“So if I were to take something other than the cross . . .”
“I will set your hair on fire, Kaldar. You’ll be bald.”
Kaldar got up. “You wouldn’t.”
“Try me.”
They walked back to the clearing. “Friends again?” Kaldar asked.
“Partners,” she said.
“You don’t want to be friends with me, Audrey?” A seductive note crept into his voice. He said “Audrey” the way a man might say the name of a woman he had just made love to.
“I prefer partners.” She raised her chin and winked at him. “Let’s keep it professional.”
“Isn’t it too late for that?”
“Don’t we have a heist to plan?”
Kaldar sighed in mock surrender. “Yes, love.”
Audrey let the “love” go that time. He had to have some small consolation after being knocked out.
She was in too deep. If she wasn’t careful, she’d find herself waking up next to him, then she would be in for a hell of a heartbreak.
At their approach, Gaston hoisted himself up into the wyvern’s cabin and stuck his head out. “Is it safe to come out?”
“It’s safe,” Kaldar told him. “Audrey just explained to me that taking her things without permission is not allowed. Since I’ve never had anything taken away from me, I apologized.”
Gaston hopped back onto the ground.
“They’ll be taking us in a bus,” Kaldar said. Yonker had told them as much when they agreed to the camp visit. “Then they will walk us across one by one. Audrey is right—if things go sour, I’ll need you close. I’ll plant the tracker on the bus. Don’t take any chances, and don’t follow too closely. I don’t want one of Yonker’s goons shooting you.”
“Can do,” Gaston said.
A faint buzz spread through the air. Kaldar and Gaston looked up. A metal insect plunged down from the sky and landed on the ground between them. Gaston picked it up, extracted a narrow sliver of crystal, and pulled a gadget from one of the trunks. Shaped like a bronze flower bud, thrusting from a stack encrusted with tiny specks of crystal, the flower terminated in four delicate metal roots bent outward to provide a sturdy base.
“News from the Mirror,” Kaldar said.
Gaston pushed the crystals in a complex sequence. The flower bud opened, revealing pale petals in its center made of some strange material, paper-thin, but with a metallic sheen. Gaston set the crystal in the middle of the flower.
Magic ignited inside the crystal and shot out in four streams to the ends of the petals. An image appeared above the crystal, floating in thin air. An average-looking man in nondescript clothes from the Weird looked at them.
“Erwin.” Gaston’s thick eyebrows crept up.
“The woman in the shot is not a member of the Hand,” Erwin said. “Her name is Helena d’Amry, Marquise of Amry and Tuanin. She is a Hound of the Golden Throne. Spider is her uncle. Full file to follow. Be careful, Kaldar.”
“Shit,” Gaston said.
“What does that mean?” Audrey looked to Kaldar.
“The Hand protects the Dukedom of Louisiana, which is a colony of the Empire of Gaul. The Hounds protect the throne of the Empire. They answer directly to the Emperor,” Kaldar said.
“Who is Spider?”
“He’s the man I want to kill,” Kaldar said.
A piece of paper replaced Erwin’s image, covered with weird characters.
“What does it say?” Audrey tugged on Kaldar’s arm.
“It says that Helena likes skinning people alive,” Gaston answered. “Also says that the guy who threw that head at you is named Sebastian. He is her right-hand man. His kill count is at forty.”
“Fourteen?”
“No. Forty.”
Oh God.
“This changes nothing.” Kaldar swiped the buckets. “We stick to the plan. Right now, we’ll concentrate on getting the invitation and feeding the wyvern. We may have to take off in a hurry.” He headed down the path to the stream as if he couldn’t get away from the two of them fast enough.
“IT isn’t really true,” Gaston said quietly.
Audrey looked at him.
“What Kaldar said about nothing being taken away from him. It isn’t true.” Gaston sat down on the crate and checked the disks with the chain attached. “Kaldar has two brothers. Well, he had two brothers, Richard and Erian, but Erian was a lot younger than them and had a different mother, so they were never close. Their father was the head of our family. Their mother left. The family likes to pretend she died, but she didn’t. She left all of them, ran off into the Broken. The Mire is a tough place to live. People try to get out any way they can.”
Being left by your own parent as a child . . . Her mother had checked out on her emotionally more than once, but at least she didn’t leave.
“Then a rival family killed their father. Richard was sixteen, and Kaldar was fourteen. Erian was nine, I think. Aunt Murid, their father’s sister, took them in. She was tough. She’d escaped into the Weird when she was young and fought in the Dukedom of Louisiana’s army for years, until they found her out, and she had to escape again and come home. Murid was hard. I used to be really scared of her when I was little. Anyway, she raised Richard and Kaldar as her own. Richard was kind of already an adult, I guess. He’s very serious. Smartest man I know. Kaldar was always like he is now, funny, hehe-haha, oh look, I stole your money out from under your nose. The family didn’t starve because he and Cerise, his cousin, they hustled and sold things in the Broken. Don’t ever haggle with him. It’s a bad idea. Anyway, so Cerise and Kaldar did whatever they could to keep all of us fed. Kaldar always tried to impress Aunt Murid. He barely remembers his real mom, so she was as close to one as he ever had. Then Spider brought the Hand to the Mire, kidnapped Cerise’s parents, and it all went to shit.”