Steel's Edge (18 page)

Jack emerged from the room. He was nude, and his eyes were red.

Richard offered him the clothes. The boy dressed.

Richard rose. “There is no shame in grief. It's human. You didn't do anything wrong. It doesn't make you weak, and you don't have to hide it.”

Jack looked away.

“You couldn't have prevented your grandmother's death. Don't take any of the guilt or blame on yourself. Blame those who are actually responsible.”

“What happened to the slavers?” Jack asked, his voice hoarse.

“Your grandmother killed some of them. Charlotte killed the rest.”

They went down the stairs side by side.

“I want in,” the boy said.

“In on what?”

“You're the Hunter. You're hunting the slavers. I want in.”

“And how would you know that?” If someone had opened their mouth, he would be really put out.

Jack gave a one-shouldered shrug. “We overhead you and Declan talking.”

“Declan's study is soundproof.”

“Not to reanimated mice,” Jack said. “George wants to be a spy. He listens in on everything, then he tells me.”

Fantastic. Declan and he had taken extra measures, like activating soundproof sigils and meeting during late hours, and two teenage boys could still undermine all of their careful security precautions. How comforting. And he wasn't feeling like a complete moron, not at all. He was sure Declan wouldn't feel like a moron either.

“I'm coming with you,” Jack said.

“Absolutely not.”

Jack bared his teeth in a feral grief.

“No,” Richard said. “This isn't a fun adventure.”

“Kaldar let us—”

“No.” He sank enough finality into his voice to end all arguments.

Jack clamped his mouth shut and walked sullenly next to him. They left the tower and headed toward the city.

This battle wasn't won, Richard reflected, looking at the stubborn set of the boy's jaw. And once they got back, George and Jack would tag team him. If worse came to worse, he'd talk Barlo into keeping them under lock and key while he and Charlotte dealt with the ship.

*   *   *

“GEORGE,”
Charlotte murmured.

George remained slumped in her arms, catatonic. She scanned him again. No physical injury. Too much magic, expended too quickly. She had no idea if he was slipping into a permanent coma or just resting, exhausted.

I shouldn't have told you.
She realized she'd spoken the words aloud.

“She was our grandmother,” George said. “We have a right to know.”

Charlotte exhaled.
Conscious. Finally.

The boy pushed away from her very gently, got up, and offered her his hand. She took it and stood up.

“Richard values family above all else,” George said. “He would've told us if you didn't.”

“Do you know what he does?” she asked.

George nodded.

“Then you know he will do all he can to get justice for your grandmother, and so will I.”

“She liked you,” George said. “She told us a lot about you. We saw your picture.”

Charlotte swallowed. “Your grandmother was very kind to me.”

“Is that why you're with him now?” George asked.

“It's complicated,” Charlotte said. “But yes.”

“We will join you.”

He said it matter-of-factly, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for a sixteen-year-old to become a killer. No. Not on her watch.

“There is no place for children in what we are about to do. Richard will tell you the same thing.”

“I'm sixteen,” George said. “I'm less than a year away from being an adult. I need this. I need to get my own justice. You know how I feel. You must've cared for her. Why would you stop me?”

“Look at me.” She waited until he met her gaze. “No. We will do our part, and the two of you will take care of Rose. You have my word that the slavers will pay for what they've done. I'll fight them until I end them, or they end me. This is my battle, and you will stay out of it.”

“Exactly,” Richard said, opening the door.

Jack slipped into the room.

“Your sister will need support.” Richard stepped inside and shut the door.

“She has Declan,” Jack said.

Richard turned to him, his face suddenly hard. Charlotte fought an urge to step back, and Jack tensed.

“It's your duty to take care of your family, and Rose and your brother are the only family you have left now. A man doesn't avoid his responsibilities. Do I make myself clear?”

“Crystal,” George said.

“Tonight, a slaver ship will dock in a secret location,” Richard said. “You will watch us board it, and you will deliver the name of the ship to your brother-in-law. He will trace it. In the event things don't go as planned, he will at least have that information. That's as much as I'm willing to let you do.”

Jack opened his mouth.

“Think before you say anything.” Richard's voice held no mercy. “Because unlike my brother, I have no qualms about hogtying the two of you and paying Barlo to sit on your bodies until we're out to sea.”

Jack clamped his mouth shut.

“We'll take it,” George said.

“Smart move. Do I have your word?”

George's face showed no doubt. “Yes.”

“Wait for me outside.”

The children left.

“What are you doing?” Charlotte peered at him. “Why involve them at all?”

“Because their grandmother is dead, and they feel helpless and angry. Letting them have a token part in this revenge will ease that anger. Otherwise, their grief will drive them into doing something rash, and neither of us will have an opportunity to save them from the consequences.”

It was obviously a mistake.
“How are you planning to keep them from getting on that ship?”

Richard smiled. “George gave me his word. Honor is important to him.”

How can a smart man be such an idiot?
“Richard, did you feel how much magic that boy expended? If he cared about his grandmother that much, some faint notion of manly honor isn't going to stop him from getting his revenge.”

“My lady, we agreed you wouldn't question me.”

“My lord, this will end in disaster.”

He smiled, a narrow sardonic smile. “Then you'll get to tell me, ‘I told you so.'”

Like arguing with a brick wall. Charlotte opened the door and walked out.

She had to remember why she was doing this: she sacrificed and killed so nobody else would suffer the way these children were suffering now. She would deal with Richard, and she would get on that ship. When she was done, the slavers would be little more than a scary story.

SEVEN

NIGHT
came far too quickly, Charlotte reflected, patting the muzzle of her horse. She stood under an oak. The wolf-dog sat by her feet and showed his teeth to anyone who came too close. In front of her, about forty people assembled in the clearing. The moon hid behind the ragged clouds, and what little illumination they had came from the tall torches thrust along the edge of the clearing.

About half of Jason's people, the “slavers,” wore an assortment of leather and carried weapons. The other half, mostly women in filthy clothes, busily tied knives and cudgels under their skirts and shirts. A few had on the Broken's jeans, others wore the Weird's dresses. Here and there clothes were being strategically ripped. A young woman walked around the gathering with a bucket of blood and a paintbrush, and smeared the red liquid on random bodies.

Richard was somewhere out there, getting ready. George and Jack had concealed themselves at a good observation point, ready to play their role in the mission. She and Richard had dropped the Draytons off half a mile away, with Richard giving them strict directions to stay out of sight, to which both teens informed them that it wasn't their first time.

“Beautiful,” Jason said next to her.

The dog growled low. She petted the big black head.

She hadn't heard Jason walk up. He wore a monk's cowl. Stripes of white paint crossed his nose and cheeks, while a horizontal black stripe darkened the skin around his eyes. He looked terrifying.

“Shouldn't you be joining them?” He nodded at the slaves.

“I suppose I should.” She walked over and took her place between two “slave” women. The redhead with the bucket of blood stopped by her and casually painted some blood on her neck.

“Whose blood is it?” Charlotte asked.

The redhead shrugged. “No clue. Got it at the butcher shop.” She moved on.

At least it wasn't human.

“You got a knife?” a slender, filthy girl asked her. There was something familiar about her . . . Miko.

“I don't need one, thank you.”

“Take a knife.” Miko offered her a curved, wicked-looking blade. “It might save your life.”

“What about you?”

The girl grinned at her. “I have several.”

Charlotte took the blade, slid it into the waistband of her trousers, and pulled her tunic over it. She looked up and saw a ghost striding through the crowd toward her. Wide-shouldered, wearing a padded leather jacket, his hair in a ponytail, an eye patch covering his left eye, leading a black horse. His name was Crow, and she'd killed him. She had watched him die in that clearing with the rest of the slaver crew.

Her heart hammered. She took a step back.

Crow kept coming.

That was fine. She would kill him again. The dark tendrils slipped out of her.

“Charlotte?” the one-eyed slaver said in Richard's voice.

She had always prided herself on excellent control of her magic. Between the moment her magic slithered out to kill him and the next instant, her brain made the connection, and she withdrew her power, aborting his murder in midstrike.

“Yes?” she asked, sounding as normal as she could.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes.” No. No, please take me away from here. “You look older,” she said, to say something. His face was covered with wrinkles.

“Liquid latex,” Richard said. “Processed tree sap mixed with water. If you slather it on your face, it will shrink as it dries, wrinkling the skin.”

He resembled the dead man so much, it was uncanny.

Richard leaned toward her. “Once we get to the island, things will be chaotic. It's essential that we aren't separated. We must find the bookkeeper. He's our only lead to the top of the slaver ring.”

A shrill whistle made them turn. Jason had mounted a horse.

“Wretches, scum, and villains,” he called out. “Lend me your ears!”

Light laughter rippled through the crowd.

“Every single one of you is owed a debt by the slavers. Tonight we collect. We'll board their ship. We'll sack the Market. We'll be legends.” He paused and smiled. “We'll be rich.”

An enthusiastic riot of catcalls and guttural grunts answered him.

He tilted his head. “But we don't do this just to get rich.”

“We don't?” someone asked with pretended shock.

More laughter followed.

“No, we don't. Look around you.” Jason spread his arms. “Go ahead, look.”

Heads turned as people looked at the woods and the night sky.

“Tonight, we're the masters of all we see. Tonight, we will triumph and grind those bastards under our boots. We'll take their money and their lives.” His voice gained a savage intensity. “We'll listen as they scream and beg us for mercy. We'll smell the gore as we cut them open and bathe our hands in their blood. We'll gouge the light out of their eyes. Tonight, we'll truly live!”

Silence claimed the clearing.

“Hell, yeah!” Richard barked in a deep voice.

“Yeah!” another male snarl echoed.

The crowd erupted in shouts, shaking their fists.

“He gets carried away sometimes,” Richard told her under his breath.

“You don't say.” More violence. More murder. More joy as her magic devoured lives. Charlotte swallowed. She vividly remembered the seductive rush of pleasure she had derived from killing the slavers, and experiencing it again terrified her to the very core. Her teeth chattered. She clenched them, and her knees began to shake.

“We move!” Jason roared.

Around her, people picked up their gear. She wanted to turn around and run the other way.

“May I?” Richard asked, holding a pair of cuffs.

She raised her hands. Carefully, Richard placed the pair of handcuffs on her wrists. “Twist like this, and they'll open.”

The cuffs felt so heavy on her wrists. Charlotte forced herself to nod.

His fingers brushed her hands, the rough sword master's calluses they bore scraping her skin. His hands were warm. She looked up at him, asking for reassurance.

He met her gaze. “I won't let anything happen to you, my lady.”

He said “my lady” as if it was a term of endearment. There was such quiet conviction in his voice that, for a moment, the clearing and everyone around them faded away. It was just the two of them, and he was touching her hands and looking at her in that particular way, concerned, almost tender. Such a strange emotion in the eyes of a man who was a killer. Her worry melted into the air. If only she could walk right next to him, with him holding her, nothing could hurt her.

“Form two lines,” Jason called out. “Slaves in the middle, slavers on the sides.”

Reality rushed at her in a terrifying avalanche. What she was doing, standing with him like this, was wildly inappropriate. She didn't care.

“Stay safe,” she said.

“You, too.”

Richard released her and nodded to the dog. “Come.”

The beast hesitated.

“Come,” Richard ordered. The big beast rose off his haunches and trotted over to Richard. Richard locked a long chain on the dog's collar, mounted his horse, and took position next to Jason. The women formed two lines behind her and Miko, and they started down the road, the “slavers” on horses around them.

They trudged down the trail. The oaks ended, and the marsh began, a perfectly uniform field of low grasses. The trail veered left and right, cut in the grass. The horses clopped through the slushy, oversaturated soil, their hoofs splattering her clothes and face with mud.

The anxiety returned full force. Charlotte knew they'd only been walking for a few minutes, but this trek through the vast field of mud seemed endless. It felt like she was marching through some extended nightmare to her death. The wind rose up, flinging the salty smell of the ocean into her face.

She thought of Tulip's ashen eyes, and Éléonore's charred body, and George's haunting voice.
“Please, Mémère . . .”

She would stop it. No matter how much it cost her.

An eternity later, the marsh gave way to sandy dunes rough with clumps of sea-oat grass and blanketed with patches of short, creeping grass with wide leaves. Thin spires, like the stamens of a water lily, rose between the leaves, glowing with green, and as the breeze touched them, they swayed, sending dots of brilliant emerald into the night.

“Don't step on those,” Miko said next to her. “That's fisherman's trap grass. It will burn your legs.”

They crossed the dunes and finally stepped onto the beach. In front of her, the ocean stretched, dark and menacing. To the left, the coast curved, forming a small peninsula, cutting off her view with trees. To the right, the distant turquoise lights of Kelena shimmered, like a mirage above the water.

“Three torches,” Richard said. “One in front, two in the back, about twenty feet apart.”

A “slaver” on her right slid off his horse, took three torches out of his saddlebag, ran forward, thrust the first torch into the sand, and lit it.

“It's a dark night,” Jason said.

“Dark works for us,” Richard said.

The third torch flared into life. They waited.

The dog strayed back, the chain stretching, and licked her hand.

The dark silhouette of a brigantine slid from behind the peninsula.

*   *   *

GEORGE
lay on his stomach atop a sand dune. A small black box rested on the sand in front of him. Below, the false slavers and their “captives” waited on the beach. In the distance, the brigantine dropped anchor. It was a Weird-style ship, with six segmented masts that rose in a semicircle from the deck, like the wings of a water bird about to take flight. The masts bore panes of gray-green sails. In the open sea, the sails melted against the sky, making the ship harder to see.

Mémère was dead. It had been six months since he'd last seen her. She had come up to visit for a week at Midwinter. He remembered her face as if he'd seen her yesterday. He remembered her smile. The scent of lavender that always floated around her. He knew that scent so well, that years later catching a whiff of it calmed him down.

When he was younger, Mémère was a constant presence in his life. He barely remembered his mother. She was a distant smudge in his memory. He recalled his father better, a large, funny man. When he was eight, he was invited to a friend's house in the Broken. He was given a choice of movies to watch, and as he flipped through the cases, he saw a man in a leather jacket and a wide-brimmed hat, holding a whip. The title read
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. He'd read the description and realized that this strange man, Indiana Jones, did the same thing his father did. He hunted treasure.

He'd watched the movie twice in a row, which was probably why he was never invited back. But as he'd grown older, maturity had given him a new perspective. His father wasn't Indiana Jones, no matter how much he wanted it to be true. His father had abandoned them when they needed him most, forcing Rose to take on all the responsibility of caring for them. There were days she'd come home so tired she could hardly move—once she even fell asleep in the kitchen while peeling potatoes.

But Mémère was always there. Her house served as their safe haven. No matter what trouble he would get into or how much Rose was mad at him, Mémère was always there with hugs, cookies, and old books. She was there the first time his magic showed itself. He was three years old. He'd been playing in the yard when he saw a squirrel. She had a bushy tail and fluffy red fur, and she didn't seem afraid of him. She just sat on the trunk. He wanted to pet her, so he started moving closer and closer, one tiny step at a time. He was almost there; and then she fell off the trunk and died.

He'd picked up the fluffy body. He didn't really understand death. He just knew that she wasn't moving. He wanted her to move, but she wouldn't. She just hung in his hands, limp, like an old toy. He remembered a feeling of stark terror. For a second he'd thought he would die too, just like the squirrel, then something pulled on him, hurting, and the squirrel turned and looked at him.

He'd dropped her and ran, across the yard and up the porch. He must've screamed because his grandmother had run out onto the porch and scooped him up. He'd buried his face in her shoulder, and she hugged him. A ghost of her voice fluttered from his memory:
“It will be all right. It's a gift, Georgie. Nothing to be afraid of. It's a gift . . .”

George locked his teeth. Six months ago, he'd asked her again to move to the Weird. They had been sitting on the balcony drinking tea. She was leaving to return to the Edge later that day, and a feeling of dread had smothered him, heavy, like a wet blanket. In his mind, she looked exactly the same as she had been when he was little, but now every time she visited, he noticed incremental, alarming changes. Her hair was thinning. Her wrinkles cut deeper into her face. She seemed smaller somehow. It made him ill with worry.

“Please stay,” he asked.

“No, dear. I live in the Edge. That's where I belong. This is very nice, but it's not for me.”

He'd helped her get into the phaeton that morning. She'd kissed him good-bye.

He should've done more. He should've insisted. He should've compelled her to stay. If he really had begged, she would have. How could he have been so careless and stupid? Now she was dead. He didn't even know how she died, if she had burned alive in that damn house . . . he closed his eyes tightly, stopping the tears from welling up.

He would have to tell Rose.

The brigantine was lowering two boats. The people on the beach waited patiently.

“We should be down there,” Jack said next to him.

But they weren't. Of the two Mar brothers, Kaldar was the more malleable. His ethics had flexible boundaries, and he bent, if the wind was strong enough. But George had taken sword-fighting lessons from Richard over the past year. Richard was like a granite crag in a storm, immovable and resolute. The look in his eyes had told George he wouldn't be getting his way. Not this time.