Thus our Headless-heavy weekend draws to a close and the eye shifts back to PotV. I will have my monthly update for you all on Tuesday, btw. There's a good reason I had to delay it a bit; we'll talk then. In the meantime, this ended up being another twofer. Mazel tov!
***
”I want to take her for a turn first,” Seth said. “Just around the block.”
The stable groom twisted his face as he patted his palfrey’s flank. “We don’t do that.”
“I’m with the Verdugo.” Seth held up his new coin purse. “Annalise al Ydris. Ask her if you don’t believe me.”
The look on the groom’s face made it clear how eager he wasn’t to approach an unlit Verdugo.
“Here.” Seth pulled his stiletto from his boot and held it out. “I’ll leave this with you as collateral. Fine, fine blade. You could get five score for that, easy.”
She was a sleek black-and-white palfrey with bright, placid eyes. A month of riding the drafts and drays of the al Ydrises, and it was like night and day, how smooth her gait was and the calm obedience with which she took corners.
He took his second, and then turned her toward the city gate, and left Fontana. He patted his boot and felt the stiletto there, ready as ever.
Dusk was already underway when Fontana’s outskirts gave way to plainland. The sky was a deep hunter green as he passed the last Fontana-field roadhouse. He slowed the horse’s canter, then sped up again. He’d sleep on the road. He was fine at that. And he wanted to be as far as he could.
In the burnt-sage dark he listened to the rattle and the billow of the wind outside his tent—he’d kept the tent. He had a sorcerous weapon, now, and a new hexentat, and a horse, and a newfound aptitude for swordwork. He had money and he hadn’t even counted it. This he now did, by feel, turning every solitar and brace and score over in his fingers, and by the time he’d piled them up he was worth two hundredscore in jade and nickel. More money than he’d ever had.
In a month, he’d gotten all of this. The luckiest month of his life. His creditors dead, his future wide, his pockets full. The dream of all thieves. A genuine blessing from St. Procas.
His hands itched. His hands itched so hard they burned. He scratched until they hurt, and they still itched.
There’s something fucking excellent waiting to come out of you, Seth il Gutierre, she’d said.
Hot tears cut their way down his face. He wept himself to sleep.
He woke up in a moment of delirious elation. It had been a dream. He knew it—it had just been a bad dream.
But it hadn’t been. It had all happened. The best night of his life, and then the worst, and he was waking up alone.
His fingers were raw from last night’s clawing. Something had happened to them. He frowned in confusion—he’d thought the itching was just on his brain, but his skin was—
Gray. Gray and discolored. His toes too, he realized, as he took them out from the blanket. A month with the al Ydrises and one evening of lush touch with Lisa, and now the pads of his fingers would show it forever.
Fine. He could cover these with gloves when he needed, or a bit of skin paint, or really it didn’t matter. Nobody’d notice at a glance. You really dodged a bullet, he told himself.
But he didn’t feel like he’d dodged. He felt the hole in him.
He saddled his stolen horse. “You’re wondering about your name, maybe,” he said.
She blew air out between her floppy horse lips. Her ear twitched.
“I’ll call you Annalise al Equis,” he decided. “Because I’m never gonna see the other one again. And at least this way I finally get a ride.”
He scoffed dryly at his own stupid asshole joke and clambered into his saddle.
The morning was spent in riding. He let the rhythm of it take him out of his body, let the hours roll onto and over him like a substance, and did his best not to think about anything at all. Briefly he allowed himself to speculate about something as innocent as lunch, and then a memory came to him, of sitting atop the carriage splitting a roast chicken with the al Ydrises, and laughing and bullshitting. And so he tightened the border of his brain, and beat any thought that dared to raise its head into submission.
He waited to hear something from the Fox. But it said nothing.
The sun was beginning its descent. He allowed himself to turn into the next roadhouse he saw, a middle-of-nowhere clapboard two-story on the edge of a cattle ranch called The Sirloin.
“The sirloin’s good, then?” he asked the silverhaired, beak-nosed bartender.
“It’s fine,” the man said, mechanically.
“It’s shit,” came the call from the fireplace, where a meager handful of other patrons were gathered.
“I’ll have the sirloin,” Seth said. “And whatever beer’s second-most expensive.”
The bartender wrote sirloin on a slip with a dug-in resentfulness at the affront of having to do his job. “We got two beers.”
“There you go, then.”
Seth drank his watered-down swill and ate his sirloin, which was somewhere acceptably between shit and fine, and became a human again, briefly, with human thoughts, to work out where exactly he was heading.
Not Prossimo. Not any of the places they’d been. She’d be there again next year. He had to go somewhere far, further than he’d ever gone. Maybe to Tuthima. He’d always wondered about life in Tuthima. He’d ride south, and he’d pick it up again as he went, and all the vulnerable spots he’d opened up would callus over again, and he’d find a bedmate a head shorter than him and never look twice again at a pair of white-on-black eyes.
A stool scratched out to his right.
“Hello,” Tiago al Ydris said.
“No,” Seth said.
Tiago settled into his seat and undid the clasp of his charcoal felt traveling cloak. “No what?”
“No,” Seth repeated. “No, Tiago. We’re done. We don’t know each other anymore.”
“We don’t?” Tiago smirked. “You have a fall off that horse you stole?” A half-dozen pairs of eyes swiveled their way. “We’ve already paid for it, people. Mind your own mud, please.” He knocked on the bar. “I’ll have whatever he’s drinking, please.”
“You old enough?” the bartender asked.
“You give a shit?”
The bartender shrugged and pulled a draft.
“I am sorry you rode all this way,” Seth said, as Tiago received his drink. “Don’t do it again, okay? Stop trying to find me.”
“Just because you gave up at the first obstacle doesn’t mean I have to, Seth il Gutierre.”
Seth scowled. “First obstacle? I fucking hunted seraphs for that woman. And now she wants nothing to do with me anymore.”
“She wants everything to do with you, Seth. She’s desperate for you. It’s really fucking obvious.”
“It seemed obvious to me that she wanted me gone.”
“If you wanna hear she’s miserable right now, I can tell you she is,” Tiago said. “Normally she’s stiff upper lip, y’know, but she can’t even hide it. Went and postponed the executions again, pissed everyone off. Didn’t leave her room all day.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better,” Seth lied.
“Come back, then.”
“No.”
“Come back and fix her, Seth,” Tiago said. “Don’t make me find a set of stairs, huh?”
This brought a scoff of unwelcome amusement to Seth. “Whatever she needs, I can’t give. I tried.”
“She’s sabotaging herself because she doesn’t think she deserves you,” Tiago said. “And she thinks being unlit is a curse.”
“And I suppose you don’t,” Seth said.
A couple of the travelers in the barroom sidled their ways out. Others tried to hide how attentive they are to this conversation. The bartender stood inexpressive as a decorative suit of armor; Seth didn’t think he was pretending.
“Of course not,” Tiago said. “And don’t pretend you do. I look dead cool, and I get to fly, and I’m gonna live into my hundreds. It’s amazing. It kicks ass. Sure, people look at you like you’re some sort of diseased monster, and you can’t have babies, but it’s not like they were looking at you with big smiles, eh?” He gestured around the barroom and several faces turned urgently away. “And I don’t think you care about kids of your own. I don’t. The only problem is I’ve been going through puberty for a decade but you’re already through that. This is the perfect time for you to get snuffed.”
“Not to hear her tell it.” Seth looked dismally into his drink. “She’s acting like I’m a child. It’s dumb.”
“I know it is, man. The people we love are dumb sometimes. Is that a deal-breaker?”
“Of course it isn’t,” Seth said, and surprised himself with the vehemence of it.
“Then nut the fuck up,” Tiago said. “And get back there.”
Seth retreated back to the grayish hill of his subpar sirloin and busied himself with sawing another chunk from it. “I’m not the kind of guy who chases a woman when she’s told me no.”
“Il Gutierre—hold on.” Tiago took a draw from his tankard. “Lemme be clear here, okay? I have come here asking you to fuck my mom.” Not even the bartender was ignoring them, now. Tiago made no indication he cared. “I need recognition about how difficult this is.”
“I recognize it.” Seth forced his spine straight. Here was ground he would not give. “But I need to hear it from her. If she really wants me, she can come and get me.”
Tiago sighed. One last long gulp of his tankard, and he stood. “I’ll go and fucking tell her that, I suppose. Passing notes in class.” His voice rose an octave and went wispy like his sister’s. “Are you mad at me, check yes or no.”
He strode to the roadhouse’s swinging six-panel door. He tarried for a moment.
“You’ve become one of us, Seth,” he said. “Not unlit, maybe, not yet. But you’ve gone al Ydris.”
Seth tensed his jaw to keep his shock from showing. “You calling me your fucking brother or something?”
“I’m calling you an idiot,” Tiago said. “Pretend you don’t feel it for as long as you want. But we’re where you left us for the rest of the week.”
He strode into the night.
Seth glared around the room. “Get your show’s worth? Anyone wanna toss a coin in my hat?”
“All right now, sir.” The bartender slid his emptied tankard away. “You’re the one who carried on in a public house with a crow-eye.”
“Whatever.” Seth tapped a score coin onto the bartop. “Give me whatever room this’ll pay for and leave me alone.”
He was shown to his sparse room, and told to keep thick socks or shoes on for the floor and that the Sirloin wasn’t responsible for any splinters if he didn’t. He judged his socks thick enough to kick his boots into a corner, underhanded his effects across the room to join them, and locked his door (a cheap four-pin shackle, child’s play). He sat on his scratchy bed, and lay on his back, fully clothed, and told himself you’re tired from the ride and you’re a cup deep. You’ll get some good sleep. You have that.
He stayed up thirty minutes, and the hell of it was they weren’t even spent in tortured longing, at least not consciously. Just in staring at the ceiling in a pool of miasmatic nothing. The roadhouse's walls were thin enough that the industrial-grade tinnitus drone of the ranch's slaughterhouse dynamo vibrated through them. Seth thought of the preservative blood sloshing through its blackout chambers.
That's all she'd been. Just another cell of the Legion swimming its veins. That's all. What kind of idiot would fall in love with that?
How many days, he asked himself, before you’re racking your brain for a way back to her? How many more days can you pretend you have any hope in the wild, when she’s domesticated you?
And as if this admission had been the tether keeping him to the world, he slept.
He dreamt about the choke tunnel. He crawled and crawled and the voice at the end kept changing as it urged him on. Annalise, Lisa, Anna, Annalise again, and then Rohan and Uncle and some woman he didn’t recognize, and the water was getting warmer, was steaming, and steaming against his face like a sauna, and his breathing thickened.
There was a Fox in the tunnel, dripping water, eyes shiny and black. “Wake the fuck up,” it said.
And Seth woke up, and his room was on fire.
The curtains burned merrily, roiling the ceiling with a thick choking blanket of smoke. Seth tumbled sideways to the floor, staring wildly about for his stuff.
His stuff was the pyre. In the corner of the room. It was all burning, his money, his supplies, his gear, his boots, his—
The stiletto. It was the fucking stiletto. It was white-hot in the heart of the fire. It had melted through the leather that contained it. It shone like a blazing star.
Seth scrambled for the door key, and scalded his fingers on the blistering lock as he opened it. He sprinted for the stairs, halfway fell down them, rolled at the bottom into the empty bar. Empty. The fire’s crackle was rising to a storm-sound above him.
“Hey,” he roared. “Fire! Hey! Where is everyone?”
No time to worry for anyone else. He shouldered himself out the door of the Sirloin and fell forward into the dust, and the burning roadhouse illuminated the grasses like the fur of a vast amber alien behemoth, and it illuminated the men who were waiting for him. Some afoot, some on horseback. Seth tried to stand and a boot slammed firmly into his stomach and sprawled him onto his back.
“That him?”
“That’s him,” a woman said. “The Verdugo’s errand boy.” Something familiar in her R sound. Seth craned his neck and saw the murani woman atop a snorting gray courser. The one from Laramme, whose stiletto had just burned his life down.
A leering face, lit in fiery orange, placed itself between him and his frowning accuser.
“Look here, boys,” the man said. “Caught ourselves a fox.”
Seth hung by his wrists from the barn’s central beam. He’d stopped trying to shift his shoulders into some way that didn’t hurt. It all hurt.
The murani woman hadn’t come in with the rest of them. She’d rode off into the dark, perhaps to retrieve her stiletto from the smoldering roadhouse.
It had kept coming back to him. No matter where he’d left it. He’d thought it was some wonderful enchantment, and it was. But as his captors were so smugly eager to tell him, the wonder hadn’t been for him.
“Followed you the whole time,” said the biggest of them, a guy with a Sektoric mustache and height and brawn rivalling Annalise. “Had a twin blade, y’see. Pointing us right to you.”
“It’s a real object lesson, isn’t it,” mused the man who’d kicked the air out of him. He was familiar, too, though Seth was sure they hadn’t met. One of those faces, perhaps. “The cutpurse who gets a little too good a little too quick, and loops back ‘round to a gutterflied corpse.”
“I’m Seth, by the way,” Seth said.
“I know,” the man said.
“You got me at—” Seth spat blood onto the floor. “A bit of a disadvantage, then.”
“We do indeed, Seth.”
“It’d feel good to tell me, though, huh,” Seth said. “So I can know who got me. Right?”
“See, I thought it might feel good to punch you in the stomach again,” the man said. “Let’s try both, shall we?”
“Y—” Seth began, and then a fist buried itself in his gut, and another, and he rolled his head back and gasped for air.
A voice filtered to him through the pale haze of pain. “I’m August il Agante. And you’re my newest little project.”
“Ahhh,” Seth mumbled. “Okay. Yeah.”
“You really thought you could just fucking kill a patre of the Syndicate and gallop off into the sunset, il Guiterre?”
“Well,” Seth said. “I managed a couple sunsets, at least.”
Another punch. If they thought these were going to shut him up, they hadn’t met him. He grinned a drippy red grin. I’ve faced down seraphs, motherfucker.
“Enjoy it,” he wheezed. “Enjoy me while you got me, August. She’ll find you. You’re fucked.”
Another punch. Another.
“By she I presume you mean the new Central Plain Corridor Verdugo. “August il Agante accepted a cloth from one of his minions and wiped spat-up blood from his knuckles. “I understand you’re coming off a stint in her retinue.”
“I juh,” Seth said, and spat more blood up. “I just called her Annalise.”
“Made a friend, then?”
“A few.”
“And that, Seth, is why I won’t kill you quite yet.”
Seth was slowly turning like a trussed-up rotisserie. The beam above him creaked. “Cause I’m friendly?”
“Get him facing me again,” August said, and rough hands stilled Seth and centered him again. “I am going to keep you alive for a while,” he said, “while we come to terms with our new Verdugo. I appear to have something she wants. Something she wants very much, to hear the story from the other patrons.”
“Buncha bean-spillers,” Seth said, and August punched him in the face.
I’ve lost a tooth, he thought, as the darkness roosting at the edge of his vision receded again. Wait, no. He’d already lost that. With Anna.
“Happily for me,” August said, “and for the memory of my uncle, alive is actually quite a wide net. You can be alive in all kinds of ways. And with all kinds of pieces missing.” He held out a hand, and a cleaver was placed into it. “And I think, Seth, to inaugurate the many months we will spend together, reducing you, we might send your big spooky girlfriend a greeting gift.”
Reflections off the torches in the corner of the barn studded the surface of the cleaver like stars. Its tip descended to rest between his eyes.
“Now normally you take a hand from a thief, but you happen to be hanging form them,” August said. “And for a guy like you, losing a hand is quite the depreciation in value. So we’ll save them for the first month or so, to give her some hope that there’ll be some Seth left in the thing we make out of you.”
The cleaver slid down the bridge of his nose.
August smiled. “I think it might be fun to start with the face, gents. What do we think?”
“I think,” Annalise said, “that if you’re looking for the nose of your uncle’s killer, mine’s hard to miss.”
She stood in the open door of the barn, her longcoat flowing in the autumn wind, her roadwarden hat dancing the shadow of its brim across her face.
“Evening, gents,” she said. “What’s the craic.”
“Madame Verdugo.” August’s voice alloyed itself in formality. “How auspicious that our first meeting is so early in our new partnership.”
She shook her head. “No partnership,” she said. “One offer. Cut him down and give him to me, and get on your horses, and go.”
A rumble of laughter from the assembly. Annalise’s black lips and ivory teeth shone in the fire as she smiled.
“No?” she said. “Right, then.”
“We can discuss the return of your thief,” August said. “We don’t even need to go with the installment plan. Your predecessor had a fruitful relationship with my people. You’ve had a troublesome start, I admit, but I’d hate to start over again.”
Annalise shook her head. “One offer, I said. And you’ve refused it. So.”
She took a step into the barn. All around the fading edges of Seth’s vision men moved in the subtle first steps of a violent dance to come. Forward, or back, or to the side to stand between her and him. Swords and knives and axes and wheelguns creaking and whispering from their leather lairs.
“Seth,” Annalise said, gently. “Are you awake? Can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” he croaked.
“I love you too.” She was barely audible over the crackling torches. “And I’m sorry it took me this long to stop being a fucking spanner and say it back.”
“Timing—” He blinked blood from a cut on his forehead. “Timing could be worse, I guess.” He wheezed a weak laugh. “Came in by a nose.”
“Shhh, now.” She shrugged out of her longcoat. Her sleeveless tunic beneath was missing its baldric or its executioner scabbard. “You said come and get me. I came.”
August put his hand on his chest. “That’s plain beautiful, Madame Verdugo. That does tug on the heartstrings.”
“Now, August.” Annalise put her hands on her hips. The only weapons on her were her smallsword and one dagger at her belt. “I’ve killed north of a quarter-thousand people.”
“How many of those were on the scaffold?”
She inclined her head as if acceding a point. “Not my point, sir, but fair enough. What I’m getting to is that everyone wants a good death. But most people, when they die, they shit themselves. All those touching sacrifices and bedside boo-hoos. Death’s mercy is they’re already gone back to the Wheel when it happens, so they'll never know it.” She rubbed her chin. “But Rohan il Agante. Well. He shit himself first. And then I killed him.”
“Where’s your sword, Verdugo?” a voice from beyond Seth’s sight rumbled.
“Brought you the spare,” Annalise said. “if that’s all right.”
“I must admit to some offense.” August paced slowly behind the ragged line of his men, speaking from a gap between two thick-necked enforcers. “Do we not rate the souldrinker?”
“Well, lads, I won’t lie.” Annalise counted on her fingers. “There’s… nine of youse. And nine’s my highest number this year. And despite the reputation, I fight better without the blade. Bit disappointing, I know. I figured I ought to leave the big fecker at home, so I could be sure I’d kill each and every one of you.”
“Oh, you’re sure?”
“Sure.” She took one huge arm in the crook of the other and stretched her shoulder out. “But the reason in the main, boys, is I don’t need your hinky fucking hexis. I am not a Verdugo tonight. I didn’t bring the souldrinker, because I’m not here for your souls.”
Slowly and deliberately she crossed her arms over each other and settled one hand on each pommel. The night and its soldiers drew close and looming. Her side sword clicked from its scabbard and caught the torchlight glow like a baton striking up a band.
“I’m here for his,” she said.