Twig

by wildbow

  One of my hands pressed to my throat, where the slit marked it, and the other held the fat Wyvern syringe, still in its leather case. I stared at the Baron, trying to figure out the next move.

  He could barely see us as we stood there, blinking as if his eyelids had weights attached to them.

  It was Candida who did it. Driven by rage, by fury, or something else, I couldn’t say. But she saw a moment where he didn’t seem to be seeing very clearly and she ran. The Baron tried to raise his voice, only to find it strangled by the poison he’d inhaled. Candida carried the thin, lightweight rapier as if it was as heavy as a greatsword, but she managed to raise it for a thrust for his chest. He moved his hand, smacking it aside.

  I chose that same moment to stab the leather case for his heart. He caught my wrist.

  My other hand, holding the syringe, plunged the syringe into his bleary eye. Both of his hands seized me, fighting me, up until Candida managed a second thrust, piercing his lower chest. I managed to sink it in as deep as it would go. I’d managed the right angle. Past the bone inside the eye socket, and into the cavity where the brain was.

  He froze. The rapier blade kept one of his arms from moving to intercept me. The other groped me, searching for a hold.

  “Tell me,” I said, my voice a whistle, blood bubbling at the cut, “Tell me what happens to the children you take from Warrick. You pretend they’re turned into Firstborn, but they serve some other use. What?”

  His eye locked onto mine.

  He smiled, and then he laughed, a choking sound.

  I would get no answers here. I wasted no time in depressing the syringe. The resistance I felt told me I was pumping it into the meat of the brain.

  The Baron would be mildly resistant to most poisons, but I’d overwhelmed him. Now I gave him a dose of Wyvern that would have left me in bad shape. Twice what I might have been able to tolerate, possibly three times what he could. And as with any drug, it had adverse effects in too high a dose. For Wyvern, it would strip away his wits and sanity. He would lose everything and gain nothing.

  I saw as his head leaned back. His mouth yawned open, his entire body twitching.

  Ironic, that all he’d needed to do to win was to keep toying with me and taunting me, gradually breaking me down. But the moment he’d sought to crush the life out of me, he’d become vulnerable.

  It was done.

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  In Sheep’s Clothing—10.19

  My head rocked side to side, while my eye remained locked onto the Baron, who slouched against the wall, chest rising and falling. Now and then he twitched, or he tried to breathe and found his nose clogged, and snorted out a wad of bloody mucus. I wasn’t sure why his nose was bleeding when I’d pierced him through the eye, but I didn’t mind. Once proud and arrogant, the nobleman drooled.

  Candida’s ministrations at the side of my head continued, jarring me and moving my head this way and that. I was being bandaged, pieced back together. If I’d had two eyes, one would have been on the door, in case the Baron’s elite soldiers wondered at the silence, and one would have remained on the Baron while I convinced myself that it was really over. As it was, I kept my eye on the Baron and kept my ears out for trouble.

  As my other senses went, my instincts were that the soldiers wouldn’t intrude. He wasn’t the type that encouraged others to stick their necks out on his behalf—he was too fond of beheadings and slit throats.

  “Almost done,” Candida murmured. Her face was so close to my bandaged ear that I could feel her breath. She squinted. She fumbled for and then took hold of my most intact hand and raised it up to the side of my head, where the bandages had been set, “Hold this in place for a second.”

  I did.

  I could hear the ripping sound as she tore at the dress the Baron had given her, turning it into strips. She tended to my hand.

  The Baron raised his head up, very suddenly, and then let it drop. It lolled. One of his hands moved a great deal, fidgeting, the other remained still, as if the symmetry of his body had been absolutely broken.

  “We still need to get out of here,” Candida said, her voice hushed.

  “Talk louder,” I said, my voice a croak. The wound at the base of it had been closed. “They won’t hear the words. Hearing speech, they’ll be less suspicious.”

  “I don’t know how you can talk,” she said. It seemed to take some effort for her to speak with more confidence. “The way I cut into your throat… I’m a hack when it comes to medicine, my knowledge is piecemeal, things Drake and the primordial text taught me.”

  “Third time,” I croaked the words, touching my throat. “Throat slashed, first time. Then dog. Then the burrower worm. Think… doctors were proactive, second or third time. Relocated bits.”

  “That doesn’t sound like any way to live,” Candida said. Her hand found and touched the back of my head, stroking my hair.

  My first impulse was to argue the point, but my mind, even as tired as it was, was quick to jump to why, to call up counterpoints, to draw conclusions. Before I even asked for it, I thought about those days. The early days of the Lambs. After my throat surgery, I’d been rendered mute for a week, on strict orders not to speak or laugh. Gordon had had a field day, teasing me.

  I wanted to tell Candida that she was wrong, that those days had been the good days, but the thought of Gordon made emotion well up in my throat, and some combination of being choked up, trying to talk, and the damage to my throat left me hacking out some fantastically painful coughs instead.

  “Thank you for coming,” Candida said. She’d dropped her voice again, despite my urging to the contrary no more than a minute ago. “Thank you for killing him. For rescuing me.”

  Still suppressing my coughs, I nodded.

  “I thought you’d take longer. I thought, maybe, that by the time you came, I wouldn’t have any fight left in me. It’s stupid, I hate feeling weak, but everything I did, every change I had made, to be stronger, fiercer, he had the doctors take it away.”

  “You get it back,” I croaked. I coughed some more, and then climbed down off of the stage. “After we leave. You go to Drake. Understand?”

  “It sounds too good to be true.”

  Someone should get a happy ending, I thought.

  I checked my pockets, and found them largely empty. All I had was the ribbon and the empty syringe, now. I approached the Baron, periodically glancing at the door. I stopped roughly ten feet short of the man himself.

  Laboriously climbing to the ground, I swept my hand along the stone floor, brushing up the dust.

  “I’ll help,” Candida said.

  “No,” I said. “Poison.”

  And you can barely see.

  All of the poison that I’d dashed into the air while trying to drive back the Baron had gone somewhere—and most of it had gone down. Now I collected it again, with a side helping of the dust that had layered the floor of the unused church.

  Once I had two piles of the dust in hand, I gently transitioned it over to a bench. I stared at it, thinking.

  I ached, every single part of me, from the physical to the mental to the emotional. Staying still and thinking of nothing in particular meant not hurting. Not hurting that much, anyway.

  The plan was straightforward, the execution simple and very possibly easy, depending on how things unfolded. But the plan in and of itself, for reasons entirely separate from the execution, was the furthest thing from easy.

  I was shaking, I realized, and I had no idea why. The chill in the air combined with me being soaked in sweat? Suppressed emotion? Shock?

  “Sylvester?” Candida spoke, venturing. “Are you still there?”

  I raised my eye from the pile of poison. “Yes.”

  “Are you okay?”

  I couldn’t bring myself to respond. I would have choked up, started coughing again. Even nodding would have been a bad lie, and I didn’t have it in me. Shaking my head would mean making an admission to both Candida and to mys
elf that would have brought tears to my eye. If that happened, it could be treacherous. A tell for Mary to use to know that something was wrong. I’d already given her so many.

  A huge part of me didn’t want to move forward. I wanted to just stay where I was, hurting, in the candlelit church, and postpone the next hour, the next few days.

  I managed to convince myself that if I stayed still for one second longer, I wouldn’t ever be able to move. “Help me move the Baron.”

  “I’m not very strong, Sylvester. I could barely lift the sword.”

  “I know,” I said, my voice reedy. “I know. Just help.”

  She gave me a nod.

  I took one arm, and Candida took the other. It was very possible that she weighed twice what I did, and she wasn’t exhausted and hurting to quite the same extent I was, in the end, but she only contributed roughly as much as I did as we managed to drag the Baron around. We left him between the first and second pews on the far end of the church.

  “Is this good enough?” Candida asked.

  “No,” I said. I walked over to the nearest corpse that had been nailed to the pew, and I dismantled it. I took the first armful of rags and scattered bones, and draped them over the Baron, camouflaging him.

  I was midway through my second trip when Candida got over her shock and horror and began to assist me. She could only see the vaguest of shapes, but the white bone against dark wood and darker stone seemed distinct enough for her to work with.

  When we were done, I stopped, and I watched the Baron’s chest rise and fall. One of his hands still twitched, dancing like the entirety of his ability to move had been trapped in the one extremity. I paid mind to the corpse that draped him, a woman, if I judged by the hips.

  “I hope she would be happy, knowing she helped,” I said.

  Candida nodded, but she wasn’t able to bring herself to even face the scene. With eyes as bad as hers were, she was still unwilling to look at it.

  “This next part,” I croaked. “It’s on you. You’re going to go to the side door of the church. You’re going to open it. You’re going to talk to the soldiers standing guard.”

  I expected her to balk, to give me another excuse. But her offer to help earlier had been earnest and carried over even to this, and I seemed to have her trust.

  “You tell them the Baron wants me taken to Richmond House. To amuse himself with. To interrogate.”

  She nodded.

  “Repeat it.”

  “They’re to take you to Richmond House, for the Baron’s amusement and later interrogation.”

  “Make yourself smaller, weaker,” I said. “While you’re at it, scratch at that cut on your neck. Open it up, so it bleeds. Then hide it, keep your arms up and in front of you…”

  I watched her as she moved her arms, thumbnail working at the cut until blood trickled down. She held them up, more of a fighter’s style than anything.

  “Wrists closer together, elbows out. Head down. Like the world is a bad place and your arms are the only thing between you and that badness. Like you’re a child again, and cover that wound. They’ll see the trickle of blood.”

  “They’re going to wonder where he is,” she said.

  “If they wonder, then say he’s in the back of the church, he’s angry, because I hurt him, but he doesn’t want the guards to know, so tell the guards they need to be very, very quiet. They’ll know—”

  “They’ll be quiet, if I say that,” Candida said. “Definitely.”

  She understood how things worked here, then.

  I nodded.

  “And you?” she asked.

  I walked around the first pew, and I scooped up the dust I’d collected, a fistful in each hand. I made my way to the carpeted space between the first pew and the stage. Slowly, carefully, I lowered myself to the cold stone floor, curling up in a fetal position, fists held tight to my chest.

  “Just like that,” she said.

  “I’ll need the sword,” I croaked. “And you’ll need the knife that’s lying somewhere, just in case. Let me know if you can’t find it.”

  She brought me the rapier. I raised myself up, indicating where she should set the rapier, and then lay down on top of the blade, the length of it running between my arm and my ribs.

  Once I was settled and sure I wasn’t going to slice myself by lying the wrong way, I let my head drop down to rest on the floor, bandaged side down. Once there, I altered my breathing, making it hyperventilation-quick, coinciding with sharp movements, as if I was in pain. It was the convulsing of a dying rabbit, a pig that had been struck in the spine with a blade, but without enough force to instantly kill it.

  “When?” she asked.

  “Give it a minute. Let the silence sit with them.”

  The side door had had three soldiers stationed there, last I’d seen. If it was four, this got that much harder.

  I lay there, controlling my convulsed breathing, listening as Candida paced.

  When the door opened, I suspected it caught Candida and I both by surprise. Small fortune that it was the side door that creaked open.

  “My lady,” one of the soldier’s voices echoed through the church.

  Then silence. It took me a second to realize that Candida had raised her finger to her lips, shushing the man.

  Good of her, to do that. It would be ideal if she didn’t expand on that, if she let their imaginations draw the conclusions instead of relying on her words to do it.

  I couldn’t make out the words of the conversation that followed, only the tone. I wanted to give more pointers, even though I doubted it mattered. She would be playing the battered fiancee, looking after the aftermath of one of her husband’s sadistic games.

  Hearing the footsteps, I knew that it was two men approached me, not three. I was dimly aware of Candida hanging back, closer to the door.

  The third was still watching the door. Was he watching this?

  That would be a problem.

  Still, I would do what I could. Two was easier to deal with in the short term, if not the long.

  They bent over me, and I resisted their initial efforts to budge me, keeping my body stiff and curled up. As one hooked an arm under my armpit and the other seized my knees, I moved. Nothing sudden. Sudden would have caught them off guard.

  Fluid, easy movement, raising one hand to my mouth, then blowing through my fist, expelling a cloud of dust. Before the one at my feet could react, I moved, hurling the fistful in the direction of his face.

  Both stumbled away, coughing and choking. Their efforts to take in breath only choked them more, and they were nearly silent. The person still at the open door would hear, I suspected, but the ones at the front door wouldn’t.

  My movements felt glacially slow as I got my feet under me, picking myself up off the ground, taking up the sword. Every muscle that I used to lift and thrust with the sword resisted me, pushing almost in the opposite direction. The soldier at my feet was my first target, and the rapier thrust beneath his sternum and up into the space between his ribs. I stumbled to one side, levering the blade inside him, but it was far less than I’d hoped for. It made a sucking noise as I pulled it free.

  I half-turned, facing the other one that I’d blinded and suffocated, and swung the blade around. I caught the soldier’s face instead of his neck, summoned the strength, and then swung again. It bit deep into the neck and shoulder, and blood started spurting out of the wound in a rhythmic fashion.

  I looked to the door. Candida was there, on her knees, her arms around the third soldier. He must have seen her as weak or inconsequential, a bleed-over of the Baron’s attitudes, overlooking her in the moment of crisis. She’d managed to grab him from behind probably with one hand to his mouth, and she’d opened his throat.

  Carefully, I divested the man I’d stabbed of his pistol. I tucked it into my belt, at the small of my back, and pulled my shirt down over it.

  I gave Candida a hand, helping her to rise to her feet. I then had her wait, while I
peered out the open door, checking to see if the coast was clear.

  I saw a flash. Light reflected off of a mirror or a very well-polished blade.

  “Sy?”

  “There’s a signal. A friend.”

  “We could have used a friend in here.”

  One hand went out to my left, indicating that one side.

  One flash.

  I switched sides, indicating the right.

  Two flashes.

  That meant there was probably one soldier at one corner of the building, and two at the other.

  I indicated the way forward, hand out in front of me like I was offering a handshake.

  A long pause, then one flash. No soldier, followed by the universal one-for-yes, two-for-no.

  The dance. Coordination, knowing how each of us thought. I felt a pang.

  “Go,” I said.

  My injured chest hurt with each deep breath I had to take while running. Candida had a much longer stride than I did, but she wasn’t quick. She was blind, reliant on my lead, and the alterations to her muscles, the removal of the enhanced strength she’d sought, it impacted her ability to move. I thought her more akin to an animated doll in the way that only some limbs could move, and only in certain ways or on certain planes. Arms that could raise and lower, but not stretch out to either side. Legs and hips that were much the same.

  We made it across the street before anyone started shouting.

  The soldiers started toward us, but it wasn’t the whole contingent. Others were going inside, to check on the Baron. They would find their fellow soldiers first. Wariness would slow them down.

  Not so for the ones chasing us. They were faster, picking up speed. Only a winding path and the use of corners for cover spared us from gunshots. That, and perhaps a fear of bringing on the wrath of Firstborn or of angering a Baron who wanted us alive rather than dead.

  We reached the building where the flashing had originated from. A door was wide open, Mary, Chance, and Lainie on the other side. We hurried through, and Mary closed it after us, turning the deadbolt.