Queen of the Night (The Revanche Cycle Book 4) (20 page)

He turned from the window to face her.

“And what should I think, Livia? What about how we captured Lerautia in the first place? I don’t know who or what you called upon to get us into the papal manse—”

“Dante had mercenary contacts. You know this.”

“Don’t.” Amadeo shook his head angrily. “
Don’t
. I saw the bodies of those guards in the street. They were
shredded
. Do you know what else I saw? Your face when we passed them. Your face, without the slightest inkling of surprise. Then you made a deal with Marcello Accorsi, the man who tried to have us all murdered, fresh after cutting your own brother’s throat—”

“Carlo is alive.”

Amadeo fell silent. Her gaze fixed on him, her eyes like burning ice.

“Carlo is alive,” she repeated. “I sent him into exile. Had to make believe he was dead, though, or our enemies might try to find him and prop him back up on the throne. As for Cardinal Accorsi, sometimes the safest place for a viper is curled up beside your breast. Keep him sleepy and warm, and he might not bite.”

Amadeo still didn’t reply.

“I am walking upon a spider’s web,” she said. “Everything I do, every move I make, brings me one misplaced foot from a fall. And with every step, the entire web vibrates, the consequences of my choices rippling outward and into the future. There are a hundred swords dangling above my head and a hundred spears waiting in the pit below. So, yes, I’ve made some hard decisions. I am fighting, not just for my own survival, but for the survival of this entire Church. And yes, I will do whatever it takes to win, because the alternative is so much worse.”

She tore her gaze away and looked to the ceiling.

“But that does not include harming the people I love. I have rewarded the guilty, Amadeo, but I have
not
punished the innocent. And if saving Freda’s life won some hearts and souls to my banner, then call it a happy accident. I give you my word, on my father’s grave: I had nothing to do with this.”

He trudged back to the chair, his anger turned to weary resignation, and sat down at her bedside.

“And what about you?”

“What about me?”

“Not harming the people you love. Do you have any love for
yourself
, Livia? Back before your father died, I remember catching you…flagellating yourself, like a monk. Seeking purity in the mortification of the flesh. I thought you’d given up the practice, but now I wonder if you’ve just found a more effective means of punishing yourself.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“This…power, Livia—it’s killing you. It’s killing you from the inside out. You
have
to stop. You have to swear it off forever, no matter what happens.”

“I’m safe. As long as I take the Owl’s tonic, it won’t kill me. All it can do is try. I’ve got a lot of fight left in me, Amadeo. If you know anything about me, know that. I have this under control.”

“No.” He stared at her with tired eyes, shaking his head. “You don’t.”

Something in his look made her heart pound a beat faster.

“Amadeo? What aren’t you telling me? What’s wrong? Did something happen out there when I passed out?”

“I was waiting,” he said slowly, “until you were awake and calm. I didn’t want to surprise you with this—”

“
Tell
me, Amadeo. What’s wrong?”

His only response was a gesture. He nodded toward the full-length mirror by the wardrobe.

Amadeo averted his eyes as Livia rose from her bed. Her muscles groaned in protest, jolts of pain coursing from her shoulders to her calves as she walked, the marble floor like ice under the tender soles of her feet. She stood naked before the mirror and gazed upon her reflection.

Every strand of hair on her body had turned white. Not the white of age but the white of color’s stark absence, her once-raven tresses—tangled and twisted by sleep—cascading down her shoulders like the first snow of winter. Her eyes, once rich and dark, had been drained as well. Now her irises were pale, softly glittering, like opals tinted with the faintest specks of turquoise.

“They’re saying,” Amadeo told her, “that it’s another sign of the Gardener’s blessing. A sign of your purity.”

Livia tugged open the wardrobe with a hand gone suddenly numb, fumbling for a dressing gown and pulling it on. Keeping her gaze fixed upon the glass.

Amadeo rose. He crossed the room and stood at her shoulder, looming behind her in the mirror.

“The next time you do this,” he said, “it
will
kill you.”

“You don’t know that,” she said to his reflection.

“Yes, I do. And so do you. Livia, if you love me, then promise me that you will never—”

She whirled around, her glittering eyes fierce.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t question my heart like that. Don’t turn my emotions into a weapon. That’s not fair.”

“If you love me,” he repeated, “if you have ever loved me, then say the words. Swear that you’ll never call upon this power again.”

She curled her lips in a snarl and poked at his chest. “That’s not
fair
, Amadeo. Don’t ask this of me.”

“I don’t know any other way to save you!” he shouted. Then he took a step back, his shoulders sagging, and shook his head. “I’m…I’m watching you kill yourself by inches. And I don’t know how to make you stop.”

Livia turned back to the mirror. Her fingertip brushed one downy, snow-white eyebrow.

“Maybe,” she said softly, “that isn’t your job.”

“It’s the most important job I’ve ever had. Promise me, Livia. Swear to me that you will never, ever do this again.”

She looked at herself in the mirror as if gazing upon a stranger. And the stranger, with her snowy hair and opal eyes, stared back at her with cold curiosity.

“All right,” she said. “I promise.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

An escort of four dour-faced librarians ushered Nessa and her followers through the vaulted corridors of Lerautia’s great library, their soft slippers whispering on the mosaic tile floors. At the end of an unmarked hall, beyond an oaken door sealed with two heavy iron locks, a stairway yawned down into darkness.

“Very good,” Nessa told their escorts. “We’ll take it from here. Have supper sent down in a few hours, yes? We’ll be working late tonight.”

Nessa kindled a lantern, the glow lighting the way down into the bowels of the library as the door swung shut and locked at their backs. Despina and Vassili looked at each other with sudden mad grins and raced down the steps, whooping with excitement as they vanished into the dark. Nessa grinned and looked over at Mari.

“We’ve been waiting a long time for this,” she explained. “The old Dire had a standing kill order on anyone who even
thought
of setting foot in this place. Couldn’t take the idea of competition.”

Skipping down the steps just ahead of them, at the edge of the lantern light, Hedy looked back over her shoulder. “Where do we start?”

“First, we organize,” Nessa said. “I want books of history in one pile, anything resembling spellcraft or theory in another. I expect ninety percent of this archive will be nothing but superstitious dross and false confessions tortured out of random peasants;
that
we can use for kindling. It’s a bit nippy down here.”

Mari nodded, feeling the clammy chill as they came to the bottom of the stairs. The Black Archives were built as literal as their name, the walls and floor laid with bricks of starry-black basalt. A junction in the corridor opened up into small galleries in three directions, all dark and dusty and forgotten.

“Mistress,” Despina called from the left-hand gallery as her brother let out a shrill, giddy laugh. “Come see! Quick, quick, quick!”

In contrast to the orderly shelves on the main floor of the library, the archives were a clutter of cubbyholes and uneven-legged tables, cobwebs and moldering scrolls. Books piled high upon one another in teetering stacks, others spilled out across the floor or scattered upon ink-stained benches. Tiny feet skittered in the dark, and a spider the size of Mari’s fist kept watch from the corner of the chamber, its eyes glimmering like wet amethysts in the lantern’s glow. Despina rushed over, holding up a loose scrap of paper for Nessa’s inspection. The page bore a diagram in rust-red ink, chaotic and harsh, and glancing at it made Mari’s eyes swim out of focus.

“We’re off to a good start,” Nessa said. “That one goes in the ‘interesting’ pile.”

Mari gestured to the stacks. “What should I do? I mean, I…I don’t know what’s useful and what isn’t. How can I help?”

Nessa turned, contemplating her. “You like books,” she said. It was a statement, not a question.

“I do. I’ve never owned any, they’re too expensive, but sometimes I’d get the chance to borrow one for a while. Werner”—she paused, gaze flicking away, her heart pricked by a dimly remembered pain—“Werner taught me how to read.”

“Wait here. I’m going to find a suitable book for you. You should know something about our history, our heritage. You should know the deeds of the coven knights who came before you.”

“I would like that,” Mari said.

Without windows to see the sun and stars, the work dragged on for what felt like an eternity. Ransacking shelves and stacks, sorting the wheat from the chaff, scurrying from gallery to gallery and ferrying armloads of books from pile to pile. The Church had spent centuries securing the most heretical, blasphemous, and forbidden texts known to mankind, locking them down in this basalt tomb to rot. None of the archive’s architects could have imagined they’d wind up in the hands of the very foe the galleries had been built to keep out.

A pair of custodians descended the steps bearing long brass trays laden with light fare: strips of smoked and peppered duck, crisp garden vegetables, and tureens of fresh water. The coven ate while they worked. Mari, for her part, sat in a corner chair beside a lantern, engrossed in a fat leather-bound tome Nessa had found for her. She glanced up, momentarily distracted, as Despina and Vassili gesticulated at each other over a yellowed scroll. One of their silent arguments, entire conversations passing with a twist of a hand or a twitch of an eyebrow. Mari smiled to herself, feeling at home with her family, and went back to reading.

She didn’t notice Hedy scurrying past, a book clutched to her chest and her face lined with worry.

*     *     *

Alone in the farthest gallery, Nessa adjusted her glasses. She perched on a stool beside a scribal desk and frowned at two books laid out side by side. Two maps, drawn a century apart, and neither agreeing the way they should. Movement caught her eye and she glanced up.

“Hedy? What is it?”

“I…found something,” the young woman said. “And I don’t like it.”

“Show me.”

Hedy skirted the desk, moving to stand beside her.

“I found this in the stacks. It’s a history of inquisitions in the western Empire, written by a Church historian.”

“Probably a waste of time. False confessions, tortured out of old women unfortunate enough to live on valuable land. What’s troubling you?”

“This,” she said and opened the book to a page marked with a scarlet silk tassel. Nessa took one glance and snatched the book from Hedy’s hands, moving it closer to the lantern and squinting through her glasses.

It was a woodcut engraving, taking up an entire page, framed in a twisting vine.

It was a picture of Nessa.

There was no mistaking it. The resemblance, down to the slightest detail, was uncanny. Nessa stood, lashed to a post with kindling at her feet. The artist had drawn her roar of defiance as flames welled up around her. Burning her alive.

“Eighty-two years ago,” Hedy said softly. “Her name was recorded as Neffa Raneri. When the witch finders took her, they found the mask of an owl in her cupboard.”

Coincidence
, Nessa wanted to say, but the image took her back to her mother’s waterfall cave. And the vision Muskrat had shown her.

Do you ever get the feeling you’ve been here before?
her mother had asked.
That everything happening HAS happened?

Then she’d taken hold of Nessa’s temples and showed her a vision of her own death. Hers, and Mari’s.

What you saw was your past
, she’d said. Just before imploring Nessa to train a successor. In case she couldn’t escape the doom that was coming for her.

“Did she have a knight?” Nessa asked.

Hedy nodded. “A man, a Murgardt named Marius. He tried to rescue her, but he got there too late. According to the official account, when he came upon her body he slashed his own throat and threw himself onto the pyre. So he could die with her.”

“But that wasn’t what she showed me,” Nessa murmured.

Hedy furrowed her brow. “Showed you?”

“Nothing,” Nessa said.

“Read the next page.” Hedy pointed to the book. “They removed her gag before they lit the fire. She called out to the crowd.”

Nessa turned the page, reading the murdered witch’s words, taken down word for word by some dutiful and long-dead scribe.

“
Do you think yourselves rid of me?
” Neffa had laughed. “
You have slain me a hundred times, a thousand, and yet I still live. I remember now. I remember worlds of steel and worlds of lightning-fire. Worlds of ice and sweet red roses. Every time you strike us down, we return, and we shall return again. Perhaps someday I will walk this land once more, to rain plague upon the children of your children. Weep, insects, weep, for you do not have the power to stop me. You only delay my triumph
.”

“You have to admit,” Hedy said, her voice meek. “It…does kind of sound like something you’d say.”

Nessa stared at the page. “A thousand,” she echoed softly.

“There was something else. Another reference, though the scribe didn’t connect the two events. About a hundred and fifty years before, another burning. The details are sketchy, but the victim was named as ‘the most dreaded Owl, garbed in feathers brown.’”

Nessa bit her bottom lip.

“And this…most dreaded Owl,” she said, “did she have a knight?”