The Instruments of Control (The Revanche Cycle Book 2) Read online

  He sat, silent, feeling Mari shake against him, and he hated that dead girl more than he’d hated the motherless fools who killed her.

  She’d been easy enough to find, a street urchin playing at witchcraft. The aftermath, that was the part he hadn’t seen coming. The good folk of Kettle Sands were cowards, he thought, and the mayor and magistrate the worst of the lot. If I’d known they were going to stick a gag in the kid’s mouth and roast her alive, I’d never have claimed the bounty. Never. But what’s done is done, and spilled milk’s just like spilled blood: you can’t put it back in the container again.

  He could live with that. He was a soldier, and he’d stopped counting the bodies he’d dropped—rightly or wrongly—a long time ago. Werner said his prayers to the Gardener every night and paid his tithe to the Church every now and then, and he figured that was the best he could do.

  Mari couldn’t live with it. She was fine during the day, mostly, but the memories all came back in her dreams. He watched, night after night, as she tore herself to shreds.

  She was fine when I kept her drugged, he thought, grimacing from a twinge of guilt that punched him square in the gut.

  Civilizing Mari—transforming her from a feral Winter’s Reach cutthroat driven by an all-consuming rage to a righteous young woman bound by notions of honor and knighthood—had taken two years of hard work. Hard work and chemicals. Over time, as the conditioning set in, he’d been able to ease back and let her mind do the rest. Build her own cage. Not now, though. The memories of that damned girl were ripping her to pieces. He had to do something to help her.

  The next morning, he did.

  Reinsbech was more of a trading post than a town, nestled in a patch of scrubland just inside Murgardt’s eastern borders. Despina and Vassili, a pair of peddlers riding the merchant road, had been kind enough to give them a ride to the local inn. They’d taken the room right next door. Strange couple, Werner thought as he walked through the quiet common room of the Rambler’s Rest. Friendly, but strange. Glad we took their advice to stay at the Rest. Not that we had a choice in the matter. They talked it up so much, I could almost think they owned the place.

  The sunlight filtered through the tangled branches of withered pine trees, and sickly gray plumes of hearth smoke rose up over chip-shingled rooftops. Werner’s boots squelched in fresh mud. He stepped around the deep, watery holes left by a passing packhorse’s hooves and watched for stray droppings. On the far side of the street, an old woman in a gingham dress swept down the boards outside her shop. She gave Werner a wave as he approached.

  “Looking for meadow apples?” she said, eying the big man up and down as if weighing his coin purse with her eyes. “They’re in season. Tart and juicy.”

  “Something a little more medicinal, miss,” he said.

  “Unless that’s a fancy way of saying whiskey, I’ve got springthistle, summer’s moss, and if you’ll give me twenty minutes I can whip up a poultice that’ll dry any wet cough. Oh, and I do have whiskey, too.”

  He climbed onto her makeshift porch, his boots leaving black smears on the gray boards.

  “Salamander root,” he said.

  She clutched her broom with both hands. Her eyes narrowed.

  “Come inside,” she said, nodding over her shoulder.

  There was barely room to move inside the woman’s shop, from the barrels and casks cluttering the floor to the strings of onions and potato sacks dangling from the low ceiling. Werner followed the storekeeper to her back counter, leaning against it while she stepped around to the other side.

  “Salamander root.” She scrutinized him. “From the desert. You know what that’s for, do you?”

  “Joint ache and gout. I’m not as young as I used to be.”

  “Keeps you fighting, all right. Tell me something. Are you a good judge of character?”

  “I like to think so,” Werner said.

  “And do I, in your good judgment, strike you as a fool?”

  “You do not.”

  “Then why,” she asked, “would you speak to me as if I were? That staff on your back and the scars on your hands mark you as a fighting man. You have a soldier’s bearing, but the paunch in your belly says you haven’t marched under discipline in a long time. Wrong weapon for a hired killer, but you’ve got a killer’s eyes, and we’re on the edge of outlaw country. I’d mark you for a bounty hunter.”

  “You’d mark me well, then.”

  “A hunter, and a veteran soldier to boot, would know very well what salamander root does to a man’s mind over time. Makes you…suggestible. Pliant. No, you don’t want this for yourself. What is it, then? You’ve got a prisoner you’re trying to keep docile? Or a reluctant girl you’re looking to fuck?”

  Werner put his hand over his heart, looking pained. “Please, nothing of the kind. My motives are pure. I’m an honest man.”

  The old woman laughed and slapped a long, low wooden box on the counter between them.

  “Words spoken by no honest man ever. Fortunately for you, business is slow and I can’t afford scruples this month. Salamander’s hard to come by in this part of the world. It’ll cost you.”

  “I have silver.”

  She opened the lid to reveal rows upon rows of dried herbs separated by thin wooden dividers. Her wrinkled fingers crooked and scooped out a few gnarled yellow twists of fuzzy plant fiber.

  “I’m sure you do,” she said, wrapping up the root cuttings in a stained wrap of faded parchment, “but it’ll cost you gold.”

  Werner grimaced and felt the weight of his coin purse. They had the money—after Dante Uccello had left them a bribe when he fled their camp, “hiring” them not to hunt him down again—but a single chip of gold could carry them a long way.

  Feast or famine, he told himself, just the nature of the business. He handed over the money.

  As he pushed through the front door of the Rambler’s Rest, stepping into the dusty common room, he delighted laughter and voices chattering in the silky tongue of Belle Terre.

  “Quen ques-theli?Theli ka?”

  “Oh yes, theli ka melais,” said Mari, beaming. She sat at a table under a high window-slit chiseled in the stone, a shaft of sunlight reaching down to touch her shoulder. She wore her usual mismatched patchwork leathers and one dented pauldron strapped to her right shoulder. The woman at her side put a pause in Werner’s step.

  She was maybe thirty or so, with the pale complexion that marked her as one of Mari’s native countrywomen. Her straight raven-black hair fell neatly to the shoulders of her light blue blouse, and her eyes glittered like sharp sapphires behind round wire-frame glasses just slightly too big for her face.

  “Werner.” Mari gave an excited wave. “Come here, you have to meet someone!”

  The newcomer smoothed her riding skirts as she stood and offered Werner her hand.

  “Nessa Fieri,” she said. “A pleasure.”

  “Werner Holst. Seems you’ve already met my partner.”

  He took her hand, inclining his head, and her thin lips curled in a smile.

  “I have, yes.”

  “Nessa’s a scholar,” Mari chirped, looking more alive than she had in days. “Of our people, I mean! She’s reconstructing the history of Belle Terre, putting together everything we lost in the war.”

  “I was raised in Verinia,” Nessa said. “Fieri is my adoptive family’s name. The war was so long, and it made orphans of so many of us.”

  Werner nodded slowly, taking her measure. Something about Nessa’s steady gaze put him off-balance, as if she was looking through him, not at him. He had her full attention, and he didn’t want it.

  “So it did,” he said. “Damn shame, that. Damn shame.”

  “Nessa is just like me,” There was a soft, gentle wonder in Mari’s voice, like the relief of coming home after a long voyage.

  And when’s the last time Mari’s spent five minutes with one of her own kind? Werner asked himself. If I went years without seeing another Murgardt, I�
��d be homesick myself.

  A deeper, darker part of his heart answered: But I don’t WANT her spending time with her own kind.

  “Perhaps a bit less adventurous.” Nessa took a seat beside Mari. “My new friend tells me you’re bounty hunters. Are you working right now?”

  “We’re just passing through,” Werner said. “Finished our last job a couple of days ago.”

  “That’s good. Because I want to hire you.”

  “You, ah, got someone you need found?” Werner sat across from her at the table.

  “Several someones.”

  Nessa laid a pewter brooch on the table. Rounded, edged with glyphs, its face resembled the craggy orb of the full moon.

  “The Order of the Autumn Lance,” Nessa said. “They still exist. I aim to find them.”

  In a heartbeat, Mari had her own brooch on the table. A little more tarnished, worn by endless rubbing from hours of fervent prayer, but a perfect twin to Nessa’s.

  “I’ve been searching—we’ve been searching for so long,” Mari’s voice was breathless, awed. “I carry this with me until…until I earn the right to wear it. You’re sure? You’re really sure they still exist?”

  “I’m certain,” Nessa said. “Not only am I certain, I know exactly where they are. I just need help getting there. Our homeland is…troubled. Still scarred from the war. Not a safe place for a woman to travel alone.”

  Werner felt like the room was spinning around him as his stomach plunged. In his mind he was back at the Battle of Pheasant Run, plucking a brooch from the still-warm corpse of a Terrai soldier. The same brooch he’d eventually give to Mari, with a story about stumbling across it in a desolate ruin.

  There was nothing chivalrous about the Autumn Lance. They were savages in fine linen cloaks, whose idea of sport was torturing and butchering unarmed civilians. Everything Werner had told Mari about her “heroes,” every last detail, was a bald-faced lie.

  He just never thought they’d meet someone who could expose him.

  From now on, only the truth, she had told him the night she found out about his part in the war. Never lie to me again. If you do, we’re finished.

  He would lie to her a thousand times to make her stay. To keep her from turning back into one of them.

  “No,” he told Nessa. “We’re not interested.”

  “Werner!” Mari’s jaw dropped. “What do you mean, not interested? This is what we’ve been waiting for!”

  “This isn’t…this isn’t our kind of job, and we’ve never met this woman—”

  Mari shot to her feet. “I’m sorry. My partner is being rude. Will you excuse us?”

  “Of course,” Nessa said, her expression placid.

  Mari grabbed Werner’s sleeve, tugging him out of his chair and over to the corner of the room.

  “What are you doing?” she hissed.

  “I don’t…I don’t feel right about this, Mari. Isn’t it just a little too, I don’t know, easy? We’re passing through some nowhere backwoods settlement and along comes a person who just happens to have all the answers? I don’t trust her. Despina and Vassili should be awake soon, and they said we could get a ride with them—”

  “It’s called faith, Werner. You used to have some. You told me that if I was faithful, if I kept up my training and upheld the creed, the Autumn Lance would find me. You told me that.”

  “And they will.” He held up an open hand. “Maybe…maybe this is a test, you know?”

  Mari glared at him, leaning closer.

  “I am going with her. And I am going to make my dream come true. You can come, or you can stay, but I am going.”

  She turned her back on him. He followed her to the table, where she sat down beside Nessa. Closer this time.

  “I’ll take the job,” Mari said.

  Werner sighed. “We will take the job. There’s a daily fee, plus expenses.”

  “That won’t be a problem,” Nessa told him.

  Mari ducked her head and looked at Nessa. Almost bashful. “Can I tell you something?”

  “Of course.”

  Mari ran her finger over the surface of her brooch, tracing the canyons of the moon.

  “I think this is fate. I think the Lady sent you to us. Or us to you. This was meant to happen.”

  “You know,” Nessa said with a faint smile, “I think you might be right.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  That didn’t take long, Rhys thought, slouching on his throne and cradling a brass chalice filled with bitter red wine. The messenger from Lerautia wore a long tabard marking him as a Church diplomat, the Gardener’s great black tree spreading its boughs across his chest, but the white cloth was muddy and worn from days of travel. Given the bags under the man’s eyes and the slump of his shoulders, it looked like he’d been ordered not to stop for rest.

  He stood before Rhys’s throne in the drafty hall, with a small mob of courtiers and petitioners at his back. It was the time of afternoon the king hated most, when tradition obliged him to open the castle doors and let any goat farmer with a petty grievance step up and beg for redress.

  “I bring word from the Holy City of Lerautia,” the messenger said, unfurling a scroll of parchment wrapped around an ornate iron rod. “This missive is from the Holy Father himself, Carlo Serafini, dictated as follows, writ by his first scribe—”

  “And we will hear it gladly,” Rhys said, twirling his hand in a “hurry it along” motion.

  “We are honored by your presence, good sir,” Queen Eirwen said from the slightly shorter throne at Rhys’s side. She actually sounds like she means it, Rhys thought.

  The messenger cleared his throat and read aloud, “To the esteemed King Rhys Jernigan, undisputed and respected ruler of Itresca, friend and cousin to the Church—”

  “Perhaps,” Rhys said, “it would be wise to skip the preamble and jump to the meat of the message. That way we could all focus more closely and truly grasp the import of the pope’s words. Wouldn’t want to miss anything.”

  “Er, of course. As you wish, Your Majesty.” The messenger skimmed down a paragraph or two. “The criminal and fugitive Livia Serafini has sought sanctuary within your borders. Be it known that she has been tried in absentia and found guilty of high treason and witchcraft. She has been rendered excommunicate and outlaw, and neither the grace of the Mother Church nor the iron shield of Imperial law extends to cover her traitorous head.”

  That got the crowd murmuring, and low, excited whispers rippled through the hall. Rhys sipped his wine, holding the goblet to his lips to mask the disdain on his face. Like throwing raw meat to a pack of wild dogs, he thought.

  “The Holy Father requests, as a sign of friendship and fidelity, that you deliver this criminal to Lerautia at once in order to face righteous punishment for her dire crimes.”

  “Serious allegations indeed,” Rhys said slowly, giving his spymaster a get over here look. “And from the lips of an honored friend, ones not to take lightly. It is my regret that…Livia Serafini was here but managed to slip away. We do know that she’s somewhere in the city, and my men are scouring the streets. Good sir, would you do me the honor of staying here as my guest while we conduct the search? It should be a couple of days at most, and I can offer you a warm bed and a good meal or two while you wait.”

  The messenger looked pathetically grateful at the mention of a bed. He dropped back down to one knee, almost crumpling the scroll.

  “Thank you, Your Highness. I gladly accept your hospitality.”

  While Rhys’s attendants ushered the man away, Merrion swooped in to stand at the arm of the king’s throne.

  “I thought we’d have at least a week before Carlo’s first lapdog showed up,” Rhys muttered. “I bought us a little time. What can you do with it?”

  “My man from Lerautia will be here by morning with a full report. Once he arrives, we’ll have more information to base a plan upon.”

  “Hogs’ balls, Merrion. We’ve got a golden goose in our grip. I’m exp
ecting you to know how to pluck and cook her. Don’t let me down. And make damn sure that messenger doesn’t get sight of her. If he spots Livia in the castle, it’ll force our hand.”

  Merrion bobbed his head. “We can confine him to one of the guest rooms and bring him his meals. We’ll tell him there’s been an assassination threat, and it’s for his own safety.”

  “Fine, fine. Get him a whore, too. Keep him distracted.”

  “Sire, he’s…a Church messenger.”

  Rhys shrugged. “Then get him three or four. He’ll be making up for lost time. Let me know as soon as your spy shows up, and we’ll meet in the strategy room. Right now, I’ve got some goat farmers to humor.”

  As the petitioners clustered in, forming a ragged line, a lone stranger lingered at the edge of the crowd. With his features shrouded under a hooded cloak, he turned and strode out of the hall.

  * * *

  The walls of Lychwold, Itresca’s capital, towered like gray, shaggy mountains in the late afternoon sun. The craggy stone bore the scars of twenty wars, pitted and cracked and flame-blackened here and there, but still resolute. Hamlets and farms dotted the lush, hilly green land outside the protection of the walls.

  A few barren acres, once a farm but left fallow when the soil went bad, now teemed with new life. A tent city had risen up overnight, painted hide-stretched frames sprouting wild mushrooms in the shade of the wall. Livia descended into the camp, wearing a puff-shouldered burgundy dress compliments of the queen’s seamstress—her request for something simpler had been denied, but she absolutely drew the line at golden embroidery.

  Her minders, a pair of stubble-faced guardsmen assigned to “ensure her safety,” kept a respectful distance as she walked among the tents. The scent of roasted pheasant rose from the wispy smoke of cook fires, and stoop-shouldered women carried clay jugs filled with water drawn from the nearest well. The survivors of the refugee fleet were getting some color back in their cheeks, looking more alive than they had since the terrible night they fled Lerautia.