Winter's Reach (The Revanche Cycle Book 1) (9 page)

He trailed off.
But what
? he thought. She stared at him expectantly, but he realized he didn’t have a theory to hang his suspicions on. He felt ridiculous. His gaze drifted. Over on a chair by the fire, something caught his eye. It was a scourge of braided leather with four or five wickedly knotted strands dangling from the whip’s handle. The sounds he’d overheard suddenly made sense.

“Mortification of the flesh?” he said. She followed his gaze to the discarded whip but said nothing.

“Livia,” Amadeo said, drawing her eyes back to his. “I know it’s a Church-sanctioned practice, for a monk at least, but…have a care. Sometimes I worry that you might be demanding too much of yourself.”

“We must all do what we can,” she said. “Don’t you know the ‘Parable of the Lazy Apprentice’? You should read it again, if you haven’t lately.”

An icy finger trailed down the back of Amadeo’s neck. It felt like someone was trying to throw that story in his path today. To make sure he was paying attention.

“Oddly enough, I was just sharing it with some of the children down in the Alms District. I think they got something out of it.”

“Children are the best listeners,” Livia said. “Now, if there’s nothing else, I should get back to my studies. I’m working on a special project, and I don’t want to lose my focus.”

Amadeo nodded. “Of course. Goodnight, Livia.”

She shut the door without another word. He heard locks clicking into place, one after another.

Something was wrong here. Whatever Carlo and Lodovico were cooking up together, it wasn’t anything good.

“And nobody is going to figure it out and
do
something about it. Nobody but me,” he sighed, talking to himself in the empty hall. “Apprentice, get to work.”

Livia leaned her shoulder against the door, shut her eyes, and let out a pent-up breath. She waited until she heard Amadeo’s retreating footsteps before she dared to move again.

She walked across the room, shedding her slippers and feeling the cool floorboards against her bare feet. A chill hung in the air that her modest fire couldn’t chase away. On the other side of the bedroom door, lying on the quilt of her four-poster bed, the hateful
thing
waited for her. It was just a book, a slim little folio with black leather covers and cheap parchment pages, but it sang to her like a siren.

Her gaze flicked toward the fireplace. Ten steps. Five to snatch it up, five to throw the book into the flames. That was all it would take. Ten steps and her problems would be over.

And if you could do that
, she thought as her stomach churned,
you would have done it two weeks ago when you brought the book home
.

She unfastened the neck of her dressing gown and let it fall to the floor, pooling around her ankles. Naked, her back reddened with throbbing welts, she picked up the scourge and knelt before the fireplace. The crackling flames filled her bright emerald eyes.

“Gardener,” she said, “in your infinite wisdom, you forbade us from the artifices of the deceitful and the damned, the poisoner and the witch, that we might not lead ourselves down the road to the Barren Fields. You know that I am your faithful daughter. You know that I will do what I must to save this church, even at the cost of my mortal soul.”

She paused, feeling the whip handle in her palm, its leather warmed by the fire’s glow.

“Please,” she whispered. “Please don’t make the price that high.”

She swung her arm back with a sudden ferocity, and the braided strands of the scourge slashed across her shoulder blade. She gritted her teeth, eyes squeezing shut against sudden tears.

Purity
, she thought.

The second blow, over her opposite shoulder, lashed across a rising welt. It burned like a hot razor slicing into her skin.

Faithfulness
, she thought.

The third blow broke the skin, leaving a hair-thin line of blood trickling down the curve of her hip.

Love
.

The knotted tails of the whip came down again and again, a staccato rhythm of pain drowning out the world, drowning out everything but the repetition of her mantra, three simple words.
Purity
.
Faithfulness
.
Love
.

When it was finally done, there was nothing left of her. Nothing but tear-stained cheeks, a whip-scarred back, and a peaceful emptiness in her heart. The handle of the scourge tumbled from her trembling fingers. She stood slowly, wobbling on exhausted legs, and left tiny blood spatters on the wood behind her as she hobbled into the bedroom. The book was waiting.

One year ago, the villagers of Kettle Sands cried out that they were plagued by a witch. Nothing but mass hysteria, usually, but a pair of bounty hunters had tracked down a likely culprit: a young girl who was immediately put on trial and burned at the stake. It was only later, searching the hovel she’d been squatting in, that a scavenger found the hidden book.

The book ended up in the Black Archives in the vaults of Lerautia’s great library, left to rot in the darkness. And that was where Livia had found it. She couldn’t say why she’d slipped the book under her skirts and stolen it from the vault, only that she needed it.

It called to her.

“My book of Secretts (by Squirrel)
,” the first page read, with a clumsy blot of ink to fix the misspelling. Whatever the girl’s talents as a witch had been, she was barely literate.

Livia turned the pages slowly, feeling lost in a dream. The throbbing pain from her welts pushed away her conscious mind and washed her in lightheaded tranquility. Her fingers found the page she’d left off on.

“…
we lured the cat from the yard with some bits of tuna, and Miss Owl gave me the knife
.
She showed me how to squeeze it and cut its throte just right, so that she could catch its last yowl in a jar of blue glass
.
Miss Owl says there’s much mischief we can make with a cat’s last yowl!
But tonight we needed its bloode so I caught it in a bowl and coverd it with lamskin
.

“Then Miss Owl taut me the Marque of Passage
.
Draw it above the door in bloode no colder than two hours gone, and those what are asleep inside the house will stay asleep unless frightfully roused
.
It is this way, she says, that we can come and go as we please after dark and no-one will wake to learn our business. This Marque looks like this
:”

A ritual circle took up half the page, lined with swirling glyphs that made Livia’s eyes hurt. It was something primitive, something wild and cruel that evoked images of fires in a nighttime forest glade. Livia traced her fingertip over the circle’s lines, following them like a wandering explorer lost in a labyrinth, memorizing their twists and turns.

And she was only a fledgling
, Livia thought.
With this kind of power, imagine what I could do
—and then she slammed the book shut, her tranquility broken.

“Tomorrow,” she told the book and went off to find a bath. She needed to sluice the dried blood from her back.

Felix wasn’t cut out for a sailor’s life, but he had to admit he’d weathered this voyage pretty well for a land lover. He stood up at the helm of the
Fairwind Muse
while Captain Iona held the ship’s great wooden wheel. An icy wind ruffled their hair and billowed the canvas sails.

“Here’s the tricky part,” Iona said, pointing off toward the coastline. “The Jailer’s Teeth. Jagged rocks reaching up from the ocean floor like knives, just waiting to rip an unwary ship from stem to stern.”

Felix cupped his hand over his brow and squinted. Here and there, off to starboard, he watched the ice floes bob against tiny dark nubs in the water.

“Most of the rocks are just below the waterline,” Iona explained. “No good trying to navigate between them. We’ll skirt alongside the whole mess, close but not too close. We’ll follow around until we make port tomorrow morning. Until then, I might as well be lashed to this wheel. Too dangerous to trust anyone else with the job.”

Felix was silent for a moment, but his curiosity finally overwhelmed his fear of sounding foolish.

“I was talking to some of the crew,” he said. “They told me a story about this, ah, sea monster—”

Iona laughed. “The Elder? Oh, he’s real enough, but I wouldn’t worry. He won’t vex us as long as we send out an offering. Besides, if that old bastard hasn’t shown up by now, he won’t. We’re just past his usual hunting ground. Of course, there’s always the return trip! So what do you think? Ready to abandon the banker’s life and join an honest crew?”

“Oh, I think I’ll leave that to hardier souls than mine. I know where my talents lie.”

“No shame in that,” Iona said. “The sea’s a fine lover, but she’ll take everything you’ve got. Speaking of lovers, saw you feeding that pale sewer rat.”

“Sewer rat?” Felix raised an eyebrow.

“The Terrai girl. You’re not getting sweet on her, are you?”

“I’m sweet on my fiancé back home,” Felix said, “and faithful. Mari’s just…she’s an interesting person. And it’s always good to make a new friend.”

Iona snorted. “Just as well. She looks like the type who goes for other women, anyway.”

“You are a prince among gentlemen, oh captain, my captain,” Felix deadpanned with a bow and a flourish. “Huh, look at that. Werner is back on deck. He’s giving it another try.”

Iona shook his head and smiled. “I’ll say this much about him: never seen a man so stricken with seasickness, but I’ve never seen a man fight it that hard either. Stomach of jelly, will of iron.”

“He’ll probably put that on his tombstone. I’m going to go check on him. Galley should be open soon. Since you’re stuck at the helm, can I bring you back some food?”

“And see,” Iona said, “when we took you on board, I was afraid you wouldn’t be useful.”

Felix wandered down-deck, keeping his feet light on the snow-flecked beams, and gave Werner a wave.

“I see you’ve returned to walk among the living!”

Werner chuckled, but his face was pale gray. “For now. Another few months of open water and I might actually get my sea legs.”

“Bad news: we’re making landfall tomorrow. I’m sure you’re crushed.”

“Devastated,” Werner said.

They walked together, strolling along the side of the ship, watching the snowy wilderness glide by.

“I was talking to Mari—”

“Talking?” Werner said. “She actually
talked
to you? Like, more than please and thank you? That’s…that’s a good sign.”

Felix glanced over his shoulder. Mari was up toward the bow, practicing with her batons, well out of earshot. He leaned a little closer.

“What’s her story, anyway?”

Werner didn’t answer at first. His hand slid across the ship’s railing, fingers tensing.

“Found her in Winter’s Reach. When you talk to her, what words come to mind? If you had to describe her in a nutshell.”

Felix shrugged. “Controlled. Devout. Taciturn, maybe. The girl’s practically a monk.”

Werner looked up at the gently falling snow and took a deep breath as tiny flakes turned to water on his cheeks.

“Met her in a tavern. Some drunken sot grabbed her rump as she walked by. She spun and threw a punch—”

“Not unreasonable,” Felix said.

“—then she smashed a bottle over his head, knocked him to the floor, and stomped on his skull until it cracked like an eggshell.”

Felix stopped walking.

“Mari’s father was an aristocrat in Belle Terre,” Werner said. “He was supplying the resistance, or they said he was, anyway. When Mari was six years old, Imperial soldiers dragged the entire family out onto the lawn. They beat her father to death in front of her. Broke every bone in his body with an iron bar, making sure to keep him alive and screaming until they felt like letting him die. Then it was her mother’s turn, and what they did to her…her father was the lucky one. That girl has
seen
things, Felix.”

Felix stared at him. He looked back up toward the bow, watching Mari move in slow motion. A picture of restrained serenity.

“The years after that weren’t any kinder to her. When I met her in the Reach, she was feral. Rabid. What you see now, Felix, isn’t what I saw then. She was this…this bottomless pit of rage and hate.”

Felix’s voice was soft. “What did you do, Werner?”

“I…civilized her. Like rehabilitating a fighting dog. Slowly, carefully, I won her trust. Then I set about teaching her a new way to live. Taught her to honor her religion, her heritage, just…in a safer way. Did you see that brooch she carries around?”

“Her beggar’s moon, sure,” Felix said. “What of it?”

“It belonged to a Terrai knight. See, the
one
thing Mari remembers of her father, besides watching him die, was when he’d read to her from this big book of fairy tales. Stories about valiant knights and chivalry. Honor and justice. She jumbles these things together in her brain. It’s the only happy memory she has, from a time when life made sense. When it was fair.”

“Werner.” Felix stared at him. “What did you
do
?”

“I plucked that brooch off a dead knight’s corpse,” Werner said, “after I ran three feet of steel through his gut. Course, she doesn’t know that. Mari’s gotten it in her head that the ‘holy order’ it belonged to is still out there, somewhere, and if she lives up to their ideals, they’ll find her someday and make her a real knight.”

“Gardener’s rain. She doesn’t know, does she? She doesn’t know you fought in the war.”

Werner loomed over Felix, suddenly furious.

“No,” he hissed, “and you’ll not say a damn word about it! Far as she knows, I went straight from your family’s employ to hunting bounties for a living, and it needs to stay that way for
both
our sakes. It’d destroy her if she knew.”

“Why are you doing this, Werner?”

Werner turned his back on Felix. He leaned against the railing with both hands, looking out toward the distant mountains.

“You can’t understand what it was like out there. The Terrai weren’t some oppressed, noble people being picked on by the big, bad Empire—”

“Murgardt
did
invade them.”

“Yeah. Empires do that. Your people at least had the good sense to save themselves. The Terrai poisoned their own wells and salted their own fields just to spite us, and that was only the start of it. I remember my first time out as an officer, greener than green, leading my men up a merchant road. Ragmen, far as the eye could see. You know what a ragman is?”

Felix shook his head, mute.

“They’d take a prisoner of war and skin him alive. Then they’d drape the skin back on the body and impale him on a pole. Ragman. If you got taken captive by the Terrai, that was the
best
thing that could happen to you. Every man in my squad carried a mercy knife, so they could slit their own throats if we got overrun.”

“I don’t see what this—” Felix started to say.

“The Terrai were slavers. During the Plague Summer, they deliberately infected their slaves with the Blistering Fever and set them loose, aiming them right toward our forces. Eventually my squad had a crossbowman whose only job was to shoot down any refugees in sight before they reached us, because we couldn’t tell the difference between the genuine escapees and the infected ones. Even escaped prisoners of war. Even our own men.”

Werner turned back toward Felix. His face was chiseled from stone, and his eyes seemed focused on something a thousand miles away.

“We didn’t call them the Terrai,” he said. “We called them the Wolves in the West, because that’s what they were to us. Feral animals. That made it easier, see. Easier to fight savagery with savagery. Easier to justify grinding an entire nation to dust under our boots, because ‘they had it coming.’ By the end of the war, we were just
like
them.”

“And Mari?”

Werner leaned against the railing and sighed.

“I saw her in that tavern and said to myself, ‘
This
is my legacy.’ This feral, fucked-up, broken girl. What happened to her was done under
my
flag. In
my
motherland’s name. That’s on me. So I decided to fix her.”

“Fix her,” Felix echoed.

“There’s an herb, a root that grows in the desert. The Caliphate feeds it to their elite soldiers. Makes their minds…pliable, to help with their training.”

“You drugged her? You drugged her and you brainwashed her.”

“I
civilized
her, like I said. For her own good.” Werner shrugged. “So maybe what she believes ain’t exactly real history. So maybe she thinks if she lives up to some made-up creed, the heroes from her father’s fairy tales will show up and make her a real knight. Who’s it hurting?”

“
Her
. It’s a lie, Werner. This isn’t…this isn’t
right
. And you’re not the man you used to be, if you think it is.”

Werner shot another furtive glance toward the bow, making certain she couldn’t hear them. He leaned in close, murmuring in Felix’s ear.

“None of us,
none
of us who fought our way out of that nightmare came back the way we used to be. As for Mari, I gave her something to believe in and ideals to live for. More important, I taught her to take all that anger and hide it away, to shove it deep down inside and never,
ever
let it out.”

Felix watched as Mari took a step forward. Her boot slid on the damp deck, breaking her concentration and throwing off her rhythm. Her placid expression suddenly turned to utter fury, and she whipped her arms down, sheathing her batons and squeezing her hands into fists. She closed her eyes and took a long, ragged breath, steadying herself, mouthing the words of a prayer until the serenity returned.

“Best hope she keeps believing,” Werner said softly. “Because the rage bottled up in that girl’s heart could burn the whole world down.”