The Misbegotten (An Assassin's Blade Book 1) (22 page)

Instead, I looked to Vayle, who dipped another arrow into what I presumed was oil. She then touched the tip to a torch between a crenellation, pulled the fletching back and let it fly. It crashed into the food and booze. Wine spilled onto the marble floor and quickly turned into a tiny lake of seething flames.

Wilhelm and his city guardsmen peeled back and shielded Chachant, Sybil, Vileoux and Mydia with their bodies. They hurried them along, keeping their heads below the banister.

The lords and ladies of various courts flocked to the door in panic. One of them in an olive cotehardie heaved the chair over the balcony and pushed his way inside the hallway just as a herd of guards pushed out.

“Seize him!” Chachant cried. “Seize him!”

A barbed arrow screamed past my face. It tinked off the mail chest of a guardsman. He grunted like a bear who’d just been poked with a hot iron. In a moment of foolish rashness, he reached for my arm. I pulled away, making him overextend. The plate bracer that protected his forearm and wrist slid up to his elbow, revealing a gap of flesh between his chain glove and his wrist bone.

My ebon blade sung as it slashed downward, between the fat flakes of snow. It flashed a midnight-blue wink at the guardsman just as the edge sunk into the first layer of skin and chewed through the remaining ones with precision and ease. It gnawed into his bone, stopping partway through. I knelt and ripped it like a saw across the remaining portion, and the guardsman stumbled backward with blood fountaining out of his arm.

A gloved hand clangored onto the marble floor.

Apparently a guardsman’s curdling scream is like a battle cry for his fellow soldiers. They all wanted a piece of me, but I much needed my pieces if I wanted to continue living. So I sheathed my sword, jumped over the banister and lowered myself down so that I was hanging from a sword-sculpted baluster.

Below me lay a thick blanket of snow.

Sharpened steel glimmered at me from between the balusters. The hands that wielded the swords pushed closer.

Time to go.

I withdrew my ebon blade and let it fall to the ground. Then I released my hands from the baluster, spread my legs and tucked my hands behind my head for protection.

And I flew, in much the same manner as a goose in the throes of a heart attack.

Hopefully the snow was as forgiving as it looked.

T
here exists
a type of snow so fluffy you could stuff it in a pillow and mistake it for the feathers of a duck.

This was not that kind of snow. This was the kind of snow that’s compact and stiff. This was the kind of snow that splinters into icy fragments when a two-hundred-pound man falls on it from twenty feet up. This was the kind of snow that cracks like a sheet of frozen water. This was the kind of snow that hurt like hell.

The fall had punched the breath from my lungs, numbed half my arm and reopened the gashes Tylik had carved into my back. Much as I wanted to lie there and groan in self-pity, time was not a commodity I had.

I shook the pins and needles from my arm and got to my knees, coughing as the bitter air inflated my chest.

Pandemonium held Edenvaile in its clutches. Men and women and children scurried like a school of minnows in the shadow of a whale. Parents lifted their small children into their arms and yanked along the older ones, fleeing for the gates. Panic marked their faces, and dread scarred their shrill cries.

I crawled on my knees and swung my hands in front of me until the familiar soft leather of my sword was once again in my grasp. I picked it and myself up, stuffed it in my scabbard and tore off through the market district. There were guards down here, but none of them likely knew of the precise events that had happened on the balcony. They were hopelessly trying to organize the mass hysteria that unfolded before them. But it wouldn’t be long before the soldiers who witnessed my dismembering of one of their brethren would make their way out of the keep and begin what I imagined would be a very thorough search and rescue. Or perhaps more accurately, a search and beat-the-shit-out-of-Astul.

I reached the stables and spun around, alert. No one had trailed me. One of the benefits of wedding days is that, so long as you are neither the bride nor the groom, you can typically blend in, which is a fantastic advantage if you intend to commit atrocities on that day. Or if you’re unfairly blamed for committing atrocities.

Still, tight pants, an undersized kirtle and an oversized cotehardie are not beneficial for battle. My movement was too restricted. On my knees, I combed through the stockpiles of roughage for where I’d left my leather armor. A horse with a pink nose sniffed my arse while I did so.

“Would you mind?” I asked.

She blew air out her nose and continued sniffing.

“Yes, as you can see, I’m not one of yours. Apologies. Here. Eat some of this.” I offered her a handful of roughage, which she investigated with her big brown eyes. She took it gingerly and left me alone to locate my armor.

I plucked my jerkin from deep within the roughage, along with an undershirt, breeches, socks and finally my boots and gloves.

“This is going to be brutal, old girl,” I told the horse. She snorted angrily, and I gave a quick look at her anatomy. “Oh, sorry. Old boy. Well, here we go.”

I held my breath, and I stripped stark naked, save my skivvies. Cold does not begin to describe what I felt. My nipples were hard enough to stab through flesh, my toes painful enough that a passerby could have cut them off and I’d have probably thanked him, and quite frankly, what that bitter air did to certain tools of masculinity, I may as well have not been wearing underpants at all.

Just as I was pulling up my breeches past my knees, a smooth, warm voice thawed my mind.

“Nice ass,” Vayle said.

“Thanks for saving it,” I replied. I jumped in an attempt to get a better pull on the breeches so they’d fit past my hips.

“This kingdom is crawling with city guardsmen,” she said. “We need to leave.”

“Can’t leave just yet.” I tied my breeches securely around my waist, then grabbed my undershirt and put it on. The stinging burns of gelid air were finally beginning to relent.

“Oh, I understand,” Vayle said. “You want to experience life in the Edenvaile dungeon again, don’t you? I very much do not, so if you don’t mind, you can do so yourself.”

“They have Dercy,” I told her.

She raked her chocolate hair mottled with snowflakes out of her eyes. “That’s Dercy’s problem.”

“It’s going to quickly become our problem when Sybil takes his mind and uses it to call upon his bannermen for her war effort. That’s my best guess as to why she wants Dercy.”

“Let her have him. We don’t need him. The Rots are going to usurp him anyway.”

My commander had a special quality about her. She was the most optimistic person I’d ever met. Victory was always a possibility in her mind. Her pessimism when dissecting my strategies might have been unmatched, but her optimism for carrying them out was equally unsurpassed.

But sometimes optimism blinds you. It didn’t often blind Vayle, but clearly it had cleverly stretched itself over her eyes this time.

“Vayle… that plan… it’s spitting on a fire to put out the flames. It’s digging a hole in the desert in hopes you’ll find a pristine pool of water underneath. You have to understand…it’s a strategy that has very little hope of succeeding. Our hope now rests with freeing Dercy Daniser. There are not many things that would bring the man to war… but I think this is one of them.”

Vayle stared at me like a woman whose vision had retreated away from reality and was stuck in an endless loop inside her mind.

Finally, in a tattered voice, she said, “We should hide here.” She cleared her wet throat and added, “In the roughage. There’s enough to cover us. They won’t look here, I don’t think. Stay for a few hours, yes? Wait until the guards scatter a bit?”

Her breath rasped from her gaped mouth, and she sniffled. Was it something I said? She’d seemed fine moments ago. Hmm. I wondered. Her sudden change in temperament reminded me of a pane of glass I had once touched. It appeared pristine, structurally perfect. But the subtle graze of my finger shattered it into thousands of minuscule fragments. I learned that happens when a tiny, seemingly insignificant crack lurks beneath the surface. It only takes one meager prod to fracture the whole pane.

I’d seen Vayle like this only once before, after she revealed why she joined my side, those fifteen years ago. But I had no time to console her this time. Not now. There were angry men shouting and swords clanking together.

We were being hunted.

Vayle and I shuffled into an empty stall where all the excess roughage was stored. I covered her first and then myself. Her knee trembled against mine. Slowly at first, but as time wore on, it battered against my leg like shutters against a window.

A dank and musty air entrapped us within the roughage. It was wet to breathe in and lay thick in your lungs. Neither of us dared cough — there were too many steel boots stamping across the stables and patrolling the parapet behind us. After a while, the guardsmen complained we were likely out of the kingdom by now, halfway to the Hole.

The cavalcade of soldiers passing through grew more distant and predictable. I felt at ease enough to talk for the first time in several hours.

“Are you awake?” I asked Vayle.

She sniffled. “Of course I am.”

“Not many things worry me on a personal level,” I said. “But seeing my commander lose her composure will do it.”

“You don’t need to worry about me.” She sounded like she was smiling out of embarrassment as she spoke.

“I’ve heard you’re an excellent liar when it benefits your cause.”

“Aren’t all the Rots?”

I grinned. “It’s one of the qualities I look for. But no one lies to me, least of all the greatest friend I have. So tell me what happened. What unhinged you?”

A long stillness was interrupted by a rustling in the roughage next to me. “I don’t like to think,” Vayle said. “My thoughts unravel and lead to places that are not kind. Places that make me feel things I do not want to feel. Fear and loathing. Restlessness. Panic. All of these emotions… I feel them in my chest. I feel them crushing my ribs, squashing my heart into my throat. I can’t escape them — I could never escape them — unless I have a skin of wine in my hand. The sips, they chase away those dreadful monsters. They tidy up my thoughts, make the feelings go away. Far, far away, where they don’t bother me anymore.”

She paused for a while, and then added, “I’m all out of wine.”

“I can find you wine,” I said. “This kingdom overflows with barrels of the stuff. I imagine it’s the only way they can keep their people from fleeing to warmer pastures.”

“The conjurers,” Vayle said, ignoring my offer, “I hate them. My very purpose for not killing myself after escaping slavery and servitude was to dole out justice. I wanted to bring an end to as many of those who deserved it as possible. The conjurers are the epitome of injustice. They come to a land that doesn’t belong to them and attempt to reap its riches while exterminating its people. If they win this war, Astul…”

“They won’t win,” I said. “Now let’s go find some wine and force Dercy Daniser into our debt.”

T
he law
of stealth says that your chance of succeeding is inversely proportional to the number of steps you take and to the number of eyes you must slip past. Only the Black Rot knew of the law’s existence, mostly because I was the one who penned it.

If the law was true, the chances of Vayle and me succeeding in busting Dercy free were approximately — not quite, mind you — somewhere around… zero percent.

First was the not-so-small matter of getting into the keep. Vayle and I had crept out of the roughage at nightfall and discovered Edenvaile had more guardsmen than either of us remembered.

They posted up in pairs along the cobblestone streets of the market square, with no more than twenty feet separating each group. From what we could see of the keep — which was very little — it was much the same. More torches than usual illuminated the walkways, so drifting into the darkness as two shadows wasn’t in the plans.

The only refuge from the armored presence was where Vayle and I were currently trapped: the stables. It made sense. The only way out of the stables was toward the gate or the market square, both heavily guarded and patrolled.

“This is problematic,” I said.

Vayle’s teeth chattered in sync with her shivering hands. Withdrawal was taking its toll.

“We need a distraction,” she said.

“Shall I strip and streak through the market square while singing love poems? That would serve well as a distraction.”

Vayle sported a grin that quickly disappeared. “Fire would be a more promising one.” She licked her lips: a tic of hers when she was deep in thought. She shuffled through the snow, toward a horse. “Help me untie them.”

I lifted my chin slowly as her plan became clear. Smart woman, that one.

I slid into a tie stall, where the horse who sniffed my arse was stationed. After undoing a rope with three knots in it that secured him to the feeder, I patted his long face. “No hard feelings on the mix-up earlier, yeah? You know how it is.”

The steed blinked.

Vayle and I worked with haste to free the remaining horses from their rope. Thankfully, all of them remained in the stalls, none the wiser. One even lay down.

I met Vayle in an empty square stall piled high with excess roughage. She was kneeling, two daggers in hand. Affixed to the foundation of their leather grips was a charcoal-gray distention. This distention was present on the daggers of every Black Rot. It was a tool of survival: flint.

She held one dagger firmly on the roughage and struck the flint with the other. Flecked sparks licked the air and fizzled out. She struck the flint again and again, faster and faster. Sparks spat from the blade and settled onto the roughage, smothered into nothingness by the cold and snow. But it only takes that one special spark to conflagrate that one special piece of tinder, and then… well, you’ve got yourself a pretty little campfire.

With a few more strikes of the flint, a long stem of roughage sizzled and smoked. Vayle carefully cleared away the damp coating of snow that lay near it and protected it with her hands as the insignificant flame burbled in the wind. It slowly engorged the entire stem and began trailing along the top layer of the roughage.

Vayle backed away and proudly watched her creation grow into a hot fire that sent white smoke billowing into the black sky.

One of the horses picked her head up. Her ears were high and forward, but all the weight was on her back legs. She snorted a deep vibrating pitch and waddled backward unevenly, her haunches crashing against the stall. She pinned her ears back now. She snorted again and spun around, knocking against the stall. And then she galloped away furiously, tail tucked behind her butt.

The other horses took note of this and the growing fire and thought they too would bail out while they had the chance. There were suddenly fifteen horses galloping freely and wildly inside the Edenvaile walls. There would have been more — potentially a good hundred more, on account of the wedding visitors — but they were likely stowed away in the stables of nearby villages. Can’t have the kingdom smelling like horseshit on the cusp of a wedding.

A guardsman hollered from across the market square. “What in the bloody hell are these horses doing?”

“There’s another!”

“Three more,” a third guardsman put in.

“I’m gonna slice the fuckin’ skin off that stable boy’s ass. Get these damn beasts wrangled up.”

“Sir, there’s smoke! By the stables.”

“Fuck’s sake.”

Vayle and I slipped into a narrow alleyway that cut between a curtain of small stone buildings, the front of which faced the market square. It smelled like rotten fruit had been shat upon by bats with rotting guts. I gagged a few times before pulling my undershirt up above my nose and breathing in the sweet smell of sweat. You have to take what you can get in these situations.

There was a heavy clank of steel near the stables.

“Fuck me,” the guardsman muttered. Or perhaps he was a captain. Seemed like it, with the way he issued commands.

“I need buckets!” he yelled. “Whole damn thing is going up in flames. Haul your asses!”

The hooves of a frightened horse pounded through the market square.