Strictly speaking, his employer hadn’t told him to stop stealing. In fact, she’d encouraged it. Perhaps she wouldn’t appreciate his freelancing, but he hadn’t appreciated the goddamn charnel house she’d thrown him into.
If that bonus was still on the far horizon he wasn’t about to wait. He needed an emergency supply of cash, enough that he could cut and run; the brush with Anna had shown him that. Maybe he was sticking around, but who could blame him for devising an exit strategy?
And if picking pockets was the best way to burn off the twitchy energy he sometimes got, the itching in his hands, well, that was just a happy side effect. Some thieves talked about it like it was a high, like it was sex. The rush, the gratification. Seth couldn’t wrap his head around that.
Seth stole because stealing was when he felt normal.
A silver-plated pocketwatch. A billfold of braces. Everyone wanted lumber, and this far from the iron arteries Laramme was the only good place to get it. They were well-heeled, the people here. Satisfaction curled the corners of his mouth. He was too threadbare himself to limit his lifts to the affluent, but it was his strong preference.
“Verdugo Erheis is dead,” Annalise said. “Fallen in this past Winter War. Condolences, folks, if he was a friend. Unlikely as that is.”
Laramme, unlike Prossimo, could afford at least a pittance of a laugh, and Seth dutifully joined in its low rumble before getting back to work.
The work. The purpose, the calm. The clarity of need, the execution of expertise. Like he was doing what he’d been designed to do. Like a tangle finally being worked out of matted hair. And the risk of getting caught and hurt, yes. But Seth felt a version of that all the time, every minute. Always something over his shoulder. To have an actual reason to feel it was a balm, not a burden. It made life fall into ticking clockwork order. The world was hounds, foxes, and hens. Seth il Gutierre was a fox.
He nudged a well-dressed woman in such a way that she turned to murmur a brief apology to the man next to her, and then her pocketbook was in his sleeve. Beautiful work. The distant echo through time of a hand resting atop his head. Good job, Seth. Good lift. Good boy. That’s everyone’s supper he just earned, kids. Learn from Seth.
He moved away from the square and around the outskirts of the village, as Annalise’s voice rang indistinctly from the scaffold. He stayed out of the sturdy logbuilt interiors. He untied a pouch of tobacco from an ashwood fencepost. He unhooked a roast chicken dangling above a corpselight heating element at an abandoned butcher counter and carefully wrapped it in an unattended roll of paraffin paper. He recalled the sheer size of his boss, and unhooked another. He strolled past a humming hexis dynamo the size of Annalise’s carriage and lifted a canister of popmites and a sachet of feed from the monitor’s hut. It wasn’t quite enough outdoor thievery to warm him up for second-story work, but he knew a fine middle-ground between indoors and outdoors.A murani hardcamp sat at the edge of the village in a stump-studded clearing. A clutch of cinnabar-colored conical yurts, decorated with beaded mosaics, mushroomed from the earth around a firepit with still-glowing embers. The camp had crept further away from the mostly human heart of Laramme since Seth’s last visit, as the murani rode the rim of the forest’s slow sacrifice.
There were all manner of kindred in the United Territories, but almost everyone Seth had ever met was human or muran. He supposed the al Ydrises didn’t count any longer, and he’d run into a kari-kine once at a taphouse who had flirted with him, but it was hard to get past the independently moving eyes. Turns out a lady gazing at your lips isn’t quite as titillating when she’s looking you in the eye simultaneously.
The murani were a regular presence in this region of the Plainlands, but they preferred to keep to themselves. There was much to admire about the Felix Folk of the Plains, despite their prickliness. Their willingness for rough living, their tight communalism, and—Seth’s favorite—their general disuse of locks.
He strolled to the center of the hardcamp and cast a look around its carpeted yurts. Empty as the streets that had led to it. Seth thanked St. Wycrest of the Scales for the law of witnesses, but it was better to be safe than sorry. He took the tobacco pouch in his palm, invoked his Fox hex, and dropped it in the dry afternoon grass.
He stuck his pinky in his ear and ducked into the flap of the largest and fanciest yurt. He squinted through the dim illumination its circle-cut windows provided and rifled through the tent’s belongings. A fine camp stove, an ornate three-stringed balaphone leaning against a carved instrument rest.
He’d only just found his trophy—a well-balanced stiletto dagger he’d stuck in his boot, safely away from the discovery of his employers—when the crisp crunch of the underbrush filtered from the tobacco pouch, through his pinky, and into his brain. He hurriedly folded and packed the yurt’s contents back into place. The tent flap was just falling shut behind him as he scrambled from the entrance.
A sun-dappled muran woman stalked into visibility from the forest outskirts with a bloody faun draped across her shoulders. She halted by the farthest tent; the tension on her bowstring went taut as she drew it a few lethal inches back.
“Who’s there, then?” she called.
“Who’s there?” He puffed his chest out. “Didn’t you know the Verdugo was on the way?”
The woman’s whiskers twitched. She dropped the faun before the yurt he’d stepped from; it landed with a heavy thud and left a streak of blood down her shoulder. “My travel companion neglected to inform me.”
Her clothes were fine, despite the twigs and the deer blood. Here was the owner of the yurt, and the stiletto he’d put in his boot.
“You’re able-bodied, you should be at the square.” He jerked a thumb in that direction. “Law of witnesses.”
“You should be at the square, too.” She squinted at him. “What are you doing here?”
“Scraping for stragglers like you,” he said. “I’m part of the Verdugo’s retinue.”
She sniffed and looked him up and down. “You work for the Verdugo?”
And here was the best feeling in the world. Someone high and mighty, sneering down their nose at you, with the contents of their coin purse in your back pocket.
“That’s right,” he said. “For your own good, you want to see her before I do.”
“Her?” She tucked her thumbs into her belt loop. “What happened to Erheis?”
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“The Verdugo is dead,” he said. “Long live the Verdugo.”
“Two heads for the Deathspell. Not a bad haul.” Annalise unfolded the first bundle of waxy paper; the grease glistened from the roasted chicken cocooned in it. “And this smells lovely, Seth. What’s this other yoke?”
“That one’s yours,” Seth said. “Figured you’d polish off a full one.”
She chuckled and adjusted her pipe with her teeth. “I will, yeah,” she said, which he’d learned was Annalise for I won’t. “The cheek of you. We’ll do halves.”
They’d parked by the roadhouse and gathered for a late lunch, and the scent of paprika and fragrant garlic filled the crowded carriage interior. Seth took a deep, grateful breath. “What’d the dead people do?”
“One was a rapist,” Tiago said. He’d managed not to cover himself in quite so much sword-blood today. “And the other was his accomplice.”
“Good riddance,” Seth said, with feeling.
“Yep.” Annalise sawed the chicken in half with the crack of a wishbone. She parceled a breast onto a plate and held it out to Seth. “Tits guy, right?”
He snorted and took the portion from her.
“I like to hope the condemned remember a piece of it.” Annalise took a final pull from her long-stemmed pipe and tapped its contents out over the edge of the carriage roof. “The taste of the steel. And on their next turn through the wheel they do better, as whatever they return as.”
“Doubt it,” Tiago said. “Forgetting is what the wheel is for.”
“Ah, sure.” Annalise tsked. “How’d my cub get so unsentimental, Feeli?”
Ofelia daintily cut into her chicken thigh and shrugged. She was the only al Ydris bothering with cutlery.
“Tell you, though,” Annalise said. “Seraphs remember it all. They slip the wheel on reincarnation. That’s why Sik-Ersetim wailed my name like that. For all the marks they’ve given me, it’s nice to think I’ve given a few right back.”
“They come back different, too. Physically.” Ofelia’s knife scraped against her tin plate. “The Necropolis has old editions of the Serapharium in its library that describe Sik-Ersetim as two-headed. At some point, she got a third.”
“Goddamn,” Seth said. “How had she changed this time?”
“Dunno,” Annalise said. “Killed her too quick. But they come back uglier and uglier, tell you that.”
“Is it like scar tissue? Do they come back stronger?”
“Maybe.” She smirked. “Not strong enough.”
Seth wagged a wingbone at her. “Well, you had help.”
There was obvious relief in Annalise’s grin to hear him joke about it. “That I certainly did, il Gutierre.”
“I appreciate the moral clarity of days like today,” Ofelia said. “When you have a quota, it muddles everything. One ought to be glad when one rolls into town and nobody’s done anything heinous. But when execution is one’s business, one leaves a village of virtue disappointed. It leads to a sort of perverse hope for evil deeds.”
“The vision of a Verdugo most people have is that if they can’t find a crime worth executing for, they’ll just butcher a couple of misdemeanors and be done with it,” Seth said. “Begging your pardon.”
Annalise scoffed and shook her head. “Makes your blood boil, that sort of Verdugo. Especially if they’re killing bread thieves while their territory is crawling with seraphs.”
“You’re talking about Erheis?”
Annalise nodded and licked grease from her thumb. “It’s more efficient killing seraphs. If you have the balls for it. The dynamos are built so a condemned kindred’s hexis usually fills one, unless they’re an oldtimer. You earn so much more for whacking a seraph. Sik-Ersetim gave us three.”
“Between her and the goons you dispatched in the woods, surely we’re ahead of schedule now,” Tiago said.
“Mmhmm.” Annalise tapped the ricasso of her sword, where the emerald abacus glowed. “Just about two-thirds of the way through the season and we’re already at thirty-five beads.”
“Out of?” Seth prompted.
“Usual quota is fifty,” Tiago said. “And this is a usual year. We keep this pace, we’re staying comfortably out of the Winter War. Maybe we even get an extra month off.”
“So.” Annalise dabbed her face with a scrap of linen. “Where’d you run off there, Seth?”
He shifted to stop an errant pommel from digging into his side. “Around, y’know. Bought these chickens, dropped by the Murani camp.”
“Stayed out of trouble?” Annalise asked.
“Certainly I did,” he said, which was certainly true, from a certain standpoint.
Annalise looked skeptical. Perhaps it was because of their uneasy new arrangement with one another she said, simply, “All right, then,” and eased herself out of the carriage window, up to its roof. Seth heard her heavy tread above his head.
He made eye contact with Ofelia and felt a moment of foreboding at his own lie; but the girl had spent her Darkness on the scaffold, surely. He kept his face neutral but for a raised brow, as if in challenge. Ofelia gave an ambiguous smile and returned to her book.
“A lot of gratitude in Laramme that we took that seraph out,” Annalise called through the roof. “They’re offering to put us up in the Corregidor’s manor. Got a couple very fancy guest rooms.”
Tiago craned his neck out the open window. “How are we splitting them up?”
“You get one, and Feeli gets one.”
“What about you and il Gutierre?”
“Me and il Gutierre have a little trip to take.” There was a wooden scrape across the roof. “Seth, would you help me out?”
Outside the carriage walls, Laramme was giving them a wide berth. The late afternoon wind carried fire-orange leaves their way. Annalise stood atop the carriage holding a solid-looking steamer trunk. “I’mma lower this. Lend a hand?”
Seth reached his arms up and helped her guide the trunk to the ground. When she let go, he halfway staggered under the thing’s weight. She’d been hefting it like it was empty; it was assuredly not.
He gingerly dragged the trunk out of the way as she descended. “What’s this trip?”
“Headhunting,” Annalise said. “Following a lead from that book you stole to the next town over. Place called Fontana. Have you been?”
“Fontana?” He shook his head. “That’s ritz-ville. It’s on the iron artery. There’s plumbing. They don’t let guys like me in there. Chase me out with torches.”
She chuckled. “A shave and a new outfit and a big old battle axe like me with you and they’ll put the torches away.” The smile shrank. “The thing is, I don’t really want to show up in an official capacity, see. And I’m a pretty hard-to-mistake kind of woman.”
“That’s for sure.”
“When I need to travel incognito, I sometimes use, uh… Lisa.” Annalise opened the trunk.
“Another head?”
“Yeah. I lopped her off a sorceress.”
“An evil sorceress?”
“Well, what’s evil, really? The seraphs are, of course, but the rest of us are just various degrees of doolally.” Annalise rummaged in the trunk as she spoke. “She sacrificed a couple people. But she was an all right sort, despite how I had to kill her. And there’s some really handy spells rattling around her noggin. Including one that’ll disguise me as human.”
Seth heard Ofelia, sotto voce from the carriage. “Oh, he’s meeting Lisa.”
Tiago let out an airy tch in reply.
“All right.” Annalise produced a cranium-sized silk bundle from the trunk. Her fingers tapped nervously across something hard and hollow inside it. “Now I’m gonna warn you, because I didn’t when I was Anna.”
He steeled himself. “Is Lisa going to be a problem?”
“No. I mean, not really. I just…” She laughed uncomfortably. “Her donor was a pretty uninhibited woman.”
“Uninhibited how? Anna-level uninhibited?”
“Not like Anna. No. Not at all. I mean, sort of.” Annalise sucked air through her teeth. “I…I might say some things I normally wouldn’t. Some things I don’t really mean. Just don’t take me too seriously. If I try and, uh…”
There was a look of pained concentration on Annalise’s face, like she was getting a tooth extracted while extracting someone else’s tooth.
“If I put the moves on you, just shut me down. Okay?”
“Oh.” Seth’s throat dried. “Yeah, sure.”
She patted his shoulder and opened the carriage door. “Thank you, Seth. For your patience. I know it’s been hard to adjust. I’m still keeping an eye out on how to make it up to you. But I promise Lisa is better-behaved.”
Tiago had a look of deep skepticism on his face.
The carriage door shut and there was that crackling sound again. Evidently Annalise had no compunctions about swapping in front of the kids.
The door swung open again.
Out stepped a woman with the kind of face the men of antiquity started poems and/or wars over.
Her full, cupid’s-bow lips were a deep merlot—the first splash of color he’d seen on any al Ydris, if blood didn’t count. Her soft, shapely cheek was studded, just past her jawline, with a mole placed as perfectly as a period ends a sentence. Her eyes were elegant, almond-shaped pools of black. Her hair was a silken curtain down her back, jet black but for a graceful stripe of silver slashing from her side part to frame her delicate face.
Her eyes locked on his and widened. Those black cherry lips parted, as if she were surprised he was there waiting for her. Then they curved upward into a wide, dazzling smile, displaying a flawless set of pearly whites.
“Seth il Gutierre.” Lisa pronounced each syllable of his name like she was letting it melt on her tongue. “I have been waiting to get a look at you with these eyes.”