Several weeks ago, just before the Queen’s capture, Howell had picked up word that something had been stolen from the Arvath. The Holy Father’s enforcers didn’t know that something from Adam, but they knew that it was kept in a polished cherrywood box; it was this information that had made Howell prick up his ears. The Fetch’s men had never seen that box, but the Fetch had, long ago, in the hands of the man he had thought was his friend. Keeping it out of Row’s hands was paramount, but there were other hands almost as bad. The entire Church was on the lookout for the Keep priest, Father Tyler, and the bounty on his head seemed to go up every day. If the Keep priest had taken the crown, then the Fetch would not find it by skulking around the Arvath. But yesterday he had spotted something interesting, and if life had taught him nothing else, it had taught him that more information was never a bad thing. The small facts one learned by accident often became useful later.
Before him was a dark-haired woman sitting on a bench in the hallway that ran the length of the brothers’ quarters. Her face had been sliced to ribbons by what looked like a straight razor. The cuts had not been stitched, leaving the woman’s face a seamed patchwork of dried blood and infected flesh. She stared at the ground as the Fetch approached.
Howell had not said anything about this woman, but the Fetch had picked up enough gossip in the kitchens to know that her name was Maya, and she had been one of the Holy Father’s concubines. The Fetch, who knew a comer when he saw one, had kept a weather eye on Cardinal Anders for years; the man always had women, two of them, no more and no less. Though well hidden from the populace, these women were no secret in the Arvath. They came from prostitution and usually went back there when Anders was finished with them. But this one, Maya, would never be able to work again. Like all of the Holy Father’s women, she was addicted to morphia, and the Fetch guessed that her addiction was the only thing that kept her sitting obediently on the bench. She might be looking no further than her next fix, but the Fetch knew that her death could not be far behind.
Still, she was a puzzle. Anders had never been one to cut his women. He was a violent man, for certain, but he had always reserved that violence for his antisodomy demonstrations. There was no attempt to hide Maya; she was out on full display. She was being punished, made an example of. He was determined to find out why.
The Fetch tapped her on the shoulder, and she looked up. The slashes on her face were cruelly visible, even in the dim torchlight; one of them traveled up and over the bridge of her nose, very near to the corner of her eye. It looked as though her eye had wept blood, and this made the Fetch think again of Row. In the excitement of discovering this woman, he had forgotten about the hell that was currently raining down on the northern end of both kingdoms, Tear and Mortmesne. That was one of Row’s many dangers; he was so damnably easy to ignore until it was too late.
“You are the Fetch,” Maya murmured.
For a moment he was stunned, and then he remembered that he was wearing his mask. He often forgot about it; he was so used to its leathery feel that it often seemed like part of his face. Far away, deep in the bowels of the Arvath, he heard a clock strike two.
“What do you want with me?” she asked.
The Fetch touched a light hand to her hair, brushing it away from her forehead. He had often used artifice to get what he wanted, particularly from women, but there was no art here. The Tearling was full of battery, but the Fetch had rarely seen any woman so poorly used as this one. For a moment, the Fetch seemed to hear William Tear’s voice, deep in his mind.
God does not keep his hands to himself. Believe, or not; your neighbor’s belief will wound you just as surely as your own.
The Fetch nearly groaned. They had heard, all of them; they had heard William Tear speak these words—or some variation thereof—many times, but they had never listened. To all of them, born after the Crossing, with no frame of reference, Tear’s words were merely so much breath. The Fetch had belonged to God’s Church long enough to know that the carnage before him was nothing to do with God, or good. Brutality found such great camouflage under the cross.
We didn’t listen.
No, you didn’t listen. Katie listened.
That was true. She had. And she had paid for it, forced into exile, her belly great with Jonathan’s child. More than anything, the Fetch suddenly wished that he might have five minutes with Katie, just to apologize, to tell her that she had been right. The younger Gavin had been too proud even to think of apologizing, but the Fetch had found that age brought that need, to even scores and make things right. But it was many long years too late to beg forgiveness of Katie. There was only the woman in front of him, her face a path of razors.
“Why has he done this to you?” the Fetch asked.
“Because I let the Keep priest get away.”
“Why?”
Maya stared at him blearily. “The old man was kind. He listened. He said the Queen was good—”
She paused, looking around her, and the Fetch realized that he’d been wrong; she was immobilized not by morphia, but by withdrawal. The skin of her neck and shoulders was damp with sweat.
“Good,” Maya continued, her voice growing hoarse now; her muscles were spasming, constricting her vocal cords. “He said she was good. And I thought, well, if she is good, then Anders shouldn’t be allowed to keep it from her. He shouldn’t be allowed to do that.”
“Keep what?”