Our Lady of the Islands (50 page)

“We’ll never find them in all this,” Reikos muttered as he and Ennias struggled to make headway through the massive vigil surrounding the Factorate House. His anxiety was building quickly, despite the powder’s muffling cloud. Had Sian and Arian ever gotten here at all? He did not allow his mind to wander toward the darkest possibilities — or refused to listen when it did, at least — but with Pino watching over them, he wasn’t very hopeful they’d stayed out of trouble.

“If the Factora-Consort is here, she’ll be inside by now anyway,” said Ennias. “We just need to reach the door. Whoever’s guarding it will likely know me, or …” He fell silent, stretching his tall frame to look across the heads of those around them. “What’s happening over there?”

Reikos went onto his toes and tried to crane his neck as well, but pain powder or no, his shoulder wasn’t having any. “What is it? I can’t see.”

“Everybody’s moving up ahead. And shouting about something.”

Reikos followed as Ennias pushed forward toward the disturbance.

“She’s here!” someone ahead of them exclaimed. “Our Lady of the Islands!”

Sian!
Reikos thought, washed in relief. “Can you see them, Sergeant?”

“No, but something’s cut a swath through the crowd up there.”

“Our Lady, heal us!” someone else cried out. “Heal our broken nation!”

“Let’s try to head them off!” Ennias called over his shoulder, elbowing even more fiercely through the increasing crush. “Stay with me, Captain!”

Reikos grabbed the sergeant’s shoulder with his good hand for fear of being knocked aside by others seemingly as frantic as himself to reach Sian.

“I see her!” Ennias shouted. “Just behind the Factora-Consort! They’re both here!”

“Sian!” Reikos shoved around beside the sergeant as they neared the Factorate stairs, and finally saw her, with a small crowd of people at the building’s ruined doorway. She had turned to stare out at the crowd. “Sian! Wait! I’m here! I’m coming!”

He saw her find him, and her face begin to pucker. She was going to cry, damn it all. “Sian!” he called again, shoving through the last wall of onlookers, heedless of his shoulder.

“Konstantin!” Sian cried out, as he ran up the stairs, a step ahead of Ennias, for once.

As her arms closed tight around him, Reikos was unable to prevent a shout of pain. Sian flinched back, gasping as if wounded too, and one of her companions — a tough-looking boy in a sleeveless shirt — lunged between them with murder in his eyes, drawing a machete, of all things. Behind him, Reikos saw two knives materialize in the hands of an even younger lad. At the bottom of the stairs, onlookers cried out in alarm.

“Rothkin, Bartolo! Stop!” Sian shouted. “He’s injured! I just hurt him! We are fine!”

The fire in young
Rothkin’s
eyes gave way to flustered chagrin, as his companion’s knives vanished, and Sian reached up to wipe her tears away. The belligerent boy stepped back as quickly as he’d jumped in. “Thought you try to hurt her,” he said, half accusingly, as if the whole misunderstanding were still Reikos’s fault somehow. “I sworn to protect Our Lady.”

“You too, eh?” Reikos looked around for Pino, massaging the renewed pain in his shoulder, which, oddly, seemed to be receding fairly quickly. He looked sharply at Sian. “Did you just —
oh, balls!
” he yelled, as the fractured bones seemed to leap and stretch. He cried out a second time, more loudly, grappling at the injury with his good hand, as if to swat out a fire there, then tearing at the burlap sling in which his arm had been re-dressed. The muscles around his shoulder convulsed again, then seemed to deflate before slumping all at once into position. The relief came just as swiftly and intensely, not only to his shoulder, but all through him. The cloud around his mind cleared as well. He felt well rested and alert now, and … realized the crowd below them had grown almost silent.

The boy called Rothkin gazed at him with naked envy now. The young priest studied him with avid interest. Even Ennias’s eyes were fastened on him as he reached up calmly to unbind his sling, then lowered his uninjured arm.

“Well … That smashed thumb a while back was not a tiny patch on this,” he told Sian.

The crowd began to murmur, then to cheer again, realizing they’d just seen her work another miracle. A few of them seemed about to start heading up the steps.

“We go in now, Our Lady,” Rothkin said, giving Reikos an unhappy look, “or maybe you don’t reach the door before they mob you here.”

I do believe she’s claimed another victim
, Reikos thought
,
alert to jealousy in young men around Sian by now. As everyone rushed her toward the entrance, Reikos glanced around once more for Pino. He’d noticed Arian on his way up the stairs, of course, then recognized the young priest as well. Who all these other people might be, he had no idea, but Pino’s absence worried him. Surprisingly, there seemed to be no guards inside the entrance either, which worried him as well. Was the building empty after all of this? “Where’s Pino?” he asked Sian.

“Oh, Konstantin, I’m frightened for him.” Rothkin went to right an overturned chair, as the priest led Sian to it. “Our boat was fired on by two of Orlon’s ships —”

“What?” said Reikos. “Was Pino hurt?”

“He cast us into the water near shore, and led the ships away in
Coppersmith
,” said Arian. “I believe we are alive and here at all now because of what he did.”

“But, oh, I wish I knew that he was safe.” Sian’s face was filled with distress.

Heroics
, Reikos thought sourly.
I knew it. Damn boy.
From what they’d said, it had likely been the right thing to do.
But if you’ve gone and gotten yourself hurt, I’ll wring your neck, lad.

“I would very much like him found, Sergeant,” said Arian. “Is there anyone who might arrange a search?”

“My Lady Consort, as I see you have a guardsman with you,” Ennias nodded at Joreth, “and this fellow who’s so handy with the machete, I will go, with your permission, and look for Hivat. He’ll know how to find Pino, if anyone in Alizar can.”

“Hivat is alive then?” she asked with obvious relief.

“Yes, My Lady Consort.” Ennias fell uncomfortably silent, then said gravely, “My lady, you are surely aware … Has anybody told you yet about the Factor?”

“That he is dead?” When Ennias said nothing, she nodded palely. “I had hoped … that these were only rumors, but … Yes. I have known for some time. Thank you, Sergeant. For making sure. Have you … any news about my son?”

Reikos watched Sian climb wearily to her feet, and go to take the Factora-Consort’s hand.

“When I left to pursue … what we thought was you, my lady,” Ennias replied, “your son was hidden under guard with other members of the household in the Factorate cellars, and, to my knowledge, unconscious but alive. I know nothing more, having just returned myself; but, since hostilities ceased some time ago, they may all have been moved elsewhere now.” He looked around the expansive chamber. “It does seem odd that there aren’t any guards here. Perhaps the building’s been evacuated. But, to my knowledge, your family’s wing wasn’t damaged very badly, and I doubt they would have moved your son farther than was necessary. So you might wish to check up there. I’ll be back to let you know as soon as I learn anything, of course.”

“Thank you, Sergeant. We have much else to discuss, but it can wait until we know that Pino is safe. When you find Hivat …” She shook her head. “Never mind. Just go. And thank you.”

“Yes, my lady. We are all more glad than you can know to see you back and well.”

With that, he turned and headed out into the first, pale light of dawn.

“I go search for this man, Pino, too, Factora Lady,” Rothkin said to Arian. “He disappear outside our village, we know how to find him best of all, maybe. You and Our Lady safe now, like we promise.” He thrust his chin at Joreth. “You got a guard and these other men to watch over you here, yes?” He shot Reikos the kind of frown he imagined a father might give his daughter’s dubious new suitor. Reikos suppressed a doubtless impolitic urge to grin.

Arian nodded her consent. “Thank you, Rothkin. I will not forget what you have done for us. And I meant what I said before. We will speak again, I hope.”

Rothkin nodded without smiling, gave Reikos another baleful look, and beckoned his two henchmen to follow as he left. This seemed a rather fractious little group. Reikos wondered how they’d come together as one of the remaining men, whose partial armor seemed to bear the colors of the now-infamous House Orlon if Reikos was not mistaken, spoke up next.

“My ladies …” he said awkwardly. “I’m not sure I will be … welcome here, given the current circumstances. Might I leave as well? I … have a family who will be worried.”

Sian nodded at him, in the lead, it seemed, though the Factora-Consort stood right beside her. “All three of you are free to go, of course. Thank you for your assistance.”

The three men she’d spoken to nodded wordless, somehow uncertain farewells, like departing strangers — and to Sian again, not to the Factora-Consort, he noticed with interest — then left as well. Looking after them, Reikos realized the crowd outside had started chanting once again. ‘Our Lady’ were the only words he could make out clearly. Sian’s status had clearly grown since she had come to him a few weeks before. Neither alone, nor helpless anymore, it seemed.

Arian turned to Sian. “Well then. Are you ready?

Sian nodded. “It’s long past time.”

The five of them remaining moved toward the winding, marble staircase that led to the Factorate’s upper stories. All but one of the leaded stained-glass windows lining it were smashed. Though the sun itself had still not risen, enough light came through them now to see how fierce the fighting must have been here. Nearly everything, right up to the blackened ceiling several floors above them, seemed marred beyond repair. Where the hall’s grand masonry and plaster had not just been blown away in chunks, it was streaked and smeared with soot. Where not covered in rubble, the marble floor tiles were cracked and pitted. Once-elegant tapestries hung in ashy tatters now. Nearly all the entrance hall’s fine furnishings and sculpture had been shattered or overturned. As they climbed farther up the staircase, they were able to look out and see the long wing of bureaucratic offices stretching south of them, just a blackened scaffold now against the paling sky. Smoke rose like incense from their charred skeletons.

Reikos thought again of his once-lovely ship, now lying with its costly cargo on the bottom of the bay somewhere between here and Montchattaran.
It costs us everything to make the world new.
He turned to gaze at the priest who’d told them that, now helping Sian ascend the steps just behind Arian. But what new world had they purchased here, Reikos wondered silently. Would they have anything more than ruin to show for all they’d lost?

Not until they’d reached the fifth and highest floor, and turned north toward the ruling family’s private wing, did the destruction all around them dissipate — and the guards show up.

One minute they were walking through a smoke-stained ruin. Down a hallway, round a corner, and suddenly the marble floors gleamed freshly waxed again. Clean pastel walls were framed in delicate, undamaged plaster reliefs as white as snow. But for an occasional shattered windowpane, the relatively faint scent of smoke, and the darkened palace’s utter emptiness, of course, there might never have been any war at all.

Then they turned another corner and came face to face with half a dozen armored guardsmen, pikes raised and ready in the ghostly light. “Halt, and state your business!” one of them demanded.

The dead Factor’s guardsman, Joreth, immediately stepped forward. “Quino? Bartiem? Is the light so poor that you don’t know me?”

“Joreth?” one of the guardsmen murmured in clear disbelief. “But … I saw you burn.”

“Have you not heard of Our Lady of the Islands, Quino?” Joreth gestured toward Sian. “This is she, and everything they say is true. I did burn. But I hadn’t died yet when she came along, and healed me.” The guardsmen’s faces slackened as they turned in unison to stare at Sian. “And though you will not likely recognize her any more than I did at first, this is the Factora-Consort, whom you are sworn to serve, if I’m not mistaken.”

Now all the guardsmen stared at Arian.

“You … do not look like her,” said one of them, hesitantly.

“I have been traveling in disguise,” she answered wearily. “Has no one told you anything about where I’d gone?”

He shook his head.

“The Factor told only myself and Castahn, my lady,” Joreth said, “who perished … with the Factor.”

She sighed. “My hair is dyed, gentlemen, and this is surely the first time you’ve ever seen my face without its normal mask of paint and powder, but I assure you, if my ladies, Lucia … or Maronne, are here perhaps somewhere, they will vouch for what I say.”

The guardsman in charge came a few feet closer, still peering nervously at all of them. “With apologies, my lady, Joreth,” he nodded at the Factora-Consort, the resurrected guardsman, and, belatedly, Sian as well, “Our … Lady of the Islands, this has been a day to make me mistrust my own mother. Who are all these other people?”