Winter's Reach (The Revanche Cycle Book 1) (19 page)

“Don’t you want to say hello?” the woman asked.

Livia took a slow, deep breath. Her heart pounded against her rib cage as she turned around.

The Owl peered out from the bloody waters, eyes bright and curious behind her mask of bone.

“H-hello,” Livia whispered. Her tongue felt fat and dry in her mouth, her throat parched.

“This is a nice surprise,” the Owl said.

“You’re Miss Owl,” Livia said, fumbling for words.

“Did the mask give it away? Oh, but you know my name, and I don’t know yours. That’s not fair, is it?”

Livia shook her head and took a step back from the bowl. “I’m sorry. This was a mistake. I shouldn’t have done this.”

“I think you have something that belongs to me,” the Owl said.

“I don’t want it,” Livia said. “Please—I don’t even want it.”

“I think you do. Tell me your name. I’d like to visit you. We could chat over tea.”

“Gia,” Livia stammered. Her mother’s name was the first word that came to mind.

The masked figure wagged her gloved finger. The tiny metal talon at the tip gleamed.

“Mm-mm. It’s not nice to lie to Miss Owl. Where are you? Looking behind you…that looks like a very pretty bath. Very expensive fixtures. Fine towels. Though you should replace that one on your arm. It’s all soaked through.”

Livia dropped the bloody towel. It landed with a wet splat on the tile. She grabbed another one from the shelf.

“Have you told anyone that you have Squirrel’s notebook?” the Owl asked.

“No! No, never. Nobody knows.”

“Good. That’s very good. Because if anyone finds out…well, that means you’re a witch, doesn’t it? And witches burn.”

“I am
not
a witch,” Livia said. Her face was a pale ghost in the bathroom mirror.

“Tell me your name,” the Owl said. Her tone was light, coaxing, but there was nothing friendly in the eyes that shone behind her mask.

Livia shook her head. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, all right? I didn’t mean to bother you. It won’t happen again. I promise. I’ll just…I’ll just lock the book away, and I won’t ever even open it—”

“But you don’t want that,” the Owl said gently. Livia felt her voice catch, as if an invisible hand had squeezed her throat shut.

“Let me make it easy for you,” the Owl told her. “I’m going to find you. Then you and I are going to sit down and have a chat about my stolen property and what you’ve been doing with it. You’ll tell me your name then. Or maybe I’ll give you a new one. After all, I can’t just call you L.S.”

Livia blinked. “How…?”

The image in the basin lifted her gloved hand and pointed. Livia followed it to the clean towel pressed against her wound. Her eyes widened at the delicate twist of golden thread in one corner, dangling at the edge of her grip.

“Monogrammed towels,” the Owl said. “Very classy. See you soon, L.S.”

The image rippled and vanished.

Livia slumped to the blood-spattered floor. She curled her knees up against her chest, her muscles clenched tight as a steel spring, and rolled her head back.

“Don’t you cry,” she told herself in a ragged, hoarse voice. “Don’t you fucking
dare
cry.”

The first night on the
Cruel Jest
, sailing south from Winter’s Reach and out of Veruca’s clutches, was smooth and quiet. The Elder slumbered beneath the black waves. For now, at least, he’d eaten his fill.

The next afternoon, three of Zhou’s pirates tried to corner Mari in the galley. One came away with a concussion, another with a fractured jaw and dislocated arm, and the third was smart enough to run. Werner cut him off, stumbling in on the fight, and beat the man half to death with his bare fists. Mari was willing to leave it at that, but Zhou had other ideas. One by one, the three crewmen were bound by their wrists to the mainmast, howling in pain as the first mate lashed their backs bloody with a cat-o’-nine-tails.

“This isn’t for your benefit,” Zhou said to Mari. He crossed his arms over his silken vest and scowled at the scene. “It’s about maintaining discipline on the ship. If they’re on shore leave or we’ve just captured a prize that didn’t surrender when we ran up our colors, they can rape anyone they damn well please.
Not
on board, not on duty, and not someone paying me for safe passage. Even an animal knows not to shit where he eats.”

After that, the crew didn’t even look in her general direction.

Zhou hadn’t been kidding about earning their supper. He kept the three of them busy. Mostly scut work, scraping down the frosty decks and scrubbing the ship from end to end, but Mari didn’t mind. It was good exercise. By night she would sit out on deck and cradle her brooch in her hand, letting the small beggar’s moon guide her thoughts.

“Funny, isn’t it?” Dante said. She looked up and shook her head mutely. He pointed at the brooch. “We’re being ferried to freedom by a band of remorseless, bloodthirsty killers, and you find time to pray.”

Mari shrugged, not seeing the humor.

“So was it your father?” he said. “Or your grandfather?”

“What was?”

Dante crouched down beside her.

“Order of the Autumn Lance,” he said. “That brooch you carry around. I recognize it from my military studies. They were wiped out by the Empire, no? I assume it was passed down through your family.”

“No. Werner found it on his travels, before we met. He believed it would lead him to its rightful owner. Which…isn’t me. Not yet.”

“Not yet?”

“When I was a child,” Mari said, “all I wanted, more than anything in the world, was to be a knight. All the orders in Belle Terre were disbanded, though. The Empire burned their chapterhouses, drove them underground.”

“So you found a more realistic dream,” Dante said.

She shook her head.

“I…forgot my dream for a while, but Werner woke me up, reminded me how I used to be. I decided that it didn’t matter if the orders were gone. I would live as a knight aspirant anyway. I took the oaths, trained as hard as I could, and set out on my quest. I don’t hunt criminals for money. I do it because it’s a way to further the cause of justice.”

“Wait,” Dante said. He curled his legs, sitting down. “Wait a moment.
All
the oaths? You took vows of chastity and poverty, even though you didn’t have to and you don’t actually answer to anyone but yourself?”

She held up the brooch.

“I am the last squire of the Order of the Autumn Lance,” she said. “And someday they’ll find me, and I’ll earn the right to wear this.”

“And if they don’t?”

“Then I will live as a knight should, nonetheless. And maybe someone after me will find this brooch on my bones, and they’ll be inspired to do the same.
Veritas
is my motto. Truth, above all.”

Dante ran his fingers through his hair and let out a faint, nervous chuckle.

“You do realize,” he said, “that you’re insane.”

“Says the man who worked for Veruca Barrett.”

The boat swayed gently, canvas sails crackling in a night wind. Dante laughed.

“She’s a different kind of crazy. Crazy for money and power, like any politician.
That
I can understand.”

“You don’t understand principles?” she said.

“I don’t understand empty principles or pointless oaths. Wealth can buy you the leverage to achieve your goals. Sex can…well, I don’t suppose it’d make you a better knight, but it would likely make you a happier one. I’m a pragmatist.”

“I know. I’ve read your work.”

His eyes widened a bit. “You didn’t strike me as a student of political philosophy.”

“I like to read,” Mari said. “Werner gave me one of your books once.”

“Then you understand how I could work for a woman like Barrett. She’s the leader the Reach needs. Her reign is hard and cruel, but that’s nothing compared to the hellish nightmare that city would turn into without her. Between a choice of evils, she’s the most palatable.”

“A choice of evils still ends in evil.”

“Yes,” Dante said, “which means absolutely nothing. Politics and morality are apples and parakeets. Leadership involves compromise. Sacrificing principles in the short term to reap a long-term benefit. Taking the seedy vagaries of human nature into account. A true leader must be a tactician first and foremost, cold and calculating.”

Mari looked him over. “When you sacrifice your principles, you don’t magically get them back at the end of the day.”

“There has never been, and never will be, a moral government. The question is whether a government is effective, and whether it is beneficial for its people.”

“You don’t live up to your own ideals,” Mari said.

Dante smiled. “No? How do you figure?”

“You write about utilitarianism and the art of the possible. Working with the people and the resources you have, not the ones you want.”

“That’s right.”

“Yet,” she said, “when you were the captain of Mirenze’s militia, you fought to have the Marchetti family dislodged from the Council of Nine. One man, crusading against the most powerful family in the city. You had to have known you couldn’t win, and you knew they’d retaliate.”

Dante ran a finger along his collar, looking wistful for a moment.

“And so they did, hence my current miserable condition. I did it for the city. Luigi Marchetti was both a councilman and the chair of his family bank. I think his son Lodovico has taken over the business since. Luigi was an agitator. Hated the Empire, hated the fact that Mirenze had gone from the greatest city-state in the world to a humble vassal of the holy west.”

“Don’t most Mirenzei feel that way?” Mari asked.

Dante nodded. “Yes. We are, however, smart enough to shut up and toe the line. Luigi wasn’t. I learned through my militia contacts that he was trying to stir up support for a rebellion. It was mad. He would have gotten thousands of people killed. I couldn’t expose the truth in public—just the admission that a plot existed would draw down Imperial thunder—so I hammered him on everything else I could find. Banking irregularities, rumors and scandals—half of which I made up out of whole cloth—to keep the heat on him and push the Council to take action.”

“And he retaliated by accusing you of treason.”

“I miscalculated,” Dante said. “I’m not proud of it. I thought I had more friends than I did, and I thought I’d embarrassed the Council of Nine less than I had. So, one night, I was visited by some very somber gentlemen from the government, and we came to an arrangement.”

“Arrangement?” Mari said.

“I’d done exactly what I set out to do: wake the Council up and force them to do something about the viper in their midst. I knew there would be consequences. I fully expected to sacrifice my career, but my mistake was thinking it would end with that. They warned me that treason charges would be levied the next morning. They generously gave me the night to pack what belongings I could and flee into exile.”

“And Marchetti?”

Dante looked up at the night sky, as if counting the stars.

“Yes. Our arrangement. I would go into exile, never to return to the city I loved, in order to salvage the Council’s public reputation. Meanwhile, well…they say Luigi Marchetti was a man haunted by demons. A fortnight after I left Mirenze, he killed himself. Drank four bottles of wine, took a hot bath, and slit his wrists. A tragedy, but with the agitator dead, the city was safe.”

Mari ran her thumb over the face of the pewter brooch, thinking it over.

“Suicide,” she said flatly.

Dante’s smile was almost too faint to see in the dark.

“I received a letter from a dear friend of mine, after the deed was done. Said the hardest part was forcing the first bottle of wine down Luigi’s throat. In the end, civic pride, confidence, and order were restored, and life in Mirenze went on.”

“With you in exile, branded as a liar and a traitor.”

Dante shrugged. “I’m one man. Mirenze is a city of thousands. It was a fair trade.”

“Look at that,” Mari said, “you have principles after all.”

*   *   *

The
Cruel Jest
put in at Shepherd Bay, a sleepy Verinian town with a port built for fishing boats. Mari stood out on the deck, marveling at the feel of warm morning sunshine against her cheeks. A crisp wind ruffled her ragged hair and snapped the canvas sails, but after almost two weeks in the north, she barely noticed the chill.

“Can’t say I was happy to have you lot on board,” Zhou said to her, Werner, and Dante, standing at the edge of the gangplank. “Still, any other way this could have gone, I’d have profited less. Suppose I should thank you for that.”

“We all profited,” Dante said. “That’s my favorite kind of deal.”

“Well, we’re square now,” Zhou said, “so don’t expect any special favors if you land in my sights someday. All the same, I won’t be looking to cause you no harm. We’ll call it a buccaneer’s truce.”

“What’s that?” Werner said. The color was already returning to his cheeks, now that the ship was moored and land was in sight, but he still hadn’t completely shaken the cough he’d picked up in the north.

Zhou stuck out his hand. “Peace until it isn’t.”

“Peace until it isn’t,” Werner agreed, clasping the pirate’s hand and giving it a hard shake.

The town was still waking up as Mari, Werner, and Dante walked down its rolling dirt roads. The scent of warm, fresh-baked bread wafted out from a baker’s open window. Dante leaned toward the smell and let out an exaggerated sigh.

“We’re stopping there,” he said. “We are having fresh bread. And pastries if they have them. With sugar. And tea. Hot tea, with leaves that have never been used before.”

“Not used to roughing it?” Mari said.

“There is no virtue in denying oneself pleasure. Asceticism is a cheap substitute for character.”

“Discipline makes you strong…” Mari paused, then sniffed at the air. “…but I like pastries.”

Happily sated, the trio made their way to a stable at the edge of town. Dante wasted no time in requesting a coach with a trained horseman to take them to Lerautia.

“Less expensive to hire an open wagon and drive it ourselves,” Mari said.

“Never you mind,” Dante said. “I’m paying. Remember how I opened Veruca’s letter to Captain Zhou?”

Mari nodded.

He smiled wanly. “Well, I opened the coffer, too. A few shiny pieces of gold might have found their way into my shoe before we went on board. It’s a shame I didn’t have more time to plan my escape. I know the combination to Veruca’s safe, too. So what’s your take on this Cardinal Accorsi fellow? Is he a man of honor?”

“We haven’t met,” Mari said. “You said Terenzio Ruggeri was an old friend, though.”

“In a sense. A greedy man with predictable vices, but he has Mirenze’s best interests at heart. You remember the letter I told you about? The one that mentioned forcing wine down Luigi Marchetti’s throat the night he ‘killed himself’?”

Mari nodded.

Dante put his hands behind his back and stretched, smiling.

“Ruggeri wrote it.”