“See those outcroppings of rock, poking up from the waterline?” he said to his first mate, nodding to the waves. “They call that the Jailer’s Teeth. Don’t be fooled: even close to shore, this water’s fathoms deeper than you might think. Lose a ship out here, you’ll never find it again.”
The first mate squinted through his spyglass, scouting up ahead. “What in the…”
“What? You have something?”
“Movement. One ship. Just the one. A stripped-down three-master, closing fast.” He passed his spyglass to Gagliardi. The captain raised it high, one hand on the wheel, and frowned.
“I know that flag. That’s the Cruel Jest.”
“What’s she doing?”
Gagliardi flashed a feral grin. “Bet you a pay purse that Zhou found out about the attack. He’s fleeing to save his own hide. Didn’t expect we’d be coming along. Hah! Look, I was right.”
The first mate took back the glass. The Cruel Jest tacked hard to starboard, turning fast to head back the way it came.
“She’s running, Captain!”
“Sure, sure, right back to the Reach. Just in time for us to pound it flat, too. Let’s hope we can fish Zhou’s body out of the drink. There’s a fine bounty riding on that head.”
“Now she’s—that’s odd.”
“What is?”
“Well, she just dropped all four of her ship’s boats. She’s leaving ’em there, just bobbing empty in the water.”
The captain shrugged. “Probably trying to lose any extra weight they can, for speed. It won’t help.”
Ahead of the Imperial convoy, a bubble of air rose to the surface.
A bubble ten feet across.
It popped with a wet glurp, and Gagliardi narrowed his eyes. “Now what in the Barren Fields—”
Distant shouting. One of the ships, a merchantman hastily repurposed for the fight, suddenly broke formation and veered dangerously close to its neighbor. Signal flags flashed, colors waving wildly in an Enoli sailor’s hands.
“What is that idiot doing?” Gagliardi snapped. “He’s going to cause a wreck.”
The first mate peered through the spyglass, focused on the signalman. “He’s spelling out…E…L…D…huh. ‘Elder’? What does that mean?”
The merchantman tacked too hard, too fast, and a sudden gust of winter wind set it straight into a war barque’s path. Hulls scraped and crunched, masts teetering wildly. Gagliardi barely noticed the disaster in the making; his eyes were locked on the water dead ahead.
The sea boiled. And then came the sound, a bassoon call from the depths, impossibly loud, impossibly vast.
Impossibly deep. But streaking for the surface.
In a sudden panic, and one side of the ship blocked by the slow-motion collision happening a hundred feet away, the captain hauled the wheel to port. The Mongoose’s nose turned toward the shoreline, turning slow, too slow to make it.
“Captain,” the first mate shouted, pointing, “the Teeth! We don’t have room to turn!”
A brutal jolt threw them to the deck as rock pylons just below the water’s surface tore gouges in the pirate hunter’s hull. Sailors shouted, running for their stations, repair and bailing crews pounding down belowdecks. But as he rose back to his feet, Captain Gagliardi froze. He couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, petrified by the rising groan from the depths.
And then the sea exploded as a barnacle-encrusted beak, fifty feet across and open wide, burst up beneath the merchantman and slammed its maw shut, crunching the ship’s hull like a chunk of dry tinder. Tentacles uncoiled from the water, dozens of them, some whip-fine and some thicker than oak trees, snatching at masts and men.
“Sir,” the first mate shouted, “your orders, sir? Sir! We need your orders!”
It’s not that far away, Gagliardi thought, staring at the rocky shoreline. A man can swim that far.
“Sir, please! We need you to take command!”
The captain ran for the railing and leaped, plunging into the freezing water. The shock of the cold drove the breath from his lungs, but as the ships of the Imperial expedition died at his back, one by one, he paddled toward the shore.
He made it fifteen feet before a tentacle snaked around his ankle and hauled him down into the black.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Once they hit the forests, the Imperial forces broke ranks. The logging road was too narrow for their standard box formations, so signal flags flashed and sent the orders for a new approach. The body of the main force marched in tight procession down the road, packed shoulder to shoulder, and an advance guard to the front spread out like ragged wings, picking through the dead trees and ankle-deep snow one grueling mile at a time.
Hannes Jund had pulled advance-guard duty, stationed about a hundred yards east of the main column. It wasn’t an honor. His calves ached and his feet had gone numb two hours ago, and he dedicated most of his thoughts to reassuring himself that it wasn’t frostbite. Gardener, he thought, I don’t ask for much. Just let me come home with all my toes still attached.
“Stay sharp,” murmured his sergeant, standing to the right and scanning the tree line. “Unless they’re blind, by now they have to know we’re coming. Reckon we’re just two hours shy of the city gate.”
Finally, Hannes thought. After all this damn marching, a good, straight-up fight.
A bowstring snapped, an arrow whined, and his sergeant fell dead.
Hannes dropped to his belly in the snow. Shouts ripped through the air, archers taking a knee, nocking arrows and searching for a target. Gray shadows flitted among the trees, running fast, native sons of the forest.
Hannes bit down on his panic and tried to spot their attacker. Another arrow, whining just over his head. He’d been trained for this. He’d felt so confident in training, but—
“Bagged him!” shouted someone on the far side of the logging road.
Soldiers pushed themselves back to their feet and dusted the snow from their greaves. He did the same, shaky. And the march resumed as if nothing had happened.
They were attacked four more times before the stockade walls of Winter’s Reach loomed into sight. Three soldiers he knew, men he’d called friends for years, died from arrows they never saw coming. Murdered by phantoms in the snow.
Hannes made it, though. They’d always said he was lucky.
* * *
Sending out the harassers had been Veruca’s opening gambit. The Imperial retort, as the column emerged from the wood and the companies scrambled to reform their ranks in sight of the city walls, came on the tips of pitch-dipped arrows.
The first volley scattered against the towering stockade walls, and the glow of crackling flame pushed back the long shadows of sunset.
The second volley went higher, hit its mark, and landed in the city streets.
Burning arrows peppered thatch rooftops and rough-hewn walls, fire spreading wild and consuming all it touched. The winter wind, howling down the narrow and cluttered streets, spurred the blaze into a cyclone of flame. Bucket brigades scrambled, forming lines, scooping up snow in pots and pans and battling the fires with everything they had. Even as the walls of black smoke and flesh-searing heat pushed them back, one desperate step at a time.
* * *
Veruca buckled the last strap on her boiled leather armor, ink-black with a gold braid at one shoulder, and scowled up at the murky blue sky as the fire arrows flew. A casket-lid shield, just like her men carried, rattled on her back.
“We shut this down now,” she roared and pointed up to the watchtower. “Open that fucking gate! Vanguard, on me. Flank squads, stay behind our cover until the archers are down. Let’s kill these bastards!”
She unslung her shield and led the charge, screaming a battle cry as the log gate groaned wide. The Coffin Boys followed her, fanning out, rushing with their shields held before them. A tidal wave of death. The Imperial archers let loose a desperate volley that punched into the tall shields, piercing more wood than flesh.
&n
bsp; Then the lines collided, archers going down under the press of the shields, and the army at their backs spread out to encircle the Imperial flanks.
* * *
Hannes crouched safe behind the firing line with a bronze shield strapped to his left wrist and a stout gladius clutched in his other hand. As ready as he could ever be, he thought. Then the gate opened wide and the wall of coffin lids came screaming toward them, not breaking under the next volley of arrows, not even hesitating.
Wood and steel clashed and archers went down screaming, bowled over by the towering shields as their wielders drew stout steel maces and started swinging. Behind them, the rabble of Winter’s Reach. Men, women, youths, anyone with the arm to swing a blade. And while they wore no common uniform, every last one of them was armed to the teeth.
“W-why are the civilians fighting us?” stammered the soldier at Hannes’s side. “They didn’t say the civilians would be fighting us!”
Hannes felt the surge at his back, the nervous energy and press of bodies pushing him toward the fight. He swallowed hard and took a deep breath, then waded into the fray.
One of the Coffin Boys came at him, swinging his mace in a skull-shattering sweep, and Hannes leaned back as it whistled past the tip of his nose. Then he lunged in, his body moving on instinct, and punched the tip of his short sword through the man’s belly.
Someone was screaming orders, but no one was listening. Ranks broke like waves on the beach, their careful parade formations dissolving into raw chaos. Hannes didn’t think, didn’t listen, consumed by the mechanical slaughter. He cut down a woman with a two-handed sword, slashing her open from throat to hip, then slammed his shield into a graying man’s face and stabbed him dead where he fell. Bodies littered the cherry-red snow in all directions, the sun down now, the smoky battlefield lit by the glow of the burning stockade wall.
Hannes thought of his wife back home. Their child, growing in her womb. I’m coming back to you, Greta, he thought. We’re going to win and I’m going to come home to you. The thought spurred him on, kept him fighting even as his legs went numb and his aching muscles screamed for relief. The stench of raw meat, blood, and excrement choked the air.
Movement in his peripheral vision. A man hurtling toward him, shrieking and covered in blood, waving a gore-streaked meat cleaver over his head. No, not a man, Hannes barely had time to register. A boy. Couldn’t be more than twelve years old.
An arrow screamed past, punched through the boy’s face, and knocked him to the bloody snow. Hannes gave a shaky nod of thanks to the archer, standing on the far side of a sea of corpses, and charged back into the fray.
How many people can they throw at us? he asked himself, parrying a clumsy sword blow from a man in a butcher’s apron and cutting him down with a swift, brutal stroke. How long can this last before they surrender?
Doesn’t matter. Just keep fighting. Keep fighting until it’s all over.
He was thinking of Greta—the smooth touch of her cheek, the scent of her fresh-baked bread—when a boot slammed into the small of his back and sent him sprawling to the crimson snow. He rolled onto his back as a cutlass came whistling down, cleaving his breastplate and chopping his belly open. The pain was like nothing he’d ever known, like someone had dropped a squirming, hungry rat into his guts to chew and tear. He convulsed on the ground, eyes tearing up, unable to draw a breath deep enough for a scream.
Veruca Barrett flicked the blood from her blade and stepped over him without a second glance, not even bothering to finish him off.
He heard her voice as she strode away, distant, as if underwater. “Left flank, close it up, damn it! Tighter! Spearhead, don’t chase the stragglers. Let ’em run—”
Sound faded away, swallowed by the pounding of blood in his ears and his own strangled, wheezing breath. All he could see now were the stockade-wall fires, a blot of shimmering orange in his blurred vision, and the pain gave way to the numbing cold of winter. He faded by inches, forgotten in the snow, one more dead man amid countless others just like him.
* * *
Dawn came to Winter’s Reach. The sunlight washed over flame-ravaged city streets and the charred, pitted ruin of the stockade wall. It lit up the scarlet field of war, where ravens flocked to pick at the bodies of the dead.
And it fell upon the city’s flag. Flying atop every watchtower that still stood.
Veruca sagged into her basalt throne. It was the first time she’d stopped moving since the call to battle. Her armor was torn, her skin streaked with a dozen clotted cuts, but she barely noticed. Just more scars. She never minded more scars. She listened, half numb, as her commanders—the two who’d survived the long and dreadful night—read off the tallies of the missing and the dead.
“We will rebuild,” she said softly. With all they’d lost—countless dead by Imperial blades or the merciless fires, homes gutted, businesses destroyed—it would take a long time. But they hadn’t lost it all. She’d bounced back from worse. Started from less than nothing and made herself a queen. She imagined her city could do it too.
“Once their nerve finally broke,” one of the commanders said, “handfuls of infantry scattered into the woods. Scouts have spotted a few pockets of men hiding out there. Probably trying to decide their next move. Should we let them run, let the cold and the snow take them?”
Veruca sat forward on her throne, her eyes cold as death.
“No. Round them up. I want every able-bodied Imperial brought back in irons. The city needs to heal after all this. I think we can arrange some suitable entertainment to boost the people’s morale.”
“And the injured?”
She flicked a glance toward the door.
“The logging road,” she said. “Crucify them.”
They moved out, ready to dispatch her orders, and she sank back onto the hard, stone chair. She spoke aloud, her voice soft but still carrying across the empty hall. Touched by sorrow, but unbowed.
“We will rebuild.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
The Cutter Blue was a sleek, small ship, built for ferrying light cargo. Part of the cargo, on this run, was a woman.
Sister Columba stood alone on the deck, on a narrow walkway between the forecastle and the sea-slick rail, and looked out over the water. Another day and they’d be in sight of the Verinian coast. And then?
She didn’t know. She couldn’t believe Livia thought she’d run back to Carlo. After seeing Carlo’s schemes firsthand, witnessing how he’d tried to imprison his sister and murder Amadeo, the idea was obscene.
Amadeo, she thought, who helped Livia. Who sat there, still as a stone, while her servant slashed Merrion’s throat at the feast table.
Another person to betray her faith. Carlo, Livia, Amadeo…these sick games of power perverted everyone they touched. At least she’d escaped with her life. She could just walk away from it all now. Go to some small village, take work as a seamstress or a maid. Maybe one day she could forget that she ever met Pope Benignus or fell into the nightmare of his poisonous family.
But she didn’t want to forget Benignus.
“You were so…good,” she whispered to the waves as a salty breeze ruffled her white hair. “Why did you have to die? Why did you have to leave us?”
“Everyone has their time,” Kailani said, standing behind her. The hood of her brown cloak drooped low over her bangs.
Columba turned, eyes wide, stumbling. Her back thumped against the ship’s rail.
“I’m supposed to make sure you make it safely to Verinia,” she said. “Our mistress was very concerned that nothing happens to you.”
“Well…fine,” Columba snapped, smoothing her skirts. “I suppose she’s very proud of herself, extending charity to an old woman.”
“Extending mercy, I think you mean.”
“I did nothing wrong. I followed my conscience. I followed the teachings of the Church.”
“Livia is our pope,” Kailani said gently. “The teachings of the Church are whateve
r she says they are.”
Columba pointed a trembling finger to the cloudy sky. “No one is above the Gardener’s judgment. Not even the pope. She used to believe that, too.”
“She still does. But she’s learning.”
Columba tilted her head. “What do you mean?”
“She will come to accept her true nature. To accept the mantle of a living saint. And on that day, she will rain justice upon the entire world. She will be transformed and transform us all. Until that time, though, she needs the Browncloaks’ guidance, far more than she realizes. That is our purpose. To protect her, and to nurture her, and to prepare her for glory.”
“You’re talking nonsense,” Columba said. “She’s just a woman.”
Kailani chuckled. “That’s what Livia says too. She’ll learn, though. For now, we simply have to accept that we know what’s best for her. Like, when faced with a criminal who tried to smear her good name, brand her as a witch, and even make an attempt on her life, Livia saw fit to forgive you. Showing the kindness in her soul, though it meant letting a poisonous serpent wriggle free.”
Columba saw the knife gleam in Kailani’s hand a split second before she lunged and drove it into her heart. Kailani clutched the old woman tightly, whispering in her ear.
“But we know what’s best for her. And you are not forgiven.”
Sister Columba’s body tumbled over the railing, landed with a heavy splash, and vanished. Swallowed by the sea.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
It was a cold clear morning on the Itrescan coast the day Livia went to war. She stood atop a windswept hill in her greens, Amadeo at her right hand and Dante at her left, and gazed down at the armada as the preparations for departure got underway.
Terms of Surrender (The Revanche Cycle Book 3) Page 26
