The pain and humiliation of that is like a fist to my gut. I grip the stone railing of the bridge and stare down at the river. How deep it is? I wonder. I know how to swim, but my gown and cloak are heavy and would drag me to the bottom in no time.
“My lady.”
Annoyed at the intrusion, I snap my head up.
A drunken soldier saunters toward me. Here is the release I seek. He is a hard-faced fellow, a mercenary, I think, for his jerkin is of boiled leather, and neither his cloak nor his brooch bear any insignia. He is wine soaked enough to be friendly, but not so much that he is impaired. I turn to face him.
“Is my lady lost?” he asks. “For this is no part of town for someone as fair as yourself to be wandering.”
“Do you think I am not safe?”
“No, I think you are at grave risk, my lady. There are any number of louts and ruffians who would take advantage of you.”
“But not you.”
He smiles then, a wolfish grin. “I have only your pleasure in mind.”
“Indeed?” At first, I am not sure if I want to fight him or bed him, but when he places his large, gloved hand on my arm to pull me close and I smell his sour wine breath, I realize it is not his lust I hunger for, but his blood. I want to bury my fury and betrayal in his thick, meaty neck and watch his blood spurt back at me in a red-hot rage that will meet my own.
I could even call it an offering to Mortain. Or the Dark Matrona. Whichever god will listen to my prayers and deliver me from this nightmare I inhabit.
He leans in to kiss me but gives a yelp of surprise when he nearly kisses the tip of my knife instead. He grows still and watches me carefully. I feel his pulse beating in his throat, can see his artery throbbing with the blood that flows through it. Slowly I move my knife nearer. I am tempted—so sorely tempted—but he has done nothing wrong and bears no marque. He has not invaded our country, nor does he serve d’Albret. He has not even tried to harm an innocent, for I am no innocent. Of all the lines I have been willing to cross in my life, this is not one of them.
Just as the point of my knife touches the tender skin at his throat, a scream rings out. At first, I think someone has seen me and cried a warning, but the scream is followed by the sound of blows. My heart quickens at the thought of a true fight, and I content myself with simply nicking the chin of the fellow in front of me.
One fat red drop of blood wells up, then falls to the filthy cobbles beneath our feet. “Be gone from here,” I tell him.
Anger flashes in his eyes, and for one moment I think he will reach for his sword. “Be careful of the games you play, my lady,” he says. “Not all will be as forgiving as I.”
I say nothing. When he turns and walks back the way he came, I hurry in the direction of the scream.
It came from downriver, near one of the stone bridges. As I draw closer, the sounds of a struggle reach my ears, and grip my knife more firmly. Cautious now, I move forward. In the shadow of a bridge’s stone footings, two soldiers struggle with a man and a woman. The man’s thin mouth is split and swollen, and his long, sharp nose is bloody. The woman is backed up against the bridge, and one of the soldiers is unlacing his breeches.
It takes but a second for me to recognize that the victims are charbonnerie, which only serves to stoke my fury. Moving on quiet feet, I creep closer. Something feels familiar about the two soldiers, and when the one restraining the man turns to watch his friend, I feel a jolt of recognition. It is Berthelot the Monk, so called because he never touches a woman. Which means the second man must be Gallmau the Wolf, named thus because he cannot leave them alone. Both are d’Albret’s men, and I feel in my bones it cannot be an accident that I have found them.
Killing two of d’Albret’s own will do much to lessen the pain of my breaking heart.
Gallmau is still leering at the woman and taking his time, so I decide to strike Berthelot first. Clinging to the shadows, I move around the bridge’s piling until I am behind the monk. It will be tricky, cutting his throat while he holds the charbonnerie, but the charbonnerie can take a quick dunk in the river to wash away the blood if he must.
Faster than a striking snake, I step forward, grab the man’s hair and yank his head back, then run my knife across his throat, cutting his vocal cords as well as the main arteries. As Berthelot falls to the ground, the charbonnerie stumbles back, managing to pull his arms free just in time so that he does not go down as well. I feel him glance at me, feel the moment that he recognizes me, but I am transfixed by the marque I see on Berthelot’s forehead. I smile then, and turn to Gallmau, who is so engrossed in his lustful activities he has no idea that death is reaching for him. When I am close enough to embrace him, the woman looks over his shoulder and sees me, and her eyes widen. I hold my finger to my lips, then shove my knife into the base of Gallmau’s skull. In truth, this is not the best knife for this sort of job. A thinner knife would slip more easily between the bones of his neck, but I am able to make this work. And keep the blood from ruining the woman’s dress.
To the girl’s credit, she bites back her scream as Gallmau collapses into her arms, and then she shoves the body away so that he falls onto the ground. I peer down, happier than I can say when I see a second marque appear, for that must mean I have not stepped so far outside Mortain’s grace that He no longer reveals His will to me.
I wipe my blade on Gallmau’s cloak, then return it to its sheath and stand up. “Are you all right?” I recognize the thin, dark-haired man as Lazare, the angriest of the charbonnerie. I doubt that this incident has improved his temper any.
“I should have been the one to kill the pigs,” he spits out.
“You can be the one to kill them next time,” I assure him, and then I ask the woman if she is all right. She shakily nods her head. I turn back to Lazare. “Go, wash the blood off in the river before anyone sees. If you come across any other soldiers or the night watch, simply tell them you had too much wine and fell in.”
He stares at me a long moment. Unspoken things move in his eyes. Rage at being preyed on, discomfort at being saved by a mere woman, frustration that he was not the one to avenge their honor. But there is gratitude as well, even if it is begrudging. He gives me a terse nod and does as I instruct. While he is cleaning himself, I ask the woman, “What happened?”
“We were returning from one last delivery, as Erwan wanted to leave at first light, when these two attacked us. They took our money and were going to . . . going to . . . and when Lazare tried to stop them, they beat him. Thank you, my lady. Thank you for arriving just when you did. The Dark Mother was looking out for us.”
“Or Mortain,” I say. “For that is the god I serve, and it was He who led me here to these two.”
The excitement of the hunt has begun to leave and I realize I am tired. So very, very tired. Even so, I take the time to kneel beside the bodies, search for whatever coin they have on them, and give what I find to the woman. “Now go. Collect Lazare and get yourselves back to the others.”
Once I see them on their way, I begin the long walk back to the palace, empty and hollow, nothing but a burned-out ember now that my rage has passed.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
WHEN I REACH MY CHAMBER door, I can feel someone waiting inside. A spurt of panic shoots through me. Is it Beast wanting to confront me? Furious that I even care, I draw a blade from my wrist and open the door.
It is only Ismae, slumped in a chair by the dying fire, and I cannot tell if it is relief or disappointment I feel. At the faint snick of the door closing behind me, she stirs, then blinks awake. “Sybella!” She comes to her feet and takes two steps toward me. “Where have you been?”
I cannot tell her I have been moping over a broken heart when I have worked so hard to convince her I do not have a heart at all, so instead I cock an eyebrow at her. “Are you going to rail at me for not having told you sooner?”
“No! I’m not surprised the abbess bade you to hold your tongue.” The love and compassion I see
on Ismae’s face nearly undoes me.
“It was not the abbess,” I say. The truth begins bubbling out of me like vile humors from a wound. “She never forbade me to tell you. I just . . . could not bring myself to do so. Especially once you’d met d’Albret in Guérande.”
Ismae crosses the distance between us and takes one of my hands in each of her own and gives them a squeeze. I cannot tell if it is meant to show reassurance or exasperation. Mayhap both. “We all have our secrets. And our scars. Annith told me that my first morning at the convent. I have not told you everything about my past either.”
“You haven’t?”
Ismae shakes her head, and I study her to see if this is but a ploy to comfort me.
“I know you were married, and that your father beat you.”
She winces slightly. “Both of those are true, but there is more to my story. I never told you of the poison my mother sought from the herbwitch in order to expel me from her womb. Nor of the long, ugly scar along my back where it burned my flesh. I never spoke of my sister, who feared me, or the village boys who taunted me and called me cruel names. Like you, I was so glad to have escaped, I had no wish to speak of them and taint my new life at the convent with those memories.”
And just like that, she has granted me absolution, declared my crimes against our friendship no crimes at all. I have no words that will let her know how much this means to me. Instead, I smile. “What sort of taunts did they hurl at you?”
Ismae wrinkles her nose and lets go of my hands. “None that I care to repeat.”
“So, then,” I say, changing the subject, “why are you here waiting for me?”
“I was afraid for you.”
“Afraid? What did you fear?”
She shrugs, embarrassed. “That the abbess had sent you somewhere again. That you had run away. The possibilities seemed endless as I sat here all night.”
Something in my heart softens. “You’ve waited for me all night?”
“Once I was here, it seemed pointless to leave until I knew what had become of you.” She turns and grabs a poker to stir up the embers in the hearth. “Where have you been?”
“I needed to get out of the palace, away from the abbess and all her manipulations.”
“It does not help that you are exhausted. Here. Come to bed. You need to sleep. Knowing you, you have not slept more than six hours in the last six days.”
That she has guessed so accurately makes me smile. “Even so, I will not be able to sleep. Not here, not now.”
“Yes, you will. That is another reason I came to your room. To bring you a sleeping draft.”
I feel tears prick at my eyes—merde, but I am becoming some soft, weepy thing! So she will not see, I turn my back and motion for her to help unlace me. “But what of the duchess? Do you not need to attend her?”
“Not for a few hours yet.”
Some of the tension leaves me and I allow Ismae to help me undress, as if I am a small child, after which she puts me into the bed and draws up the covers. I wait while she pours the sleeping draft into a goblet, then drain it. Our eyes meet. I do not even know how to begin to thank her. And because it is Ismae, she simply smiles and says, “You’re welcome.”
I smile back, then study her while she finishes putting away my things. Once we begin going on assignments for the convent, we are forbidden to talk about them with others. But Ismae is no longer as beholden to the convent as she was, and I am half starved to hear about her experiences so I can see if she has the same doubts and questions I do. I begin plucking at a loose thread on the bedcovers. “Tell me,” I say casually, “do you know if the Tears of Mortain wear off?”
She stops smoothing the gown she is holding. “I do not know. Mine haven’t.”
“So you still see the marque?”
“I have been able to see the marque since I was a child. I just didn’t know what it was.”
“Then why did they even give the Tears to you?”
“It heightened my other senses. I was suddenly able to—this will sound mad—feel people’s life sparks. I am more aware of their living, breathing bodies, even if I cannot see them.”
“That is a gift I have had since I was a child,” I tell her. And more than once did it save me. I realize how useless Ismae’s gift of seeing marques would have been in my circumstances; I had no need to spot the dying, but every need to avoid the living, which sensing their pulses allowed me to do. “I suppose you let that blind old woman nearly put your eyes out with her wicked crystal stopper?”
“Didn’t you?”
“No, I took it from her and did it myself.”
Ismae gapes in shock. For a moment it is as if the old Ismae, the one who worshiped everything about the convent and followed every rule, is back. Then she laughs. “Oh, Sybella! I would have loved to be a spider on the wall and seen that.”
“She was most affronted.”
“Why did you want to know if the Tears wear off?” she asks gently.
I take a deep breath. “Because there have been men who I know are guilty of treachery—for I have seen it with my own eyes—and yet they are not marqued.” I look up and meet her gaze. “If Mortain grants mercy to d’Albret and Marshal Rieux, then I find it hard to want to serve Him.” I did not mean to confess that to her, but the words spill out of me.
She studies me a moment, then comes to kneel beside my bed. “Sybella,” she says, her eyes shining with some mysterious light. “I have met Mortain face to face, and the abbess, maybe even the convent, is wrong about so very many things.”
I stare at her dumbly, and my heart begins to race. “You have seen Him? He is real?” I ask.
“I have, and He is more kind and merciful than you can imagine. And He has given us such gifts!” She looks at her hands. “Not only am I immune to poison’s effects, but I can use my own skin to draw it from others.”
“Truly?”
There is not a whiff of hesitation or doubt. “Yes.”
I turn my face toward the wall and pretend I am snuggling into sleep so she will not see the hunger in my eyes. “Tell me,” I whisper. “Tell me of this father of ours.”
“Gladly.” She pauses, as if she must collect her thoughts. When she speaks again, it is as if her voice is filled with light. “There is so much kindness in Him. And mercy. All the judgment and retribution we have been trained to expect of Him was not there. In His presence, I felt whole and complete in a way I have never felt before.”
There is such certainty in her voice that I find myself filled with envy.
“We are not just His handmaidens, spawned to do His bidding. He loves us,” she says.
The idea is so foreign to me that I snort.
“He does! For He is trapped in the realm of Death, and it gives Him great joy to know that we who were born of His seed are able to embrace life.”
“If that is so, then why has He consigned us to lurk in the shadows and cloak ourselves in His darkness?”
She does not answer right away. I sneak a look over my shoulder and see that she is frowning at the window, as if she seeks the answer to this question there. “I believe those are not His wishes, but the convent’s.”
Those words are like a shower of winter hail down my back. I sit up and turn to look at her. “What do you mean?”
“I mean”—she chooses her words as if picking her way across a stream—“that I believe the convent misunderstands both Mortain and His wishes for us. Whether through ignorance or intent, I do not know.”
The magnitude of this makes my heart clutch in my chest. “Explain,” I say, shoving my hair out of my eyes so I may use every sense I possess to try to understand this huge revelation she has just shared.
“First, He does not insist we act with vengeance or judgment in our hearts. To Him, bringing Death is an act of great mercy and grace, for without it all people would be forced to struggle on in frail and broken bodies, riddled with pain, weakened. That is why He has given us the misericorde.�
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“The what?”
Ismae looks at me, puzzled. “You do not have one?”
“I have never even heard of such a thing.”
Ismae reaches into the folds of her skirt and withdraws an ancient-looking knife, its handle of bone with chased silver. “It is an instrument of mercy,” she says softly. “Just one nick causes the soul to leave the body, quick and sure and painless. But I do not understand why the abbess did not give you one.”
“It could be she knew no one in d’Albret’s household was deserving of mercy.” Of a certainty, she knew I would not be interested in dispensing it.
She puts that aside for now. “But Sybella, what I learned is that He does not love us because of the acts we perform in His name—He loves us because we are His. What we choose to do or not do, how we choose to serve Him or not serve Him, will never alter that love.”
“He told you this?”
“Not in words such as you and I speak, but I felt it. I felt this grace and love of His surround and engulf me like a river, and it stripped the ignorance from my eyes.”
“Much like the Tears of Mortain allow us to see His will better.”
“Precisely like that. Only a hundredfold more.”
I reach out and grab her arm. “So have we been wrong all this time? Committing murder by striking when we see His marque?”
“Not wrong, exactly,” she says slowly. “But I would say instead it is not required of us. Those who are to meet Death bear a marque, whether they are to die by our hands or by some other means.”
“How do you know this?” Have I been killing men all this time, thinking I was doing His will when I was actually following some dark impulse of my own?
“After we were attacked at Nantes, I returned to the field to search for survivors among the fallen.”
Dark Triumph (His Fair Assassin #2) Page 21
