Chương 29: 1.28. Four Days

The Thief Four days with no executions. On the fragrant streets of Jonquil, whose boughs were heavy and redolent with its namesake, and atop Asterbak's indigo-painted bandstand, which had been repurposed into a scaffold through the application of a vast and bloodstained canvas, Seth bore witness twice over to the same transformation on the faces of corregidors and citizens.

From abject fear when the carriage rolled in, to cowed confusion when its black-clad behemoth greeted them with a friendly smile and a what's the craic, to guarded hope as it departed. Four days, two villages, no heads. Annalise steadfastly pretended as though their conversation had never happened, but every day that went by in cozy companionable routine, without the lurking awfulness she had promised, was another day that ended with an unspoken moment between the thief and the Verdugo.

A shared look—quiet, grinning provocation from Seth, a roll of the eyes from Annalise. The rations were rough-and-ready; the going was, too, in most places. But Seth cooked well enough, and he was getting much better at keeping everything settled on the bumpier days when the road nigh-on evaporated into the thistle and brush.

He spent his days learning to swing a cutlass thanks to Tiago's punishing but patient instruction, or riding the coach listening to Annalise hum road songs and tell stories, or reading one of Ofelia's castoff books, which she'd otherwise happily leave in the road's dust; he'd never met a reader so zealous and with such callow disregard for a book as soon as it was finished. He spent his nights staring at the tent canvas above his head and thinking about Annalise. There was a knack to setting up the tent.

Far enough away to avoid any awkward looks or conversations. Close enough that, in the dark, he could fall asleep to the sound of Annalise's snoring breath. He hadn't realized he was capable of this sort of yearning. He hadn't considered himself the type, even in his hormonally tempestuous teenage years. But he'd been right about that stupid dam. There was no going back. Over the two weeks Seth had known her, Annalise had gone from good-looking, to beautiful, to the most beautiful woman in the United Territories.

Seth's pulse leapt the moment her sing-song alto brogue graced his ears. He'd memorized her face: the proud, symmetrical prow of her gloriously pointy nose. The lines around her plump lips and her big emotive eyes, carved into her skin from four laughing decades of resilient joy in the face of setback after brutal setback.

His sense of smell was so attuned to the scent of leather and apricot that preternaturally followed her that whenever his nostrils got too close to a leather-tanned jacket or saddle or set of reins, she came back unbidden to his mind. And her body. War and murder and injury and bearing two children and the endless, disciplined honing of herself into a weapon of the Legion had marked her, scarring her, desaturating her, covering her with ink, forging her lethal, leonine muscles.

And despite it all— because of it all—she was heart-stoppingly, tooth-grindingly, hair-pullingly sexy. How had he managed to be so physically close to her on those first days without passing out from sheer horniness? They didn't ride Demetrius together anymore, not like they had—she was too careful with him, too guarded. He wanted to go back in time and slap himself in the face, tell himself to cherish the moments of unhesitant close contact she'd blessed his undeserving skin with.

Late at night, he tried to re-summon the feeling of her breasts smushed warm and heavy against his back. He should have committed them to memory. Every inch of her he'd seen, he painstakingly reconstructed in his mind. A thick, smooth thigh emerging from a slit in the dress. Her calves and ankles and toes, shining out of the shower. The mole on her breast. The shapely curve of her broad, motherly hips in her mercilessly tight riding clothes. Every inch of her he hadn't seen, he tortured himself in the imagining of.

He was parched. He was dying of thirst in a tent next to a deep, dark, glorious ocean. He entertained the ridiculous things he'd do for a glimpse, a touch, grinning at his own adolescent foolishness. I would sword fight a seraph if it meant she'd flash her tits at me for two seconds. Just one tit, even, as long as it was the one with the mole. I would let her chop my stupid head off if she'd sit that big beautiful ass on me for an hour first.

The cow's blood she pours into her scabbard to refresh its sanguine enchantment—I would drink a liter of it to kiss her wrist. She was unlit. She was unlit, she was unlit. He repeated it to himself like a mantra, willing it to penetrate the haze of want. She was unlit, and he'd turn unlit because of her. He singled out beautiful people in the villages they visited, attempted to gawk, to feel anything for anyone besides Annalise al Ydris. She was unlit.

He tried to remember everything he'd lose if she invited him into her bed. But oh, Saints. Everything he'd gain. Onward to Sondam, called Furnacetown for its wood burners and game smokers, which dyed the late afternoon a shade of unclean amber. Their scaffold was a rickety thing, reinforced with scrap metal where it had cracked in seasons past. Tiago kept asking Seth if he'd like to do the announcement; he wasn't sure if that was a way to bond or to take the piss.

Either way, he demurred again today, and watched the sooty crowd gather to Tiago's clarion voice. This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. Praise the Sorcerer General. Praise the deathspell beneath which he shelters us. Praise the Verdugo and make way. The younger al Ydrises and their crooked guest stood at the scaffold's base and watched the blood gush, bright and arterial, from the Verdugo's stained leather scabbard. A unified sound of entranced dismay rose from the Sondam crowd.

Annalise settled the gory blade on her shoulder. A crimson tally mark smeared across her pale trapezius. Tiago stood to Seth's right, out of the splash zone, his hands folded tightly behind his back, a studious frown on his face.

"You're looking grim, Tiago," Seth whispered.

"This is my state executioner face," Tiago replied, out of the side of his mouth.

"Grimmer than the last stop. Is everything good?"

"We need heads," Tiago said, loud enough that Seth glanced furtively around to make sure nobody had looked their way.

"One per stop, from this point on, or enough seraph hunts to make up the difference. Or we won't hit quota." He side-eyed Seth.

"We talked about mercy, but she's overdoing it. She's anxious about how you see her, I think."

"I watched her kill a half-dozen men and it—" It was fucking hot, he refrained from saying.

"It didn't bother me. If she's holding back on my account, she doesn't need to." Tiago slouched against the scaffold.

"I know she doesn't."

"I don't mean to be a problem, Tiago."

"You're not, il Gutierre." He raised a dark, full brow.

"If that changes, I'll confront you."

"Really? You seem so conflict averse." Tiago snorted and refocused on his mother as she crossed the deck, past the shivering coal shoveler she'd just spared. She stopped in front of a grizzled muran with a scar on his lip.

"Who's this?"

"Carse il Brackin, Madame Verdugo." Sondam's corregidor, a ginger-maned man called Liam, read the name out from a leather-bound casebook.

"Poached white-tail out of Asterbak's woodland."

"Ahh. Poaching." Annalise rubbed her chin, unknowingly putting a red thumbprint on her jaw.

"The lightcamps don't recognize those boundaries so much, do they, Carse?" Carse shook his whiskered head.

"I'm afraid Asterbak does," Liam said. Annalise scratched her chest above the ring of sweat at the lip of her tunic.

"You like venison, Corregidor?"

"I do, Madame Verdugo." Annalise nodded in thought.

"I wasn't fond when I lived up in Orwiny. Bit too fatty. But the critters you have in the lowlands, that's good eating." She turned to her would-be victim.

"Shuvai Murani-li, Carse?" Carse's stone face cracked into surprise.

"Dai."

"Ap lumitas nuwa Asterbak lektap?" Annalise asked.

"Dai, Seia Verdugo. Tap malitan. Shuvai ti?"

"Not as well as I ought to. Not when I'm in this head, anyway." Annalise leaned against her bleeding sword.

"Righto. Carse will pay Asterbak's foresters market rate for what he took. That's five brace every shankweight, yeah?"

"Yes, Madame Verdugo," Liam said.

"Five?" Carse frowned.

"Hunter rate is three." Annalise smirked.

"The word you're hunting for, if I recall my Murani-li, is azzi very much, Madame Verdugo. You could pay in hexis share if you prefer."

"No. I pay brace."

"I figured." Annalise turned back to the Corregidor.

"And the Legion will furnish a further penalty in the name of the Sondam Corregi. I'll call that a loan to you, and forgive it next year if I return and you've worked out a better enforcement deal with the lightcamps. There's enough flesh out there to feed everyone as long as nobody tries to screw anybody." As Annalise spoke, Tiago produced a thin black field journal and wrote yet another reminder in its crowded lines. The last Verdugo had never acted like this, not to Seth's knowledge. Never any talk of next year.

Perhaps Prossimo had been too unimportant. Annalise swayed to the next man, tapping her fingertips against her crossguard. The dress had been beautiful, but the tight, dusky riding breeches she lived her workday in were his favorite. She gave them a tug as they rode up—Seth spared a curse to the saints—and halted before the next prisoner, a bearded midlifer with a hangdog expression.

"How about this one, then?"

"This is Lorac il Peliar," Liam recited.

"Abused his son. Beat him so badly the boy took two weeks to wake up. And now the doctor says—" Annalise sank her boot into Lorac's calf, sending him to his knees with a yelp. The blade swung so fast and ferociously that its front edge thunked two fingerspans into the wooden platform. The newly headless son-beater's blood came foaming after.

"Does the kid have a place to stay?" she asked.

"Uh." Liam tore his attention from the twitching corpse as its blood leaked through the loose boards.

"His uncle."

"Mother's side?"

"I think so, Madame Verdugo."

"Good." Annalise stepped away from the spreading stain.

"Next." She continued down the line. Something in the smoggy air had shifted. Tiago's lips were tight with stern satisfaction. Liam named the next convict, a ragged woman with an unwashed face behind a mop of stringy hair.

"Rami il Gotswain. She took part in a scheme to steal a dynamo from the artery stop in Kachakai. The only conspiracist we caught. She's given us two more names."

"They recover the dynamo?"

"Not yet."

"Hexis theft." Annalise crouched before the thief.

"You know how that's punished, Rami?" Rami's voice was a cracked, whimpery thing.

"Yes, ma'am."

"You know why it's so important we hold onto that hexis?"

"To keep the seraphs out, ma'am."

"That's right." Annalise pointed her dripping sword to the emerald sky.

"If enough people do what you did, Rami, the deathspell falters. If the deathspell falters, then death becomes a door again. And on the other side of the door, the seraphs are waiting."

"It wasn't my idea." Rami's pale eyes were bright in her grimy face.

"I swear it wasn't. I never would've done it if I hadn't been forced into it." Annalise clicked her tongue.

"Feeli. Up here." Ofelia mounted the steps to her mother's side. Annalise placed her raven-haired daughter in front of Rami's sweat-shining face.

"Say it to her." A horrible hope animated Rami's spine straight.

"It was all Bron's idea. Bronick il Mantari. He—" Ofelia interrupted.

"Exactly what you said again, please. I never would've done it if I hadn't been forced into it."

"I never would've done it if I hadn't been forced into it," Rami said. Ofelia gagged and stepped away unsteadily, hand over her mouth.

"You're excused, Ofelia," Annalise said.

"Seth, do me a favor and take her with you back to the carriage, right?"

"I don't need—uh." Ofelia lowered her palm sheepishly.

"Thank you, Seth." Seth had a strong suspicion, as Rami glanced around in frantic confusion, that Annalise had an ulterior reason to bid him depart. But how do you tell your crush that you don't mind watching her kill people? You don't, he supposed. He held his hand out and helped Ofelia down from the scaffold. A hundred pairs of eyes or more tracked his departure. They slid across his skin like the shadows of a forest canopy.

He still wasn't all the way used to that amount of attention, but he told himself he was getting there. From behind them, across the heads of the assembled citizenry, came a sound like tearing silk and a wet thud.