Chapter 33
Thirty-Three
Mark
It’s the easiest decision I’ve ever made.
I shove Tristan and Isolde both behind the pulpit—Veronica long gone—and press my gun into Tristan’s free hand.
“Go,” I say hoarsely.
“Absolutely the fuck not,” Isolde hisses.
“Sir” is all Tristan says. Hearing that one word right now feels like having my chest bludgeoned in with an organ pipe. I can’t stand it. I don’t deserve it.
“I have help coming if they succeed in getting me to Rome,” I say, which is technically true. “Cashel wants me alive. I have a chance. Tristan doesn’t, and I won’t risk you, Isolde. Please.”
Stone chips spray as a bullet hits the side of the pulpit, and I feel my cheek open up. Hot blood trickles down.
I reach to the small of my back and pull the honeysuckle knife from the harness I took from my penthouse earlier this morning. I hand the knife hilt first to my wife.
“I need you to be my shadows and glass girl right now,” I tell her. “Think of what I said last night by the window.”
Her chest lifts once, hard, and her chin begins to quiver. She remembers.
He’s not made for this.
And we are.
Yes. We are.
Only Isolde is built to make a choice like this, to save Tristan at the expense of saving me. And I love her so much for it that I could weep.
Tristan watches this silent exchange and then starts shaking his head violently, seeing the shift in Isolde. “No, no, whatever you’re thinking?—”
“He’s right,” she says. Her voice is throaty and thick, but I see the clarity in her eyes. “We can save two of us this way rather than no one. It’s the only choice.”
More stone chips fly, razor-edged confetti, but I ignore it to yank Isolde into a hard kiss.
“I love you,” I say and bury my nose in her hair. Even amidst the gun smoke and pulverized stone, I can smell honey and flowers. “I would marry you again every day if I could.”
Tristan is staring at me like I’m asking him to shoot me in the throat, and when I kiss him, he clings to me.
“Don’t make me do this,” he begs. “Don’t make me leave you.”
I press my hand to his heart and then fold his hand over that. The black and silver ring presses into his palm. “Do you feel that?” I murmur. “I’m holding on to something good. You do the same for me.” I move my eyes to Isolde so he understands. “Carry it carefully for me. Okay?”
Veronica has crept almost to the dais, and I have to let go of Tristan so I can return fire.
“Go!” I tell them both. “Find Jago. Get to Anguish—she’ll be able to help you get somewhere safe, with Lox or back to Morois. But you have to go now.”
Isolde does it. With tears in her eyes and a steely set to her mouth, she yanks Tristan toward the door. And he is forever the Ruth to her Naomi—where she goes, he will follow. A flash of silver daylight, a cascading shatter as a bullet hits one of the stained glass windows, and they’re gone.
I pull back behind the pulpit again, on my knees in the shards of stone, and for the first time in a very long time, in the middle of a church being broken for the sake of my sins, I say a prayer.
Please let this fucking work .
I drop my gun, grab one of the sharp flakes of stone, and drag it against my forearm, over the wing of my tattoo. Right next to three other short, hastily made scars.
There’s no time to pray again before the saints round the corner. Pain flashes from the back of my head, and the world goes black.
Plane engines thrum underneath me. The edge of Veronica’s scapular catches the faint artificial light of the cabin.
An IV tube stretches up from my arm.
I think I prefer the darkness of unconsciousness to this, and that seems to suit the darkness just fine. It happily takes me back under before I see anything more.
I’m sitting in a chair.
It’s my first thought, and it’s a bad one.
It’s never good to wake up in a chair, as I learned at the hands of my own wife last autumn.
It’s especially not good to wake up when dried blood still crusts the side of your face and the hair of your forearm.
One of my eyes is swollen enough to affect my vision—a gift from the saint I sent to heaven with an organ pipe—and the jagged wound on my forearm hurts so fucking much that I am certain I’ve accidentally severed a tendon or cut a nerve.
I’m naked or near to naked, wearing only my boxers, and I’m handcuffed with my hands behind the chair. They’ve taken my watch, which upsets me a great deal. My black and silver ring, they’ve left on my finger, which I remind myself to be grateful for.
“It’s good to see you awake,” says a soft Irish voice, and I look up to see the heterochromatic eyes of the man who ordered Eliot’s death and the death of his own sister. The man who would kill Tristan and Isolde if he had the chance.
Tristan and Isolde . They made it out the door. Did they find Jago? Did they get out of Albany and to Anguish?
“Are you thinking of my niece and the bodyguard of yours? I regret to say that they made the journey with you. I also regret to say that your driver did not. Although he did die bravely, trying to defend them.”
Jago. Fuck.
I force myself to breathe, to think, even though I’m still groggy from whatever they used to keep me under during the flight here. “You kept Tristan alive,” I rasp.
“I decided he could be useful. As an incentive for you or perhaps Isolde. I’m sure you’ll appreciate that there are one or two things I’d like from you before the inevitable happens.”
“Lyonesse,” I say.
Cashel sits on a stool in front of me, piscatory ring glinting under the exposed light bulbs that hang from extension cords slung over metal girders. The floor is concrete; I don’t see any windows. A warehouse?
“It would be useful for me to know what you know about Ys, of course,” Cashel is saying.
“But the rest of your treasury will be put to work as well. How funny to think that you’ve built a temple of secrets, all for the sake of destroying me, and in doing so you’ve created a weapon beyond anything I could have made myself.
Thank you for that, Mr. Trevena, truly.”
Are Tristan and Isolde here too? Or at a different location?
I rub the inside of my injured forearm against the back of the chair and bite back a groan. Fuck, that hurts.
“I’ve always wondered though, and I hope you’ll indulge me by answering,” Cashel goes on, lifting a hand to press against his jaw once and then dropping it.
“How did you connect me with Ys? I’ve worked hard to be careful, to keep a wall between the saints and Ys, making sure anything they did for Ys, they thought they were doing for the Church.
That will change now, of course, no sense in wasting resources, but I like to think I’ve been careful. ”
Talking is good. I should do lots of that, buy myself as much time as possible. I grind my forearm against the chair again and pretend that the pain is heat and then pretend the heat is light.
Harmless, bright light. It helps a little.
“John Lackland,” I push out. My voice is dry and strained with pain. “The deputy director of the NSA. Remember him?”
“I do. I remember also that you killed him last year. Very cleverly done.”
“I try.” It’s not pain in my arm. It’s heat.
It’s not pain in my arm. It’s heat. “The NSA shouldn’t have anything to do with CIA business in ordinary circumstances, so after Kraków, the fact that Lackland coordinated the meetup between Eliot and our asset struck me as strange.
It also struck me as strange that the deconfliction protocols were so flagrantly ignored.
The only variable I could see that tied everything together was Lackland’s potential involvement with this group, this Ys that the asset had wanted to talk to Eliot about.
Because if Lackland was implicated in something the asset knew about—if he risked exposure—then friendly fire in a troubled city was a neat way to tidy up both after the asset and anything that Eliot might piece together later and with a decent degree of plausible deniability besides. ”
Fresh blood is dripping down my forearm now, hot and slick on my skin. I have to press my arm harder and harder against the chair as I discreetly rub it back and forth.
“It would have been a decent degree of plausible deniability if an angry, grieving CIA officer hadn’t been left alive after,” says Cashel affably, ruefully.
“No one accounted for you in their plans. Though I suppose that’s what I get for trusting John Lackland.
So how did you get from Lackland to me?”
“I went back to the arms dealers our asset was working for and worked my way inward over the years. I found myself happily torturing the brother-in-law of Filip Drobny’s cousin’s best friend one day, and he let something slip.
Something about his boss’s boss. He’d never seen the man, only heard him a single time on the phone, but the Irish accent stuck with him.
It left me with only a shred of a suspicion, but it was enough to start poking at the edges. ”
“Or have your pet hacker Robin Loxley poke at the edges,” Cashel adds pleasantly. “But this is a lovely cast of characters, at least. And most of them now dead at your hands.”
The nice thing about the past twenty-four hours is that I don’t feel like I need to hide the occasional wince or grunt as I continue to abuse my bloody forearm with the back of the chair.
“I don’t think anyone will miss John Lackland,” I say. I sound breathless. “And Drobny couldn’t have been surprised after the attack on my club.”
“One wonders why you allowed him and his lackeys into the club in the first place if you knew they were connected to Ys.”
“Him, I wanted. His lackeys, not so much.” Blood is dripping off the ends of my fingers now. “I didn’t account for someone inside my club letting them in. A failure on my part, I freely admit.”