The dirt road ended in a clearing. A hunting lodge stood under the starry night sky. The shingles on the roof were broken, the rough-hewn log walls rotting and mold-kissed, and a broken bay window leaned down from a steepled attic.
“Fox End,” Dante said, looking up at the house with a strange, cold reverence. “My father’s retreat. He’d come here to escape the world. And his family. He only brought me here once, on my seventeenth birthday. It was the first time we’d spoken in over a year. He told me that when he was gone, all this grandeur would be mine. And that one day, I would return and find my destiny here.”
Werner shook his head at the ruin. “I assume it wasn’t a dump back then. So what did you find, when you came back?”
“I never did. In fact, I’d pushed the conversation out of my mind until the good cardinal jogged my memory. My father had been drinking so he was more maudlin than usual when he said it, and I chalked it up to a feeble attempt at impressing me.”
“He said your destiny was here, and you never bothered to take a look?”
Dante put his hands on his hips. He stared up at the ruined lodge.
“I wanted nothing from him. It’s not uncommon for a man of a certain age and certain wealth to take a mistress, but my father was…rampant and indiscreet. Everyone knew about his philandering, the dalliances with noble wives, the whores he’d bring out here for his little holidays. The gossip slid right off his back. No, the shame landed on my mother. And on my brothers. And on me. He’d only married my mother for her dowry in the first place. Seed money for his professional ambitions.”
“He dishonored your name,” Mari said, nodding like she understood.
“When he died,” Dante said, “I sold his business, his properties, everything that carried his stink. I made my own way in the world. I never did sell Fox End, though. I think it pleased me in some petty way, the idea of his pride and joy going to rot.”
Werner shrugged and led his horse over to a splintered hitching post, tying off the reins. “Well, let’s see what he left for you.”
The front door might have been painted nightingale blue once, but the pigment had faded to the color of spoiled milk. The wood warped in its frame, bulging out and wedged fast on its rusted hinges. Werner stood back, took a two-step run, and slammed his boot against the door as hard as he could. It jolted but didn’t give.
“Here,” Mari said, leading the way to a side window. She turned her face and smashed it open with one of her batons, knocking out the shards of broken glass from the pane until it was safe to swing a leg over the sill and climb inside. Dante saw Werner grit his teeth in pain as he followed, shifting his weight between his feet, but he didn’t say anything.
Cobwebs thick as silken veils draped the gloomy parlor. The stench of mildew hung in the air, mildew and animal rot. Dante made his way through the dark to a table, blowing dust from an antique oil lamp. He rummaged in his belt pouch for a thin flask of oil. Soon the lamp ignited, casting a baleful yellow glow across the forgotten lodge. Trash filled the once-grand hearth, choking it shut, and the rotten corpses of rats lay strewn across the broad floorboards.
“My legacy,” Dante said.
They rummaged through the cupboards, sending fat black roaches scurrying from the light, and found a second lantern. Werner carried this one with them as they cautiously climbed the creaking staircase to the second floor. A board snapped under Dante’s foot and he tumbled back, off-balance. Mari quickly caught him, grabbing his arm and shoulder, holding him steady.
Once he caught his breath, they made their way to the bedrooms. The lantern’s glow strobed through open doorways, across broken four-poster beds and once-expensive quilts reduced to rotten tatters. Beady red eyes glared out from the guts of a savaged mattress, and the chittering of rats followed their footsteps.
“If there ever was anything here,” Werner said as he poked the tip of his staff into a pile of debris, “the vermin got to it first. Let’s hope your father left you something rats don’t eat. Like a pile of gold bars, maybe.”
At the end of the hall, a rickety ladder led up to the attic trapdoor. Werner gave it a dubious look, but Dante didn’t hesitate. One slow rung at a time, resting his full weight on each step before reaching for the next, he climbed up and gave the trapdoor a shove. It lifted, swinging up and over, and fell on its hinges with a dusty boom that shook the lodge. He reached down, and Mari passed the lantern up to his outstretched hand.
The lantern’s light fell over rotten crates and cobweb curtains. Still Dante pressed deeper into the attic, squinting at the shadows, as the others climbed up behind him. The warped floorboards groaned under their feet, buckling, threatening to snap.
“Not safe up here,” Mari murmured. Dante peered around, holding the lantern out before him, then froze. Something caught his eye, a glint of tarnished brass in the dark.
It was a steamer trunk, shoved against one wall and almost out of sight amid the debris. The leather straps that once bound it were rotten, the brass clasps dangling from threads or lying scattered in the dust, but it was still better kept than anything else in the lodge. Dante crouched down on one knee, running a finger across its lacquered lid.
“I remember this,” he said. “My father kept curios in here. Keepsakes. The chest was in his office for years, until one day it wasn’t. I didn’t care to ask where he’d moved it to.”
Hinges squealed as he pushed up the lid. Dante’s heart sank.
“Empty,” he said.
Nothing waited for him in the chest’s wooden heart, not so much as a speck of dust. Some legacy, he thought.
Something was off, though. He leaned closer, tilted his head, and tried to figure out why the chest seemed strange to him. Something about its dimensions he couldn’t put a finger on.
“Well, it was worth a look,” Werner said. “We should go. We didn’t exactly cover our horses’ tracks, and it won’t be hard to follow our trail—”
“A moment,” Dante said. His heart started to pound as he realized what was wrong: the inside of the chest was too shallow. The bottom, on the inside, was at least three inches higher than the bottom on the outside. He reached in and felt around the seams, fingers pressing against rough wooden joins, trying to find a catch.
With a click, the bottom lid pivoted inward, then rose up on a concealed hinge.
“A secret compartment?” Mari said, leaning over his shoulder to look.
His father hadn’t left bars of gold behind. He’d left him letters. Yellowed sheets of folded parchment, envelopes still bearing crumpled bits of sealing wax on their torn flaps. Fistfuls of letters, some in his father’s careless hand and some written with a more feminine curve. Dante picked one up at random and was starting to read when a voice bellowed from outside the lodge.
“Werner! Werner Holst, you get your treacherous ass out here and parley like a man!”
Werner and Mari darted to the broken bay window. Butcherman Sykes stood alone on the weed-tangled lawn below, holding up a guttering torch to push back the dark.
“To the side!” Werner whispered harshly and quickly moved away from the window. “Lydda and Pig Iron’ll be with him, and Lydda’s a crack shot with a crossbow. Don’t give her a line of sight.”
Mari followed his lead. They flanked the window, craning their necks to see as much of the forest clearing as they dared.
“Sorry, Sykes,” Werner shouted down. “We went to a lot of trouble to keep this man’s head firmly attached to his shoulders, and we’d like to keep it that way. Call it professionalism.”
“You’re a fine one to talk of professionalism! Your job was done, and you took your pay, Werner. He’s our bounty now. I’ll make you a deal, for old times’ sake. Send Uccello out. We’ll take him and leave, and that’ll be the end of it.”
Under their feet, somewhere in the lodge, a stray floorboard creaked. Mari pointed downward and mouthed, “One’s in the house.” Werner nodded grimly.
“Can’t do that,” Werner c
alled back. “The cardinal duped us. Can’t let him get away with that. It’s a matter of reputation, you understand.”
“Reputation, my arse! It’s that Terrai bitch, bound around your neck like an anchor. She doesn’t even know, does she?”
“Shut up, Sykes!” Werner’s gaze flicked between Mari and the window’s edge as his face reddened.
“Hey, Renault! You up there? Bet he never told you what he did in the war.”
Mari blinked. “War? What’s he talking about?”
“Nothing, he’s lying,” Werner stammered.
“Holst the Harrier,” Sykes shouted, “the Terror of Blue Creek. Oh, yeah, we were mates then, tight as drumskin. Comrades-in-arms while we were carving our bloody way across Belle Terre. Did you know, Renault, that your partner there had a necklace of Terrai ears? I won’t make excuses. It was just the sort of thing that made sense after a few months on the front lines.”
Mari stared into Werner’s eyes. Her mouth fell open, but she didn’t say a word.
“Shut up, Sykes!” Werner bellowed.
“Hey, Renault,” Sykes shouted, laughing. “Your mommy and daddy died in the war, didn’t they? Who knows, maybe it was Werner there who did the deed. What do you say, old buddy? Did you make that poor girl an orphan? If it wasn’t you, it was somebody just like you.”
“He’s just—he’s just trying to confuse you,” Werner said, but Dante could hear the desperation in his voice. From the dawning look of horror on her face, so did Mari.
“We’ll take care of him for you, Renault. Just leave the lodge. Walk away and leave Werner and the bounty to us. We’ve got no scores to settle with you.”
Something shifted behind Mari’s eyes. Her lips tightened, her shoulders slid back.
“I am a knight aspirant of the Order of the Autumn Lance,” she shouted down, her voice hard as a diamond, “and Dante Uccello is under my protection. So long as I draw breath, my honor and my weapons will shield him. Take him if you dare!”
Silence.
Then, sounding halfway between bewildered and amused, Sykes shouted back, “See, Werner? This is what you get when you team up with lunatics. All right, Lydda, smoke ’em out.”
A crossbow bolt whistled through the air, streaking through the broken window. Its tip, dipped in pitch and lit aflame, trailed sparks like tiny fireflies. The bolt slammed into a ceiling beam, and the flame danced across the dry wood in all directions, reaching out for fuel with ravenous, licking tongues.
“Mari, listen—” Werner started to say.
She drew her batons and turned on her heel.
“Survive now, talk later,” she hissed.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Dante grabbed letters by the fistful, shoving them into his pouch, stuffing them under his vest, anything to save them from the growing fire. Smoke billowed through the attic and stung his watering eyes as the blanket of flames above their heads continued to spread, fast and hungry and hot.
Werner was the first down the ladder, with Mari right on his heels. He only made it halfway before a stout length of chain lashed out of nowhere, wrapped around his ankle, and hauled him down, tearing his grip from the rungs. Werner fell backward, arms flailing, and cracked his head against the floor. He didn’t get back up.
Lips curled back in a sudden, feral rage, Mari jumped down through the trapdoor hatch like a falcon plunging toward its prey. She landed in a crouch, the tortured wood groaning under her boots, drew her batons, and lunged. Pig Iron waited in the corner, his leering grin shrouded under the battered full-face helm of a Murgardt infantryman. His tattered leathers were adorned with riveted plates here and there, making him look like some kind of scrapyard golem. He yanked the chain from Werner’s ankle and clutched it between his meaty fists.
Mari’s batons whipped against his shoulder and hip, clanging off tarnished steel. He laughed and flung out one end of the chain toward her eyes. She lifted a baton to block and the chain spun around it, yanking it from her grip and sending it skidding down the hall.
Dante climbed down, followed by billowing smoke. He dodged clear of the fight, crouched at Werner’s side, and pressed his hand to his chest, feeling for a heartbeat. He looked up as Sykes climbed the stairs to the second floor. Standing at the far end of the hallway, he gave Dante a hungry smirk and plucked the meat cleaver from his belt. He slashed the air, spinning the cleaver in his grip, gracefully twirling the wooden handle between his fingers in a practiced dance of murder.
“Don’t worry,” Sykes said. “Once our boss gets what he needs out of you, we’re not takin’ all of you back to Mirenze. Just your head. Your body can stay a free man.”
Pig Iron’s chain-wrapped fist cracked against Mari’s chin, stunning her and sending her staggering back a step. He got behind her, fast, and wrapped his arms around her in a brutal bear hug that clamped her arms at her sides and squeezed her ribs so hard the air gushed from her burning lungs. As she squirmed in his grip, he dragged her closer to the window at the end of the hall.
Sykes took a run at Dante, cleaver raised above his head. Dante stood up from his crouch, squared his footing, and watched him come. He didn’t move an inch, just stood steely-eyed and waited for the blade to fall. At the last possible second he lunged toward Sykes, getting inside his reach, swinging up a forearm to push away his swing and throwing a punch with his other fist that cracked Sykes’s nose and left Dante bloody-knuckled.
“I was the captain of the Mirenze militia,” Dante roared as he drove his knee up into Sykes’s gut, doubling him over. “Did you think I got the job without learning how to fight?”
Black spots bloomed in Mari’s vision, her air long gone as Pig Iron dragged her to the window. Out in the darkness, by the tree line, she caught the glimmer of steel and understood why. Lydda was aiming her crossbow. With heartbeats before the shot, Mari ducked her head and bit into the back of Pig Iron’s ungloved hand. Her teeth chewed into skin and vein, coppery blood pouring down her throat as he howled behind his helmet and loosened his grip. She pivoted, twisting her shoulder and throwing him off-balance, spinning them around just as Lydda’s bolt punched through the glass and straight into Pig Iron’s back.
The big man dropped to the ground in a spray of broken glass, twitching and thumping his feet as he died. Sykes saw his partner go down just before Dante delivered a lightning-fast rabbit punch to his throat. Choking, eyes tearing up as the roiling smoke from above filled the narrow hall, Sykes turned and ran in a blind panic.
Mari drew in a deep breath only to cough it right back out again. Weak-kneed, she still forced herself to wade through the thickening smoke to Werner’s side.
“He’s just out cold,” Dante said. Mari nodded, coughing again, and got her arms under Werner’s shoulders. Dante helped her, and the two of them dragged Werner down the stairs, just ahead of the growing fire. Flames licked the ceiling over their heads, searing the old wood black, and the lodge trembled under their feet.
Out in the clearing, there was no sign of Sykes or Lydda, but Mari wouldn’t let Dante stop moving until they were past the weeds and into the forest proper. They laid Werner down behind a clump of tangled brush, stayed low, and watched the shadows. Nothing moved out there, nothing but the yellow glow as the fire devoured Fox End.
“They’re long gone,” Dante whispered as Werner groaned, coming around. “Cut their losses and ran.”
“They’ll be back,” Mari said. “Did you get the letters?”
Dante nodded, patting his vest. Werner sat up, rubbing the ugly red knot blooming on the back of his head.
“We all right?” he asked Mari. Mari didn’t say anything. She stared out into the darkness, frozen in a panther crouch.
Timbers groaned and snapped as the lodge slowly collapsed, a section of blackened roof teetering and crumbling in on itself. Dante had a tiny smile on his lips as he watched it burn.
“They won’t be far,” Mari said, “and they’ll try again. We’ll set our horses free. Go through the fore
st on foot, covering our tracks as we go, staying parallel to the road.”
“Mari,” Werner said.
She acted like she hadn’t heard him. “We’ll make camp for the night as soon as we’re a safe distance off and I’m sure they’re not tracking us.”
“Mari.”
“In the morning we can choose a new direction,” Mari said. “Or just go our separate ways, if that’s what we decide.”
“Mari!”
She turned her head to glare at Werner. “What?”
“Those things Sykes said back there, we should talk about it—”
“I can’t talk to you right now,” she said flatly, standing up and brushing autumn leaves from her patchwork armor.
She looked up to the canopy of stars, reckoned their direction, and pointed west. Dante followed her as they made their way through the brush, leaves rustling in their wake. Werner trailed a few feet behind.
Chapter Forty
A fever took hold of Benignus in the night, staining his silken sheets with sweat and making his aching joints tremble and clench. His vision was all but gone now, lost in a pearly fog, but a light like the morning sun bloomed before him.
The light, he thought. The Gardener beckons me. It’s time.
A firm, warm hand held his. He curled his lips back in a pained smile. Amadeo. His faithful friend, true to the end. Of course he would be here.
“Watch,” he wheezed, “watch Carlo. Please. Remember…remember your promise.”
The hand tightened over his. Reassuring him. The next generation of the Serafini family would hold the papal throne. Hold it and do honor to it. His legacy was assured now. Carlo will be so good, so strong! They will call him the greatest of leaders, the holiest of men.
“Livia will help,” he rasped, his voice failing him. He needed her here, now. Needed his son here, in his final moments. “Go,” he said, pushing the hand away. He meant to say… he wasn’t sure what he meant to say. His thoughts slid away like grains of sand in a sieve, and his joints were so cold, but the light was so warm, growing so bright and so very inviting.
Winter's Reach (The Revanche Cycle Book 1) Page 24
