Winter's Reach (The Revanche Cycle Book 1) Page 7

  “Tell me something, Confessor. And tell me the truth.”

  He lifted his chin, catching the look in her eyes. Sharp. Hungry. She made him think of a falcon soaring over a field of mice.

  “If I had been the one,” Livia said, “would my father have needed to coerce you into an oath to serve me? Or would you kneel down and kiss my ring of your own free will? Would you recognize me as the rightful heir, one worthy of leadership?”

  Amadeo looked over at the iron tree, unmoving in the warm breeze.

  “I have seen where you go at night,” he said.

  She crossed her arms over her stomach.

  “I have seen you,” he said, “garbed in hooded rags, down in the Alms District and the worst parts of the city. Carrying food and medicine for the destitute. I have seen you cradle a leper in your arms as he died.”

  “No one was supposed to—” she started to say, quaking with barely controlled fury.

  “No one else knows. And no one will. I have said nothing to your father. You know how he would react, if he found out his only daughter was putting herself in danger like that.”

  “The Church is broken,” she said. “My father has tried his best, but the cardinals have blocked him at every turn. We have the means to help people, far more than we do, but Gardener forbid we actually get it to them. All I can offer is my little service.”

  “I happen to agree with you. And to answer your question, no. There would have been no coercion. I would have gladly seen you on your father’s throne, but that does not change the reality. The reality is that you are a woman. The reality is that canon law doesn’t change without a four-fifths majority of the College in favor, and they can’t build that much agreement on whether water is wet. The reality is that Carlo will be our next pope and you, as his sister, have the opportunity to bend his ear in ways none of us can.”

  “So I can graduate from the useless girl,” she said, standing up from the bench and smoothing her skirts, “to the slightly less useless girl. Tell me something else, Confessor? If you had the opportunity to change things, to truly change things for the better, for everyone…how valuable would your pledge be then? Would you break your oath to my father, if it meant saving the Church?”

  Amadeo looked up at her, surprised, peering into her eyes as if trying to read her mind. He shrugged. “I can’t answer that.”

  “One day,” she said, “you might have to.”

  Chapter Ten

  Days passed, and the sky turned white as the ocean turned black.

  Shipboard life took on a dulling rhythm punctuated by moments of terror. Felix could sit for hours, lulled while the boat swayed on an easy wind, then suddenly feel his stomach clench as a rogue swell lifted the galleon high only to slam it back down on waves that felt hard as stone.

  He had to bundle up now when he went topside, swaddled in his brother’s cloak. The air was cold as a Mirenzei winter, and twice now he’d seen glimmering snowflakes kiss the billowing sails. Sailors scrubbed the deck night and day with thick chunks of sandstone, fighting the encroaching frost. Felix’s alarm grew one morning when he looked out over the bow and saw floes of ice bobbing in the brine.

  He found Anakoni on the starboard side, tightening the braces on a massive harpoon gun. He grunted, waved Felix over, and pressed a wrench into his hand.

  “Here. While I push down, tighten that brace as far as you can. The wood’s wet, makes it hard to get a grip.”

  The first mate put his body weight against the brace while Felix pulled hard on the wrench, hauling against the bolt until his arms ached.

  “Lots of ice in the water,” Felix said. “You don’t look worried.”

  “Because I’m not. We’ve carved our way through fields of ice thicker than a landslide. This time of year, not likely we’ll need to. It’s only autumn, too early for the nasty stuff.”

  “But we could still hit those floes.”

  Anakoni chuckled and shook his head.

  “This is the Fairwind Muse, brother. She’s built for cold weather, and reinforced against a head-on hit. She also has a false keel and bands of iron at the waterline to save us from nipping.”

  Felix gave the bolt another tug. “Nipping?”

  “Nipping’s the real danger. That’s when two big fields of ice squeeze against a ship from both sides at once. The pressure could crush a lesser ship like an eggshell. Not the Muse, though. Her hull’s rounded and shaped for leverage.”

  The first mate held out his hand lengthwise, demonstrating as he explained. “A nip would squeeze our hull and push us up and over, see? Instead of being crushed, we ride the ice and shove it down beneath us. Worst case then is that we capsize, but that hasn’t happened yet. Never will, so long as Captain Iona’s at the helm.”

  “So what are the harpoons for? Whaling for meat?”

  Anakoni patted the gun, running his palm along the frost-slicked iron curves of its firing tube.

  “No,” he said, “they’re in case the Elder comes.”

  “Who’s the Elder?” Felix said.

  Anakoni grinned, flashing dirty teeth. “Not who. What. The Elder’s haunted these waters for a hundred years or more, never far from the Reach. One trip in ten, it’ll come sniffing our way. We load up a skiff with whatever meat we’ve got left in the ship’s stores and set it adrift. It’ll take our offering, but we’ve got the guns just in case. Don’t think we could actually hurt it, but it’ll take a free load of meat over getting stung by a harpoon.”

  Felix handed him the wrench. “But what is it? A shark or something?”

  “Our god Ochali, he’s a storyteller. Long before man set foot on our islands, he told the stories of birds, and trees, and fish, and they came into being. Well, one day, Old Man Ochali took a nap while he was supposed to be working. Ribeda the Trickster planted a nasty dream in his head and walked away laughing. When Ochali woke up, he found out all of his nightmares had climbed right out of his head, scattering to the four winds, hiding in the dark spaces so he couldn’t snatch them back up again. There’s no place in the world that’s darker than the bottom of the ocean.”

  “So the Elder is a god’s nightmare.” Felix arched an eyebrow. “Is that a metaphor or something? I’m trying to understand.”

  Anakoni spit over the ship’s rail. “You don’t want to understand. But if the waves start to boil, and you hear the Elder scream…you’ll understand plenty.”

  Kimo slogged past, dragging a huge coil of rope wound over one bent shoulder. He paused to catch his breath and leaned on the rail.

  “Believe that,” Kimo said. “First time I heard it, I thought the Tallyman had come for me.”

  “Tallyman?” Felix said. “That’s another one of your gods, right? I read something once—”

  Both sailors burst out laughing. “He read something,” Anakoni snorted.

  “We tell our stories like Ochali does,” Kimo said, “mouth to ear. It’s the mainlanders who think they can lock everything up in ink and paper. Here, I’ll give you this one for free. When it’s your time to die, the Tallyman comes. He always takes the form of whatever you fear most. So when he whispers your name, looming before you, turning your piss to ice and stopping your heart dead, remember this and remember it good: you stand up straight, look him right in the eye, and spit in his face.”

  Felix blinked. “And if I do, he’ll…let me live?”

  “Nope,” Kimo said, “but when you go to meet your ancestors, they’ll all know you’ve got balls the size of coconuts.”

  * * *

  With two days left before landfall, Felix had yet to see any sea monsters. There was plenty to look at, though. The Muse had swung within sight of land, following the curving coastline from about a mile out. Misty gray mountains rose up over a snowy forest, the treeline stretching all the way down to the rocky and bramble-choked shore. Ice floes clanked against the galleon’s hull, spinning away on black, still waters.

  He had seen Mari every day, usually on deck, doing her
slow and strange dance with the fighting sticks. Today, though, she was nowhere to be seen. Not until he wandered into the officers’ berths and found her sitting cross-legged on the floor.

  She cradled a metal emblem in her cupped hands, some kind of rounded pewter brooch, and she sat so still that Felix wasn’t sure, at first, if she was still breathing. The berth was empty except for the two of them, and the hustle and bustle of the ship seemed muffled and impossibly far away.

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I just wanted to get something from my pack. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  She looked up. She blinked at him.

  “Are you praying?” he asked.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “Was almost finished.”

  He nodded toward the brooch. “Is that…some kind of Terrai idol?”

  For the first time, she quirked a corner of her mouth in the faintest of smiles. She stroked the brooch with her thumb. It looked like a relief image of the moon, encircled with winding and baroque glyphs.

  “Is that what they tell you? That we are idol worshipers?”

  “I’ve just heard that your faith is…different,” Felix said. “That you worship five hundred goddesses.”

  Now she did smile, openly and with a faint chuckle.

  “No,” she said. “We worship the Lady of Five Hundred Names. Same god as you.”

  He shook his head. “No, no, I’m from Mirenze. Faithful to the Mother Church. I believe in the Gardener.”

  “And one of the Lady’s names,” Mari said, “is ‘the Gardener.’ Same god. Different church.”

  “Then why not just call him—I mean, call her that?”

  “Because sometimes she doesn’t feel like gardening.”

  “Seriously?” Felix asked.

  “We are very small,” Mari said, “and the divine is very big. Different names, different faces…they help us to understand.”

  Felix tilted his head, an amused smile on his lips as he studied her.

  “What?” she said.

  “After a week of traveling,” he said, “you have spoken more words, just now, than you have in the entire journey put together.”

  Mari shrugged. She looked down at the brooch. “I’m not good at talking. So I don’t do it much.”

  “Practice helps. You know, if the pin on that thing is broken, I’ve probably got the tools to fix it in my pack.”

  She clutched the brooch tightly. “Not for wearing. This piece has…history. I’m not worthy of wearing it, not yet. I just use it for a beggar’s moon.”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “In my grandmother’s day, every family had a shrine in their home with a symbol of the Lady’s moon. Some great, some small, some wood, and some gold. The point was to have a place where the family could come together, for her love and guidance to strengthen one and all. Not an idol, you understand? Not a thing to be worshiped, but a symbol to remind us of our obligations to her and to each other.”

  Felix nodded. “I get it.”

  “It wasn’t enough for the Empire to conquer us. We’d fought too well, shamed their best generals. We had to be humiliated. Every family was made to take their shrine out to the street and smash it to kindling while the Empire’s soldiers watched. Only then, you see, could we properly convert to the ‘true faith.’”

  Felix shook his head. “I…I had no idea. I’m sorry.”

  “Why? You weren’t there.”

  “Because that’s not my faith,” he said. “The Gardener I believe in would never want that to happen. It was wrong.”

  “And that is the difference between a church and a god. How could I be angry at a god for something a church did? Anyway, our faith never died. We couldn’t have shrines anymore—too big, too obvious—so we took to carrying tokens with us wherever we travel. Could be anything, so long as it reminds us of the divine. Beggars’ moons. ‘Moon’ for the Lady, and ‘beggars’ for what your Empire made of us. Bitter little joke. Most Terrai jokes are.”

  Felix leaned against the bulkhead and crossed his arms.

  “I am no fan of the Empire,” he said. “We Mirenzei are proud of our heritage, and we haven’t forgotten the sting of surrender, but what they did…that’s just cruel.”

  “Life is cruel,” Mari said simply. “That’s why the Lady gave us weapons, courage, and will. What are you fighting for? Must be something, to bring you into the north.”

  “It’s a business deal—”

  “Lie,” Mari said.

  Felix blinked. She shook her head at him.

  “I read people,” she said. “I have to, to be good at what I do. I know the kind of man who risks his life for nothing but fistfuls of money. That’s not you. Don’t lie. Why are you here?”

  He didn’t answer at first. She watched him, eyes focused and unblinking, until he spoke again.

  “I’m engaged.”

  Her gaze flicked down to his left hand and back up again.

  “I thought the Mirenzei wore pledge rings.”

  “It’s a secret. We’re going to run off together, start a new life far away from the city. I owe a debt, though. My family business is on the brink of collapse, and if I don’t pull this off, my father and my brother’s family will lose everything they have.”

  “Debt?”

  “Debt of honor,” Felix said. “My family is dead-set against this marriage. They will disown me, they will certainly never speak to me again, but none of that matters. If I abandon them without setting the bank to rights, my father will die in a poorhouse and my brother won’t be far behind him. I cannot have that on my conscience. Once I’ve secured this deal and ensured they’ve been taken care of, that’s when I can leave. Probably sounds idiotic, I know.”

  Mari shrugged.

  “Honor,” she said, “is the coin that stays in your pocket when all your silver has been spent. I think you’re doing the right thing.”

  “It’s my last chance. If I can’t pull this off, the only other option is an arranged marriage with another merchant family. I can’t—”

  A shadow on the threshold caught his eye. Simon stood there, freezing in mid-step, his gaze flicking between Felix and Mari.

  “Sorry,” he said, taking a half step back. “Thought the room was empty.”

  “It’s okay,” Felix said. “Did you need something?”

  “No. No, thank you.”

  The blond sailor quickly turned and retreated.

  “He is a strange one,” Felix murmured, watching him go. “Pleasant but strange. Must be hard, getting used to a new ship and crew.”

  Mari ran her fingertips over the brooch, cradling it in the palm of her hand.

  “Felix?” she said. “Would you like to pray with me?”

  He looked over at her.

  “For strength,” she said. “We can pray in her name of the Gardener, if it makes you comfortable.”

  He slowly nodded. Felix sank down to the floor and crossed his legs, sitting opposite from her.

  “I would like that,” he said. “I would like that very much.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Amadeo’s eyes burned at the bottom of a salt sea, and his last breath burst from his lungs in a stream of bubbles. He flailed, clawing toward the surface, toward a bobbing ball of light. Something held his ankle fast. He looked down, frantic, to see a rubbery black tentacle curling around his leg. Hundreds of suckers chewed into his flesh, each one a tiny, toothy mouth.

  Far below, far beyond where the sun’s light could reach, something was coming for him. The water boiled around him, and he thrashed against the tentacle’s iron grip as a shape surged out of the darkness. A blob of living shadow, impossibly huge, opening wide to swallow him whole—

  Amadeo shot up in bed, sucking down air in a strangled wheeze. Icy sweat soaked through his dressing gown and cotton sheets. He sat stone-still, arms wrapped tightly around his chest, until he caught his breath and dared to move again.

  “Stress,” he said to the empty be
droom. Even to his own ears it sounded like a lie.

  It didn’t help that it wasn’t his bedroom. The four-poster bed and the wardrobe carved from imported wood, scalloped and polished to a shine, cost more than a year’s wages. It had only been a week since he’d moved out of his tiny cottage near the cathedral and into a guest room at the papal mansion, and it didn’t feel like home. Still, he needed to be here, close to Benignus. Just another quiet acknowledgment that his friend was living on borrowed time.

  His window looked out over the darkened gardens. A sliver of moon hung high in the sky, but Amadeo didn’t give his pillow a second glance. Instead, he stripped off his sweat-sodden gown, put on a simple cassock and slippers, and stepped outside.

  Even at this hour, he wasn’t the only person awake. He gave a friendly nod to a pair of scribes, shuffling past him in the vaulted corridor and clutching heavy books to their chests as if they were smuggling diamonds. The papal guard was reduced but still in force, with one man stationed at every important door to keep a lonely watch over the night.

  The dining hall was big enough to feed a small army, lined with communal benches under the light of two great iron chandeliers. The chandeliers hung cold, but the hearth at the end of the hall burned with a small but warming fire.

  “Another night owl,” Cardinal Accorsi said from his seat by the fire. “Come, join me. I’m starved for intelligent company.”

  “Cardinal?” Amadeo said, wandering over. “What brings you to the mansion at this hour?”

  Marcello Accorsi sighed. His robes of office were wrinkled, and the green stole hung off-kilter on his shoulders. He was cadaverously thin, and liver spots flecked his long hands.

  “The College was in congress today. And tonight. And on and on. By the time the inevitable after-meetings were done, I decided I’d just stay here and get a fresh start in the morning instead of going all the way home and back again. Too much on my mind to sleep, I suppose. Do you like hot chocolate?”

  He gestured to the silver kettle at his side and a pair of porcelain cups. Amadeo took a seat near him, close to the fire’s warm glow.