Foul Tide's Turning (42 page)

‘His son?’ said Duncan, confused. ‘You mean Carter? He asked to marry Willow?’

‘He never asked,’ snarled Willow’s father, his voice swelling louder on anger and thick red wine. ‘The boy broke into the park and tried to carry her away, as bold as any highwayman or scavenger plaguing Northhaven. We sent him on his way after a good flogging.’

‘The apple never falls too far from the tree, Colonel,’ noted Nocks, his sly eyes almost daring Willow to gainsay him.

‘Never was a truer word spoken, Nocks,’ grunted Benner. ‘The Carnehans attempted to corrupt Willow’s soul, but their wicked schemes were foiled by my vigilance and the kindness of my dear wife. But that’s the past. Now Willow’s been blessed with a husband worthy of the Landor line. Her firstborn is to be the next Viscount of Belinus Hall.’

‘Then you all have what you want,’ said Duncan. Willow suspected her father missed the trace of sarcasm she’d heard there. ‘I require your help.’

While the only thing I want is to be far from here with Carter
.

‘Naturally you will have our every assistance,’ said Benner. ‘The land’s gone to hell in your absence, Duncan. Rebellion and banditry and traitors at every turn; our own Gaiaist Party and assemblymen supporting the claims of some far-called pretender, seeking to turf the lawful king off his throne. But the saints are on the side of the righteous, or why else would they have sent the Vandians from their distant shores to make common cause with King Marcus? Between our armies and your foreign friends, we’ll set matters right here. Restore peace and order and punish every rebel who has dared to raise arms against the king.’

Willow wanted to scream at her father. Call him for the fool he was. Tell everyone in the room that the South’s precious monarch was a regicide who had murdered every member of the royal family blocking his way to the throne, and then sold off his own people like cattle so he could swell his coffers. Instead, Willow met Nocks’ malevolent stare and bit her tongue.

‘Not the house’s help.
Your
help, Willow,’ said Duncan. ‘Where is Lady Cassandra being held prisoner now?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Willow, sadly. ‘She was in Northhaven, being moved around to stop the king’s agents from finding her. Maybe she’s still there. Nobody ever hurt the poor girl. She was very well provided for. A lot better than any slave was ever treated.’

‘You were aware of this?’ said Benner Landor, outraged. ‘Of the wickedness of that pirate of a priest … of this abduction and hostage taking?’

‘I didn’t know anything about Jacob Carnehan’s past,’ said Willow, realizing how weak she sounded even as she said it; the testimony of the imprisoned guild courier Thomas Purdell returning to unsettle her.
I heard the pirate leader himself call Jacob Carnehan ‘brother’. The pastor fights like no priest of my acquaintance – I think he must have been a mercenary across the water
. ‘I still don’t know if I believe what they said about the father,’ Willow added.

‘Damned if it’s not the truth,’ said Duncan. ‘I was there when the pastor abducted Lady Cassandra. I tried to stop him seizing the girl, as did your friend Hesia. He put a bullet in both our hearts for our trouble. If it wasn’t for a medallion slowing the slug and the wonders of Vandian medicine, I’d be filling a grave. I came as close to dying as a man can before the empire’s doctors brought me back.’

‘Father Carnehan shot Hesia?’ said Willow, hardly believing what she was hearing. ‘But she helped us escape!’

‘When it came to it, Hesia knew what was right and what was wrong,’ said Duncan. ‘And what seizing an innocent like Cassandra for a hostage counted as. I’ve read the local news. The papers say the pastor was known as
Quicksilver
when he led his army of hired killers in the Burn. It’s as good a nickname as any. I’d never seen a man move so fast with a pistol. Carnehan gunned us both down as cold as a hound’s nose. I survived, but Hesia wasn’t so lucky. I’ve stood over her grave with my friend Paetro and watched him weep for hours for his dead daughter. I came back to Weyland to save Cassandra, but Paetro’s here to slay Jacob Carnehan. I wouldn’t stand in the way of his revenge.’

Benner Landor banged the table fiercely, the others in the restaurant turning around at the noise. ‘By the saints, he shot my son, did he? Tried to murder my boy! I’ll leave Carnehan’s bones swinging in a gibbet at Northhaven until my great-grandchildren can stare at them; have everyone understand that no man wrongs a Landor with impunity.’

‘Are you sure of this?’ said Willow, searching her brother’s face for any hint of a lie. But she knew Duncan too well. She had grown up with him, and for all of his many faults, he rarely lied. Willow recalled the fleeting glimpses of the pastor’s memories she had experienced in the sky mine as a by-product of Sariel’s strange sorcery.
So much darkness, so much blood
. More than she could bear to examine at the time. Jacob Carnehan had told Willow that her brother had been left unharmed in Vandia, and that Hesia had chosen to hide in Vandia rather than becoming an exile in Weyland.
All lies.
And if so much was false, what else were lies?

Duncan undid a button on his shirt and pulled the fabric aside, revealing a terrible scar across his chest. ‘That’s where the Vandian doctors cut his bullet out of me. Put there by Jacob Carnehan or Jake Silver or whatever his real name is.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Willow. ‘Carter and his father are prisoners inside the king’s own dungeon. They were taken when the national assembly was dissolved during their testimony. There’ll be no blood or revenge … not for you or for your friend.’

‘I don’t give a fig about revenge,’ said Duncan. ‘Not over what the pastor did to me … a wild dog only knows how to bite. As soon as I’ve helped free Lady Cassandra, my business in Weyland is done. Perhaps the empire’s business, too.’

‘You may have forgiven Carnehan, but by the Seven Saints, I’ll see the man swing for this,’ swore Willow’s father. ‘I’ll present Northhaven to the king, turn it into a royalist city, and His Majesty will hand me that bastard’s neck for the magistrate’s gallows.’

Duncan looked like he didn’t care either way. ‘Why bother? The pastor was a shattered man when I last saw him; as dangerous as a spitting snake and as insane as a hornet. I just want Cassandra back, alive and safe.’

‘Weyland’s enemies are Vandia’s, now,’ said his father. ‘We’re allies. If your abducted Vandian girl is being held in our acres, I’ll recover her safe for you. You have my word. Perhaps when you’ve done a man’s duty for these foreign allies, you’ll reconsider your place among your real family. I can see that your travels have hardened you, changed you. You’re your own man now. The decision will be yours to make and you’ll call it true whatever may come to pass.’

Duncan nodded, seemingly satisfied by their father’s offer and his fawning words of support. Willow was anything but satisfied. Her father’s lips moved, but all she could hear was Leyla Landor’s words. Willow tried to bring forth some platitudes of flattery and encouragement, but they choked in her mouth.
Oh Carter, we should have left the country when we could. Abandoned it to its madness. Taken Sariel up on his offer and escaped to some far-called land a million miles from this evil and insanity. This isn’t my home any longer, no more than it’s my fool of a brother’s.

Cassandra’s muscles were stiff from the cold as she pierced the darkness of unconsciousness, discovering she had merely traded it for the dark velvet of a night sky spotted with silvery stars, more stars than she had ever seen before. Whole whirling constellations scattered above her head. She lay under a coarse blanket and a crackling fire burned nearby, the smell awakening a rumbling hunger deep in her gut, voices filtering in from unseen speakers. They didn’t sound happy.
Who, then
? Cassandra gazed around. She was surrounded by wreckage, aircraft wreckage, but not the
Lightning Gull
… there was too much of it, a twisted wooden airframe with ribbons of fabric rotted by age rising up around her, clawing towards the starlight. Like camping in a broken, tumble-down castle. This had been a merchant carrier once, one of the slow nomadic cities of the sky. Cassandra remembered the still air above the steppes; there were few trade winds to ride and even fewer places to trade for fuel, making it a dangerous crossing indeed.
I’m still on the plains of Arak-natikh
. She remembered the last few seconds of her descent, but not the crash itself. The pain throughout her body spoke well enough for how hard that had been, as though she was lying in a bath of scalding water despite the freezing night; but there was little warmth from the burning, she was numb and shivering. A reaction to shock or something worse? She tried to get up, but while her arms twisted out from under the blanket easily enough, finding purchase on the icy grass in the hollow of wreckage, she couldn’t stand. That was when she realized that the pain across her body burnt everywhere except her legs, cold and numb from more than the cloudless night air.
They’re paralysed
. She tried to move her legs again, and when she failed, she slapped her thighs with her fists, trying to feel something, anything. But she might as well have been beating the ground for all the sensation that came from the strikes. Cassandra swore in frustration, moaning as she tried desperately to roll over, stand, but her legs dragged around below her torso; a useless weight of meat, no feeling there, nor the slightest evidence of obeying her urgent commands.

A figure appeared, tall and dagger-thin and almost as dangerous. The Nijumet witch rider, Nurai, drawn by Cassandra’s convulsions across the dirt. She called out. ‘It is as I warned you. The useless foreign sow is broken. Better to have left her in the Rodalian machine to burn … that would have been a clean death, at least.’

Alexamir appeared, looking as hale as when he had leapt out towards an enemy flying wing with only a parachute for company, but his solid face was creased with worry. ‘Is it true, golden fox? Can you not stand?’

‘My legs,’ said Cassandra, trying to keep the rising terror from her voice, ‘they’re dead below me.’

‘You are a healer,’ spat Alexamir towards the witch rider. ‘Use your skills.’

‘It is not my healing skills that whisper of her fate, it is my Sight. She will not walk. I saw that when we warmed our skin around the fires of her wooden pigeon.’

‘If she cannot walk, she will ride. Or let us signal one of Temmell’s chosen.’

Nurai did not look happy. ‘There are none due here for many weeks.’

‘You used one to reach the steppes,’ accused Alexamir.

‘I foresaw where one of the chosen would be passing, as is my gift.’

‘And you will not use your Sight for her?’

Cassandra did not know who the chosen were, but she guessed they had something to do with how rapidly Nurai had put Rodal behind her.

Nurai shook her head in contempt. ‘To what fate, what end? Abandon her here. Perhaps the rice eaters will follow after their pink-skinned sow. The mountain folk seemed eager enough to recapture her the first time. What victory would it be to return with
this
?’

‘You’re lying to me,’ said Alexamir. ‘You saw this fate before I stole her from Talatala! You knew she would be broken in the crash. This is what you wanted all along.’

Nurai pulled the hood of her cloak back up around her head, but not before Cassandra saw the sly look she stole toward her, and she knew that Alexamir had the right of it. This had been the witch rider’s plan all along. Alexamir would have gone raiding to steal Cassandra back whatever the witch rider had said or done, so she had reluctantly facilitated his strike on the Rodalian town, knowing that their escape would leave Cassandra a cripple out in the steppes. Useless to the nomads, and useless to Alexamir. Nurai had managed to keep the wild barbarian horseman for herself after all. Cassandra was cursed as surely as if the witch rider had slipped a blade into the Vandian noblewoman’s spine.

She groaned in agony, reeling with the implications of her condition. It was more than her future that had ended out on the plains. Princess Helrena Skar could not possibly hope to seize the diamond throne with a crippled daughter. Lady Cassandra would not be seen as a marriageable match for any alliance beyond the truly desperate. Bad enough that as a woman, Helrena Skar couldn’t treat the great houses of the empire as endless breeding stock for the imperial harem … her mother was limited to the heirs she could personally produce. With a cripple as her only current heir, what would the house’s chances be of prospering?
Next to none. I have to die here tonight
. ‘Leave me. Take the blankets, kick out the fire and ride off.’

‘Then you will surely perish,’ said Alexamir. ‘This cold is nothing to me, for Alexamir this is as warm as summer, but you will not last the night.’

‘That is what she wants, you fool,’ said Nurai. ‘She knows what she is now and what she must do. Leave her a knife to make an honourable end.’

‘I gave the golden fox my oath to show her the life of the free people, and if she did not like it, to send her on her way home via the traders of the thousand duchies.’

Nurai struck a hand out towards Cassandra. ‘And how well do you think she likes that life?’

‘Do what she says,’ begged Cassandra. ‘Give me your blade.’

‘I will not. You may yet be healed.’ Alexamir glared at the witch rider. ‘This one is a base apprentice to Madinsar. If Madinsar says you cannot be healed, I will trust her judgement. But not Nurai.’

‘You did not give your oath to this broken sow,’ spluttered Nurai. ‘You gave it to a whole woman, and a dirty
foreigner
at that. Let her die as she wishes.’

‘No … as
you
wish,’ said Alexamir. ‘You see, but you do not say. Is there any crime worse for a rider?’

‘Indeed there is. Being enchanted by a foreign sow who makes you forget you are a free man. Will you plant this broken thing in the ground like a root, build her a dirty wooden shack and grow crops around her body? Will you be known as Alexamir, Prince of the Farmers?’ She hooted in derision at the notion.