Assassin's Gambit: The Hearts and Thrones Series (10 page)

Vitala backed away from the sight, feeling light-headed. She stumbled to the door of the nearest cottage and knocked. Someone had to know where Hanna and Glenys had gone. But no one answered.

On a cross street, she looked for signs of anyone or anything living. Something moved in her peripheral vision. She turned to see a tiny figure dash behind a rain barrel. The city could not be entirely dead—smoke curled from a few chimneys. She knocked on more doors, but still no one answered. Up ahead was Barley Street, the main thoroughfare. She saw movement there—soldiers, probably. She could talk to Kjallan soldiers, couldn’t she? They weren’t Legaciatti. They wouldn’t recognize her or suspect her of anything.

The stench of death increased as she approached the main thoroughfare. A flock of overfed ravens crowded the cobblestone road; they flapped lethargically out of her way as she passed among them. She kicked a slow one aside.

“Hold,” called one of the soldiers.

The soldier approached with two of his fellows. Vitala stood still, obedient and demure. The street was like nothing she’d ever seen before. Stakes with their rotting victims lined both sides of the road. She felt her throat seizing up and lifted a fold of her syrtos to cover her nose and mouth.

“Go home, miss,” ordered the soldier.

“Yes, sir,” she said meekly. “But I was wondering—have you seen two women about? One was about fifty years old with graying black hair. The other was a young Riorcan slave.”

“I’ve seen many groups that fit that description,” said the soldier.

“They went out to attend a birth, and they never came back—”

“Miss,” said the soldier sternly. “Go home. There will be time for inquiries later.”

There was a shout from down the street, and she turned. A group of uniformed men were restraining someone, while two others held a sharpened stake. A third man was fastening on the stop that prevented a victim from sliding down to the ground once the stake was pulled upright.

Someone grabbed her arm and shoved her. Vitala suppressed a scream, and her hand contracted into a claw, poised to pull a Shard from the Rift. But it was only the soldier turning her away from the scene.

“Do not watch.” His voice was firm. “This is not for a maiden’s eyes. Go home.”

11

T
he next afternoon, the battalion formed for departure and marched by the cottage in a grim procession, the soldiers’ footsteps thudding in unison against the dusty street. After their passage, the city was eerily quiet.

Vitala didn’t like the idea of leaving without knowing what had become of her hosts, but she knew that if Hanna and Glenys could speak to her now, they would order her to go. The mission came first. She and Lucien packed bags of food and supplies from the apartment’s stores, not stating the obvious: that it was unlikely Hanna and Glenys would need them anymore.

“Can you ride a horse?” she asked Lucien.

“Yes.”

“We’ll steal a pair of them. We can move faster that way.”

“Where are we going?” asked Lucien.

Vitala sighed. “Let’s not have this argument right now.”

“Fine,” he said. “We’ll have it later.”

“It’s bad out there,” she warned as she slung a pack over her shoulder and checked her pistol. She opened the door and stepped outside. The smell hit her like a coach-and-four; it had permeated the house, and to some extent they’d become accustomed to it, but outdoors it was far stronger. The sun was setting on the western hills, where it burned like a bloodred beacon, tinting the streets.

Lucien limped outside, his expression grave.

“I hate to say it,” said Vitala, “but I think Barley Street is our best bet for finding horses.” She followed the path she’d taken earlier, up the road and past the two staked men, who were now in an advanced state of decay.

“Gods,” said Lucien, staring at the placards. “These men weren’t bandits.”

“No. The battalion staked anyone who assisted the bandits.”

“Sapskulls. Don’t they realize most of them were probably forced?”

“Don’t ask me to explain their logic,” said Vitala, heading onto the cross street. As far as she was concerned, it required no explanation. This was standard-issue Kjallan savagery. How strange that Lucien, the former leader of the Kjallans, did not understand that.

She covered her mouth as they stepped onto Barley Street, with its double rows of staking victims. They looked like grisly trees lining the roadside. Her stomach roiled, threatening to empty itself. She scanned the shops and buildings that lined the road. She and Lucien weren’t alone. Other townsfolk flitted about the street like wraiths, darting into shops and emerging with stolen goods. A few were loading up wagons with possessions, preparing to leave town.

She pointed at a building. “There’s a stable,” she whispered to Lucien. She didn’t know why she was whispering. The surroundings seemed to demand it.

She headed for it. Lucien followed, his breathing shallow and rapid. “Shouldn’t we look for Hanna and Glenys?”

Vitala shook her head. She couldn’t stomach the thought of seeing the two women up on stakes. “I think it’s obvious what must have happened to them. Let’s get the horses.”

“You get them. I’ll look for Hanna and Glenys.”

“Lucien, I could use some help—”

“You get them,” he said firmly, and turned away, ending the conversation.

Excited whickers greeted Vitala as she entered the stable. The four animals were restless, almost frantic. Perhaps they hadn’t been fed in a while? She looked around and saw an upper story loaded with bales of hay, with gaps in the floor above each stall.

She ascended to the upper story, grabbed a pitchfork, and pitched some hay through each of the gaps. The horses fell upon it greedily.

Which ones to take? Lucien should have come with her; he would be a better judge of horseflesh. After giving the animals a little time to eat, she saddled and bridled a sorrel gelding and a bay, and led them outside.

Lucien wasn’t where she’d left him. She spotted him across the street, standing at the base of one of the stakes. She jogged toward him, muttering epithets under her breath and tugging the horses at a trot behind her.

“Look.” He pointed at the placard. It read, G
AVE MEDICINES TO THE BANDITS.
At the base of the stake, half buried in the dirt, was a silver bracelet.

Vitala glanced up at the impaled corpse just long enough to verify that it was Hanna. Not as long dead as some of the others, she was still recognizable, though one of her eyes had been eaten away, and gobbets of flesh dangled from her cheek. Bile rose in Vitala’s throat. On the adjacent stake, she found Glenys, with an identical placard. She felt her face flushing, and her eyes filled with furious tears.
Kjallan bastards.

“Let’s go,” she said harshly.

“This shouldn’t have happened!” spat Lucien. “Milonius didn’t need to kill all these people. Certainly not Hanna and Glenys. They didn’t do anything!”

“I know. It’s awful.” His reaction softened her anger. Didn’t he know it always happened this way?

“It’s
idiotic
,” said Lucien. “Cassian has destroyed this city. And for no useful purpose.”

“I know.” She held out her arm and helped him up.

Lucien grabbed the nearest horse, the sorrel, and mounted by placing his wooden leg in the stirrup and pulling himself into the saddle. He sat there for a moment, blinking and rubbing his eyes, then seemed to make an effort to pull himself together. “Can you get me a riding crop?”

“You think you’ll need one?” The horses looked lively enough.

“Not to hit the horse with,” he said. “It’s to serve as my other foot, in case the peg leg doesn’t do the job. You’ll see.”

She handed him the reins to the bay, ran back to the stable, and fetched him a crop. He did not wave it about, but slid it down his left side and let the end of it dangle where his foot would be.

She struggled into the bay’s saddle, feeling clumsy after Lucien’s surprisingly graceful example. Her riding experience was limited. “You sure you can ride?”

“Of course. It’s all in the knees.”

Vitala leaned down to adjust her stirrups.

“Oh, gods. Look.”

She sat up in alarm and looked where Lucien was pointing. A gold-and-white dog was sniffing around the base of the stakes. She watched in horror as Flavia whimpered a little, then lay down below the bodies of her owners. “Did you leave the door open?” she whispered.

“I thought I closed it,” said Lucien.

Gritting her teeth, she steered her horse away from the scene. Lucien followed. After a moment, so did Flavia.

“I believe we’ve been adopted,” said Lucien.

Vitala stared at the dark-eyed dog panting up at her. She had a high-stakes mission to accomplish; she didn’t need a dog slowing her down. And yet she owed a debt to Hanna and Glenys.

Besides that, she had her suspicions about Flavia. Hanna’s story about the dog’s being abandoned by a local family did not ring true. If Flavia had been a cur off the streets, perhaps she might have been tossed aside like so much dirty straw, but Lucien had immediately identified her as a hunting dog. Hunting dogs had value. And Glenys had dropped hints about a lost Riorcan bloodline, now hidden away somewhere. Who else would hide and protect that bloodline but the Obsidian Circle?

Whether Flavia was a Riorcan hunting dog in hiding or not, the mission had to come first. “Can she keep up with us?”

“I’ll wager she can,” said Lucien. “A day or two from now, you may be asking, Can we keep up with her?”

Vitala looked back at Hanna and Glenys. They were Obsidian Circle spies. They had been prepared to die for their country. They probably expected to someday be exposed, arrested, and executed. Instead, they’d been the victims of pointless Kjallan savagery. It didn’t feel right. If they were going to die, it should have been for a reason. Vitala’s fingers itched to form the Riorcan blessing for them, but she could not do that in front of Lucien. Instead, she said a silent prayer for them, the Sage’s Peace, and laid heels to her horse.

She and Lucien galloped north with a dog at their heels, out of the graveyard that was Tasox.

•   •   •

Traffic on the road was light, and all of it northbound. Vitala sympathized with the departing Tasox residents. Who would want to stay? The corpses made the place unbearable, and as more people ventured out of their houses, the looting would get worse, possibly turning to violence.

A scraggly lot shared the road with them. Laden donkeys trudged beside wagons piled high with possessions: linens and chairs and bed frames, chests cinched closed with leather straps. Most wagons had extra horses tied to the back—fine horses of a quality not commensurate with the goods in their wagons. Stolen, perhaps, like her own mount. The families looked bedraggled and demoralized. Many seemed to be missing members. Here was a determined-looking father with two ragamuffins; there was a grandmother traveling with a woman close to Vitala’s age, brushing tears from her dust-streaked face.

They camped that night by the side of the road, and were off again at first light. Unburdened by wagonloads of possessions, they quickly outpaced the other refugees, and by afternoon they had the road nearly to themselves. Flavia, as Lucien had predicted, kept up effortlessly, panting a little as she trotted alongside the horses. She’d lost her rolled-up bandage but often picked up a stick from the side of the road and carried that instead.

Lucien rode far better than he walked, his seat and posture flawless.

Vitala watched him admiringly. “You ride very well,” she commented.

He nodded. “Been up on horses since I was four years old.”

He rode on her left side, so she couldn’t see his wooden leg. He looked so capable that she had to remind herself he was crippled. It was like seeing the man he’d been before he lost his leg. “So why do you need a crutch and a wooden leg?”

He shrugged. “More stability that way. I can get by with just the crutch when I need to, and I can walk on the leg without a crutch. But it hurts.”

“Why does it hurt?” She’d known a Riorcan man, a member of the Circle, who used a wooden leg, and she’d never known him to complain of pain. He didn’t use a crutch, not that she’d seen.

He looked at her with annoyance. “When I walk on that leg, all my body weight is on the stump. It’s not meant to bear that much weight. I use the crutch to take some weight off it.”

Maybe Lucien’s wooden leg was poorly constructed. When they reached the Obsidian Circle headquarters, she would ask around and find that man with the wooden leg, see who’d made it for him. Riorcans were excellent woodworkers.

“Look.” Lucien pointed to the road ahead, which forked, one branch heading north and the other east. “Decision time. Who do you work for, and where are we going?”

“We’ve been over this before. I can’t tell you that.”

“Because you work for the Obsidian Circle.”

She shook her head. “No.”

He snorted in anger. “You think this game of yours is funny? The Obsidian Circle killed my brothers. They cost me my leg.”

“I know. It’s not a game.” Strange how those events made her feel simultaneously proud and ashamed of her people. She’d been in training when those attacks took place. Her stomach had knotted when she’d learned that Lucien had been injured by the assassins but not killed. She was relieved that the target she’d been aimed at for years hadn’t been taken away from her, but the partial failure had been a blow to Riorca at the time, especially since the assassins had all died in the operation, and the pressure on her to complete her training had become that much more intense.

“So,” said Lucien, “when we get to that fork, you’re either going to keep going north, toward Vesgar, or you’re going to turn east toward Worich. If you choose north, I’m going to assume you’re Obsidian Circle.”

Her bay gelding chose that moment to swish his tail at a fly, and Vitala, annoyed more with Lucien than with the horse, rebuked the animal with a kick to the ribs. The horse tossed its head in affront. “And what if I’m not Obsidian Circle but my destination is still north?”

Lucien shrugged. “I’m listening. Explain.”

“Gods, Lucien. I’m sick to death of this argument.” She kicked her horse into a canter. Why did her plans never go the way she intended them to? If she’d just killed Lucien as ordered, her troubles would be over. She would ride home and be praised as a hero, even if the assassination didn’t start the civil war they’d hoped for.

The problem was she was starting to second-guess herself. The more she thought about it, the more she feared the Circle would not see things the way she did. In theory, the Circle’s purpose was to free Riorca. But for a lot of people, it was really more about killing Kjallans. What if she brought Lucien to the Circle and they decided they’d rather execute him than see him in command of an army opposing Cassian? Her efforts would have been wasted. Riorca would be no better off than it was before, and a man would die for no good reason.

Rhythmic hoofbeats behind her grew louder as Lucien caught up. “You seem touchy,” he said. “Why? Guilty conscience?”

“I’ve been through a lot over the past few days,” she said. “I’ve killed people. I’ve seen people killed. I’ve been—gods, never mind what all I’ve been through. I’m not in the mood to fight with you over this.”

He spoke calmly. “I’m not fighting. I just want the truth.”

She pulled up her horse. They’d reached the crossroads.

“Here’s the truth, as much of it as I’m going to give you,” said Vitala. “I’m going north. You can come with me, or you can go somewhere else. It’s up to you.”

He looked taken aback. Clearly he’d expected her to work harder to keep him with her. “What about my riftstone?”

“It stays with me.”

His brows lowered. “That’s not fair.”

“Good-bye, Lucien.” She sent her horse into a trot, taking the northern road toward Vesgar. To her irritation, Flavia did not follow her, but stayed behind with Lucien.

Vitala listened with increasing desperation for hoofbeats behind her, but they didn’t come. Finally she looked back and saw Lucien and Flavia loping east, toward Worich.