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

  “Sorry. It’s hard for me to fall asleep sometimes.”

  “Not tonight, it won’t be. Close your eyes. Focus on my voice.”

  Mari’s eyelids drifted shut.

  “I feel floaty,” she said.

  “That’s the tea doing its work.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “Good things,” Nessa said. “Now, shh. Inhale. Nice deep breath. Now hold it…and let it go.”

  Mari felt as if she was sinking into her bedroll, and lifting away from it at the same time. At Nessa’s prompting, she took another deep breath, then a third.

  “As you exhale,” Nessa said, “your burdens fade away. You are weightless, falling upwards to the night, up to the stars, free and—”

  There was more, but Mari didn’t hear any of it. She had already slipped away, into a dark and dreamless sleep.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  In the strategy room of Lychwold’s keep, Rhys paced with his hands clasped behind his back. Merrion had brought in his man Iago, a wiry Verinian with frazzled black hair and bloodshot eyes. The spymaster leaned over the map table, rearranging marble weights and markers in accordance with Iago’s tale.

  “—Carlo hasn’t been sober since they put that cap on his head,” Iago said. “Might as well fix strings to his wrists and ankles. The College of Cardinals thinks they’re in control, but that Marchetti’s the real puppet master.”

  “Lodovico Marchetti,” the spymaster mused. “That name has appeared in more than one dispatch of late. We know at least two members of Mirenze’s Council of Nine—ones who have history with the Marchetti family—have been assassinated. Another member of the council was killed in the raid on al-Tali that very same night.”

  “Hell of a coincidence,” Rhys said, still pacing. Movement helped him think.

  “I don’t believe in coincidences,” Merrion said, “and this has all the makings of a greater scheme. So. Lodovico subverts the Church, making a servant of its pope, and then circumstances arise that might make Emperor Theodosius’s dream of a Third Crusade a reality.”

  “Where’s the money?” Rhys frowned. “What does he get out of it?”

  “War profiteering,” Iago said. “A month before the attack on al-Tali, Lodovico rented a large warehouse in Mirenze—under his own name, not the bank’s. I broke in and took a peek. It’s stocked, floor to ceiling, with exotic wares from the Caliphate. Preserved spices, Oerran carpets, high-end goods. If this really turns into a crusade, it’ll kill the eastern trade routes dead. He’ll be ready to meet the demand, and charge a king’s ransom for it.”

  Rhys stopped pacing.

  “Carpets,” he said.

  Iago nodded. “Yes, sire.”

  “You’re telling me this man is orchestrating an international war to make a few extra silvers on a shady carpet deal.”

  Iago winced. “It…is the prevailing theory right now, sire.”

  Rhys looked at Merrion. “And this is what I pay you people for.”

  A hammering at the door turned their heads. It swung open a moment later, and a thunderstorm in the shape of a man burst into the room. The hem of a forest-green cassock swirled around his slippered feet and the iron tree pendant around his neck bounced with every lurching step. He slammed the door behind him.

  “You,” he proclaimed in a reedy voice, “have to do something!”

  Rhys stared at him. “Being the king means no, I don’t actually. Hello, Bishop Yates, thank you for coming. Spot of tea before we get down to business?”

  “Those refugees,” he said, waving a trembling finger. “They’re heretics.”

  “Seemed like perfectly nice people to me, though last I checked you weren’t entirely certain about the status of my salvation, either. What’s the problem?”

  “They’re holding a celebration of the Feast of Saint Wessel in an open tent just outside the city gates. They’re drawing crowds. Local crowds.”

  Rhys smirked at Merrion before looking back to the bishop. “Ah, now I see clearly: they’re stealing your audience. I wouldn’t worry about it. The feast is only…what, three days? I’m told one of their number used to be Pope Benignus’s personal confessor. He probably gives a hell of a sermon.”

  “He isn’t preaching! That…that woman is!”

  Merrion’s chin lifted. “Livia Serafini?”

  “She’s been going at it for the last seven hours straight,” Yates seethed. “That’s why she’s drawing a crowd. It’s like watching a dancing cow or a singing monkey. A woman, preaching. She can’t possibly have anything to say.”

  Rhys snapped his fingers. “Spy. Your name was?”

  “Iago, sire.”

  “Get down there. Find out if she’s a dancing cow or a holy woman. I want a report within the hour.”

  As Iago darted off, Yates shook his head. “You have to stop her.”

  “Again, we’re back to this ‘have to’ phrase. You really need to stop saying that.”

  “Beyond the fact that she’s a wanted criminal—and if she’s not gone by the time Cardinal Vaughn comes back from the Holy City, we’ll all be in hot water for that—she’s taking on the mantle of a priest with no authority to do so. She’s acting like a man.”

  “Then,” Rhys said, clamping a hand on Yates’s shoulder and steering him toward the door, “perhaps you should follow her example and do the same.”

  Once he ushered Yates into the hall, Rhys shut the door and leaned against it with a heavy sigh.

  “Merrion, why haven’t I had that idiot killed?”

  “He has his uses, sire.”

  “So does cow dung, but I want it fertilizing my fields, not stinking up my council chambers. He’s not entirely wrong, though. How long do we have before Vaughn returns from Lerautia?”

  Merrion squinted, doing the math in his head. “The College of Cardinals has recessed for winter, so…a few days, at most?”

  “We need to deal with Livia, one way or another, before he gets back. Man makes Bishop Yates look like a moderate. He’s likely to go ahead and burn the girl at the stake all by himself, just to prove his piety.”

  “He has been known to enjoy the occasional execution, sire.”

  Rhys closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead, feeling a headache coming on. A faint, distant throbbing in his temples, with the promise of more pain to come.

  “Preaching,” he muttered. “In public, and drawing a crowd no less. So much for keeping this situation nice and quiet. How long did Yates say she’s been yammering? Seven hours?”

  Merrion gave him a helpless shrug. “She has to stop eventually, sire.”

  * * *

  She didn’t, though.

  For her first hour, Livia recited the Benedictions of Saint Clavis, which she’d memorized at the tender age of nine. There weren’t many people around that early in the morning, only a handful of refugees who had wandered over from the gathering tent.

  Leaving the tent had been one of Dante’s first improvements on Amadeo’s original plan. “You need to be visible from a distance,” he said, “and your voice has to carry.”

  He’d set her up a stone’s throw from the merchant road into Lychwold, standing under the open sky and the shadow of the shaggy gray walls. A few flat-topped wooden chests lined up end to end, salvaged from the refugee fleet’s boats, served as a low but precarious stage for Livia to stand on.

  “What do you mean, save my life?” she’d asked Dante when he first introduced himself.

  “There’s a courier from Lerautia currently enjoying the king’s hospitality, and he’s not to leave without you accompanying him, preferably in chains or in pieces. Apparently you’re a traitor and a witch and a thoroughly disreputable person.”

  Livia felt sick. Amadeo stepped close to her, getting between her and Dante, and waved a hand.

  “We’ll fight the charges. If Carlo wants to slander his own sister, fine. A public forum will give us a chance to tell our own side and expose him.”

  Dante shook his hea
d, chuckling. “A bit late for that. She’s already been tried and convicted. Your brother means to see you dead, signorina, and I wouldn’t count on the good King Jernigan to harbor you for much longer. Like any competent ruler, he’ll act in his own self-interest—which may or may not include keeping your head attached to your pretty neck.”

  Carlo couldn’t just let me go, Livia thought, tasting bile in the back of her throat. And as long as I’m here, all of these people are in danger. Damn it all, they’ve suffered enough.

  “I’ve heard of you,” she said once she could speak again. “You’re no friend of the Church. Why are you here?”

  Dante smiled. “Because I am no friend of the Church. And you may be the daughter of Pope Benignus, but right now you are most assuredly no friend of the Church either.”

  “I am a woman of faith.” Livia glowered at him. “My beliefs haven’t changed simply because the political body of that faith has fallen into corruption.”

  “Thank you. You just made my point for me. The fact remains that you’re in grave jeopardy. I, however, have a plan to fix all that.”

  “Why?” Amadeo frowned. “What do you get out of the deal?”

  Dante looked over the piled supplies for the refugees. He reached into a wooden crate and plucked out a fat, bruised apple. He took a bite, chewing thoughtfully.

  “Some minor consideration,” he said once he swallowed, “to be named later. Nothing too taxing. Suffice to say—for now—that Signorina Serafina’s survival is very much in my best interests.”

  Livia balked at first when he laid out his plan—the small part of it he’d share with her and Amadeo, anyway.

  “The entire feast?” she’d asked. “The fasting is fine, but I can’t preach for three days straight. I’ve never spoken in public for three minutes straight. I don’t…I don’t know how to talk to people.”

  Dante waved his hand toward the tent flap.

  “And yet, there are nearly two hundred people outside this tent, ready and willing to hang on your every word. Do you even see the way they look at you?”

  “I don’t like being looked at.”

  “Do you like breathing? How about eating and sleeping? Because if you would like to continue enjoying those little pleasures, then you need to trust me. Just for a little while.”

  And that was how she ended up standing on a wooden chest, shadowed by the city walls on a chilly morning at the end of autumn, feeling her heart pound against her rib cage as she tried to find her voice.

  So she recited the Benedictions of Saint Clavis. That was all it was. A rote, shaky recitation. Some people watched, no real interest in their eyes. Some drifted away.

  I’m losing them, she thought, and the realization piled onto her anxiety. The one light in the scant audience was Amadeo, watching her from the shade of the city wall. She latched onto him, desperate for a friendly face.

  He held up one finger and tapped his heart.

  Take a chance, she thought.

  Livia stopped reciting.

  “People don’t like the Benedictions,” she said, “because they read as…cold. They don’t think Clavis was a passionate man. I understand that. People think I’m cold too.”

  A few heads perked up. One refugee, in the middle of turning away, looked back to the makeshift stage.

  “The truth is,” she said, the words flowing faster, “he felt—keenly. He felt so much. He just had a hard time putting it down on paper. I think I just understood that when I was a little girl, because it’s hard for me too. Is it ever hard for you? Getting out what you feel? I think it must be hard for all of us sometimes.

  “I could recite what he wrote, but that doesn’t tell you the whole story. It doesn’t explain what finding the Benedictions on my father’s bedside table meant to me, when I was little and had so many questions about the world and my place in it. So let’s talk about that. And maybe, when we’re done, you’ll see Saint Clavis and his work in a new light.”

  She had an audience of fifteen people when she started speaking.

  An hour later, she had fifty.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Sofia Marchetti’s once-flaming red mane had faded over the years, turning to the color of tarnished steel, but age hadn’t stolen the fire from her eyes. Eyes that narrowed to venomous slits as she stood behind the desk in her son’s private office, paging through the leaves of an oversized ledger.

  Lodovico had been quick to share his good news: the emperor was demanding a crusade to smite the heathen east, and his ministers had approached the Banco Marchetti to fund the war effort. She told him she was happy. She told him she was proud.

  And she might have been, if he hadn’t turned her house into a den of secrets and lies.

  One of my husband’s old business associates is murdered in his bathtub, she thought, and another stabbed by ruffians in the street. And both attacks happen on the very same night, for no reason anyone can explain, that the Caliphate breaks a decades-old truce and invites a crusade.

  And all of this happens after Lodovico lavishes money on Benignus’s drunkard wastrel of a son, who looked like a long shot in the fight to take his father’s throne. Getting into his good graces and putting us in the perfect position to make a fortune from the Empire’s latest war. Nobody could have known this would happen.

  Her fingers traced the last few entries in the ledger, reading them again, checking and double-checking the dates to make sure her eyes weren’t deceiving her.

  But you knew, Lodovico, didn’t you? You knew.

  Before, Sofia had worried that Lodovico was involving the family business in some reckless scheme.

  Now she worried that he might be a murderer.

  Not directly, of course. She had already checked that. Lodovico had spent the night of the assassinations gorging himself at the Harvest Vine Inn in front of a hundred witnesses, with an expensive courtesan on his arm. You couldn’t buy a better alibi.

  And you can buy killers, too, she thought.

  “Oh,” said a voice from the doorway.

  Simon Koertig stood on the threshold. He blinked at her, off-balance, and pushed his horn-rimmed glasses up on his nose.

  “I was expecting Vico,” he said.

  “He went into town for breakfast. I’m here now.”

  “You…shouldn’t be in his office.”

  Sofia slammed the ledger shut.

  “This office is in my house,” she said, “and I will enter any room I please.”

  “Speaking as Lodovico’s personal accountant,”—Simon pointed at the ledger—“and given that you hold a purely advisory position with the bank, those records should only be reviewed under proper supervision.”

  “Or?”

  He tilted his head. “Or?”

  Sofia stalked across the room like a panther.

  “Or,” she said, standing before him with her hands on her hips, “you’ll do what about it?”

  He took a step backward.

  “I’ll—I’ll have no choice but to make a formal complaint to the board.”

  “That’s fine. I’m done here. I’ve seen everything I need to.”

  It wasn’t true, but she knew her words would get back to her son. Put a little fear in him, she thought, and maybe he’ll slip up and show me his hand.

  Besides, what she’d seen in that ledger disturbed her to the core. She just needed help making sense of it.

  * * *

  Felix and Aita weren’t the only ones using the Guildsman’s Seat for their secret meetings. Sofia’s heart fluttered like a hummingbird’s wings as she walked, cloaked and veiled, down the dusky hall toward the suite on the end.

  It was the same every time. She’d agonize over sending the note asking for a meeting. She’d hold her breath as she put the sealed envelope in the courier’s hand, loosing an arrow she couldn’t call back, then lament doing it. The response would come within an hour—always yes, always now—and she’d walk to the door at the end of the hall like a prisoner marching
to the gallows.

  She knocked. He knew she was there, he had to know, but he made her knock anyway. Three long taps, three short. Then she waited.

  The door finally swung open, and Basilio Grimaldi gave her a hungry smile.

  He grabbed her wrist and pulled her into the room without a word. The door had barely closed before he tore off her veil, carelessly tossing the black lace to the floor, and pressed his lips to hers. Growling into the kiss, taking what he wanted.

  “You made me wait.” He bit her bottom lip, a sharp, fast nip. “Over a month since you last called on me? You’ll pay for that.”

  I know, she thought, and her legs trembled.

  “Couldn’t get away,” she whispered, “and business before pleasure. I found something in Lodovico’s ledgers. First, have you heard about the request from the throne? Theodosius the Lesser is finally getting his holy crusade, and the bank is putting up part of the money to make it happen.”

  “Of course I’ve heard. You aren’t my only spy.”

  “I am not,” Sofia said, glaring, “your spy.”

  Basilio smiled—then his hand clamped down on the back of her neck, dragging a gasp of pain from her throat.

  “In this room,” he said tenderly, his lips brushing hers, “you are whatever I say you are.”

  “I hate you,” she whispered.

  “I know.” He chuckled, stroking the back of her neck. “So. The ledger. What did you learn?”

  She took a deep breath, steadying herself.

  “According to the terms, the Banco Marchetti will help finance food and weaponry. The Empire plans to raise a peasant levy to form the rank and file of the invasion, and crusaders can’t fight on religious zeal alone. They need steel in their hands and food in their bellies.”

  “And you’ll be repaid when? After the bloodshed is done?”

  “Annual installments, with a handsome finance fee added. It’s a good arrangement, provided the Empire stays solvent. Such a good arrangement, in fact, that my son acted on it before it was offered to him.”

  Basilio squinted at her. “How do you mean?”