The Lone Warrior
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Teaser chapter
PRAISE FOR
THIEF OF LIGHT
“One of those amazing books that comes along very rarely. Ms. Rossetti has crafted a unique world and culture, and filled it with complex, wonderful characters that draw you in and won’t let you go. This is complex world-building and enthralling storytelling at its best.”
—Manic Readers
“Imaginative . . . Filled with eroticism and likable characters. This is an author worth watching.”
—Night Owl Romance
“This standout novel pulls readers into a steamy romance with a fun plot . . . On a romantic level the chemistry between the easily likable main characters is sizzling and realistic. Rossetti paints a vivid picture that truly allows readers to escape.”
—Romantic Times
“This is one book, and series, I recommend wholeheartedly to anyone who wants a little fantasy and magic woven into their romance.”
—The Romance Studio
THE FLAME AND THE SHADOW
“Sparkles with excitement! An inventive tale of magic and erotic adventure.”
—Shana Abé, New York Times bestselling author
“Should appeal to fans of Storm Constantine and Laurell K. Hamilton.”
—Library Journal
“I was so captivated . . . I couldn’t put it down. The Flame and the Shadow is darkly intense, warmly romantic, and blazingly erotic.”
—Publishers Weekly’s WW Ladies Book Club Blurbs
“Rossetti’s first installment of the Four-Sided Pentacle series is exciting and full of passion and intrigue. I will be anxiously awaiting the second book.”
—ParaNormal Romance
“Rossetti creates such lovably flawed characters in Cenda and Gray that it is hard not to laugh (and cry) at their expense. The Flame and the Shadow is exceedingly hot! Explicitly hot!”
—Romance Reader at Heart (Top Pick)
“Denise Rossetti creates an erotic, mystical, futuristic world full of excitement and intrigue, promising even more adventure in the next book in this thrilling series. This is a great read!”
—Fresh Fiction
“The erotica is in high supply and the sexual tension is repeatedly built up and released only to be built again. If you enjoy reading about sensual sex, and like the sex to be flaming hot and steamy, this erotic romance in an unearthly universe will seductively draw you in.”
—SFRevu
“Readers will delight in the author’s rich imagination as they are caught up between the dilemmas of the main characters, the fight for power between the magic-wielding Pures and Technomages, and a thorough fall into love.”
—Love Romances and More
“Denise Rossetti is a stunning new voice in futuristic romance. She hits the scene with a thrilling view into a magical world . . . I’ve not read anything in romance like it.”
—Night Owl Romance
Titles by Denise Rossetti
THE FLAME AND THE SHADOW
THIEF OF LIGHT
THE LONE WARRIOR
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2011 by Denise Rossetti.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violationof the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
BERKLEY® SENSATION and the “B” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley Sensation trade paperback edition / May 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rossetti, Denise.
The lone warrior / Denise Rossetti.—Berkley Sensation trade pbk. ed.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-51483-2
1. Female assassins—Fiction. 2. Demonology—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3618.O8484L66 2011
813’.6—dc22
2010054170
http://us.penguingroup.com
Prologue
LONEFELL KEEP, BEYOND THE CRESSY PLAINS PALIMPSEST
She was dead, gone from him forever. And all for the life of a puny girl child.
“Show me,” said the baron of Lonefell Keep.
Shaking with terror, the midwife placed a small warm bundle in his arms. Reflexively, he tightened his grip and the babe squirmed, mewling. The baron stared down at the skin of her cheek, palest ivory and roses, and examined the slender fingers and long bones. Then he looked for an endless time at the body of the tiny, olive-skinned woman lying twisted among the bloodied sheets. She had been his cousin, and there was a strong resemblance between them.
Finally, he lifted his gaze to the window. Outside, in the barrack square, his sergeant of the guard drilled Lonefell’s soldiers. The man had journeyed an unimaginable distance from the far north to join the baron’s service. A light breeze fondled his long braids, so fair as to be almost white. Sunlight caressed broad shoulders and long, straight limbs.
A film of ice
formed over the baron’s heart, for he had been foolish enough to love his pretty young wife.
He thrust the child at the trembling midwife and ripped open the door. His captain stood outside, awaiting his lord’s pleasure. With a jerk of his chin, the baron drew the man to him. “Kill the northern barbarian!”
When the man’s face went slack with shock, he snarled, “Now!”
He strode away without a backward look, dismissing the child from his mind and his life.
After a week, the midwife, nonplussed, named the babe Mehcredi, for that had been her sister’s name. Then she handed the infant over to a passing maidservant and departed. The squalling bundle passed from one exasperated maid to another until one more ruthless than the others set the child aside in a distant storeroom. She considered it a politic move, for after all, hadn’t the baron made his disinterest clear? In any case, the life of a single girl child was a cheap and easy thing.
Mehcredi would have died, save for the merest chance. A few days later, the keep’s laundress was brought to bed of a stillborn son. That in itself was not such an unusual occurrence, but the loss affected the woman strangely. She fell into a deep melancholy, complicated by milk fever. By the time her best friend bethought herself of the abandoned babe, the child was almost too weak to suck.
But suck she did, with an avid desperation, and the washerwoman recovered. But the melancholy lingered like an evil spell. Mehcredi had reached the toddling stage when the woman drowned herself in one of the deep stone tubs in the laundry, her hair floating like weeds among the baron’s sheets.
The child grew wild and dirty, scavenging like a little animal, her fingers always clawed, ready to snatch, her strange, light eyes stretched wide. As the seasons passed, she shot up like a sturdy sapling, pale as a snow birch seeking the sun. No one spoke to her, save in passing. No one touched her, save for an absentminded buffet if she were underfoot.
Only fat old Cook noticed the girl, for he loved to see a body eat and Mehcredi inhaled anything he gave her, in any amount, at any time. She haunted the cavernous kitchen, for there it was warm and she could fill the emptiness inside her. But all she did was grow—and grow and grow—her long limbs straight and true, her shoulders square and well set.
The laughter of the castle children excited her almost unbearably, but they interacted according to unwritten rules she had no hope of understanding. On the rare occasions she was permitted to join in, something always went wrong, though she was never able to pin down what it was. Baffled, angry and hurt, she’d stand like a lump while the little ones pointed and complained and the older children jeered.
Chewing her thumb, she lurked in the shadows, a tall, pale wraith, staring, always staring. More than once, she pushed or kicked a smaller child, so she could watch with greedy eyes when it ran to its mother and was comforted. She had to blink back the tears every time, though she could never work out where they came from or why—or even prevent them in the first place. With a defiant sniff, she’d stamp off to the kitchens and swipe a pastry.
By the time she had breasts and a woman’s hips, Mehcredi was already taller than most men, monosyllabic and sullen. A few years later, when she stood at Cook’s graveside, she was six feet in height, her strange silver eyes shielded by thick, light brown lashes. A tangle of ice-pale hair straggled down her broad back, almost as far as the swell of her buttocks.
Before dawn the following morning, she crept into the baron’s study, levered open the lock on his treasure box and took what she thought she was owed simply for surviving. Without a word, she hauled herself onto one of the castle’s grain wagons, heading for market in Caracole of the Leaves. By first light, she was long gone.
Mehcredi discovered, rather to her surprise, that she liked Caracole, that city of sea-canals and shining white towers and smiling vice, a far cry from the silence and cold unyielding stone of Lonefell Keep. When she sat idle, watching the summer breeze play chase and kiss with the blue wavelets in the canals, strange thoughts drifted into her head, tantalizing fragments of meaning hovering just beyond her grasp, eluding her by the smallest of margins. Skiffs and barges floated by, the people on board talking, laughing, arguing, or sitting in comfortable silence with their arms around each other.
She’d hoped it might be different here, away from the keep, but it wasn’t. She didn’t know how to do any of the things other folk did so naturally. When she tried, they looked at her sidelong—or worse, they laughed outright and turned away.
As if life were a cruel game and they had all the pieces, while she’d been robbed of hers before birth.
After a week of increasing frustration, grief and fury, Mehcredi betook herself and the baron’s gold to the House of the Assassins. The Lonefell soldiers made the sign of the Sibling Moons every time the place was mentioned, half in awed admiration, half in horror. If they were impressed, so was she. She thought no more deeply than that, like a child who only comprehends enough of the world to want what it wants.
Those who had the power of life and death controlled the pieces and the board, and therefore the game itself. Or so she reasoned.
1
CARACOLE, QUEENDOM OF THE ISLES PALIMPSEST
Death padded in pursuit, slipping through the double shadows without a sound. Like the worst nightmare Mehcredi could imagine, except this was all too horribly real. How much longer could she elude him, the man with the hunter’s face? Panting, she glanced over her shoulder at the dark figure pacing behind. As he drifted from one patch of shadow to the next, something pale gleamed where the light of the Sibling Moons tangled in his black hair. Feathers worked into a long braid, and . . . bones?
Were they finger bones?
The shock thrilled down her nerves, making her head swim and her vision blur, but her long legs carried her away at a swift, stumbling run, lurching down a narrow alley, deeper into the reeking slum the people of Caracole called the Melting Pot. Turning to fight never entered her head. Gods, she’d barely scraped through the First Circle tests as it was, and her first real commission for the Guild of Assassins had been an unqualified disaster. No, she wouldn’t have a chance.
She couldn’t hear his footfall, couldn’t detect any movement, but his presence behind her was a tangible force. Every cell in her body sensed him with the animal instinct of the hunted—his predatory focus, the grim relish with which he anticipated her death. From her left came the frantic click of claws on the cobbles, a soft whining noise. That damn dog! She might as well wave a flaming torch above her head and be done with it.
“Get lost,” she hissed, glancing around for something to throw. “Scat!” But the little animal only skittered aside, continuing to flank her.
Mehcredi twisted and doubled back. One hand pressed to the stitch in her side, she reeled around a corner and inevitably, there he stood, waiting—pitiless. He wasn’t a great deal taller than she was, but much broader. Lithe and strong and graceful, where she was longboned and clumsy and doomed.
She opened her mouth to shriek, to plead, but long-fingered hands fastened around her throat. As he slowly increased the pressure, digging painfully into the soft flesh under her jaw, the man smiled, lips pulling back from white teeth. The expression gave him an eerie, chilling beauty. He could have been an avenging angel or a handsome demon. Either way, those elegant brutal hands were the sure instruments of her death.
Her fists flailed, punching. When that failed, she raked at his forearms with her nails, but he didn’t even flinch. Mehcredi knew she was strong, stronger than any woman she’d ever met, but it made no difference. Black spots formed in her vision, her lungs labored and cramped.
“No,” she tried to rasp. “No, please.”
From far off, as if down a long tunnel, came the sound of hysterical barking.
The man thrust his face into hers. “Now you pay,” he snarled as he sent her down into the dark. “Assassin.”
By the bones of Those Before, she was a strange one, this Mehcredi. Walker had never se
en a woman like her. Certainly, never one so pale, nor so big. He stared down at her unconscious form, stretched full length in the bottom of the skiff he was poling under the Bridge of Empty Pockets. He flexed his shoulders, still a little surprised by her bulk. But he’d managed well enough in the end, heaving her over his shoulder in the alley and manhandling her into the skiff without tipping it over. Drowning the assassin wasn’t part of his plan. Every time she looked like regaining consciousness, he shoved hard fingers into the nerve cluster behind her ear and she slipped away again.
Arriving at his House of Swords, he moored the skiff, hauled her out and dumped her at the foot of the stairs. Then he woke Pounder, whose room was on the ground floor. It took the combined heft of two fit, powerful men to haul her long limp body up the steep flights to the top floor. Once they had her laid out in the narrow bed, Walker unfastened her cloak, discovering it was thickly padded. So was her jerkin and vest. An interesting disguise, part of an assassin’s stock in trade. No wonder she’d looked so bulky.
He had the woman down to shirt and trews before heavy breath on the back of his neck recalled him to the presence of his companion.
“Brother’s balls,” rumbled Pounder, chewing his moustache, battered brows arched in surprise. “She’s not bad. Don’t look like a murderin’ bitch, not really. Who’d a thought it?”
Who indeed?
The woman moaned and rolled her head on the pillow. Her lashes fluttered, revealing a glimpse of strange silver irises. Unnerved, Pounder fell back with a curse, making the sign of the Sibling Moons.