“Hedging his bets, probably. Like I said, don’t worry about …” Michel trailed off as he spotted someone over Tenik’s shoulder. “Don’t turn around,” he said in a low voice, lifting his half a loaf of bread up to his face but keeping his eyes fixed down the street. “Loosen up,” he told Tenik. “Your shoulders are hunched and your body tense. That’s going to be obvious to anyone who knows what to look for. Now, I see Hendres just over your left shoulder. She just came out of that alleyway next to the cobbler’s. We’re going to stay here until she moves again. If I say turn, I want you to casually look at that playbill plastered on the wall to your left. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” Michel watched for several moments as Hendres spoke with someone just around the corner. He silently urged them to step out into the street so he could see the other party, but Hendres was suddenly on the move again. “Turn!” he hissed at Tenik.
They waited as Hendres walked past them. Michel forced himself to breathe evenly, watching out of the corner of his eye until she rounded a corner. He glanced over Tenik’s shoulder once and then took one step after Hendres before freezing in place.
“Should we follow her?” Tenik asked.
Michel didn’t answer. Slowly, casually, he swept his gaze back across that alley Hendres had been standing in a moment ago. A man had emerged to chat with one of the shopkeeps, smoking a cigarette carelessly.
“She’s getting away!”
“Forget about her,” Michel said. “We got lucky. Damned lucky.”
“How?”
Michel took Tenik by the arm and led him down a nearby alley without answering the question.
“Where are we going?” Tenik asked.
“To find a lookout spot. The man who Hendres just met with is named Marhoush. He’s a Silver Rose, and he’s the right-hand man of Val je Tura. Not only is je Tura Lindet’s personal enforcer, but he also spent most of the Fatrastan revolution killing Kez soldiers and civilians with explosives. I’m willing to bet je Tura is the one bombing your soldiers, and Marhoush will lead us right to him.”
CHAPTER 17
Styke, Celine, and Ka-poel rode for three days in near silence, broken only by Celine’s occasional questions about the people and horses they passed on the road. They traveled against the flow of traffic as thousands of refugees left their homes and businesses and fled northwest in an attempt to stay ahead of the Dynize invaders.
Stories traveled with them: a thousand rumors that painted the Dynize as everything from blood-drinking monsters who snatched away Kressian youths, to liberators who brought with them freedom from the oppressive rule of Lindet and her Blackhats. Regardless of which rumor was carried by the passing travelers, everyone seemed to prefer taking their chances with the evil they knew—Lindet—rather than the evil they did not.
By the third day, Styke found the spring that gave birth to the Cottonseed tributary, a small river that meandered between plantation fields for about thirty miles, growing bigger until it joined the Cottonseed River and eventually poured into the Hadshaw. Styke stopped at the spring, washing the road dust off his face and instructing Celine to do the same before making sure his carbines were loaded and his knife was sharp. After a brief lunch, he lifted Celine back into the saddle and followed the banks of the tributary.
“What are we looking for?” Celine asked.
“The closest plantation.” Styke handed the reins to Celine and removed a skull-and-lance banner from his saddlebags before tying it to the tip of his lance and raising it above him.
They crossed several streams and a mile of plantation fields full of bonded Palo working desperately to harvest the half-grown fields. No one challenged Styke as he rode past, but Ka-poel received more than a few curious glances.
“Who are we going to kill?” Celine asked.
“Try not to sound so eager when you ask a question like that,” Styke retorted. “I’m going to kill a man named Bad Tenny Wiles.”
“And who is that?”
“One of the Mad Lancers,” Styke answered. “At least, he used to be. Sometimes he was a clerk, sometimes did some cooking. A mean son of a bitch—mean enough to keep the men from pilfering the rations when times were lean. But we were all mean back then.”
“Why do you want to kill him?”
He felt a knot tighten in his stomach. Over the years people had called him a brute, a murderer, even a monster. He’d been all those things and more, but the idea of killing someone who’d once ridden at his side was distasteful. Murdering Agoston had sated his rage the other night, but it had also left him feeling queasy. He supposed he could just forget the whole thing, but … vengeance needed having. “It’s complicated.”
“So?” She looked up at him expectantly.
“Do you know what ‘precocious’ means?”
“I know I’m one. Ibana said so.”
Ka-poel grinned openly at Styke.
“Of course she did.” Styke checked his knife and drew the blade down his whetstone a few times before stowing them both, taking the reins from Celine’s hands. He wondered if he was getting such a young child too used to the idea of blood and death, and had to remind himself that she’d seen men gut each other over a biscuit in the labor camps, and she’d watched her own father drown in the fens. He pointed to the sorcery-healed scar on his left hand between the knuckles of his third and fourth finger. “This,” he said, then pointed to his leg, then his face. “This, and this. All from the firing squad ten years ago.” The sorcerous healing of his wounds had come ten years too late, and they all still ached every day—and those two fingers still didn’t like to obey him.
Celine took Styke’s hand in hers, running her fingers over the wound, then across his knuckles. Her hands were tiny compared to his. “Did Tenny Wiles shoot at you?”
“Not exactly.”
Styke ignored Celine’s further questions as he spotted a nearby driveway and directed Amrec away from the riverbank. The drive ran beside the river for a few hundred yards and then across an open lawn to a manor house. The manor had the typical flat facade in the common style of Fatrastan plantations. As far as those went, it wasn’t immense—though it was obviously the home of a rich man. The fountain out front was in disrepair, the paint on the shutters peeling, but otherwise the house and grounds were in decent condition for an older home.
Styke felt his queasiness increase, and he thought about Agoston’s blood on his hands and arms and pictured the look on Tenny Wiles’s face as he gutted him. Killing old comrades. A dirty business, even for him.
A carriage and a dozen wagons filled the drive just outside the front door, and a flurry of activity filled the vestibule as servants rushed to load the wagons with furniture and supplies.
Styke caught sight of Bad Tenny Wiles standing on the front step, directing the whole thing. Tenny was probably five years younger than Styke, and hadn’t borne the rigors of the labor camps, but he did not look good. His split nose was red and runny, and the side of his face with the missing ear was covered in the scars of a past infection. But it was definitely Tenny—just wearing expensive clothes.
Everyone was so focused on packing the house that they didn’t seem to notice Styke as he came up the drive, rounded the fountain, and dismounted. He pulled Celine down and set her next to Amrec, handing her the reins. “Stay here,” he said. The knot in his stomach was still there, but he could feel it loosening beneath the resolute feeling of a job that needed doing.
“I could come with.”
“You don’t need to watch me skin a man.” He pointed at Ka-poel. “You stay here, too.”
He left Celine scowling at his back as he headed through the bustle of the servants and toward the front door, stopping just a few feet from the bottom step. He sighed, a hand on the hilt of his knife, and let his weight fall on his good leg as he waited for Tenny to notice him.
It didn’t take long. Tenny directed two servants maneuvering a feather mattress out the door, pointing to one of the wagons. On noticing Styke, his mouth opened and he blinked in confusion. Slowly, the blood drained from his face.
“Hello, Tenny,” Styke said.