“Oh, they will. But until the black giant is off the Isle, I don’t want the two of them wandering around off-leash.”
“But—”
“Now, woman.”
Jada pressed her thin lips together and stalked down the hill towards the soldiers’ tents, casting a death glare back at Lynn over one shoulder.
Milo chuckled. “Ah, Lynn. That girl is going to do her best to make things hot for you, once she doesn’t have your sister around for entertainment.”
Lynn shrugged. “Emphasis on do her best. I think we all know she’s outclassed. Milo?”
“What?”
“You never did tell me about your mother.”
At the bottom of the slope, Jada pulled a tent flap aside and poked in her head. A second later, she recoiled, looking revolted. Silly girl. If she’d only asked, I could have told her that while it’s tricky to knock before you go inside a tent, it’s still a good idea. Back when I worked the caravan routes, I used to bash a couple of rocks together before I walked in on any of my men. It was self-preservation as much as politeness. People have many, many ways to masturbate and very, very few of them are fun to watch.
“My mother,” Milo repeated. “She was nobody. I told you that.”
“Was she nobody to you, really? Come on, you can’t think of a single thing she taught you?”
Jada stooped down by another tent, but this time, the tent flap was flung aside before she had a chance to touch it, and soldier staggered into the open air.
Jada screamed. I didn’t blame her. He looked like a living corpse. Chalk-white skin, dry and shrivelled. Dark eyes sunk deep in the skull-like face. His shirt was foul with greenish slime—vomit, maybe?—and his pants were around his ankles. Milo let out a sharp, shocked exhale.
“So I guess I’ll talk about my mother, then,” Lynn said conversationally. “I don’t remember much, but from what I’ve heard, she believed in a lot of the old peasant remedies. Like putting mouldy bread on wounds instead of boiling oil. And raw cabbage as a cure for bleeding gums.”
Jada looked about wildly, seized the canvas of another tent, and ripped it free from its pegs. The four men inside didn’t even blink up at the light. They lay writhing weakly in their twisted blankets, the dirt around them sludgy with some liquid foulness that I didn’t want to see up close.
“What’s going on?” Milo whispered. “What the hell is going on?”
“Cholera,” Ariadne said, with unhesitating confidence. She glanced at Lynn.
“Cholera,” Lynn confirmed. “That was one of my mother’s stranger ideas. We had an outbreak on Bero when I was six or so. My father’s physicians and apothecaries blamed it on bad air wafting uphill from the slums—in the end, they burned down half the village. My mother was not a physician or an apothecary, though, and she clung to an old superstitious notion about what caused the disease. Can you guess?”
Down at the foot of the hill, Jada’s flight instinct had kicked in. She hurried away from the tents, but another corpse-faced man stumbled into her path. She shrieked, kicking at him.
“My mother,” Lynn said, “thought that cholera spread when human muck got into the drinking water.”
The army camp looked less like a ghost town and more like a nightmare as more and more men crawled out of the tents. At least half of them were shrivelled, cadaver-like shapes, lurching and groaning; the rest were goggle-eyed with shock and disgust. Unconsciously, I’d been ignoring the reek in the damp air. It’s hard to survive as a sailor if you can’t ignore horrible stenches. Now I let myself notice how truly foul it had become, like an outhouse that backed on to a swine farm in hell. The whole lower camp had to be awash in puke and shit.
“Want to know how strongly she believed it?” Lynn went on. “She gave me a very memorable whipping right in the middle of the outbreak, because I emptied a waste bucket in the wrong place. I was supposed to lug it out to a drainage ditch, see, but I didn’t want to carry it that far, so I poured it out in the middens, near the castle well. My mother wasn’t very happy about that, and after she whipped me, neither was I. On the bright side, it made me a lot more careful about where I pour out chamber pots. At least, until today.”
“You,” Milo breathed. “You little bitch, what the fuck did you do?”
“Well, I can’t take all the credit. It was a team effort.”
“The giant. You and the giant—”
“Her name is Latoya. And, yes. We have our differences, the two of us, but there’s no one I’d rather have at my back when I’m visiting a plague port. Yag Sin Tor is putrid with cholera at the moment, did you hear? We made a quick stop there and picked up a bucket of that which cholera patients produce in large runny quantities. Then we used it to spike a couple of barrels of beer.”
Lynn waved a hand at the road that stretched between the hill-fort and the Keep. “The plan was for Latoya to leave the barrels in the road, apparently abandoned, about half a mile from the fortress. Now, your men aren’t stupid, so they probably tested the beer for poison once they found it lying around. Sopped a piece of bread in it and fed it to a hound, something like that. But that must have been the extent of their safety precautions before they got their drink on. Don’t blame them. It was really good beer.”
Milo’s teeth were bared and his chest was heaving.
“Your men didn’t tell you that they’d found and guzzled a bunch of random road beer, did they?” Lynn asked with gentle sadness. “Poor communication. It’s a killer.”
From the far side of the camp, a horn pealed. This confused the fuck out of me, because we didn’t have any hunting horns on the Banshee that I could recall. Then I asked myself whether Lynn was the kind of person who, while planning a rescue, would stop to pick up a hunting horn just for the damn drama of the thing, and the question answered itself.
“It’s an attack, you cunts!” Milo screamed at his men, eyes bulging. “Get into formation!”
The men in camp, the ones who weren’t on the ground retching with their trousers half-down, scrambled for helmets, clubs, and spears. They were confused, and groggy, and they kept tripping over prone bodies as they rushed about. Still, there were a fair number of them. Enough to put down a righteously pissed-off Latoya, and however many pirates had snuck back onto the Isle during the night? My sleep-addled brain wrestled with the complex mathematics involved and was only able to reach one conclusion: At best, it would be close.
This thought was enough to spur me to action. I yanked and cursed at the rain-slick shackle on my ankle, then the chain, and then the tree. It wouldn’t move, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t help, I couldn’t get to them, unless . . . hang on. Maybe if I broke the bones in my foot . . .
I raked frantically through the leaf litter around me in search of a biggish rock, but Lynn grabbed my hands and squeezed. “Mistress, just wait.”
The horn rang out again, a clear pure note in the mountain air. On the other side of the camp, forms appeared in the mist. One seven-foot shape strode in front of the rest, swinging a length of heavy chain in slow, lazy circles.
Latoya was wearing some kind of intricate vest, and though I’d never seen it on her before, it looked familiar. I figured out why after a couple of seconds of squinting: it had enjoyed a previous career as my best blue coat. Somebody had cut the sleeves off, and used the spare cloth to widen the garment until it fit Latoya’s muscular trunk. The same somebody had embroidered the vest with a pattern of roiling clouds and thunderheads in mauve and deep purple, shot through with threads of silver.
And I didn’t know whether I was hallucinating or just seeing clearly for the first time, but when Latoya threw out her arm to whip that chain forward, it really did look like she was throwing a bolt of lightning.
“The Master of Storms!” someone shouted, high and wavering.
One of the Freemen nerved himself and bull-rushed Latoya with a burbling howl. She caught his mace arm on the down swing, bent it back until it creaked, and hurled him away. He flew three clear yards an
d crashed into a tree nose first. Several nearby soldiers exchanged nervous glances, dropped their weapons, and echoed the cry. “The Master of Storms!”
“Oh, you cheeky devil,” I said to Lynn, wonderingly.
Her eyes danced. “I told you people would go for that.”
Jada panted her way up the hill towards us, swaying and gasping. “Milo, you have to get out of here!”
“In a minute.” He’d gone cold again, his voice level and hard. “Go to the wagon. Get a rope.”
She reached out a trembling hand to his face. “My love—”
“Woman, do as I say!”
Jada dashed off, while Milo wheeled, braced, and dealt a vicious kick to Lynn’s stomach. “You lying little bitch, I’ll gut you.”
“Oh, I think very the fuck not,” I said, and flopped my body over Lynn’s. Inelegant, maybe, but it was the best I could do. “You better start running before Latoya gets here, you shitbird, or she’ll fold you up until you fit in a very small snuff box.”
Jada dashed back, coil of hemp rope in hand. “I have it.”
“Good,” Milo said. “Tie two nooses.”
He turned burning eyes on Lynn. “I warned you. There will be no rescue. Not for your parasite sister, not for your Torasan pimp. Did you think that I was bluffing?”
She was still shivering, now from the pain of his kick as well as the cold, but she looked up at calmly through messy bangs. “I knew you weren’t. That’s why I killed you.”
Jada’s hands froze in the act of tying a slipknot. Milo snorted. “You really think—”
“Check your cup.”
His drinking mug sat on a stump where he’d abandoned it, still topped with a plume of pleasant-smelling steam. Milo stared, then nudged the cup with his boot until it tipped. Thin golden liquid trickled out, followed by thicker, darker dregs.
“Blackroot,” Lynn said. “It was my father’s favourite poison. No smell, no taste. Takes a while to kick in, but that’s why I’ve been talking at you at such ridiculous length. I think you should be past the point of no return by now. If you want to make yourself vomit, be my guest. It won’t help, but you should do whatever you like with your last few minutes.”
He stared, uncomprehending, unbelieving, but a spasm ripped through his whole body, racking it neck to ankles, and his confusion turned to panic. He thrust his finger down his throat—retched, spat, retched again.
“But I didn’t let you touch my cup,” he said between heaves. “You never touched it.”
“I didn’t personally, no. You know, I’ve never been very good at delegating, but I’m trying to work on that.”
Jada let a half-formed noose drop from her shaking hands, and ripped her hook-pointed knife loose from her belt instead. With a strangled cry, she hurled herself towards Lynn, and I braced for the impact, but someone else got there first.
Barely half an hour before, I’d watched as a silent servant-woman carried fuel for Milo’s fire. Now, that same servant sailed out of nowhere, long skirts billowing. As Jada blundered forward, the servant dropped into a low crouch and then sprang up, a quick driving motion with all the punch and snap of an uppercut.
A head-butt is not a complicated move, but executed correctly, it’s a thing of beauty. The servant’s skull met Jada’s throat with a meaty-sounding squelch. She stumbled backwards, clutching at her neck, gasping and croaking, tripped over Milo, and went down hard.
I understood, then. I’d taught him that move myself, so he’d always have a trick in reserve if he got jumped by some cocky asshole in a market town.
“Nicely done,” I said. “And much appreciated, Spinner.”
“THANKS, CAPTAIN,” SPINNER said, ever so casual. He pulled off the woman’s headscarf he’d been wearing and ran his fingers through his hair. “Lynn, you all right?”
“Just dandy,” Lynn said. “Get the key to the chains. It’s around his neck.”
Milo was crouched on his hands and knees now, still hacking and spitting, shoulders jerking as his body convulsed. Very deliberately, Spinner stepped on both his hands before leaning over to rip the key loose.
He tossed it to Lynn, who went to work. Her shackles came off easily, and so did Ariadne’s, but the lock on mine must have rusted tight. Lynn cursed at it under her breath, wiggling the key, while I stood there looking gormless and feeling unwanted. “What can I do?”
“Um. I don’t know.” Lynn hammered at the key in exasperation. “Inspire the troops.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Say something piratical.”
“Avast, ye swabs!” I yelled at nobody in particular. No one seemed to notice.
“I don’t think that helped,” I said.
“It was beautiful, darling, you’re being very useful,” Lynn said absent-mindedly. With a grunt of triumph, she wrenched the rusty shackle loose. “There. Now, if you could give me one second—”
She whipped the garrotte from her sleeve, and I winced. “Lynn.”
“What?”
“Do not murder Jada to death.”
“Why not?”
It was a cold-blooded question, but maybe a reasonable one. Ariadne, beside me, stood transfixed, one hand crushed against her open mouth, and her eyes, once again, glassy with tears. But, well. I wasn’t Lynn and she wasn’t me, and we had different ways of fighting our wars.
“Because I’m asking,” I said. “And I’ll say please if I really have to. Just tie her up for now.”
“Oh, fine,” Lynn muttered testily. With rather a poor grace, she used her foot to roll Jada over onto her stomach and looped the garrotte around her elbows.
“If you were anyone else’s sister,” Lynn said. “Anyone else’s . . .”
She let the sentence trail off while she pulled the garrotte tight and knotted it firmly. “There. Now stay down, you little coward. If you give me any grief, then I may do something very fatal to you completely by accident. Darren would scold me later, but you’d be too dead to appreciate that.”
Meanwhile, Milo was crawling, his face a blue-white rictus mask, reaching out with splayed fingers for the knife Jada had dropped. Spinner hiked up his skirts and kicked the knife away. “We’re not done, you and I.”
It was Spinner’s normal quiet voice, but there was icy strength all through him, straining in his sinews.
“So,” Spinner said. “You remember the man you killed the night you took over? The one you delivered to the Banshee in two separate pieces?”
Milo stared up, eyes wide and blind with agony and confusion, his lips moving soundlessly.
There was a tug on my sleeve. “Come on,” Lynn said. “We should let them have some space.”
We straggled down the hill, my arm around Lynn’s shoulders, her free arm on Ariadne’s waist. Behind us, Spinner kept talking in that soft and deadly tone.
“Some people might say that he wouldn’t want this,” Spinner said. “And it’s true, he wasn’t a vengeance kind of person. I don’t think he ever hated anyone in his life. But there’s the thing—if you kill all the people like him, you end up surrounded by the people like me. Tell you what, though. I’ll make this quick, if you can tell me his name.”
IT WASN’T UNTIL days later, when the dust had finally settled, that I found time to punch Lynn in the arm and say, “See? I knew you had a plan.”
“You want a shiny prize? Of course I had a plan.”
“Although—not your best one ever, to tell you the truth? I don’t think you’re allowed to give me any more grief about how shitty my plan was when we rescued you from Bero.”
“What? Your plan was shitty. My plan was not. Cosmic justice demands that I continue to give you grief.”
“Really? Don’t you think you left a lot up to chance?”
“Lies. Lies and slander. The plan was a little complicated, but that was so we didn’t have to take any chances. We had a lot of back-up options and fail safes built in. You should see the chart I made. It is colour-coded. It is glorious.”
>
“So there never was a mutiny?”
“Well. Latoya and I did come close to blows, the day after you and Ariadne got taken. We were both exhausted and scared, so we lost our minds and screamed at each other for a while. Not our finest hour, I know. Fortunately, Spinner came up from belowdecks just as things were getting stupid. He went and fetched the hose, and sprayed us both until we couldn’t do anything but gasp and squelch. He asked us what precisely the fuck we were thinking, acting like assholes right in front of Regon’s body, and . . . yeah. Latoya and I managed to agree that our mutual assholishness wasn’t helping the situation. We didn’t exactly hug it out, not then, but we pulled ourselves together. Took a nap. Had a bowl of porridge and a long drink, and sat down for a council of war once we were human again.”
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