Winter's Reach (The Revanche Cycle Book 1) (3 page)

The docks of Mirenze were no place for a gentleman, but under the murky moonlight Felix looked like any other eager wanderer out for a night’s pleasure. His hand-me-down cloak swallowed him up in warm folds of wool, staving off the chill and the faint mist that clung to the air. The sky still rumbled with the threat of a storm, but it held back its fury for now.

He knew the route by heart. All the way down to the end of Peregrine Street, where tall ships bobbed in the harbor and the moon’s glow gleamed off jet-black waters. A mouth harp trilled in the distance, accompanying the muffled, drunken sounds of a sea shanty as a merchant’s sloop slipped away from the dock. Not far up the lane, orange lights glowed behind scalloped glass windows. The sign for the Hen and Caber dangled above the door—a ruffled-looking bird painted on clapboard.

A fire’s warmth and a jaunty reel of lute song rushed to greet Felix as he stepped inside. He wiped his boots on the muddy thatch mat just inside the door, while his eyes adjusted to the flood of lantern light from every knife-scarred wooden table and bar shelf. The inn’s common room was rough but friendly, mostly dockhands coming in to relax and spend their pay after a hard day’s hauling. Some of the men played
primiera
, shouting, tossing tarnished coins, and slapping their bad cards down on the ale-stained wood, while others simply got down to the serious business of drinking. Nobody gave Felix a second glance as he made his way to the edge of the crowded room, finding an empty table and a rickety chair to sit in.

A barmaid meandered over. Heavy rouge streaked her shallow cheeks, the color of a sunburn in the lantern light, and Felix could make out the faint ravages of pox scars under the pigment.

“Evening, Zoe,” he said with a smile. “How’s the pheasant tonight?”

“Oh, you don’t want that,” she said, leaning in with a theatrical whisper and putting her hand to the side of her mouth. “The cook’s been fearsome sick tonight and coughing up a storm back there. How about you let me bring you a hunk of bread from the pantry? It’s yesterday’s, but it’s still perfectly good.”

“You are a marvel and a beauty, as always,” he said.

“And you’ve got a devil’s tongue, you have. I’ll let you-know-who know you’re here.”

She tapped her finger against the side of her nose, winked, and slipped into the crowd. Felix leaned back in his chair and soaked in the music and the swirl of conversation around him. The anonymity felt as warm as the hearth fire. It was nice to disappear for a while, and try to forget the wolves at the door.

Not much later, as he bit into a crusty chunk of bread, a young woman in a white linen tunic and a heavy apron appeared at the edge of the crowd. Her rust-red hair was done in a braided twist, and she flashed a brilliant smile when she caught his eye. She held up five fingers on one hand, two on the other, and disappeared back behind the bar.

Felix waited seven minutes before he slipped outside.

He strolled around the building, hands in his pockets, and tried to look nonchalant as he glanced over his shoulder. Behind the inn was a narrow alley where the cobblestones glistened under a spray of mist. He was halfway down the passageway when hands darted from a shadowed alcove, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him into the darkness.

His alarm gave way to sudden heat as warm lips pressed against his, hands stroking his shoulders and curling in his hair. He wrapped his arms around the woman’s waist and pulled her close.

“Renata,” he breathed, kissing at her chin, her throat, whispering her name as the tip of his tongue flicked against her earlobe.

Renata opened his shirt, fingers urgent as she tugged his collar to one side, while his hand slipped beneath her tunic and fumbled at the laces of her thin linen shift. His fingers slid past the laces, sneaking under the filmy fabric, and she bit at his neck as his fingertips caressed the soft curve of her breast.

“Did you talk to him?” she murmured, tugging at his belt. Felix nodded, quickly, bending down to kiss his way along her collarbone. Every touch of her hand burned under his skin, stoking the fires in the pit of his stomach.

“I leave tomorrow,” he whispered. “Back in two weeks, no more than three.”

Felix’s belt clattered to the cobblestones, and her hand slipped inside his leggings. Her slender fingers curled around his hardness and drew a strangled gasp from his throat.

“Renata, we—we shouldn’t—”

“What’s the matter?” she whispered, giving him a fiery smile as her fingers slowly stroked up and down. “Afraid someone’s going to catch the heir to the Banco Rossini fucking a barmaid?”

“No, but—”

She clasped her hand around the back of his neck and squeezed, hard, as she lifted one foot and hooked her leg around his waist.

“Two weeks is a long time without you,” she said and guided him inside her.

Then there was no time for words, no room for them, just two lovers clinging to one another and leaning against a crumbling stone wall as they rutted like beasts. Renata bit down hard on his shoulder, her muscles tightening like steel coils as she crescendoed, and he let out a hoarse cry as he followed her over the precipice. They held each other close, sweating, panting, feeling each other’s pounding hearts.

“I love you,” he whispered.

They sank to the damp cobblestones together, their legs too wobbly to stand.

“Two weeks,” he said, “and I save the Banco Rossini. Money, pride, a place at the bargaining table. My brother and my father can run it from there.”

“Without you,” Renata said.

“Without me,” Felix said, “and I can walk away knowing they’ll be all right, with my honor intact.”

Her fingers curled around his, twining, holding tight.

“Do you think they’ll come looking for us?” she asked.

“When they find out I eloped with a ‘commoner’? Father will be furious, but Calum will calm him down. He always does, and the money will soothe any open wounds. Besides, let them look. We’ll be all the way to Kettle Sands before anyone notices we are gone.”

“I heard back from the owner of the Rusted Plow,” Renata said. “You wouldn’t believe the hoops I’m jumping through to keep my parents in the dark. He agreed to our offer. I’m starting to think we can pull this off.”

Felix smiled. “An inn by the shore, someplace peaceful and warm, just for us. You can tend the bar and I can cook. It won’t be easy, but we’ll make it work.”

She looked in his eyes, and her smile faded just a bit.

“Felix?”

“What is it, love?”

“You once told me that there are no sure things when it comes to business,” she said.

“You know that as well as I do. You practically run the Hen and Caber yourself, not that your drunkard of a father has ever given you a lick of credit for it.”

“What if you fail?” she said.

He looked down at their twined fingers and shrugged.

“If I fail, the only way I can save the family business—and keep my father from dying in a debtor’s prison—is by marrying Aita Grimaldi. So that means there is only one possible outcome here.”

“What’s that?”

He gave her a lopsided smile. “I don’t fail.”

*   *   *

A light rain fell from the midnight sky as Felix returned home. He ducked under the columned porch and let himself into the dark villa, shutting the door behind him as softly as he could. Metallic plinking sounds echoed up the empty halls as raindrops leaked through rotting boards and down the edges of warped window frames, landing in the battered pots and pans that littered the mildewed rugs.

I will never set foot in this house again
, he thought. A bitter pain gripped his heart and nearly drove him to his knees.

The door to his father’s study hung open, the candles doused, the hearth cold. It brought him back to the day he’d told Albinus about Renata, almost three years ago. Before the pox had shriveled his father’s body, when Albinus could still swing a fist strong enough to break his son’s lip and loosen a tooth.

Felix remembered standing there in shock, blood running down his chin as Albinus ranted at him.

“Your mother
died
giving
birth
to you, you ungrateful shit! This is how you want to repay her memory? By dragging our family name into the gutter? By making us the laughingstock of the city?”

“I thought you would be happy—” Felix had said.

“Happy? Why? Because my son is fucking a piece of dockside trash? You are a
Rossini
. A nobleman! I’d rather see you
dead
than dirtying yourself with a commoner.”

The room was silent now, but he could still hear the fury in the old man’s voice, echoing from the worm-eaten wood.

“Well, Father,” Felix said to the empty fireplace, touching his bottom lip and reliving the memory of the pain. “It looks like we both get what we want, in a way.”

Another man might have stormed out that night, and sometimes Felix wished he’d been that man. Then he’d taken a look at the crumbling villa, the family business on the brink of ruin, and the old man who could be so loving when he wasn’t in one of his rages, and left his bags unpacked. Ever since that night he’d had two goals: to steal every minute with Renata he could, and to find a way to reverse the Banco Rossini’s fall from grace.

He’d save the business. Save his family. Then he and Renata could disappear.

Felix padded to his bedroom, wincing at every creak of the floorboards. He undressed in the dark and slipped under the piled quilts. They cocooned him in velvety warmth, the dark stirring memories of his lover’s touch.

Mari woke up screaming.

Werner jumped up from the armchair he’d been sleeping in, feeling a fresh whiplash of pain in his lower back as he loomed over the small rented bed. He knew the routine by heart, keeping a safe distance as she shrieked like a cat with a sliced-off tail and threw wild punches at the air.

The fit passed as suddenly as it began. Mari sat upright, the sheets and her cotton nightgown soaked and freezing. Icy sweat made her bangs cling to her pale brow as she gasped for breath.

“You’re awake,” Werner said softly. “It’s all right. You’re awake now.”

“
I don’t know that
,” she hissed. She closed her eyes and shuddered, forcing herself to take deep breaths.

“You’re safe,” he said, his voice gentle. He still didn’t dare come closer. “You’re safe, and I’m here, and everything is going to be all right.”

She nodded once. Hiccupped. Her shoulders slumped.

“Can I sit down?” Werner asked.

She nodded again. He sat on the edge of the bed, keeping his hands where she could see them.

“You want to talk about it?”

“It was her again,” Mari said, not meeting his gaze.

“The witch.”

“The
girl
.”

“Mari, we’ve talked about this—”

“That was no witch. That was a child, and we
murdered
her, Werner.”

“We did nothing of the kind. Mari. Listen,” he said, and now he did take hold of her shoulder. She flinched and yanked away from him. “
Listen
.
We
did not kill that girl. Witch or not, guilty or not, it was those motherless fools in Kettle Sands who denied her a trial. If we had known what they were going to do…we wouldn’t have taken the job. We wouldn’t have.”

“But we did.”

He sighed and looked over at the window of their tiny room. A waxing moon hung low in a blanket of stars. Under their feet, he could still hear the faint but lively commotion coming from the inn’s common room. It couldn’t have been much past midnight.

“Yeah,” he said. “We did. And that was my call to make. My weight to carry, not yours. So let me carry it.”

“How? How do you deal with it?”

Werner stretched one of his legs out, leaning forward to rub at his calf. Another sore muscle. He wanted to blame the weather, but that excuse only carried so far.

“When I was a younger man,” he said, “I took a bounty on a fugitive killer. I tracked him all the way to the Enoli Islands and found him drinking himself blind in a thatched hut. He pulled a blade on me. Got in a good cut across my arm, too. The bounty was the same, dead or alive, so I finished him off and rode back home with his head in a sack. Easier than dragging a live prisoner for a hundred miles, I figured.”

“That’s different,” Mari said. “He attacked you.”

“Let me finish. Turned out, while I was on the trail, his wife found proof that the poor bastard was innocent. He’d been pardoned. If I’d been just a little more careful, if I’d put just a little more effort into the job and brought him back alive, he would be a free man today. Instead I turned his wife into a widow, because it was
easier
that way. Worst, stupidest thing I’ve done in my entire life, and that is the honest truth.”

He rolled up the sleeve of his shirt, showing her the long, jagged scar that ran a fish-belly-white trail down his bicep.

“Every morning, I see this in the mirror. How do I deal with it? I promise to do
better
. To make that man’s death
mean
something, so instead of a weight that drags me down, it’s a spur to remind me that I owe a debt. My one big debt.”

Mari stared at his scar. A trickle of cold sweat dripped down the nape of her neck.

“I don’t know how to pay her back,” she said softly.

“Why don’t you…why don’t you pray on it for a while,” Werner said. “That always makes you feel better, doesn’t it?”

Mari nodded. She slipped out of bed and rummaged in her knapsack, digging out an old pewter brooch. The face of the brooch resembled the craggy circle of a full moon, encircled with a ring of faded glyphs.

“I’ll give you some privacy,” Werner said, pushing himself to his feet and ignoring the jolts of pain in his calf and his back. “Sounds like the common room is still open. Think I’ll go treat myself to a nightcap.”

He meandered down the smoky steps to the tavern below. A few diehards still lingered, drunks slumped against wooden tables, dozing in their cups, but the hearth fire was down to the evening’s last embers. Werner took a stool at the bar.

“Whiskey,” he told the barmaid and laid a few of the coins from Terenzio’s down payment on the ale-sticky wood.

“Looks like you need it,” Renata told him. She made the coins disappear and wiped down a glass with a wet rag. “Why the long face?”

“A friend of mine is sick. And I don’t know if I can help her. Used to think I could, but now…I don’t know. She’s getting worse.”

Renata uncorked a dusky, unlabeled bottle and splashed two fingers of whiskey into a glass.

“You a surgeon or an herb-monger?” she said. “You don’t look the type.”

“No. She’s not that kind of sick.” He tapped the side of his head, then tossed back the glass and downed it in a single swig. As soon as he set the glass back down, Renata was there with another pour from the bottle.

“You’re not wearing a ring,” she said with a casual flick of her eyes. “Lover?”

“Nah. Apprentice. Business partner. Friend. Hurts like hell seeing her in pain. But I’ll stand by her, long as it takes. That’s what you do. It’s just what you do.”

Renata took down a second glass and poured a splash of whiskey for herself. She raised the glass, catching the lantern light.

“Here’s to love,” she said, “and how far we’ll go for it.”

“To love.” Werner clinked his glass against hers. “Sounds like you have someone to care about, too.”

Renata smiled, sipping her drink. “My fiancé. Twelve hours on my feet, hair ragged, smelling like smoke and stale beer, and he looks at me like I’m a princess dipped in gold.”

“Hang onto that one. Decent men are hard to find.”

“You sound like one yourself,” she said.

Werner chuckled, but he couldn’t keep a trace of sadness from his eyes.

“No, miss, not me. I’m just making up for lost time, trying to set a few things right while my old bones still let me. I owe some people.”

“Owe?”

Werner studied his glass. “Debts. I owe a
lot
of debts.”