The Miscreant (An Assassin's Blade Book 2) (18 page)

Boom
. She dropped it on me, like a brick right to the head. I bit down on my knuckle, dissecting the possibility. There’s a trick to analyzing solutions. You break it down. Sever any emotional attachment you have to the problem at hand and the players involved. You grind it up, make it as black-and-white as you can.

The prospect of having a conjurer on my side wasn’t one that I’d considered before, largely due to the aforementioned emotions. But this would provide the opportunity I needed. And it’d work, most likely, so long as Lysa was skilled enough. Tough break for Dercy, having his mind filched. But it was with good intentions, however slippery a slope that justification might be.

One minor impediment, though. If you encounter enough problems and conceive enough solutions, you learn that, in the end, you can’t disregard emotional attachment. Gotta add it back in. It’ll come back to haunt you, if you don’t.

“If you fail,” I told Lysa, “or are discovered, or Occrum’s reapers intercept you, or if a number of other obstacles trip you up…”

She touched my shoulder. “Astul, I know. I want this.”

“Do you? You’ve confessed to me that you only want to use your power to do good in this world.”

“But I’ll be doing good.”

“Mm. This isn’t the kind of good that’s as clear-cut as helping a distraught woman overcome her child’s death, you know.”

She was standing straight, unflinching. Unbudging.

“All right, then,” I said. “We’ll get you a horse, and you can gallop away to Watchmen’s Bay. I’ll send Kale with you. He’ll bloody some reapers if need be.”

Lysa smiled so big, her tongue was poking out of her mouth. “I was gonna go anyways, even if you didn’t agree.”

“You’re an ass,” I said, grinning.

“I learned from the best,” she chirped, winking. She eased her hand around mine. “I’ll go ready myself.”

“Send Rovid in if he’s awake.”

She flashed me one last freckle-dashed smile, then spun around like a wind-whipped curtain.

I watched the last of her shadow slink around the bend, and I thought of those words she said to me —
I’ll be careful
. I hoped they weren’t a lie. A man can only endure so much. Can only be shattered and broken so many times, before the wires cobbling him together simply will not hold anymore. Or ever again.

Thankfully a groggy man with fucking cat eyes interrupted my inner spewing of sorrow and heartache.

Rovid groaned and plopped down against a wall. “I’m still exhausted. What’d I sleep, fifteen hours?”

“I told her not to bother you unless you were awake.”

“She didn’t listen. What do you want?”

I slipped the parchment out of my pocket. “I’d wager you probably want some time to yourself.”

“What is this? A clever way of demanding I do something for you?”

I folded the parchment twice over and walked it to the reaper. “Go back to Amortis, read this. Do not open it until you’re there. You’ve got ten days to get what we need.”

He sniggered. “Ten days? Anything else, your highness?”

I crouched so the two of us could see eye to eye. “You don’t like being told what to do. I understand that. What I don’t understand is how you functioned in your little circle of reapers. No one gave orders?”

“I did. I was leader material from the start, Occrum even said so.”

“Now you’re not,” I said. “Now you’re someone who’s a flash of steel away from going to a very bad place. So, what do you say? Do you wanna help save this fucking world and maybe readjust your weight on the celestial scale of goodness? Or are you going to continue being a piece of shit and bitch that I didn’t give you a sword, sew a fucking emblem on your shirt, and call you Commander Rovid?”

With a scoff, he snatched the parchment from me. Held my eyes for a while, then pocketed the paper, silently acknowledging that we had a deal.

“Take whatever you need from here. Food, gold — not that it’ll do you much good in Amortis — water, wine.”

Rovid grunted, got up and presumably went to fetch whatever supplies he needed.

I pinched the candles in the room, then dislodged the torch from its brazier. Time to put the plan into motion.

I
fucked up
.

The crows told me as much. They cawed and cawed, then beat their wings and soared over the ridged, pockmarked landscape. Out here, the birds know everything. They know when the weather’s about to turn, when the worms will wriggle out of the muddy ground, and when the foreboding approaches.

They weren’t flying away because of me, but rather from whatever was coming for me.

The sounds were subtle as evening laid its plum-colored sheet overhead. A snap of dry grass, a crackle echoing deep in the forest over ways. Sounds that the wind can stir up. But there was no wind out here. Nothing but the stillness of a humid air.

The noises inched closer. Pebbles sledded down a hillside, as if a misplaced foot had jettisoned them off. I looked up, saw nothing.

I’d been on this path for two days now, after seeing Lysa off with Kale. Under the presumption that Occrum wouldn’t know the passage I was on from Braddock’s puckered and now-charred asshole, I set out alone. After all, Mizridahl’s a big place, and thoughts alone don’t lend themselves well to identifying location with precision.

It seemed, however, that either I’d been mistaken and his agents of death
were
pursuing me, or something else had a sniff of my scent. I hoped it was the prior. It’s always easier to take comfort in knowing
what
chases you. If not reapers, then what? Various sects of clans lived in these hills, none too receptive to strangers. Wanderers would roam here, but few would be sophisticated enough to hunt down anything more than game. Wolves prowled behind the shadows of jagged rock, and they were patient, rarely ever seen till they were on top of you.

Or maybe something my mind hadn’t yet conceived pursued me. I’d met conjurers, reapers, the reaped, phoenixes and all sorts of things that make your teeth chatter and your innards bounce around. So I wasn’t counting anything out.

So yes, I’d fucked up. I’d wanted the alone time. I’d been elbow to elbow with Lysa, Rovid or Rav for the past month. Stuffed in tiny wagons half the time, sleeping in confined spaces together. It’s the kind of thing that’ll make you snap and tell everyone to fuck off while you march off into the distance to collect your sanity. But now I wished I’d swiped a mercenary from some hovel. One of us would sleep while the other kept watch.

I didn’t have that luxury. If I closed my eyes, I might as well have stuck a sign into the ground that said GET YOUR DAILY DOSE OF MURDER HERE.

So, I didn’t sleep. It’d only been twenty hours. I’d be fine for a while longer. Or was it more along the lines of twenty-five? Oh well. Didn’t matter. With all the
lovely
scenery — if you looked over there, you’d see blackness, and over there? A different shade of blackness — you could have gotten ten hours of rest and been immediately sleepy after a one-mile jaunt through this morose place.

Two hours later, sitting my ass on a cratered floor of pebbles, rock and dirt, I wished death upon myself. My thighs ached, my butt was splotched with what felt like bruises, and I had to listen to a snoring horse. Moreover, I was the kind of tired where nothing really existed except whatever lay in the narrow cone of vision in front of my face. My mind had begun shutting off unimportant things, like peripheral vision. And emotion. And hope.

Fuck, I need sleep.
I had another thought too, but a loud
pop
rudely interrupted it. Sounded like a branch being snapped in half. But there were no branches here; the forest had retreated long ago.

Another
pop
. Then a hiss. No, not
a
hiss. Multiple hisses. They weren’t really hisses at all, were they? They were tongues. Voices, whispering amongst one another.

I got to my feet. Spun around, ebon blade in hand. A halved moon spat out a meek band of light, peeling back a layer of the nighttime shadows. There were monstrous outlines of crags, reaching and clawing over one another in desperation. As still as the breath in my chest.

Nothing moved. Nothing hissed.

Maybe I’d dreamt it all up. Sleep deprivation will do that to you.

In the moment of ultimate fatigue, I drummed up a brilliant plan. Or at least it seemed brilliant at the time. To prevent reapers, reaped, mountain clans, thieves, wolves or other yet-to-be-named scavengers and misfits from brutalizing me and tenderizing my corpse while I slept, I’d set up an obstacle that would warn me of intruders.

I opened up my satchel and riffled through it, flinging my possessions madly about. I gripped a handful of string, grinned insanely, then took a handful of empty skins. From there, I gathered several sturdy-looking sticks and a couple handfuls of pebbles.

I stuck the sticks in the ground, which was no small task given rock lay shallow beneath the dirt like tree roots. I poured some pebbles inside each skin of wine, cut two pin-sized holes in them, then ran the string through them. After tethering the string to each stick, I stood back and examined the circular boundary I’d created.

“Not bad, huh, girl?” I said to my horse. She continued snoring.

Whoever or whatever would try and take me from this world early would inevitably trip on the string, which would jostle the pebbles inside the skins, which would then wake me. Ideally.

Confident, or too goddamn exhausted to perceive the flaws in my plan, I lay down beside my horse.

Then I awoke. My eyes felt heavy and gritty, so apparently I’d been sleeping for at least some time. I blinked, which resulted in an uncomfortable sensation, as if my eyelashes were scraping against something hard.

The sky looked quite black. Blacker, in fact, than I could ever remember it appearing. As my mind slowly stirred to life and washed away the stupor, I became faintly aware that my eyes weren’t heavy because of fatigue. They were heavy because two rocks were sitting on them.

Also, the sky wasn’t black. It wasn’t even night anymore. The sun was rising, with mango waves cresting out from its core.

I sat up and inspected the rocks. And my heart fluttered, and all the blood withdrew from my fingers. Two chunks of coal sat in my palms. My brother and I, when we were young, would often dust our fingers with coal and gently rub the black soot around the other’s eyes when he was sleeping. The next morning you’d awake and, if the placement was just perfect, you’d never notice. And you’d walk around the whole day looking like a raccoon.

I stood up and chucked each piece of coal as far as I could, cracking them off spiked rock.

“It’s fucking funny, isn’t it?” I screamed.

My voice carried for miles. I wiped the soot from my eyes and inspected my barrier. It hadn’t been breached.

A quick flick of my wrist dislodged my sword from its sheath. I skipped over to one of the sticks I’d staked in the gravel and chopped the bastard right in two. One half soared through the air top over bottom.

“You wanna play games?” I hollered. “Let’s fucking play. Come on! I’m ready to fucking play.”

No answer. Of course there was no answer. The reapers that I was now convinced were following me were brainless drudges. They answered to one man and one man only. Question was, why didn’t Occrum have them kill me? Or at least kidnap me? What use could there be in shoveling up memories within my mind?

A bobcat stopped atop a ridge and stared at me. “What are you looking at?” I yelled. It stuck its head forward, sniffed the air and scurried overtop the hill, down the other side.

Disgruntled, I kicked one of the empty skins of wine I’d strung, then went back and saddled up on my horse. None of this made a lick of sense. Occrum was the only one who could have known where I was, but he didn’t seem like a prankster.

The next three days parroted the prior two, right down to the coal chunks left on my eyes. They’d be there, each time I’d awake. I pretended not to care, but you can’t pretend away your thoughts. As my horse carried me deeper into the South, I recalled those mornings my brother and I shared. Smiles on our faces, squealing like pigs as we’d run from the ire of the other.

The outskirts of Vereumene flung themselves at me, stabbing my eyes with brittle mountains made of black glass. With volcanic rock crunching underfoot and noxious powder billowing around the flanks of my horse, my memories were not so joyous anymore. Beatings from our father, the tears my brother cried each night, till sleep took him.

Now I was beginning to understand. Occrum didn’t want to kill me, because he didn’t see me as a threat. He simply wanted to break me, for the fun of it. To prove he could. Narcissism at its finest.

I arrived in Vereumene on day seven, so I had eight days before Rovid would provide me the tools necessary to rescue my Rots. It’d only take five to haul my ass up to Erior, so long as I could secure a quick meeting with Kane.

And it appeared that wouldn’t be a problem. Although this wasn’t the kind of meeting I had in mind.

At the gate, dressed in cherry-red tunics with disturbingly similar cherry-red cheeks, were a handful of guards. Expecting the whole who-the-piss-are-you routine, I crossed my arms and waited.

“Hallo,” said one of the guards cheerfully. “Here for the blessings of Lord Kane?”

I stared past him, into the city square. Crowds gathered. Children, farmers, merchants, perhaps even whores and drunks. They clapped and hollered in delight as a bucket tipped over and doused a bald head with water.

“Er,” I said, stumbling on my words. “Sure.”

If you want access to a king, you generally don’t decline the invitation to meet him. Even in… highly unusual circumstances.

“Wonderful!” the guard said, smiling in ways guards don’t often smile. “Now, hope you don’t mind, but we’ve got to take your weapons. Keep ’em nice and secure, for ya.” He leaned in and thumbed his chest. “Got
my
word!”

I… I didn’t know how to react. The last time I’d visited Vereumene, blood had stained the battlements and I’d kicked a king right off the fucking wall. Now it appeared a traveling circus had moved in.

“Sir?” the guard said.

“Oh,” I said, stumbling on my words. “Yeah, sure. How does one receive the, um — you know. The blessings.”

The guard leaned in brightly, curled his arm around my shoulder and said, “Now all youse got to do is walk right up there. See the line? Stand there, wait to be ushered in.”

“Line’s movin’ quick,” another guard put in. “Lot shorter than it was earlier. Big turnout this mornin’. Couldn’t count how many curses the sea has cured since then. Must be thousands!”

I unbuckled my belt and placed my weaponry in the guard’s outstretched arms. “These are very important swords,” I said. “If they were to get mixed up and given to someone else, why…” I licked my lips, feigning the beginnings of hysteria. “I’d be wrecked. Family heirlooms, you understand?”

Most of the time, I’d sneak in a good threat in a situation like this. But preying on these clowns’ emotions seemed a better strategy.

“Ohhh, yes,” the guard said, lifting his head sagely. “Perfectly understood. I’ll keep it right here by me, personally insured.”

I slapped him on the shoulder and walked into city, assuming my place in line.

Thirty minutes or so later, a guard motioned me forward. Water puddled in the porous volcanic rock where he positioned me.

Kane’s back faced me. He scooped his bucket through a massive reservoir of water, turned and paused unlike he had for any of the other recipients of his blessings. A cerulean blue robe lay wet at his bare feet. His hair of threaded strings the color of wet dirt had been pinned back into a long ponytail. Droplets of water collected in the thick wires of his beard.

Smiling from the corner of his mouth, he lifted the bucket over my head. His hands were pruny, arms slick. “The power of the ocean, of the Mother,” he began, embarking on the same speech he delivered for all those to be blessed, “may she wash away the sins, drown the spirits that would do you harm, and cleanse the mind and the body.”

I gasped as cool water crashed upon my head, cascading down my face.

Kane pulled me in tight and whispered, “Why are you here?”

“To talk,” I said automatically.

He pulled away, his face full of cheer and hope so as not to worry the crowd that something was amiss. He tilted his head over there somewhere, then mentioned the Mother blessing me before the guard escorted me away to make room for the next in line.

I sat on a bench a ways behind Kane, in front of building with fake windows and a wooden sign carved into the shape of an anchor. On the sign were the words “OILS, WATERS AND SUNDRY BLESSINGS.”

The water still dripping from my hair and into my mouth tasted salty. I watched as the blessings continued, unsure of what to make of all this. I’d only met Kane in the flesh once, in Edenvaile when the war with the conjurers had ended. Guy seemed eccentric, but I couldn’t have expected this.

In the short six months since Serith’s usurping, Kane had done a fancy job of fixing the place up. Vereumene looked respectable now, what with freshly stitched banners hanging from the parapets, occupied buildings whose holes had been patched and rot hacked away. The streets of volcanic rock had been raked and tidied up so that the sleek bits lay on top. Maybe handing the crown over to Kane wasn’t such a bad decision after all. Of course, the best way to deceive outsiders is to dress yourself up real pretty. Hides all the blemishes on the inside.

The let-me-pour-this-water-over-your-head event lasted another hour or so. Afterward, the crowd applauded, gave their thanks, and dispersed.

Kane untied his hair, letting it fall like a wet bird’s nest upon his shoulders, in clomps and knots. “You’ll find the chairs in the keep considerably more cushioning for your behind,” he told me, winking.

I got up and followed him and his cohort of guards. The armed men sang songs as we walked, which disturbed me. I’m all for change, but happy-go-lucky guards are just… it’s not right.

Kane dismissed the jolly lads once inside the keep. He took me up several sets of stairs, all the way to the top. In the middle of an expansive hallway, two doors swung open and I followed Kane into, unexpectedly, the king’s quarters. Those of nobility generally don’t invite you into their quarters unless they want to fuck you, kill you, or… well, those are the two most common reasons. Everything else is hearsay.