by Bobby Adair
The leader of what? Fitz wasn't sure anymore.
She'd hoped that by gathering the townsfolk around Franklin and the ideas he spoke about, they'd be able to cow Tenbrook with the weight of their numbers. In Fitz's vision, it would have happened without the loss of life or shedding of blood. The degree to which she was wrong shook her confidence and made the loyal gazes of all her friends difficult to bear.
What if she made another miscalculation?
They'd all die just as brutally as Franklin had.
How many could she lead to their death to satisfy her ambition?
And that's what it was, wasn't it? Ambition.
Fitz had a difficult time wrestling with the idea. Was it wrong that what she wanted coincided exactly with what was good for Brighton? Did that make her ambition wrong?
Another question that gnawed at her confidence was the temperament of The People. They'd all watched, horrified and paralyzed, as Tenbrook stood on the stage in the Temple and murdered Franklin. They stood back while a few dozen soldiers slaughtered the clergymen. They'd let the war horses trample their friends and neighbors.
So had she.
The criminality of what they'd all witnessed was irrefutable. Though scant few of them could count higher than their fingers, nobody needed mathematics to figure out that the people being killed vastly outnumbered the men doing the butchering, and yet, the murderers did as they pleased. They walked away arrogantly and without the slightest fear of punishment.
That made Fitz fear that her lofty thoughts about right and wrong and her ideas about what could and couldn't change were rare thoughts to have in Brighton. Most people were sheep, and apparently always would be. Some were wolves. Fewer still were shepherds.
Fitz had to ask herself which she was. She was no sheep, though she'd been behaving as one her whole life. She thought she was a shepherd, but she wondered whether all wolves saw themselves as shepherds, as well.
All of those questions needed answers before Fitz could decide what to do next: climb the wall and run, more like a rabbit than a sheep, or stay in Brighton and accept that she'd always be a sheep until the day that Tenbrook slaughtered her. Or maybe she'd put on a wolf's hide to do the things necessary and then, at the end, rise above it all like a shepherd.
The girls continued staring at her, waiting for her to tell them what to do next and how to avoid the pyre now that they were all complicit in murdering Housemother Mary. Fitz needed an answer for them, and she needed a plan.
Chapter 94: Fitzgerald
"We need more women," Fitz said, looking around at the others.
The House women and the eighteen watched her, their hope fighting with the fear in their eyes.
"More women?" Ginger asked, clutching the knife. "How are we going to convince them to join us, after what happened here?"
"Or what happened at the Temple?" Ashley added.
Fitz watched them for a moment. "Maybe we can use that tragedy to our advantage."
"What do you mean?" Ginger asked.
"Tenbrook's hope is that by destroying the Temple and The Word, he'll prevent anyone from meeting together. What he doesn't realize is that for every person who died, many more are affected."
"Affected by fear. He wants to frighten everyone into submission," Ginger argued. "How can we get them to listen to us?"
Fitz paced Mary's room. Although it was larger and cleaner than the others, the smell of men's sweat seeped through the doorway, reminding Fitz of the years she'd spent there.
"We need to use the pain of what we went through to bring us together again. Not just the women in this room, but as many women as we can convince to join us from Brighton. We all know women in town, many of whom lost people in what happened at the Temple. We need to find them, and we need to use our experience to fight Tenbrook. We need to recruit and lead them."
"What experience do us Barren Women have?" Ginger asked, throwing her hands in the air. "All we've ever done is lie on our backs, taking whatever coins men throw at us, hoping we can avoid a beating."
"That's exactly right," Fitz said, thinking of Mary's body with a grim smile. "Our bodies have been the only things keeping us alive. We've used our bodies to keep us fed, to keep us clothed, to avoid a beating. Those in The House have done whatever Mary has demanded. The rest of you have done whatever Brighton, the Elders, or your husbands have demanded. Maybe it's time we used our bodies for ourselves for once."
After a pause, Ginger nodded. "I'm sure the others will agree, once you've told it that way."
"Listen," Fitz said. "I have a plan."
Chapter 95: Tenbrook
Tenbrook laughed out loud at the joke Sinko had just made. As the other captains laughed, Tenbrook said, "You've been hiding this sense of humor all along. I didn't know you were a funny man."
A girl came in and leaned between Captain Sinko and the man next to him, filling his cup with wine. He waved her away. "Enough, girl." He looked at Tenbrook. "I talk too much when I have too much wine in me."
"As do we all," the captain across the table said.
Tenbrook leaned back in his chair and patted his stomach as he looked at a slab of roasted pork on the table. "I can't eat anymore."
The captains all stopped eating and looked at Tenbrook.
"Eat up," Tenbrook told them. "Stuff yourselves. This is a night for us to sit on the laurels of our conquest and partake in the pleasures awarded the victors."
"Pleasures?" Sinko asked. "Is there to be more than food and wine?"
"Here, here!" another captain agreed.
They were talking about women, of course. When men got drunk on victory and wine, every vague phrase alluded to a single thing: women.
"Let us finish our dinner first," said Tenbrook. "For dessert, I have a collection of virgins for you to choose from. Take one if you like, two if you prefer. Three if you're man enough to put them all to good use."
"I speak for us all, General," said Sinko, "when I say I hope you have three each."
"Perhaps," said Tenbrook with a sly smile. The smile was a mask. He did have a dozen virgins in a room in the back of the house—all young, all pretty—but none of them were for him. He'd grown bored with young virgins, their timidity, they're begging, their fear of his manhood. Sure, it was fun at first, but the fun of seeing a woman's fear just by dropping his trousers had grown old. His tastes at the moment were for women who were greedy for a man, tough women who thought they could tame him, women with fire in their eyes, who didn't accept the fear until they earned it.
That's the sort of women Tenbrook wanted.
Perhaps he'd ride to The House of Barren Women later and treat one of those wenches to an unforgettable night.
A guard barged into the room, anxious, out of breath, trailing another guard behind him in a similar state.
Tenbrook, like the other officers at the table, hadn't lived long enough to rise in the ranks because they reacted slowly to danger. Each of them jumped to their feet, hands on the hilts of their swords or daggers.
"What is the danger?" Tenbrook asked calmly, though he was already tense. In the back of his mind, he hoped it was a revolt. He relished the idea of a battle—even a battle against wretched peasants with pitchforks. That would be so much better than eating and drinking himself into a coma.
The first guard pointed through the open doors behind him. "In the square, sir. I think they're worshiping you. You have to see for yourself."
Chapter 96: Tenbrook
A thousand women danced in the square, lit by rows of fires, not wearing a stitch of clothing, moving in a slow rhythm around the Cleansing platform in the center. They sang a sad, slow song that the worshipers used to drone in the Temple after one of Winthrop's bleak, haranguing sermons. But the women had changed the words. Where the song had contained "THE WORD", the women had changed it to "TENBROOK".
"TENBROOK is life."
"TENBROOK is the answer."
"TENBROOK guide us."
"TENB
ROOK make us strong."
"TENBROOK give us children so that we may serve even after our death."
All around the square, Tenbrook saw his men on their backs on the ground, in various states of dress, with their manly needs being tended to by more than one girl.
More men ran into the square from their barracks, eager to participate. Women who caressed them like a lover, or grasped them like a whore, quickly engulfed them. Some men pushed their way through the first women that came to meet them, walking instead among the dancing worshipers, looking for particular ones, perhaps the favorites that they'd been eyeing in the market, hoping their husbands would never return from Blackthorn's folly so they could claim them, or perhaps just looking for a girl with the right color of hair or eyes.
As titillating as the debauchery in the square was, Tenbrook's attention was focused on the Cleansing platform. Around it's edge knelt a dozen naked women, all watching the center, where one woman stood with her arms in the air, surrounded by three others. The one at the center screamed each time one of the others swung a short horsewhip across her bare skin. Front, back, it didn't matter, the whipped girl's skin was crisscrossed with red welts and blood.
"Shall I muster the men?" Captain Sinko asked, looking around warily.
"Would they listen?" Tenbrook laughed, knowing they would once he got their attention. But why?
He continued watching the girl on the platform cry out each time the leather found her skin. He saw the glistening of tears down her face, and he saw her pain as she cried for her tormentors to stop. As he watched, another fair skinned girl with red hair was dragged up the steps and shoved to the center of the platform. The whipped one, disappointingly, was led away.
The three with the whips all took a few moments to curse the redhead between them. When they finished that part of their new ritual, or punishment, or whatever it was, the redhead reached her hands to the sky and looked at the stars overhead. One of the whips lashed her across her back, and the redhead screamed. Another lashed across her belly, and the third whipped her legs.
Tenbrook told Sinko, "Let the men have their pleasure. This is the reward of stone-hearted men who do what they must. We earn the adulation of the weak." Tenbrook left his captains and guards and strode toward the center platform.
Chapter 97: Fitzgerald
Kneeling on the edge of the platform with her head forward, and her black hair hanging around her face to keep it hidden in dark shadow, Fitz watched Tenbrook walk through the slowly undulating women as he came to the steps at the bottom of the platform.
Tenbrook looked on as the three tormentors whipped the redhead, taking slow turns, letting the girl feel the pain of each lash, and forcing her to anticipate the burn of the next one.
Each time the leather cracked across the girl's skin, Tenbrook seemed to inch a step closer to pleasure.
He stepped up and the girls near the stairs reached out to drag their fingertips softly down his legs.
Fitz watched Tenbrook stop at the top of the stairs. Most of his men were in the square, enveloped in women who couldn't seem to get enough of them. More of Tenbrook's men, perhaps the last of them, walked or ran into the square, following their lust.
Coming to an unspoken decision, Tenbrook turned toward the whipped redhead and crossed to the center of the platform.
He reached out and clasped a hand around her throat and squeezed.
The girl's eyes went wide as she choked. Unable to breathe, she grasped Tenbrook's wrist and tried to pull it away. But she was much too weak to resist Tenbrook's strength.
He slapped her across the face. Blood spilled from her split lip. Tenbrook pulled her to him, releasing her throat and grabbing a handful of her hair to guide her face toward his. Nose to nose, he held her there for a moment, staring into her wide, fearful eyes as she cried. Tenbrook pushed closer and licked the blood from her mouth as he engulfed her mouth with his own, grinding his face into to hers, taking pleasure from the pain.
The tormentors had their hands on Tenbrook, moving up and down his back, rubbing his thighs and pushing their hands down the front of his trousers.
Tenbrook responded by touching what he wanted to touch, kissing what he wanted to kiss, and letting the women slowly disrobe him.
All around the platform, the women who were not engaged with a man chanted and danced.
The last of Tenbrook's clothes fell away as the women greedily tried to be the first to please him. They laid him on his back on the platform. Tenbrook, still focused on the redhead with the bloody welts on her skin, pulled her down on top of him. She didn't struggle to get away. She mounted him, sitting straight up.
"Whip her," Tenbrook ordered, "while she pleases her master."
One of the tormentors slapped her horsewhip across the redhead's skin, and Tenbrook seemed immensely pleased.
Fitz got to her feet and walked to a spot at Tenbrook's feet, where he'd not be able to see her with the straddling redhead blocking his view. Fitz got down on her knees as one of the other girls passed her Tenbrook's sword, which the girl had stolen from his scabbard while Tenbrook's attention was focused on the redhead.
Fitz took the cold hilt in her hands and held the blade straight up in front of her as she looked around the square, catching eye after eye of the women out there. They saw the blade. They understood what was to come next.
Fitz lowered the sword and pointed it straight ahead between Tenbrook's legs, the tip not more than a few inches from his crotch. She thought about Franklin's mashed skull in Tenbrook's upraised fist as Tenbrook taunted all the worshippers in the Temple, all the women too weak, too afraid to stand up to him.
With all the anger from that moment blazing in her mind, she pushed the long sword up through Tenbrook's pelvis, into his abdomen, skewering his chest.
Tenbrook's legs locked straight out in a spasm, and his scream was immediately muffled by one of the tormentors pressing a cloth over his mouth.
The redhead hopped off of Tenbrook, giving Fitz a view of Tenbrook still lying on his back, with his shocked face looking up at her. The tip of the blade came out through his shoulder to the right of his head as she drove the sword all the way to the hilt.
Tenbrook gagged, and his eyes went wide and white. He tried to move in jerks. He raised his arms and grasped his chest as blood poured out of his mouth. He kicked weakly as Fitz let go of the hilt, standing up, throwing her hair back to give Tenbrook a good look at her face before he died.
"For Franklin," she said.
Tenbrook's struggles stopped, and he lay lifeless at her feet. She looked around the square to see the glint of silver knives and swords, taken from scabbards and pockets, wherever the men had left them before they succumbed to temptation. All of the blades turned red.
Men yelled and gasped. Some screamed and struggled, but in the space of moments, it was over. The dancing stopped. The singing ceased. All or nearly all of Tenbrook's men were dead.
Ginger stood up, still bloody from being whipped, her mouth still red from Tenbrook's brutality. She put her arm around Fitz. "You've done it."
Fitz put an arm around Ginger and another around Ashley, who'd just come up beside her, and she said, "We've done it."
Ashley asked, "What now?"
Fitz looked at all the new butchers of Brighton, naked and staring back at her, many with bloody hands and others with their victim's blood on their faces and chests. A few chanted, "LADY FITZ. LADY FITZ. LADY FITZ." Others joined in until the voice of every woman in the square had merged into one. Fitz looked across the square at Blackthorn's empty house, now her house.
Fitz said, "We have a new home to sleep in tonight."
Chapter 98: Oliver
After following the coast for so many days, they'd all gotten used to the rhythm of flat, inlet-broken ground and bays, both of which they had to work their way around. Sometimes the rivers flowed into the ocean and forced them to find a way across. The terrain was generally easy, but the farther they walked, the
hillier it grew, with more and more cliffs standing above the surf.
"When was the last time we saw a demon?" Oliver asked.
Melora, who'd taken to walking along with Oliver, said, "Three days ago, right?" She called out to Jingo. "Jingo, when was the last time we saw a demon?"
Jingo stopped and took a deep breath. "Three days, I think." He looked over at Beck. "I haven't done this much walking in a long, long time." He walked over and sat down on the trunk of a tree that had fallen in the shade of another.
Melora and Oliver joined him.
Beck said, "I'll let Ivory know we're going to rest." He jogged along the trail, nearing the crest of a hill upon which they'd been walking while Jingo drank from his canteen.
"Where do you think all the demons have gone?" Oliver asked.
Jingo shook his head and looked around. "I used to journey up and down the coast and into the mountains when I was young."
"In an airplane?" Oliver asked.
"No." Jingo laughed. "I meant after the fall. I stayed in the city for three or four years before I ventured out the first time." Jingo frowned and shook his head. "Things were still bad then. I was nearly killed."
"What happened?" Melora asked.
"I was shot."
"Shot?" Oliver asked. "What does that mean."
"Remember when you asked about guns?" Jingo asked.
Both Melora and Oliver nodded.
"To put it simply, a gun is a metal tube about that size." Jingo held up a finger. "Using Tech Magic, guns took a small piece of metal and expelled it from the end of the barrel going unimaginably fast. That's what made the thunder noise and the fire that you talked about in your legends, Oliver. A tiny piece of metal did the killing." Jingo held up one of his little fingers and pointed at the tip. "The metal was about that big, mostly."
