The Bloodforged (27 page)

She would send for a quill and parchment straightaway, she decided. If she couldn't be there, she could at least send some comfort from afar. She was in the process of working out how long it would take a hawk to cross the mountains when a gentle tinkling sounded above her head. She looked up to see a small brass bell juddering on the end of a cord that disappeared into the wall. Erik, she supposed, ringing the servants' bell. Folding her letters away, she headed for his chambers.

I wonder how much I should tell him
, she thought as she knocked on his door.
Maybe it's better if I—

The look on Erik's face was enough to drive even Liam from her mind. “Good gods, are you all right?”

“Come in.” He stood aside, closing the door behind him. A letter dangled at his side, crumpled into a ball.

“What is it? What's happened?”

He'd just shaved; his smooth jaw showed every taut muscle, every blotch of fury. He held up the letter, his hand showing a slight tremor. “A massacre. On the border.”

“Farika's mercy.” Alix sank onto a chair. “Where?”

“A village called Raynesford.”

“I don't know it.”

He hardly seemed to hear. He'd started pacing, boots all but silent on the plush Harrami rug. “I've sent for Kerta. According to this, Raynesford is just upriver from Harriston, which means it's near her family home. She may have lost people.”

Alix swallowed a knot in her throat. “Who is it from?”

“Rig.” He held it out to her.

Alix scanned the familiar handwriting, her eyes filling. It wasn't just the tidings, though those were awful enough. Her brother's rage, his grief, saturated the page.
I wish I could promise that I will avenge this, Your Majesty, in your name. But the truth is, without reinforcements, there is little I can do. To say that I have failed you would be inadequate.

Futility. Failure. The same bitter flavours as Liam's letter, the same taste that had sat on Alix's tongue throughout their journey through the Broken Mountains.

Blessed Farika, is there nothing we can do to end this?

A soft knock came at the door. Alix answered it. She could tell from the look on Kerta's face that her friend was already braced for terrible news. Wordlessly, Alix handed her the letter. Kerta wept silently as she read, one hand over her mouth, the other holding the letter as far away from her as she could, as though the distance might shield her from the pain.

“Did you have people there?” Erik asked.

Kerta gave a convulsive shake of her head. “But the Raynesfords . . . They're family friends . . .”

Alix put her arms around Kerta. As she stood there—holding
her sobbing friend, listening to the pacing of her furious king, her eyes still stinging from the grief of her brother—Alix felt something snap, sharp and brittle as an old chicken bone. A single thought, blazing red, formed in her mind.

The Oridians would
pay
.

She would write a letter after all, she decided, but not to Liam. Not yet.

If you require anything of me, do not hesitate to send word.

A rasping voice in a rose garden, like a memory of long ago. She did require something of Saxon after all, something that demanded his particular skills.
Wars are rarely ended by assassination
, he'd told her. That might be true, but surely the death of a Trion would be a staggering blow to the enemy. The more Alix thought about it, the faster her heart pounded, fury and determination and something else she couldn't quite place, something teetering between exhilaration and terror.

Erik would never approve. She knew it, yet in that moment, she'd didn't care. Erik didn't have to know. No one had to know.

Saxon might not succeed—might even refuse altogether—but Alix was determined to try. After all, she wasn't merely some servant. She had resources. She could influence events. After weeks of frustration and impotence, of being a victim, Alix had glimpsed a way out.

The way of blood.

L
iam flopped onto his side and blew out a long, irritated breath. Rudi stirred at his feet, groaning reproachfully. The wolfhound had lately taken to sleeping on Liam's bed, which he wouldn't mind so much if that didn't actually mean
on his feet
, an arrangement that might
have been comfortable if he was sleeping in a lean-to on the highest peaks of the Broken Mountains in the dead of winter but was otherwise disagreeably sweaty.

“This is going to stop when we get back to Erroman,” Liam informed the wolfhound groggily. Rudi's ears did not so much as twitch.

Liam sighed. It was no use; he'd been tossing and turning all night, and that wasn't going to change in the last hour or so before dawn. Extracting his feet from under the beast, he tugged on his breeches and headed for the balcony.

He decided to do some sit-ups. It had been ages since he'd had any decent exercise, and he'd be damned if he went home soft around the edges. His wife was quite fond of his edges, so it behove him to keep them intact.

He was nearing a hundred when he thought he heard a noise on the wrong side of the balcony rail. He paused, elbows to knees, listening, but his ears were too full of the sound of his own laboured breathing to discover anything else. He uncoiled, recoiled. Paused. Had he heard it again? Rolling to his feet, he peered over the rail. Darkness sloped away into the distance, pooled in the valley below, the contours of the city barely visible in the weak moonlight. The morning lamps were not yet lit; it must have been earlier than he thought. A sharp breeze swept up from the sea, rustling the potted cedars.
There you go
, Liam thought, turning away.

Pain erupted at the back of his skull. White light flared behind his eyes, and he staggered, slicing his bare feet on broken pottery. Instinctively, he threw himself to the ground, managing to avoid a flash of metal that could only be a dagger. He glimpsed the vague outline of a shape looming over him. It was enough. He blasted his right heel into his attacker's knee, bringing him down. That bought him enough time to roll onto his back, which gave him a disturbingly good view of the sword aimed at his chest. He jerked aside, the tip of the blade ringing off stone and sending sparks flying. Liam swept the ankles and rolled again, this time to his feet.

Frenzied barking from the other side of the door, just out of reach. Liam hoped it would rouse help, because from the looks of things, he'd need it.

There were three of them, just like last time. But this time
they were properly armed, and Liam was half naked. The first two had regained their feet, and a third had just hopped over the balcony rail, blade in hand. Two swords and a knife. The closest thing Liam had to a weapon were the bits of flowerpot buried in his skull, and that probably wouldn't be much help.

They spread out. Liam planted his feet and crouched. Everyone waited to see who would go first.

A sword whistled toward him. Liam jerked the upper half of his body back, letting the blade breeze over his chest. He couldn't afford to give ground, not with the balcony rail only a few feet behind him. If he got tied up against that, he was finished. He could jump, but the slope on the south side was a nasty bit of rock, ideal for breaking an ankle. He'd be easy prey after that. As for the front rail, the one he'd gone over with the spy, there was a regrettable number of blades between him and it.

The sword came at him again, and this time it was joined by another, aimed lower. Liam leapt back, losing precious space. The back of his knee hit the stone bench. If he went around it, he'd be pinned in a corner, with nowhere to go but dead. His attackers knew it too; he could see the realisation kindling in their eyes. In a heartbeat, they'd charge, and that would be it.

Liam jumped up onto the bench and sprang at the eastern rail. Pushing off with his right foot, he threw himself into the nearest swordsman, tackling him to the ground before the man could react. He really didn't have a plan for what came next, so it was a good job that things went down like they did.

Glass exploded onto the balcony as Rudi sailed through the rose window. The wolfhound's paws had scarcely touched stone before he was in the air again, launching himself at the man with the knife. The poor fool tried to get his arm up, but that just gave Rudi something to grab on to. Screams of terror turned to screams of pain. Liam didn't pause to marvel. He cracked his attacker's head against stone, twisted the sword from his grasp, and came up swinging before the third man could recover from his shock. Liam had him skewered before the thug even really knew what was happening.

Only one assassin remained now, lying stunned on the balcony floor. Liam wavered for all of two breaths before Rudi made the choice for him, going after the man's throat with
terrible enthusiasm. By the time Liam hauled the wolfhound off, the deed was done.

“Bloody hells, dog, did you have to—
ugh
.” Liam had seen more than his share of death, but a man with his throat torn out was a new level of gruesome. Moonlight gleamed off the darkness pumping from the wound. Liam eyed the wolfhound warily, half afraid he'd be next, but Rudi just wagged his nub and sat, panting as if he'd had a particularly satisfying walk.

“Commander!” Rona Brown burst through the door, sword in hand, nightgown flapping around her. Dain Cooper was half a step behind, also armed, and quite thoroughly naked. Ide appeared a moment later, blessedly clothed.

“I'm fine,” Liam said, patting Rudi down to make sure the knife hadn't touched him. “We're fine.”

“What the—oh.” Rona grimaced.
“Ugh.”

“Yeah, that's what I said.”

“Good boy, Rudi!” Ide dropped to her haunches and ruffled the wolfhound's ears. “Who's a good boy?”

“Can we not encourage him, please?”

“Who were they?” Dain asked, patrolling around the dead men with his sword tip up, as though one of them might recover from having no throat. Rudi had even made sure that the man Liam killed was really, truly dead. Thorough, his dog.

“Not sure.” Liam scanned their faces. “This one looks familiar. Might be one of the ones who jumped me the other night. Looks like he meant it this time, though.”

“He's got a tattoo,” Rona said, gesturing with her sword.

Ide cocked her head. “That a snake, or a rope?”

“It's a maritime knot,” Dain said.

She scoffed. “Dumb thing to get inked on your arm, you ask me.”

“Nautical tattoos are surprisingly common around these parts,” Dain said dryly.

Shef appeared in the doorway, ghoulishly white in the glow of his lantern. “Your Highness! By the gods, is everything all right?”

“Er, more or less, thanks. Nothing we can't handle. Well, except we have a bit of a mess here . . .”

Dawn found Liam's room rather crowded. Servants bustled to and fro, clearing up bodies, blood, glass, and forlorn bits of
flowerpot. One particularly intrepid fellow even thought to give Rudi a bath, which proposal the wolfhound declined with a flash of teeth. (Liam promised to do it himself, possibly after donning full plate armour.) The Wolves all stayed put. Dain had put on a pair of Liam's breeches, but Rona was still in her distressingly thin nightgown. Liam had never before made such a conscious effort to maintain eye contact
at all costs
.

“Sure,” Ide was saying, “it's got to be the same ones as sent the note, but where does that get us? Got no idea who they are, do we?”

“Or what they really want,” Dain said. “Beyond the immediate, I mean. Guess that death threat wasn't just bluster after all. But why are they out for the commander's head?”

“To keep him from stirring things up about the fleet, presumably,” said Rona.

“Which means they're most likely connected with our saboteur,” Liam reasoned. “Either that, or they really just don't like monarchist bastards.”

Rona frowned. “Commander, please. You shouldn't make light. If anything had happened to you . . .”

“Have I ever told you how much you sound like my wife?”

Rona looked down at her feet, her teeth working at the inside of her cheek.

“
Anyway
,” Dain said, a little intrusively, “linking these blokes to the saboteurs doesn't help us either, since we're still nowhere on that. Nothing plus nothing equals nothing.”

“Yeah, about that.” Liam's gaze took a quick inventory of the room. Judging that Bayview's servants were sufficiently occupied, he said, “I had a thought.”

The Wolves clustered in tighter.

“Something Syril said the other day has been stuck in my mind. Spent most of the past five hours tossing and turning over it. Remember that motion he mentioned? Mass mobilisation, I think he called it?”

“The one the Alliance tabled,” Rona said. “What about it?”

“Syril called it a betrayal. Said it was little better than slavery.”

Rona shrugged. “He's a populist.”

“Right, and apparently, he doesn't think much of forcing Onnani men to fight someone else's war.”

“Won't be someone else's for long,” Ide said.

“The point is, Syril thinks it's wrong to oblige his countrymen to fight. He tried to block the declaration of war, and now he's trying to block mass mobilisation.”

The Wolves glanced at each other. Ide seemed to be speaking for all of them when she said, “So?”

“So what if it's that simple? What if the saboteur isn't in league with the enemy, or trying to embarrass the government, or anything so complicated as that? What if someone is just prepared to go that little bit further to prevent Onnan's sons from having to march to war?”

“Okay,” said Dain, “but that still doesn't tell us
who
.”

“I've got an idea about that too. I think Syril was trying to tell me something the other day.”

Rona raised her eyebrows. “
Trying
to tell you something?”

“Dain, what do you know about the dockies?”

“Not much. They're a union like any other, I suppose. Though . . .” His forehead cleared, his eyes widening a fraction. “The knot.”

“Come again?”

“The tattoo. The maritime knot. I've seen it before!” Dain shook his head in amazement. “I'd forgotten all about it until you mentioned the dockies. Remember when I told you that my father and I used to hang around the docks when I was a boy? We used to watch the dockies working. Twice a day, their foreman would come out to keep an eye on things. He had a sort of uniform, a bright yellow vest with a crest on the back. I'm almost certain it had a knot like that in it.”

“You said lots of folk have tattoos like that round here,” Ide pointed out.

“Quite a coincidence, though,” Rona said.

Liam found himself pacing, just like his brother. “The first I heard of the dockies was when we went to inspect the fleet. They were giving us the sour eye. Then a couple of days later, Chief Mallik mentioned them, how they'd gone on strike and held up the work. I didn't think much of it at the time, but then on the day of his arrest, Syril suggested that I try to meet with them.”

“And now this,” Rona said. “By Hew, Commander, do you think . . . ?”

“I think . . .” Liam stopped, shook his head. “No, you know what? It's not even about thinking. This
feels
right.” He started for the door, striding like a man with a purpose.

“Where are you going?”

“I need to get a message to Syril. He seemed to think he could arrange a meeting, even from prison. I plan to take him up on his offer.” Belatedly, Liam realised he was being followed. He paused midstride and looked down. Rudi was at his side, nub wagging, looking up at him expectantly. “Since when?” Liam muttered.

“So, what,” said Ide, “you're gonna have a nice sit-down with the blokes who tried to kill you?”

“That's about the size of it, yeah.”

“Commander, could I have a moment?” There was a
tone
there, Liam thought, a suspicion that was confirmed when he turned to find Rona Brown glaring at him, hands on hips.

“Okay,” he said warily, gesturing for her to join him in the corridor. He closed the door behind him. “What is it?”

She folded her arms tightly over her chest, eyes on her feet. “May I speak freely, Commander?”

“Always.”

“I don't think you're taking this situation seriously.”

Liam's eyebrows flew up. “You're kidding, right? I'm taking it plenty seriously, Rona, believe me. If I can't fix this—”

She cut him off with a shake of her head. “That's not what I mean. I'm talking about what happened here this morning. I'm talking about everything that's happened up to now. I don't think you realise how much danger you're in, Commander. Those men wanted to
kill
you.”

“I got that impression, yeah. The whole coming-at-me-with-swords sort of gave it away.”

“You see, that's exactly the sort of—”

“Look, I get it. You think I'm being glib, and maybe I am. That's just how I deal with things. But don't forget, this isn't my first horse race. I've been a soldier since I was thirteen years old. I've faced plenty of men who've wanted to kill me. Except there's usually a lot more of them, and they're better armed and better trained.”

“They're also out in the open, right there in front of you brandishing their intentions. They're visible and predictable.
Everything your enemies here are not.” She raised her eyes to him, and he saw real fear. “I'm a soldier too, Commander. But I was also raised at court, and I learned very quickly that the enemies you can't see are far, far more dangerous. Whatever's happening here, it involves powerful people with hidden agendas. They're ruthless and ambitious and they won't let you get in the way of their designs. It's a game that's been going on since before you got here, and will keep going long after you leave. Please tell me you understand what I'm talking about.”