Queen of the Night (The Revanche Cycle Book 4) (2 page)

An angel crouched over him. Her skin glowed like a burning diamond, her eyes downcast as her snow-white hair rippled in the wind. She put a hand on his chest, pressing her palm to his wound.

“Don’t save me,” he whispered.

A crystal tear dripped from the angel’s eye. It struck the cobblestones and shattered like glass. Amadeo took her wrist.

“Don’t save me.”

Sudden darkness. Amadeo woke in his cabin under a sweat-drenched blanket, timbers groaning in the shadows as the galleon rocked on a restless sea. No wound, no ax, no angel. Only the cold was real, carried on the salty tang of a night breeze.

He didn’t pray about his dream. He knew it wouldn’t lead to clarity. For whatever reason, the Gardener had seen fit to grant him these riddles and visions—they never came with an explanation. It was up to him to make use of what he’d been shown—or not—as best he could.

I should take it as a compliment
, he thought wryly as he sat up and mopped his forehead with a corner of the blanket,
that my Creator thinks so highly of my intellectual faculties
. He tugged a cassock over his head and draped a wool cloak across his shoulders, opening the creaky cabin door and making his way up to the deck.

The
Sabre
sliced across the waves like a fine-bladed knife, manned through the night by a skeleton crew of Itrescan sailors in the tartans of their homeland. A dozen different patterns and colors paying tribute to their clans and united as one under the griffin flag that crackled from the mast. To port and starboard, Amadeo saw the
Spear
and the
Rhiannon’s Kiss
keeping pace.

Farther up-deck, a small circle of sailors crouched in a pale puddle of lantern light, rolling knucklebones and slapping tarnished coins on the sanded planks. Amadeo wasn’t surprised to see Dante Uccello with them, stroking his thin goatee and grinning as the dice tumbled. Dante scooped a few coins into his hand, looked up, and gave him a wave.

“Father! Come to test your luck?”

Amadeo chuckled despite himself. “Just taking a walk to clear my head.”

Dante pocketed his winnings, clapped the nearest sailor on the shoulder, and rose.

“I’ll walk with you, then. What’s cluttering your mind enough to keep you awake at this hour?”

“Bad dream,” Amadeo said, “and I could ask you the same thing.”

“It’s just your nerves acting up. We should sight land by first light. Then we follow the Verinian coast and, wind willing, we’ll reach Lerautia by sunset.”

“Bringing warships to the Holy City.”

Lips curled in a lopsided smile, Dante walked at Amadeo’s side as they strolled the deck.

“Would you return
without
them?”

“Never thought I’d return at all, to be honest. Too many bad memories.”

“Time to make some better ones, then.” Dante fell silent as a pair of Browncloaks, faces shadowed under their burlap hoods, sauntered past in the opposite direction. They paused just long enough to fix him with a hard-eyed stare before moving on.

“Not fans of yours?” Amadeo asked.

“Mm. Just before we set out from Itresca, a pack of them cornered and quizzed me. I’m quite certain they had my doom in mind if I didn’t give the right answers.”

“You’re joking,” Amadeo said. “You think they would have hurt you?”

Dante glanced back over his shoulder, his face somber.

“Do I look like I’m joking? I wouldn’t have put it past them to stick me with a shiv and shove me overboard. But judging from the squint of your eyes, you’re not surprised at all.”

Amadeo’s shoulders sagged. “The Browncloaks are out of control, Dante. It’s not a holy order, it’s a…”

He trailed off, looking for words. “Livia’s personal cult,” Dante said, filling the silence. “Except I’m not sure
she’s
got a hand on their leash, either. It’s not all bad. There are times when a pack of devout fanatics can come in quite handy.”

“Such as?”

Dante stopped at the railing. He flung a hand out over the waves and wind, pointing to the starry horizon.

“Livia’s brother isn’t going down without a fight, and neither are the men pulling his puppet strings. Going by what you and Livia told me about the night you fled the city, I’m guessing Lodovico Marchetti has at least a hundred killers guarding the papal manse. Guarding Carlo. They’ll have to be dealt with.”

“That’s what the soldiers Rhys loaned us are for,” Amadeo said. “Isn’t it?”

“I’m sure they’ll do their jobs well, keeping peace in the streets and smoothing the rocky road of regime change. But when it comes to the business of raw butchery, Father, nobody does the job like a zealot. They’ll wash the palace floors in blood if they have to, anything to tear Carlo off that throne and put Livia on it.”

“You seem disturbingly comfortable with that idea.”

Dante tilted his head back, taking in a lungful of sea air.

“Right now,” he murmured, “Mari Renault is bringing food to the hungry.”

“Who?”

Dante looked at Amadeo, his smile almost bashful. “A madwoman I knew once. Fancied herself some kind of storybook knight. I have a…a pet theory that all of my deeds are mitigated by all of hers. She balances the scales for me.”

“That’s not how morality works,” Amadeo said. “At all.”

“Feh. With all due respect, if I wanted to talk about morality, a priest is the last person I’d consult. I know, you think me perverse. But that girl, for all her lunacy, made an impression—”

He fell silent as another patrol passed them by. One of the Browncloaks paused, glancing over at Amadeo. Freda. The freckled girl was too short for her cloak, the hem dragging along the frigid deck.

“Evening, Father,” she said with a dimpled smile.

“Freda.” He bit the inside of his cheek until the girl was gone, then shook his head. “I feel sick to my stomach, Dante.”

Dante leaned over the rail, closed his eyes, and took another deep breath of the salty night air.

“You’re merely seasick. It will pass.”

“It’s not the sea,” Amadeo said. “It’s the dread of land.”

“And that too will pass.” Dante gently patted Amadeo on the back. “Once Livia’s properly enthroned, mistress of all creation, you and I will have all we’ve ever wanted.”

Amadeo didn’t answer right away. He put a tired hand on the ship’s rail, looked down to the sapphire-black water, and sighed at the sea.

“I already
had
it,” he said. “Once. Before Benignus died and the whole world went mad.”

Dante chuckled, pushing himself away from the railing. “The world is a wheel, my friend. It’ll shift right out from under your feet and send you tumbling. Only one way to beat it.”

Amadeo glanced at him. “Oh? What’s that?”

“Keep running.”

*     *     *

Dawn’s first light streamed through the porthole, finding Livia in a tangle of blankets. She sat up on the stiff, cold cot and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes, feeling an icepick scrape the inside of her skull. She swallowed back a wave of nausea as she stumbled over to her trunk, fumbling at the brass catches. Inside, spun-glass vials nestled in neat rows on a bed of black velvet. Too few, now, more than half of them empty.

I’ll need to mix more of the Owl’s elixir as soon as we arrive in Lerautia
, she thought, picking up a vial and tugging out the cork with shaky fingers.
Otherwise
…

She didn’t want to think about “otherwise.” The scent of fresh-cut grass and ripe green apples touched her nostrils as she raised the vial to her lips. She downed the concoction and winced. The aroma was pleasing, but it tasted as if she’d crammed a fistful of dirty ashes into her mouth. Livia thought back to her last talk with the Owl and remembered the witch’s admonition: “
This tonic will only preserve your life. It will not halt the spreading sickness inside your body
.”

No herbal potion could stop the splinter of raw Shadow, the infection worming its way into her veins and her soul. That battle was hers to fight alone.

The nausea and the headache slowly ebbed away, the tonic doing its work. A gentle knock at her cabin door startled her from her thoughts. Freda stood in the corridor, looking tired from the voyage but still eager-eyed.

“Mistress,” Freda said, “the captain says we’re about to sight land. Would you…maybe come up and say a few words? Everyone would really appreciate it, I think.”

“I’m still Livia to you, Freda.”

“But Kailani says—”

Livia held up a finger. “This is what
I
say. You’re my friend, not my servant. Call me Livia.”

Freda shifted her weight from foot to foot, cringing a little. “Okay…um, Livia. So, could you? Come up and talk?”

Livia bit back a sigh. The last thing she wanted right now was a crowd of eyes on her, eager for words of wisdom she wasn’t sure she had.
It’s part of the job
, she told herself and nodded.

“I’ll be up in a few minutes.”

With heavy bags under her eyes and her hair a mess, the woman who looked out from Livia’s mirror didn’t much resemble a pope. Three days on a ship with little sleep and no way to wash up could make anybody look like a refugee.
Still
, she thought,
we’re all in the same boat. Literally
. King Jernigan’s soldiers and the Browncloaks wouldn’t be expecting glamour from her.

They’d be expecting a general rallying the troops to war. Leading the conquest that would unite their fractured Church once and for all.

She draped herself in green linen, pinned up her raven hair as best she could manage, and emerged into the hazy light of dawn. Crowds gathered on deck, swirls of colored tartan and brown burlap rising from the berths below to meet the sun. And as a cold glow touched the horizon, a line of rippling aquamarine, they saw it: the coast of Verinia, dead ahead.

Voices fell silent as Livia walked among the sailors, the soldiers, and her self-appointed guardians, all eyes turning her way. She took a deep breath.

“Soon,” she said, “we will reach Lerautia. The Holy City is in pain. It cries out for a liberator. It cries out for
us
. Each and every one of you has been chosen for this noble—”

“
Ahoy
!” shouted a sailor up in the rigging, a spyglass pressed to one wide eye. “Black and gold! Imperial troops on the beach!”

Livia blinked, turning to the rail, squinting to spot movement on the distant coast. As the galleon moved closer, cutting the waves, she could make out the wind-snap of flags and the glint of steel.

And war machines.

“Imperial troops,” she echoed, looking to Dante. “They should all be tied up with the crusade. Why would they be
here
?”

Her answer came in the whistling slam of a trebuchet, the catapult’s mighty arm whipping down, flinging a burning ball of pitch across the morning sky.

CHAPTER TWO

The first mate clanged a copper bell, the peal ringing out as flagmen climbed the rigging and signaled back and forth between the three ships. Livia stood in the heart of a stampede, half the crew rushing to battle stations and the rest milling in a sudden panic, waiting to be told what to do. She shouldered through the crowd, making her way up to the captain’s wheel as the ball of pitch splashed down in the water twenty feet shy of the ship’s bow. It sizzled as it bobbed and sank. Up on the beach, the trebuchet’s arm was already groaning back, its crew working fast to reload.

The captain, a whiskered Itrescan with a sunburned face, passed her a spyglass. She took it without a word and trained the blurry lens on the beach ahead. A company of Imperial soldiers stood ready on the bone-colored sand—archers and footmen under black and gold banners—with a pair of mammoth crossbow-like ballistae cranked back and ready to launch a hail of death as soon as the ships came within range.

And if you sail in a straight line from Lychwold to Verinia
, Livia thought,
this is exactly where you end up. They were waiting for us
.

“Evasive maneuvers,” Livia said, forcing down her panic and steeling herself. “Get us away from here, any way you can.”

“I
can’t
,” the captain said, both hands on the ship’s wheel. “The plan was to turn and follow the coastline. You see those ship killers on the shore? We turn and show ’em the
Sabre
’s broadside now, we might as well scuttle her ourselves.”

“Then turn us around. We’ll go back to Itresca and return with more troops.”

“We’re not riding a horse, Your Holiness. Wind’s against us. By the time we get all three ships turned around, we’ll be dead in the water. They barely missed with the first shot, and that was guesswork. They won’t miss again.”

Livia took a deep breath, shoulders back, and fixed her glare upon the shoreline.

“Then we make our landfall here,” she said. “We attack.”

The captain’s eyes went wide. “M’lady?”

“We attack.
Now
. Full speed to the shore.” She waved over the closest Browncloaks. “Spread the word. Everyone make ready for an assault on the beach. I want Rhys’s troops in the vanguard; they’re more experienced. We go in behind them.”

Dante stood at her shoulder. “We?” he said. “Livia, you need to stay out of the fight. You’re too important. We can’t risk losing you.”

The trebuchet’s arm slammed down. Another fat ball of pitch scorched through the air, hitting the masts of the
Spear
and thundering into the sister ship’s forecastle. Timbers cracked, blazing canvas billowing down as screaming men flung themselves overboard.

“You hear that?” Livia demanded. “That’s the sound of our options running out. Everybody fights.
Everybody
.”

Signalmen gave the orders, colored flags waving from ship to ship, and the
Sabre
and the
Rhiannon’s Kiss
closed in on land as the
Spear
foundered and burned in the water. Livia watched, grim and silent, as the
Spear
’s mainmast collapsed with a groan and the fire spread. Ropes rattled on pulleys, steel-eyed soldiers and Browncloaks piling into the landing boats. Livia found Freda in the crowd, jogging alongside her as they made their way to the closest skiff.