Winter's Reach (The Revanche Cycle Book 1) (13 page)

Felix knew he stuck out like a sore thumb in Winter’s Reach. His skin and hair were too dark for the frozen north, his clothes too expensive for this town. Still, he kept his chin up and ignored the heat from the staring eyes.
You’ve been in worse places than this
, he told himself, though he knew it was a lie.

The tavern he strolled into didn’t even have a name, just a sign over the door with a crudely painted fish and what he thought might have been a hunk of green cheese. The smoky smell of charred halibut wafting through the doorway, though, won out over his better judgment.

The room fell silent as he walked in the door. Dirty faces and hard eyes looked over from a scattering of mismatched tables and chairs, silhouetted in the light from a couple of frosted-over windows. Even inside, Felix could still see his breath gusting out in a curlicue of steam.

He ignored the looks, kept a polite smile on his face, and saddled up to the bar. The stools, like the scattered chairs, had dirty leather skins stretched over the seats to cushion the wood and fight off the cold. The bartender, a stout woman with braided blond hair and a scar notching her bottom lip, made her way over.

“If you’re lookin’ for paradise,” she said, “this ain’t it.”

“If you’ve got something I can eat, then it’s close enough for me. What kind of coin do you take?”

She shrugged. “Mostly barter and logging-company scrip around here, but we get enough sailors that I’ll take any coin that spends.”

He dug into his belt pouch and held up two silver scudi.

“What’ll this buy me?” he said.

She made the coins disappear. “Best damn meal you ever had, that’s what.”

She wasn’t lying. The fillet was a little too charred, and the tin plate she served it up on was a little too dirty, but it quieted the rumbling in Felix’s stomach even as it left a pleasing burn on his tongue. After a week of nothing but hardtack and salted beef, he couldn’t imagine a better meal.

“Spicy,” he said, nodding at his tarnished fork. “Is that chili pepper?”

“Ground juminweed. Grows like, well, like weeds up here, but it makes a hell of a spice. We like our food hot in these parts. You Imperial?”

“No. Mirenzei.”

“Mirenze is part of the Empire,” she said dubiously.

“That’s not the way we see it.”

She chuckled and wiped down a tankard with an oil-spotted rag.

“Hope you didn’t come up here because you like the weather,” she said.

“I’m hoping for an audience with the mayor. I have a proposal for her, about the old alum mines outside town.”

The bartender shook her head. “Huh? This is a logging town, Mirenzei. We don’t have any mines here.”

His heart skipped a beat.

“Not—not active ones,” he said. “But I’ve read that before…before the Reach was a free city, there were mines here.”

“First I’ve heard of it, but we don’t spend a lot of time reading history books around here. I’d ask one of the old-timers, they’d know. You just mind your p’s and q’s when you talk to Her Honor. Folks don’t much like Imperials around here, Mirenzei or otherwise.”

“I’ll be on my best behavior,” he said with a smile.

There was nothing but bones and a bit of burnt gristle on his plate by the time he was done, and the meal lifted his spirits. The bartender’s comment about the mines still worried him, but if the mines had been left to rot since the revolution, it made sense that she might not have heard of them.

Maybe we’ll be able to hire local workers after all
, he thought.
That’ll save money, and it certainly won’t hurt the economy here
.
These people could use some opportunities
.

He was too deep in contemplation to notice the tavern going dead quiet, or how the bartender suddenly needed to scurry over and tend to a table on the far end of the room. His first warning that anything was wrong came when a leather glove clamped down on the back of his neck and slammed the side of his head down against the hard wooden bar.

“Hello again, dandy,” the leader of the Coffin Boys hissed in his ear.

Rough gloves grabbed his arms and hauled them back. Ice-cold iron burned his wrists as a pair of heavy manacles clamped shut. Head stinging from the blow, he blinked, dazed, as the glove yanked him to sit upright.

“You’re making a mistake—” he started to say. Then the backhand hit him, spinning him off the barstool and onto his knees on the frost-licked floorboards. The Boys clustered around him, four in all. Felix felt a trickle of blood leak from the corner of his mouth.

“No mistake,” the leader said. “Your pal told us everything. He led us right to your little hidey-hole.”

“What pal? What hidey-hole? What are you even—”

One of the men grabbed him by his hair, yanking his head back and forcing him to kneel up straight. Their leader waved a tiny glass flask in front of his eyes. The flask was almost empty, but it still glistened with traces of green liquid.

“That sailor, the Murgardt. He saw what you did. Cyladic toxin. You poisoned everyone on that ship.”

Felix’s eyes went wide. “What?
No!
It wasn’t me! You have to believe me!”

“He saw where you stashed your gear, under a loose rock just inside the gates. This look familiar?”

He held out a long, thin-bladed stiletto and rested it on the bar. Next came a strand of wire with two leather-wrapped wooden handles. It took a second before Felix recognized what it was: an assassin’s garrote.

“This is insane,” he said. “Those aren’t mine. Look, I’m Felix Rossini, of the Banco Rossini. You can check—”

The leader leaned in with a cruel smile.

“I knew you were gonna say that. Know why?”

Felix shook his head, mute. The leader unfurled a piece of water-stained parchment and held it up so Felix could read it.

“You will be traveling under the guise of a banker named Felix Rossini
.
The real Rossini is vacationing in Itresca, so there’s no risk of your ruse being discovered
.

“We need you to determine the strength of the Reach’s defenses, especially the stockade wall, and their troop numbers
.
Your service will pave the way for the reclamation of Imperial soil
.
Fealty and glory!”

“No,” Felix said, his heart pounding. “No, this is all…oh
damn
it! Simon, it was fucking
Simon
! Don’t you get it? He’s the one who wrecked our ship, and now he’s setting me up!”

“What do you think, boss?” one of the Boys asked. “Take him out to the logging road, string him up?”

The leader shook his head. “Oh, no. Not this one. Been a long time since we had an Imperial dog to play with. She always comes up with the best punishments for spies.”

He leaned in, nose to nose with Felix, and grinned.

“Her Honor is going to want to pass sentence on this one
personally
.”

They hauled Felix to his feet and dragged him out into the snow. He trudged along with them, occasionally stumbling on the ice or falling to his knees on the rocks when a hard hand gave him a shove. The men yanked him up just as quickly as he fell, keeping him moving.

A procession waited up the street. Ten or so people, a mixture of men and women dressed in rags and misery, forming a chain gang.

“Hold up!” the leader called. “Got one more for the show!”

Each of the prisoners wore a chain belt around his or her waist, linked through their manacles and passing forward to the belt of the person in front, keeping them together. Felix stood mutely as they chained him up at the end of the line. He felt like he was lost in a nightmare, that this couldn’t possibly be happening, but he couldn’t will himself to wake up, no matter how hard he tried.

At a shout from the guards, the prisoners trudged forward.

“Where are they taking us?” Felix whispered to the man in front of him.

“Hall of Justice,” the man said glumly. “For the show.”

“What show?”

The man looked back as far as he could, turning enough for Felix to see his badly beaten face.

“The one where we die.”

As they made their way to the center of town, the streets grew more crowded, more energetic. Electric anticipation hung in the air while the sun sank behind the mountains, shrouding the snow-swept city in darkness. Torches ignited here and there and cast a yellow, flickering glow over the eager faces of the locals as they ran ahead of the chain gang.

It wasn’t long before Felix saw where everyone was going. It had to be the biggest building in Winter’s Reach, a longhouse-style enclave built from stout cedar logs. The guards led the prisoners away from the throng of people jostling to get through the front doors, around the side and down a sharply sloping log-paved ramp.

As they marched through a wide doorway and down a short torch-lined hall, Felix almost dared to hope. If this was the Reach’s courthouse, that meant he’d get a chance to talk to a real judge, a
sane
person. He could explain everything, he was sure of it. He just had to keep calm and focus on his breathing.

Breathing got harder when they shoved him into a cage with the other prisoners in the middle of a screaming auditorium.

Edging up to the rusty bars, he craned his neck to see. The cage was down in a shallow pit of sorts, about six feet lower than the rest of the hall. The wooden planks of the pit were knife-scarred and strewn with sawdust and what he hoped wasn’t dried blood. All around the pit, the “court” was standing room only. Citizens of the Reach packed the bleachers, standing shoulder to shoulder and leaning against the pit railing to get a look at the new arrivals.

Cordons kept the far end of the hall free of the rabble. An empty throne of black basalt, jagged and crude, sat on a lip overlooking the pit. Behind it, doorways curtained with dangling animal furs led into parts unknown.

As if on cue, from no signal Felix could perceive, the room went silent as the grave.

One of the furs swung aside, and a woman stepped out onto the dais. Her hair was the color of ripe strawberries, under a black top hat that dangled crookedly to one side. She wore patchwork trousers and boots, along with a red-and-white striped blouse and a brass-buttoned vest accentuated with ruffles.

The crowd exploded. Felix almost covered his ears as the citizens hooted and screamed and stomped their feet on the wooden bleachers. The woman flashed a dazzling grin, waved, and walked in front of the throne. Two men took up places behind her, a gaunt Mirenzei with a neat black goatee and a giant of a man wearing a sable robe. A mask of white bone shrouded the giant’s features, carved to resemble a bear’s head. Felix’s shoulders tensed as he remembered Kimo and Anakoni’s shipboard tales about the mayor’s witch.
One of the old Northmen
.
They say he can turn you inside out without even touching you
.

“Well, well,” the woman called out as the clamor died down. “Look at you! Look at all these smiling, eager faces. I think you boys and girls are hungry for some
justice
.”

She laughed, waiting for another round of cheering to end, and stretched out one languid hand to take in the packed hall.

“You know,” she said conversationally, “a man came to me last week, and he said, ‘Why don’t you declare yourself queen?’”

A shocked murmur rippled through the crowd. “No!” shouted someone in the back.

“I told him,” she said, her voice slowly rising, “because I believe in the rule of law. I believe in the principles our great city was founded upon. Equality, unity, freedom!”

She shook her head defiantly and put her hands on her hips as applause broke out like wildfire, rolling through the room and growing fast.

“I am no queen,” she said, her fervor growing like a kettle boiling over. “I am no tyrant, no dictator, no would-be
aristocrat
come to lord it over the peasants. No, I am one of you! I am Winter’s Reach!
I am Veruca Barrett, Her Honor the FUCKING Mayor, and THIS IS JUSTICE NIGHT!
”

The crowd cheered and stomped hard enough to shake the cage bars. The floorboards jumping under his feet, Felix felt his heart crawl up into his throat.

Nobody here, he realized, was sane. And no one was going to help him.

Veruca tumbled into her throne and twirled one finger in the air. The cage door clanked and swung open. Two of the Coffin Boys strode in, keeping the prisoners at bay with swings of their maces, and grabbed a pair of ragged men. Up on the dais, the gaunt Mirenzei handed the mayor a furled scroll.

“Let’s see,” Veruca said as she unwound the scroll and gave it a once-over. “We’ll start things off with a proper trial. Two men caught red-handed trying to make off with a merchant’s coin box. They each say—now, get this, you’ll like this part—they each say that the
other
man is the
real
thief, and that they were merely trying to stop the crime like a good citizen.”

The Coffin Boys tossed a pair of rusty, dented short swords at the two men’s feet. The prisoners picked them up, hesitant, their hands shaking as they clumsily raised the blades to guard themselves.

“One of them must be innocent,” Veruca called out. “Let’s find out who.
Fight!
”

The prisoners looked at one another, then down at their swords. Their expressions mirrored the sick churning in Felix’s guts. Trial by combat was an artifact of the grisly past, outlawed a century ago in Mirenze. Here in the Reach, it was what passed for entertainment.

For a moment, Felix thought they might fight back. Turn on their captors and attack the Coffin Boys guarding the doors out of the pit. They knew it was futile, though. One of them lost his nerve first, raising his sword and charging the other prisoner with a frantic scream. The other man stepped to the side, lashed out with his sword, and sliced his enemy’s guts open. The first prisoner went down and the second one pounced, bringing the sword up high and chopping it down again and again as if he were cutting firewood, drenching himself in blood and bile while the audience roared.

The prisoner staggered back. The sword dropped from his hands as he looked down at the other man’s mutilated corpse. He fell to his knees and vomited on the sawdust-littered wood.