Chapter 1 #3
“Sod off,” Jesstin hissed.
The woman’s head popped up in alarm.
“Not you,” he grunted, waving a hand at her.
She squinted dubiously but obliged, though he may as well have excused her. Maintaining his erection with his mind so distracted was less likely than Gennady returning to life.
Gennady prodded. “You don’t think your chattel already know you hallucinate?”
Jesstin’s hands went white on the chair arms. He closed his eyes and bared down in futility, but he felt nothing more heady than his ex-best friend’s phantom breath against his ear.
“Or is it that you don’t want them to know you correspond with men you’ve killed?” Gennady’s shrill laugh echoed so piercingly, it was incredible only Jesstin could hear him. “You hide here to keep the bogeyman away, when we both know there’s none but the one you created.”
“Not me,” Jesstin said, forgetting himself again, but the woman didn’t notice this time. “My father.”
“The one who made you a bastard or the one who raised the bastard?”
It would have been easier if the visits were hallucinations, but Gennady Hawthorne was not the first ghost Jesstin had corresponded with, just the one most determined to drive him insane.
“You’re worried about what Ellie will do. You should worry. Five men she took down, and she was miles away when it happened.” He swept his arm in a wide swath when he said the word miles. “There’s nothing more dangerous than a storm without control.”
Jesstin switched his response to his thoughts. Even you can’t believe the ridiculous rumors. Miles away? Really?
“How do you think she’ll find out? By accident? One of Taven’s convenient ‘clairsights’? Your own conscience conspiring against you?” He tsk-tsked. “Only a matter of time.”
The upbeat organ music switched to a boot-stomping, raucous melody that drowned out the deals and gambles in the background.
Speculation, dice, prostitution, cockfighting, tax evasion, gold smuggling.
.. Nothing was out of bounds for those who traded their troubles for something more satiating.
Not in a thousand years would any of it have been allowed to propagate in pious Riverchapel, but in Mythgarde, everything was lawful, except running one’s mouth about what happened in the shadowy hamlet.
It was all his, built upon an altar of the guilt-laden sum Mathias Skylark—the father who had raised a bastard, as Gennady had so eloquently put it, not the one who had made him one—had bequeathed upon him when he came of age, as well as the shame that lingered a step behind him.
It wasn’t the life he’d imagined for himself, but he’d outgrown the daydreams of a wistful boy.
He was proud of his sordid achievements, which he wasn’t open about, especially not with his sister, Rhiain, who loved him more than his parents ever had.
She was forever disappointed that he spent his hours in the infamous village, but the rules of the place protected his full truth; he wasn’t just patron but proprietor.
To speak of the doings in Mythgarde was to find oneself dragged back to the village and hanged, for all to witness what happened to traitors.
That secret was safe.
The other one, the bigger one...
“The one where you killed your best friend in a fit a childish rage before he could defend himself? That one?” Gennady was never far away with an unwanted answer.
The woman between his knees yelped as she was pulled away. Jesstin opened his eyes and found Raegnar, one of his two personal protectors, waiting to be addressed.
“What have I said about laying hands on our workers?” Jesstin snapped. He fixed his glare on the burly man as he slid his trousers up without standing. “And interrupting me?”
“You said not to harm them.” Raegnar flicked the faintest nod over his shoulder, at where the woman was already charming another patron. The brief pass of his eyes downward was enough of an answer to Jesstin’s second question.
“Even Raegnar knows you can’t stay hard anymore,” Gennady said before bowling over in laughter. “How much should we bet they all know? I’ll double my money that they know you’re a virgin too.”
Jesstin grunted under his breath. “What, Raeg?”
Raegnar sniffed hard and drew closer to lean in. “There’s a woman here to see you.”
Jesstin tilted his head back with a humorless snigger. “Is that not the point of the Azure?”
The guard licked his lips. He seemed almost amused. “Not that kind of woman, boss. She doesn’t want to be...” He turned to glance behind himself. “Seen in such a place. Asked for you to come meet her in private.”
“I think fucking not,” Jesstin said, wondering if Raegnar detected his uneasiness. What woman would visit him there under such covert intentions? If it was Rhiain, she’d storm in like a hurricane, though she’d never come to Mythgarde. That was good, because it would probably break her heart.
“You are well and bloody done if it’s Elloven,” Gennady said helpfully.
Jesstin vowed to find a way to make his old friend corporeal, so he could throw him into the street and be done with him, like he would any other nuisance. Maybe murder him again, for the fun of it. “Who? Say it already.”
“The widow Hawthorne.”
Aw fucking fuck—
“Baroness Esmeray.”
Jesstin pitched forward. Not Elloven. Her mother. “She left her bed... to come... here?”
“You see why she’d want to keep others from knowing.”
Esmeray was famously a recluse. A drunkard too, which started when her husband had died but had become an established trait after her son had followed him. “Why is she here?”
“She wouldn’t say.”
“She knows,” Gennady whispered with a devious grin. “She knows, Jess.”
Of course Esmeray didn’t know. It had been two years, and that was plenty of time for the old woman to deal with him, but she still asked him over now and then for some of her suspiciously delicious tea.
But Esme and her children were rumored to be descended from the mountain witches of the Seven Sisters, who could.
.. see things others couldn’t. Do things no ordinary magic could accomplish.
He wasn’t sure he believed that, but he didn’t not believe it either.
“You’re sure it’s the elder? Not the daughter? ”
“Unless the daughter aged thirty years overnight.”
Jesstin finished buckling his trousers. There was nothing to do but handle it. “Take her to my office.”
“She’s already there.”
Jesstin shoved past Raegnar and wove through the thick crowd of men and women, the mingling of clove and tobacco drifting across the tavern.
Nods greeted him all around, the respect he could find nowhere else so had purchased with his blood money.
The same people would have avoided him in the streets of Riverchapel.
Esmeray Hawthorne, drowning in layers of vibrantly hued veils, turned at his arrival, but Jesstin urged her to stay seated. She suffered from terrible gout and physical maladies that made her trek to the village not only surprising but troubling.
“My dear Jesstin,” she said, gathering his hands in hers and pulling him to the seat beside her before he could take his own behind the mahogany desk. “How have you been?”
“Well enough, Baroness,” he said, nervous again. He’d closed the door behind him, but had he locked it? “You shouldn’t be traveling. I could have come to you.”
Gennady flopped into Jesstin’s tall desk chair with a pitiless scowl. His earlier drollness had darkened into unsettling loathing.
“I sent two ravens, but it seems neither reached you.” Esmeray coughed into her lace handkerchief before endeavoring a smile.
He saw traces of it behind her mountain of fabric.
She had once been an astonishingly gorgeous woman, but her beauty had been swallowed by the gnarling of her joints and the pruning around a mouth that inhaled all manner of herb for relief.
“Ravens can’t cross our boundaries, in either direction,” he said.
Nothing could be put into writing in Mythgarde.
All bets were burned once a game ended. Any ravens who came close were met with a redirection of scents, which sent them straight back to their source.
“If you need to find me, sending one to the Hermitage is better.”
“Ah. Well, I will not waste your time, my dear boy. Have you heard what has befallen my Ellie?”
I’ve heard what has befallen the five men who pissed her off. “Whispers. Has she come home?”
“Taven has gone for her, and they’ll be arriving soon. Within the hour, I expect.”
Jesstin cleared his throat. “That must be a relief to you.”
“Mostly it strikes a great fear in my heart. The Quinlandens will have to abandon their claim against her eventually. Even if Riverchapel weren’t a sanctuary village, the crown would never sanction harm to come to a woman who once served in the Reliquary.
Her right to haven is sacred. But our own people will not be so kind.
You remember her reputation when she left here. ”
Jesstin nodded, though he didn’t know the details of how or why she’d been sent to the Reliquary. Many young women were shipped there on the back of a scandal.
“They’re already branding her a murderous harlot.”
Isn’t she? “Uh-huh.”
“Ruffians are plotting to intercept her carriage, and with only Taven to protect her, I fear... No one respects him. His authority extends no further than Nightwood.”
Because he was a tack-and-feed boy before you elevated him to the head of a great household. Of course they don’t respect the piece of shit was what he wanted to say, but what came out was “a fair assumption.”
“Once she’s home, I can wrap her in...” Esmeray sighed. “I can keep her safe, but I’m not the woman I once was, before everything happened.”
“In her prime, Mother could have eliminated an entire town without even leaving her bed,” Gennady quipped from his chair, but went quiet after.
“Would you like me to send guards?” Jesstin eased some when he realized that was her reason for coming. “I can have a dozen ready within the hour. I’d need until morning to gather more though.”
“No, Jesstin. I would like you to meet them outside the village and escort her home yourself.”
Jesstin choked on an uncomfortable laugh. “Me? If there’s anyone the people of Riverchapel hold in less esteem than your daughter or Considine, it’s the bastard without even a proper name.”
Esmeray’s veils shimmered as her head shook.
“You wield the power of both Skylark and Edevane. People may turn their noses at you, but they would never touch you. They fear you. Your fathers are the two most powerful men for many, many miles. Together, they may even hold more power than Lord Quinlanden himself.”
There was no together for archenemies Mathias Skylark and Sestinn Edevane, and he considered neither man his father. “My birth father hasn’t been steward for almost a decade, Baroness. It’s his eldest son who runs Oldcastle now.”
“But Sestinn’s power has never diminished. Even you know this. He conspires against Theocratin, brokering his own deals from the shadows.”
Jesstin sighed, not because it wasn’t accurate but because he wished it were not.
“It needs to be you, because what I say is true. And I trust you as I would my own son.” Her chest shuddered.
Jesstin’s stare burned a hole in his desk in his avoidance of Gennady’s attempt to grab his attention.
“Please, Jesstin. I will ask nothing else of you. I need my Ellie home. I need her home safe. And I know you wouldn’t allow any harm to come to her because you’re like family to the Hawthornes.”
“She always was too sentimental,” Gennady muttered. “Just... go. Do as she asks. It’s the least you can offer her. And me.”
Jesstin felt no debt to the dead man who had turned him into a murderer, but he was loyal to Esmeray, because she’d always been kind to him and was all alone, save for that ne’er-do-well stable hand. Elloven’s arrival would ease that, which helped Jesstin too.
“I’ll go,” he said on the end of a resigned exhale.
The deafening racket outside his door never ended.
He loved the sound of morality’s contours crossed, over and over.
Joy, however bought, however momentary. There was no room in Mythgarde for conscience and consequence.
It was home to him, and after he did right by Esmeray, it would still be there, waiting, and behind him he could leave the restlessness he’d felt all day.
“I’ll do what I can. But I think you’re mistaken about me and any authority I might have. ”
Esmeray leaned in and gathered both of his hands again in her shaking ones.
It struck him suddenly how much he missed his own mother, whom he didn’t remember.
Every detail etched into his memory had been lovingly placed there by Rhiain.
His only image of his mother had been constructed from her portraits scattered around Riverhelm Citadel.
“I think you’re mistaken about yourself, Jesstin. But it will not be me who convinces you.” She kissed his hands. “This mother owes you a great debt.”
Gennady shoved away from the chair and stormed out.
“You owe me nothing, madam,” Jesstin said distantly, already crossing the town gates in his mind.
If he was going to successfully intercept Elloven’s carriage before the villagers tore it apart, he couldn’t waste another second.
The sooner he got it over with, the sooner he could put Elloven Hawthorne Quinlanden out of his head.