12
The trouble with dead men, Albric decided, was that their brains were dead too. Whatever magic animated their bodies and put breath back in their lungs did nothing at all to revive their wits. That was the only reason—the only reason—that he sat out here on a bare wagon bed, freezing his balls off and waiting for the gods-cursed baker to leave his shop.
They’d had the girl. They’d had the girl, the false knight, and the child—that helpless, defenseless, deadly child. All three of them unsuspecting and ripe for the taking.
It had taken weeks to get this close. Weeks of greasing palms and buying drinks and feigning interest in idiots bragging about their “bravery” across the border, when none of them had done more than knife an unarmed crofter and burn down his hut. Weeks during which Albric had wondered if the Thornlady intended to do anything but stand back and watch him do the work that his lord had paid her for.
But, finally, he’d found their quarry: a black-haired freesword with a baby, his identity confirmed by the girl with the Langmyrne accent who was said to be caring for that child. Most of Albric’s sources thought the girl was a doxy who’d been cast aside when her soldier-lover got bored—and the real wonder, they said, was that he’d bedded such an ugly wench in the first place.
Albric knew better. He knew what she was, if not precisely who, and he knew who that baby had to be. Wistan. The closeness of it galled him.
The girl had been right here, living inside this bakery, walking to the same doors with the same baskets every day. It would have been the simplest thing in the world to swoop in and spirit her away. They wouldn’t even have had to hurt her; they could have snatched the baby while she was gone and left her unharmed. She’d been a baker. Bakers started their rounds early, more in night than morning. There wouldn’t have been a soul awake to see the deed, nor a candle’s worth of light to show it. A half-wit could have done the job.
But the gods had ordained that nothing in Albric’s life should be easy, and so instead of executing a clean little snatch-and-grab on the baker’s girl and the baby, Severine’s rotwit hound had spooked her out of Tarne Crossing.
He knew why it had happened, although that did nothing to lessen his annoyance that it had. Tarne Crossing lay in Leferic’s domain, and the embattled Lord of Bulls’ March could scarcely afford to have his most trusted servant kidnapping and killing his own subjects at whim. Leferic had issued strict instructions that they should minimize casualties—and, given the Thornlady’s predilection for making them, that was a wise rule. So they had decided not to seize the baker’s girl until they were certain that she was the right baker’s girl, and that was what had landed them in this pigslop mess.
That was the reason he chose to believe. It was also possible that the Thornlady had tipped her hand deliberately to flush them out of the town’s safety. One couldn’t very well bloodmist the entirety of Tarne Crossing or set ghoul-hounds on an inn full of people. But out on the road, with nobody watching … out there, they might have to kill all three, instead of removing the child alone. And it would be like her to orchestrate three murders where one would have done. It would be very like her.
Albric spat onto the frozen ground, cursing the night and the cold and the day he’d first heard of Willowfield.
The girl, whoever she was, meant nothing to him or his lord. She was probably some poor, ignorant village girl that Brys had hired as a wet nurse. Most likely she had no idea what she’d stumbled into. Albric didn’t particularly care about Brys Tarnell, either. The man was a wandering mercenary with no family, no armsmen, and scarcely any social standing. He was a landless knight who’d been given spurs by a dead man, and there was nothing he could do to hurt Albric’s lord.
Neither of them needed to die to keep Leferic’s reign safe. Only the child. Only Wistan.
And yet the blood of all three was likely to be on his hands before long, and probably the damn stupid baker’s too. He spat again, adding Severine to his list of curses. He was a knight. His duty was to protect his lord’s people, not murder them. Not when it wasn’t necessary. Not for her sake.
As if in answer to Albric’s oaths, the bakery door finally swung open. Light and warmth poured out to the night: the warmth of hot brick ovens, the light of lanterns to illumine the scoring of raw loaves and the crackly golden-brown of their freshly baked crusts. A peg-legged man hobbled out, sticking his wooden leg in the doorway to prop it open as he eased himself down the step with two big baskets in his arms. He had the belly of a man who enjoyed his own wares, and he mumbled curses at his wooden leg constantly as he walked.
Intent as he was on manuevering his burden, and likely dazzled by the sudden transition from bright to dark, the baker never looked up as Albric got off the wagon bed and walked over.
“Morning, friend,” Albric said. He stayed in the shadows, keeping his face shielded from the light. On the off chance that this encounter went well, he didn’t want to have to kill the man for having seen him.
“It’s morning all right. I’m not so sure about that next part,” the baker replied. He set his baskets down and squinted into the darkness, propping his fists on his hips and rolling his shoulders forward to show his muscle. Despite his great belly, there was little fat on the rest of him, and his arms were thick as a smith’s. “Might be you should just move on.”
“Might be I will,” Albric said. “Be happy to do just that, if you’ll answer a few questions.”
“What questions?”
“You had a girl working for you not long ago. Plain, brown hair, liked to wear a white band over it. Sometimes she carried a baby while making her rounds. Looks like she might have wandered off. Any idea where she’d have gone?”
The baker’s jaw clenched under his bristly beard, hard enough that Albric could see it, although the man’s back was to the light. “Leave her alone. Whatever she was tangled up in, she’s a good girl, and you ought to leave her be.”
“Only trying to help her,” Albric said, willing the man to believe him. It was truer than he could know.
“That might be. Friend. But helpful people don’t generally accost a man in the dead of dark, so I hope you don’t mind me being a little skeptical. Now it seems to me you should be on your way. I’ve got work to do.”
“That’s a shame.” Albric slid up behind him, smooth as silk, and clapped one hand over the baker’s mouth while he crushed the man’s throat in the crook of his other arm. Giving him a good rap on the head with a cosh might have been faster, but Albric had never been able to do that without braining a man, and this wasn’t the best time for experiments. Cutting off blood to the head was fast enough, as Maol’s stranglers knew too well. It wasn’t the air that had to be stopped, it was the great heart-vein on the side of the neck.
He counted to fifteen. Thirty. Forty-five. The baker slumped limp shortly after Albric finished the first count, but he didn’t relax the chokehold until he finished the last. He hoisted the man up with an effort—the baker weighed near as much as he did—bound and gagged him with the rope he’d carried under his cloak, and shoved him into the bed of his own wagon. Albric covered the unconscious man with baskets of loaves hot from his oven and led the donkey north through the sleeping streets. Just a carter making his morning rounds.
He wondered how long it would take the real carter to notice that his rig was missing and his employer gone. An hour, maybe a little less, if this morning went like the ones before. Plenty of time.
It would have been just as easy to snatch the girl before she’d been frightened off. No, easier; she was smaller, so Albric wouldn’t have had to bother with the donkey-cart. Bright Lady burn the blundering of the ghoul-hound and the hubris of the Thornlady who’d sent a deadwit dead man to do a thinking person’s job.
Albric let the rankling unfairness of it all carry him to the north gate. It was easier than thinking about what would happen when he got through.
The gate itself was eerily silent. The only movement was the flicker of the torches that were burning out at night’s end; the only sound was the soft crackle of burning pitch. There was no mumbled conversation from guards trying to ward off sleep, no barking from their dogs at a stranger’s approach. A crow perched on the wall ruffled its wings and shifted its stance as the cart creaked near, and Albric grimaced as he passed beneath its gaze.
That crow was dead. Distance hid its ragged feathers and gaping eye sockets; darkness veiled the bone that peeped through its balding skull and the dry sinew that roped its legs under cracking scales. But Albric had seen the thing before without the blessing of night’s concealment, and he knew what it was. He knew, too, that the guards and their dogs were sleeping—only sleeping, if the gods were good; they didn’t need more deaths—and that there was no need to be quiet.
He unloaded the wagon two streets away, leaving the donkey in harness and the loaves in the cart bed. They’d likely be stolen before the sun came up, not that it mattered. The thefts would confuse the trail a little, and the odds that the baker would be back to complain were growing slimmer by the moment.
The baker was awake when Albric came to take him. His eyes promised murder, but the ropes held strong.
“You should have answered my questions,” Albric told him, not unkindly, and hoisted him out of the cart.
They left through the small postern gate. Albric closed it quietly behind them and picked his way down the embankment to the ditch inside the ring of stakes that circled Tarne Crossing. The weight of the baker leaning on his shoulder pushed him off balance so that he staggered down the slope too fast, cracking through the thin ice that covered the ditch’s water. His boots were soaked before he came up the other side, and Albric cursed the Thornlady for that too.
Then he was through the stakes and out, and he circled east around the town to where Severine waited in the woods.
She glowed in the dark between last starlight and dawn. Glowed like a ghost, Albric would have said, before he’d seen the ghosts she made and realized the truth of them. Her silver hair shone like a crest of false stars down her neck, and the blue crystal of her eye was so radiant that he wondered why they couldn’t see it from the walls. Two of her ghoul-hounds skulked behind her, their crouched forms nearly eclipsed by her unearthly glow. No glamour covered these; their ragged talons and mist-filled eyes were plain for all to see, and saliva dribbled between their teeth in thick silvery strings as they saw living men come near.
The baker stiffened when he saw the Thornlady. Albric had to drag the man the last few steps of the way; his foot and peg leg drew furrows through the dead leaves. The front of his breeches steamed and stank of urine by the time they reached Severine.
“Here.” Albric pulled the baker upright, yanked the coiled rope from his mouth, and gave him a shove that sent him sprawling face-first at Severine’s feet. “This is the baker that the girl was working for. He wouldn’t tell me where she went. Maybe you can make him talk.”
“I don’t know,” the baker moaned through a mouthful of dirt and leaves. His face was shiny with the tracks of tears or sweat; the moisture glistened in Severine’s aura. “I don’t, I swear, I’ve nothing to tell you. I don’t know where she’s gone.”
Albric believed him, but that didn’t matter anymore. The baker had sealed his own fate by resisting. He’d have to die, and because he was now in the Thornlady’s hands, he’d have to suffer first. And possibly after.
“We shall see,” Severine replied. “Silence him again, please.”
Masking his disbelief, Albric did as he was told, stuffing the spit-slimed gag back into the man’s mouth. He stepped away as soon as it was done.
The Thornlady smiled down at the man. The crystal in her eye twinkled. For an instant all was still. Then the ghoul-hounds leapt out from behind her to seize hold of her captive, one on each side. Their claws ripped through his skin as they hoisted him up, and they leaned forward to lap at the blood with curling purple tongues. They pulled him away, deep into the trees. Albric sat down on a stump after they had gone and tried to shut his ears to the muffled screams.
An impossible time passed. The eastern horizon softened to gray and gentle blue. He watched as a sea of clouds parted to reveal the full glory of the sunrise. A bird trilled over the delicate tapestry of frost that glittered on the browning leaves.
None of it touched Albric’s soul. He had heard from a wandering sellsword that there were warriors in Kai Amur who could find such loveliness in a sunrise that they could kill or be killed thinking of it, and never flinch from the blade either way. Albric doubted that story was true, but he wished he could share in that strange brave madness. Anything to blind himself to the ugliness he had caused.
They weren’t even Celestians in Kai Amur. To them a sunrise was only a thing of beauty, not a call to prayer. Albric was a Celestian, a knight anointed to the sun, and yet he found no comfort under the Bright Lady’s sky. He was unworthy of her light.
Every day he spent in Severine’s company, he betrayed his oaths again. The priest in Willowfield was the beginning, but there at least he’d been able to persuade himself that the solaros was a traitor who deserved his fate. The priest had only agreed to betray Galefrid when they’d threatened to eradicate his village, true, but he had agreed and he should have known better than to trust the word of a Thorn.
So Albric told himself when he couldn’t sleep without seeing the solaros’ crushed face swimming up at him in the dark. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes.
But the other priest? The pilgrims? He had no defense to that. Those deaths, and the ghoulish, shrieking thing that the solaros in Bayarn Wood had become, haunted his nightmares. He couldn’t close his eyes to pray without hearing that awful, reedy cry, seeing the veined white fingers tearing at anguished eyes. The solaros was a holy man on pilgrimage, performing the vensolles to honor Celestia, and Albric had killed him. As surely as if he’d plunged a knife into the man’s chest with his own hands, he was guilty of that murder. Worse than murder: he’d led the Thornlady to them, and she had desecrated the pilgrims beyond mere death.
She might well do the same to this baker, a man whose only crime was trying to protect a girl who’d worked for him.
It was necessary. Albric clenched his fists in his lap, staring at the sky. It still is. I must do my duty. A knight was nothing without duty. Stripped of his oaths and his lord, he was just a man with a sword, a masquerading mercenary like that pretender Brys Tarnell.
But what was his duty, in the end? Albric had no doubt that his oaths and his lord deserved obedience, but he wondered whether Leferic fully understood what he had done in hiring Severine. Had he known what she was? What she would make Albric do?
Surely not. Surely Leferic believed he was simply bargaining for a mercenary. One with unusual skills, to be sure; one who used spells rather than blades to do her killing, and had no qualms about hiring on for a child’s death. But still a mercenary. Not this mad, sadistic horror. He couldn’t have known about that.
The Thornlady wasn’t even efficient. She’d been lethal in Willowfield, but since then she seemed to have lost interest in the hunt. Her dead crows circled the skies day and night, but they never seemed to find anything useful.
Was she really that ineffective? Or was she planning some treachery of her own?
The thought soured Albric’s stomach. They should never have allied with Ang’arta. Never. His failure to talk Leferic out of this folly was his greatest mistake. If only he’d been a better counselor—more forceful, nimbler with his words …
He looked up as Severine returned. Blood darkened her right sleeve and streaked her face in a diagonal trail of fine droplets. The bones of her maimed hand were wet and crimson, the color just visible in the rising light. She licked the blood from those sharpened bones, favoring Albric with a coy little smile. “He wasn’t lying. He truly didn’t know where she went.”
Albric nodded tersely, feeling another twist of nausea. The man had been one of his lord’s own subjects. “What about the body?”
“You need not be concerned.” Even as she spoke, Albric could see her corpses shambling out of the woods: first the two loping ghoul-hounds, their mouths red with blood and their eyes empty as ever, then the baker moving with a slower, shuffling walk. His bearded head lolled drunkenly from side to side with each step, but no drunkard’s head ever twisted around until his chin pointed down to his spine.
And yet there were no other wounds on the man, nothing to explain where all the blood came from. His clothes showed no sign of dirt stains, although Albric had knocked him down hard.
“What do you mean?”
“Let us say the baker never left Tarne Crossing last night. Let us say he got drunk and stumbled out in the dark. Let us say he tripped—drunkenly, foolishly—and broke his neck. A pity. But nothing to do with us.” The Thornlady gave him one last, cool smile, drawing her hood up against the morning sun. “So, you see, having never made a body, we have nothing to return.”
“Convenient,” Albric muttered. The ghoul-hounds had stopped in the trees near their creator, but the baker’s corpse kept walking, through the stakes and across the ditch that protected the town where he’d lived. He supposed the guards were still in their spell-cursed sleep, for no challenge came from the walls as the broken figure crossed their defenses.
“Yes.” Severine retreated back into the lacy shade of the leafless wood. “I am afraid, however, that the rest of the day will be less so. I am tired, and must rest … and I must send another message to my Tower.”
“Why? What about the baby? The girl left not a week past. They can’t have gotten far. We’re this close and you want to stop for a full day?”
She gave him a frosty glance. Her blue eye glittered like broken ice. “Magic is exhausting. I do not expect you to understand that, but the concentration it requires is far beyond anything you can fathom. You would not like what would happen if mine should falter while I worked. So I will rest, and you will wait.”
“But the baby—”
“Will not get far. For the sake of the child, they must travel slowly. I will send the crows out to scour the skies, and soon we will know where they’ve run.”
Albric scowled. “Why didn’t you do that in the first place? We needn’t have bothered with the baker at all.”
“Yes. But I’d have been less amused,” Severine said lightly, and vanished into the wood.
Behind her Albric’s scowl deepened. What had Leferic been thinking?
The Thorns kept to their bargains. As hated and feared as they were, everyone knew that much to be true. The Maimed Witches of Ang’arta were as oathbound as Celestia’s Blessed; they could not lie or renege on their word, once it was given, and Severine had given hers. She’d taken Leferic’s money and sworn an oath to him in return, so she was bound to do all in her power to ensure that Wistan was captured or killed.
But that didn’t make her trustworthy. She might not play them false, at least not directly … but Albric couldn’t shake the conviction that she was acting on her own time, for her own reasons, and without his lord’s interests at heart.
Whatever she plotted, it was Albric’s duty to see that it did no harm to his lord. But how? He had no idea what she was really doing, and no proof to confirm his suspicions.
Muttering another curse, he stalked after her.
Their camp consisted of two tiny tents on opposite sides of a small clearing left by the fall of a grandfather maple. One would have been more efficient, both for warmth and concealment, but the Thornlady liked her privacy and Albric was all too happy not to sleep near her, so two tents it was. The ghoul-hounds that she kept nearby crouched in the leaves, impervious to such mortal concerns as cold and damp; the rest of them were off ranging. Albric preferred not to know where.
He’d stabled their horses in town, both as an excuse to keep up on the ostlers’ news and because the animals spooked when the ghoul-hounds came near. They’d likely have to choose between horses and ghoul-hounds when they finally left Tarne Crossing.
That choice would not be made today. Severine sat cross-legged on the frosted trunk of the fallen maple, whispering to each of her dead crows in turn and sending them off with a kiss on their heads. Neither she nor Albric would be going anywhere until her birds returned.
Collecting those crows had been another ugly task. She’d bought a sheep and cut it open on a stubbled field and made him shoot down the crows that came for the gory feast. For hours he’d shot carrion birds, until finally she had near twenty, called an end to the game, and let her ghoul-hounds devour the poor sheep’s carcass. At sunset she used her unholy prayers to animate the little corpses into black-winged, eyeless spies, and Albric had gone to drink himself senseless.
Hellish work, and a waste of a day they should have spent on the hunt. He pushed away the memory and went to his own tent.
Buried at the bottom of his pack was a leather-covered prayerbook. It wasn’t a true book, despite the Celestian sunburst embossed in gold on its cover. Between every short prayer were several pages of simple illustrations, each one blank on its other side. The design enabled Albric to tear those pages loose without a casual observer realizing that anything was missing from the book. The twisted scrap of paper between them, seemingly used to mark his place among the pages, unfolded into a slightly larger sheet with an uneven sunburst cut into its center. Back at Bulls’ March, Leferic had a twin to this sheet.
The prayerbook’s spine hid a thin stick of charcoal mixed with hardening agents. The charcoal stick was wrapped in a tight spiral of dried leaves, helping it hold its shape and protecting Albric’s hand from picking up telltale marks as he wrote. As the tip wore down, he could peel back the leaves to expose more of the stick. It was a Northmarchain invention; their scribes had invented it and their soldiers had spread it. Ink froze too readily to be reliable in their brutal winters, and it was too messy to be easily used in the field.
The writing-sticks had yet to spread far through the Sunfallen Kingdoms, but Leferic had grasped their advantages immediately and procured a small supply some years ago. They were clean, convenient, and readily concealed. Perfect for work like this.
Albric tore a blank page from the prayerbook and laid the sunburst stencil upon it. In the outlined space he described their progress thus far, the news he had heard and the rumors he half-trusted, and his suspicions of the Thornlady’s motives. He didn’t mention his nightmares. Nothing about those would help Leferic, and his lord didn’t need to know how guilt-ridden he’d become. Although Albric avoided names and too-damning words, he otherwise wrote frankly, for a coded message would be harder to disguise.
When he was finished, Albric lifted off the stencil and filled in the remaining space with trivial nonsense, blending the hidden message into a mundane letter to a wife he didn’t have. Then he put away his implements, sealed up the letter, and circled wide through the woods so that he could approach Tarne Crossing from the road. He needed to check on the horses anyway, and a coin to an innkeeper would soon see his letter with a traveler headed to Bulls’ March, where Leferic should receive his message within days.
He lingered in town longer than he had to. The horses were fine, and there wasn’t much new news to be had, but it was such a pleasure to be among living, breathing people—with all their profanities and complaints and base gutter concerns—that Albric was willing to buy men beers just to hear the same rumors retold a dozen times from different mouths. No one was talking about the baker—yet—and that was a relief as well.
Only when the sun was dipping low to the west, and he had heard the fourth version in two hours of the “true reasons” for the Burnt Knight’s ride, did Albric finally make his excuses and stagger out of the Dancer and Drum, pretending to be drunker than he was. He wanted oblivion, but that would be unwise.
Twilight had fallen by the time he returned to their hidden camp. Most of Severine’s crows had come back to roost, squatting in the bare branches of the tree over her tent as if waiting for a hangman to come out with their meal. The ghoul-hounds were nowhere to be seen, and Albric was not about to look. He ignored her tent altogether, hoping she would return the favor.
He had no such luck. He’d barely set foot in the maple’s clearing before she came out of the darkness toward him, drifting over fallen leaves with the silence of a shade. She wore the dead woman’s face, which meant she’d been in town today too. Severine disguised herself as the murdered pilgrim only when she went to visit the good people of Tarne Crossing. He didn’t recall seeing her, but he hadn’t been looking, so that didn’t mean much.
“What?” Albric snapped, in no mood for pleasantry. He should have let himself get drunk as a pig’s uncle in town. Maybe, if he was lucky, he’d have tripped and broken his neck while stumbling through the ditches, and wouldn’t that be a tidy end to it all? But that was a coward’s escape; if he did that, he’d fail his lord and everything he’d done thus far would have been for nothing. All those deaths, wasted.
The Thornlady seemed unruffled by his foul temper. “My orders have changed.”
“Oh? No more torture and murder of people who have nothing to do with our task? Wait, that never was an order. Never mind, then, I don’t care.”
She raised a sandy eyebrow, but her stance remained serene, an oddly elegant pose for such a dumpy body. “I am to await Sir Kelland’s arrival. The crows have seen him; he is on his way here.”
“You were hired to take care of a child. One child. No one else. Not some hapless pilgrims in the woods, not a bloody baker, not a gods-damned Sun Knight, for the Bright Lady’s sake!” Albric took hold of himself with an effort, forcing his voice lower. The wine he’d drunk sloshed like acid in his belly. “One child. Which, for all these other deaths, you’ve proved remarkably incapable of finishing.”
“He will be dealt with shortly. The crows have seen him as well.”
“Good. Then finish him and let our bargain come to an end. After that, I don’t care what you do. I might even refrain from sending my lord’s men after you for the murder. For a day or two. If you leave promptly, perhaps they won’t catch you.”
“It would be a waste of their lives if they tried.” Severine let the spell fade around her, returning to her own form. She folded her hands into the wide sleeves of her cloak so that she was entirely swathed in blackness and her face seemed to float, disembodied, in the night. “In any event, I shall require your assistance with Sir Kelland.”
“No.” All the corroded remains of Albric’s conscience rose up in rebellion. “I’ll have nothing to do with that. Take care of the child and begone.”
“Easily done … if that is truly your desire. Yes. I can finish the child, and the girl who carries him, and the false knight who fancies himself their protector. And everyone else with them on the road. Oh, yes,” she said, with a glint of malicious amusement at his surprise, “they were not so foolish as to leave Tarne Crossing alone. They left in the company of the Vis Sestani. And they can all be dealt with so easily, and all within the word of our contract. The Vis Sestani do not carry weapons. As you know.”
“And if I stay, and help you with the Burnt Knight?” Albric said, hating himself.
“Then only the child dies. I shall prohibit my pets from visiting harm on any who do not intervene.” Severine unclasped her arms and held up her maimed hand in mimicry of a liegeman’s oath-taking. The bare bones and silver fastenings of her two small fingers twinkled in the shadow-laced starlight.
“Fine reassurance.”
“I cannot promise that they will be gentle with those who get in their way. But they will not inflict one scratch more than necessary to accomplish your lord’s desire.”
Albric bowed his head. It was not meant as a gesture of acceptance; it was that he could no longer hold up his head under the weight of his guilt. But intentions didn’t matter, only deeds, and he knew what his deeds had to be. “Very well.”