Winter's Reach (The Revanche Cycle Book 1)

by Craig Schaefer

  Mari shrugged. “Let’s go get my partner.”

  * * *

  “If this is a joke,” Captain Zhou said, arching one slender black eyebrow, “it’s a poor one.”

  Benegali riches adorned the captain’s stateroom, with olive and black silks draping the walls and a tiger-skin rug laid out over the floorboards. Musky incense swirled in the air. Zhou leaned back behind his strategy table, resting wrists heavy with golden bangles on the pitted wood, and stared dubiously at Mari, Werner, and Dante. Behind them, five hard-bitten sailors stood between the new arrivals and the only way out.

  “Not in the slightest,” Dante said, nodding to the open brass casket on the table. “That payment should be more than adequate to carry us to Verinia. Where, unless I mistake your comings and goings, you’d be headed next anyway.”

  Zhou stroked his wiry beard, braided into two tails and wound with strips of green silk ribbon.

  “Think you’re forgetting something,” he said.

  “Do tell,” Dante said, with the air of someone who already saw the question coming.

  Zhou dipped his hands into the open casket, letting the silver coins trickle through his fingers like water.

  “Veruca was going to give me this money anyway, and you along with it.”

  “Right,” Dante said. “And Signorina Renault and Signore Holst were going to kill you and take it all back. Don’t forget that part.”

  The sailors snickered. Zhou gave Mari a long, appraising stare. She stared back, unblinking, until he looked away.

  “Maybe yes, maybe no,” Zhou said. “That was before you told us the whole plan. So what’s to stop us from gutting you all right here and keeping the money?”

  One of the sailors moved up behind Mari, grinning. Her eyes flicked to the left as she heard his footsteps, but she didn’t move.

  “Or we could hang onto ’em for a while,” the sailor slurred, his breath rotten with cheap wine. He reached around and groped Mari’s breast through her patchwork leathers. “This one could be—”

  She spun on one heel and drove her knee up between his legs. As he pitched forward, the breath gusting from his lungs, she grabbed him by the hair and smashed his forehead against the captain’s table. Blood spurted and he crumpled to the tiger-skin rug, groaning, cupping his hands over his face.

  “No touching,” Mari said.

  Zhou let out a surprised bark of laughter. His eyes lit up with glee.

  “What’s to stop you?” Dante said. “Satisfaction.”

  Zhou nodded. “I’m listening.”

  “The mayor just tried to have you killed.”

  “Cost of business,” the captain said. “I don’t like it, but what can I do?”

  “Humiliate her.” Dante leaned in, resting his manicured fingernails on the strategy table. “Think about it: her plan’s already been derailed, but what could make your survival even sweeter? Take her money as the payment to ferry us to safety. Instead of all of us being her pawns, none of us will be.”

  Zhou slouched back in his chair. He stroked his beard with sharp, dirt-encrusted fingernails.

  “That’d tweak her nose,” he said.

  “She’ll be furious,” Dante said, “and she’ll know that we must have told you all about her little murder-by-proxy game. That means she won’t dare try it again anytime soon. She doesn’t want to attack you in the open, and she won’t risk doing it from the shadows. You’ll be able to come and go from Winter’s Reach as you please.”

  “An insult she can’t avenge,” Zhou mused. “Only thing better than putting an enemy in the ground is letting ’em live to hate you. All right. I’m sold. But we take you to Verinia and no farther. And you’ll work for your supper. The Cruel Jest ain’t no damned pleasure cruise.”

  Dante smiled. “I don’t think any of us will have a problem with that.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Felix drifted in and out of consciousness. When he was awake, his world was dark and cold and damp, punctuated by throbbing pain. It felt like the tip of a frozen icepick was driving itself into the lump of mangled tissue that used to be his left ear. Someone had tied a strip of filthy, ragged linen around his head to cover the wound.

  He wasn’t sure how long he’d floated between drowsy wakefulness and sleep. Nightmares eagerly waited for him in both worlds, wrapping their skeletal arms around him and celebrating his downfall. Awake for the moment, he sat in a dark and icy cargo hold. The ship rose up and dropped hard on a sudden swell of water, making his empty stomach lurch. Dried bile stained Felix’s shirt, but he couldn’t remember when he’d thrown up. Ropes bound his waist and legs to the bench he’d been abandoned upon, presumably to make sure he didn’t tumble over and hurt himself.

  A lantern’s feeble glow painted the hold flickering yellow as a grizzled man trundled down the steps. He grabbed Felix’s jaw and forced his head to one side, tugged up the bandage to look at his wound, nodded, and shoved a mold-spotted chunk of hardtack into Felix’s hands.

  “Fever’s passed,” the man said. “You’ll live.”

  “Where am I?” Felix croaked. His throat felt raw.

  “Going home. Veruca paid us to ferry you back to Mirenze.”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head weakly. “We have to go back. I have to go back. You don’t understand—”

  “You ain’t welcome in Winter’s Reach,” the man said, “and you’re nothin’ but cargo until we make landfall. So be a good piece of cargo and shut the fuck up.”

  He tromped away. The trapdoor rattled shut behind him, plunging the cargo bay into darkness again.

  Mirenze. Without the alum deal. Without anything to show for all his effort.

  I’m mutilated, he thought, imagining Renata’s horror when she laid eyes on what Veruca had done to him. For the rest of his life, he’d carry the disfigurement she’d carved into him, see the revulsion in the eyes of everyone he met. Renata…

  And now, his one opportunity lost, there was only one way to save the Banco Rossini and keep his father from dying in a poorhouse.

  Marry Aita Grimaldi.

  When his spirit broke, it broke quietly. Felix sagged against the ropes and wept softly into his hands. His shoulders trembled in the dark. No one saw, and no one cared.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Amadeo woke with a scream frozen on his lips. He lay in bed, shaking, cotton sheets soaked in a cold sweat while a rainstorm pounded against the bedroom window.

  His dream was a half-remembered phantasmagoria. He’d been following Livia down a hallway with bone-white walls, calling to her as she ran toward a glowing light at the end. Blood slowly guttered down the walls, rolling from the ceiling in thick, drooling rivulets. Livia stopped and turned to face him. Her eyes were blots of crimson.

  “You can’t save me,” she said.

  “I’m coming! Don’t go,” he’d called out. He kept running, but the floor slid backward under his feet with every step, forcing them apart.

  “This is just a mask,” she said and reached up to tug at the skin under her eye. The skin yielded under her fingernails, tearing to reveal the wet, glistening muscle and bone underneath.

  Then he’d fallen, plummeting backward into an empty void. He saw black smoke curling in a cold and cloudless sky above the Holy City, proclaiming the death of a pope.

  The image ripped away, swallowed by billowing flames. Three figures, two men and a woman, searched for an escape behind the wall of fire. Burning timbers fell and the ground shook. Amadeo looked up just as a blazing chunk of wood came plummeting down to crush him.

  Then he was awake, soothed by the driving rain, trying to sort it all out in the dark. He knelt down beside his bed, shivering in his sweat-soaked nightshirt, clasped his hands tightly, and bowed his head.

  “I am your servant,” he said to the empty room. “Please, help me to understand the mysteries before me. Help me to protect my flock, to lead and guide them, to…”

  Amadeo let his hands fall to his sides
and looked up at the ceiling.

  “I don’t know why you show me these things,” he said. “I don’t understand what you want me to do.”

  He didn’t get an answer. He didn’t expect one. Instead, he bathed and changed into a fresh cassock, heading out to greet the morning.

  He found Livia in the hall. Dark circles drooped under her eyes, and her normally pristine hair was disheveled. She greeted him with a tired wave. The dream was still fresh in his mind, that image of her bloody gaze and torn face, and he rushed over to check on her.

  “Livia?” he said. “Are you all right? You look like you’ve barely slept.”

  “Just a bout of insomnia,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

  Livia was good at many things. Lying wasn’t one of them. Amadeo pretended to believe her and motioned her closer, looking back to make sure they were alone in the corridor.

  “I talked to Cardinal Accorsi,” he said. “He believes us about the knights. He says he’s going to do some investigating.”

  “Good. I think we made the right choice. Accorsi is a snake, but we need a snake in our corner right now. I’m going to say good morning to Father. Coming?”

  He gamely accompanied her through the papal mansion, making polite small talk when the knights were in earshot. The usual throng of courtiers and aides clustered in the audience chamber, but Benignus’s ivory throne sat empty.

  Livia clutched at Amadeo’s arm. It was a reflex, mirroring the lurching feeling in the pit of his stomach. She yanked her hand away and mumbled an apology. Sister Columba scurried up to them.

  “He’s too tired to greet visitors today,” the elderly woman whispered.

  “Is he…?” Amadeo started to ask, then realized he didn’t want to finish the question.

  “I…don’t know when he’ll feel well enough to sit in that chair again,” Columba said. She left the or if he ever will unspoken, but Amadeo could hear it in her voice. “But he’s awake right now. And breathing.”

  “Can we see him?” Livia said.

  “You aren’t visitors. You’re family,” she told them. “Come on, both of you.”

  Two of the knights stood silently outside Benignus’s bedroom. Amadeo fought to keep his face expressionless as he realized how easy it would be for the impostors to murder the helpless pope anytime they wanted.

  Of course, he thought bitterly, they don’t have to. Time is the master of assassins.

  The rain hadn’t let up. It lashed against the shuttered bedroom windows and left a damp chill in the air. An oil lamp on the pope’s bedside table stood in for the morning sun. Dwarfed by his huge four-poster bed and buried in piled comforters, Benignus looked as frail as a sickly child. He raised his head from the pillow, just an inch or so, and curled his lips back in a trembling smile as Livia and Amadeo came into the room. Columba shut the door behind them, staying out in the hallway to guard their privacy.

  “Daughter,” Benignus said, reaching out his hand. Livia took it in hers, holding it gently. “Where is Carlo? Is he with you?”

  Livia and Amadeo shared a glance.

  “He stopped by earlier, when you were sleeping,” Amadeo said. “He sat by your bedside for a while. He didn’t want to disturb your rest.”

  “So considerate,” Benignus said, eager to believe the lie. He looked toward Amadeo, but his eyes didn’t seem to hold their focus. “He is a good son.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Amadeo saw Livia bite down on her lip.

  “He is,” Amadeo said. “Is there anything we can get you, Bene? Anything we can do to make you more comfortable?”

  “No, no. I just need to take a nap. Just…don’t have the energy I used to. Don’t worry. I’ll be up in no time.”

  “We’ll let you rest,” Livia said. She laid her father’s hand down by his side and let go. He closed his eyes, still smiling.

  Livia stormed out of the room, her skirts swirling around her as she shoved the door open, balling her hands into fists at her sides. Amadeo ran after her.

  He caught up with her in the portrait gallery, standing in the shadow of an alcove. Her arms were crossed tight over her chest, her shoulders tensed and chin tucked down, like her entire body was a cork about to explode from a bottle. She kept her eyes squeezed shut.

  “Livia—” he started to say.

  “Don’t,” Her voice quavered. “Don’t tell me it’s going to be all right. Don’t you dare.”

  He reached out towards her, then pulled his hand away.

  “I wouldn’t lie to you.”

  “Good,” she said.

  “You can cry if you need to, you know.”

  Livia’s eyes snapped open. He almost took a step back as she turned her glare upon him. Her eyes boiled with fury, a rage bordering on abject hate.

  “I do not need,” she said, “to cry. My father is dying. My brother is a worthless glutton who’s leading this church, my church, down the road to ruin. And if I’d been born with a cock between my legs, I’d have the power to stop him, instead of being the useless daughter just waiting to be married off to some foreign aristocrat.”

  “Livia, I—”

  Livia held up her hand. “Have you ever considered, for even a moment, the list of things I’m not allowed to do because some bitter old men say so? I can’t lead a mass, can’t earn the greens of a priest, let alone claim my birthright. My entire life, from the cradle to the grave, is dictated by ‘traditions’ and rules that you aren’t subject to. My power was taken away from me the moment I was born a woman. So no, you do not get to give me permission to cry!”

  “I’m sorry,” Amadeo said, “I didn’t mean it like that. Livia, I’m your friend. We’re on the same side.”

  She looked away.

  “You are,” she said, her voice softer. “You are a good friend, Amadeo. But I’m concerned. Are you really willing to do whatever it takes?”

  “Whatever it takes?”

  She looked him in the eye.

  “Whatever it takes to save this church,” she said. “No matter what has to be done.”

  Amadeo felt a serpent worming its way through his guts. A low and treacherous roiling that set his teeth on edge. Still, he nodded.

  “We made a pledge,” he said. “I’m with you.”

  “Good. Now excuse me. I need to be alone.”

  Amadeo stood aside. She walked away without another word, chin high, eyes hard.

  Marcello strolled in from the other side of the gallery, his manner so casual that Amadeo could almost believe he hadn’t been eavesdropping.

  “You were right,” the cardinal said.

  “You investigated?”

  Marcello nodded. The clomping of steel boots echoed up the corridor as a patrol of knights approached. While they swept through, Marcello clasped his hands behind his back and pretended to study an oil portrait of Benignus’s father.

  “That piece of artwork I was thinking of buying,” he said lightly. “I had it examined by an expert. Turns out it’s a counterfeit.”

  Amadeo stood beside him and nodded, not looking back at the patrolling knights.

  “That’s a shame,” he said. “I was hoping against hope that I was wrong.”

  “As was I. Still, at least now we can save our money for a better investment.”

  As soon as the knights were out of earshot, Marcello leaned close, his voice low and urgent.

  “Don’t let on. Not a hint. These men are killers.”

  “How do you—” Amadeo blurted loudly, then caught himself and whispered, “how do you know?”

  “Best not to ask. The important thing, right now, is that you do nothing without my authorization. What was that conversation with Livia about? I heard her raising her voice.”

  “Nothing,” Amadeo said. “Her father isn’t long for the world. She’s feeling the pain of it.”

  “Is she involved in this? Does she know anything?”

  Amadeo looked over at Marcello. His instinct was to deny everything, but the cardinal al
ways knew more than he let on. He couldn’t risk being caught in a barefaced lie. He couldn’t tell the truth about their compact either.

  “She has suspicions about her brother and his relationship with Lodovico Marchetti. I’ve been telling her what I know, which isn’t much.”

  Marcello sighed, looking up at the portrait.

  “Livia is…a very headstrong young woman,” the cardinal said. “Given to dangerous ideas of independence. She can’t help us, only get in our way. Cut her off.”

  “Cut her off?” Amadeo said.

  “Don’t tell her anything more. Especially not our business. Simply feign ignorance and change the subject should it come up. Amadeo, we are playing for very high stakes here. I need to know my confidence is well placed. I need to know that you’re my man. Mine alone.”

  Amadeo swallowed hard. Then he nodded.

  “I’m your man,” he lied.

  * * *

  Back in her suite, Livia’s scourge lay abandoned on the divan, still flecked with dried specks of her blood from the night before. There was no time for the ritual today. No time for purity. She made a beeline for the chest at the foot of her bed. She burrowed through her linens and dug out Squirrel’s notebook.

  “Come on,” she said, flipping through the pages with reckless abandon. “Tell me how to save him. Tell me how to save them all. Give me what I need.”

  It was useless. There were spells to wither crops, spells to make a corpse dance and bite, but nothing that could rescue a dying man from the ravages of time. Squirrel had been a fledgling, a novice taking her first steps into the shadows.

  “Miss Owl says the strong rule over the weak and that is nature,” read her fumbling, scrawl, “and that is why the sheep and cattle forbade our Art, because they cannot master it and we can. They have muscles and swords and money and they call it strength. We have will, and will is true power. Muscles wither, swords rust, money means nothing if all the bankers are dead.”

  Livia flopped back on her bedspread and pressed her knuckles against her forehead, feeling another headache coming on. She had the will, all right. She’d been born with the will to steer a nation. She just didn’t know how.