”We have a night and a day, and then this fucker will be on us.” Annalise strode from the taphouse, sliding her road leathers back over her shoulders. “Feeli drives.”
Ofelia tossed her straw hat into the carriage’s accumulated clutter. “Why do I have to drive?”
“Cause you know when Draka is about to do her fusspot routine,” Annalise said. “And we have to push them. Canter when they can, trot when they need, let ‘em rest around the crossroads to the Artery checkpoint, press the rest. The carriage’ll make it in two hours, I reckon.”
She let out the rest of her breath in a heavy sigh and let her face drop into her palms.
“God, I’m too buzzed and fearful for this bullshite. I need to change out.”
Ofelia clambered onto the driver’s box. “Lisa’s fireballs would certainly not go amiss.”
“Not Lisa. No.” Annalise opened the carriage door and sat for a moment on its step. “The skywire’s out and spreading. This far North we’ll get a handful of sorcerers answering the summons.” She pressed her fingers into her temples. “No. This is a blackfeather. I need Anna for this one.”
The already damaged mood cracked further. Tiago chamber-checked the boxy pistol Seth had given him. “Makes sense, I suppose.”
“You two get the carriage ready, yeah?” Annalise tapped her thigh. “C’mon, Seth.”
The al Ydris twins swarmed across the carriage like industrious black beetles, battening and harnessing. Annalise led Seth into the darkness. The crunch of threshed grass beneath her boots and the keening warble of the night insects nearly overshadowed the anxious sigh she released; if Seth hadn’t been listening intently for it, he wouldn’t have heard.
She halted and turned. The waning crescent moonlight was dim, but her skin was ghostly pale enough that Seth could make out the sorrow deepening the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes.
“Knew this was coming,” she said. “Came a bit quicker than I’d have liked.”
“You knew about the blackfeather?”
A shake of her head. “Anna.”
“It’s really no big deal,” Seth said. “It’s not like I’m about to fall out of love with you as soon as you put her on.”
“I know, pet.” She took him into her arms; her shovel-spade hands met on his lower back. “But maybe you oughta do an impression of it.”
“No way.”
“I don’t know how I’ll be, exactly,” she said. “But I doubt I’ll be grand craic. I might…”
She sighed again. Seth rested his palms on her hips.
“I’m scared,” she said. “Of hurting you. Not laying hands on you, but of saying some shitehawk thing to you.”
“I hurt a lot less easily than I used to,” he said.
“I know you do. My soldier boy.” She rubbed the curve of his spine. “You keep a running tally of all the ways I’m a geebag to you. Soon as I’m back to Annalise you can come up with nasty ways I have to make up for each of them.”
“Careful, Madam Verdugo,” he said. “You remember last time you told me how to handle Anna?”
She laughed. “Eat shit. I remember. You pricked my bleeding ears with that one.”
Two huge fingers tucked under the protrusion of his chin and raised his face. Her plush black lips found his and claimed them in that slow, sweet, unrelenting way she had.
“I love you round the Turning Wheel and back, Seth il Gutierre,” she whispered.
“Te chasel tuo’mie krei, Annalise al Ydris.”
She giggled, silvery and soft. “Bleeding awful, your pronunciation.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He kissed her throat. “Go stuff your head in a box.”
Hand-in-hand, they returned to the carriage. Tiago was holding a bucket of water up to Draco’s rhythmically schlupping snout. Ofelia was furtively finishing her dinner in the driver’s seat, her own slurping sounding like a soprano version of their horse.
“Be right back,” Annalise said, her usual refrain when she switched heads. Seth wondered, as his girlfriend stole into the carriage and squeaked its shock absorbers beneath her beautiful bulk, whether she meant right back as in the moment she stepped out, or however long she’d take before Anna al Ydris was put away again.
The muran-headed seraph hunter emerged from the carriage, tight and coiled like a spring. She prowled past Seth as if he weren’t there. “Let’s kill a seraph.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Tiago said, with a touch more emphasis than usual. Something about Anna al Ydris energized the guy. Seth resolved to take a cue from him.
He stood in the carriage’s doorframe and examined his transmogrified 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 an actual 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 just—” He held up his hands. “You got it, Anna. Like I said.”
“And don’t come near me tonight,” she said. “Understand? Ten feet 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, and it’s fucking obnoxious when you act like you’re the mature one even though I’ve lived twice as long as you have, and 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.”
“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 turn 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 just.. doing what Anna does.” Seth swung 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.”
“Don’t sweat about it, please.” Tiago laced his fingers together in his lap and looked out the carriage window at the tidal flowing of the nighttime plain. “We’re about to have a long, shitty night.”
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-foot 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 salt-and-pepper 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.”
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 jutted a finger at 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 with his hands at a tight parade rest behind his back. “Seth, Feeli. With me.” He beckoned 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 ginger bun beneath it. “I’m older than I look.”
“We know the feeling,” Ofelia said.
“Pardon our Verdugo’s snippiness,” Seth said. “It was a long ride and she’s not in her right head.”
Ricanna shook her hair out and pinned it up again, tighter this time. “I can imagine.”
“Ignore him,” Tiago said. “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. Fuck my life.”
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. “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.” He flapped a hand. “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.