Lady Of Regret (Book 2)

by James A. West

  “Gods and demons,” Loro murmured.

  Rathe nodded, too stunned by what he had just seen to speak. Then he started violently, and looked down at his friend. “Blessed Ahnok, you’re alive!”

  “Did you expect otherwise?” Loro said, offering a weak grin.

  Before Rathe could kneel at his friend’s side, Yiri shoved him out of the way, muttering under her breath. “It worked,” she kept saying, sounding delighted and shocked, all at once.

  “What was that?” Rathe asked, uneasy.

  “If I am to help,” she snapped, “then stand aside.”

  Rathe backed off. Horge seemed to spring from the ground at his feet. Weariness and concern for Loro could not quite overshadow the ratty man’s abrupt return, or the latest revelation of his sister’s talents. “Soon,” he said to Horge, voice menacing, “we must have ourselves a long conversation.”

  Horge gave him a fretful look, then reluctantly nodded. “Aye.”

  “We have to leave here with haste,” Yiri said, helping Loro to his feet. He looked better, despite the blood covering his face and neck.

  “Tell me why?” Rathe demanded. He was finished being put off and lied to. Everyone he had met since crossing the Gyntors seemed guilty of one or the other, and sometimes both.

  “Other riders will come,” Yiri said, scanning the dark forest.

  “Who are they?”

  Yiri opened her mouth to speak, then pressed her lips together.

  Horge answered for her. “The Wardens of Tanglewood.”

  “Unknown grace has spared us a fate worse than death,” Yiri added. For the first time, Rathe detected an emotion besides scorn or anger in her voice. Now he heard fear.

  Rathe said, “When we are safely away, I want answers.”

  Yiri faced him, ratty hair parted round one squinted black eye. “Once given, your wants might change.”

  Chapter 27

  Nesaea peeked through the door’s small, barred window. She could just see the curve of the guard’s jaw. Far as she could tell, he had not moved since she came awake in the dim cell. She had hoped he would become careless, but that now seemed unlikely.

  Mind made up, a rising sense of urgency filled her. She backed well away from the door, raised a finger to her lips for quiet. Fira watched from one corner of the cramped cell, as Nesaea swiftly unlaced her breeches, reached into a pocket sewn in the leg, and withdrew a set of lock picks. “We have to get out of here.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait until later in the night?” Fira asked. Like Nesaea, she bore numerous bruises and scrapes, but seemed no worse for wear.

  “We’ll make our escape in the small hours of the night, just before dawn,” Nesaea assured Fira, despite neither of them knowing what the present hour was in their windowless cell. “For now, I want to make sure we can flee, when the time comes.”

  “We don’t even know where we are. What if we end up in the hands of those—” Fira faltered “—those dead folk?”

  That was as close as either of them had come to mentioning those who had beset them, or the pale woman who had put a halt to the attack. Nesaea had avoided thinking about what had happened. Now that the subject had been broached, she had no choice.

  She knelt before the door and, with a delicate touch, began working the lock. “After we get out, we’ll need weapons.”

  “Blades didn’t help much the last time we used them,” Fira said with a shudder.

  Nesaea felt a tumbler go with a soft click. She pressed the picks deeper, wiggling, probing. “We’ll have to stay hidden.”

  “A fine plan, if we can stay out of sight. What if not?”

  An idea came, but Nesaea was reluctant to say it. “There is a way, if hard.”

  Fira glanced out the barred window. “Well, have out with it.”

  Nesaea considered the young woman she had cut the hand from and then beheaded, the same who had then blindly wrapped her remaining hand around Nesaea’s throat. “Cut them to pieces. Anything to slow them down, and keep them from coming after us.”

  Fira shuddered again. “That didn’t work so well before.”

  “Our butchery was not thorough enough. That’s the key, and our only hope,” Nesaea said, as another tumbler went.

  “A lot of extra work, cutting folk to bits.” Fira’s face contorted at the ghastly nature of the conversation. After scrubbing her palms over her eyes, she went on. “Work like that takes time. So much time, I expect they’ll overrun us.”

  Nesaea tamped down her rising irritation. Fira was just trying to be helpful. “I—”

  She cut off at the sound of approaching footsteps. Nesaea backed away from the door, hastily stuffing the picks down the front of her breeches. The naked steel was cold again her skin, but not as cold as the tight knot that formed in her gut when the lock rattled and the door swung inward. The pale woman stepped into the cell, and calmly regarded them. Fair, slight, and golden-haired, she did not look dangerous. Yet she had commanded the dead folk, and they had heeded her. She spoke without preamble.

  “Why have you come to Ravenhold, when both fools and the wise shun this fortress and its holdings?”

  Nesaea forced herself to remain calm as the guard moved behind the woman, the visor of his helm a black, light-devouring slit. “I am Nesaea Vonterel, mistress of the Maidens of the Lyre.” She avoided adding Lady to her name, aware of how foolish it would sound, here and now. Nesaea glanced at the fire-haired woman behind her. “This is Fira Timon, a dear friend, and sister of the lyre.”

  The pale woman blinked slowly, as if bewildered by the necessity of introductions. “Why are you here, Nesaea?”

  Nesaea might have invented a reason, and it would not have been the first time she had hedged, but could see no point in it now. “I seek my father.” Saying it aloud made her think of Brother Jathen. If any doubt remained that he had wanted to be rid of them, it had vanished.

  “Your father?” the woman said, clear blue eyes widening in surprise. “Why ever would you expect to find him here?”

  “I was told he came to Ravenhold.”

  “Who claimed such a thing?”

  “A cockless son of a one-eyed whore, that’s who,” Fira snapped.

  Nesaea shushed her with a sharp gesture. “Brother Jathen of Skalos sent us.”

  The woman’s features stiffened. “I do not know what he tucks into his breeches,” she allowed with a faint smirk, “but he is, without doubt, a deceitful bastard of a man. Long have I dealt with his consorts, those who seek to steal that which belongs in Ravenhold. Twice in so many days, he has sent strangers into my midst. My patience with him and his order is quickly coming to an end.”

  Nesaea had heard words spoken in anger. She was not so sure she had ever heard them spoken with such hate. Distantly, she wondered who else Jathen had sent to Ravenhold.

  The woman gave herself a little shake. “You mentioned your father. Tell me of him.”

  “Sytheus Vonterel,” Nesaea said. “He’s a man of many talents, but for the most part a performer of illusion. Last I saw him, he was portly, middling height. A man given to laughter.”

  “I know of this man.”

  “Where is he?” Nesaea asked, heart beating heavily in her chest.

  “Your father died in the Tanglewood, cut to bloody pieces before I could end the slaughter.”

  A hand fluttered to Nesaea’s mouth, stifling a moan. For the longest time after the raiders had destroyed her family, she had believed Sytheus died, the same as her mother. She had concealed the misery of that belief deep inside her, used it to fuel her resolve in getting free of her former master, to escape Giliron and begin a far different life than her mother and father had imagined for her. That misery, once a bleeding rip in her soul, had healed into a hard, nearly invisible scar. And so it had remained, until hearing her father’s name in the Blue Piper.

  Now he was dead again, and she felt like the lost and crying girl she had been, chained in the musty darkness of a ship’s hold, naked and
molested to drunken cheers, destined for a life of unending degradation.

  Their host stepped closer, voice at once soothing and sorrowful, and altogether mesmerizing. “I can ensure grief never again touches you.”

  Nesaea peered at the woman through shimmering tears. Behind her, another guard joined the first, the gap in his visor as dark as the other’s. Shoulder to shoulder, they moved through the doorway, a burnished metal hedge.

  “I want nothing from you, save our release,” Nesaea said, backing away. Her journey was short, given the size of the cell.

  “You will think differently, once you begin to live in the absence of all pain and loss.”

  Fira brushed by Nesaea, jammed her nose against the woman’s. “Stand aside, you pasty bitch—”

  Whatever else she might have said ended when one of the guards struck her a terrible blow, toppling her to the floor. Nesaea leaped into the fray, but the second guard caught her flying hair and jerked her back. The first guard abandoned Fira, slammed his fist against Nesaea’s belly, once and again, battering the breath from her. A third blow landed against her chin, bringing with it a burst of stars.

  Nesaea fell to her knees. Unsteady, she looked to Fira, reached out one quivering hand to her dazed friend.

  The golden woman smiled. “Your struggles and pain will soon come to an end, and you will thank me.”

  Chapter 28

  A cheerless gray dawn found the foursome bleary-eyed and exhausted from lack of sleep, but far from their previous camp. A light mist beaded every surface, sank a damp cold into weary muscles.

  Horge and Yiri knelt on either side of Samba, searching the murky forest for any who might stalk them. Rathe took the moment to hone the nicks from the edge of his sword. Close by, Loro slumped against a tree trunk, bald head swathed in a drab linen bandage.

  “Gods and demons,” the fat man swore, nose wrinkled. “What did you put in this poultice?”

  “Remedies to heal you thrice as fast as without,” Yiri said. “Things,” she added with a savage smirk, “that you’re better off not knowing.”

  “Well,” he grumbled, “it smells like spoiled fish and sheep droppings.”

  “You’re lucky you can smell anything,” Rathe reminded him, pausing to test his blade with a thumb. Be it luck or fate, the blow to Loro’s skull had been with the flat of the sword, rather than the edge, otherwise they would have been burying him, instead of listening to him grumble. Still, Rathe could sympathize, for the same noxious ingredients had been added to the bandages Yiri placed on his shoulder wound. Fetid or not, he felt no pain, and could move as if no sword had cut him.

  Deciding he had waited long enough for Yiri and Horge to begin volunteering information, Rathe sheathed his sword, and pulled a swatch of cloth from his belt. It was a piece of the tabard taken off one of the dead horsemen, before Yiri had burned them all to ash. “Tell me about the men who wear this,” he said, “these Wardens of Tanglewood.”

  Horge recoiled at the Shield and Raven adorning the fabric. Yiri just stared.

  “Answer him,” Loro warned, “or I’ll have out your useless tongues.” If he feared Yiri burning him alive, he gave no sign of it.

  “Tell me of these men,” Rathe insisted. “I cut one in half. He did not make so much as a peep, and his blood was dry as dust. I have seen the like, but only in a crypt.”

  Yiri shook her head slowly. “They were men once, but no more. And, as it happens, they have been dead long years.”

  “Dead men do not ride and fight,” Loro scoffed, gaze rolling toward Rathe. “And to say the man’s blood was dry, makes me think it was you who took a knock on the head, instead of me.”

  Rathe spread the scrap of tabard, poked a finger through a long slit in its center. “You made this with your sword, yet there is no blood. Can you explain that?”

  “My steel never touched flesh,” Loro said.

  “I assure you, it did,” Rathe said, looking to Yiri. “If they are not men, what are they?”

  Yiri twisted her fingers together. Rathe waited. Nervousness did not suit her. After a few moments, she blurted, “The Wardens of Tanglewood are wights.”

  “I fought no ghosts,” Rathe said, “but flesh and bone.” So far, he had avoided thinking about how those dead men and their pieces had continued to move, stopping only after Yiri set them afire.

  “’Tis the power of the Wight Stone which gives them unnatural life. They are soulless beings, controlled by the holder of the stone. Those we fought were turned after they died. Those who are changed while still alive, remain alive, after a fashion.”

  Rathe shook his head in disgust. “And when were you going to tell us we faced such creatures?”

  “’Tis not the creatures you must fear,” Horge said in a rush, “but she who controls them—”

  “Be still!” Yiri shouted.

  “I suggest you remain lively,” Rathe countered.

  Horge looked from Rathe to Yiri. “There is no reason to hide what they will soon learn for themselves.”

  Yiri’s mouth twisted. “Very well. Tell them, for all the good it will do. Tell them, Horge, just who controls the Wardens.”

  Horge fidgeted for a moment, then hung his head. “Lady Mylene of Ravenhold … the Lady of Regret.”

  Rathe clutched Horge’s shoulder. “You claimed she was but myth and legend, and dead besides, with the rest of the fortress.”

  “Unhand him, lout!” Yiri snarled.

  Rathe loosed Horge, but did not relent. “Who is this Lady of Regret?”

  “She hunts the living,” Yiri began, “and makes of them slaves to her will. Ravenhold is a place of death. What matters to Lady Mylene is keeping her illusion alive. She cares naught for the living she destroys.”

  Rathe was not so sure of that, else why warn him away outside of Wyvernmoor? “How do we take the Wight Stone from her?”

  Yiri gave him a wondering look. “You still mean to go on, even after what I have told you?”

  Rathe laughed grimly. “The dead do not frighten me.” The dead walking about killing the living, however, was another matter entirely. He kept that to himself.

  “And lest you forget,” Loro said to Yiri, “there’s all that tripe about his honor. Jathen gave him back his life, and now he seems to think he’s obliged to give Jathen what he wants.”

  Rathe did not waste a breath explaining himself. Honor was one of the few things that could never be stolen, but did require diligent labor to keep ahold of it. “At the camp, before the Wardens attacked, she invited me to come to her, should I survive. I see no reason not to indulge her.”

  “Very well,” Yiri said, eyeing him mistrustfully. “I accept your help.”

  “We will see who accepts help from who,” Rathe said, knowing full well the moment would come when he must deal with Yiri and Horge’s claim to the Wight Stone. He hoped Horge would side with him, but the man seemed beholden to his sister, even at the cost of his own life. Time would tell.

  Chapter 29

  The four companions crouched in the trees a little way off a road that skirted farmlands, and ended at Ravenhold. The fortress perched between the flanks of two densely forested mountains. The setting sun painted its high, pale walls a dusky rose. Flapping Shield and Raven banners soared atop turrets studded with arrow loops. Sentries paced the ramparts, wielding halberds and crossbows. Rising high behind the walls, great towers and keeps, some flat-roofed, others with spires or onion-shaped domes, kept vigil over the surrounding lands.

  “Seems tidy,” Loro said uneasily.

  “And very much alive,” Rathe added.

  Yiri shook her head. “There is naught but death here.”

  “If so,” Rathe questioned, glancing at the farmland north of the fortress, “why do they grow crops? Do wights have a taste for turnips?”

  “’Tis not as it seems,” Yiri insisted. “And, as it happens, wights eat anything they lay hands on, if their master allows it.”

  “How do you mean to get
us in, without losing us our heads in the bargain?” Loro asked.

  Rathe studied the workers in the distant fields, the numerous guards, the open gates leading into the fortress. To Yiri, he said, “You mentioned a stream that flows down from the mountains, and passes through a culvert to water the fortress.”

  “I did,” she said slowly. “I also told you it is guarded by an iron grate, with openings no larger than my fist.”

  “Iron rusts,” Rathe said. “With a bit of leverage, we can pry it open.”

  “If that fails?”

  “Well,” Loro drawled, “the good Lady of Regret did, after all, invite our esteemed Scorpion to come into her presence. Mayhap we should just walk up and hail the gate?”

  Rathe ignored the mockery. If it came to it, he would do just that. For now, secrecy suited him. Last he wanted was to fight off more wights. “If the grate proves too difficult, we’ll look for another way.”

  “Easy as that, is it?” Yiri flared. “Just wander round the fortress, poking and prodding, looking for a hidden way in?”

  “You have a better idea?” Rathe countered.

  Before she could speak, a horn sounded on the curtain wall, and a score of lancers charged from the gates of Ravenhold, the Shield and Raven emblazoned their snowy tabards.

  “They’ve seen us!” Horge cried. “We must be away!”

  “We cannot outrun riders,” Rathe said, drawing his sword and stepping into the road. He was almost glad the problem of getting into Ravenhold had been taken out of his hands. Almost. He glanced back at his companions. “Not all of us, at any rate. I will distract them. The rest of you, run. Stay hidden, and you will escape.” That smacked of a fool’s desperate hope, but he took what hope he could, where and when he found it. “Of course, I’ll expect you to come back for me.”

  Only Loro laughed, and him darkly. “I’ll stand with you, brother, until I cannot.”