The Miscreant (An Assassin's Blade Book 2)

by Justin DePaoli

  I lunged for Rovid, tackling him. We both went head over heels. He cursed and tried to wriggle free as we skidded to a stop.

  “Stop fighting me,” I whispered.

  “Astul?”

  “Yeah, I’m your guardian fucking angel. Imagine.”

  “How’d you—”

  “Doesn’t matter. Play along, got it?” I lifted him to his feet. Holding him by the back of his bare neck, I announced to Silma, “He’s my prisoner now.”

  The apparent patrician of Crokdaw Village was holding the flower from her hair. Petal by petal fluttered to the ground in her crushing hand.

  “I wish to inspect the rope,” she told the men in the tree. “Bring it to me.”

  Shit. I looked for Vayle, but didn’t see her. I coughed into my shoulder and whispered to Rovid, “Stick by the tree.” Way I figured, if Silma sicced Red Eye and his men on us, we could use the tree to deflect the arrows. Had no idea what to do after that, though. Run? But to where? Open space surrounded us, except for the forest behind the village. Getting there wasn’t really an option.

  “This was cut,” Silma said, holding both the rope and the detached noose. “Intentionally.”

  I feigned a smile. “I assure you the reaper will be executed nonetheless. He won’t escape my possession this time.”

  “No,” Silma said. “You will stay. Until our investigation is complete.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve places to be. People to see. I’m a busy man, after all.”

  From the corners of my eyes, the emptiness of the surrounding fields scrambled to life with lurking figures. Suddenly Rovid and I were not men, but bull’s-eyes.

  A tremor quaking from the center of Crokdaw Village suspended their approach. On horseback, Vayle barreled down the sloping terrain. She zigzagged unpredictably, dashing between and around sailing iron tips. As arrows were readied and nocked again, she aimed the chest of her mare straight, searing a blur into the air as the horse galloped toward the tree.

  Someone screamed, a cry steeped in blood and fury. A barrage of arrows rained down upon us, just as I’d shoved Rovid and hit the dirt. With bits of mud in my mouth and eyes, I clawed out clumps of grass and gouged visible tree roots, dragging myself to the rear of the tree.

  “Get up!” Vayle shouted. A pair of hooves appeared before me. I looked up and saw my commander.

  Rovid and I scurried. I sliced the rope binding his hands.

  Fwwhip went an arrow, somewhere past my head. Another sunk into the tree, splashing shattered bark into my hair.

  I threw a foot into the saddle strap, swung my arm up. Vayle grasped me by the elbow, helping me onto the saddle behind her. Soon as Rovid got on safely, Vayle clicked her heels.

  My hands were fastened around the waist of my commander, and Rovid’s around mine. The mare galloped valiantly, despite the heavy load. She’d not last long under this weight, but hopefully long enough to whisk us away from Crokdaw Village.

  Another fwwhip. Followed by a scream.

  “Shit,” I said, upon turning around.

  “What is it?” Vayle asked, leaning hard into the saddle.

  “Er. Nothing. It’s fine. We’re… keep her going hard.”

  “It’s not fine!” Rovid hollered. “I’m naked, I’ve got a fucking arrow sticking out of my arm, and everything hurts!”

  That was all true. It likely wasn’t fine, he was naked, and he did have an arrow sticking out of his arm. And everything probably did hurt. But all in all, the outcome was a whole hell of a lot better than what it could’ve been. We put Crokdaw Village far behind us, and it didn’t appear Red Eye and his archers were tracking us. Yet.

  After slowing to a trot for a few minutes, I told Vayle it’d be a good idea to find somewhere to regather our senses. She agreed, and we stopped off in a grassy hollow.

  A milky froth slathered the horse’s chest. Exhaustion would take her if we didn’t figure out a way to lessen her load. A mare like her, she could reliably carry only one rider at a time. Two for a short distance. But three? Only if the need was dire, which it had been.

  “Sit,” Vayle told Rovid.

  He touched the feathered fletching and grimaced. “Ugh. It feels like it’s in my bone.”

  “Unlikely,” Vayle said. “Your arm would be in far worse shape.” She examined the reaper, her arms crossed. “This will bleed badly when we remove it.” Blood had oozed out initially, staining his skin in bright red swaths, but slowed to a trickle since then. The iron head plugged it like a patch of mud to a hole in the wall.

  “Then don’t remove it,” Rovid said. “Just… leave it be. I’ll get along fine.”

  “You’ll die eventually,” I said.

  “We all die eventually.”

  Great. Apparently maiming brought out the philosopher in him. “Next time,” I said, “don’t run away, and this won’t happen.”

  He cocked his head. “What exactly, pray tell, should I have done? Wait around on Mizridahl till the reaped came through? You were in disarray after you saw those ships come in. Then I wake up at your Hole or whatever you call it and find you’ve left. I thought I was fucked, that everything went to shit. My only option was to find sanctuary in Amortis.” His black eyes seemed to cloud over like a stormy night sky. “Which I admittedly bungled.”

  “Yes, you did,” I said, in an effort to lighten the mood. He took it the wrong way.

  “Story of my life.” He rested his forehead on his knuckles. “I’m a paragon of fuckups.”

  Vayle walked away, back to the horse. She seemed to be inspecting the mare’s tail.

  “We all have our miscalculations,” I said.

  A lopsided smile touched Rovid’s lips. “Yeah, sure. Some bigger than others. I shouldn’t have been a reaper.”

  “No one should be a reaper.”

  “Thanks, but… you don’t understand. You couldn’t.”

  “Never mind,” Vayle said. “This won’t work.”

  “What won’t work?” I asked.

  The horse’s tail fell from her hands. “We’ll need to tie his wound off to stem blood flow. We’ve rope in the bags, but that would be painful. I thought braiding horsehair into a long strand and tying it around his arm would allow him to be more comfortable, but that won’t work either.”

  “Then use the rope,” I said.

  Vayle shook her head. “If we don’t find supplies to suture the wound, the rope — or anything we use — will cause his arm to… I’m not certain the proper term for it. But it will die.”

  Fair point, there. Tourniquets are lovely little lifesavers, but not when you’re wearing them around for three days straight. Then they become limb killers.

  “The Prim can’t be far,” I said. “We walked from there to here in two days. Think we can find a needle there? Some string?”

  “Good chance of it,” Rovid said. “It’s due west of the village.”

  “Right,” I said, spinning around. “Which way’s west?”

  Rovid got to his feet. “We came out that way,” he muttered, gazing into the distance that sheathed the village. “So the Prim ought to be…” He clicked his fingers. “That way.”

  “Then let’s walk,” Vayle said. She untied the saddlebags from the horse, slung one over her shoulder and threw me the other. “The reaper rides.”

  “Appreciate it,” he said. He ambled to the mare, one hand steadying the shaft of the arrow so it wouldn’t bend inside his arm.

  “You can pay it back by not dying on us,” I said.

  The Prim met us in the morning of our second day of travels. Its monstrosities of buildings and the complexities of its streets had taken my commander aback. The city had also left myself and Rovid in wonder, but for other reasons.

  Wreckage from wagons and carts no longer lay splintered in the streets. Glass from shattered windows had been swept up. The fine layers of dust and dirt lying atop the cobbles had vanished.

  Wheelbarrows full of books sat in the empty streets.

  Vayl
e stopped abruptly. Her head rose high into the air, eyes tracking up the face of the colorful structure I’d named Big-Ass Building Number One.

  Ebon broke the plane of her sheath. “We’re not alone,” she said.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  A glint of sunlight passed between doughy clouds, striking the building like a match. Up it went, into a blaze of scarlet red. Behind a pane of glass, murkiness. A shadow. It vanished for several seconds, then reappeared behind another pane, one floor lower.

  Whoever — or whatever — was in there was coming down. I gave Rovid the extra sword I’d brought along, hoping this time he wouldn’t give me a reason to demand it back.

  “Get behind there,” I said, motioning to one of the many wheelbarrows scattered around. My hip crashed into the stack of books inside, displacing them on the ground. One of the titles read The Workings of Blood.

  The three of us crouched behind a single wheelbarrow. Rovid had to sit his ass on the cobbles so the fletching of the arrow embedded in his arm didn’t stick up like a bannerman’s flag. His wound had turned black.

  “Looks like it’s only one person,” I said.

  “Unless it’s a trap,” Vayle pointed out.

  “I’m not discounting that, which is why we need to let him or her or it come to us. Take it by surprise.”

  “What if it’s Occrum?” Rovid asked.

  I hadn’t an answer for that. The reaper opened his mouth to speak again, but I silenced him with a finger in the air. Something click-clacked across the cobbles.

  Vayle and I communicated silently. She’d take the right side, I’d take the left. Rovid would sit patiently in the middle and keep his bloody arrow from calling the enemy to us.

  Click-clack. Click-clack. The sound neared. An echo now, boring into my skull. I held my breath so I could hear it more clearly, gauge its distance from us.

  Click-clack. Click…

  It stopped. A chill scurried across my neck. Suddenly, I felt less like a predator and more like prey hiding in tall grass, hoping my would-be killer couldn’t quite sense its dinner hiding right beneath it.

  I kept my body still, but swept my eyes over to Vayle, who noticed.

  Silently, I counted. One. Two. Three.

  We sprung out from behind the wheelbarrow, swords in guard position. My teeth were gnashed, muscles flexed, ready to strike ebon into a belly or across a throat.

  Instead, my knees went all wobbly on me and my hands fell, holding my blade listlessly.

  “Lysa?”

  She smiled, teeth curling back her bottom lip. “Were you expecting someone else?”

  A stupid grin stuck itself to my face and I couldn’t have wiped the damn thing off if I’d tried. I hastily sheathed my sword and grabbed hold of Lysa like… well, like she was my own daughter. And I held her by the back of her hair as I hugged her, and my body softened in a way I’d rarely ever felt. It was the kind of feeling where the very fibers of your skin tingle, and you get flush in the face and a little hot behind the eyes.

  She pulled away after a long embrace, but I kept my palms on her cheeks, disbelief holding them there.

  “I thought Occrum had you,” I said.

  “He thought he did too. But I’m slippery, and he didn’t expect that.” She looked at Vayle. “Hi, Vayle. It’s nice to see you again, and safely! And… Rovid?”

  “Lysa,” the reaper said, bowing his head slightly.

  Lysa scrunched up her nose. “Is that an arrow in your arm?”

  “It is.”

  She grabbed him by the wrist. “Come on, come on. We have to get that taken care of. It’ll get really nasty if you let it fester.” She whisked him away into Big-Ass Building Number One.

  “I can’t fucking believe it,” I told Vayle, that dumb grin still giving the world a glimpse of a happy assassin.

  Vayle smiled awkwardly, almost as if she was ill at ease. She patted my back, and together we followed Lysa and Rovid into the building that now sparkled like polished amethysts.

  The innards of the building were vastly changed since the last time I’d visited. At least the first floor. Rugs stitched with intricate designs covered the floor, clear of wood chips and splinters from desks and tables and chairs that had been torn asunder. A romantic hazel glow seemed to suffuse the room, born from spheres affixed to the wall. How they were illuminated, I did not know. Not by fire, that was certain.

  Lysa had Rovid laid out on a long metal table. She then riffled through a cupboard and produced a small clay bowl, a pestle, and what appeared to be several herbs in tiny drawstring bags.

  “Do you have water?” she asked.

  I dug into my saddlebag and offered her a skin. She squeezed a small amount into the clay bowl and handed it back to me.

  “What’s all this about?” I asked.

  “Medicine. Remember the maggots?”

  “The maggots. Of course.”

  She took a pinch of various herbs and added them to the water. “Wolf’s leaf isn’t the only thing that kills the maggots. Lots of stuff does. I’ve read all about it.”

  “Hence the books,” Vayle said.

  “Yup,” Lysa said. She began grinding the water and herbs into a thick paste. “I’m hoping to make a library here.” She looked up from her bowl. “I hope it’s big enough. There are lots of books in the world.”

  Er, a library? That seemed a strange passion to take on in the midst of the dead raising hell back in the living realm. But maybe she hid here because she didn’t feel safe traveling alone. She’d probably escaped Occrum’s fortress, come through the gateway at the cove and sought refuge in the Prim. I’d ask her later. She seemed rather busy with ensuring Rovid didn’t die from maggots, or whatever they were.

  With her paste sufficiently ground, she fetched thin string and a needle. Then it was on to the part of the process Rovid probably dreaded.

  Lysa found him some shredded cloth she’d swept up with all the litter. She made it into a ball and told him to bite down on it. She and Vayle held him down, and I pulled.

  Savants and I have little in common, but I had dislodged arrows from flesh before. It was never a pleasant experience, and this one was one of the worst.

  It’s not so much the wet, sopping slurps the iron head makes as you move it back and forth, loosening its grip on muscle and tendon. Nor the blood that comes surging up and out. It’s the cries. They’re loud and they’re sharp. The kind of cries prisoners make in the darkest dungeons, as their torturers hammer away at their fingers, snapping bone, flattening knuckles.

  The projectile came out with a deviant sucking sound. I let it fall onto the ground, along with blood that gathered on it like syrup.

  Rovid was breathing hard, his black eyes bigger than I’d ever seen them. Lysa moved into position, pressing cloth against the wound.

  “That hurts,” Rovid said flatly. “But not nearly as bad as that fucking thing hurt coming out. Oh, gods. Gods, gods, gods.”

  Once Lysa stymied the flow of blood, she slathered on her herb paste, then sutured him up.

  “All done,” she said finally. “I’ll give you some medicine to take with you. You’ll have to smash it into a paste like I did, but if you rub it on every day, it should keep the festering at bay.”

  “Well, you can keep an eye on him,” I said. “It’s due time we get you out of here. I read your notes.”

  Lysa brightened. “They got to you, then? Good. Listen. Serith and Nilly are still alive. Not my parents, but the reaped I’d been researching. I stowed them away inside the library.”

  I clapped my hands. “I knew the good luck would start pouring in hot and fast. Always the optimist here.” I winked at my commander, whose mouth formed a frown. “All right, let’s go. And you can tell me all about how you tricked Occrum on the way out of this place.”

  Strangely, no one seemed to be exceptionally pleased. I understood Rovid’s dissatisfaction. Bastard just got an arrow yanked out of his arm. But Vayle and Lysa — they should’ve be
en jumping for joy. We finally had a way to end this mess.

  “Let’s go,” I said again. “Unless you believe there’s a reason to wait. It better be a good reason, because I’m fairly certain Mizridahl’s in the process of being sacked by dead things.”

  “Astul,” Lysa said, her eyes tumbling to the ground. She folded her lips in, then out. “I can’t go with you.”

  “Why not?”

  Lysa brought her hands together, massaging them deeply. She looked at Vayle, who seemed to give her a reaffirming nod, as if she knew something I was not privy to.

  “I’m… I mean.” She closed her eyes as she took a big breath, then opened them upon releasing it. “Astul, I’m dead. I’m part of this world now.”

  My temples throbbed. I clapped my thighs and tried to make a word or two with a voice buried beneath the inundation of disbelief and… well, an emotion I do not like to court.

  “You knew,” I said to Vayle. “How?”

  “It was obvious,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” Lysa said. “It was the only way I could outwit Occrum.”

  The hits kept coming. “Back up,” I said. “You’re telling me this was all a ruse, then? The notes, the plea for help. You killed yourself in Lith? Occrum never got his hands on you?”

  Her face turned up in a sideways smile. “I thought you’d be proud. There was only one way out, and I took it. Think what would have happened if he’d captured me. I’m tough, Astul — I am. But I’m not invincible. He would have broken me, and I refused to take that chance. And it wasn’t a ruse. You would never have found Serith or Nilly without coming here.”

  Maybe another time I’d have half a mind to be proud. But not now. Not here. Not seeing her like this. She didn’t look any different physically, sure, but knowing the girl I was talking to would never again set foot in my realm, how are you supposed to imagine that? Be at peace with it?

  “You’re certain they are safe?” Vayle asked.

  “Serith and Nilly? Absolutely. It’s kind of weird, dying. You don’t… I hope I’m not breaking a weird metaphysical rule by telling you this, but you don’t go anywhere right that instant. Your eyes close, and you feel a strange calm wash over you. Then, you’re there. Over your body. And you hear a voice, feel something or someone beckoning you. But I waited. I waited until the reapers who stormed the library left, and they were there for a while. They turned up every shelf and nook they could find. But they never got their hands on Serith or Nilly. I hid them in a special place. After the reapers went away, I gravitated toward the voice.”