Renick #2
He humphs, not believing me. He also doesn’t care. He takes my coin—the last I have in this life—and tosses the outfit at me.
I change into it behind his wagon, standing in the mud in my underclothes. The trousers are too short, riding up past my ankles. The hat sits crooked on my head, and the bells annoy the shit out of me every time I move. I look absurd.
“Gods.” I drag a hand down my face.
Kammy would have laughed. She would’ve laughed until she cried, sitting cross-legged on the bed with her book in her lap, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. You look ridiculous, she’d say, and that at least brings a smile to my face.
Before he packs his wares away, I nod to a dull-bladed dagger in the back. “What will you take for that?”
He looks me over, sucks his two teeth. “You have nothing.”
Resigned, I dig deep into my folded trouser pocket, producing the porcelain angel figure. The last tangible thing I have left of my sister. An ache tears through my chest at the thought of giving it away—but I decide I’m not long for this realm anyway.
I’m doing this for her.
I toss the angel at him, and he catches it. The next moment, I’m slipping the small dagger into the ankle of my boot.
I catch my reflection in a puddle, and the man staring back at me is a stranger. Hollow-cheeked, one dark eye, the other scared, dressed in dead bells and drab color. My shaggy dark hair lands just below my ears, in need of a cut.
I’m a fucking fool, carrying nothing but grief, walking toward his death.
I trudge ahead.
The road to the palace takes two days. I try to walk through the night, sleeping only a handful of hours in a field.
The jester’s hat pulled over my face, the bells rattling an eerie tune every time the wind rustles.
I dream about my sister beneath the hawthorn tree, only when I call to her, her sweet smile is gone.
Her face becoming skeletal, decomposing.
I wake with a panic, my heart battering the wall of my chest.
“It’s just a dream,” I tell myself. But there’s a grave I left behind, at a home I’ll never return to. The reality of this, of her death, hits me with a fresh wave of grief, knocking the breath from my lungs.
The second day the road fills with other men headed the same direction.
I see them trickling in from side paths and crossroads.
Men in bright clothing, carrying lutes and juggling clubs.
Walking with the swagger accustomed to performers.
Tumblers with calloused hands, wits with sharp eyes. One is even a fire-breather.
Hells.
They talk and laugh and size each other up the way dogs do—circling, sniffing, deciding who’s a threat.
Except for me. Who receives a few snide remarks and mocking scoffs.
I’m no threat.
A dark smile ghosts my mouth, and I tip my hat sideways, further owning my ruse.
Near midday, the palace appears on the horizon.
Like a cloud of white stone and spires against the gray sky, it’s too beautiful, too pristine.
An insult pressed into the landscape. Flags snap from the soaring towers.
The road leads through iron gates that have been parted wide, expecting us, welcoming us.
Right into King Aldric’s domain.
I watch the performers in motley pour through those gates, thinking about sheep and slaughter, and how one only needs the right bait to set a trap.
I line up behind what appears to be a hundred other fools all waiting for their chance to stand before the king.
Ahead of me, the palace courtyard gleams with metal and marble. Servants in royal uniform move through the crowd, offering water and bread. Gods, it’s real bread, freshly baked. Warm and soft, and I barely inhale the scent of it before I’ve devoured a whole loaf.
Yet the moment my stomach is full, the aftertaste immediately turns to ash in my mouth. Fury lights up my sternum, my ego furious over accepting charity from the king.
The dagger sheathed in my boot feels heavy with my next step forward in the line. I might not be able to make his death painfully slow, the way he deserves to die. But I’m going to make gods-damn sure he sees my eyes when I sink the rusty blade into his heart.
And I can’t fail.
I’ve walked for two days with vengeance marching in my steps, and now that I’m here, so close, I almost laugh, realizing with a clarity that borders on madness that I never plan to leave that throne room.
I make some kind of peace with it. I won’t die in vain. For my sister, for all the others who’ve suffered due to his vile rule, I can’t let myself fail.
I have only this one chance.
I’m anxious to get inside that throne room. The longer the wait, the more my anger mounts, the more I shake with it. I blow out a breath.
The line moves slowly. Men enter the palace through the great doors and emerge minutes later. Some laughing, some cursing, most looking bewildered, as if they’d been weighed and measured, and found extremely lacking.
From my position, as I crane my head to see into the throne room, it doesn’t appear the princess laughs at the juggler who keeps seven balls aloft.
She does not smile for the acrobat who flips across the marble floor.
She doesn’t even shift in her seat for the wit who makes the entire court roar with laughter—even the king himself.
She simply sits there, unmoved, her gaze somewhere far from this room.
“She’s a witch,” mutters the jester ahead of me. He’s a squat guy with a puppet on each hand. “Has to be. No woman lacks such emotion who isn’t dealing in evil things.”
I think about my sister’s face in her last days. The way the light bled from her eyes before her body surrendered it. Sadness doesn’t need witchery. Loss of hope only needs a cruel king to incite it.
As the sun travels the sky, the line shortens. My legs begin to ache, and my stomach is mourning the bread I ate too fast hours ago and the bells on my hat won’t stop their pathetic death rattle every time I breathe.
Nearly a hundred men have come and gone, and not one has made this melancholic girl smile. Seven hells, I’m not even a real jester, and my plan—if the incoherent mess in my head deserves such a word—has all the tactical precision of a drunkard swinging in the dark.
I glance back toward the high gates. The road out is right there. Two days of walking and I’d be back at my empty cottage, at the hawthorn tree—my sister’s grave.
My nothing of a life.
I face the throne room.
The puppet man is called forward. He disappears through the high doors. I hear muffled laughter from the court, then he reappears, deflated, defeated, his puppets limp on his hands as he sulks off.
“Next,” says the steward, and he’s looking directly at me.
My heart kicks against the cage of my ribs. My mouth goes dry. The bells on my hat tinkle with my tremble as adrenaline surges.
Then I think about Kammy. I think about her hawthorn tree. I think about the seven days I watched her die while the king’s tax collectors rode past our village on horses worth more than our cottage.
And rage heats my veins.
Muscles corded with the fury of the seven hells, I walk through the doors.
“Wait—” The steward calls. Then suddenly, I’m being approached by guards, their meaty hands circling my arms. “Search him.”