Winter's Reach (The Revanche Cycle Book 1)

by Craig Schaefer

  “Oh hey!” he said, waving to Amadeo and tossing back a swallow. “C’mon, join me in a glass.”

  “I think you’ve had enough already. What’s going on here? Where did these soldiers come from?”

  “Knights,” Carlo corrected him, holding up a shaky finger. “Order of St. Friedrich. Pedigreed. Very distinguished.”

  “And why are they replacing your father’s personal guard? Did Bene approve this?”

  “Of course he did! Emperor Theodosius wants to come out and pay his last respects to the old man, maybe stay for a few weeks. And you know, the guy’s a little jumpy. So we thought he’d feel more comfortable, all things considered, if he was surrounded by his own people.”

  “‘We’ meaning who?” Amadeo said. He crossed his arms.

  “Just, you know, people. I spoke to his people; they spoke to me. It’s politics! You don’t need to worry about it, okay? Just…do your priest thing, that’s what you’re good at.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m doing,” Amadeo said, turning on his heel.

  His next stop was Benignus’s suite, but Sister Columba, the elderly woman who served as the pope’s maid and nurse, caught him at the doors.

  “Please don’t wake him,” she said, shaking her head under the forest-green wimple that shrouded her head and wrapped under her chin. “He’s had a frightfully long day as it is, and his cough is back.”

  “Sister, do you know anything about these knights? Did Bene approve of this?”

  Columba looked up the hall before leaning close to Amadeo. She lowered her voice to a whispering rasp.

  “I was in the room when Carlo spoke to him. The Holy Father was half-asleep, and he’d taken his tonic. I tried to tell Carlo, but he wouldn’t listen. He talked and talked, and finally I think his father just nodded and scribbled his name on the writ just to make him leave. But he didn’t say anything about sending the papal guard away. He made it sound like we were just bringing in more guards, not replacing the old ones.”

  Amadeo nodded, remembering a bit of Carlo’s conversation with Lodovico Marchetti. Just get your father on board, and I’ll do the rest.

  “I’ll be back in the morning,” he told her, and headed down the hall.

  He nearly ran into Livia, both of them rounding a corner at once. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days.

  “I owe you an apology,” she said. “I brushed you off last night, when you were telling me about Carlo. I should have paid closer attention.”

  “We both should have,” Amadeo said. He went silent as a stone-faced knight marched past them, patrolling the halls.

  “We should talk,” they both said at the same time.

  Livia led the way to the Remembrance Chapel, a tiny prayer gallery not far from the papal quarters. A few short pews lined up before a wooden carving of the Gardener’s Tree and a spread of votive candles in red stained-glass cups. Deep frescoes adorned the walls, depicting the lives of the saints. Amadeo and Livia stood in the gloom together, their faces lit by the faint and flickering candlelight.

  “It’s Lodovico Marchetti,” Amadeo said. “He’s scheming with Carlo. Pushing him into something bigger and more ambitious than your brother would ever dream up on his own.”

  He told her about his visit to the conference room yesterday, relating the snatch of conversation he’d overheard, and watched Livia’s expression go more and more grim.

  “Gardener’s rain. And now my father’s guard is gone and we’ve got fifty armed strangers in our house.”

  “I told Gallo to hold his men close for as long as he could, but that probably won’t buy us much time. The cardinals are reconvening here, too. I can’t imagine they won’t start squawking when they see Murgardt knights guarding the assembly-hall doors.”

  Livia paced the chapel, rubbing her chin.

  “Maybe that’s the point?” she said. “Lodovico wants to make sure Carlo is our next pope. Maybe it’s some kind of intimidation play, something to throw the cardinals off-balance.”

  Amadeo shook his head. “They’re the emperor’s men. It wouldn’t matter unless Theodosius supports Carlo too. From what I hear about the emperor, he’s barely cognizant of anything outside his own palace. The one thing I think we can be sure of is that they’re not here to hurt your father. To be painfully frank, considering his condition…”

  He paused, but Livia finished the thought. “Assassinating a dying man would be pointless, even if I believed Carlo would do it. And no. He’s a drunken, lecherous buffoon, but he loves my father as much as I do. So. We have a force of Imperial knights who were obviously brought in to render the papal guard powerless. Logic gives us two possible objectives: intimidation or violence.”

  “Right,” Amadeo said. “We’re just missing the who and the why.”

  Livia stopped pacing. She stood at the chapel’s edge, cloaked in shadow, with her back turned to the priest.

  “Amadeo,” she said after a short silence. “Are we agreed that what’s happening here is wrong? That whatever my brother and Lodovico Marchetti are after, it’s not something healthy for the Church or its people?”

  He nodded slowly. “I think so, yes.”

  “And right now, I imagine you’re thinking about the oath my father begged you to swear. An oath to serve my brother, made on soil and water and your own beating heart.”

  “That’s right,” Amadeo said.

  She didn’t move.

  “And you’re wondering,” she said, “if oathbreakers go to the Barren Fields when they die.”

  He swallowed. In the stillness, it sounded as loud as an arrow punching through his heart.

  “The thought had crossed my mind,” he said, “but I don’t believe in a god of absolutes. Sometimes you have to commit a sin for the best of reasons. Maybe the Gardener will forgive us. But if he doesn’t…maybe it doesn’t matter.”

  Livia didn’t say anything. Amadeo saw her hand go up to her face, as if brushing something from her eye. Then she finally turned to face him, walking over to stand at his side before the wooden tree.

  “We are resolved, then,” she said, “to learn the truth, and to do whatever is necessary to protect the Church and her faithful. Whatever is necessary.”

  She held out her hand, palm down. He reached out, after only a moment’s pause, and rested his hand on top of hers.

  A faint cough turned their heads. At the end of the pews, just inside the closed chapel door, Rimiggiu the Quiet watched them from the shadows.

  They froze. The pope’s spy approached, and joined them before the wooden tree. Then he reached out and placed his hand on top of Amadeo’s.

  “I serve the Holy Father,” he said in a soft, sonorous voice. “Sometimes that means doing what I know is best for him, not what he commands.”

  Amadeo nodded slowly. “Well. Two’s a partnership, and three’s a conspiracy.”

  “I call it a good start,” Livia said.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Kimo died in the night.

  Without bedrolls or furs or shelter, the survivors of the Fairwind Muse were left with fire as their only defense against the murderous cold. They’d taken shifts standing watch by the crackling flames, keeping the fire fed while the others huddled close and gathered their strength. Simon’s clothes dried and left him with nothing but a sniffle, but Kimo had spent too much time in the freezing water. They found him at first light, stone dead, staring with glassy eyes at the warmth that came too late to save him.

  Anakoni didn’t talk much after that. Then again, none of them did.

  They reckoned their direction by the morning sun and set off northwest, on a bearing that Anakoni thought would eventually lead them to an old logging road. His instincts were good. After seven hours of slogging through thick woods and ankle-deep snow, they emerged onto a wide road slicing through the forest and pointing the way to Winter’s Reach. The snowdrifts still sucked at their boots with every step, but at least they knew they were on the right path. It was also a
little warmer outside the shadow of the forest canopy. Not by much, but Simon was thankful for tiny blessings.

  You, Simon thought, staring at Felix’s back, are the luckiest bastard in the world.

  Try to shove him overboard? The captain came calling. Try to cut his throat in his sleep or ambush him belowdecks? That feral little Terrai was never more than ten feet away. Try to poison the entire damned ship, and he doesn’t eat the beef.

  Then a genuine sea monster shows up, and he’s one of the only survivors.

  Simon was privately grateful for that. He would never take credit for another man’s kill, even if that ‘man’ had tentacles and a giant maw. If the Elder had eaten Felix, Simon could never have lived it down. Besides, he’d done a fair job of surviving this whole ordeal himself, and that was something to be happy about.

  “Five more hours if we keep a good clip,” Anakoni called out, leading the weary pack as they trudged through the snow. Werner rubbed the back of his hand against his wet nose and coughed himself hoarse. The cold had gotten into his lungs, in the night, and sounded like it was settling in for a good long stay.

  “I had gifts for the mayor in my pack,” Felix said to Mari, the two of them hiking side by side along the logging road. “Just some nice Mirenzei porcelain and silk, something to start us off on the right foot. I hope the Elder chokes on it.”

  “What will you do?” she said.

  “Go in with a handshake and a smile. I can’t let anything stop me, not after all of this. At least I saved my coin purse. Shouldn’t be too hard to book passage on another ship to get the three of us back home.”

  “The three of us?” Mari said.

  He shrugged. “We’ve all got a job to do, and it shouldn’t take either of us too long. We’d probably save money if you, me, and Werner arranged passage together. Besides, I’d…I’d just feel better if I knew you got home safely.”

  She nodded, falling silent.

  Not happening, Simon thought.

  As long as they split up in the city, even for an hour or two, catching Felix alone would be easy enough. Then it was just a matter of getting the job done with any old tools that came to hand, and slipping out before the militia was any the wiser. Easy.

  He frowned. Too easy.

  No, after all this effort, all this trouble, jumping the man in a dark alley and strangling him to death would be vulgar. When he went home to write the story in his dead-book, it wouldn’t be a chapter to be proud of. Honestly, after all they’d been through together, he owed Felix a more dramatic death. It was the professional thing to do. As the miles limped by and the powerless sun crested in a cloudless sky, Simon wove together the threads of a plan.

  A few hours later, they came to the first corpse.

  “Is that—” Felix started to ask as the cross loomed up ahead, a tall wooden pole with a crossarm at the top. A corpse dangled from the pole, lashed to it at the ankles and wrists. It was hard to tell how long the man had been dead. His naked body was frozen and blue, and the crows had pecked the eyes from his skull. A small board hung from his neck by a length of twine, with the word “THIEF” painted across it in jagged black letters.

  “The captain warned you about this place, brother.” Anakoni waved his hand at the corpse, curling his fingers in a ritual warding gesture. “It’s evil. The Reach changes everyone it touches. Never for the better.”

  Mari walked right up to the pole, looking innocently curious, and paused to study the corpse’s bound wrists and ankles.

  “Wrists are skinned,” she said, “from struggling. He was alive when they put him up there.”

  “They let him freeze to death?” Simon asked.

  Mari pointed to the splotches on the man’s body, from his chest to his withered genitals to his feet. “Frostbite hit here first. They splashed a bucket of water on him. Suffer more that way.”

  About a mile up the road they found another body, hung like the first, but this one had a board that said “MURDERER.”

  Two more came soon after that, a man and a woman. The woman was another thief, while the man’s crime was “DISRESPECT.”

  “What exactly,” Felix said slowly, squinting as if making sure he was reading it right, “constitutes criminal disrespect in Winter’s Reach?”

  Mari shrugged. “City was a prison. The people still have prison instincts. Veruca can’t afford to let anyone think she’s weak, not even for a second. She’s in charge only as long as her people fear her. The second she slips, she falls.”

  “I’ll remember that,” Felix said.

  The road turned toward the icy mountains in the distance, towering jagged slabs of bleak gray stone capped with frozen snow. Then they saw the palisade. A stockade wall of stout wooden stakes harvested from the cedars, thirty feet high and banded with mariner’s rope, ringed the city of Winter’s Reach. Crumbling stone towers sprouted up here and there behind the wall, and scouts stood vigil with crossbows cradled in their arms. One saw them coming, as they trudged along the snow-choked road, and called something down from his perch.

  When they got closer, tall gates set into the palisade rattled open, shoving back the snow. Six hardy men walked out to meet them, garbed in black leathers and tattered soot-stained fur. Heavy maces swung from their belts, and they wore tall wooden shields slung across their backs. The shields were in a style Simon had never seen, cut in a sharply angular shape. He realized, a moment later, that they were cut to look like casket lids.

  “Coffin Boys,” Mari murmured to Felix. Behind her, Simon perked his ears.

  “Who?”

  “Mayor’s elite. They run the city.”

  “Don’t usually get visitors on foot,” called out one of the men. “We heard the Elder caught a little snack near the Jailer’s Teeth. You wouldn’t happen to be the leftovers, would ya?”

  Anakoni held up a hand. “Anakoni Mahelona, first mate of the Fairwind Muse. We’re all that’s left.”

  “He tossed ’em back,” one of the Coffin Boys muttered to a chorus of snickers. “Too shrimpy to eat.”

  The two groups formed ragged lines in the snow, facing each other outside the city gate. The Boys’ leader gave each of the survivors a long once-over.

  “I see two sailors,” he said, “an old man, a sad excuse for a piece of ass, and a dandy. What’s your story, dandy?”

  Felix blinked. “I, er…me? I mean…I’m Felix Rossini, of the Banco Rossini. I’m here to speak with the mayor, please.”

  The leader looked back to his men and grinned. “Aww, he’s polite. We’re gonna have some fun with this one.”

  “No,” Mari said. “You aren’t.”

  The leader tilted his head, walked over, and stood in front of her like a drill sergeant on inspection. He leaned in, his bristled and wind-burnt face inches from hers.

  “Did you say something, cupcake?”

  “You will go to your mistress,” Mari said, “and you will tell her that Mari Renault has returned to Winter’s Reach.”

  Maybe it was the name, maybe it was the steel in her voice, but Simon watched the man’s expression change in the space of a breath. He took a slight step back and squared his shoulders, obviously mindful that his men were watching him.

  “You know who I am,” Mari whispered.

  Their eyes locked. He blinked first.

  “Welcome to the Reach,” he said grudgingly. “Obey the law, and respect our mayor’s benevolent rule.”

  The streets of Winter’s Reach, to Simon’s eye, weren’t planned so much as organically grown. Like a cancer. The rebellious inmates had broken the old stone buildings down to the foundations and stolen bits and chunks to build their new homes, along with logs from the forest. It was a crazy quilt of tangled streets and off-kilter buildings, leaning and ramshackle and falling apart. Dirt roads limned with slick ice ran this way and that, widening and shrinking on a whim, with nothing so much as resembling a street sign or a map in sight.

  As for the people, they moved like hungry ghosts throu
gh the snow. Most wore hoods, and they all kept their heads down, as though eye contact was a lethal poison. When a pack of Coffin Boys came sauntering down the street—Simon noticed a few women in their ranks, despite the name—beggars vanished from the roadside and ragged curtains whipped across windows.

  “I guess this is where we part ways,” Felix said. “Anakoni, Simon, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything.”

  Anakoni shook his head, too exhausted for anger. “The sea’s a lover, but she likes to bite. And when she bites, you bleed. I just want to go home. I hope you find everything you desire here. But be careful, brother. Remember: Old Man Ochali isn’t done telling your story. He doesn’t promise any of us a happy ending.”

  Simon shook Felix’s hand. He savored the moment of intimacy. “Good luck.”

  Anakoni slapped Simon’s back and said, “Come with me, down to the docks. I’m hiring on with the first ship that’ll take me south, and you should too. You’re green, but you’re a good sailor. I’ll vouch for you.”

  Simon imagined what it would feel like to slit Anakoni’s throat. Then again, there was a certain poetry to leaving one single man from the Muse’s crew alive. Anakoni would carry the nightmares of that terrible day for the rest of his life, nightmares Simon had helped to weave. Yes, he thought, I like that. You should live.

  “I’m going to stay on for a while,” Simon said. “After that experience…well, I’m wondering if I’m really cut out for the sea. I think I’ll talk to the loggers, see if they need another strong back. I might enjoy swinging an ax for a living.”

  Anakoni arched one eyebrow and shook his head. “You’re mad, but if it’s really what you want, all blessings to you. I’ll say a prayer for you every night. As far as I’m concerned, after what we’ve been through together, you’re my brother until the end of days.”

  Simon just smiled.

  While Felix, Werner, and Mari made arrangements to meet up after their business was done, Simon wandered up the street and ducked around the corner of a clapboard shack. Once they split up, he dogged Felix’s heels, elated when the banker stopped in a roach trap of a tavern for a bite to eat. Simon’s own stomach was growling itself into knots, but there was no time to lose. He had resolved to try a new approach, something worthy of a chapter in his dead-book.