I half expected an angry fist from some god to pierce the sky and crack her right across the jaw for such a brazen lie. But only snow drifted down from the thick clouds, reaffirming my belief that if the Pantheon of northern gods did exist, they didn’t give two shits for what happened below them. They were probably drinking barrels of cider and commenting happily on the swarm of diseases and rashes and infections each had thought up. Seemed like something a bunch of gods responsible for this reprehensible weather would do.
The savant instructed Chachant and Sybil to stand tightly against one another, shoulder to shoulder.
He carefully lowered the Sword of Righteousness and placed the flat side of the blade equally on their shoulders. “The Pantheon has declared these two as one. I present to you Chachant Verdan, Lord of the Verdan Family, King of Edenvaile and the Immovable Mountain of the North, and Sybil Verdan, Lady of the Verdan Family and Queen of Edenvaile. I now command the two of you to commence this celebration with a kiss.”
Chachant and Sybil turned, joyous smiles picking at the corners of their mouths. He picked Sybil up in his arms, cupped his hands beneath her butt and kissed her for all of Edenvaile to see. Then he sat her down and winked at her, his mouth agape with a wry grin.
Edmund quickly handed her a bouquet of colorful wildflowers likely picked from the lavish fields of the West. She held the bouquet over the balcony and tossed it to the people below, who would fight over its petals for good luck and good health.
Sybil smoothed the wrinkles of her dress from where Chachant’s hands had soiled it. She grabbed her newly wedded husband’s hand as he attempted to leave the dais. She whispered in his ear and then waited for the cheers and clapping from the farmers and peasants below to quiet.
I looked for Vayle, who was crouched behind a crenellation. She’d seen the same thing I had and gave me a nod.
“Women, men and children of Edenvaile,” Sybil announced. She turned to the nobles. “And the lords and ladies who were so kind as to travel from, in some cases, great distances to be here today. I have an announcement to make.”
I hoped the announcement would be something along the lines of her finally realizing her dream to become queen and now that she’d accomplished what she wanted to in life, she would be pursuing other ventures, such as possibly discovering what it felt like to stab herself in the throat with a sword.
I had a feeling my hopes would be crushed.
And they were.
“It has been little more than two months since my husband, since the people of Edenvaile, since the world over has grieved the loss of a man whose greatness was so tremendous, Mizridahl has felt heavier and darker in his absence. I speak, of course, of Vileoux Verdan, the king of the North who was assassinated on a cold winter night.”
She paused and expertly allowed the emotions to swell over the crowd like a thick fog. Half the art of speech is not stumbling over your words like a tongue-tied buffoon. The other half is presenting your palm to the audience and persuading them to eat from your hand. And there is no greater persuasion than the power of raw emotion.
“Or so we were led to believe,” Sybil continued. She squeezed Chachant’s hand and allayed the growing concern on his face with a warm smile. “But I had heard whispers a foul trick was in play. I had heard whispers that the poison that seeped into Vileoux’s veins could only render him unconscious.” She paused again, leaned her bosom over the banister and, with a heaping dose of exaggerated effect, said, “I had heard he was still alive.”
Speaking of whispers… they rippled across the crowd now.
“Is he?” someone dared ask from below.
Sybil raked her teeth across her bottom lip. She stood aside and opened her hand toward the doorway. “See for yourself.”
The door opened and a chill unlike any I’d ever experienced burrowed into my flesh and seemed to gnaw at my bones. My teeth chattered.
I saw the shadow before I saw the man. My teeth stopped chattering and my body stopped feeling. No cold, no fear. Just the unrelenting rush of excitement — the twisted kind — that you can feel surge into your throat and pound into your chest.
My hand instinctively went to the hilt of my ebon blade as Vileoux Verdan walked onto the balcony.
His acorn face was a tinge darker than I remembered it in Lith, like a man who had been forced to stay awake for centuries. But his white beard was as flawless as ever, his blue eyes as cold as the kingdom he had ruled for fifty years, and the crown upon his head as gold as a noonday sun.
The whispers rippling across the crowd were no longer whispers, and they no longer rippled. There were shouts and shrieks and cries of disbelief, and they rumbled and thundered and boomed.
“Gods below and above,” Dercy said to me as Vileoux made his way onto the dais.
“Mind calling up some of your gods from the sea as well?” I asked.
With his quaking hand covering his mouth, Chachant gingerly touched his father’s arms, inspecting them for perhaps worms, maggots and festered flesh — things a dead man would typically be slugging around.
“Father?” he said, bewildered.
Vileoux gripped his shoulder. “My son. You’ve become a man in my stead.” He swiveled around youthfully and stepped up to the ornate banister. “Your king has returned,” he shouted.
The people wept and cheered with affection. They should have run far, far away and prayed heavily to the Pantheon.
Sybil addressed the assembly, dividing her attention between the nobility behind her and the vast numbers of peasants below who ate up her words like seagulls suck down garbage.
“The whispers came from none other than an assassin present here today.”
Oh. Shit.
She pointed to me with her sharp chin. “Astul, Shepherd of the Black Rot, informed me that your great king may have been held in a dungeon.” She paused. “A dungeon operated by Dercy Daniser. And that is where I found him.” She turned to Chachant. “That is why I stayed behind in Watchmen’s Bay.”
Chachant’s face resembled the asperity of a chiseled rock as he looked at me. Fur
y reddened his cheeks. “You told me you knew nothing about my father’s death!” His anger flung spittle across the balcony.
“I think it was a trap,” Sybil said. “He hoped I would fall prey to whatever foul plan he and Dercy concocted.”
Chachant shoved his finger angrily toward me. “Seize them both!”
“I don’t think your daughter will be wedding their son,” I told Dercy. I backed away and withdrew my sword. “Good luck.”
The balcony shuddered as plated armor rose from the ranks of the nobles and stampeded toward me and Dercy.
Desperate for an exit, I opened the door only to see the pronged candles set upon the wall dragging unfriendly shadows, pursued by the sound of clanking armor, ever closer. I slammed the door, yanked a chair sitting next to Dercy and propped it up against the bronze handle.
It wouldn’t hold long, but hopefully long enough for me to figure a way out with my guts still inside my belly.
Three city guardsmen slammed into Dercy. The Lord of Watchmen’s Bay tumbled to the floor, his face thudding off the snowy marble. His eyes were open, but they looked like they were staring into oblivion.
There were three more guards on the balcony. They approached me with care, each of them advancing under the protection of a gleaming steel shield. Unlike Dercy, I had something in my hand that could inflict grievous harm.
And I knew how to use it.
I could probably take all three of the guards. The small quarters gave me the advantage; they’d have to file in like a cone rather than surround me. Plus, ebon has been known to cut through steel given enough whacks. But the door beside me that trembled under the pounding fists of more city guardsmen presented another problem. Famed as I was for putting sharp tips into spongy skin, I was no conqueror of an entire city guard.
But I really didn’t want to pay a visit to the Edenvaile dungeon again.
What to do, what to do. I could jump off the balcony, but that would hurt. I could take Chachant or Sybil or Vileoux by the neck and escort them out of the keep under the pretense I would slice their jugular should their guardsmen attempt anything funny. But I probably couldn’t reach them.
“Get down!” someone shouted, interrupting my devious planning.
An arrow tipped with fire whizzed through the air and struck the Verdan banner hanging upon the wall of the balcony. The flames raced down the banner, engulfing the fabric in a hungry inferno that contrasted quite nicely with the black background. Had my life not been threatened at that very moment, it would have been a nice time to pour a skin of wine and scrutinize the artwork flames can bring about.
Instead, I looked to Vayle, who dipped another arrow into what I presumed was oil. She then touched the tip to a torch between a crenellation, pulled the fletching back and let it fly. It crashed into the food and booze. Wine spilled onto the marble floor and quickly turned into a tiny lake of seething flames.
Wilhelm and his city guardsmen peeled back and shielded Chachant, Sybil, Vileoux and Mydia with their bodies. They hurried them along, keeping their heads below the banister.
The lords and ladies of various courts flocked to the door in panic. One of them in an olive cotehardie heaved the chair over the balcony and pushed his way inside the hallway just as a herd of guards pushed out.
“Seize him!” Chachant cried. “Seize him!”
A barbed arrow screamed past my face. It tinked off the mail chest of a guardsman. He grunted like a bear who’d just been poked with a hot iron. In a moment of foolish rashness, he reached for my arm. I pulled away, making him overextend. The plate bracer that protected his forearm and wrist slid up to his elbow, revealing a gap of flesh between his chain glove and his wrist bone.
My ebon blade sung as it slashed downward, between the fat flakes of snow. It flashed a midnight-blue wink at the guardsman just as the edge sunk into the first layer of skin and chewed through the remaining ones with precision and ease. It gnawed into his bone, stopping partway through. I knelt and ripped it like a saw across the remaining portion, and the guardsman stumbled backward with blood fountaining out of his arm.
A gloved hand clangored onto the marble floor.
Apparently a guardsman’s curdling scream is like a battle cry for his fellow soldiers. They all wanted a piece of me, but I much needed my pieces if I wanted to continue living. So I sheathed my sword, jumped over the banister and lowered myself down so that I was hanging from a sword-sculpted baluster.
Below me lay a thick blanket of snow.
Sharpened steel glimmered at me from between the balusters. The hands that wielded the swords pushed closer.
Time to go.
I withdrew my ebon blade and let it fall to the ground. Then I released my hands from the baluster, spread my legs and tucked my hands behind my head for protection.
And I flew, in much the same manner as a goose in the throes of a heart attack.
Hopefully the snow was as forgiving as it looked.
Chapter 20
There exists a type of snow so fluffy you could stuff it in a pillow and mistake it for the feathers of a duck.
This was not that kind of snow. This was the kind of snow that’s compact and stiff. This was the kind of snow that splinters into icy fragments when a two-hundred-pound man falls on it from twenty feet up. This was the kind of snow that cracks like a sheet of frozen water. This was the kind of snow that hurt like hell.
The fall had punched the breath from my lungs, numbed half my arm and reopened the gashes Tylik had carved into my back. Much as I wanted to lie there and groan in self-pity, time was not a commodity I had.
I shook the pins and needles from my arm and got to my knees, coughing as the bitter air inflated my chest.
Pandemonium held Edenvaile in its clutches. Men and women and children scurried like a school of minnows in the shadow of a whale. Parents lifted their small children into their arms and yanked along the older ones, fleeing for the gates. Panic marked their faces, and dread scarred their shrill cries.
I crawled on my knees and swung my hands in front of me until the familiar soft leather of my sword was once again in my grasp. I picked it and myself up, stuffed it in my scabbard and tore off through the market district. There were guards down here, but none of them likely knew of the precise events that had happened on the balcony. They were hopelessly trying to organize the mass hysteria that unfolded before them. But it wouldn’t be long before the soldiers who witnessed my dismembering of one of their brethren would make their way out of the keep and begin what I imagined would be a very thorough search and rescue. Or perhaps more accurately, a search and beat-the-shit-out-of-Astul.
I reached the stables and spun around, alert. No one had trailed me. One of the benefits of wedding days is that, so long as you are neither the bride nor the groom, you can typically blend in, which is a fantastic advantage if you intend to commit atrocities on that day. Or if you’re unfairly blamed for committing atrocities.
Still, tight pants, an undersized kirtle and an oversized cotehardie are not beneficial for battle. My movement was too restricted. On my knees, I combed through the stockpiles of roughage for where I’d left my leather armor. A horse with a pink nose sniffed my arse while I did so.
“Would you mind?” I asked.
She blew air out her nose and continued sniffing.
“Yes, as you can see, I’m not one of yours. Apologies. Here. Eat some of this.” I offered her a handful of roughage, which she investigated with her big brown eyes. She took it gingerly and left me alone to locate my armor.
I plucked my jerkin from deep within the roughage, along with an undershirt, breeches, socks and finally my boots and gloves.
“This is going to be brutal, old girl,” I told the horse. She snorted angrily, and I gave a quick look at her anatomy. “Oh, sorry. Old boy. Well, here we go.”
I held my breath, and I stripped stark naked, save my skivvies. Cold does not begin to describe what I felt. My nipples were hard enough to stab through flesh
, my toes painful enough that a passerby could have cut them off and I’d have probably thanked him, and quite frankly, what that bitter air did to certain tools of masculinity, I may as well have not been wearing underpants at all.
Just as I was pulling up my breeches past my knees, a smooth, warm voice thawed my mind.
“Nice ass,” Vayle said.
“Thanks for saving it,” I replied. I jumped in an attempt to get a better pull on the breeches so they’d fit past my hips.
“This kingdom is crawling with city guardsmen,” she said. “We need to leave.”
“Can’t leave just yet.” I tied my breeches securely around my waist, then grabbed my undershirt and put it on. The stinging burns of gelid air were finally beginning to relent.
“Oh, I understand,” Vayle said. “You want to experience life in the Edenvaile dungeon again, don’t you? I very much do not, so if you don’t mind, you can do so yourself.”
“They have Dercy,” I told her.
She raked her chocolate hair mottled with snowflakes out of her eyes. “That’s Dercy’s problem.”
“It’s going to quickly become our problem when Sybil takes his mind and uses it to call upon his bannermen for her war effort. That’s my best guess as to why she wants Dercy.”
“Let her have him. We don’t need him. The Rots are going to usurp him anyway.”
My commander had a special quality about her. She was the most optimistic person I’d ever met. Victory was always a possibility in her mind. Her pessimism when dissecting my strategies might have been unmatched, but her optimism for carrying them out was equally unsurpassed.
But sometimes optimism blinds you. It didn’t often blind Vayle, but clearly it had cleverly stretched itself over her eyes this time.
“Vayle… that plan… it’s spitting on a fire to put out the flames. It’s digging a hole in the desert in hopes you’ll find a pristine pool of water underneath. You have to understand…it’s a strategy that has very little hope of succeeding. Our hope now rests with freeing Dercy Daniser. There are not many things that would bring the man to war… but I think this is one of them.”
An Assassin's Blade: The Complete Trilogy Page 22
