Chương 49: 1.48. Through Lamenting

The Verdugo Annalise lifted her face from her sodden and shadow-stained pillow, and took stock. She'd finally cried herself out for the morning, she reckoned. Finally, the well was dry and she could sit up and hydrate, for fuck's sake, and get organized. She'd send a runner round to the Corregidor's, saying today was finally the day she'd get up and do her job and kill a few people. And while she waited for the scaffold to come up, she'd hurl Lisa's skull against a wall until it broke.

There'd be another fucking sorceress someday getting her head lopped off for some sorceress malarkey, and with any luck it'd be a warty crone with a hair lip and a gee drier than the Sarkani desert. And if she wouldn't be able to disguise what she was anymore, maybe it was better that way. She sat up and saw the bed on the other side of the room and remembered a night in a room like this with Seth il Gutierre, laughing with a hand full of cards and a heart full of hope.

You've probably been kinder to me than anyone else has, he'd said. Saints, isn't that sad. A broken croak of a sob shoved out of her, and she buried her face in her hands again. This beautiful, flighty little thing that had finally crept up to her welcoming hand, finally shed years of pain and betrayal, and what had she done to him? What had she done? It'd have been one thing if Feeli and Sunshine had understood.

If, when she'd gathered the family and with grim stoicism told them that Seth was gone, and it was better this way, for his own good, they'd nodded and said they understood. Maybe patted her on the back like aw well Annalise kudos to you for making the hard choice. But Tiago had let out this thunderous, annoyed sigh, and Ofelia had sorrowfully shaken her head, and when they'd asked why, all her reasons tripped over each other. How bitterly had she fought against turning her kids?

How insistent she'd been that her new life was to be lived alone. And how many times since had she felt that secret burning joy of kinship, despite her feigned regret? How often had she thanked every Saint that her son and daughter were alongside her? Without them she'd have turned into the exact kind of unfeeling blackheart they wrote all the cautionary Verdugo tales about. Right.

She was still crying, sure, but it was time to stand up and pick through the blown-up bits of her life until she found some new diminished piece big enough to float on. She dragged herself upright and fumbled into a snug pair of breeches, shimmying to fit them over her thunder thighs and her horsey hips and her stupid fat arse. He thinks you're beautiful, a voice like Lisa said, and she knew she was ready to leave her room because that didn't knock her back into bed.

She dragged herself across the hall and knocked on Tiago's door. Then she knocked again, half a minute later.

"Sunshine," she said.

"Hey. Shift yourself, boyo. Work day." A click and creak to the right. Ofelia poked her towel-bound head out of her room.

"Good morning," she said.

"You really ought not to wear so much makeup if you're going to cry all the time."

"I can't scrub my mascara every time I put on a new head," Annalise said.

"Not my fault my Darkness tarts me up." She dabbed her eyes with the collar of her tunic.

"Where's himself in the next room?"

"Tiago? He's gone." Annalise's fist froze mid-knock.

"Gone?"

"He took off last night."" Where?"

"I believe he's gone after Mr. il Gutierre." Annalise raked her hands through her hair.

"Fucking Saints. Why didn't you tell me?"

"I called it your way," Ofelia said.

"I suppose you were busy lamenting."

"Fucking saints and fucking seraphs." Annalise dashed back into her room, all slouchy sorrow forgotten, and re-emerged pulling on her longcoat.

"Grounded," she said.

"Grounded for the rest of the fucking season. Bleeding barred. Both of yous."

"Oh, no," Ofelia said mildly.

"No boys over, then?"

"None." Annalise's hands shook as she notched her sword belt tight.

"Which way?"

"South along the corridor," Ofelia said.

"Tracking the thief. A very angry horse salesman pointed us the way."

"You handle that?"

"Handled, yes. He demanded double." Annalise gave the wall a hearty kick.

"These are the things you miss when you lament," Ofelia said.

"Aye, well." Annalise thumped her roadwarden hat onto her head.

"I'm through lamenting." She spent the day on horseback, pushing Demetrius as hard as she dared between trot, fast walk, and anxious, land-eating gallops. She kept her head low, walling off the stares beneath her heavy brim and her round sunglasses. Wide berths, always, to the pale goliath in black on the snorting warhorse, the wind whipping her coat out to display the sword and dagger at her waist.

The traffic thinned from land-schooners and wagon trains to stragglers and lone riders as she passed Fontana's perimeter. The high sun beat down on the road and its rider. Demetrius' ears folded upward—his sign of annoyance at the pace. But his breath was steady and even, and Annalise kept her lean forward.

"I know, Meaty," she murmured.

"I know. But we've two idiot boys to find." The first idiot she found after sundown, riding the other way up the Fontana corridor. At first, the roadweary haze cloaked him from her; that's a big horse, she thought dumbly. Looks just like Draco. But it was Draco, of course, and Tiago astride, his pale wave like a dove in the gathering dark. Annalise pulled Demetrius into a grouchy standstill.

"You're grounded," she barked.

"Sure," Tiago said, cantering Draco alongside her.

"I saw Seth." She tried to keep her frightened eagerness from standing her in her saddle.

"And?"

"And he says if you want him, come and get him." Tiago pointed behind him, down the road.

"He's at a roadhouse called the Sirloin. South on the central corridor till you're past the old Tarry turnpike, then you go left at the marker for Tarrywood Ranch."

"Don't you go—""We need him, mom. He can do things we can't, and he can cook, and he's apt to get himself in trouble if we let him run off by himself."

"Let me get a word in," Annalise says.

"You are a wee fucking weapon. You know that?"

"I know. Are you bringing him home?"

"I haven't decided."" Mom." Tiago's voice sharpened.

"Don't be fucking stupid."

"You—" She sputtered.

"You're double-grounded."

"You know where you'd be if it wasn't for us?" Tiago tugged his eyelid.

"If it wasn't for unlighting us? You'd have self-hated your way into a seraph's gullet years ago."

"I wasn't worth all this fuss," she said.

"Not from Seth and not from you. You and Feeli, you're family, and you're pigheaded besides, and I still regret—""You don't," Tiago snapped.

"You don't regret it. You know you should regret it and that makes you feel bad, but you're glad, because you have people who love you, and you're not alone, and you'd do it again. Admit it." Annalise's tongue tied itself in a pretty bow.

"You think that your self-effacing stuff makes any of us feel good? It doesn't. It's for your benefit, because if you think you deserve misery, you don't have to risk trying for anything better and getting hurt. Stop fucking treating the people who love you like they're idiots for loving you." Annalise drooped in her saddle.

"I'm sorry. I never meant—you're right. I've been a silly old sod lately."

"Please just let yourself adopt that mangy little weasel man," Tiago said.

"So that Ofelia and I can focus on something besides keeping you from hopping off a bridge. I promise we won't haze him any worse than we already do. When you're near him you're happy. Like actually happy. You can't fool us."

"He's not family," she said.

"I've known him a month. It's mad, what he's asking for." Tiago shook his head.

"All the changes in this family have been sudden and catastrophic and dropped on top of us, and we keep surviving them. Maybe it's time for a big step that you take, instead of letting the world step on you." This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"I'll talk to him," she said.

"That's all I can offer you. I'll talk, at least, and we'll…" She tightened her grip on her reins.

"We'll talk."

"Fine. Talk." He turned Draco's massy head around.

"I'll head back to Fontana and if you come home without him, I'll kick your ass." She scoffed.

"Gobshite."

"Love you."

"Ah, fuck off." She gave a firm flick to the reins and sent Demetrius into a grim-faced gallop.

"Love you too." She told herself, as Demetrius's breath huffed in the dark, that she would wake Seth's skinny ass up, and he'd be angry, but surely he was already angry. And she'd apologize, and give her excuses, but acknowledge that excuses was all they were. And she'd tell him she loved him. He deserved to hear it, even if it couldn't save them.

She told herself it would be complicated, and they'd pace and pontificate, and she would hear him out—she'd really hear him, and treat him like an adult, and if the night ended and it couldn't happen, then at least it couldn't happen on both their terms.

Then she saw the burning roadhouse, like an orange star fallen into the valley, and she got the story from the huddled evictees at the bonfire's perimeter, and they pointed the way to the Tarrywood's barn, and she stood in the dark beside it, listening to men congratulate themselves for the fatal mistake they'd made. And she stepped into the torchlight, and exchanged useless words with corpses that didn't know they were corpses yet, and then blades were bared, and it wasn't complicated, not at all.

It was all so beautifully simple. In the autumn colors, the blood and the fire, in every beat of Annalise's heart and every precise step and surgical swing There was a sword and it was to be turned from her. There was an enemy, knuckles white and nostrils flaring, and he was to be destroyed. There was her lover, and he was to be rescued. The future—the years to come and the leaden anxieties that turned their steps to slow thunder—did not exist any longer.

The only real thing was that Annalise al Ydris was in love with Seth il Gutierre. He needed her, and here she was. Nine souls besides yours and Seth's, the Eclipsing Moon told her, each side-armed but for the mustached man with the poleaxe. Fifty squirming munition mites between the lot of them, it whispered. Call that two or three guns, then. In Annalise's experience there was a point of outnumbered you reach where the exact number stops mattering.

Unluckily, that figure hovered around nine, and that was how many murders the night demanded of her. But the first was always the simplest. Look around at your colleagues, and how wholly you surrounded the single raven-clad swordswoman, and the idea that she would strike first, and that it would be you, was so improbable that the first Syndicate man she killed didn't even realize what she'd done until enough blood had pumped from his neck that his legs no longer held him.

He died with the consternation of a gambler who suspected cheating but couldn't prove it. Arterial spray dappled her. The gathering pond of gore shone at her feet.

"Eight," she said. They set upon her. In the tales and stageplays, the villains went at you one at a time, and in the inexperienced soldier, this led to a bit of an overcorrection; surely if we all go in at once, it's finished.

But she was already charging forth, side sword flashing, and the thicket of blades bound up with one another or undershot or were turned aside by the explosive force of her shoulder-checking leap, and what edges found her only slid across her skin, ensorcelled as it was with the Tortoise on her triceps, and the next corpse was the biggest one, the Sektorbravo with the ridiculous mustache.

Here was another trick: find the most confident guy, the one with the meanest look and the biggest weapon, the one the rest of them fear, and make a spectacle of him. She disemboweled him and pirouetted from the unfurling entrails, planted a kick into his hamstring to send him to his knees, and he screamed like a teenaged trainee as his death caught up with him and his guts slid through his twitching fingers.

"Seven," she said. They were giving her room now, a widened ragged ring, and she paced her breath—in, out—and came to stillness.

"For fuck's sake," someone said.

"Kill the bitch!" A novel strategy. The armchair general from whom it had come shrank further; he had meant the order for everyone else, presumably. Two things were about to happen: the guns would come out, and someone (that terrified one, probably, with the close-set eyes) would make a move for Seth. She loosened her fingers around her offhand dagger and let it pivot in her palm. A wheelgun cleared leather. A muscle twitched in Annalise's forearm as she invoked the Eclipsing Moon.

The mitelamps on the ground winked out. The humming dynamo outside of the ranch dropped from beneath the soundscape like the opening of a gallows trap. In the new absence, you could hear the gun's hammer click fruitlessly. The Moon was the rarest and most priceless hexentat she had, worth a year's purse to these men, easily; nobody was ever truly prepared for it. August il Agante's jaw loosened as he stared at the useless gun in his fist. The realization was setting in by now that he'd picked the wrong fight.

The man who came at her lover was exactly the man she'd foreseen. The chopper in his hand lofted high and Seth shrank from it, writhing like hooked bait, and Annalise would never ever ever let anyone hurt him and live ever again, not now or ever, and the murderous proof flicked from her outstretched fingers, sang as it spun end-over-end, and quivered into the pig-faced bastard's beady eye.

"Six." Another man, lantern-jawed and jumpy, was following in Piggy's footsteps. Annalise sprinted into Seth, shoving him away like a pendulum, and sent him cursing through the air to the groaning of the beam that held him aloft. She stepped into the space Seth had occupied. Her side sword whistled round to meet the outlaw. The edge whipped through his neck with a cut so clean that her wrist barely registered the jolt.

"Five." Seth's pendulum motion swung him back around; his flailing kick planted itself on another thug's stomach, sent him sprawling. She caught her lover on his next returning swing and stilled him.

"You're all right."

"I will be if you stop using me like a fuckin' flail," he said. August tarried on the edge of the fight, the cleaver on the straw-covered floor, a fine, thin estoc in his hand. The uneven waver of its point, and the way his feet vacillated between wide, planted stance and pawing the floor, told Annalise he was not a man who would fight to the last. She had a special death planned for him. She stalked forward, placed herself between Seth and his captors.

She had thirty seconds, now, before the Moon's invocation ended and the guns went live, though she doubted any of them knew the finer points of third-ring hexentatuae. The Moon had turned to its dark side on her arm and the hexis no longer carried the scent of souls along it, and wouldn't again until she'd had time to rest and eat and let her soul flow back into the skin. That was the knack to hexentat fighting—once you fired one off, its passive effect halted. You had to make the moment of invocation count.

The Tortoise, for example. With its passive hardening her skin, she could move without fear of shallow lacerations from glancing blows. But her Argosy Peacock tattoo showed her the guy coming from her left, with Mustache's abandoned poleaxe in his hands, and as its head came scything downward in a logsplitter overhand, she took her moment. She ducked, and the Tortoise tucked itself into its shell, and the skin between her shoulder blades hardened to steel.

The axehead clanged off her, kicking out a brilliant spark, and her heel shot and spun and knocked the wielder's legs from under him, and as she stepped smartly over him she punched her side sword into his heart.

"Four." August's final dram of courage left him. He turned and fled into the night. Annalise's hand went to a baldrick that was not there and she cursed between her teeth. She launched her Orb Weaver's filaments, and he sprawled to the floor, legs wrapped in thick silk. She returned her focus to his minions. Her longcoat snapped out and caught a blade in its leather tail; she balled her fist into its open flank, pulled, and bound the sword to her side, slamming it in place with the tightening muscle of her arm.

The man who held it tried to pull it back, and the edge bit at her waist, and she hissed her aggravation as it opened a shallow groove in her de-tortoised skin. But she did not release his weapon, and the cut she gave in response bit far deeper.

"Three." The next man was just unlucky. His heel slipped on a friend's gore and he took a reeling slapstick stumble and Annalise's sword parted the gap between his clavicle and his shoulder and skewered his lungs. He had just enough time, perhaps, to be embarrassed about the bullshit way he was going back to the Wheel, and then he drowned in his own blood.

"Two." Annalise gave a quick glance to August and to her severe displeasure saw that the little gombeen was on his feet and running again. The Orb Weaver's silk smoldered and fizzed where he'd severed it with something. A hexentatua of his own, she guessed. The Horned Lizard, maybe. You could blame the fury she had for that loping Syndicate bastard, and what he'd promised to do to her Seth, for the hitch in her flow—yet again her juvenile infatuation tripped her.

She dithered for a moment too long on hurling her side sword August's way and a mace caught her on the shoulder and bowled her forward, sent pins and needles along her arm. The Weaver was inactive; her sword no longer stuck in her palm but dropped from her tingling grasp. The final man was Tuthimi by the dappling on his skin, and his first blow had been struck in flailing panic as the last of the early-fight adrenaline coursed through him.

Elation lit across his face as he beheld the blow he'd dealt and its effect, and he lunged forward to capitalize on the disarmed Verdugo. Annalise's eyes darted. Watch for the swing, brace your legs, get ready to—" Stop," August il Agante cried. The flanged head of the man's mace stilled in baffled hesitation. Annalise kicked him in the bollocks. He staggered, retching.

She rolled to the floor, came up with bloody straw clinging to her and her blade back in her hand, and its tip slid into his stomach and out his back. She wrenched it once, puncturing the man's liver, tugged it out, and cut off his addled wail along with his head. One. She whirled round. Why had August stilled her attacker? Was he trying to negotiate? But August was gone. Sped off into the dark atop his courser, hoofbeats drumming his flight. Annalise was alone with the corpses and the dangling thief.

"What the fuck," she muttered, shaking the aching shock out of her arm.

"Why'd—""Hey, honey," August said, and Annalise spun round to the impossible source. Seth il Gutierre grinned weakly.

"It does animals, too," he said, in his kidnapper's voice. He whinnied in a flawless impression of Demetrius. Annalise let out a shocked guffaw that turned into a long, delirious laugh. Seth joined in, wincing as the air passed through his bruised chest. She cut him from the ceiling, and when his bare feet landed on the blood-spattered floor, his legs buckled. Before he could hit the floor her heavy arm shot out around his waist.

She lifted him, held him to her chest in macabre mimicry of a bridal carry, and the bloody Verdugo and the dazed, bound thief shared a deep, distraught breath of relief.

"You said come and get me," she said.

"You came," he said.

"I fucked it all up," she said.

"Those beautiful things you said to me. About how you waited for me your whole life. And how brave you were to say it. And I was so cowardly, and ungrateful, and such a fucking disappointment."

"I'm not disappointed anymore," he said.

"I'm… appointed. And concussed, maybe."

"I'm sorry," she said.

"I love you."

"I love you, too," he said.

"You were ready, and I wasn't. But I am, now." A tear fell from her face onto his cheek, smearing the dried blood from the cut on his forehead.

"I'm ready, Seth. Will you come home?"

"You fired me," he said.

"You want a job?"

"Yeah."

"You're hired," she said, and her fingers laced into his matted hair, and their noses touched, and her lips brushed his, and his breath blew coppery against her face. In the cold river-green of the night, the roadhouse was still smoldering, and in the barn the torches guttered, and there, surrounded by blood and blades and butchered men, Annalise al Ydris and Seth il Gutierre kissed, and kissed, and kept kissing, with gasping, animal desperation.