CHAPTER 9 #2
He came in and sat in a chair, throwing one leg over the other. He looked fresher somehow. Like a man who, after enduring restless nights for weeks, had finally slept till morning.
“Rough reading.” He nodded at Lasa’s ledgers stacked on my desk.
“Like swimming through a sewer.”
“Is there anything in there about Matheo?”
I passed him a ledger with a knife in it. I’d needed a bookmark and that was the only thing handy.
He took the knife out, looked at it for a moment, set it on my desk, and read the entry. It was very short. One puppy, fourteen weeks, mother didn’t survive. Shipped to a southern buyer. Code for “We stole a fourteen-year-old boy. We killed his mother. We shipped him south.”
Reynald raised his gaze. “Puppy?”
“Derog paid taxes. He pretended to be a livestock trader. Dogs and cattle.”
“What does this mean?” He pointed to a small star by the entry.
“Special request. He didn’t grab your son at random. Someone paid him to do it. There is another thing. If you look at the other entries, the buyers are identified by initials or code names. ‘Southern buyer’ doesn’t appear again anywhere. Why southern buyer? Why so generic?”
“Someone targeted Matheo,” Reynald said.
“Do you have any enemies I don’t know about? Can you think of anyone?”
He shook his head. “All of my enemies are dead. No, it has to be Silveren.”
Silveren was the Lord Commander of the Redeemer Knights.
The books didn’t spend much time on him.
He was fanatically devoted to the Order of the Redeemer and would do just about anything to help it thrive.
When Hreban rose to power, Silveren put the military might of the Redeemer Knights behind him, hitching his wagon to the only horse willing to help him draw ahead.
The entire Order of the Redeemer consisted of people who had done something so screwed up that they were willing to risk their lives to atone for it.
They were capable of terrible things, and for some of them it didn’t take much to cross that threshold a second time.
Their leader was a ruthless, stone-cold killer.
Hreban waved the banner, but Silveren carried the sword.
“You think Silveren was Derog’s southern buyer?”
Reynald nodded. “My son has the gift of farseeing. Any knightage would want him.”
He wasn’t wrong. In the 1970s, both the CIA and the USSR became obsessed with psychics and actively recruited people who claimed to be capable of remote viewing—perceiving distant objects and locations in real time with their minds.
Matheo was the real thing. He didn’t see the past or the future, he saw the present, and his visions were brief but clear.
It made him the perfect scout. He could catch glimpses of the enemy commander’s map in their tent from miles away or spy on a conversation that happened in a secure room in another end of the city.
The Redeemers would hold on to him with every tooth and claw.
“The Redeemers are desperate for talented recruits,” Reynald continued.
“I think Silveren approached Derog and paid him to steal Matheo. Then Derog sent my son, escorted by a couple of his less valuable lowlifes, to a prearranged spot, where the Redeemer Knights ambushed them, killed the witnesses, and ‘rescued’ Matheo. If any questions arise, the only thing the Redeemer Knights are guilty of is saving a child from some slavers.”
“If you’re right, Silveren must view Matheo as a double-edged sword.
Matheo claims that he lost his memory, but there is no way to verify that.
For all Silveren knows, Matheo remembers everything.
If he is allowed to escape the Redeemer Tower and this matter is investigated, he might link Derog and Silveren, and Silveren wouldn’t want that. ”
Reynald’s face was grim. “Yes. We must be certain that we can pry him free. If we show our hand too soon, Silveren might kill Matheo rather than let him go. I don’t want my son to suddenly suffer a fatal fall from a horse or have a ‘regrettable training accident.’”
He fell silent. We sat quietly for a while.
The books didn’t do Reynald justice. He wasn’t a stunningly handsome man like Solentine or the guy in the Garden, but there was something about him, something compelling and forceful that dragged your attention to him.
If you put him in a room full of men, I’d instantly zero in on him, and I wouldn’t be the only one.
Right now, he sat completely relaxed. He was in a house he had taken away from a gang of slavers, with eleven corpses in the basement, in the middle of a very dangerous city, in the company of a woman who had mysteriously come back from the dead, and absolutely none of it bothered him.
He hadn’t looked like this back in the basement. He’d looked like a demon, and he had kept cutting grown men down like it was their first day with a sword.
Reynald could turn on me at any second, and the demon would return and cut me down. But right now, it didn’t feel like he would, so instead of being scared, I felt . . . safe. Probably for the first time since I crawled out of that muddy ditch. It was almost addicting.
Reynald stirred. “I owe you protection for your meeting.”
And had I known we would get a fortress of a house at the end of this adventure, I wouldn’t have gone to the Shears in the first place. But then I wouldn’t have contacted Reynald or saved the kids either.
“Thank you. I will need it.”
“What are you planning to do with the children?” he asked.
I picked up Lasa’s latest ledger and tossed it to him.
“The three younger girls were ‘quietly obtained,’ meaning kidnapped from the neighboring villages and towns. The locations of the ‘breeders’ are listed. We can take them home and their parents will be overjoyed to get them back.”
Reynald would be overjoyed to get his son back. I wished so badly there was something I could do to spring Matheo out of the Tower.
“I will help you with this,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“What about the other two?”
“Kaiden has nowhere to go.” I flipped through the right ledger and passed it to him.
“One puppy, twelve weeks, local breeder, breeders no longer available, sold by the trainer, requires a course in obedience.” Reynald frowned.
“A twelve-year-old orphan from Kair Toren sold by whoever he was apprenticed to.”
Reynald’s gaze darkened.
“My plan is to keep him with me until I figure out something better,” I said.
He would be a handful, but he was my handful now. I was responsible for him. I wouldn’t toss him out in the street or pawn him off on someone else.
“What about Clover?”
I sighed. “It’s on the next page.”
Clover’s entry was short. It said, “Puppy, seventeen weeks, trained as LM by KR, not intact, damaged, extremely poor condition, recommend disposal.”
Reynald looked at me.
“Someone dumped Clover on Derog’s doorstep half dead. Her condition was so bad that Lasa actually argued for letting her die. For some reason Derog kept her alive.”
Only Derog could overrule Lasa.
“She’s been here for almost two months. You can still see the bruises on her face.”
“What about LM and KR?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. She doesn’t seem like a noble or a merchant’s daughter. I think she might have been employed by a wealthy family.”
The way she’d been standing when Derog asked her about Kaiden was practiced and demure.
I could tell by Reynald’s expression that he understood what was left unsaid. Whoever had employed Clover had punished her and then sold her to Derog. This went beyond simple theft, incompetence, or household politics. This was rage.
“I will help her in any way I can,” I said.
These two children had gone through more suffering in their short lives than some people endured during their entire lifetime. And the worst part of it was, I knew it was real.
I’d read those books cover to cover, and there was no mention of Clover or Kaiden, yet here they were.
They existed just like the other random people I had met: the bakers, the inn clerks, the landlords, the Garden attendants .
. . Each of them had a life, a past, and hopes for the future.
They weren’t abbreviated characters; they were actual human beings.
The amount of detail in the city itself, the people I met, the lives they led, it seemed impossible to have come from one person’s mind. It was too much.
Technically, yes, I could’ve just fallen through some dimensional hole into a pocket world imagined by the author in greater detail than he was able to record.
Maybe he was a supergenius and knew the location of every rock and the story of every one of the three hundred thousand residents of Kair Toren.
Except that it didn’t feel like a fictional world.
It felt real. I had been sure of it ever since I looked into Reynald’s eyes on the roof terrace.
The books might have described and recorded the events that happened here, but this was its own separate reality.
It existed independently of the fictional series, and it was headed for a cliff at breakneck speed.
Several months from now, Hreban would manufacture suffering on a mass scale. He would do it out in the open, without fear of retribution. There would be no Justice Chamber to stop him because he would be running it. Nobody would escape unscathed.
Thinking about it made my stomach churn.
What would happen to Reynald and the kids?
True, I’d helped them for now, but it wouldn’t last. Their lives would turn into nightmares, and I was the only one who knew about it.
I hadn’t saved them. I’d just postponed the torment.
I’d given them hope, and then Hreban would set their world on fire.
What was the point of being thrown into this world and watching it all burn?
“Will you try to get Matheo out of the Tower?” I asked.
Reynald stirred. “Yes. He is my son. I promised my wife . . .”
“At her grave. I know.”
He looked at me and shook his head. “What will you do after we return the children?”
“I’m going to destroy Ulmar Hreban.”
The moment my mouth shaped the words, something changed. It felt right, as if I had blundered out of the woods onto a path. Almost like a bell tolled somewhere.
Reynald raised his dark eyebrows. “You’re going to destroy the richest man in Rellas? The head of a Great Family?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I will not let Rellas burn.”
Reynald and Matheo, Clover and Kaiden, Galiene and her daughter, Solentine, the bakers, the nameless handpie seller, I would give them all a different future.
Just wait, Ulmar. You thought you could murder people left and right as if they didn’t matter. I will fix you right up. Fucking watch me.
Reynald pondered me. “How are you planning to go about it?”
“I don’t know yet. I have six months to figure it out.”
“Not a lot of time.”
“You’re right. Unfortunately, your timeline to rescue your son is even shorter . . .”
Reynald was a careful man. Cautious, even. But he was also a grief-stricken father desperate to find his son. He’d been trying for months and gotten nowhere, and he was at the end of his patience. I saw a hint of that when he was on that roof, thinking about storming the Redeemer Tower.
There was an excellent chance that if I told him exactly what would happen, he would lose his shit and go on a killing spree, which would likely end with his head separated from his body.
The fictional Rellas had killed him, and I didn’t want to take a chance that the real Rellas would want to do the same. I had to keep things vague.
“You have about five months at most. Less than that actually. More like four and a half, before the end of the High Court Session. You have to pry Matheo out of the Tower before the first assassination, because after that it will be very difficult.”
Impossible. It would be impossible.
“And Reynald, if you fail, you must leave the city before the Winter Hunt. I don’t care how angry you are. If you value your life at all, you must leave. Once the second murder happens, that entire mess of Hreban and the Redeemers spins out of control and sets Kair Toren on fire . . .”
Reynald rose from his chair and stared at me.
“What?”
“Maggie,” he said, his voice quiet. “Can you see the future?”