His words stayed with her as she returned to her pile of clothing and took up the rough cotton towel to dry herself. We were the joyful servants not to men but to gods.
By habit, she slathered on the mud and ash, rubbing it into her skin and hair. When her hands reached her breastbone, she stopped, remembering the old man’s scrawny chest and the bare patch of skin over his heart. The stark white of that scar shone bright as snow in her memory. Not the pink of a fresh cutting but something old and deeply cut.
And shall be again.
She shuddered despite the warmth of the cavern and wished suddenly that she had not teased Neb when he’d asked her to come with him to the Ninefold Forest. Would you take me as your bride, Nebios ben Hebda, she’d asked him, and grant me a Gypsy wedding filled with dancing and music?
I should have said yes, she realized. But even as she thought it, she knew it was not her path to follow.
“We dance to the music that is played us,” Hanric had once told her not so long after her father had died. “And regardless the step or the tune, if we are true we will find joy at the end of it.”
Now the only music she heard was the harp that haunted her dreams, mad Tertius with his fingers flying over the strings as the light consumed two thousand years of dreaming. And the only dance she saw ahead was cold, spinning iron in a hurricane of blood.
Winters did not believe in gods. Tertius had taught her better than that. But in this moment, she wished she did.
She reached for something higher than herself to invoke and found only a campsite beneath the moon and the warm, strong arms of a boy in her dreams.
“Help me be true,” she whispered to that dream.
And still the canticle played on.
Rudolfo
It had been a long while, Rudolfo realized, since he’d mucked a bird coop. Despite the stench, he felt a smile pulling at his face as he imagined what he must look like now, his hands and arms gray with bird droppings.
He’d removed his turban and rolled up his sleeves for the work just an hour earlier, and now he stepped back from it, clucking at the birds in their freshly cleaned cages. Behind him, one of his Gypsy Scouts snored in a makeshift bed while the other kept watch outside.
The others had ridden out for Kendrick Town nearly a week earlier, leaving Rudolfo and two scouts to man the bird station and await word from Petronus-or whoever sat at the end of the line.
A reply had come, certainly, but Rudolfo had not been pleased by it.
I will send for you, the brief note said, but the handwriting was unfamiliar and there were no codes ciphered into it that Rudolfo could read. For all he knew, anyone could’ve sent it, and at this moment, the same anyone could be en route to intercept them.
Had Gregoric been alive, Rudolfo knew what that First Captain would think of this development. Still, he’d followed his instincts and forced himself to patiently wait. Forced himself to trust that whatever Petronus had built here could be trusted with his own life and ultimately, the life of his son.
For the first few days, he’d paced and plotted strategies when he wasn’t tending to the birds that came and went. But after that, he’d grown restless and set himself to whatever work he could find in Petronus’s boat house.
Now, he grinned at the clean cages and the filth that covered him and wondered at how something so foul could bring such delight.
Perhaps, he thought as he scrubbed his hands and forearms in a waiting bucket, it delighted him because the clean cages were a bit of chaos made right.
A low, short whistle reached his ears from outside, and everything fell away with that sound. Rudolfo’s right hand went instinctively to the satchel of powders around his neck as his left hand reached for his scout knife.
The other Gypsy Scout was already on his feet, slapping fistfuls of the white powder at his shoulders and his feet, then raising the palm of his hand to his mouth. As the magicks worked their way into his skin, he faded to shadow and eased open the door.
Rudolfo crouched and waited. His men knew their work better than any, and he knew that letting them do that work was the highest honor he could pay them. Still, he inched the knife out into his hand.
A minute passed.
Wind moved into the room.
Rudolfo felt the lightest of taps upon his arm. Something approaches on the water.
Rudolfo furrowed his brow, found the man’s shoulder and pressed his fingers into it. Something?
There was hesitation in the scout’s fingers. Moves like a boat. But magicked.
Magicked? Rudolfo imagined it might be possible to magick a ship-they rubbed oils into their knives to keep them sharp and hidden, so why couldn’t it be done for a ship? He pushed the speculation aside and forced his attention back to the Gypsy Scout. Take up positions outside, he tapped.
Then, he magicked himself, drew his knives and followed.
In the morning drizzle, Rudolfo picked his way across muddy snow, careful to step into the prints already there. He moved to the shelter of a pine tree and squinted out at the bay.
He could see it there-the shape of something on the water that wasn’t there. A shadow smudged into the rain, tall as a ship and moving along the choppy water. Rudolfo could hear the water rushing against it.
Rudolfo waited, listening, as a longboat-also magicked-was lowered. He heard its oars sliding across the water and slipped away from the tree to pick his way onto the dock.
There was no way to know how many men might be in the longboat, nor any way to know what their intent was. Though it seemed to Rudolfo that no friend would arrive magicked.
He tensed his muscles as he heard the sound of wood on wood.
When the first magicked sailor stepped onto the dock, Rudolfo kicked him into the bay and then danced back. “Stay put,” he said, “unless you’d like to swim in the winter bay with your friend.”
He heard movement in the boat.
The water thrashed and sputtered. The sputtering became a voice. “Wait,” it said. “Damn you, wait.”
Rudolfo knew that voice but couldn’t place it immediately.
Meanwhile, the thrashing became a more practiced swim. “I’m going to climb out,” the voice said. “Don’t kick me again, you ridiculous fop.”
Ridiculous fop. Rudolfo smiled and remembered those words. How many years had it been since he’d heard them? At least twenty, he thought. “Rafe Merrique,” he said. “I thought you’d drowned by now.”
“No thanks to you,” Rafe said, grunting with effort. “Gods, it’s cold.” Rudolfo watched as wet handprints appeared on the dock and a dripping, man-shaped shadow pulled itself up out of the water. “And what in all hells is that terrible smell?”
“Me,” Rudolfo said. “I’ve been at the cages.” He sheathed his knives and whistled for his scouts to do the same. He whistled again, and moments later, a thick woolen blanket drifted out of the boat house and into his waiting hands. He extended it to the magicked pirate. “Petronus has sent you for me?”
He’d known that the Order had used Merrique’s services over the years, but he also knew that those services could not come cheap. When he and Gregoric had sailed with him in his youth, even then it had cost a goodly sum.
Rafe took it and wrapped himself in it. “Not quite Petronus,” he said. “But his host has arranged this. quietly, of course.”
His host. Quietly. Rudolfo frowned. It explained the magicked ship, though the last time he’d seen Rafe Merrique, when he and Gregoric had been young men bound for the Wastes, the pirate had nothing so elaborate under his command. “And where is Petronus, exactly?”
“It would be better,” Rafe said, “to talk aboard the Kinshark. Suffice it to say that he is safe. for the moment.”
“I need to speak with him.” But already, Rudolfo wondered if that were true. It was possible that all he needed stood, magicked and dripping, before him on the narrow dock.