SWORDS (The Paladin's Thief Book 3) Page 3

  Then the city is behind us. We thunder across the bridge and into the lesser estates and farmlands, and one by one the Lord’s horsemen peel away.

  I breathe a sigh of relief. Nightshades can move silently in the country, but they prefer towns where they can find both comfort and contracts.

  It isn’t long before I lose familiarity with the territory. I’ve never bothered to explore the surrounding area too much, and never traveled at such speed. Soon the jostle of the coach and the flashing countryside has worn away the excitement of the morning, and all my questions from the last few days return in force. I pick the most immediate, the one that has me most confused. I’d rather not discuss it in front of the kids, but they’re growing up fast, and I need to know the answer now.

  “Magnus, we shouldn’t have survived the morning. It doesn’t make sense. There were at least a dozen of them.”

  Magnus lets the curtain fall and looks back at me, shaking his head. “Sometimes there are miracles, Teacup. Things we can’t explain.”

  “I don’t believe in miracles. I believe in stealth, steel, and blood.” I gesture to Val and Timnus. “Under those restrictions, why aren’t we dead?”

  “Aside from Pan’s grace?”

  “And Lucinda’s skillet? Yes.”

  For a while Magnus doesn’t respond. He nods curtly to acknowledge the question, and I can see the tactical wheels turning. Magnus isn’t stupid, not when it comes to fighting. “It isn’t one thing,” he says at last. “Each one of these factors played in, and perhaps others that I can’t figure.”

  Magnus holds up a thumb. “First—and easiest—you heard them and woke me up. Stealth is the Nightshade’s primary advantage over any other trained fighter. They’re taught to kill before the guard is up.”

  “I’m not a trained fighter, Magnus. Lucinda isn’t. Carmen certainly isn’t. Knowing shouldn’t have made a difference.”

  “It made a difference for me. I’ve been trained to kill Nightshades since I was tall enough to hold a wooden dagger. I don’t claim to understand them, but I know how they move. And you and Lucinda were smart enough to keep cool and follow directions. That’s my second point.”

  I start to protest again, but Magnus cuts in: “Hear me out, Teacup. Nightshades don’t follow directions. They only work in small groups when distractions are needed, but not as an organized fighting force. They don’t trust each other. They’re solo operators. Third, they didn’t have time to plan a solid operation. A Nightshade might take weeks to plan out a dangerous job. This one had to be patched together in a few short hours. Fourth, there is something very different about the way you move, Teacup. I only caught a glimpse, but you’re faster than any abbey recruit I’ve ever seen, and you can take much more punishment than a guy your size should be able to take.”

  Magnus pauses for a moment, and I’m impressed that he’s thrown together this rationale in such a short time.

  “Fifth.”

  “I capitulate.”

  “But I haven’t even given you my most convincing arguments. Most of them couldn’t have been full Nightshades, and . . .”

  I wave my hand. I’d thought of that one on my own, and even so, we should be dead. “It’s enough,” I say aloud. “We survived.”

  “Yeah, Da. You were fearless.” Val’s tone is respectful for once, almost reverent.

  “You two were brave, too,” I say.

  We crest two more hills before I phrase my second question, the one at the crux of our problems.

  “Magnus, why are the ’Shades after you?”

  It feels like an appropriate question, considering all the trouble I’ve gotten into for helping him. It doesn’t explain why Tom was so surprised when Magnus walked through the door to the Black Cat, or why Tom seemed intent on cursing me with his collection of oath rings, but it’s a start.

  Magnus launches into what threatens to be a long and grandiose prelude about rites of passage, initiation, and how one proves his or her dedication to the Abbeys of Light.

  “Magnus,” I mutter, “is there a short version?”

  Timmy looks at Magnus as if he wants to know the same thing. “Did you, like, steal a bunch of rings from them?” he asks.

  Magnus answers both questions at once. “Just one. And actually it was my friend Cobalt who did it.”

  “So?” says Timmy. “Did anyone see you? One time Val and I followed Da. He thought we were sleeping and we thought he was doing some acquisitioning and wanted to watch. Instead he went to Carmen’s house—”

  “I’m pretty sure someone saw him, Timnus,” I interrupt unsuccessfully.

  “—and just stood there looking through the window, and then she saw him and started making faces at him, and then she—”

  When I put my hand over Timnus’s mouth he gets the message. “Grown-ups are weird,” he says.

  “Yeah,” Val adds.“I can’t wait to be grown-up.”

  I sigh, trying to get Magnus back on point. “So your buddy stole a ring. That doesn’t seem so bad.”

  “And I saw some things I shouldn’t have seen,” he adds.

  Val giggles. “It’s okay Magnus. You’re old enough.”

  “Not like that,” Magnus says, blushing.

  I shush Val. “None of this merits that guy Archus coming after you.”

  “I also stabbed one of their leaders.”

  “Oh. That’s certainly . . .”

  “. . .helped a prisoner escape. . .”

  I wait patiently.

  “. . . and killed the rearguard in their Grand Sarcophagus.”

  “You’re really good at making friends, aren’t you?” I say. “If the Paladin thing doesn’t work out, you could always be a tax collector.”

  “I also sent their secret pass codes out to a bunch of people in letters.”

  I have to admit, those parts of his story sound interesting. I probe a bit, trying to get a feel for the shape of it without all the details. “How does one turn a simple walkabout into a personal war with the guild of assassins? Weren’t you supposed to be learning to judge character?”

  “It’s my friend Cobalt’s fault. Father Jeremiah said that a year’s worth of journaling in ‘unsavory’ places should cure me of my innocence, and Cobalt suggested that Byzantus was about the least innocent place he could think of.”

  “Who is Father Jeremiah?”

  “My mentor. Probably the Altus Mitre now.”

  “The what?” Then I reconsider my question. It’s been hard enough getting Magnus to talk about this without getting him side-tracked. “Never mind. So you just dove right in? ‘Let’s head south and pick fights with the guild of assassins and hope it makes us smarter?’ ”

  Magnus nods, making a face. “That was the gist of it. Seems a little stupid, now that I think about it.”

  “A little?”

  “That’s not the most interesting part though. The morning we were leaving, Father Jeremiah asked us to do a favor for him since we were heading south. ‘Probably dangerous,’ he said, ‘but certainly a grand adventure for two young cadets like you.’

  “Cobalt glanced at me and I glanced at him. He grinned. ‘Special Duties’ for the Altus Mitre had a nice ring to it. Father Jeremiah showed us the note he’d gotten from Pale Tom, though I didn’t know it at the time. He said it was from an old contact that had possibly joined the Nightshades.”

  I remember the note, or rather I remember Magnus quoting it in the death-quiet tavern after Tom made mincemeat of his fellows.

  “At home in the evening,” Magnus intones, “standing at the hockey, the half-breed holds his court. Come for mercy, brother. Release me from my past, and I’ll deliver you when shadows fall.”

  “A bit dramatic.”

  “And not really very helpful,” Magnus says. “Sometime between Doward and Kafk, after another failed round of darts, Cobalt gets it into his head that he’s going to infiltrate the Nightshades. ‘Think of it, Magnus. We’ll join up, and do an inside job!’ ”

&
nbsp; “That’s not very Paladin-like.” I say, shivering. “And very stupid.”

  He nods, missing the point. “Right! Pretending to be evil is half the fall.”

  “No, Magnus. It’s stupid for other more obvious reasons.” I gesture to the countryside. “You are now running for your life and you’ve dragged half the town of Ector into your little war.”

  Magnus blushes and has the grace to look ashamed. “I’m sorry I pulled you into this, Teacup.”

  “Me, too.”

  There is silence for a few minutes before I decide I want to hear the rest of the story. “This friend Cobalt. He can’t be very much like you. He seems to have even less common sense.”

  “He isn’t like me, that’s for sure. He’s been assigned more extra duties than any other ten cadets combined. It’s probably one reason Father Jeremiah sent him out with me—to keep him out of trouble. But when Cobalt gets an idea, he goes with it, and then it doesn’t really matter if Pan himself raises objections. And this ‘infiltration’ idea took Cobalt by the teeth. He got it into his head that we could make off with the Nightshades’ entire collection of in one fell swoop. ‘We’re going to bring the shadows to them, alright,’ he kept saying.”

  “Joining the Nightshades is a very bad idea,” I reiterate.

  Timmy seems worried. “Did he do it, Magnus? Did he join? They put spells on you to make you do evil things, even if you want to be good.”

  Those are the bedtime stories I told to Timnus and Valerie. Even so, some of Tom’s final words echo in my head. “Some oaths cannot be broken.”

  Magnus has a distant look, and Timmy pokes him in the knee to get his attention. “Magnus, sir?”

  The big man realizes he hasn’t answered the question. He stares Timmy in the eyes. “No. In the end, even Cobalt knew better than to do that. And he knew it well enough to make me promise never to tell the Mitres that he’d even considered it.”

  “What happened, Magnus?” Val’s eyes are open now. She’s no longer pretending to sleep.

  “I saved him, we escaped the city, and then he insisted that I go on ahead. We planned to meet in Ector, but he never showed. I should have never left him.”

  The coach jolts once as it hits a dip in the road and then rocks back and forth. Val and Timnus don’t say anything. They already think Magnus is a saint after what he’s done for Val, so it doesn’t matter who he might have left behind in Byzantus.

  “You may have helped him,” I say diplomatically, “by drawing pursuit away from him. Then he could escape without the scrutiny.” Or that might have been Cobalt’s plan all along. Escape is a lot easier when the advance guard goes haring after a decoy. But I don’t offer my opinions to Magnus.

  He looks doubtful, anyways. “No. A Paladin always does what’s right. I shouldn’t have left him.”

  I snorted. “Everyone makes mistakes, Magnus.”

  “I abandoned him, Teacup.”

  “You didn’t abandon him, Magnus,” I say. “You did the best you could.” I remember how I felt when Sara died. I hadn’t known it was poison back then. I’d tortured myself over all the choices I might have made differently, over the medicines I might have tried, over the healers I could have called on. Could I have done more? Could I have saved her from Sanjuste’s poison?

  No. Not back then. But if she were to die today, I’d be ready. I look back at Magnus. “You can’t save everyone.”

  “I know. But I left him in there. I ran into the water and let the horses pull me across the river. There’s no way he’d make it out by himself. We only set one lifeline, and I took it.”

  “You helped him when he asked for help. You left him when he asked you to leave. End of story. And he obviously made it out alive. He sent you that note.”

  “It is the sort of thing he’d write,” Magnus agrees. Gradually, the anguished expression leaves his face. “But there’s no guarantee he’s still alive. I wouldn’t have survived if it hadn’t been for you and Pale Tom.”

  “If he’s anything like you, Magnus, he’s still alive.”

  “Cobalt’s nothing like me,” he says again.

  I don’t have a response for that. A man’s own guilt can’t be teased away by other men—not if he’s set on it.

  The carriage thunders along, eating up the miles.

  TWO

  By nightfall I’m excited for a warm bed, and to stretch my legs a bit. No man is meant to sit on a bumpy seat for hours on end. When the carriage pulls into the livery in Tharmouth, I roust the kids from the coach and herd them into the dirt wagon yard.

  Unfortunately, Magnus has different plans. He speaks to me in a low voice. “We’ve got to keep moving,” he says. “When Cobalt says a storm is brewing . . .”

  He doesn’t finish, but I get the impression that Cobalt is a man of few words, and prone to understatement.

  “We continue on foot? You can’t run a team day and night, especially not when they’ve been pulling a heavy coach.”

  Magnus shakes his head. “I know that, but we can’t continue on foot, either. It’s too dangerous. I’ve got plenty of funds, though, thanks to your friends Grippy and Tom.”

  “Excellent,” I sigh with relief. “I could use a good bed, and some good food.” Val and Timnus nod eagerly.

  “It’s not that,” he says, clearing his throat. “Tharmouth has a night coach we can hire. It will only take a minute.”

  Val groans. “Da!”

  Timnus pokes her in the ribs, not the injured side. “You’re the one who wanted to see the world!”

  “We aren’t going to see anything at night,” she retorts.

  “Surely we can get some food,” I say to Magnus, watching my kids grouse at each other. “We could rent a room and get up early. The kids . . .”

  Magnus shakes his heads. “All the more reason to keep moving. A kid should—”

  I cut him off. I’m irritated, and it shows through. I haven’t done anything to deserve this, except maybe steal Tom’s ring in the first place. Knowing Tom intended that only makes me angrier. “Spare me the shoulds and shouldn’ts, Magnus. Timnus and Valery have seen a great deal of things that they shouldn’t.”

  There’s steel in Magnus’s eyes that I’ve only seen glimpses of before. It isn’t cold, but it is unflinching. “We need to go.”

  “Hire your damn coach, then. I’m getting food.”

  “Teacup. It’s our only advantage. A Nightshade can’t ride all night.”

  “Unless he hires a coach like us.”

  Magnus is surprised and horrified at the thought. He puts a hand on my shoulder. “Then they could be right behind us. I can’t let you wander off.”

  “Let me?” I shrug his hand off. “Am I your prisoner now?”

  He jerks his hand back as if stung. “No! I . . . I just . . .The kids.”

  “They’re my kids. I protect them. And I know when enough’s enough. That one,” I say, pointing at Val, “needs a real meal and several hours’ rest.”

  After a moments pause, Magnus nods. “Two hours?” he pleads.

  “And time for a real meal.”

  “Fine.” Magnus stalks off to find the livery master for a fresh team.

  The nearest inn has an open room that the innkeep says he’ll rent us. I don’t inform him that we’ll be leaving early, but I do ask him for some soup and he throws in yesterday’s bread with the deal. I’ve just settled Val when she complains that her clothes are sticking to her bandages. “Carmen said we’re supposed to change the bandaging at least twice a day.”

  “It can wait two hours, Val.”

  “No, Da! It really hurts.” And she lets out a little whimper that sounds like it might be real.

  Magnus is already asleep on the floor, meaning I get first watch. For a man who didn’t want to stop, he sure falls asleep fast. Then I remember that he’s got a matching set of bandages on his ribs, and my irritation softens, though it’s going to be a nightmare waking him up to change them. Two sets of bandages.


  Right.

  I let myself out of the room and the inn quietly. The air is chilly but not yet wintry, and the empty road is cold beneath my bare feet. I climb quickly to the livery wall and peer down into the wagon yard: one wagon and two coaches, ours catching a patch of moonlight, and the trunk I need is still strapped to the back of it.

  I unstrap it, remove the lip-board holding it in place, and give it a yank to pull it down where I can open it. It’s heavier than I remember and doesn’t budge. Impatient, I yank harder, this time with both hands. When the trunk slides free, I’m unable to stop it from accelerating and have to dive out of the way. There’s a muffled cursing as the trunk topples and smashes on the hard-pack of the wagon yard, boards and metal bracing going all to splinters.

  It’s Lucinda, curled up in the fetal position. “God’s blazes, Teacup. There are better ways to open a trunk. And where have you been? You’re supposed to change those bandages every six hours, didn’t Carmen tell you? I thought you were going to leave me in there all night!”

  She’s a pitiful sight. She can barely move.

  I help her sit up, but it’s obvious she’s dizzy.

  She glances at the splintered trunk around her and smiles weakly. “There is no way I’m ever getting in another trunk.”

  “You rode in the baggage? Why didn’t you just ask?

  “Because Magnus told me to look out for Carmen. I think he’s nervous about having me around.”

  “No doubt.”

  “I don’t understand it,” she says, frustrated. “I know he likes me.”

  “He does.” I help her pick splinters off her back. “Do you know what a vow of celibacy is?”

  She gives me a dirty look. “It isn’t a permanent vow,” she says.

  “Whatever,” I say. “I guess that’s none of my business. Why didn’t you stay to watch over Carmen, anyways?” I add a bit selfishly.