The Crimson League (The Herezoth Trilogy) (17 page)

“I hadn’t noticed,” said Kora.

“I’m not sure if I should be proud or ashamed, but I can pick any lock in Podrar in under three minutes.”

Kora stared at the small-framed, red-headed amateur thief. Bendelof was the youngest of the group. Uneducated. Kora wondered briefly whether she knew Menikas was a prince; then her surprise at discovering Bennie a thief-in-training pushed all other wonderings away.

“Ranler trained
you
?”

Kora meant no insult, and Bendelof herself knew how unlikely the apprenticeship must seem. “I don’t expect to use the skills when I’m finished here. But then, I doubt I’ll ever know a normal life again, if you understand.”

“Someone will take up our work,” said Neslan. He looked up from his reading. “And more after them, and still others, as many as it takes.”

Kora shivered. Zalski’s parting admonition rang in her ears, as though he stood next to her, repeating it. “Someone else carrying on doesn’t do us much good,” she said. “I keep telling myself there’s a chance we’ll succeed. There’s some small chance…. I couldn’t do this if I didn’t believe that.”

Bendelof said, “I take one day, one objective at a time. I remember the little wins, and the people they were great wins for. And I know that if we fall, every one of us, well, we brought some small peace to this place, and I find some peace myself.”

Kora smiled. “You’re one of kind, Bennie.”

“I’m not the one who kept fifteen families in tact this afternoon.”

“Zalski never wanted to rip them apart.”

“He’d have done it, had you snubbed his invitation,” said Neslan, looking up once again from his book. Kora peered down at him.

“What has you so engrossed?”

“Just some poetry,” he answered. Kora stared at him, and he explained, “I’ve always been drawn to poems. I studied literature at the university. There’s a transcendence in poetry, in its language…. This is the one book I packed after the coup. I didn’t have space for it, but I crammed it in my sack anyway.”

“Read one aloud,” suggested Bennie.

Neslan cleared his throat and moved closer to the lamp set on the table. Then he read, with a tone so dramatic and with such good inflection it shook Kora to the quick:

“A vile and cruel master Love has proved;

Sweet lies he speaks whene’er he opes his lips.

False hope he gives, anxieties to soothe,

As lines of fair deceit with skill he quips.

My heart into surrender Love cajoled,

Entreating me to lower fast-held sword.

Convinced, upon my blade I loosed my hold,

And now am but Love’s captive, he my lord.

For sake of hope my heart I sacrificed;

For sake of dreams Love’s slave did I become.

But hope is false, and dreams be but a guise,

For, love’s accomplice both, they reason numbed.

Betrayed, my thought impaired, I shan’t break free...”

“But slave must I remain to treach’rous three.”

Kora spoke the final line, softly, as though she hardly believed it could be the right one. Neslan turned to her with bright, excited eyes.

“You know Trenzelag’s sonnet sequence?”

“Only that one poem. My father had a copy of it, he showed it to me once. Well, more than once, he said it was his favorite sonnet. He spent a year at university himself, in Yangerton, before his father died and he had to go home to work.”

Kora said nothing else. She still was not comfortable speaking about her father, and the sonnet, which she had never understood, took on an entirely new meaning when she thought about the League, and the coercions that kept its members functioning: memories and dreams of the world the way it was; hope to know that lost world once again, or at least the hope that loved ones might. As angry as Kora was with Lanokas, Brianna was real, and there had been no lie in his eyes when he spoke of her. Ranler wanted a just legal code restored, for the sake of his old accomplices. Kora herself kept pushing forward because of her family. To imagine Zacry trapped in a safehouse for years on end….

That was an awful thought, and Kora tried to push it away. More to make conversation than for any other reason, she asked Bendelof, “How did you get involved in this? I’ve never heard your story.”

“It’s a long one,” said Bendelof, concern in her eyes. “You haven’t slept in thirty-six hours, and you won’t rest much on the way to Yangerton.”

“I’ll sleep after you explain,” Kora told her.

Neslan returned to his reading. Bendelof was hesitant, but she said, “I’m from the farm country ten leagues west of here. Across the river. After Zalski’s coup things got real bad, especially in the closest village to where I lived with my grandmother. I was part of a group that would take milk, eggs, wheat—anything we could spare—from the farms and sell it cheap to the villagers, or give it to those who couldn’t pay. We were better off than most, and our thought was that by keeping people fed we were keeping them from the noose for stealing.”

“I bet the guards loved your little group.”

“They actually turned a blind eye, until Zalski came down on them to stop black market exchanges. One winter afternoon they arrested three of us in the village. I remember it was snowing, and I had a hole in my boot. I thought I’d freeze before we made it to the jail. I guess we were lucky the village resistance group freed us before we got there, ‘cause there would’ve been no getting us out of those holding cells. Anyway, the guards surrendered because they were only halfhearted about arresting us anyway, and Kansten was more surprised than she should have been to see I was one of those arrested.”

Kora’s eyes went wide. “Kansten?”

“She grew up at the neighboring farm from me.  She’s a good seven years older, and we never saw eye to eye, but her father was cruel and her mother ignored her for the most part, so she spent more time than she otherwise would have with my grandma. Kansten was a second grandchild to her, though we rarely listened to Gran’s stories together or cooked three in the kitchen. Kansten was devoted to Gran, so she wouldn’t let me go home out of fear they might arrest me there. She hid me in a storage closet in her parents’ barn. I slept there for two months, as terrified of her family as I was of the soldiers. I’d still go out with Kansten from time to time, disguised, to help her with her work when she needed it. When Laskenay wrote that they needed people here, the group sent the two of us. Not that they thought I’d be useful. They figured I’d be in danger around home, ‘cause I was known as a black marketeer. So I came to Podrar. I learned how to get along, but not as quickly as Kansten did. I surprised her with how quickly I did adjust, but looking back, I was nothing compared even to you, Kora.”

“My beginnings were less rustic than yours, that’s all. How long have you been with the League?”

“With Menikas, Ranler, and the bunch? One year and four months.”

Neslan shut his book. He told Kora, “When you realize the uncertainty’s what you really fear, you find how best to cope with it. Me, I prefer order in my life, so I read to maintain some semblance of control. I’ve read this book so many times I can recite half the sonnets from memory. They remind me I’m a man of reason, of deliberation, that nothing—nothing—can prevent me responding as I see fit to any situation. In tight spots I find one of those poems running through my brain, and I think clearer.”

Kora remembered how, facing Malzin in that warehouse, Sedder’s advice about making her story worth telling had forced an incantation from her lips. “I understand,” she said. “No,” she added, when Neslan shook his head, as though no one could possibly comprehend the guidance literature afforded him, “I do. I really do.”

“Then you’ve found your compass,” he told her.

“My what?”

“Your direction. The thing, or the thought, that puts you back in control of your decision-making when it seems you can’t control a blasted thing.”

“I guess I have,” said Kora.

Neslan put out his hand. Hesitant, for she had not expected the gesture, Kora gave it a single firm shake.

“Welcome to the League,” he told her. “No one without a compass is worth a damn in what we do.”

Bendelof threw Kora’s pillow to her. “You said you would rest a bit.” Kora had never felt so emotionally drained, not to mention physically exhausted, so she lay down despite the part of her that still ached with anger at the thought of Lanokas. She appeased herself directing Neslan to wake her the moment the prince walked in.

445

CHAPTER TEN

A Trust Shattered

No one woke Kora until it was time to leave. Bennie would not let them, with the result that Sedder had readied Kora’s things, Laskenay proposed that Kora report to her later about Zalski, and Kora herself had no time to speak to Lanokas—but with the prospect of a night journey ahead, she hardly cared, especially when Kansten told her they would not be going by the road but would cut as straight as possible across the woodlands between Podrar and Yangerton.

Kora’s face must have shown her reluctance, because Kansten clapped her on the shoulder. “We’re going as far tonight as we
have to to find a resting place, no farther. W
e just can’t sneak unnoticed from Po
drar by day.
Leaving by dark’s no problem.
Ranler’s traveled this path so often he could make the trip with no eyes.”

Sedder walked up to the two women and hugged Kora tight, as tight as when he had sent her off. “We were worried,” he admitted. “
I
was worried.”

“I can’t say Zalski was pleasant. But Menikas was right, if he’d wanted to harm me he wouldn’t have done it that way.”

“So what did he want?” asked Kansten. “What’d he offer? Did he want you to turn spy?”

“He wouldn’t trust me as a spy, there’s no way. He wanted…. Look, he wanted to shake my nerve, and he did a decent job.”

Sedder responded, “This is a bad time to tell you this, then, but I can’t make it wait: Menikas just asked me to stay behind. To help out Bennie and Neslan. I’ve gotten to know the two of them, and I think it’s a good idea.”

Kora’s throat dried out a little. She had not expected to leave Sedder behind for him to go stalking the elite guard. “When will you three catch us up?”

“When we feel like we’ve done what we can up here.”

He looked not only willing to stay in Podrar, but confident in the arrangement. That made it easier for Kora to say, “Be careful.”

“You too, especially in city limits. It’s no guarantee you’ll get safely to the woodlands.”

“We’ll be fine. So will you, just trust Neslan and Bennie, they’ve been at this longer than us. Watch yourself, Sedder. I mean it, be careful.”

“You already told me that,” he said, half-smiling. He embraced her again and kissed her cheek; she resisted the impulse to kiss him on the lips, and thanked the Giver that she had no time to dawdle. Bendelof tipped her an imaginary hat, and Kora smiled back to show there were no hard feelings for the decision not to wake her.

Bennie had ruined Kora’s chance to confess her love to Sedder, as well as prevented her from confronting Lanokas in the heat of her anger, and the sorceress was grateful for both interventions, unwitting as they were. Already she could think of the prince without her skin burning, and though to have a calm discussion with that liar might prove less satisfying than to yell and storm at him, Kora sensed self-composure might serve her best. Lanokas would still be a displaced royal when they reached Yangerton.

Kora’s cheeks only seared when she relived what a simpleton she had made herself out to be in front of Zalski, and as that was a memory best pushed away (though it returned far too often), she found herself thanking Lanokas civilly when he took her sack from her to allow her to climb from the lower room.

The sun had just set when Kora stepped outside. The last vestiges of daylight clung to the horizon, but they soon surrendered to the sliver of a red moon and the attempts of what streetlamps were not broken to lessen the dark’s stranglehold on the city.

Laskenay gave Kora the unsurprising command to hide during any attacks. Kora said she would, though she thought, in those circumstances, her invisibility would be better employed to help the others and determined to use it thus.

They made their way through the Landfill’s quiet neighborhood, then through a lively street that housed two pubs, a bakery, and a cheap inn. The goal was to avoid the Great Square, where a crew was at work rebuilding the scaffold: a goal easily met, though doing so lengthened the League’s trek a bit. Next came a string of gloomy apartment buildings. The League crossed a footbridge over a creek that cut the city, then waded across a brook to avoid the wider bridge of a main road, where guards stood sentry. They reached the woodlands well before the dead of night.

Here Ranler became their guide. They walked a faint trail through the trees that he followed with a lantern’s aid, a trail that, though overgrown, had fewer prickly weeds than the rest of the area and a smaller number of roots to stumble over. At a safe distance from the city, maybe four miles, they found a suitable clearing in which to pass the night, and Kora volunteered to take first watch.

“I’ve slept most recently,” she told Menikas. He accepted her reasoning on condition that someone sit up with her. To Kora’s chagrin, Lanokas volunteered. His willingness was no shock, really; he wanted to know about the meeting with Zalski. The others settled down as comfortably as they could, leaving Kora huddled with her blanket and her guard partner, who kept silent until the air was full of soft, quiet breathing and Kansten’s occasional snore. Then Lanokas broke the night with an anticipated whisper.

“What did Zalski want?”

“For me to join him.”

“Bribes? Blackmail?”

“Nothing beyond his pardon. That surprised me, actually. I thought he’d offer more.”

Lanokas shook his head. “You don’t know Zalski.”

“And you do,” Kora hissed. “I know.”

Lanokas stared at her, perturbed. “Is something wrong?”

“
Royally
.”

Kora’s partner groaned. “I was worried he’d tell you.”

“I looked like an idiot! Working against him with the princes he deposed and not even aware of it…. Why wouldn’t you tell me yourself?”

“Your first night with us, when you found me on guard, you were frightened, yes? You knew no one among the League. And then we talked, and I could tell you were starting to feel more comfortable. You were taking steps in that direction, at least. Revealing who I was might have destroyed that. Kora, you could never relate to my position.”

Kora jabbed a finger at her forehead. “Not relate to being different?”

“You had your own unique situation to adjust to. You didn’t need to be dealing with mine.”

Kora stopped herself from responding curtly. To keep calm she stared at a tree trunk a few feet away, visible only as a darkness more solid than its surroundings. “I needed to know,” she said. “You should have told me, if for no other reason than the raid we went on the next morning.”

“I respectfully disagree.”

“Then I should have known before you sent me straight to Zalski.”

“When we’d just learned Zalski had an illegitimate royal killed? You’re right, knowing I was the king’s son would have calmed all your worries.”

Kora gripped Lanokas’s arm with a jerky movement. “How did he know?” she whispered.

“Know what?”

“That no one had told me about you? How did he know? You don’t think….”

“None of us is a spy,” said Lanokas. “Zalski’s known me all my life. He knows how I react to people. Thanks to his guardsmen, he knows how we two met. When he met you….”

“He put two and two together.” Kora bit her lip. “If nothing else, he thought you might not have told me, that it was a possibility. Nothing I said proved otherwise. The man’s either very confident, or a good actor.”

“A bit of both,” said Lanokas.

Kora tried to pinpoint exactly what about meeting Zalski had alarmed her so much. It was the lack of vivid threats, she realized; the way the sorcerer left ultimatums beneath the surface, allowing Wilhem’s death, even Kora’s life in hiding to hint of the undertow near which the entirety of the League was treading water. To expose its precise locale would make the current pose less of a danger, would make it less fearsome. Even now, stuck in Podrar, Sedder was one mistimed action away from being dragged under as Wilhem had been.

Kora raised her eyes to Lanokas, her voice shaking.

“Does Sedder know? He warned me about secrets.”

“Menikas told him when they were searching for the
Librette
. I asked him not to mention my birth to you, to let me handle that. Don’t be angry with him.”

“Oh, I’m not. Not with Sedder. My God
,
Lanokas, do you know what makes Zalski so dangerous? He’s instinctual. He knows what lies and secrets do to people, what a chokehold secrets have on this group. I don’t trust you anymore. I don’t trust any of you. And I swear on all that’s holy if I had somewhere else to go….”

“Kora….”
             
“No. Excuses. Always there’s excuses with you people. It astounds me you tell me to leave and save myself, you think me so valuable, yet it’s beyond you to think I can handle the simple truth. How the hell do you expect me to fight with strangers and succeed? I don’t care what your motives were, you should never
have let me go to Zalski not knowing who you are!”

He consented, “Fair enough,” but Kora knew he was only appeasing her. She pulled her blanket tight and turned her back to him with a huff, wishing it were day so he could see her roll her eyes, and made her voice deliberately cold when next she spoke, two hours later, to say they should wake the next guard.

The crown prince’s first order of business in the morning was to ask Kora about Zalski. What did he want from her? What specifically had he said, his phrasing? How had she replied, not just words but in tone? Her temper had flared? That was no good, no good at all, he’d interpret that as defensiveness born of fear.

“I don’t know how he judged me and I don’t care. I hope never to set eyes on the man again.”

Menikas turned severe. “You can hope that all you want. You’d best be prepared for the alternative.”

“Let him think me a coward. Let him underestimate….”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Porteg. You might think you’ve seen enough to know what he’s capable of….”

“I’ve been in a raid. An ambush. Rescued Wilhem just to watch him die. And that little chat with Zalski and Malzin…. I have a pretty good idea what….”

“Malzin?” said Menikas. “Was she there? She didn’t touch you at any point?”

“She wouldn’t deign to come near me, don’t worry.”

Laskenay joined them, they lagged behind the others, and Kora kept answering Menikas, though she left out all mention of learning his true identity. His domineering manner irked her less than before, now she knew where it came from. Laskenay listened with him but said nothing. They both looked concerned at how shaken Kora seemed, especially when she started avoiding Lanokas with no clear cause. For the journey’s duration, Kora only spoke to him when she had to, though she did try to keep from sounding bitter on those occasions.

The League reached Yangerton at sundown on the third day, and everyone, Kora included, was too exhausted to do anything but wash and bless the opportunity to sleep on an actual mattress. The next morning Kora woke refreshed, surprised to find the change of scene had lightened her antipathy toward Lanokas. His presence did not annoy like before, and she wished him good morning without his speaking first. Kansten pulled her aside before he could reply.

“You still planning to enchant my amulet?”

“Which book was the spell in?”

“The
Librette
, I think.”

Kora’s heart grew light. After all she had griped to Lanokas about secrets, she would be a hypocrite to cast that spell without Laskenay knowing. Now she saw that she could not.

“I’ll do it today, if I can. I’ll need
the spell from Laskenay, though. S
he’s got the book, and the list of incantations we made going through it.”

“Let’s go ask her.”

Laskenay agreed to the enchantment, and even suggested Kora stay in with her while the men went to meet with Galisan. She asked Kansten to stay as well, as an object upon which to cast spells.

“Oh no I won’t.”

“Kora has to cast them on someone.”

“Why not you?”

“I should be in a state to reverse them, in case she can’t. She won’t cast anything that could harm you, you have my word. Think of it as payment for enchanting your amulet.”

So
that
was why the apartment was suddenly secure enough for the amulet’s spell. Still wary, Kansten agreed. The princes set off with Ranler, and Laskenay put up a sound barrier in the main room. “First,” she said, to Kora, “I never talked to you about that fire spell in the warehouse. You could have killed me.”

Taken aback, Kora sputtered, “I’m so sorry! I’m sorry, it was the only thing I could think of and I knew I needed to free you and it….”

“It was the proper move,” Laskenay told her. “I told you to use magic as a last resort. There was nothing else you could have done, and the execution was perfect. Don’t be afraid of risks when you have to take them.” Kora nodded. Kansten, in the corner, looked put out that she had no idea what they were talking about. “Now, I want you to try the spell I used against Malzin. It’ll freeze you, Kansten, but you won’t feel a thing. Come more to the center of the room, please…. When you’re ready, lunge at Kora. She should remember the incantation.”