“Which is when?”
“That depends,” he said, walking up the steps to the keep, “if you would like to fill your coffers.”
“They’re already rather full.”
Two guards saluted Patrick and opened the keep doors. Into the stone fortress we went.
“Mm,” Patrick grunted. “That’s disappointing.”
Black carpet trimmed with gold clomped up beneath our wet boots. Patrick took the grand staircase all the way up to the royal quarters. Nostalgia chilled my bones as the memories of this place stabbed my mind. Last time I was here, I’d ended the conjurers. At least I thought so. Maybe I was wrong.
A couple Verdan royal guardsmen in brushed steel helmets acknowledged Patrick. They grasped the handles of the double doors leading to his quarters.
The king had none of it. He waved the men away and let us in himself. He kicked the door closed, plucked the golden pins holding his cloak in place, then tossed the furry thing across the room.
He ran his fingers through his curly hair. “I need poison,” he said. “I’m not knowledgeable of ways to kill a man silently and without raising questions. So I thought I’d talk to someone who is.”
I strolled around the expansive room. It looked vastly different than when Vileoux had held the crown. Gone were the banners with golden swords and the paintings of old Verdan kings. A painted sign that read “The Might of the North” had been taken down, and various decorations featuring the family’s trio of swords were missing.
“For someone who apparently doesn’t like to play the game,” I said, “your request is rather unusual.”
“Darvin Fausting, lord of High Pitch, will want this throne. I prefer handing it over to Keira Gultz. She’s been the lady of Montfall for fifteen years. Land used to be wild, constantly overrun by tribes and smaller families. She brokered peace and has maintained that peace ever since. She’s level-headed, calm. Fausting is old in the body and in his ways. He’s war-hungry. He won’t let Keira take the crown without a fight. So I want him put away.”
“And you think I have the skills to do so?”
Patrick untied his boots and removed them. He massaged his feet. “I have contacts who will be willing to carry it out. All I need from the Black Rot is the poison.”
I went over to a closed window and looked out across the sage-green landscape of grass that had thawed for the first time in a long while. “Not much left of the Black Rot anymore. But I might be able to get you some good poison, if you tell me where Vayle is.”
“Passed through two days ago,” Patrick said. “She has a camp north of here, in the gully of the mountains, beneath Grayman’s Bridge.”
“Don’t know the name,” I admitted, “but I’m sure I can find it.”
“You’d have to be blind not to see it. It’s a two-hundred-foot bridge that connects one peak to another. I’ll give you twenty thousand for the poison. When can you get it by?”
I pushed myself away from the window. “I’m in a bind right now. Give me a couple weeks, huh?”
“Sure. Tell Vayle I said hello. She helped me through a lot of this nobility nonsense, before she had to follow her dream, as she called it.”
“Didn’t see her when she passed through?”
“Only heard about it,” Patrick said. “It’s as if she didn’t want to anyone to know.”
Of course she didn’t, I thought. “I’d better hop to, before the cold comes to reclaim the North. And I’m sure your guests are waiting eagerly for your return.” I grinned.
Patrick rolled his eyes. “They can wait longer. Speedy travels, Shepherd. And safe ones, too.”
A balmy air loosened the cold grasp of icicles clinging to the crags. The sharp, frozen knives plunged to the mountain pass below. They crackled and shattered all around me. Loose, wet snow slid off the face of the mountain, bringing with it rocks of all sizes, but fortunately no boulders. Yet.
The sloughing of the mountain’s features made Pormillia more tense than usual, but she soldiered on, with a whinny here and a jerk of her head there. Two days in, we reached the bridge Patrick Verdan had referenced.
It cast a shadow as broad as a lake below, a shady retreat from the bright sun. A small camp of tents and horses sat at the edge of the shadow. Two fire pits raged in the center of the camp, deer haunches roasting on spits.
Beady eyes peered from within tents. They vanished behind the canvas flaps when I looked at them.
A man with a deeply scarred face and a chunk of flesh taken from his chin came out to investigate my presence.
After a brief conversation, he pointed a finger at a white tent.
I ducked inside. Vayle looked up from a skin of wine with only her eyes. “Kale cannot keep secrets.”
I took a seat on the ground, pulling my knees up to my chin, waiting for Vayle to ask me why I was here. She simply tilted her head back and poured.
“Your promise,” I said, “is that the first one you’ve never kept?”
She gazed into the bottom of her skin and blinked. “I’m still a Rot, Shepherd.”
“And you always will be. But you promised me when I left Edenvaile five months ago that you’d come back. You never had the intention, did you?”
“No.”
“I could use your assistance in something very important.”
“I need to do this.”
“I know. I understand. Just thought I’d ask.”
Her mouth twitched. “You don’t understand.”
I shrugged. “Try me. But first, pass me something to drink.”
She grabbed a wooden bowl from the litter of items scattered around the tent, then poured from a tall clay cylinder. A dark, oily liquid bubbled in the bowl.
I drank it and coughed. “Fuck!” It tasted like someone had extracted the roots of wormwood and ground them in with charred toast.
Vayle combed a hand through her dingy chocolate hair, revealing the bandage wrapped around her arm. Blood had soaked through.
“I thought I would die in that war,” she said. “I slept with regret every night. I could have freed hundreds, thousands of enslaved girls throughout my life. I never did. I never went back after I left. Told myself I would… but those were only words.”
“But you lived,” I said, trying to keep my face straight as I took another swig of the bitter ale.
“I lived,” she said. “I’ve freed one hundred and seventy of them since the war ended. I will free one more, always. Until neither I nor they exist any longer.” She looked at me painfully. “I’m sorry, Astul.”
This was all a lot to take in. Thankfully, Vayle said something that allowed me to ignore it for a little while longer.
“Your friend is here,” she said, nodding her chin.
I turned. Then the momentum of surprise and glee propelled my body up and off the floor. “Tylik? Tylik. Tylik!”
My old friend was still short. Still had a shiny head with some disheveled hair edging the sides. Still lit up like a morning sun when he saw me. But something had changed. Something was different.
Mr. No Toes was… no, couldn’t be. The ale must’ve gone straight to my head.
I glanced back at Vayle. “Is he…”
She lifted her brows amusingly.
The fucking crippled was walking, a fact to which I felt compelled to alert him. “You’re walking!”
Well, perhaps walking wasn’t the right term. He rather hobbled, but that’s a considerable improvement from having someone lug you around on their shoulders. Hell, having his eyes open was an improvement over the last time I’d seen him. Malaise had taken him and nearly smothered the life right out of him. I had expected to hear of Tylik in only the past tense when I left Edenvaile last.
He had a big, goofy smile plastered on his face. “Patrick Verdan helped fix me these up. Well, blacksmithy is the real wonder here, but Patrick ordered him to. Just like that!” A snap of his fingers. “And it was done. Says it’s a very much deserved thank you for my part in the wa
r.” Tylik cupped his hand over his mouth and added, “Which I agree with.” He chuckled and wobbled his way over to me.
Both of his feet had been removed. In their place jutted steel rods, the bottoms of which featured sloping shoes crafted of flexible steel.
Tylik stuck his hand out for a greeting. I leaned down and embraced him. Handshakes are for acquaintances, and this little man had proven himself much more than an acquaintance.
“They chop your feet off?” I asked.
He smacked my arm. “Exactly what they did. Took a saw, put some rags in my mouth and oh, boy, was there lots of screamin’.” He saw the agony twist on my face, and he chuckled. “Only kidding. No screaming. I was about a goner there for a while. See, the disease had started in my feet. Well, my toes. That’s what the savant said. So thought was, if we cut off my feet, we cut off the disease. They say I died once, but a good punch to the chest brought me back. I don’t remember a thing.”
He glanced at Vayle. “You didn’t say Astul was fixin’ to visit. This is all a pleasant surprise.”
“A surprise indeed,” Vayle said. She drank.
“Probably be flowers bloomin’ soon, I imagine,” Tylik said.
“Flowers don’t bloom here,” I said. “I don’t even think people here know what flowers are. What’s it like farther north? Still feel like you’ve been swallowed by a glacier?”
“Warm,” Vayle answered. “It’s disrupting their way of life. Game the farmers had stuffed deep into the snow is thawing. Meat is rotting.”
“Better enjoy your warmth,” I told Vayle. “It won’t last, and you know it.”
Tylik cocked his head. “Are you not staying?”
“Got places to be,” I said.
“Oh. In that case… well, I understand this might be asking quite a bit. But would you mind — consider at the very least — helping bring me back to Lith? The phoenix is outside here. We brought it with us, Vayle and me. Patrick didn’t much like it staying in Edenvaile. We could use it.”
Damn. I’d promised the crippled bastard I’d take him back months ago, to take revenge on the guard who had butchered his toes. I treated my word like gold so that others would do the same, but this was rather bad timing. Venturing up here had already wasted precious time. If I didn’t get to Lysa soon, Braddock would position her as the queen of the South. It’s considerably more difficult to make a getaway with a queen than an heiress.
Plus Crooked Tooth was likely already dead, given that the armies Patrick, Braddock, Dercy and Kane Calbid had sent were intended to snuff out the remaining conjurers — a fact I relayed to Tylik in hopes it would temper his excitement.
“Oh, buncha nonsense that,” he said. “I don’t give two… what’s the saying? Well, whatever it is, I don’t give two whatevers about that guard. I’m just real eager to see my children again, and the rest of the lot.”
“I have this job,” I said. “It’s urgent. Quite important. It’s a matter of—”
Tylik’s face sagged and his shoulders slumped. He gave his best that’s-okay nod and feigned an I’m-not-sad-at-all smile. “Understood, Astul.”
Across the table, a louring set of eyes rested at the rim of a mug. Fucking Vayle and her guilt trips.
“The bird is easy enough to maneuver,” I said. “Take her for a ride, you’ll love it.”
“Can’t fly with my fake feet,” Tylik said. “They’ll fall right off. And I can’t put ’em in myself. So if I’ve got to make a landing somewhere other than home, well… I’d reckon that’d put me in a heap o’ trouble.”
“I see. After this job is done, I will certainly—”
Vayle cleared her throat. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I don’t want to lose the thought. Tylik, I never heard how exactly you were freed from the conjurers’ dungeon. Would you mind telling me?”
Before I could remind Vayle that I’d told her precisely how those events unfolded, Tylik piped in.
“Karem — my nephew Karem.”
“Of course,” Vayle said, sipping her wine.
“He’d got the conjurers to bring him on as a guard.”
“Mm, brave man.”
“Very brave, I agree. Well, anyhow, he sneaks down one night and says, ‘Uncle, I’m going to free you.’ Or some such thing.”
Vayle stretched her hand across the way to interrupt. “Astul was there at this time too, yes?”
“Oh, yes. Looking real ragged and down. Had no doubt the conjurers did somethin’ to him. So Karem says he’s there to free me, but I say he’s got to free Astul too.”
“I bet Karem wasn’t happy about that,” Vayle said.
Tylik shook his head. “You’re right there. He wasn’t. But I was real persuasive, see. I stood my ground — well, sat my ground. Told him I refused to leave without my friend here.” He flung his arm out and smacked me on the shoulder.
“That was very brave of you, Tylik,” Vayle said. Her eyes slanted toward me. “Very brave and very loyal.”
Vayle could read lips like a farmer could read the weather. Because of this, the first two words I silently mouthed were Fuck you. Then, You made your point, Commander.
She leaned back, lifted her skin and sneered.
“Tylik,” I said, “go pack a small bag. We’re leaving soon.”
His head snapped toward me attentively. “Truly? Thank you, Astul! Thank you so very much, from the bottom of my heart.” He scampered out of the tent excitedly.
I sighed at Vayle. “Honor’s going to get you in trouble one day.”
She drank. “I imagine it will. You haven’t told me what this job is.”
“It’s nothing,” I said, winking. “Keep an eye on Pormillia for me, will you? If one of your people here visits Edenvaile, I’d appreciate it if they took her back, till I come for her again.”
“I’ll have her escorted there tomorrow.”
I smiled my best smile, hard as it was, and I said, “See you on the other side, Commander. It’s been fun.”
“You should know,” she said, catching me before I turned to leave. “It’s been the greatest time of my life. But I have to do this.”
“For yourself,” I said. “I know. Goodbye, Vayle.”
“Goodbye, Astul.”
I had only one thought as I waited for Tylik, and that was this.
So ends the Black Rot.
Chapter 4
Okay, I thought, a thousand feet above the ground. I’m on a flaming bird, with a crippled man seated behind me holding on to my belt for dear life. I just lost my commander. There’s going to be a massive war in the South. I need to kidnap an heiress. And there’s apparently some dangerous person out of hiding. Life is good. Life is great. Life is fucked.
The phoenix stabbed itself across the sky. Thunderous cries of the wind rumbled in my ears, numbed my face. Green stalks blurred the landscape. Branches and leaves slowly smoothed out before me, unraveling into a crisp forest as I pulled back in mind. My thoughts slowed the phoenix. She aimed her beak toward the ground.
I turned to Tylik. “Hope you don’t mind a small detour.”
“Wha?”
“Detour. We’re taking a detour,” I shouted into the wind.
He pointed at his ear and shrugged.
“WE’RE LANDING HERE.”
He gave me a thumbs-up.
Flickering plumage spanned the floor of needles and detritus in the form of shadows. The phoenix gently flapped her wings and glided to a graceful landing in a thicket of bare trunks stripped of bark. The trees here looked as if a beaver had enjoyed them like you might enjoy the ribs of a pig, until about forty feet up, where branches were splayed with bristly needles.
“Goodness,” Tylik said. “That was exciting! Flying, I mean. Feeling the wind rush past me, watching as everything down here shrunk. Why, I felt like I was… like I was on top of the world.”
Prodding my cheeks revealed that I could only sense pressure. “I can’t feel my face,” I said.
“Funny feeling that, isn’
t it?”
“Or the tips of my fingers.”
“Less funny there. More annoying.”
I flicked my fingers like I was drying them. Slowly, the warmth of blood returned, first to my fingertips, then to my face. It was a pleasant sensation initially, but then things started to burn. A glance at Tylik showed sweat bubbling from his forehead.
He patted his chest. “Feels like the hottest days in Lith here.”
Each breath felt similar to that one time I’d stuck my head inside a covered pot and discovered that lungs do not enjoy sucking in steam. The air was impenetrably thick. It lay still on your skin, as if it had conquered and vanquished the wind.
“Fuck,” I spat. “It’s hot. My balls haven’t sweated this much since I fried a panful of fish naked one night at the Hole.” I looked at Tylik. “Don’t ever do that, by the way.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, Astul. What’re we here for, anyway? Rest? I’d say goin’ somewhere else might be a better idea if rest is on yer mind. Don’t think I can—”
Gods! Did the little man ever shut up? “Told you I had a job to do. That doesn’t change now that I’ve brought you along. Stay here, on the bird. If anyone comes for you, fly away. Make a ninety-degree angle.” I waved my hand and added, “Somewhere over in that direction. I’ll find you.”
“Is this about an assassination?” he asked, a slight tremble to his words.
“No.”
“Oh. That’s good.”
“Just a kidnapping.”
A bead of sweat fell into his bulging eyes. “Well, um. Do you think maybe we could reunite me with my family first? It won’t take long.”
“I’m out of time,” I told him. “Don’t worry. This is as simple as, er… growing corn.”
He frowned. “Corn’s a complicated matter. Sometimes you’ve got pests to deal with, and then the weather brings all sorts of foulness down on you. Sometimes it rains too much, you know, and other times it don’t rain at all. And what are you gonna do about that? They say way up north the folk used to do these things called rain dances. But I don’t believe in ’em. See, I think—”
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