Winter's Reach (The Revanche Cycle Book 1) (14 page)

“That one looks innocent to me,” Veruca said. “Let’s have another round of applause for the hero of the hour! He’s free to go and sin no more. Boys, clear the floor. It’s gonna be a
long
night.”

After they dragged the corpse out and led the near-catatonic victor to the door, the next prisoner to face judgment was an accused arsonist. No trial by combat for this one, not in a logging town. The guards stripped him of his rags in front of the crowd and left him naked on the floor with his wrists chained to his ankles. One of the guards upended a bucket of something over his squirming body, some kind of grease, as he kicked and thrashed.

Then they opened the side door and let in the wolves.

Felix closed his eyes, rested his forehead against the cell bars, and waited for the screaming to end.

Gardener, I don’t ask you for much
.
I try to be happy with what I have
.
But I’m praying now
.
Please, please get me out of this because I don’t think I can do it myself
.

They dragged off what was left of the arsonist’s corpse and scattered more sawdust on the floor to soak up the blood.

Then they came for him.

Two of the Boys grabbed Felix by the arms and hauled him into the center of the arena under hundreds of watchful, bloodthirsty eyes. They unshackled him and stepped away. Veruca gazed down at him from her basalt throne.

“And what do we have here?” Veruca said. “A spy? An Imperial bootlicker, come to take what we have, to topple the way of life we’ve all fought and bled for?”

Felix tried not to cower as the crowd booed and spat curses, shaking their fists at him. “I’m innocent!” he shouted over the din.

“Oh, he’s
innocent
,” Veruca deadpanned to the crowd’s delight. “Now that’s just silly. The pit is where the guilty people go. If you were innocent, you wouldn’t be down there, would you? That’s simple logic.”

Felix shook his head. Adrenaline coursed through his veins, desperation starving out his thoughts.

“
Coward!
” he screamed.

The hall went silent.

“You stand up there, and pass judgment,” he stammered, “and have your ‘boys’ do all the dirty work. How about you come down here and face me yourself?”

Of all the reactions he might have expected, snickering and cruel laughter from the crowd wasn’t one of them. Then came the faint rhythmic scraping of feet on the bleachers and the rustle of hundreds of hands lightly clapping in unison.

Veruca looked out across the audience, her mouth agape, one hand pressed to her heart.

“What is this?” she said. “You can’t possibly mean…oh, but you do!”

The rhythm grew louder. Scrapes became stomps and the audience’s clapping became a three-hit beat in time with the crowd’s rising chant.

“Ve-ru-CA
!
Ve-ru-CA!”

“You heartless beasts,” she pouted in mock dismay as she rose from her throne. “You can’t mean that you want your beloved mayor, your beloved, sweet, fragile flower of a mayor to commit an act of
violence
, do you? Well! I have only one thing to say to
that
.”

The crowd hushed. She stretched out the moment, slowly breaking into a grin.

“Have to give the people what they want,” she cried and leaped down into the pit as the room shook under a thunderous cheer. She landed in a catlike crouch, stood, and eyed Felix like a hungry lioness who’d spotted a stray gazelle.

“
Knives
,” she shouted, and held up her open hand.

Two serrated knives, bone-handled and polished to a deadly sheen, sailed through the air. She caught one, snatching it by the handle and holding it aloft for the crowd’s approval. The other knife chunked into the floorboards at Felix’s feet.

Veruca sauntered close, lowering her voice into a deadly hiss.

“You know, I might have let you off with a whipping and a brand, and sent you home with your tail between your legs as a message to your bosses. But you challenge
me
? In
my
house? In front of
my
kids? Now I
really
have to hurt you.”

“Please,” Felix stammered, “you don’t understand.”

“Pick up the knife, Imperial. Let’s give this crowd a show. You wanted me? You’ve
got
me.”

Livia’s rooms, for the time being, had become the heart of the counter-conspiracy. Her walk-in closet—already almost empty, given the little interest she had in expanding her wardrobe—soon sported a small bench for notes, a stool to hold an oil lamp, and a board of cork that Rimiggiu nailed to the stucco wall. Livia scrutinized the board and tacked up a length of blue yarn between a pair of parchment scraps.

“This is Cardinal Accorsi’s inner circle,” she said, tracing yarn connections as Rimiggiu watched in silence. “Cavalcante has been his man for years, and everyone knows it. I’m pretty sure Accorsi has some dirt on him. De Luca…well, De Luca’s an opportunist slug. He votes with the winning team, but there’s no real loyalty there. As for Herzog, he’s a wild card. He’s a distant cousin of the emperor, and his loyalty to the government comes before his loyalty to the Church.”

Rimiggiu shook his head. “The real wild card is Dante Uccello. My man in Accorsi’s house confirmed that bounty hunters have been sent to Winter’s Reach to retrieve him. Accorsi is working with a merchant named Terenzio Ruggeri. Ruggeri is influential in Mirenze. Council of Nine.”

“Uccello. I know that name. He was exiled from Mirenze years ago, wasn’t he?”

“He spoke out against the Banco Marchetti’s influence on Mirenze’s government,” Rimiggiu said. “Irritated them enough that Lodovico’s father pulled strings to get him accused of treason and sent into exile. He’s got a noose waiting for him if he ever goes home again.”

“Marchetti,” Livia mused, staring at the corkboard. “Again. Everything comes back to Lodovico Marchetti. Whatever he’s planning with Carlo involves imports from the east, we know that much, but what’s Cardinal Accorsi’s angle? Dante Uccello has never been involved in the Church. He doesn’t have any familial connections to the College of Cardinals that I know of, and whatever political pull he used to have is long gone. He’s washed up.”

Out in the parlor, a key rattled in the lock. Livia’s shoulders tensed until she heard familiar footsteps and Amadeo’s voice.

“It’s me,” he called out as he came into the bedroom. “We have a problem.”

Rimiggiu arched an eyebrow. Amadeo joined them in the closet, lugging a heavy leather-bound book under one arm.

“I know,” the priest said, “obviously. But now we have a bigger problem. The Order of St. Friedrich is a consecrated knighthood. Members have to undergo a limited form of seminary training. I was making small talk with one of the knights, trying to get a read on him. He told me that he’d been trained at the Seminary of the Scroll in Kohn, under Father Gruenewald, two years ago. Then I asked another knight the same question. Kohn, under Father Gruenewald, two years ago. Want to guess what the third one I asked told me?”

“It is possible,” Rimiggiu said. “Those men may have come into the order together and trained together.”

Amadeo opened the book and flipped through the onionskin pages almost fast enough to tear them. He scanned down a row of minuscule type with his fingertip, under a wood block engraving of a monastery.

“It sounded wrong to me. Like they were reciting something they had been told to memorize. I spent the afternoon searching through the papal library, reading up on the Order of St. Friedrich. Know what I found?”

“Something unpleasant?” Livia said.

“Someone didn’t do their homework,” Amadeo said, pointing to the entry. “Max Gruenewald, senior instructor at the Seminary of the Scroll. Problem is he’s dead. Withering Pox got him four years ago. When they cooked up their story, they must have been working with old information.”

Livia frowned. “So we have fifty armed men occupying my father’s home. They weren’t really sent by the emperor—”

“And they’re not knights at all,” Amadeo said grimly. “They’re impostors. I’ve sent a courier to the order’s chapterhouse, but it’s all the way out in Stourgardt. We’ll be waiting a while for a response. In the meantime, watch yourselves. Oh, and Lodovico just showed up. Sister Columba said he spent all of five minutes with the Holy Father, paid his respects, and then headed straight for Carlo’s office.”

“Not being very subtle about it,” Livia mused. “He must feel safe. What if we make things a little more complicated?”

Rimiggiu tilted his head.

Livia gestured to the corkboard. “We know Cardinal Accorsi has his own scheme brewing, and we know he wants Amadeo’s support. Why don’t we give it to him?”

“What he wants can’t be much better than what Carlo and Lodovico want,” Amadeo said. “Besides, there is no chance he’d suddenly believe I want to work with him, after our last discussion on the subject.”

“You can sell it. Just go and…well, be honest, in a roundabout way. Express your misgivings about the goings-on around here, and use that to justify your turn of heart. Accorsi can butt heads with Lodovico and my brother, while keeping us out of it. Create enough friction and one of them will give their hand away.”

“Making your enemies fight,” Rimiggiu said with the faintest of approving smiles. “A time-honored technique.”

Livia nodded. “That will also put one of us in Accorsi’s inner circle, which should help us to work out
his
game.”

Amadeo took a deep breath.

“All right. I’ll do it. The College is in session, so I’ll try to catch him as soon as they’re done with the evening meetings.”

For her part, Livia knew how she could learn more about the impostors occupying her father’s home. It would have to wait, though, until Rimiggiu and Amadeo left. When it came to certain matters, she was still very much a conspiracy of one.

*   *   *

“Miss Owl is very smart
,
”
read Squirrel’s cramped and uneven handwriting, littered with misspellings. “
She says everywon wears masks all the time, but we are just honest about it
.
Other people’s real faces are hard to see, but there is a trick for that
.
It is called the Red Looking Glass and it will let you peek behind everyone’s mask to see the true person underneathe
.
”

Livia knelt at her bedside with the book resting on her naked thighs. Trickles of blood ran down her whip-ravaged back. The pain helped her to focus, to hover above the pit of temptation, to stay pure of heart.
Purity
.
Faithfulness
.
Love
.

It was such a simple little spell. Some gestures, some words, two drops of blood—the caster’s blood, even, not from a sacrifice. Compared to some of the nightmares she’d read about in Squirrel’s notebook, it was almost benign.

Almost.

I can’t believe I’m even considering this
, she scolded herself.
That’s exactly how these things begin
.
Something small, something harmless
.
Gardener’s love, Livia, that’s how this Miss Owl got Squirrel started in the first place!

But still, she wasn’t Squirrel, was she? It made her think of a bottle of wine. On her nocturnal visits to the Alms District, she often came across desolate souls forced to the gutter by their craving for the grape. The love of drink took over their lives and drove out everything else. She, on the other hand, could have a glass of wine with dinner and be perfectly content. Livia didn’t understand why some people could drink in moderation and others couldn’t stop until the bottle was drained to its dregs, but it was undeniably true.

Could it be the same with witchcraft?

I have a genuine need
, she told herself, reasoning through it.
A very specific use for this one specific spell
.
I am not doing it for power or vanity or any selfish reason.
This is to help my friends and my faith
.

She reached over and took a sewing needle from the top of her nightstand.

Another thought swam up from the depths of her mind.

You always knew you were going to jump in the water
.
Otherwise, why spend so much time dangling your toes over it?

She read over the instructions, then reread to be sure. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears.

“Stir yr. blood to the brink to raise the power, while intoning the words
.
Miss Owl spelled each one for me so that I would get them right
.
”

Livia had gleaned a lot of context from the rest of Squirrel’s book. Techniques like how to pitch her voice for an incantation, or the easiest way to “stir the blood.” Sitting naked on her bedroom floor, she set down the book and needle and closed her eyes.

She caressed her body in all the places where she liked to be touched. She stroked the curve of her neck and shoulder, the side of her hip, fingers sliding like silken petals across her stomach, nails lightly grazing her thigh. She took her time, stoking the slowly growing fire in her belly, until she was ready. Then she eased her fingertips down, into the valley between her thighs. Livia bit her bottom lip against a sudden surge of pleasure.

She opened her eyes, focused on Miss Owl’s words, and began the incantation.

“
Dromadei
,” she whispered, her breath hitching as her fingers hastened. “
Yilcatarius, dromadei fex, dromadei quen isten
…”

The words were nonsense to Livia, but they still swirled inside her heat-fevered mind, taking on invisible but whirling life in the air around her. As her intensity grew, it was as if her voice had taken on the role of a second organ, with every exhalation of breath and every roll of her tongue drawing pleasure as forcefully as her fingers did below.

The words came faster now, rhythmic and driving, spilling from her hungry lips. She came closer to the edge, cresting, burning, then yanked her hand away and snatched up the sewing needle. She struck quick and deep into the pad of her index finger. With her wounded finger dangling above her face and the chant at a crescendo, she leaned her head back and squeezed a drop of blood into each eye.

A wave of power shot through Livia’s body like a stroke of lightning and knocked her flat to the floor. Every muscle, every bone, even her blood felt like it was vibrating to the tune of some cosmic dance. When she forced herself up, the room spun around her so fast it sent her stomach lurching. She looked over and caught a glimpse of her reflection in the full-length wardrobe mirror.

Crimson eyes stared back at her.

They weren’t just blood-splashed. Her eyes were gone, pupils and irises obliterated under a flat glaze of baleful red like the eyes of some foul insect. A surge of panic washed over her, but it receded just as quickly when an instinct—half thought, half a wordless spiritual understanding—chased it away.

No one will notice
.
Only you can see
.

She moved slowly, like a woman lost in a dream, and dressed with numb and trembling fingers.

She’d gotten drunk once when she was younger. This reminded her of that night, the feeling after three glasses of wine, when everything felt fuzzy around the edges. She didn’t think, just watched quietly as she moved through a world turned to the consistency of molasses.

She stepped out of her suite. A wolf stood at the end of the hall.

No
, she thought as she choked back a scream.
A man with a wolf’s head
.

He stood like a statue, sheathed sword on his hip, draped in the armor of the Order of St. Friedrich. His face, though, was a drooling monstrosity. Half wolf and half man, with jagged teeth jutting from a misshapen snout. His yellow eyes followed her as she approached.

It’s just an illusion
, she told herself, fighting to keep her shaking legs under control.
It’s just a man, not a monster
.
Walk past him, nod, and smile. Don’t let on that anything is wrong
.

“I raped a woman in the streets of Ferlonde,” he said as she walked past.

She froze, taking a halting step away, bumping into the wall. He spoke again, and she noticed that his words didn’t line up with the movement of his muzzle. The sound was a little too deep, too echoing and off-kilter.

“I cut her throat while she screamed,” he said.

“
W
-
what
?” Livia said, pressing her back to the wall.

The wolf head blinked. “I asked if there was anything I could fetch for you. Are you all right, ma’am? You seem a little pale.”

“Just…just a bit of stomach upset,” she said. “It’s nothing. Thank you.”

“If you need anything at all,” the wolf said, “let me know. We’re here to serve.”

More wolves lurked in the scribal hallways, leering as she passed, muzzles rotten and bloody. She wanted to turn back—she’d seen enough—but she knew there was one more truth to witness.

She headed for her brother’s office.

Under the veil of the spell, Carlo was a corpulent and tumor-ridden toad with eyes gone glassy and blind. Gold rings dripped from greasy, clutching fingers as he tossed back a swig of wine from a crystal glass. He wheezed and giggled. Across the desk, a hooded cobra in black velvet reached out with razor-nailed fingers.

“Another glass,” the serpent hissed in a twisted parody of Lodovico Marchetti’s voice.

“I should know better,” her brother chortled, and let his guest refill the glass to the top. Wine sloshed across the desk, running to the floor in rivulets and staining the rug.

“You really should,” Lodovico agreed, then twisted his head toward the doorway. Carlo followed his gaze with pale, almost sightless eyes.

“Witches burn,” Lodovico hissed, a spear of accusation aimed at Livia’s heart. Carlo flashed an idiot grin and waved his bloated, stubby arms.

“Sis! Come join us for a drink!”

“No,” she said, stumbling backward. “No.”

She turned and ran, charging blindly down the hallway with tears welling in her scarlet eyes. She found herself in her father’s audience chamber. The throne sat silent and empty, but knots of courtiers and petitioners still gathered and whispered under the towering arches.

Distorted and feral faces turned her way. Leprous fingers clutched at the air, perpetually needy, snatching at anything they could reach. She held her skirts as she ran past them, head bowed, trying to block it all out.