Lost Covenant E-Book

Ari Marmell

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Serie: Widdershins Adventures
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 397

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The continuing fantastical adventures of the young-but-wise thief Widdershins, who carries a deity in her head—and carries the weight of the past on her shoulders… After the tragic events that befell her and her friends, Widdershins--along with her aggravating personal god Olgun—fled her home city of Davillon searching for respite. But there is little peace to be found in the increasingly troubled land. And no place is more troubled than the town of Lourveaux, where intrigues and conspiracies against both the church and the government buzz like flies. But Shins is more concerned with the local Delacroix family than whoever wants to take down the powers-that-be. Because her beloved, late adoptive father was a Delacroix. Now, the last remnants of House Delacroix are under siege. Their crops are being blighted. A rival noble house is striving against them. And a ruthless criminal gang with their very own alchemist is working from the shadows to take them down. But Widdershins isn't the kind of girl who forgets her family… …and the enemies of the Delacroix have no idea what they're about to come up against.

Leseprobe

Lost Covenant

Copyright © 2013 by Ari Marmell

All rights reserved.

Published as an ebook in 2018 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

Originally published in 2013 by Pyr®, an imprint of Prometheus Books

Cover design © 2018 by Tiger Bright Designs

ISBN 978-1-625673-67-1

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. Rights and permissions to use this material in the development or training of any machine learning, langua ge model, or other AI program are explicitly denied.

JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

49 W. 45th Street, Suite #5N

New York, NY 10036

http://awfulagent.com

[email protected]

To Jessie C., for helping Shins grow up just a little;and to Jess H., for her probably futile attempt to do the same for me.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue: Davillon

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Interlude: Davillon

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Interlude: Davillon

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Interlude: Davillon

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Epilogue: Davillon

About the Author

Also by Ari Marmell

Thank You from JABberwocky

Prologue: Davillon

“Name?

“Business?

“Thank you. Welcome to Davillon. Next!

“Name?

“Business?

“Thank you. Welcome to…”

And on. And on. Irritating as a poorly tuned violin, played by a poorly tuned cat, just to listen to; she couldn't begin to imagine how utterly mind-numbing it must be to say, person after person, day after day.

Still, she found herself smirking ever so slightly to hear it. After so long, after such struggle to figure out who she was—what she was—what she wanted—she was coming home.

The line shuffled. She shuffled with it, hard-packed and harder-frozen dust scraping beneath her feet. It wasn't much of a line, this. Fewer than a dozen people ahead of her, and only a few of those even had carts or pack animals with trade goods. Not a hard winter, this one, at least not here, but still enough to postpone all but the most desperate travels or the most vital of imports.

It was one of the reasons she and her…ally…had chosen to return now.

Shuffle. Step.

“Name?”

Step. Shuffle.

“Business.”

Step. Shuffle. Step.

“Name?”

The guardsman's eyes were glazed as a pastry, his expression so bored that even his mustache clearly wanted to be somewhere else. The silver profile of Demas—patron deity of Davillon's City Guard, worn by every member as amulet or icon—was clearly more alert than he.

“Colette d'Arnville.” Her name was, of course, nothing of the sort. None of the ones she'd used recently were. It was just the first that came to mind.

The sentry's dull gaze focused just a bit at the sound of her voice. For the first time he looked at her, truly looked. The threadbare cloak and hood she wore against the voracious nibbling of the winter breeze only barely blocked the chill; it did nothing at all to block the roaming imagination of the man beside her.

“Business?”

Did he actually just make his voice deeper? How precious.

“Coming home,” she said, deliberately curt. (Not that “curt” was any real stretch for her.)

“Been away long?”

You don't need to attract the attention. You don't need to attract the attention. You don't need…

Mantra repeating in her head—often and loud enough to drown out the nigh-overwhelming urge to hit him, if only just—she managed a good two minutes of inane small talk until the grumbling of the folks behind her in line grew audible enough to penetrate the soldier's fascination.

“Umm, right. Thank you. Welcome to Davillon. Next!”

The hitch in her step, the limp she normally made such effort to conceal, was on full display as she pushed past the guard and beneath the arched stone of the barbican. Anything to appear less desirable; he was probably just your average lecher, visually groping whoever caught his fancy before utterly forgetting them, but she wasn't about to take the risk.

She couldn't help but chuckle, however, at the thought of all her planning—all their planning—interrupted by a smitten guardsman so young he probably still thought his job actually meant anything to this cesspool disguised as a city.

It was a mirth that faded swiftly, however, as her memory insisted once more on replaying the suffering her impediment had caused her, all the circumstances behind it. She drew herself up, prideful, scowling. The bustling crowds of Davillon's gateside square, through which she swam like a desperate salmon, already blocked her from the sight of anyone standing at the gate. No reason any longer to humiliate herself, or allow too many people to see her weakness.

Her potentially memorable, describable, identifying weakness.

A bit of muttering—so soft it would have proved inaudible in an empty privy, let alone the flesh-crammed, roughly cobbled roadways of the city—and she was off. All trace of a limp was absent, now; in fact, she seemed to almost glide through the throng, slipping through even the most densely packed logjams without slowing, without effort. Between that and her hood, which she'd pulled over her head once more to shield her distinctive face and hair from casual discovery, she might just as well have been a ghost.

Apropos, that—since she'd come not to honor or reacquaint herself with the city, but to haunt it.

Her mind wheeling with anticipation for all that was to come, Davillon's prodigal daughter—well, one of them—slipped through the milling sheep that were the city's oblivious citizens, and was gone.

Chapter One

The young woman watched, irritated, as the world turned white beneath her.

She ought to have been happy with the drifts and flurries that danced in the air like butterflies in white fur stoles. Between the snow and the gray overcast of a sky clearly grieving for a sun it hadn't seen in weeks, if not months, nobody was likely to spot her as she went about her business.

Of course, nobody was likely to spot her anyway, given the skills and abilities at her disposal. But even less likely was better.

It's just, she was so tired of snow!

“You came from a land like this, yes?” She cocked her head, listening even though the answer she awaited had nothing whatsoever to do with voice or sound.

“Colder?!”

A surge of emotion, within her and yet from something outside her. It conveyed confirmation, for the most part—but she couldn't help but detect a slight trace of patronizing smugness, too.

“This is too cold! Just because you don't feel it, all nice and snug in your coat of—of—me, that doesn't mean that the rest of us aren't gleep!”

Widdershins—former thief, former tavern keep, former citizen of Davillon—dropped to her belly atop the wall of heavy gray bricks. Her unseen companion's warning had come only a split second before it was too late. Two armed soldiers, clad in the ludicrous baggy pantaloons and gleaming cuirasses of the Church guards, but carrying their brutal halberds with military efficiency, strode by along the footpaths beneath her vantage. Their pace was casual enough, their expressions easy, but Shins had no doubt that they were more than capable.

They had to be, if they were going to dress like a colorblind monkey had selected the bulk of their wardrobe.

It had been years, now, since Widdershins had learned to sub-vocalize, to pitch her words to her divine partner in such a way that nobody could overhear; still, she lay against the stone, thinking flat thoughts, until the pair was well and truly gone.

“Cut that a little close, didn't we, Olgun?”

The tiny god from the far northlands, whom none now revered but the young woman herself, willed an indignant protest.

“Oh. You did suggest something like that was possible, yes.” Widdershins chewed a lock of auburn hair that had fallen loose from her hood. “So, what? The other gods don't like you because you're a foreigner?”

For all their time together, some concepts were still difficult, still too complicated, for Olgun to easily convey. Shins got something about the sheer prevalence of faith and divinity interfering with other, unrelated faith and divinity, and at that point she stopped trying to figure it out before her brain packed its bags and quit her skull in a magnificent huff.

“Shall we do this already?” she asked, uncertain and frankly uncaring as to whether Olgun had finished or she was interrupting. “Or have we come to our senses and decided that this is all really, really stupid?”

A stubborn, insistent prod.

“I know it was my idea! That's why I get to decide if it's stupid! Trust me, I know a stupid idea when I have one! Just, maybe not right away…” And then, “If you say one thing about me having a lot of practice, I'm leaving you here and you can walk home. And stop looking at me like that.”

A quick flex of arms and knees and she was on her feet. A second flex and she was off the wall and sailing earthward. Wind and snow scratched with kitten claws at her exposed cheeks; her dirty-gray cloak spread behind her like wings, briefly exposing the worn black leathers that would, by themselves, have cast her as a conspicuous shadow against the ambient white; and the not-quite-sound of Olgun's startled not-quite-gasp forced a delighted grin across her face.

She landed, snow crunching beneath her, and tumbled into a momentum-eating roll. When she was done, on her feet once more, she stood with such careful balance that her feet scarcely left imprints in the powder, and the trail left by her landing, while obvious, didn't resemble a person at all.

“What? Hey, it's not my fault you weren't ready! You're the one letting the divinitiness of the place slow you down. Why should I have to wait for—It is so a word! I just said it, yes?”

It was only then that she realized she'd already bolted from her landing spot, taking shelter behind a nearby mausoleum in case her arrival had attracted any attention. Using the tiny etchings—ivy and holy icons, mostly—she was up atop the structure faster than most people could have managed a ladder. Once more on her belly, she waited, watching….

Watching over a cemetery to shame even the richest that her home city of Davillon could boast. No simple tombstones here, not a one. No, the meanest, tiniest grave was still a crypt of stone rising like a handmade mountain from the earth and snow. The largest could have housed multiple families, and they averaged larger than most of the hovels or apartments Shins had lived in for most of her life.

All her life, save for those few blessed years under the roof of Alexandre Delacroix….

It was a small city unto itself, really—a true and literal necropolis. The crypts were organized into blocks and neighborhoods, connected by winding paths superior to the roads in many villages through which she'd recently traveled. A few of those structures were plain, but most had at least the sorts of iconography she'd just used as a stepstool, and many were so ornate, they were themselves works of art. Sweeping eaves, graven columns, angels and gargoyles of granite or even marble….

Honors paid the dead while the living suffered and starved. Widdershins felt her face abruptly warm, her heart pound, her fists clench. All she'd seen, all she'd endured, and these…these…

She fought him. Waves of peace swept through her—Olgun's efforts to calm her down, keep her head clear, a rising tide lapping at the edges of her anger. But she wanted that anger; clung to it as a rock, a shield.

Until she no longer could, and the flame went out.

Then she had no shield. Then she was in a graveyard—with nothing between her and the memories of another graveyard, half a year and hundreds of leagues behind her.

Broken tombstones and broken bodies…

Agony as the thing called Iruoch, creature out of nightmare and fairy tale, stripped ribbons of skin from her flesh….

Frustration at a foe that would. Not. Die!

And another pain, even worse, as she cradled the lifeless body of a man she might, just might, have loved.

It was neither Widdershins's skill nor Olgun's small magics, but sheer and unadulterated luck that her sob was lost in a sudden gust of wind before anyone loitering nearby could have heard.

“I know!” She snapped it through clenched lips, her gritted teeth a cage to prevent the words from escaping as a full-on scream. “I know you only meant to help! You still didn't!”

Until Iruoch, until she'd left Davillon—until Julien—she'd never once felt Olgun recoil like a frightened puppy. Recoil from her. Since then…

“Oh, figs…” How many times? Half a dozen? More? She'd lost count. “Olgun?”

Nothing.

“Olgun, I'm sorry.” Don't cry. Can't cry. If I cry, the tears will freeze to my skin.

If I cry, I have to keep remembering why I'm crying.

“I just…” Shins cleared her throat. “I need to be angry right now. It's holding me up.”

Time hadn't done it. Distance hadn't done it. Her fury, only barely held at bay by a leash of iron will, was all that stood between her and Davillon; between her and the searing pain Davillon had become.

She all but gasped in relief at his response, the mere feel of his presence. Understanding, nurturing, protecting.

Relief enough that she was willing to pretend—as he seemed to want—not to notice the underlying hurt that even the mute godling could not entirely conceal.

“He wouldn't have wanted this, you know,” she said a moment later, once more casting her gaze across the intricate monuments and looming statuary. “He'd have wanted something simple. Modest.

“What? Of course I think he's worth it. But he'd rather they'd spent—”

Another surge of warning, another sudden silence, as another pair of sentries rounded a nearby crypt and wandered by, oblivious to those who watched from none too far overhead. Thin snow and frozen dirt crackled beneath their boots, sounding much like a very slow fire, until they were well out of sight once more.

“Ever seen a cemetery this heavily guarded, Olgun?” A response, a roll of the eyes. “Of course I know. But this is Lourveaux; how many tomb-robbers can there—? Oh, hush! I am not a tomb-robber!”

And then, more softly, “That was one time, and it wasn't really a tomb, in the strictest sense. And it was an emergency. Shut up and help me figure out which way to go.

“You can too do both at once! What's the point of being a god if you can't even talk and be quiet at the same time?”

In point of fact, whether Olgun did indeed have the divine power of communicative shutting up, the unfortunate truth was that he currently had nothing of use to communicate. Judging by the faint sludge of emotion bubbling up through Widdershins's system like a bad breakfast, the graveyard's massive scale and mélange of faith had the god just as confused as she.

The result, then, was hours of wandering, almost aimlessly, as thief and deity struggled and failed to find one particular abode in a sea of final resting places. Racing across the tops of icy mausoleums, constantly sliding or dropping prone to avoid the roving eyes of equally roving sentries; clambering down to earth where the crypts grew too uneven or too far apart for easy travel, huddling behind corners until the way was clear for a quick dash across the roadway; all in the midst of flurries of a wind that Shins, despite Olgun's scoffing, was certain could inspire a polar bear to don a parka. By the start of hour three, her normally pale cheeks were flogged red by the cold, and she had become fully convinced that her cloak itself had actually frozen to death.

Until finally—after having avoided roughly a dozen guards or groundskeepers and having crossed over or past enough crypts to populate a thousand nightmares—purely by chance, they found it.

Neither the largest, nor the most ornate; that much, at least, the Church had done in accordance with the man he'd been.

It had a peaked roof, this particular tomb, clearly designed to look like a cathedral in miniature. It even had a steeple, which could not possibly serve any purpose beyond the decorative. Stained glass gleamed in several of the walls, reflecting the white snows despite the lack of any substantial sun, but only a few allowed that light into the mausoleum itself. The others were constructed against backings of solid stone—priceless art, deprived of both function and, for the most, any living audience to appreciate it.

Shins could have remained on the roof. Even-sloped and snow-slick, it was no perch she couldn't handle. Somehow, though, it seemed…wrong. She'd come all this way to see him, to talk to him, no matter how foolish she felt for it. No way could she bring herself to go through with it while squatting over his head.

Again she dropped to the snow, rolling back to her feet, then swiftly darted up beside the padlocked door—some sort of hardwood, inscribed and engraved, smelling faintly of old lacquer, and probably worth more than some whole tombs back home. Recessed a bit from the stone porch, overhung by scalloped eaves, it ought to provide sufficient shadow to conceal Widdershins from any passersby.

Well, it might provide sufficient shadow, anyway. That'd have to do.

Back pressed into a corner beside the door, the young thief slid downward until she sat, legs crossed, staring out at the other tombs, at the snow, at everything and nothing at all.

“Hello, William.”

Unlike Widdershins's god, William de Laurent, archbishop of Chevareaux, declined to answer.

“You probably didn't expect to see me again, did you?” she asked the mausoleum at her back. Her voice was fuzzy, almost but not quite echoing in the recessed doorway and then flattened by the snow-choked air. “Long ways between Davillon and Lourveaux, yes? Bit of a hike just for chat with…. Oh, this is stupid!”

Olgun let loose a startled bleat—or the emotional equivalent of a bleat, which was rather like a sudden urge to think about sheep—as Widdershins shot to her feet, pressed her shoulder to the side of the alcove, and began to peer about for guards.

“Because it's stupid,” she repeated, in answer to his unspoken but hardly unfelt question. “He's dead. He's been dead a year! I'm talking to a wall, Olgun. And a door. And possibly a stoop, although I'm not sure, because I've never been clear on the difference between a stoop and a porch. So maybe a porch.

“Who I am not talking to is the only clergyman I ever met who was worth more than a mangy goat!”

An image floated toward the surface of her mind, rippling into focus. An image she didn't care to see.

“An old mangy goat!”

Olgun wouldn't stop; for all her efforts, the vision insisted on crystallizing, and Shins had nowhere to turn.

“An incontinent old mangy goat! An…Oh, figs…”

Once more she slumped to the stoop—or porch—this time with her legs splayed out crookedly before her, the image of a curly haired blonde woman foremost in her thoughts.

“Yes, I spoke to Genevieve a lot after she was gone. That was stupid, too.”

It was petulant, and she knew it before Olgun could point it out, before the words were even out of her mouth. “I know, I know…” A long sigh, then, steaming in the cold. “It wasn't, was it? And she'd be cross with me for saying so. All right, well, we're here anyway, yes?”

She scooted a bit, so that this time she might at least address the mausoleum directly.

“Sorry about that, William. Haven't…really been myself recently.” She chuckled, soft and blatantly forced. “Guess the fact that I'm here proves that, yes? I mean, I'd never been out of sight of Davillon's walls when we met. Now…

“Gods, how the hopping hens did I even get here? I didn't set out for Lourveaux. I just…walked. Didn't plan to come visit you; I decided to when I realized how close we were.”

The back of her head rattled with what could only be called the clearing of a divine throat. Olgun's way, perhaps, of jogging her memory over the fact that it had been his suggestion, one that Shins had dismissed until she realized he wasn't about to give up.

She, of course, acknowledged no such thing and kept speaking, voice growing as brittle as the slender icicles hanging overhead.

“I had to get out. I had to, I…don't think you'd have been very proud of me, William. I messed things up. I tried to take care of everybody, I swear I did!” Her shoulders, indeed her whole body, had begun to shake, through no influence whatsoever of the winter chill. “But I let them all down. Robin, Renard…Oh, gods…Julien…”

Whatever was about to break loose, whatever torrent of whitewater emotion might have overspilled the dam in that moment, for good or for ill, never had its chance. Her reverie, her fragility, shattered as though they, too, were stained glass, at the crunch of a footstep on the frost-covered stone behind her.

A footstep belonging to someone that Olgun hadn't warned her about!

Chapter Two

“Maurice?!”

“Is this just how you normally greet people, Widdershins?” His words were tight, strangled, and more than a touch manic. “Because I have to confess that I assumed the last time was a fluke. I mean, it felt like a fluke to me. Did it feel like a fluke to you? I thought it was a fluke. But now I'm not so sure, and the ground is really cold, and I'm starting to have trouble breathing with you there, and that blade is awfully close to my face, when you think about it, so could you please let me up and say hello like a normal person?”

Her expression dazed and vaguely wide-eyed, not unlike a deer suddenly face-to-face with a shark, Widdershins rose. Maurice—Brother Maurice, properly, Order of Saint Bertrand and former assistant to the deceased archbishop of Chevareaux—practically inflated with a huge and desperate gasp. Whether it was relief that her knee was off his sternum, or that her rapier was no longer a mouse-stride from his eye, or both, was unclear. And, ultimately, unimportant, as the deep influx of winter air prompted a red-faced, chest-clutching coughing fit that lasted the better part of two minutes.

He looked very much as she remembered him: straw-colored hair cut in a tonsure; soft, but not remotely weak or decadent, features. The coarse brown of his traditional monk's robe was largely hidden beneath a thick white coat. His only adornment was the Eternal Eye, ultimate symbol of the Hallowed Pact, representing all 147 recognized gods of Galice.

And it stood out, primarily because—in utter disregard for the monastic traditions of simplicity and severity—it was crafted not from wood or ceramic or pewter, but from a silver that seemed to gleam without benefit of any sun in the sky.

Widdershins didn't even have to ask. She'd seen it before—not one like it, but that precise icon. For a moment her eyes flickered back to the stone façade of the mausoleum, and she could not quite repress a grin.

“He'd approve,” she said softly, then merely shrugged at the monk's questioning blink. “Sorry about that,” she said instead, though her tone suggested less genuine contrition than amused indifference. You snuck up on me.”

“Oh, I'm—”

“Why the happy hopping horses did you sneak up on me?”

“Well, I wasn't entirely sure you were who I—”

“For that matter,” Shins broke in again, brain finally catching up with the circumstances and her eyes beginning to narrow in suspicion, “how did you sneak up on me?”

“Uh, I'm not entirely sure what you…”

The indignant thief was, however, not listening to him at all anymore, but something else entirely.

“Oh, I see,” she grumbled. “And this by you was funny, yes? Just because you knew he wasn't a threat wouldn't make him any less dead if I'd stuck something sharp through something squishy! I—Oh.” She cast Maurice a tentative smile, genuinely apologetic now, when she finally noticed the gradual widening of his eyes and growing pallor of his face.

“We'll talk about this later,” she murmured from an upturned corner of her mouth. Then, more loudly, “Uh, I'm not sure exactly how much you know about—”

“Not here, in the cold, please. The caretaker's hut isn't far from here. We can get out of the wind, have some hot tea…”

“And get me out of sight of the guards?”

It was Maurice's turn for a tentative, almost-sickly smile. “I could vouch for you, certainly, but there would be a lot of questions—you, um, didn't make your entrance in any proper manner, or I'd have been informed—and I'd just as soon not try to explain you right now. If I even could.”

Shins chuckled. “All right. After you.”

Nervously glancing back over his shoulder, as though afraid she might simply up and vanish, the monk guided her along the cemetery's many smaller footpaths, winding to one side of this crypt and behind that one, avoiding the main thoroughfares as often as he might. More than once he strode ahead to check that their way was clear, then held his visitor back until the nearby armsmen had moved on.

After the third such occasion, Shins padded up to stand directly behind her host, almost silent on the snow. “What's with all the guards, Maurice?” she whispered.

“Widdershins…I realize that you and I are acquainted, but it really would be more proper to call me ‘Brother Maurice.’ At least when on holy ground such as this.”

“William didn't feel it was improper,” she said pointedly. And then, “What's with all the guards, Maurice?”

The monk glowered for a moment, then simply sighed and turned once more into the dancing flurries. “Just in case any of the unrest should happen to pass into the cemetery.”

“Unrest?”

Maurice's jaw dropped; she could tell from behind him. “Did you not notice the protesters shouting on every major street corner? The scrawled slogans and flyleaves that crop up all over? The city's had a bear of a time keeping up; they clean one block, the next just—”

“I avoided major street corners,” she said with a shrug. “And major streets, in general. Beyond that? Just looked like Davillon to me, except even richer and more pretentious.”

“Lourveaux,” he insisted through gritted teeth, “is not Davillon. This is not normal here.”

“Right. So why the ‘unrest,’ then?”

“We'll get to that. That's another ‘out of the cold’ conversation.”

Their voices fell. The wind picked up.

Shins waited until it was quite clear he wasn't about to say more, then asked, “So what's the real reason for the guards?”

Maurice jumped as though he'd just discovered a mole in his small clothes. “What?!”

“Come on, Brother Maurice. You're a monk, and a devout one at that. I could hear it in your voice and see it in your posture if you were planning to lie to someone tomorrow.”

“I wasn't lying,” he protested in a soft grumble. “I was just…waiting to tell you everything.”

“Stop waiting.”

Another sigh. “Fine. The guards…” He turned aside as a particularly brisk breeze hurled a few random flakes into his hood. “For the same reason I was so cautious approaching you,” he said, voice raised just enough for her to hear him over the gusts. “We've had a number of…suspicious characters here on and off over the past few months.”

“And you're sure they weren't just family members visiting the tomb of Lord Suspicious Character IV, or something?”

“We aren't complete fools here, Widdershins. Don't say it.”

“I wasn't going to. Too easy.”

Inside her head, Olgun was quietly having hysterics.

“They managed to pass themselves off as mourners initially,” Maurice admitted. He drew them both to a halt, took a long moment to peer both ways down a main road, struggling to see through the gray, and then continued once more. “But we figured out fairly swiftly that the same group of people were rotating through. This fellow one day, that fellow the next, and so forth. I've no idea what they're doing here—there's been no vandalism or robbery—and we haven't the right to do anything but escort them out if they're here improperly.

“But…”

A long silence stretched between them.

“I think one of your sentences slipped its leash,” she said finally.

He offered another sallow grin, then pointed through the snow to a small building—the same size as the more modest mausoleums but far less ornate. She nodded, and they both headed toward the door.

“But,” Maurice continued, producing a large, iron key from within his robe, “I couldn't help notice that most of them have been spotted not too terribly far from His Eminence de Laurent's tomb. Could certainly be coincidence, and his is far from the richest mausoleum here, so I can't even say for sure…”

The monk continued, unlocking the door with a heavy clonk, ushering his guest inside, and locking it once more with equal volume, but Widdershins wasn't hearing his words anymore. The groundskeeper's abode nicely retained the heat, and a small pile of embers still smoldered in the fireplace, but the refugee from Davillon felt a greater chill here than she had outside.

People—not a lot of people, but enough—knew that Widdershins and the archbishop had grown close, however briefly. If someone was watching for signs of her…

Was it possible? “Olgun? I'm being paranoid, right?”

His fretting, worried reply didn't precisely calm her down.

“Right. Make this snappy, Maurice,” she said more loudly, spinning and nearly colliding with the startled young monk, two steaming mugs of tea in his hands. “I'm not going to be staying in Lourveaux very long.”

Maurice blinked, twice, but apparently their first encounter, last year in Davillon, had rendered him at least partially immune to the confusion suffered by so many individuals who spoke to her. He merely nodded and placed the two mugs on the table.

Widdershins took a seat on one side of it—an old, simple, but remarkably well-preserved piece of carpentry, with lightly padded chairs to match—while Maurice took the other.

“I know about you,” he said, sipping gingerly at his tea. “You and, ah, Olgun.”

No real shock, there. Shins wrapped her fingers around her own teacup, more to warm them than out of any desire for a drink. “I'd wondered if William had the chance to tell you.”

“He didn't, exactly. He…died very shortly after you left.”

Two pairs of eyes gazed down at the table, then, rather than at each other.

“But,” he continued gamely, “His Eminence and I had discussed some of his suppositions before he sent me to fetch you. Then, more recently, when Bishop Sicard came from Davillon to tell us about your…more recent troubles, the diocese asked me to consult. They knew I'd already met you, and much of the bishop's testimony was…difficult for some of them to believe.”

“I was there,” she said, voice suddenly small. “It's still difficult for me to believe.”

Maurice began to reach across the table. “I'm truly sorry for your—”

Ceramic cracked in Widdershins's hands, leaking a steady dribble of tea onto the wood.

“Right,” he said, drawing back. “Anyway, Sicard's story filled in the remaining gaps, or at least enough for me to have a basic idea of your situation.”

“And does it bother you?”

“It might,” he confessed, “had it clearly not bothered His Eminence. He trusted you, though—and Olgun, apparently. I can do no less.”

“Thank you for that,” she said, and meant it. “I…Wait. Didn't he also want you to transfer orders and become a priest yourself? I seem to recall…”

“I'm a servant, Widdershins. I don't want to lead anyone.”

“Maybe that means you should.”

This time, their eyes did meet; Maurice looked away first. Mumbling something Shins couldn't quite catch, he rose and returned with a towel to wipe up the spill. She, though she felt a faint pang of guilt for the teacup—it looked old—allowed him to do so without offering to help.

For a time, then, they spoke little of import. Maurice shared the latest news and rumor from Davillon, carried to Lourveaux by travelers who had left far more recently than Shins, but little of it interested her, or concerned anyone she knew. She, in turn, offered a brief account of her past six months, wandering Galice, but omitted most of the details—of the towns through which she'd passed, the threats she'd avoided, the few daring thefts that had allowed her to pay her way. And certainly she said nothing of her reasons for leaving Davillon at all.

So tired was she, so accustomed to being tired, that it wasn't until Olgun gently prodded her that she realized her eyelids had begun to drift shut, that she was on her dozenth yawn of the past hour.

“I'm sorry,” she began, “I—”

“There's room for two here,” Maurice offered. “Decently, I promise.”

“Oh, thank you. I was so worried you were going to misbehave.”

“Widdershins—”

“Thank you, Maurice. But no. I really need to go.”

He rose, and for the first time she saw a flicker of iron in his expression. “It's dark. It's freezing. Whatever you fear, it won't find you here over one night.”

“I…” She stumbled, then, slightly but notably, as a wave of exhaustion drained much of her remaining strength from her limbs. “Oh, don't you dare!”

Olgun's stern response—accompanied by a second wave of fatigue—felt very much like one of her father's “If you won't take care of yourself, you'll just have to live with how I do it” lectures from her childhood.

Surrendering—sullen, cursing up what for her was a storm and for others might qualify as a single raindrop, but resigned—she allowed Maurice to show her to her bed.

* * *

“So tell me about this ‘unrest.’”

“Gah!” Maurice bolted upright, startled from a deep sleep, and promptly rolled off the side of his narrow cot in a muddle of sheets and gangly limbs. The hut reverberated with the dull thump of monk against floor.

Widdershins leaned idly against the wardrobe, the only other piece of furniture in the room, ankles and arms both crossed. It was the same spot she'd occupied—the same pose—since she'd finished packing up her few possessions in preparation to leave, over half an hour gone by. It was still almost that long again until dawn would peek in the windows to see if it might be welcome for breakfast, but the young woman had grown tired of waiting.

After another moment of tangled thrashing with no sign of an emergent Maurice, however, Shins felt a gentle, probing suggestion in her gut.

“Oh, come on, Olgun! It's a bedsheet and a three-foot fall! I'm sure even he can handle…Oh, fine.” She pushed herself away from the wall, took two steps from the wardrobe, and abruptly froze.

“Um, Maurice?”

The thrashing ceased. “Yes?” The reply was oddly muffled, less by the weight of the linens, Shins guessed, than embarrassment.

“Do you need help?”

“It wouldn't be unappreciated….”

“And,” she continued, giving voice to the question that had stopped her in her tracks, “are you dressed?”

A moment. Two.

“I don't think I'll be needing any assistance, thank you.”

The thief snorted and made a point of both stomping her feet and slamming the door so her host would know he was once more alone in his bedchamber.

By the time he emerged, she had taken an identical leaning posture, this time against the pantry. He was, thankfully, fully clad now—not in his traditional coarse robe, as she'd anticipated, but heavy, functional tunic and trousers.

“I didn't know you even owned normal clothes. Olgun, did you know he owned normal clothes? Don't monks burst into flame or turn into frogs or something if they own more than a robe, worn sandals, and a length of string?”

“Widdershins…”

“Two lengths of string, then, is it? The Church has gotten more relaxed, yes?”

“Did you want to talk about what's going on in Lourveaux right now or didn't you?” Maurice asked, his tone almost desperate.

Shins nodded once. “So?”

“Let me just brew up a pot of—”

“Oh, no!” Shins lurched away from the pantry, standing fully upright. “You've already used up your grace period, going off on that tangent about your wardrobe.”

“I used it up?!”

“Well, of course. It's not as if I could choose how you spend your time, is it?” And then, “Olgun? Is the vein in his forehead supposed to do that?”

“It's been building for the better part of a year now,” Maurice said, apparently having decided that answering his guest's questions was the safest route to maintaining at least a semblance of sanity. “Ever since the Church appointed His Eminence's successor as archbishop of Chevareaux.”

Widdershins winced as William de Laurent sprang once more to mind. A quick pivot and she began to pace the length of the tiny kitchen, past the pantry and stove in a handful of steps, and then back.

And then—whether she came to it herself or it was a nudge from Olgun, she couldn't fully say—it dawned on her where the monk must be leading.

“Oh, figs…Church politics, Maurice?”

“Um, well…”

“So nice to visit with you. Thanks for putting me up for the night. I'll be leaving now.”

“Wait! Widdershins, please!”

She was already nearing the front door, ears all but deaf to Maurice's pleas—or Olgun's protestations of curiosity, for that matter—until something finally punched through the mental cotton she'd stuffed in her ears.

“Widdershins, she wants to see you!”

She stopped, one gloved hand inches from the latch. She felt her shoulders and back tensing, so tight they might just deflect a flintlock ball. “Who wants to see me, Maurice?” Even she was frightened by the utter, icy calm in her voice.

“Her Eminence Archbishop Faranda. William de Laurent's successor.”

It took Widdershins roughly three or four years to turn from the door to face her host once again. Perhaps another year or so before she could choke back her growing fury enough to be sure she could speak to him without violence. Olgun's suspicions simmered beneath her own, not yet ignited into the same fiery rage, but certainly starting to smolder and spark.

“And how does ‘Her Eminence’ know I'm here, Maurice?” Not so calm, now, her voice, but rather something approaching an animal snarl.

“What? Oh! No, no!” The monk held both hands out before him, though whether the gesture was beseeching or defensive was far from clear. “I haven't told anyone you're here! I meant, she's wanted to meet you since she heard of you! Asked me to arrange it if, by any chance, I could. I told her I didn't expect to ever see you again, but…Well, I mean, you're here….”

Somebody might as well have unstoppered a drain, so swiftly did Shins's anger diminish, leaving only a frustrated—and perhaps frightened—weariness. For a moment, it was almost enough to make her dizzy, and she could only smile her thanks when a quick surge of strength from her partner ensured that she kept her feet.

“I think,” she said, carefully making her way to the table and lowering herself into the nearest chair, “that you'd better make that tea after all.”

* * *

“‘Nicolina Faranda’?” Widdershins repeated, transforming the name she'd just heard into a question. “That doesn't sound Galicien.”

Maurice, seated opposite her once again, nodded through the herb-scented steam rising from his teacup. “It's not. She's from Rannanti.”

Shins couldn't quite keep her jaw from dropping.

“The Hallowed Pact is hardly limited to our country. You must know that.”

“I do, but…” She glanced down at her own drink—in a simple wooden cup this time, she'd noted with some amusement—and gathered her thoughts. “I thought all High Church clergy had to be Galicien?”

“That's been the custom, since the Basilica of the Waking Choir is here. Initially, it was just simpler to draw new officials from nearby, and eventually it became a matter of politics—”

“Everything does,” she groused softly.

“—but it's not a rule in any formal sense,” Maurice concluded.

“But…Rannanti?”

“You're hardly the only one to have gotten the impression that the Church has become a Galicien institution, in fact if not in name. The appointment of Her Eminence Faranda—”

“You know,” Widdershins remarked casually, speaking to Olgun but quite deliberately pitching the comment loudly enough for her mortal companion to overhear, “he could talk at least twice as quickly if he didn't insist on using everybody's full title every single time.”

Maurice glared over his teacup, an effect largely ruined when he accidentally banged the rim into his teeth. “…of Her Eminence Faranda,” he continued through his pained wince, “was meant to cut such growing sentiment off at the knees. To say nothing of, just perhaps, being the first step in an end to the rivalry between our nation and hers.”

Widdershins didn't so much scoff as snort. “Galice and Rannanti have been rivals for—”

“Yes, thank you, I did study history in the monastery.”

“I didn't study history anywhere, and I still know that! Going to take a bit more than a Church appointment to fix that, yes?”

It might have been her own mind, might have been Olgun, might have been a cooperative effort between them, but once again she found herself leaping ahead, realizing precisely where Maurice was leading.

“And you all just learned that the hard way, didn't you?”

Her host muttered something toward the table (which, despite being nearer than Widdershins, probably couldn't make it out, either).

“Figs and finches, Maurice! Did nobody at the basilica have the brains to realize this might make a few Galicians just a wee bit irritable? Pretty sure a lot of older folks still remember losing parents and grandparents—”

“I'm not one of the high officials, Widdershins. I don't know what they thought or didn't think! My guess is that they expected problems, but not to this extent.”

“And the city guard? Lourveaux does have a city guard, yes?”

“Church soldiers. The, uh, the secular government is really just more of a recordkeeping bureaucracy than…Um…” He looked briefly like a turtle, trying to retract into its shell from Widdershins's level stare. (Olgun presented her with an alternate image to the turtle, accompanied by what could only be called a dirty-minded chortle of the soul, but she quickly shoved the image aside before she burst into laughter, blushed red as raspberry jam, or both.)

“So just to be clear,” Shins said, drumming the fingers of one hand on the table and of the other on her teacup, “the Church appointed a new archbishop from Galice's oldest rival, took no steps to handle any resulting social unrest, and now has riots on its hands in the city that is only the seat of power for the entire Hallowed Pact. Have I left anything out?”

“They're not riots, not yet. Just a lot of protesting and vandalism, mostly.” Again, he seemed suddenly to want to shrink away from her expression. “No, I…think you've got the gist of it.”

“Are you sure? None of the bishops decided to poke a few sleeping bears? Throw darts at a grimoire and read random passages?”

“I believe that's on next year's agenda.”

The wisecrack, unexpected as it was, silenced her for a moment—which, a gleefully snickering Olgun assured her, was almost certainly the monk's whole point.

“She wants your help, Widdershins. At least if she decides you can be trusted.”

“She?” Shins shook her head, trying to throw off a sudden daze or perhaps dislodge an insect buzzing in her hair. “She who? Wants what? Who what?”

“Her Eminence. We're fairly sure there's someone orchestrating at least some of the unrest, and they're far too adept at ferreting out anyone we send to find them. The archbishop was hoping that you might—”

Widdershins shoved herself back from the table and stood, knocking the chair over behind her; spun on her heel and all but dashed for the exit. This time, the monk's pleas for her to wait didn't even slow her as she hauled open the door and threw herself into the blustery winter winds.

Chapter Three

Lourveaux really was very much like Davillon, except for the ways in which it wasn't.

Here, in the poorer neighborhoods and back alleys, as distant from the beating heart of the Church of the Hallowed Pact as one could be and still stand within the city proper, things looked almost familiar. Streets caked with dirty-gray snow, passersby in threadbare coats and worn shoes; the same scent of cheap woods and even less pleasant fuels, smoldering away in a desperate defensive line against winter's advance; the same sorts of buildings, blocky and bordering on decrepit without ever quite threatening to just give up the ghost and collapse like a bad soufflé.

Even here were differences, however. The roads were paved far more often than not, in even the meanest neighborhoods, and more frequently with brick than with cobblestone. The architecture was just a bit more ornate, more ostentatious; flared eaves here, an artfully rounded corner there. The clothes had, on average, been just slightly nicer before they'd been ravaged by use and time.

And then there were those moments, when the clustered buildings and winding streets collaborated with the clouds above and the winter haze below, to part all at once. Then, for a sun-drenched moment, even from the ugliest outskirts of Lourveaux, a passerby could see the center.

The center of the city. The center of the Church.

Great arches and bridges of gleaming, white granite. Marble pillars and windows of exquisite glass. Spires and domes and steeples of classical styles, atop which flapped 147 different pennants, each with the unique icon of a god.

And towering above it all, a single cupola, large enough to have given birth to any handful of the others, gleaming silver despite the overcast. Unengraved and unadorned, save for the repeating motif of the Eternal Eye.

Beating heart and quickened soul of the Hallowed Pact, focal point of the world's largest religion. The Basilica of the Waking Choir.

Widdershins couldn't flee swiftly enough.

The streets, though far from empty, were remarkably uncrowded for early morning—though whether that was unusual for Lourveaux or just another difference between here and Davillon, Shins couldn't have guessed even if she'd cared enough to try. Where the gaps in the traffic of people and horses and carts were wide enough—as they usually were—she slipped through without so much as brushing against anyone. Where they were not, either Olgun reached out to prod someone into a mild stumble or sidestep, clearing a path, or else Shins simply pushed around whoever was in her way with just enough muttered apology not to be entirely rude.