Winter's Reach (The Revanche Cycle Book 1) (25 page)

Dante grabbed letters by the fistful, shoving them into his pouch, stuffing them under his vest, anything to save them from the growing fire. Smoke billowed through the attic and stung his watering eyes as the blanket of flames above their heads continued to spread, fast and hungry and hot.

Werner was the first down the ladder, with Mari right on his heels. He only made it halfway before a stout length of chain lashed out of nowhere, wrapped around his ankle, and hauled him down, tearing his grip from the rungs. Werner fell backward, arms flailing, and cracked his head against the floor. He didn’t get back up.

Lips curled back in a sudden, feral rage, Mari jumped down through the trapdoor hatch like a falcon plunging toward its prey. She landed in a crouch, the tortured wood groaning under her boots, drew her batons, and lunged. Pig Iron waited in the corner, his leering grin shrouded under the battered full-face helm of a Murgardt infantryman. His tattered leathers were adorned with riveted plates here and there, making him look like some kind of scrapyard golem. He yanked the chain from Werner’s ankle and clutched it between his meaty fists.

Mari’s batons whipped against his shoulder and hip, clanging off tarnished steel. He laughed and flung out one end of the chain toward her eyes. She lifted a baton to block and the chain spun around it, yanking it from her grip and sending it skidding down the hall.

Dante climbed down, followed by billowing smoke. He dodged clear of the fight, crouched at Werner’s side, and pressed his hand to his chest, feeling for a heartbeat. He looked up as Sykes climbed the stairs to the second floor. Standing at the far end of the hallway, he gave Dante a hungry smirk and plucked the meat cleaver from his belt. He slashed the air, spinning the cleaver in his grip, gracefully twirling the wooden handle between his fingers in a practiced dance of murder.

“Don’t worry,” Sykes said. “Once our boss gets what he needs out of you, we’re not takin’
all
of you back to Mirenze. Just your head. Your body can stay a free man.”

Pig Iron’s chain-wrapped fist cracked against Mari’s chin, stunning her and sending her staggering back a step. He got behind her, fast, and wrapped his arms around her in a brutal bear hug that clamped her arms at her sides and squeezed her ribs so hard the air gushed from her burning lungs. As she squirmed in his grip, he dragged her closer to the window at the end of the hall.

Sykes took a run at Dante, cleaver raised above his head. Dante stood up from his crouch, squared his footing, and watched him come. He didn’t move an inch, just stood steely-eyed and waited for the blade to fall. At the last possible second he lunged toward Sykes, getting inside his reach, swinging up a forearm to push away his swing and throwing a punch with his other fist that cracked Sykes’s nose and left Dante bloody-knuckled.

“I was the captain of the Mirenze militia,” Dante roared as he drove his knee up into Sykes’s gut, doubling him over. “Did you think I got the job without learning how to
fight
?”

Black spots bloomed in Mari’s vision, her air long gone as Pig Iron dragged her to the window. Out in the darkness, by the tree line, she caught the glimmer of steel and understood why. Lydda was aiming her crossbow. With heartbeats before the shot, Mari ducked her head and bit into the back of Pig Iron’s ungloved hand. Her teeth chewed into skin and vein, coppery blood pouring down her throat as he howled behind his helmet and loosened his grip. She pivoted, twisting her shoulder and throwing him off-balance, spinning them around just as Lydda’s bolt punched through the glass and straight into Pig Iron’s back.

The big man dropped to the ground in a spray of broken glass, twitching and thumping his feet as he died. Sykes saw his partner go down just before Dante delivered a lightning-fast rabbit punch to his throat. Choking, eyes tearing up as the roiling smoke from above filled the narrow hall, Sykes turned and ran in a blind panic.

Mari drew in a deep breath only to cough it right back out again. Weak-kneed, she still forced herself to wade through the thickening smoke to Werner’s side.

“He’s just out cold,” Dante said. Mari nodded, coughing again, and got her arms under Werner’s shoulders. Dante helped her, and the two of them dragged Werner down the stairs, just ahead of the growing fire. Flames licked the ceiling over their heads, searing the old wood black, and the lodge trembled under their feet.

Out in the clearing, there was no sign of Sykes or Lydda, but Mari wouldn’t let Dante stop moving until they were past the weeds and into the forest proper. They laid Werner down behind a clump of tangled brush, stayed low, and watched the shadows. Nothing moved out there, nothing but the yellow glow as the fire devoured Fox End.

“They’re long gone,” Dante whispered as Werner groaned, coming around. “Cut their losses and ran.”

“They’ll be back,” Mari said. “Did you get the letters?”

Dante nodded, patting his vest. Werner sat up, rubbing the ugly red knot blooming on the back of his head.

“We all right?” he asked Mari. Mari didn’t say anything. She stared out into the darkness, frozen in a panther crouch.

Timbers groaned and snapped as the lodge slowly collapsed, a section of blackened roof teetering and crumbling in on itself. Dante had a tiny smile on his lips as he watched it burn.

“They won’t be far,” Mari said, “and they’ll try again. We’ll set our horses free. Go through the forest on foot, covering our tracks as we go, staying parallel to the road.”

“Mari,” Werner said.

She acted like she hadn’t heard him. “We’ll make camp for the night as soon as we’re a safe distance off and I’m sure they’re not tracking us.”

“Mari.”

“In the morning we can choose a new direction,” Mari said. “Or just go our separate ways, if that’s what we decide.”

“Mari!”

She turned her head to glare at Werner. “
What?
”

“Those things Sykes said back there, we should talk about it—”

“I can’t talk to you right now,” she said flatly, standing up and brushing autumn leaves from her patchwork armor.

She looked up to the canopy of stars, reckoned their direction, and pointed west. Dante followed her as they made their way through the brush, leaves rustling in their wake. Werner trailed a few feet behind.

A fever took hold of Benignus in the night, staining his silken sheets with sweat and making his aching joints tremble and clench. His vision was all but gone now, lost in a pearly fog, but a light like the morning sun bloomed before him.

The light
, he thought.
The Gardener beckons me. It’s time
.

A firm, warm hand held his. He curled his lips back in a pained smile. Amadeo. His faithful friend, true to the end. Of course he would be here.

“Watch,” he wheezed, “watch Carlo. Please. Remember…remember your promise.”

The hand tightened over his. Reassuring him. The next generation of the Serafini family would hold the papal throne. Hold it and do honor to it. His legacy was assured now.
Carlo will be so good, so strong! They will call him the greatest of leaders, the holiest of men.

“Livia will help,” he rasped, his voice failing him. He needed her here, now. Needed his son here, in his final moments. “Go,” he said, pushing the hand away. He meant to say… he wasn’t sure what he meant to say. His thoughts slid away like grains of sand in a sieve, and his joints were so cold, but the light was so warm, growing so bright and so very inviting.

*   *   *

Carlo stared down at his father in mute horror.

Watch Carlo. Remember your promise
.

“It was you,” he whispered, still clutching his father’s hand as the old man labored to breathe. “It was you putting Amadeo and Livia up to it. You never wanted me to inherit your throne.”

His grip tightened on the pope’s hand, almost cracking his frail bones.

“Livia will help,” Benignus wheezed, squinting up at Carlo but not seeming to see him at all.

“Father,” Carlo said, “it’s me!
Me
, Carlo! Your son! How could you do this to me? I know I wasn’t…I wasn’t always the best of sons, but I’m the only one you have! You said you
loved
me!”

Benignus shoved his hand away and rasped, “Go.”

Carlo stood there, mouth agape, shaking his head slowly as the old man’s head flopped on the pillow, his near-sightless eyes fixed on the flame of the bedside candle.

With one last, rattling gasp, Pope Benignus died.

“To the Barren Fields with you then,” Carlo whispered, his lips curling with disgust. “You lost, Father. Your throne
will
be mine. The throne and all that goes with it. When the histories are written, it’ll be
my
name they remember,
me
they’ll be talking about for generations to come. You’re nothing but a footnote.”

He stormed out of the room. In the little office outside Benignus’s bedchamber, Sister Columba puttered in the linen closet. She looked up at the sound of the door slamming in Carlo’s wake. He stopped, glaring at her, and pointed back toward the bedroom.

“He’s dead,” Carlo snapped. “Deal with the body.”

Then he was gone, leaving the elderly woman alone with her sudden tears.

Freda walked the docks in the hour just before dawn, down in the Alms District. The freckled urchin didn’t have anywhere else to be, and she loved the way the sky glowed when the morning sun peeked its head up over the sleeping city. Winter’s hand hung over the streets. Not long before it would tighten its grip, and there’d be no time for indulgences. She’d have more little ones to bury, she knew, the ones who died from the frost or the hunger. She buried them so no one else would have to.

She walked on the edge of a dock, as close to the brink as she dared, holding her arms out and putting one ragged shoe in front of the other like she was a tightrope walker in the carnival. Down below, the waters were black, reflecting the icy sky. By the edge of the pier the water was choked with trash, discarded boxes and bottles and slops the fishmongers couldn’t sell. A rotten odor hung in the air here, clinging to the wet and slimy wood.

Under the dock, a corpse slowly floated by.

A corpse in a priest’s cassock.

Freda dropped to her knees on the wood and reached down, grabbing the hem of the cassock in her fingertips and holding fast. A few docks down, sailors were loading a barge with goods for the south. She looked back over her shoulder and screamed for help at the top of her lungs, waving frantically with her free arm. One of the men, a dark and sweaty islander, dropped his crate and ran over. Once he saw the body in the water, he shouted to the others.

Freda bit back a second scream when the sailors hauled the man out of the filthy water and she saw Amadeo’s face.

They laid him on his back on the dock. One of the sailors, another islander, waved for room and straddled Amadeo’s chest. He shoved down on the priest’s ribs, digging calloused fingers in his throat. Freda stood to the side and watched, her hands clamped over her mouth, every muscle in her body tense as a steel cord.

Amadeo’s chest spasmed. The sailor rolled him onto his stomach, and Amadeo vomited up a torrent of seawater and blood, spilling across the weathered planks. He coughed, sputtering, and fell limp.

“Is—” Freda said. “Is he—”

“There is more water in his lungs,” the sailor said in a thick Enoli accent. “And cold in his bones. With blankets and a fire, he might live.”

“Might?”

He shrugged. “Flip a coin.”

*   *   *

On the far side of a nightmare, Amadeo slowly opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was the light of a crackling fire, warming his cheeks as he nestled under a pile of scratchy blankets woven from cheap, coarse wool. It took a moment for his vision to swim back into focus, but he knew there were faces all around. The first one he saw was Freda’s.

“I knew you wouldn’t leave us,” she whispered.

All around her, the orphans of Salt Alley nodded, with grimy faces and wet eyes. They stood in a dirt-floored cottage, more of a one-room shack with rough timbers overhead and ill-hammered walls, and they weren’t alone. Gallo Parri stood at his bedside, the barrel-chested guardsman looking grave and pale.

“They came and got me as soon as you were fished from the drink,” he said. “Tell me you had an accident, Amadeo. Tell me you slipped and fell, and this wasn’t what I think it was. Comfort my worried mind.”

“You know it was no accident,” Amadeo said, groaning as he pushed back the blankets and forced himself to stand. His ribs ached with every breath, and his stomach muscles burned. “And I have no comfort to give, not this day. Where is Livia? It’s urgent that we—”

He froze, staring out the window of the shack.

Higher up the hill, far away and over the rooftops, he could make out the curve of the dome over the papal estate. And the thick, black curling plume that rose from the chimney there. A chimney only used two times in every generation, to send a message to the world in the form of colored smoke.

“What does it mean?” asked one of the children, standing at his side and following his gaze.

A single tear rolled down Amadeo’s cheek. His hands clenched helplessly at his sides.

“It means my friend is dead,” Amadeo whispered. “And I wasn’t there for him when he needed me most.”

The shack door swung open on rusted hinges, and another child led Sister Columba in by the hand. Amadeo swept her into a wordless embrace and held her tightly, pushing away his own tears while she soaked his shoulder with her own. She finally pulled back, wiped the sunken lines of her face with the back of her hand, and took a deep, shuddering breath.

“Livia?” Amadeo said.

“Imprisoned in her rooms. Safe for now. Carlo’s gone mad, Father. And Rimiggiu is dead.”

“By whose hand?” Gallo demanded, stepping toward them.

“By the ‘knights’ guarding the papal estate,” Amadeo said tiredly. “The same ones who tried to murder me. They’re frauds, mercenaries hired by the Banco Marchetti. Lodovico Marchetti and Carlo are plotting together. They aim to seize the throne by any means necessary.”

“Cardinal Accorsi betrayed you,” Columba said. “I’ve overheard him talking to Carlo.”

Amadeo’s hands clenched even harder. “Decided to back the winning team, I’m sure. He offered us up as a sacrifice to weasel his way into Carlo’s good graces.”

“I have to get back to the estate,” Columba said. “It’s dangerous for me to leave the grounds at all. Carlo is…you’ve never seen him like this before, Father. He snarls at every shadow. He’s convinced he’s surrounded by thieves—”

“But Livia is safe? You’re certain?”

Columba nodded and clasped her hands together. “I bring her meals. She’s strong. Livia is always strong.”

“I know.” Amadeo forced his hands to unclench, reached out, and gently squeezed her shoulder. “Best get back before anyone notices you’re gone. Keep your head down. I’ll send word when I’m ready to move.”

“Move?” Columba said. “What are you going to do, Father? Carlo has killers at his beck and call, the resources of the Holy City at his fingertips…soon he’ll be pope, and his word will be law. You can’t fight him.”

Amadeo let go of her shoulder. He turned away and took another step toward the window, looking up at the plume of black smoke. His heart was strangely peaceful as he came to his resolution.

“Benignus was my best friend in the world. I failed him. I
will not
fail his daughter. I swear this. I swear it by water, soil, and sun. No matter what it costs, no matter what it takes, I
will
set Livia free. And I will see Carlo pay for what he’s done.”