Chapter 33
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAY
“A smart man might hope for the best, but he’ll be prepared for the worst.”
~ Barloc’s Wisdom, complied by F. Bergsoniir
I half-shoved Audrey’s noble self out the door, keeping myself between the poverty-stricken Southerner and the sad-faced duchess-in-waiting.
“Smooth,” I said through my teeth, my heart aching for the Wuurgard heir as I dropped the bar over her door. One of these days, I’d forget to lock her in. It might even be an accident.
“It’s true,” she told me. “If I had any allies or power, I wouldn’t be sitting around playing chess.”
“Well that’s lucky, then, because your strategy is dreadful,” I snapped.
She threw up her hands and stormed off toward her rooms. “I want to make things right, but I don’t know how!”
The depth of rage in the words sparked answering frustration in me. I’d seen this dance many times before. My mother had thrown her hands in the air, too, after we’d been whipped. “ Why didn’t you stay away from him?” she’d ask us. “What am I supposed to do now? You know what he’s like when he’s in a mood.”
“Ah, of course you need to have discovered the answers for them to be right,” I said to her back. “Far be it that you actually speak to the affected parties !”
“Oh, yes, they all want to speak to me,” she bit out. “I can’t even get a look from Kaelson, much less a meeting with him, and he’s basically on my payroll now that the Acting Steward is nine-tenths dead and Smythesson isn’t far behind. I expect folks in the city who despise my father can’t wait for an audience with me!”
“Why the fuck would they want an audience with you?” I asked, genuinely confused by this woman’s brain.
She spun and leveled a finger at my nose. Her whiskey eyes burned. “Don’t make this sound simple, you cur, because we both know I can’t toss money and power randomly out the window of a carriage as I go past and expect it’ll help.”
I flicked her finger out of the way. “Why not?”
“One,” she said, getting out a finger, “ power isn’t something that one can throw, much less catch, and two, how do you think the guards would treat the folks who scooped up that wealth?”
I hated that she had a point. “That required you to count on your fingers? You can’t keep two arguments straight?”
“I don’t keep much straight,” she said, giving me a derisive look up and down. “Thanking the Wife.”
Laughter wedged in my chest. If she expected me to care that she had a crush on our prisoner, she was sorely mistaken. I’d figured that out from the get-go. But before I could respond, she pressed one hand over my mouth and tangled the other in my sword belt, dragging me back into the shadows. Frozen, I felt the pressure of her fingers over my mouth, the pressure of her hand on my belt at my hip, and her breath at my ear. Heat flooded my body. I held myself still, resisting the urge to turn into that warmth, her attention on the hall leading toward the kitchens.
Two sets of rapidly approaching steps were a welcome distraction from the fact I hadn’t been so close to anyone in what was clearly far too long.
“Jillian,” a man called. “Stop it. I’ll just come by tonight.”
A woman, basket in her arms, slowed at the point where the hall we were in joined the one they traveled on, positioned between both passageways.
My heart beat heavily. I knocked Audrey’s hand off my face, and she shot me a look that would’ve made her servants weep. I just ignored her.
The woman was dressed for the kitchens, and from the flush in her cheeks and the tendrils of sweat-dampened hair sticking to her temples, she hadn’t been gone long.
“Winn, I haven’t anything to spare.”
Winn stopped close to her, a middle-aged man with a neat tabard in the colors of the guard. “You always say that. You know if I have to chase you, it gets worse.” He held out his hand. “Give it to me.”
She took half a step back, clutching the basket to her chest, and the guardsman’s hand settled on the wicker, preventing her from taking flight.
Audrey was on the move before I could act, her eyes on the man.
I remembered, fleetingly, fighting beside her before I’d been forced into her service, when it was just she and I against Mikus and his buddy.
“Don’t run, Winn,” Audrey said, and the guard’s eyes widened. He dropped the basket and bowed.
The woman curtsied, the basket bobbing in her hand. “No, my lady,” Winn said. “Jillian was just sharing a bite with me. She promised she would, you see.”
La’Angi was painfully shorthanded and spilling blood over a few loaves of bread seemed like a bad stampede to get moving, but Audrey was already inserting herself between them. “No, she isn’t. She’s leaving now.” And she gave Jillian a hard look that made the other woman shake her head sharply.
I felt sick, imagining the repercussions.
“It’s as he says, my lady,” she said, and the words didn’t shake at all.
The man opened his mouth, and Audrey lifted a hand, demanding silence. Winn didn’t seem to take note, continuing, “My lady, I’m not sure what you think is happening, but as Jillian’s told you?—”
“No, you don’t speak,” she said, the words clear as glass and just as sharp. “That’s what it means when I hold up a hand like this.”
He cleared his throat and stood a little straighter. “Of course, my lady. Only I’ve got the Watch in a half-hour.”
I saw her close her eyes and draw in a breath. “Hey, buddy,” I said over her shoulder. His eyes flicked up to me. I jerked my hand across my neck in a cut it out motion.
Audrey turned to the woman. “If I let him go, he takes this out on you.”
Her mouth opened, then closed.
I held in a breath rather than tell my illustrious liege lady what a fool she was.
“If I send him away, he spreads the poison.”
I let the breath out. Well, she was considering her options. I didn’t like the one that was left.
“If I execute him publicly for harassment and stealing?—”
“I haven’t stolen anything!” he objected. “My lady, this is unfair!”
“Oh so you did harass someone, will take it out on her, and will spread the poison, then? Noted.”
He made a noise of frustration. “That isn’t what I said. I’m a good solider.”
“If you were a good solider, you’d be dying at my father’s whim,” she said, and I liked the way that barb of hers made him flinch. To make sure he knew it, I grinned behind her.
The look he shot me was pure venom, but I was immune. My grin widened.
“If I execute him publicly, it’ll force the guard to hide how they’re terrorizing civilians,” she went on. “Sir Chay, you’ve got all the answers tonight. I only have one option, don’t I?”
“You’re shorthanded,” I reminded her. Winn retreated a step, unconsciously mimicking the way his quarry had stumbled back earlier. I had longer legs.
“You’re right,” she agreed. “It feels like the price I’m willing to pay.”
Mayhap I’d been in La’Angi too long, but I understood my cue. He went to argue, and I reached for my sword.
A split second later, he did, too.
She was in motion already, and his knee was cracking sickeningly. The noise of pain he made between his teeth as he fell caught me off guard, and she followed up the blow to his joint by grabbing him by his precisely shorn hair and driving her knee into his face.
I stepped back, disoriented by the flurry of violence.
She let go of him and turned to Jillian. “Go home,” she said, the words a little breathless. “Sleep well. You never saw him, and you never will.”
This time, her curtsey shook.
The fool of a guard tried to get to his feet, but he just fell.
I drew a bracing breath. I’d never executed a man. Not in cold blood. Those children I didn’t count as executions. They were a mistake. A hideous, life-changing mistake.
I hadn’t drawn my sword since that day. I hadn’t trained. No one noticed to ask why.
I didn’t know why.
It felt heavy in my hands.
“Help me get him into the garden,” she said, and there was something far too normal about her voice as she made that demand.
I sheathed my sword again, relieved at the respite. My hands hooked into the depressions beneath his arms. He screamed when she took his legs, and I wished her knee to his face had done more than make him eat a few teeth. A dead weight’d be harder to haul, but if this was a stealth mission, we were failing at it.
The door to the side garden wasn’t too far, though, and as soon as we were on the ground, she dropped his legs. He was babbling pleas, and I was feeling sicker.
“Thomas’ field hospital might be worth considering,” I offered.
“He wouldn’t be there long enough,” she said with a quick shake of her head. “Men like him have long memories.” She cast her eyes around and leveled a finger at the seawall. “There.” He was struggling to sit up and she knelt, one hand going around the back of his neck, the other in his collar, fisted hard.
His struggles ended before I could do more than grab one of his hands and stop him from clawing at the collar she used to choke him.
“Obviously,” she said, still choking him, “we need to avoid being spotted. If you hear the Watch, we head to the nearest shadows, and you stay as still as you can.”
The world was upside down. In a hall nearby, someone hurried past holding a torch. They never paused, though, to come our way. He jerked and went still.
Her hand relaxed on his collar, and she straightened, stumbling a little on the hem of her skirt. I went to catch her, but she flinched back. Before I could figure that out, she said, “Get his feet.”
“ You get his feet.” His shoulders would be heavier.
She shrugged, quilting up her skirts as I’d seen Isolde do earlier, a few economical movements that didn’t stop them from getting muddy but would protect them from more damage than they’d suffered and free her up.
I took him under the shoulders this time. His head lolled. I was right about him being heavier as a deadweight. Her cheeks puffed out as she took him by the ankles, but there were no screams.
I couldn’t see where we were going. My prediction was right—he was both heavier and quieter like this—but I hadn’t accounted for my own nausea. The last of the sun’s light guided her, and I trusted her to know these gardens well enough to steer me.
“Past those lamb tongues,” she said. “The silvery-leaved plants. The lamb tongues, there? Go left ,” she said eventually, huffing with impatience. I went left around a bundle of plants that looked light green, not silver, into the soft bed of the garden. “A little more left. That’s good.”
Part of me wanted to ask if it was right. But I didn’t joke with her. That wasn’t what our relationship was like. I certainly didn’t joke with her while I carried the body of a man I suspected was still breathing. If he was, he wouldn’t be soon.
He hadn’t been sick. How many guards did she have who weren’t sick?
She put him down in the lee of a large bush and slipped away. If I hadn’t been staring at her, there’s no way I could’ve tracked her movements. She didn’t vanish the way Isolde could, hiding in plain sight, but she melted into the shadows like a native predator.
Which she was.
I heard booted feet along the walkway above us and stayed where she’d left me, my heart drumming as I waited for the cry of discovery.
The steps had moved past me when she reappeared at my side, though, somehow condensing out of the darkness. Her fingers were stained with ink as they settled over the man’s throat, her eyes on the walkway above us, her expression entirely blank.
In the darkness, I couldn’t see what she was doing. I didn’t know if she was tracking his pulse, limiting the blood reaching his brain, or preparing to strangle him if he made a noise. The rise and fall of his chest was shallow, but still present.
My heart rate didn’t settle as those boots moved further away. But at some point, she stood and murmured, “Up the stairs and to the east, just a few steps, there’s a lookout spot.”
Where we’d hurl him, unconscious and barely breathing, off the wall? Or would we murder him first? I took his shoulders again, the dead weight dragging, and again walked backward through the garden.
The stones were damp and slippery, but the sea wall wasn’t high. That it existed at all spoke more to vanity than necessity. I couldn’t imagine anyone attempting to navigate the aggressive swell and rocky outcrops to scale the cliffs to take the keep, wall or no. The course to the La’Angi bay was signposted by magework; it was so hazardous that the route safe for ships was carved into the stone in the seabed by old magics long forgotten—deep enough to let them pass safely, but only if they were cautious. Even Luca’s shortsighted plans would never include incursion by sea.
The guardsman’s head bobbed up and down, and the pressure on the bones in his neck made my stomach writhe. There was something honest about a sword to the gut.
I remembered the dark morning I’d been sworn into this woman’s service, and how one of the big guards had turned on Mikus, mace in hand. But Audrey had stuck her dagger in Wade’s eye. Was that because any other method would put her at risk, or because she wasn’t the monster her father was?
The stones on the wall were even and well-worn, and the crash and tumble of waves below grew louder. Wind whipped my cloak around my legs, but the stones came up to my chest, and I had nothing to fear from an accidental trip save injuring my ankle and dropping the man who may as well be dead, anyway.
I knew sticking a knife in this man’s eye would’ve left a trail of blood so wide we’d’ve been bound to be discovered. I could respect the decision Audrey had made to try to look after the woman when there had been no good options. But as we stopped in the viewing area, with the sea dark below us, and the sky blanketed with clouds, I just felt cold. Sick and cold.
To the best of my knowledge, Kadan had never once ordered anyone killed.
“Set him down on the bench,” she said.
I did, remembering the way she’d held him even after he was limp, and had given me instructions whilst choking the life from him.
The same woman who’d staggered and frozen at the sight of angry children.
I stepped back as she positioned herself near his hip, glancing along the wall from the little sheltered pocket. There was no one in sight, but there wouldn’t be. We were inset in the wall, a step down, and here it only came up to my hip. The early fog was a blessing for whatever she planned, but even with numbers as reduced as they were in the guard, I wanted to get out of here.
One of her hands took him by the belt. The other fisted firmly in his collar. Before I realized what she was doing, she lifted and swung, letting out a grunt of exertion as she threw the entire man, a dead weight, off the sea wall.
I didn’t know if I even heard the splash he made as he hit the water, or if it was just a wave against rocks.
My belly churned as she untied her skirts and settled them once more around her boots with a few practiced flicks.
Had his death bled off any of the rage she carried? A moment later, the memory of when I’d fought my first skirmish against the Steppe nomads, and my first kill, flooded my mind.
It was for a purpose, but not rage.
“Isolde’ll be proud,” I said as she turned to go back to the wall.
“Isolde would’ve done it faster and neater,” she said dismissively. “I’d have a dozen things to improve on for next time.” That wasn’t accompanied by a look toward me for feedback. She led us back along the parapet, her eyes clear and steps sure. I followed her to the garden, but she paused to visit the plants she’d called lamb tongues, straightening bent stems and obscuring our prints with sprinkles of damp soil and fistfuls of scattered leaves.
Unconscious, full-grown men weren’t light. She’d lifted him with a strong stance, her core braced, and her knees bent. But still, she’d feel that when the rush of violence wore off. I followed after her down the path, sticking to the shadows, deep enough in the gardens I wasn’t too worried anymore.
She’d taken me to the ground and kept me there with ease, that day in the orchard. I’d known she was strong. But I’d seen her shrink and hesitate more often than I’d seen her roar.
I didn’t know how to comment on that, though. I didn’t know how to check in with her. I doubted she murdered men as part of her daily training exercises. Isolde would’ve bragged about it by now.
“Are you okay?”
She glanced at me, then unsettled a patch of stones with the toe of her boot and scooped them up to toss them over the path where a deep boot print had been left, presumably by me. “Well. Thanking you for checking. You?”
Was I fine? I had no idea what I was. “That was not how I expected the evening to go.” One minute, she was missing opportunities to flirt with the heir. The next, she was breaking knees and tossing men to the sea.
“Apologies,” she said. “I don’t have the reach or time for the long-term solution of attempting to show someone like that the error of their ways.” She glanced up at the sky as if concerned about the hour but didn’t comment on it, opening the door to the keep and holding it for me.
There was no sign of what had passed in the corridor except a few splatters of blood that blended with flakes of mud from someone’s boots. I glanced down at myself and realized with a start that somehow, I had a crimson stain on the hem of my cloak, a long stream of it, like from a slow nosebleed or a nicked finger. I twitched the cloth closer and ran my eyes more carefully over her as we passed through torchlit parts of the keep.
There was no blood on her. Not even her sleeves or the hands she’d fisted in his shirt.
Mayhap that was a family trait.
She finally looked toward me. “I’m not injured,” she said, and I realized she’d caught me staring and assumed I was concerned.
Considering the reasons I could have been staring at her, that was probably about the best. “Of course,” I agreed, turning my eyes forward. But for once the silence between us wasn’t comfortable. “Why are you still here?” I asked.
As soon as the words were out, I wanted to snatch them back. In my mind’s eye, my mother's hands made aggressive downward motions behind her skirt, trying to shush me. The boy in my chest recoiled.
“When I could just kill people between me and the horizon?” she asked flippantly. “Oh, I don’t know. This place has a nice view.”
Something about that, the irreverence or the way she delivered it with a straight face, reminded me, achingly, of Kadan. Except I’d never bought his bullshit. And I wasn’t buying hers, either.
She’d specifically asked me to set the guard down. I went over it in my mind, the way we’d carried him up there, the way she’d positioned herself so carefully. She couldn’t have tossed him over the regular height part of the wall. I could’ve, and together, it would’ve been simple. Instead, we’d carried him farther so she could do it alone.
Ego? Rage? Distrust?
We were at the door to her tower. I lifted the key, but held it in the lock and turned to her. “Why was it important you do it yourself?” I asked her.
She met my eyes. Something about it felt forced. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d met my eyes. “I’m done asking anything of you.” It knocked the wind out of me, but she was frowning, shaking her head. “That came out more forcefully than I intended. I’m sorry, Chay. I simply meant to uphold my promise.” She looked down at the door. “I didn’t mean it to sound unkind. It isn’t, really. I said I won’t expect you to kill for me. I don’t. I apologize you were so complicit tonight. I acknowledge the weight of your oath must be significant.”
The lock clicked open, and I shoved the door, my tongue thick in my mouth. I’d known exactly what she meant because she’d said it plainly. I hadn’t needed the over-explanation. It wasn’t ego, or rage, or even distrust.
She was just doing what she said she’d do. Nothing more, nothing less.
And I had no idea how the hell to feel about it.