Haven's Blight (32 page)
Ryan put his arm around Krysty, who snuggled close and beamed at him. “Sometimes you got to just know what victory is,” he said.
Barton’s big shoulders slumped. The man was plainly spent, physically and emotionally.
“You’re the seasoned fighting man,” he said, “so I suppose I should pay attention. I hardly know what to think just now. Where could Tobias and Elizabeth be?”
“Coming yonder up the path,” Doc said, pointing with his swordstick. He stood under the gazebo, staying dry. Or at least not getting any wetter. The way he’d been staring into space, rocking on his heels and humming “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Ryan was surprised he was connected enough to the here-and-now to notice.
Half naked, barefoot and looking as if he’d showered in gore and forgotten to towel off, Blackwood carried his sister’s limp form step by torturous step. Men ran to help him, but he shrugged them off. Instead he walked straight to the porch of blazing house.
“Be careful, Baron!” Barton yelped. “It isn’t safe there. The whole house is about to come down!”
Blackwood smiled gently and nodded. “Yes, my good and faithful friend. I know.”
He looked down at his sister, who clung to his chest like a feeble child. “It’s the last chance, Elizabeth, dear. Are you sure this is how you want it?”
She nodded.
The baron of Haven looked up. His eyes were blood-colored pools of sadness.
“My sister and I are guilty of many crimes. I make no excuses. We have tried to atone by our actions, but I know now that was never possible.”
“Baron, what are you saying?” Barton cried.
“That the Curse of the Beast must end here. It is carried in our very Blackwood genes, altered somehow by heedless science before the days of skydark. I name you baron now, Barton. I know you’ll do better at it than I, if for no other reason than that you have no ravening monster lurking within, awaiting only the moment to escape.
“And farewell to you, Ryan Cawdor, Dr. Tanner, Jak Lauren. Mildred Wyeth and J. B. Dix. Good friends and heroic ones. And Krysty Wroth—I apologize for my sister’s actions and wish only you could have known each other under better circumstances.”
“Me, too, Baron,” Krysty said. “But wait, there’s no need—”
Sadly, he nodded. “Yes, there is need.”
Without more words he turned. Yellow flames now belched out the front door. Pausing only to kiss his sister on the cheek, he carried her unflinching straight into them.
Overcome with fatigue, Mildred twigged a beat late. She uttered a scream and tried to throw herself forward in a belated effort to stop them. J.B. caught her from behind and held her despite her sobbing struggles.
The greedy flames instantly swallowed Tobias and Elizabeth Blackwood. As if on cue, the whole mighty structure fell in at once upon them with a vast crashing and groaning. The heat that welled from the collapsing house drove everybody scrambling back.
A fountain of yellow sparks shot skyward toward the clouds, oblivious to the now pouring rain, like souls ascending to the heavens.
Epilogue
“You know, Ryan,” J.B. said, standing with his foot up on a locker behind the bowsprit of the vessel now doing business as
Fallen Angel.
Above and behind him her triangular mainsail snapped and boomed in a stiff easterly breeze. “I kinda wonder, didn’t poor Tobias know all of us got monsters inside, just waiting to get out?”
He paused a moment and shrugged. “Granted, not all of us got monsters that actually turn into lions and munch pirates when they break free.”
“Philosophy, John,” Mildred said from behind him, “isn’t your strongest suit.”
Behind them the crew out of Haven moved briskly about their seamanly duties in the clean-smelling early morning air. They were all pleased at their handsome new vessel, a fifty-foot schooner, although there were still some nasty cleaning duties left over from the previous owners.
They wouldn’t be needing her anymore. Scarcely had the flotilla of pirate boats towed behind the
Black Joke
vanished up a masked and little known inlet into the system of interlinked waterways than Havenite coast dwellers rowed out and fell upon the skeleton crews left on board the larger ships, hungry for retribution. As seasoned seafolk themselves, the Havenites made sure to damage the vessels as little as humanly possible.
The crews, not so much.
Krysty put her arms around Ryan’s waist from behind. “Wouldn’t it’ve been lovely if we could have stayed, lover?” she asked.
He patted her hands. “Yeah, mebbe.”
A shift in the wind carried a fine mist of salty spray into his face. In the heat of the Gulf morning, even with the sun just peeking mischievously at them from dead ahead, it was welcome coolness. He smiled.
“Well, couldn’t we at least have taken Barton’s offer of employment on a trial basis? With the swampie war ended and the pirate situation dialed way down, Haven’s a pretty stable ville. They should be back on their feet in a year or two.”
Barton, once a baron’s chief aide-de-camp, now baron in his own right, had agreed at once to the terms brought by Ryan from Papa Dough, pending face-to-face negotiations in a few weeks’ time to shake the details into place. Barton had never believed in the war. But he had been a genuinely loyal servant of the ruling family, especially its final generation.
And that, Ryan knew, was the point where the metal seriously commenced to scrape.
“You seriously believe he meant it?” J.B. said. “After we burned down the house, not to mention his favorite baron and his sister.”
“But Barton seemed like a good man.”
Behind, Jak uttered a caw of laughter. “So Tobias! How that work out?”
“Baron Tobias was indeed a good man,” Doc said deliberately. “A flawed man, it is true. But in this wicked age of this wicked world, where is the man who is not?”
“Baron turn into monster,” Jak said. “Some flaw!”
“Admittedly, some flaws are of greater magnitude than others.”
“I agree with Doc,” Ryan said. “Tobias was a good man. But in the end trying to do good in two different directions tore him apart.”
“And what moral instruction do you draw from Tobias’s dilemma, my dear Ryan?” Doc asked.
Ryan shrugged. “World’s a complicated place, for sure.”
“When you’re thinking of a good man being bent this way and that like a length of bailing wire,” J.B. said, “you might also consider the old saw about barons and gratitude.”
“Why, John Barrymore!’ Doc exclaimed. “You
are
a philosopher!”
“Dark night!” the Armorer said. He brushed at his scuffed leather jacket. “Don’t let on. People might fear it’s catching.”
“Elizabeth was a good woman, too,” Krysty said.
“Powerful judgment,” Ryan said, “allowing as your only interaction with her involved her being a ravening monster thirsting for your blood, and all.”
“I can’t pretend I sensed anything from that creature but rage and hate and fear,” Krysty said. “But I talked to people of the ville about her. About the life she tried to live, as opposed to that which was pressed on her. The evil wasn’t of her choosing. It was a hateful gift of predark science.”
“She could’ve stopped it, though,” Ryan said.
“How?” Krysty asked.
“She could have chosen suicide, instead of continuing to change shape every now and then and go kill people—then in between work hard to make up for what the Beast did.”
Krysty sighed. “You’re right. The world isn’t simple.”
“Still,” Mildred said, “it would be good not to be constantly driven from pillar to post, We don’t even have to put down roots. Just…rest.”
“We all feel that way, Mildred,” Krysty said. “But J.B.’s right. Haven wasn’t an option after everything that happened. Not really.”
“Least they let us ride boat where it go,” Jak said.
“They owed us that much, sure,” J.B. said.
Ryan turned around to face his friends. “Listen up, people,” he said. “I want it, too. What you all want. An end to constant running and gunning. Peace. Sanctuary. I promise one day we’ll find it—
home.
”
“Cross your heart and hope to die?” Mildred asked playfully.
Ryan did the deed with his thumb. “Cross my heart and hope to die!”
And, laughing, they sailed away up the golden trail of light on water, into the rising sun, toward a dream that receded as perpetually as the horizon.
* * * * *
ISBN: 9781459219717
Copyright © 2012 by Worldwide Library
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