Queen of the Night (The Revanche Cycle Book 4) (32 page)

Dante took another step back, withering under the heat of her glare.

“Mari, this—this isn’t you.”

“Isn’t me?”

Mari quirked a half smile, her voice dangerously soft. She prowled toward the bars of her cell.

“Would you like to know who I am, Dante? Do you really want to know?”

Her smile slowly turned feral as she tilted her head. Looking more like a predator with every passing heartbeat, a panther on two legs, a powder keg of compressed rage and hatred about to explode.

“I am Mari Renault, servant of the Owl. Coven knight. And you have made me your enemy. I swear to you now. I swear by my honor and my blades. I swear by my blood and my fealty: if you do not release me and bring me to my liege,
this instant
, I will kill every man in this prison. And you? You, I’ll save for last.”

“Mari.” Dante wrung his hands. “She’s…she’s twisted your head around. But it’s all right. I’m taking care of you now. I’m going to fix you.”

“I’m not
broken
!” she shrieked, the cell bars rattling as she threw herself against them, both hands clawing frantically at Dante’s face.

He stepped back with the warden, both men whispering as she slammed her shoulder against the bars again and again, screaming his name.

“We have to get her to eat,” Dante said. “Once the first dose is in her, she’ll…she’ll calm down. She’ll be docile after that as long as we keep her drugged.”

“Could use a feeding horn,” the warden said with a shrug. “It sure as hell ain’t
nice
, but it’ll get the job done.”

Dante took a long look at Mari. His shoulders sagged as he nodded his assent.

“Do whatever it takes.”

They brought up more guards. Eight in all, poised and ready at the cell door. The warden stepped up with his key, sweat beading on his forehead. The lock clanked and he jumped back, the guards flooding her cell, tackling her to the floor with the weight of their numbers as she screamed and kicked and spat. While the others pinioned her arms and legs, one grabbed hold of her jaw and forced it open.

As her shrieks turned into muffled, choking sobs, Dante looked away.

“This is for your own good,” he said, the words hollow on his tongue. “Someday, you’ll thank me for this.”

Marcello gave him a grave look.

“I’ll leave you to your little project,” he said. “Make sure the other one burns on schedule. I’ll keep Livia distracted until the deed is done. And, ah…thanks for the gold.”

The cardinal turned and walked away, shaking his head.

*     *     *

There came a point, Nessa had learned, when pain became abstract. Not a thing to be suffered so much as observed, like you were an outsider to your own body.

The guards had taken turns beating her when they brought her in. No reason, except that they could. They’d gotten bored when she finally went limp and stopped responding. She wasn’t sure how long that had taken. Maybe hours. Her good hand was broken, at least two fingers. Maybe three ribs. They’d stomped on her glasses, leaving her cell a hazy blur that wavered in and out with the pain. The world was wrapped in gauze and razor blades.

The heavy iron chains binding her wrists and throat irked her. They were undignified.

All her dreams were on Hedy’s shoulders now. Not for a rescue—she didn’t want to torture herself with hope—but to continue her work. She was smart. She was strong. She wouldn’t fail.

Her thoughts turned to Mari, but that was its own kind of torture. She only hoped they didn’t take her for a witch, that they’d believe her a sellsword by her weapons and treat her as one. It was better to hang than to burn.

Nessa slumped with her back against the cell wall, her chains cold and still.

A figure moved into her field of view. Blurry, distant, small as Hedy. Nessa squinted.

The figure stepped forward on the blistered stumps of her feet, her skin charred black.

“Squirrel,” Nessa whispered. The chains rattled as she opened her arms wide. “Come to Mother.”

And her apprentice came and lay beside her and let Nessa hold her ravaged body close. Nessa stroked her burned scalp and crooned a tuneless song into the dead girl’s ear.

“You have a sister,” Nessa told her.

Sounds rustled deep in Squirrel’s tortured throat. Nessa nodded, understanding.

“Yes, of course you know. She’s very talented, just like you. I think you two would have been great friends.”

Another strained croak.

“Yes,” Nessa said, “Mari is…very special to me. Funny. I’ve gone from hoping my mother was wrong to hoping she showed me the truth. Do you think people can be reborn, Squirrel?”

Squirrel’s tiny hand rested over hers. Nessa sighed.

“She must be so frightened right now. I wish…I wish I could at least say goodbye.”

Another blurry figure, broad-shouldered, stopped outside the bars.

“Who are you talkin’ to?” the guard demanded.

Nessa sat alone in her cell.

She didn’t reply. She had nothing to say to the cattle, and anything she
wanted
to say would invite another beating.

“Keep it quiet,” he said, suddenly sounding uneasy. “You’ll get yours soon enough. They’re burning you at sunrise.”

As he walked away, Nessa sagged against the stone. Pain, she realized, could become an abstract thing. Despair could not.

CHAPTER FORTY

There was nothing left inside Mari now.

She sat in her cell, quiet and still. A porcelain doll with her hands in her lap. She sat just the way they’d placed her and saw no reason to move.

“
Mari
,” whispered a voice. Her drugged mind, moving at the speed of dripping molasses, struggled to place it. A girl. She’d known a girl once. What was her name? Hedy. No, that wasn’t Hedy.

It came again, hovering in the stillness.

“
Mari. Wake up.
”

Mari’s gaze slowly turned to the far corner of her cell. To a patch of shadow, thicker than the rest. A puddle of oil smeared upon the wall, glistening in the torchlight like a cockroach’s shell. Something about the shadow called to her. She crept forward on her hands and knees, inching across the icy stone, her thoughts struggling to keep up with her body.

“Hello?” she whispered.

“
Mari
…”

Flame-seared hands, twisted into claws, shot out from the darkness. Mari fell over, thumping onto her back, as the corpse of the burned girl leaped upon her. She straddled Mari’s chest, her weight squeezing the breath from her lungs, and leaned in close as her hands clamped like a steel vise against the sides of Mari’s head.

“
Wake! Up!
” Squirrel shrieked, and Mari’s mind exploded.

A storm ignited inside her skull, blue lightning coursing through her thoughts, lancing down her spine, setting every nerve aflame. Mari bucked under the dead girl’s body, convulsing—then fell still.

Mari opened her eyes slowly. No girl. No patch of shadow. Only her, alone. She sat up.

The door to her cell rattled open. One of the guards, carrying a wooden bowl of porridge. He wore shabby leathers and a truncheon on his hip, swaggering in without a care in the world.

He crouched down beside her and shoved the cold bowl into her lap. “Here. Eat. You understand?”

She turned her head and blinked at him.

“You’re close to my size,” she told him.

He frowned. “What do you mean by—”

Then she grabbed him by the hair and slammed his face into the wall. He groaned, blood spilling down his nose from a gash in his forehead. She did it again. And again. And again, until his body finally went limp.

She shoved the guard to the floor, his face like a smashed tomato, and set about her work.

*     *     *

As the sun rose over Lerautia, an eager crowd gathered in the prison courtyard. Executions were always popular. Especially on days like this, when they’d dismantled the hangman’s gibbet on the raised platform and replaced it with a wooden pole surrounded by armloads of kindling.

A platoon of armed guards formed a cordon around Nessa as they marched her to the pyre. The faces of the peasants were a hazy blur in her vision, their jeers and taunts one roiling and mindless froth of hatred. Nessa stared straight ahead, holding her chin high. Armored in her disdain.

Dante looked on from the sidelines as they tied her to the post. He judged the crowd, getting a feel for their energy. He’d do his part, giving them a story about Carlo’s witch and how many of them—not
them
, of course, but perhaps their friends and neighbors—may have been taken in by her evil enchantment. How else to explain why they didn’t greet Pope Livia with open arms when she arrived, now that she’d worked miracles and proved the Gardener’s will? With Carlo gone and his witch burned, true grace could finally return to the Holy City.

“So what about the other one?” the warden asked him.

“By tonight, if we keep up the feedings once an hour, she’ll have enough salamander root in her system to tranquilize an elephant. She’ll be…receptive. I’ll take her somewhere, maybe rent a house in the country, where I can keep her safe.”

“Long as you get her away from me,” the warden said with a shiver. “Who’s this ‘liege’ she kept screaming about?”

Dante nodded to the pyre. “Her.”

The warden shook his head. “This is an ugly business.”

“Story of my life,” Dante said.

One of the courtyard doors whistled open. A guardsman, drenched with sweat and wide-eyed, stumbled over the threshold.

“The girl,” he panted, “she’s—she’s loose!”

Dante’s brow furrowed. “What? How? She’s harmless.”

“She forced her way into the armory. Then she—then she—” His face paled and he clapped his hands over his mouth.

“Stay here,” Dante told the warden. “I’ll take a look.”

Dante strode through a prison gone mad. Ragged men hooted and banged on their cell doors with glee, the smoky air electric. Another guardsman came sprinting up the hall and waved his hands frantically.

“Other way,
other way
!”

Dante stepped past him and rounded the corner.

Mari Renault stood before him, a river of corpses at her back. Guards’ bodies, maybe a dozen, each one cut down and butchered before she moved on to the next. She’d dressed herself in stolen armor and drenched herself in so much blood—streaking her tangled hair, spattering her face, coating her hands—that he couldn’t tell what color her leathers had originally been. In her left hand, she held a razor-honed rapier. In her right, a dagger with a black iron hilt.

“I told you what would happen,” she growled.

Dante turned and ran as if damnation were on his heels.

*     *     *

Mari let him go. She followed, relentless. A door shattered under her boot, swinging wide and flooding the corridor with the first light of dawn.

A courtyard. A teeming crowd of peasants, and at their heart, an unlit pyre.

Nessa.

A guardsman charged her from the left, screaming. Her rapier flashed and a fresh corpse hit the cobblestones. A smarter one tried his luck on the right, feinting with his blade. She saw it coming, darted inside his reach, and punched her dagger through his left eye. She ripped the blade away and kept walking, leaving him shrieking as he clutched his ruined face. Mari heard frantic shouts in the distance, Dante calling for the city watch, the clang of a bronze bell summoning reinforcements.

Panic spread through the crowd, people falling and scrambling over one another to get out of her way. She strode through the parted sea and climbed up on the platform.

Nessa gave her a tired smile. “You came.”

“I always will.”

Mari sheathed her rapier and sawed through Nessa’s ropes with the dagger. Nessa tumbled as the ropes parted, too weak to stand, and fell into Mari’s arms.

“They hurt you,” Mari said.

“I’m all right. But…I don’t think it’s going to matter.”

Dante returned through the open courtyard gates—and at his back, the Lerautian militia. They came in tight ranks, guardsmen with swords and pikes, pushing back the peasants as they surrounded the platform. Then still more, cavalry taking up the rear, forming a wall of horses and men at the gate. They fanned out to cover the courtyard doors, cutting off every escape.

“It’s no good, Mari. I’m happy that you came for me, but there’s just too many of them. We can’t fight them all.”

Mari looked out over the crowd. At all the upturned faces staring their way with hate and fear in their eyes.

“I know,” she said.

Nessa leaned against the wooden post and gave Mari an understanding look.

“You…didn’t come to rescue me, did you? You knew this would happen.”

Mari bowed her head.

“A knight goes where her liege goes.”

Dante shouldered his way through the militia, standing at the lip of the platform.

“Mari,” he said, “
please
, come down from there.”

Nessa reached up with trembling fingers and touched Mari’s cheek.

“Mine.”

Mari put her hand under Nessa’s and gently kissed her fingers.

One of the guardsmen lit a torch. Dante scrambled over, flailing at him, shouting, then sprinted back to the platform.

“Mari,” he said, “you have to come down. They’re going to light the pyre whether you’re standing on it or not. This is your last chance!”

“The time we spent together,” Mari said to Nessa. “I think…I think for the first time in my life…I was happy.”

A solitary tear rolled down Nessa’s cheek.

“Me too,” she whispered. “Mari, listen to me. This is not the end of our story. This is the beginning.
We will live again
. We will find ourselves in another place, another time, another life, and you may not remember any of this but 
I will
. And I promise, I will find you. I will move the heavens and I will tear the world to shreds if that’s what it takes to find you and bring you back to me. If a chasm stands between us, I’ll fill it with the bodies of every fool who defies us, and walk across. If a god blocks my path, that god will
bleed
. We will be reunited. Soon. And next time, nothing will stop us.”