Across the Long Sea (23 page)

“Flour, oil, medicines. Fresh fruit. Fabrics and metals. Little by little, he's choking us.”

“It's not a single man camped on your eastern border,” Mal said. “It's an army. What's to stop another from taking his place, I've killed him?”

“
Can
you kill him?”

“I think you know I can.”

The Rani nodded and exhaled in quiet relief. “Kill him,” she said. “And Roue will take care of the desert wolves.”

She departed soon after, taking the guards away with her, leaving Mal to nurse cooling tea and pick at the small loaves of brown bread. Baldebert feigned sleep on his bench, snoring quietly. Liam eventually stirred and clamored from beneath rucked bedding. The lad perched on the second stool and tucked cheerfully into breakfast, making much of the golden tray as he ate. Jacob, rousted from his nest, paced the stone floor, muttering.

Mal's wrists ached. He rubbed them idly, turning his attention inward. His lungs were well healed, the damage done by Siobahn's
agraine
erased as if it had never been. He wondered if he could do the same to the chafe on his wrists, and to the throbbing puncture wound between his eyes, now that he had the way of it, if not the catalyst of deep water to aid him.

Liam was a shining white star past Mal's closed lids, flush with young life and health. Baldebert was an amber blur. Mal thought neither would notice if he stole a whiff of their life to ease his damaged flesh. Neither would miss a sliver of time chiseled from their allotted years.

Jacob launched himself from the floor, dug his claws deep into Mal's shoulder, piercing blanket and tunic, punishing. Mal swore and opened his eyes. Jacob tilted his glossy head, beak half parted in a laugh or a warning. The bird had a tongue, pink as Mal's own, and Jacob used it to cluck a warning in Mal's ear.

“Let be,” Mal warned.

Liam grinned into his breakfast. Baldebert's snoring grew more vigorous. Jacob settled comfortably on Mal's shoulder and began to clean his glossy feathers. Mal shut his eyes once more.

He could follow the shine of life up through the mountain, the guards in the hall, more muted amber, the rats running along the lift shaft, smaller sparks of vitality, as yet untouched by the threat of
curucas
-­laced bait. And at the base of the shaft, the engines, strong men to tend the pulleys and rope. More men halfway up the shaft. Six at the foyer level. Willing men, trained to their work, well fed and well cared for, but there was a gray cast to their shine, and the shadow of resignation muted their candle glow.

Mal retreated back into his aching flesh. He bolstered the wards in his head, walling away temptation. He opened his eyes and rose from the table, shrugging off the blanket as he went. He caught Liam secreting a chunk of brown bread up his sleeve, and said nothing. The boy had adapted well enough to life at court, but Mal knew from personal experience that early habits were the hardest to break.

Baldebert's bench scraped on stone as the man rose to attention. Mal heard bootheels strike stone in the hall, and knew their wait was over. Liam bolted the last square of cheese, nearly choking in his haste, then came to stand at Mal's side.

“Ready?” Mal asked.

“Aye, my lord.” Liam fisted crumbs from his mouth. “I know what you're thinking, my lord. You'll be wanting to leave me behind, but think again, my lord, because you haven't managed it yet. My lord.”

Mal saw Baldebert's shoulders twitch in ill-­concealed amusement.

“I hadn't given it any thought at all,” Mal lied. He'd argued himself around and around in circles over the boy's safety as he'd chased elusive sleep, and in the end decided Avani's lad would be most secure at his side. Better an assassin's co-­conspirator, he concluded, than left in the care of a ­people who named him demon.

Mal looped an arm around Liam's shoulders in a quick embrace. The lad stood quiet for a single heartbeat before breaking away.

“I'll be needing a new blade,” he said, determined. “T'other lost somewhere between here and there.”

The Rani and her guard came at last into view through the cell bars, and with them Tajit, hung with leather and steel, and behind Tajit two young maids with silk ribbons in their hair and great leather sacks balanced on their shoulders.

“I daresay that's been taken into account,” Mal replied. “Come, Liam, and we'll see if Roue's crafts­people are as skilled with armament as they are gold.”

 

Chapter Nineteen

I
T
WAS
THE
vocent's ring that made the sealing of the
sidhe
gates possible. Mal might have managed without the yellow jewel, by innate strength or with the additional boost of a dead woman's finger bone, as had been done in the warding of Mors Keep. But Avani's skills lay in healing and hedge-­witchery, and although she was quietly proud of her useful mage-­light, and the protection of her newly perfected wards, she soon discovered she hadn't the reserves needed to inscroll an endless parade of forgotten gates, nor the audacity to search Wilhaiim's graveyard for a bit of lingering ghostie to charge the spell.

“It's worse than murder,” she told Deval. The island man had taken to stopping by Mal's quarters nearly every evening, ostensibly to brief Avani on the state of the Worm in the city. Avani knew better. Deval always brought with him a hot meal to bolster her waning appetite, or a new ointment to ease flesh gone sour from too much time spent in Wilhaiim's chill underground. “There's no passing, not for energy spent in corpse magic. No change for sleep in the Goddess's arms, or another go around in mortal form. It's the darkest form of obliteration.”

“Your own uncle used to augur a dead man's bones,” Deval said. “My mother did the same. Another form of corpse magic, a spirit tied to the seer and made to speak the future.”

Avani, who remembered her uncle rolling arm bones in the shade of his small garden, wrinkled her nose. “Uncle was a fair man. He'd not make use of an unwilling spirit.”

Deval only arched his brows and said nothing.

A
VANI
HAD
SEAL
ED
five of Russel's
sidhe
gates and lost a good stone of her body weight, when she nearly collapsed over a child's Worm-­ravaged corpse in Mal's cold room. Russel caught her before she hit the stone slab. The soldier lowered Avani to the floor, slapped her wrists and buffed her cheeks. Avani put her face in her knees and sighed.

“Candles burnt too carelessly are soon gone to waste,” Russel scolded. The bruise under her eye was turning an ugly shade of green and yellow, her mouth nearly healed. “You'll do no one any good if you're forced to bed.”

Avani stared between her legs at the stone floor and breathed. The little girl on Mal's slab was barely weaned, her face unrecognizable beneath pustules and scab. The child's father worked in the king's personal guard. He'd kept his daughter's illness a secret, refusing the aid of the temple, and now it was possible he'd unknowingly brought infection back into the palace. Court was in uproar, the kingsman and the rest of his family confined to quarters, and Renault grown somber and near as thin as Avani.

The child's corpse hadn't held any answers, nor had eight others Avani had taken apart with Mal's tools. The gruesome task put Avani completely off food or sleep, while the lack of progress made her desperate. The sense of calm she'd felt after speaking to Mal in Jacob's sending had long since dissipated, and she was too worn to waste precious energy on another.

She'd convinced herself that once she sealed the last gate, the Red Worm would vanish like the nightmare it surely was.

“We have to get them closed.” She turned her head into one knee, fighting nausea. “Before all the children are gone.”

“Bit late to save the children,” Russel replied, blunt. She sat on her heels at Avani's side, squeezed Avani's shoulder. “It's the folk are still left I'm thinking of. And you're not going to manage another sealing when you can't even stay upright. A few days of rest, I think, His Majesty will understand.”

“
Ai
, did Malachi rest, then, last plague season, when the work became too difficult? Or the season before the last?” Avani lifted her head. “Did His Majesty send
Malachi
to bed with encouraging words and a hot posset?”

“Nay,” Russel replied. “You'll recall Lord Malachi also had Andrew to school him, and a wife to feed him up, and the ring on his finger keep weariness at bay.”

“The vocent's yellow stone?” Avani reached beneath her
salwar
for Andrew's ring on its chain, held it up. It was a dull amber in the cold room's chill light, dormant. “Mal says it's just for show.” But even as she said it she felt the fool, remembering Faolan's reaction to the jewel, and Mal's insistence that she keep the ring.

Russel eyed the ring with deep mistrust.

“Have you . . . ever . . . tried?”

“Never,” Avani replied, and felt the weight of pique bow her shoulders. “I've not thought . . .” She shook her head in self-­disgust. “I've submitted to the black, and made use of Mal's journal, but I'd not given thought to the ring.”

“Well.” Avoiding the yellow stone, Russel grabbed Avani around the waist and hauled her upright. “No time like the present. Here, let's wrap the poor lass for burial, and then I'll dig out the map. I've a door marked near the city gates we can try.”

Avani nodded. She looked down at the tiny corpse on the slab.

“Goddess keep you,” she murmured, as Russel sketched a theist blessing over the girl's heart. “And guard you forever against the failings of adulthood.”

I
T
WAS
A
bit like waking from a good night's sleep, slipping the ring over her second knuckle, or a splash of cold water to the face. Avani inhaled in surprise, then exhaled slowly in relief. Russel, standing beneath frost-­covered cellar rafters, map in hand, set the tips of her fingers on the hilt of her belt knife.

“It's glowing,” she said, unnecessarily. “Feel anything?”

“Mayhap.” Avani held her hand in front of her face. The ring was loose around her finger, but kept safely in place by her knuckle. She thought she'd have to have it sized for safety's sake.

“Your mage-­light's gone stronger,” Russel said, jerking her chin at the drifting sphere.

“Everything's gone brighter,” Avani agreed. “
Ai
, and I'm hungry again. Starving, in fact.”

“We'll feed you after.” Russel looked relieved. “Gate should be just here.” She walked along the edge of the cellar, boots slipping on icy flagstone. Spring wind and rain had warmed all of Wilhaiim but the deep cellars. Avani had grown used to cold feet.

The tavern owner whose cellar they were currently invading stood halfway down the wooden ladder, his own light held out over the floor.

“Never been any door down here, Corporal,” he said, chin screwed up in dismay. “I'd know if there was. Why, we've always kept the cheese and canning down here, but up off the ground, as you'll see, and the missus and I spent an entire summer building up the shelves. We'd have noticed.”

The walls were packed earth, and stacked stone, the cellar cut complete from the bedrock. Russel, her fingers over the undisturbed earth, then glanced again at the map.

“He's right. It's just soil and rock. No sign of anything bricked over like the others.”

Avani followed in Russel's footsteps, then stopped.

“It's there,” she said. “I can taste it. Right there.” She sketched lines on the stone with the toe of her boot. “In the floor.”

“Oh.” Russel blinked. “Oh!”

The tavern-­keeper only shook his head more rapidly. “Naught but stone on the floor, big slabs of it, mortar in between. Bloody Scald knows how it manages to ice up every warm season, but that it does.”

“It's there.” Avani insisted. She bent and spread her hand over the ground. The jewel in Andrew's ring shone steadily, unchanging, even as she could see the door's dimensions in her skull. “Three strides by three,” she said.

“That's most of my floor,” the tavern-­keeper sounded indignant. “Are you saying the barrow diggers are going to rise right out of my floor? The missus will have an apoplectic; we've already lost costumers to the Worm. What's His Majesty going to do about it, then?”

“He's sent me,” Avani said. She crouched, fingers splayed wide on the floor. “Stone,” she confirmed. “Flagstone. It's naught I can lift, even if that's what's meant. The gate must be somewhere below, covered over.”

“That's good, then,” the man on the ladder said. “Not like they'll come digging out through solid stone, is it?”

Russel looked up across the top of Avani's head.

“Seamus. They've dug out tunnels beneath the city, beneath the scarlet woods and the Downs. For all we know they've spread themselves under the dunes to the sea and beyond. You're thinking a cellar floor's going to keep them down, they want your blood and bones?”

Seamus's mouth worked and he nearly dropped his lantern.

“
Ai,
hush,” Avani said, as she had to Liam when he'd woken from dreams of Stonehill burning. “It's easily fixed.”

And because it was her fifth sealing, and because Andrew's ring on her finger provided the small boost of energy she needed -­ not so potent as Hannah Baker's corpse-­spirit, nor lasting as Mal's more intimate link -­ but subtly refreshing nonetheless, it wasn't difficult at all.

Peter Shean met them outside the tavern, as Russel folded the map against the wind and Avani stamped ice from her boots. Peter's eyes were smoke reddened, tears running down new groves in his cheeks. His tunic was stained and wrinkled, and he'd forgotten his mask.

“Avani.” He pushed past Russel, ran up onto the tavern's small porch. “Avani, will you come? It's my wife.” Seamus lingered in the door, scowling at Peter's unmasked face. Peter lowered his voice, even as he gripped Avani's hand in plea. “I know the signs as well as anyone. Avani, it's the Worm.”

P
ETER
S
HEAN'S WIFE
had a sad, sour mouth and blank eyes. She sat propped on a brocade chaise, wrapped in a silk coverlet, mending in her lap, and glared at her visitors. Fever shook her limbs and reddened her cheeks, but she refused to be coaxed into bed.

“Fergus died in that bed,” she said, shifting away from Peter's soothing hand. “I'll not follow him so soon. I'll sit here, if it please you, husband. I've things yet to do.”

“Fergus?” Avani asked. She didn't miss Russel's retreat to the far side of the room, or the fact that the breakfast dishes had not been cleared away, nor the evening fire set in Peter's large hearth. She supposed the servants had fled as soon as they'd taken notice of their mistress's failing health.

“Our lad,” Peter said. “He passed early spring; I fell ill immediately after, but Alice has been hale since the beginning, and she's not been out of our rooms but the once.” He cleared his throat. “When the theists came for Fergus's body.”

“You didn't say.” Avani looked into her friend's face and saw only dull acceptance. “I'm sorry.”

He dodged her touch exactly as his wife had avoided his own.

“There isn't a family hasn't lost a child,” he said, looking about the room as if searching for something familiar and failing. “Many more than one.”

“Our Fergus was mischievous, always into trouble, but he never meant any harm,” Lady Shean said, gruff. “His lungs failed in a single night, they did, the rest of him barely blistered. Then Peter had the fever, and the lurgy, for nearly a seven-­day. But it never grew worse, did it, husband? Because the Worm, it won't take grown adults.”

The last was said with such fervent belief that Avani almost smiled.

“My lady,” she asked. “Have you had the fever long?”

“Only since breakfast,” she said. “It came on sudden like, and pain like fire in my throat, and the itch in my eyes. Peter dismissed the maids, soon as he saw.” She scoffed. “They'll have spread word by now, and the priests soon come knocking at our door. I'll not go, Peter. Don't you let them in.”

“Alice,” Peter said. “Avani's come to help. Show her.”

Lady Shean grimaced. “I suppose it's of no account now. The scullery miss will have it all about court.” She began to roll up the sleeves of her dress. “We won't live it down, Peter. Not all three of us.” Her fingers slipped on the last of the tiny buttons on her cuff. Avani bent to help, ignoring Russel's halfhearted protest.

“Brave,” Lady Shean said with some respect. “The tonsured brothers, they were too afraid to touch our Fergus. I had to wrap him myself.”

Small pustules grew in clusters on both of the woman's forearms, red and weeping. Avani wondered how Lady Shean could bear to have the brush of sleeves over the wounds, and grudgingly acknowledged the other woman's determination.

“Anywhere else, my lady?” she asked.

“Just here, on my arms,” Lady Shean replied. “The lurgy came first, aye, and then the pox. Like Fergus. Only the Worm drowned Fergus in his own blood, and I can breathe just fine.”

Lady Shean's blisters were smaller than any Avani had seen on her sad collection of corpses. Earlier in the cycle of the disease? Avani wondered, or only differing symptoms in a grown woman? Some illnesses, she knew, would stay hidden in a body for days or seasons, only to appear when least looked for. Even so  . . .

She frowned, and followed Peter's uneasy gaze about the bedchamber.

“
Ai
, and have you done anything differently? Had any visitors in the last day? Eaten”—­Avani knew she was grasping—­“anything unlikely or new? Mayhap gone visiting?”

Lady Shean gave a bark of laughter.

“Visiting? No one leaves their chambers for fear of the pox, even His Majesty's musicals are canceled. The maids go in and out, of course, but I don't allow them to leave the castle proper, not even for fruits or veg. The meat and the milk and the lye come in by way of the royal kitchens, and that's by order of His Majesty's secretary.” She paused, wracked by a sudden shiver, then started upright.