Chương 61: 2.8. Howler's Haven

The shrieking storm rattled against the carriage windows, as if the stormship's bleed-out were summoning the ghosts of the slaughtered pirates to haunt and hammer at the al Ydrises' doorstep.

"I think not," Ofelia said.

"The love you profess is overproofed, Sygar. And collapsed. A woman such as I cannot abide a claggy love." Annalise slapped her knee in merriment.

"A claggy love! Oh, no." Ofelia turned the page.

"Sygar took a knee there, with no regard for the flour strewn across the floor.

'There shall be no feast but yours for me in the whole scalded world,' he pleaded.

'I shall starve without you. I shall go mad. You are the only confection that shan't turn to ash in my mouth.' Would you top me up, please, Mr. il Gutierre?" Seth poured more cocoa into Ofelia's chipped porcelain cup.

"Thank you," Ofelia said, and returned to her narration.

"Astrid set aside her rolling pin with a clatter of malice.

'If you wanted dessert, Exark Sygar,' she uttered contemptuously, 'you should have eaten your vegetables.' Oh, that's perfectly rancid. I'm saving this." She took hold of the page at the root of its binding and tore it from the book. From the cluttered crawlspace beneath her seat she produced a thick leatherbound folio and opened it into a fluttering graveyard of likewise torn-out passages.

"Did you teach her this?" Seth asked Annalise as Ofelia pinned the page into its resting place.

"I could never teach this mad yoke a thing," Annalise said.

"It's like a lepidopterist's butterfly collection but with stories." Ofelia flipped the folio shut.

"Nobody gives them guff about the beautiful things they destroy. And a bookbinding is uglier than a butterfly."

"Most books I read growing up, I had to steal," Seth said.

"Couldn't afford them otherwise. But I loved them."

"Did you love glue and paper, or did you love stories?" Ofelia patted her dragon's hoard of paper and placed it back under her seat.

"I love stories."

"Mostly I loved the pictures," Seth said. The windows ceased rattling. The shriek died down to a convulsive moan. Annalise risked the carriage door and, when the wind didn't slam it back inward, she opened it the rest of the way. They hurried from the shelf of stone behind which they'd parked the carriage, toward the stormship's vast descending thunderhead. Tiago appeared at the vessel's anchorpoint and slid down the rope back to land.

The distance was too wide to make out his face, but his whoop of elation echoed across the verdant bowl of limestone he'd touched down in, and reminded Seth of the cry he'd sounded as a falcon. He laughed as he jogged to meet his ebony-clad family.

"That was fucking amazing!" Annalise laughed as he joined them.

"I reckon we're close to losing you to the skylanes."

"Let's just get our own stormship," Tiago said.

"Rappel down into all the villages."

"I will bring it up to Charlie," Annalise said. For now, shipless, they trooped back to the carriage. Back to Shipfarrok, where Annalise shared a handshake with a wind-bedraggled Karla and talked herself into hauling a tree the wind had toppled into a paddock. The township gathered to gawk at their grinning Verdugo, rope round her shoulder, pulling the fallen trunk upright.

"You barely need those drays," Karla remarked, as Seth tied Demetrius and the pony formerly known as Annalise al Equis into their train.

"Your wife could just pull the whole fucking carriage."

"Yeah, well," Seth said.

"Then we'd have to share the cabin with the horses." It was only as they were rolling out of Sheepfarrok—the al Ydrises manning the carriage, Seth atop his nameless pony—that he realized what Karla had offhandedly called Annalise, and by then it was too late to correct her. Oh, well. The highlands rose and fell around the carriage as it put Shipfarrok behind it for another year. The sheep clustered like marbled fat on the slabs of turf-topped stone. They trundled past the gated path to the il Mandrak pastures.

By the timber fence, with her dead husband's herding dog curled by her feet, Soya il Mandrak stood, and watched the Verdugo's carriage trundle past in its sable-and-emerald finery and its black iron bone filigree. Seth met her eyes for a moment as he passed her. On her lovely face was a look of pure, profound hatred. The scaffold creaked under the heavy stride of the Verdugo as her shadow fell across the kneeling woman.

"Do you love your people, Jesska il Maksdotir?" The waxen-faced sacrifice blinked away her sweat.

"I do."

"Do you repent your crimes against them?"

"I do."

"Do you give praise to Hundred Saints, and to the Sorcerer General, and the deathspell beneath which he shelters us?" Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

"I do." Annalise whistled toward Jesska's blind spot.

"Ho, there, Tiago. Pass me the sword." Jesska turned her head in confusion to Tiago where he stood gauntly to one side—didn't the woman behind her already have her black blade ready? —and Annalise struck. The village of Tondarre reacted with a healthy ohh! Only a couple of screams, no whooping or clapping. Seth, observing from the carriage's threshold at the rear of the crowd, was developing a theory that you could tell how the year had been in a village by the sound their assembly made when the head went flying.

"Why does she do that?" he asked the placid girl at his side as she flipped the hasped broach of her traveler's cloak open and shut.

"The fake-out?"

"It positions them right," Ofelia said.

"If they stay put, they hunch sometimes, or dart, or the muscle is tense with the anticipation of the blade. The al Ydrises don't swing twice."

"What does she whisper to them? The reluctant ones?"

"I'm not sure," Ofelia said.

"Mother's actually never executed me, if you can believe it."

"It does beggar belief."

"Thank you, Jesska." Annalise passed a palm over the corpse's gray eyes and shut them forever. She pulled a rag from her belt pouch and wiped the wide span of her steel.

"With that, folks, we're done. On behalf of the Legion and the Sorcerer General, I thank you all for your loyalty, and wish you as warm and safe a winter as Ms. Maksdotir's sacrifice has earned you. We'll see you next year." The sword hissed back into its scabbard. The prisoners who had earned a punishment gentler than its mercy were corralled from the scaffold. Annalise waved aside a hermandati gauntlet on offer to ease her passage to the ground, and hopped down instead, her boots splashing into the mud.

Corregidor Tannon valiantly attempted warmth from as far as one could reasonably excuse.

"Madam Verdugo. It's such a privilege to finally make your acquaintance." The guy had a pair of long gloves on and a scarf cinched up past his chin, which he took every second breath from. The proper Corregidor maneuver was to invite the new Verdugo to stay in the manor. Tannon's training did pitched battle with his terror of catching the soul-sickness from this huge unlit woman.

"I would love to. Er. Well, that is to say, it would be such an honor to invite you and your retinue to stay, in, in whichever, uh—we, we understand Ms. il Maksdotir lived alone, and perhaps—""It's been grand to meet you, Corregidor." With a merciful smile and a wave, Annalise released Tannon from the metaphorical meathook he dangled from.

"Truly it has. But if it's all the same to you, we've got to be on the hoof again. It's a chock-a-block schedule. So unless there's any pressing business—""Of course, Madam Verdugo!" Tannon was so loud and abrupt it brought a startled flush to his own face.

"Of course. Wouldn't dream of keeping you. Yes. Uh, be well." Annalise mirrored his relief as she departed Tondarre's emptying plaza, Tiago in tow. Seth moved aside; she caught his hand and tugged him with her into the carriage.

"Come on, come on, come on," she whispered urgently. Ofelia scurried in after them. The spring steel of the carriage's black-lacquer driver box squeaked beneath Tiago's hasty clamber to the reins. Ofelia banged her palm on the front-facing window's diamond lattice.

"Go, go!" Tiago cracked the reins; Draco and Draka huffed into motion. Demetrius, tethered into their train, knickered with annoyed confusion at the haste.

"Not yet. Not yet, dammit. They might hear us." Annalise indicated a scaffwood tree split along its midpoint like a tuning fork.

"Once we're past that." The carriage trundled past the tree. Tiago stood on his seat and proclaimed it in his praise the Verdugo voice: "Esteemed colleagues and also Ofelia, I decree the 841 quota season complete!" Annalise seized Seth and showered the side of his face with kisses; Tiago banged his fist on the roof; even Ofelia couldn't help but bounce in her seat and punch the air.

"Thank you, Jesska, for number fifty," Annalise cried, "Thank you, Plainlands, and smell you later! Thank you, Draco and Draka and Demetrius and whatever Seth is naming his! And thank you, Sunshine and Feeli and Seth il fucking Gutierre because we did it!" They cheered, and broke out the red wine and the nice cups that were wrapped in newsprint and stuck inside a munition breastplate for safe-keeping, and Seth was exactly where he belonged.

The al Ydris family and their adopted thief outran the setting sun, laughing and loose and buzzed—except Tiago, who refused the insistently passed bottles from his stolid seat on the driver box. The first roadhouse on the northbound track, they judged too dusty and venomous for celebration, and breezed right past. The sun was an emerald ember by the time they reached the second, a spot called Howler's Haven with a wooden wolf's head over the door and festive mitelamps in green and cyan dotting its eaves.

The crowd inside was merry enough that the sight of a roving crew of unlit put only a brief ding in their frivolity—it helped that Annalise had left the sword in the carriage and it was finally chilly enough that her illustrated arms had been forced into sleeves.

"Hey ho, goodman!" Seth swaggered to the spot before the bartender and drummed out a paradiddle with his palms.

"How'd it be for you if a flock of tipsy unlit want to bury your kitchen in braces?" The bartender was scarcely older than Seth himself. A straw hat was perched on his head; judging by the handful of similar crowns in the crowd, someone must be handing them out.

"How many braces?" Annalise came up beside her man and dropped a heavy velvet purse onto the bartop. It near dented the cup-stained maple.

"About this many." Whatever fear or hatred of the unlit the barkeep had drowned amid the monetary inflow. He swept his hat from his head and bowed.

"What service may we tender, madam?"

"Water for my horses, please, and a kiln ale for meself, and whatever in that cauldron is making that delicious smell for my kids and my man. And keep all of it coming." The bartender cast a confused look across Seth and the twins.

"Where's your man?" Annalise slouched an arm around Seth's shoulder.

"This one." The bartender frowned at Seth, who gave a jaunty salute in reply."That's not one of your kids?" Annalise's hand wandered down Seth's spine and nested in his back pocket.

"Sure look, if I ever find out who did raise him, we're due a chat."

"And which are your horses?"

"They're the bleeding massive black ones," Annalise said.

"And the other two tied with 'em."

"I'd like the fish, actually, please," Tiago called, as he and Ofelia passed on the hunt for seating.

"You heard him." Annalise beamed and shoved the purse forward.

"Keep it all coming and you keep the change, hear?" The bartender pulled the velvet bag from the table and clonked it on the floor below.

"Absolutely, your ladyship."" Ladyship. I like that. I like this place." Annalise hit the bartender with a happy wink.

"Cheers, sirrah. C'mon, Sethy." She flounced away. The show was for Seth, of course, but he could see the dregged mistrust of the unlit filter away from the bartender's face in real time with the silky sway of her. Let him look all he wanted at those wide, wonderful hips. He wasn't brave enough to put his soul on the line for them, and Seth had been. Snooze you lose, sirrah, Seth thought, and he went from the bar, drinks in hand, squinting into its festive dim to find his new family where they waited for him.