Chương 63: 2.10. The Treasure of Shaheill

"Yes, ma'am," Tiago said, with a touch more emphasis than usual. He really hopped to it whenever he was commanded. Something about Anna al Ydris energized the guy. Seth resolved to take a cue from him. He stood in the carriage's doorframe, watching his altered lover as she assembled her kit. His gaze tracked upward, past her incongruously cute button nose framed by its gossamer whiskers, and to her eyes, which glared back at him with obvious disapproval.

"I see you looking at my mouth, thief," she said.

"Find a cold pitcher to pour on yourself. We're working."

"Is that a geniune order?" Seth pointed a thumb to the Howler's Haven.

"Because I genuinely could."

"Ground rules." Anna didn't even entertain Seth's levity with eye contact. She turned sharply away and clacked her scabbarded blade into its place on her black saddle.

"You are Annalise's mate. You are not Anna's anything."" Mate?"

"Whatever the fuck you are. We have no business with one another but the mission."

"Understood," Seth said.

"No touching, no flirting, no attempts at fraternization. And I won't maul you in return." He chuckled.

"You got it."

"Don't fucking chuckle," Anna snapped, finally deigning to look at him with a venomous glare.

"Like you're humoring me."

"I'm sorry, I—you got it, Anna. Like I said."

"And don't come near me tonight," she said.

"Understand? Ten strides at least."

"Saints. Okay."

"Because you need to focus and not fumble with my tits like a thirsty whelp." Ofelia pulled a face at Tiago, who grimaced back.

"You don't have to worry about me," Seth said.

"You say jump, I'll jump. As long as it's not off a cliff." Anna's scowl deepened.

"You're using that voice you think sounds like a reasonable adult, but it makes you sound like a teenager trying to con a drink out of a bartender before his bollocks have dropped. It's fucking obnoxious when you act like you're the mature one even though I've lived twice as long as you have. Annalise thinks that, too, but she's willing to humor it, and I'm not." She lashed her huge executioner's sword to Demetrius, who bore its weight with stoic staunchness.

"And now I have a village to save and a wiry little thief to keep alive in the middle of it because the rest of my dumbly divided brain fell in love with him. You're about to hang like a fucking millstone around my neck for a night and a day. The least you could do is be as quiet as one and stay far enough away that I don't have to smell your underarms."

"Millstones are loud as hell," Seth said.

"What did I just say about talking to me, il Gutierre?"

"I don't need to be useless," Seth said.

"You know I don't. I can help."

"A blackfeather calls for strength," Anna said.

"You aren't strong." She hauled onto her horse, oblivious to the inward tailspin she'd just knocked Seth into.

"I'm riding out ahead," she called.

"See you in Shaheill." She reeled Demetrius around, pointed his keen pale eyes to the nighttime horizon, and was off, at a gallop. Seth watched the plume of dust in the dark and tried not to let his shoulder slump. He wouldn't be stung. He'd show Annalise there was nothing to be afraid of. Ofelia coiled Draco and Draka's shiny black reins around her forearm.

"You aren't getting in your head about being Anna'd, are you?"

"Nah. You're right. She's… doing what Anna does." Seth climbed into the carriage.

"Annalise hasn't actually mentioned this voice being obnoxious, has she? Because if she does I want a refund from that Sondam scriber."

"No, she hasn't. Don't sweat about it, please." Tiago looked out the carriage window at the tidal flowing of the nighttime plain.

"We're about to have a long, shitty night."

"About sweat," Seth said.

"I'm not... I don't stink, do I?" Tiago rapped the underside of the roof.

"Feeli. Start the carriage before I throttle our thief, please." Anna swung one heavy leg off her saddle and thumped to the ground before the whispering assembly in Shaheill's town square, which was more like a town trapezoid thanks to the abandoned market stalls crowding its edges.

"I'm the Verdugo al Ydris," she said.

"I have no time or appetite for introductions beyond that. Bring me your Corregidor and your Chief Hermandat." Seth hurried with the twins to join her; at the last second he recalled the ten-stride order and stayed skulking in the shadows she cast out of the town's clustered mitelamps. A slim and smartly dressed man of middle age, his ginger-and-gray hair swept-back and beeswaxed, raised a hand.

"Corregidor Alesandri is… indisposed. I'm his undersecretary, acting interim. Simon il Teremi."

"And if you're looking for the Chief Hermandat, I'm her." A woman—a girl, really, you might call her, or perhaps she was just petite and round-faced—saluted by Simon's side.

"Riccana il Teremi." The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement. Anna's nose twitched.

"Two Teremis?" Undersecretary Simon grinned.

"Two dozen or so, all told. We're a large clan."

"And the Hermandati are your daycare?" Anna loomed over Riccana.

"Where's your schoolteacher, girl?" Riccana stuck her chin out.

"Where's your carriage driver's?" Behind Anna, Tiago scoffed, though the hard line of his mouth tilted up at the edge.

"I'm the highest-ranking Legion officer present, and the highest this dot on the countryside map will get. Until the crisis is over, this village is under my command." Anna stalked the edge of the gathering.

"Any order I give to any one of you is obeyed, without question or qualm. That a problem? Your C. H. gonna throw her pacifier at me?" Riccana's eyes flickered at the provocation, but returned straight ahead.

"No, Madam Verdugo."

"Show me the perimeter, Teremi. The tall Teremi." Anna beckoned Undersecretary Simon, who slid out of the crowd with nervous resolve on his face.

"That's all. Anyone who can point a spear, to the muster hall. The rest, to your homes. Task them, boy."

"Yes, ma'am." Tiago turned from his mother, back ramrod straight at a tight parade rest.

"Seth, Feeli. With me." He directed his attention to the short Teremi, who remained at alert while the crowd around her dispersed.

"You too, Chief Hermandat." Seth detached from the shadows and joined the twins. Riccana cast a look across the three unlit.

"So you're the Verdugo's retinue?"

"And her children, yes," Ofelia said.

"And Seth's her Seth."

"She doesn't have to worry about me." Riccana tucked her helmet under her arm and unbound the messy bun beneath it.

"I'm older than I look."

"We know the feeling," Ofelia said.

"I suppose you do." Riccana inclined her head; her ginger hair cascaded in unruly ringlets.

"Pardon me, sirs. Here I am talking like you might not all be twice my age."

"We're not," Tiago said, at the same time as Ofelia said "We're forty."

"We're not," Tiago repeated. Riccana had a pretty smile, even if (and this was new information to him) she was much younger than Seth's preference.

"Pardon our Verdugo's snippiness," he said.

"It was a long ride and she's not in her right head." Ofelia released a humored hm. Riccana shook her hair out and pinned it up again, tighter this time.

"I can imagine."

"Do you have any idea why the blackfeather is coming for Shaheill?" Tiago asked.

"If we know what it's here for, we might be able to outthink it. They're not exactly brilliant tacticians."

"I don't suppose you need to be, when you're twenty tons," Riccana said.

"As far as what makes Shaheill special, it's only a few streets over, sir, if it please you to see." Tiago tilted his head.

"Lead on, Chief Hermandat."

"To be honest, everything is a few streets over when you're in a place like Shaheill," Riccana said, as they walked its wide, tidy streets.

"We're not exactly a destination."

"Don't sell yourself short," Tiago said.

"If you're worth attacking, you're worth defending."

"I didn't mean to put the place down. Lived here all my life, after all." A stray strand of ginger hair slipped Riccana's bun and into her heart-shaped face. She tsked and pinned it back up, and Seth was even more convinced that all my life could hardly be more than a pair of decades, if that. How'd a stripling end up the Chief Hermandat?

"And we have this to our name." She came to a wooden fence painted the same cheerful orange as her hair, pushed it open, and saluted.

"Here we are. The treasure of Shaheill." Seth cast a curious look around the field into which they walked. The furrows in the ground were dotted not with crops or hedgerows but with domes of terracotta clay, each as tall as a man.

"You're growing clay?"

"Press your ear to it." Riccana tilted her head against the closest clay structure.

"Like this." Tiago mirrored her motion. His brows knitted.

"What in the Saints' name is that?" Seth laid his cheek on the coarse clay. Within the dome something was clicking and popping. It almost sounded like a Prossimo popmite silo. Riccana grinned.

"That, milord, is rhubarb. The forced rhubarb of Shaheill. The Teremis have been growing it for decades. It comes up in the pitched dark, pushing out all pale from the ground an inch a day. Fast enough you can hear it."

"You're shitting me," Tiago said.

"No, no, I've actually heard of this." Seth listened harder. Another echoing pop.

"Didn't put the name to the thing until she mentioned it, but I knew a chef who swore by it. Sweet and tender. I always wondered how it'd be to cook with it."

"Best rhubarb in the Plainlands," Riccana said, with evident pride.

"We grow all through the frost and harvest it by candlelight. It never sees the sun 'til it's on your fancy city plates."

"You have time to work on the farm while you're Chief Hermandatting?" Ofelia asked. Riccana's smile wilted.

"Well—it's a quiet town, usually. As I said."

"Ignore my sister," Tiago said.

"She noses in. Gets it from Mother. You go on ahead and get your people to the muster hall. We'll catch up." Ricanna saluted.

"Sir." She turned on her heel with perhaps a touch too much military formalism and set off through Shaheill's mitelit streets, following the whispering, jostling flow of its citizenry.

"She's rather cute, isn't she?" Ofelia's elbow prodded her brother.

"And she called you sir, Tiago."

"I am making it a gleaming-sharp point not to get attached to any of these people," Tiago said.

"A blackfeather. Here to murder everyone for what, rhubarb. Fuck my life."

"It's very special rhubarb," Ofelia said.

"Unlit, you might say."" You might." Tiago frowned at the palisade that surrounded the town. Atop its wooden walkways, torches were lighting a circle of flickering fulmination around Shaheill. Like a ritual circle.

"I'd hoped we might understand something about what's coming. Some way to be cheeky. As though there was any reason for a blackfeather to come to a village other than to raze it to the ground."

"So why?" Seth asked.

"Why Shaheill?"

"We can wonder once we're on the other side of this," Tiago said." If we survive it." Seth wasn't used to seeing the young man look this agitated.

"You ever deal with one?"

"We haven't," Ofelia said.

"But Mother's seen them on the Winter War front. She's told us stories." Tiago scanned the hasty bustle of the wakening village around them and closed into a huddle with Seth.

"This is about to be ugly as hell, Seth. And right now I can't think of a way to use you. If you don't want this fight, I'm excusing you." Seth tried not to let that sting, either, but he was trying that with a lot of stings right now and they were beginning to add up.

"I'm here, Tiago."

"It—" Tiago sighed and unbuckled the top strap of his black hauberk to fan his thin neck.

"Look, man. I'm too fucking tired and anxious to tiptoe. You're pulling your weight, you're handling yourself. But not with a blackfeather. I can't think of a clever way to use your clever bullshit. Sorry. Your talents. You know what I mean."

"Suppose so," Seth said, but Anna's snarl of a voice returned to him in a whisper: You aren't strong.

"Other than maybe climbing the big bastard," Tiago reflected.

"And I don't suppose that'd be much help on its own. You're able bodied and you can hold a spear and stand in a formation, so you can make yourself useful that way, but I'd hazard you've never done that before."

"Nope," Seth said.

"Never stood in a spear wall and faced a swarm charge or a rampaging siegebreaker seraph?"

"Can't say I have."

"Me neither," Tiago said.

"But I reckon I might tomorrow, and I bet it'll fucking suck. So if you want out, you say. That's all."

"And we won't think less of you," Ofelia added.

"Let's, uh… let's see how the night and the morning shake out," Seth said.

"And we'll figure the spear thing out if we get to it."

"All right, man." Tiago made a fist and rapped it on Seth's shoulder.

"Just no heroics. Anyone without the last name al Ydris is expendable. Or il Gutierre."

"You forgot for a second," Ofelia said.

"You basically called him Seth al Ydris."

"No I didn't," Tiago said.

"You did. You added il Gutierre at the end."

"Shut up, Feeli," Tiago said.

"He's being mean, dad."

"Shut up, Feeli," Seth said.