FIERCE: Sixteen Authors of Fantasy

by Mercedes Lackey

  She’d known she would only have a few minutes to herself before Lord Basset came after her. He hardly ever let her out of his sight, and had only grown more protective since she’d come of age. Now he followed her like a blasted shadow everywhere she went, doting upon her to the point of near-suffocation.

  But though she wanted nothing more than to scream at him to leave her be, Olivia forced herself to be calm. She wound a hand carefully through her curls, smiling to keep her nerves from showing through.

  She could hear Carlton grunting faintly from inside the stables.

  “You know how the heat gets to me, my lord — especially in these heavy dresses. I just stepped out for a bit of air. One more turn,” she pleaded, when Lord Basset raised his thick brows, “and I’ll come straight back.”

  He smiled helplessly under her look. “Oh, very w —”

  Thunk.

  Olivia swore under her breath as Lord Basset darted by to glare into the stables.

  “Carlton? What in Kingdom’s name have you got in that sack?”

  “Ah … uh … oh, it’s just a batch of that leather you wanted sent down to the village, m’lord. I thought it’d be easier to haul it in a sack than to have it bouncing loose, what with the wind picking up and all. But having it bunched in one place makes it awfully heavy.”

  “Get one of the lads to help you with the lifting, then,” Lord Basset said with a frown.

  “Aye, m’lord.”

  Lord Basset spun from the stall, shaking his head and muttering under his breath. He’d gone a few steps past Olivia before he suddenly turned back. “You haven’t seen Horton anywhere around here, have you?”

  “Lord Horton? No, I don’t believe so.”

  “Well, I only ask because one of the ladies mentioned seeing you leave together after your dance.”

  Olivia inclined her head. “He escorted me out, my lord — he was eager to return to his ship, I think. Once I’d shown him the way, he left me to my walk.”

  Lord Basset nodded slowly. “Yes, I imagine it was all quite a shock for him, being ashore after so many years of hiding out at sea. I’ll let Tristan know. He’s asked for your next dance, by the way. You ought to be honored,” Lord Basset added with a smile. “Tristan doesn’t dance often.”

  And when he does, it’s because he means to torture me, Olivia thought as she watched Lord Basset stride away. The moment he was out of earshot, she charged back into the stables. “What could you have possibly been thinking, you stupid, worthless —?”

  “It moved, m’lady!” Carlton gasped, stumbling backwards. “I wouldn’t have dropped it — honest, I wouldn’t! But it … it moved …”

  All the skin beneath his stubble went white as the crest of a wave as Olivia stomped over to the sack. It had indeed begun to move … and groan. She muttered a string of curses under her breath as she untied the sack’s top.

  A man’s paralyzed face stared up at her. His eyes were wide and his mouth hung slack. His chest rose slowly as his lungs filled with air. There were little white blisters all across his tongue and along the inside edges of his ears. His pleas slid past his swollen, too-red lips in an unintelligible moan.

  But he was still in far better shape than the fellow before him.

  That last time, she’d mixed her numbing compound with the spores of gnarl roots: a mold that grew in the damp caves of Greenblood. She’d tested it on some merchant in Harborville — Edwards, if she remembered correctly. The real challenge had been in convincing him to have a drink of the tainted liquor. After that, she’d thought the rest would be a simple matter of observing how the spores affected his lungs.

  Unfortunately, they never made it down that far. The spores swelled inside his throat until they burst from his skin. And before Olivia had been able to get a decent look, his corpse had toppled out an opened window and into the churning waves below.

  By the time Edwards washed ashore, there was very little left of him — otherwise, somebody might’ve questioned the colony of mushrooms that sprouted from his gullet.

  This time, Olivia had mixed her compound with the sap of a poisonous ivy, and it seemed to be working rather well. She couldn’t help but smile when she saw the many little festering bumps that dotted her latest victim’s face. The blisters seemed to have risen only across the most sensitive areas of his skin, but it was a start.

  “Lord Horton?” Carlton whispered, gaping down at the paralyzed man. The skin beneath his stubble went even paler. “But m — m’lady, you can’t start nabbing the lords. Someone’s bound to notice —”

  “Don’t tell me what I can’t do, stablehand,” Olivia snapped. Then she crouched to study her work.

  It hadn’t been easy to convince Horton to come ashore. He rather famously kept to his ship, and hadn’t set foot on land for as long as anybody could remember. But Olivia’s powers were far greater than the resolve of any man.

  A smile, touch, a few carefully-worded hints, and Horton had followed her helplessly to the ball. In a matter of a few dances, he was already begging her to wed him. She’d offered him a drink while she considered his proposal, watched impatiently as he’d downed the goblet’s brew …

  Then she’d asked him if he’d be interested in seeing the new stables.

  “Give me your coat, Carlton.”

  “Are you cold, m’lady?” he said as he stripped the garment off his back.

  She draped it over her shoulders and did the buttons up tightly. “No, I’m not cold — I simply don’t want to stain my dress. Now hold his mouth shut.”

  Horton’s eyes widened as she knelt beside him. He moaned against Carlton’s fingers, pleading for his life. But Olivia couldn’t hear him.

  Something terrible and powerful rushed through her veins. It made all of the little vessels pull away from her skin and hang, trembling like their own creature beneath her flesh. Blood hissed inside her ears as she drew a small dagger from beneath the collar of her gown.

  It was a wonder beyond excitement, more intoxicating than drink — a savagery she couldn’t control. There was a part of her spirit that would not be bound, a woman who loved the taste of blood … and who turned even the most monstrous of things into a dark, anguished thrill.

  She called it The Poison.

  “Try not to fret, Lord Horton. I promise I’ll make this quick.” Olivia braced her dagger against the ridges of his throat, bared her teeth against The Poison’s groan. “Oh, and about your proposal … I’m afraid my answer is no.”

  Chapter III

  Punishment

  “YOU DID IT YOURSELF, DIDN’T you?” Tristan muttered as they spun about the room. He braced Olivia against his chest and turned slowly, moving along the patient strokes of the violin. “You know how I hate it when you use your dagger.”

  “I had no choice. He was waking,” Olivia muttered.

  Tristan’s tongue clicked against his teeth. “I’m severely disappointed in you … and you know how I hate feeling disappointed.”

  She tried to keep her face smooth as he pinched the flesh on her waist. He ground it between his thumb and forefinger and twisted, drawing fire from her skin. Each time the pain climbed to the point of numbing, Tristan twisted again. The cold depths of his eyes warmed with dark amusement as he watched her mask give way to a grimace; he smiled as she grit her teeth.

  But though he pushed her nearly to fainting, she never shed a tear. The first time he’d made her cry would be the last — and her determination burned more fiercely than her pain.

  Tristan stopped a fingernail’s breadth of making her bleed. He was always careful not to leave a mark, and it wouldn’t do to have a bright red spot show up along the hem of her gown. “You take your punishments so well, Olivia.”

  She glared over his shoulder as he pulled her in for a quick turn.

  Tristan had been only twenty years of age when the free people’s council elected him to the position of chancellor — which made him the youngest in the history of the High Seas. He’d spent
his years of office wading through the politics and grinding out the votes, putting as much of the seas under council control as possible. Now at nearly thrice Olivia’s age, Tristan was also the longest-ruling chancellor in the seas’ history — and he’d had precious little to show for it.

  That is, until he discovered Olivia’s secret.

  The Poison had lapped viciously at her memories over the years. It drove out all of the little things until she could only recall one: a single moment, a furious burst of tears that’d washed a little girl away — leaving a cold shell in her place.

  She’d waited so long to have a chance at Tristan. She spent years trying to recreate the numbing poison using the plants she found in Greenblood, months testing it on a few unsuspecting servants. When it was finally ready, she’d begged Lord Basset to take her to his next council meeting at the chancellor’s fortress.

  Then the moment she’d gotten him alone, she’d charged Tristan with a tainted dagger.

  But it hadn’t worked. He was far too powerful — she remembered how he’d laughed, how his eyes had brightened, how he’d flexed his hands as he felt only the slightest twinge of numbness. He’d drove her to the ground with his heel. He’d pressed down viciously until her ribs nearly cracked beneath his boot. And he’d sworn that if she didn’t do exactly as he said, he would turn her over to the council to be hanged.

  So Olivia had been forced to follow his instructions ever since: she convinced merchants who couldn’t be bought, killed lords no one else could reach. The council had swelled in its power over the last year … and all the while, Tristan was very careful to keep her trapped beneath his thumb.

  Olivia lost track of her stomach as Tristan dipped her down. She felt weightless in his arms, as if her body was no more significant a burden than feathers. And perhaps to him, it wasn’t.

  “Did you at least clean it up?”

  She glared into his eyes. “Carlton dropped the body off the cliffs. I led the dogs to the stains — they’ll have it all licked clean by now.”

  “Messy,” Tristan murmured as he pulled her up. “You ought to find yourself a more capable manservant.”

  “If you don’t like the way I do things, then perhaps you ought to do them yourself. Or are you too worried about getting a little blood on your cuffs to try?”

  Tristan smirked. They both knew very well what he was capable of. Though his hair might’ve grayed a bit at the edges, he still could’ve fought any man in Greenblood that night and won. For Tristan wasn’t at all what he seemed.

  He was a whisperer: part of a race of men gifted with extraordinary powers of the mind. Olivia had seen whisperers called craftsmen who could build anything they imagined. There was a clan of craftsmen in Copperdock that made the finest ships in the seas — ships that didn’t bow to tempests or split against the rocks, vessels every bit as swift as the creatures that glided beneath the waves.

  She’d heard of whisperers who could mend wounds using nothing more than their hands, but theirs was such a rare gift that King Banagher kept all the healing whisperers locked up inside the fortress of Midlan.

  Tristan was the third sort of whisperer — the sort gifted in war … the sort that was nearly impossible to kill.

  “We’re getting closer, Olivia — closer each day,” he said, clasping her hand above her shoulder. He pulled her through the crowd, cutting between the clumps of twirling people with such force and ease that at one point, Olivia’s feet left the ground. “Horton’s son is an idiot. It won’t be long before the council either owns his fleet, or it’s sunk to the bottom of the seas. Either way, we win.”

  You win, Olivia thought.

  Tristan wanted more power. He wanted to strip all of the fleets and trades out of the lords’ hands and place them in the council’s, to leave a larger mark on history — or whatever other nonsense men of a certain age began to worry over.

  All Olivia wanted was the opportunity to test her formulas … and perhaps one day discover something that would drop Tristan to his knees.

  At last, the dance ended and the ballroom broke into applause. When the musicians had bowed and resumed their seats, Lord Basset rose from his place at the head table — holding a rather frail woman against his arm.

  The woman’s eyes trailed softly around the room, her lips bent in a smile that was every bit as frail as her limbs. She had a heavy fur shawl draped across her shoulders. Her thin fingers clutched it tightly to her chest as she nodded to the lords and merchants scattered about the room.

  “I want to thank you all for joining our celebration this evening,” Lord Basset said, his voice rumbling over the crowd. “I know Greenblood Island is a far jog for some of you, but we do so appreciate the company of our dear friends. And as Lady Basset has been unable to travel these last few months,” he smiled down at the frail woman beside him, “she was ever so pleased when you all agreed to come to us. My wife and I have enjoyed twenty-five happy years together — here’s to twenty-five more.”

  “To twenty-five more!” the revelers agreed. Those who had drinks in hand raised them high. The rest applauded heartily.

  Olivia tried to use the distraction to slip away from Tristan.

  He caught her around the arm without even glancing back. “I have another task for you, my pet.”

  He drew a roll of parchment from his coat pocket, one no larger than Olivia’s smallest finger. She wanted to rip it out of his hand and tear it into pieces — not for what it said, but for how it was bound. Tristan had tied the parchment up with a bit of string, and wound that string into a rather tight bow.

  The bow was a jest, a delicate thing bound against a deadly summons — a silent reminder that he owned her.

  “I’ve spent the past few months in negotiations with a merchant from the Grandforest. He has a rather large caravan, and I’d very much like him to use the council’s ships to transport his goods — for a small fee, of course. But things aren’t going well,” Tristan said as he tucked the roll of parchment beneath the collar of her gown. He slid it past the dagger they both knew was there and securely between her breasts. “His name is Garron. Other merchants who’ve dealt with him call him the Shrewd — for good reason, unfortunately.”

  “You can skip the details, chancellor,” Olivia said, keeping her voice steady even though Tristan’s hand lingered. “Since you haven’t been able to bully this Garron into one of your contracts, you want me to kill him so that his doddering wife or spoiled children can take over —”

  “It’s his rather fat cook, actually.”

  Olivia wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly. “His cook would inherit his business? That can’t be right.”

  “I thought the same thing, so I had my informants check it twice. But I’m afraid it’s true. His mother and father have both perished, he has no siblings, no wife or children. Garron the Shrewd is one of the few people in the Kingdom who is truly, completely alone.” Tristan’s fingers trailed quickly from her collar to her chin. He smirked as he whispered: “Why don’t you go put him out of his misery, my pet? It would be the kinder thing.”

  “Thank you, Olivia darling. I don’t think I could’ve made it up without your help.”

  Lady Basset’s thin fingers dug uncomfortably into her arm, but Olivia hardly noticed: her mind was on darker things.

  She helped Lady Basset up the steps and onto the second floor landing. Below them, the ball went on. Most of the revelers would keep dancing through the dawn, guzzling as much of Lord Basset’s rum as possible.

  His liquors were the real reason the other lords and merchants had accepted his invitation to Greenblood: though he tried desperately to keep it hidden, it was no great secret that Lord Basset’s brews were among the finest in the seas.

  They were bottled perfection — a sweet mix of Greenblood’s many colorful fruits made deadly through pressure and dark rest. Despite Tristan’s best attempts to buy them, Lord Basset refused to sell his rums, insisting he was merely a dabbler. So the only way
the people of the seas could enjoy their flavors was as his guests.

  Olivia had asked once to see how it was all done, and Lord Basset had been eager to show her … though she’d used the brewing methods she’d learned to an entirely different end.

  Lady Basset leaned heavily against Olivia as they paused on the landing. Her chest heaved weakly. The breath that rattled from her lungs sounded like boot steps across a pebbly road. “Thank you … my … dear. Thank …”

  “Save your breath, my lady. We’ve got another story to go.”

  Lady Basset nodded, still gasping for air. After several long moments, she finally seemed to catch her breath. “Our chancellor has taken a liking to you. A mother notices these things,” she added with a slight smile.

  You aren’t my mother, Olivia thought. But she forced herself to smile back. “Do you really think so?”

  “Oh, yes. He dances with you the way Lord Basset used to dance with me. You’re a smart girl, Olivia. I know you see it,” she said, smiling again. Then she sighed up at the stairs. “Let’s climb this last bit, shall we?”

  They were nearly at the chamber door when Lady Basset broke into a fit of coughs. Her hand shook as she hurriedly pressed her handkerchief over her lips. When she took it away, little dots of red stained its folds. She tried to hide the blood, but Olivia still saw.

  A few months ago, Lady Basset had been sweeping down the halls and up the stairs with ease. She’d tended to Greenblood Manor’s affairs with a sharp eye and an iron fist. Olivia had hardly been able to step outside her door without Lady Basset clucking behind her at every step: telling her to wear a cloak for the rain, scolding her for getting dirt on her hems, or ordering her to put on nicer dress because the chancellor was coming to visit.

  But though she was grateful that Lady Basset no longer had the breath to scold her, Olivia didn’t wish her any ill. Oh, she’d often hoped that one day Lady Basset would wake and not be able to speak, or Lord Basset would age so swiftly that he wouldn’t be able to follow her around everywhere, or that they would both simply perish in their sleep and finally, at long last, leave her be.