The Queen of Lies (38 page)

Jessa leaned over the bed and wretched into one of the bedpans. The parquet floor was spattered with puke, but nothing could be done about it until the cleaning automaton made its rounds, which was usually on the hour. The machines were designed to maintain a full household. With just Jessa their routines bordered on obsessive.

She shuddered miserably and dragged the sheet over her body. Vomiting had made her feel better, and sleep started to feel possible. Jessa shut her eyes and prayed to Ohan and Kultea for a measure of oblivion to see her through the nausea.

She barely had drifted off before the sound of voices jerked her from a sweet second of slumber. Loud crashing came from the floor below. Jessa bolted up in bed and reached for her night-robe. She was wracked with illness and unsteady on her feet as she made her way to the hall.

Steadying herself against the doorframe, she flung the door open and stumbled into the hall. She froze. Standing there were a pair of black wolves with yellow eyes. Behind them were two men and a woman who looked to be in even worse shape than she was. Their eyes were empty sockets, their flesh pale. They carried sacks over their shoulders.

She brushed her hair back. “I’m afraid you’ve caught me at a bad time.”

The wolves snarled as they stalked closer, their eyes hungry.

“I don’t know if you’re really here or whether this is another product of delirium, but in either event, I know you can understand me…changelings.”

The wolves stopped, confused for a moment. Wolves were rare in Amhaven and practically unheard of in the Free Cities. But they clearly weren’t ordinary wolves, though how Jessa recognized them she couldn’t entirely place. She just knew.

“State your business.” She curled her fingers to summon her lightning. Anemic crackles of electricity danced over her hand. The poison in her body had weakened her abilities to almost nothing, but she was relying on reputation.

“They don’t talk much,” a young feminine voice came from behind, causing her to spin and nearly fall over.

A girl a few years younger than her, with wild multicolored hair, stood in the hall behind her, a long stiletto in her hand, which she was using to peel an apple. “Hi. I’m Esme. I’ll be your burglar this evening, but I want you to think of me as your friend.”

“My friend?” Jessa scoffed.

She sighed and took another step toward Jessa. “I live with a bunch of dudes, which is fine, but…they all just want to talk about magic and pussy and make fart jokes. I miss having girlfriends, you know? You seem like one of those really nice, proper girls who has, like, a million best friends. Am I right?”

“I am a Stormlord, not a ladies’ maid.” The rush of adrenaline gathered in her like a thunderhead. “Get out. I won’t warn you again.”

Faster than she could react, Esme flicked her dagger into Jessa’s stomach. The pain exploded through her gut like fire as she collapsed to the floor. She let out a blast of lightning at her assailant, but the shot went wild, and the girl had stepped away from her spot. Jessa couldn’t see where she was.

She’d never been stabbed before; it put a lot of her other pain in perspective. Out of instinct her hands clutched the wound, but she was too hurt and shocked to move or touch the knife. All she could think about was her child, the one she’d chosen to abandon. She sobbed as she curled into herself.

“I have to admit”—Esme was crouching next to her, bent over so she could whisper in Jessa’s ear—“I was kind of expecting a fight. I was going to kill you regardless, but it’s not personal. You should have left with the rest of the Silverbrooks.”

Jessa was in too much pain to reply. Revenants shambled up the stairs; she lost count, but there were at least ten filing into the various rooms. The hallways were raucous as things were broken, moved, and riffled through.

“Have two of the ghouls toss her room,” Esme said to the wolves. “I’m going to make my new friend comfortable.”

Esme sat back against the wall. “I know what you’re doing. You’re going to play helpless and weak, and then, when I go to pull that knife out of your gut, you’re going to unleash your electric blast.”

“Just take what you want and go…” Jessa rasped.

“I timed this perfectly.” Esme continued blithely carrying on the conversation with herself. “You see, depending on exactly where you stab the abdomen, you can control whether someone bleeds out in minutes or hours, or even just nonfatally injure them. Your injury is fatal, and you should be done by the time we’re finished here.”

Jessa closed her eyes. It was hopeless to fight.

A loud crash resounded from downstairs along with a chorus of guttural rasps. Jessa forced her eyes open. She heard the swing of steel followed by the thunk of bodies hitting the tile in the foyer.

And then a man very loudly sang off-key:

Ohhh, I’d rather be a sword than a cutting board,

’cause cutting boards are boring.

And I’d rather be a sword than a pillowcase,

’cause I hate to hear guys snoring.

Esme grabbed the dagger from Jessa’s abdomen and ripped it out. Her expression was twisted into an inhuman mask of rage. She growled, “Sword…”

I’d rather be a sword than a chamber pot,

’cause that is just disgusting.

And I’d rather be a sword than a big codpiece,

’cause those take readjusting.

With a heave and a ho

and a thrust and a blow,

all the heads will roll,

and the bell will toll.

I’m a big-ass fucking swooooord.

Another voice responded, “How many verses are there to this battle shanty?”

“Nine hundred seventy-two,” the other man’s voice replied cheekily.

Cresting the stairs at the end of the hallway, a big Patrean with a gleaming bastard sword swung his blade in wide carefree arcs, chopping the heads off revenants the second they got into reach. Each time the blade sliced clean through the neck.

The Vorpal Blade of Arix.
The sight of it made Jessa smile.

Behind him a dark-skinned priest strolled, arms folded behind his back. He wore white robes and medallions of office. They stopped when they saw Esme. The wolves gathered to either side of her, preparing to pounce.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t our old friend Esme,” the swordsman said. “I should have fucking known. She’s holding the accursed letter opener of House Setahari. I knew there was a reason I hated her.”

“You mean…she’s like you?” the priest asked. “You didn’t mention this before.”

“I didn’t see the knife. It’s easy to hide a few inches of metal.” He looked back at Esme. “Step away from the princess.”

She cooed, “You have maybe a few minutes before she bleeds out. It’s a good thing the church teaches their killers how to heal. In fact let’s make it interesting. Heath—that’s your name, isn’t it?”

The priest nodded, stepping forward with his hands raised. “You want money? Running smash-and-grab jobs on abandoned houses for trinkets is amateur. So what is it you’re really after?”

Esme stepped back. “Themis, Theril, take what you can and meet back at the place. Give them the priest’s name.”

The wolves darted off to Jessa’s room. Heath flicked his wrist, and long silver blades shot out of his sleeves, stabbing one wolf in the neck but missing the other. Jessa heard a crash come from her room then the breaking of glass.

Heath brought his hands up and drew back his blades.

Esme somersaulted back down the hallway another ten feet. “You can help her or help your buddy Sword. Your choice.”

“Cover me!” Heath ran to crouch next to Jessa and pressed his hand on her wound. Immediately golden Light spread from his fingers, and the pain receded. The Light glowed with greater intensity as he focused his energy.

Sword charged Esme, his blade aimed to skewer her. She jumped to the side and took a stab at his kidney, but almost as if he had predicted it, he twisted himself out of the way and elbowed her in the face.

Sweat formed on Heath’s brow as he channeled his Light. “What the hell did they do to you? This feels like poison.”

Esme staggered back and readied her stance, tossing her blade from one hand to the other. Sword raised his blade and brought it around in a wide slash aimed at her neck. She flung the dagger in the air and bent herself backward so the blow missed her. She caught the dagger in her hand as a few pieces of multicolored hair fluttered to the ground.

“You were always so slow and clumsy,” Esme told Sword with a smile.

“At least my house could afford the metal to make a real weapon,” he chided.

“You’re really disparaging the honor of my
house?
”
She laughed. “I was never bonded to Setahari like you were to Crigenesta. Who do you think leaked those secret letters that financially ruined my house in the first place?”

“You destroyed Sarn, you fucking psychopath!”

Esme shrugged. “Little old me. Not bad for a letter opener. I guess it’s true what they say—the pen is mightier than the sword.”

He brought down a furious strike, and she ducked out of the way.

She tried to take the opening, but Sword was ready before she could reach. They repeated the pattern. Esme was more dexterous, but he was a Patrean and incredibly fast for his size. They were almost too perfectly matched. Each knew how to exploit the other’s weakness but also seemed to know what the other would do.

Jessa started to feel better as the Light spread through her body. She felt the flicker of power awaken in her blood. “You should go help him,” she whispered.

“He’ll be fine,” Heath reassured her. “Something in your body is resisting the Light, reacting to something in your blood, thickening it somehow. If I don’t finish now, it’ll just worsen again when I’m at full strength.”

Esme sneered, “You fight like a blind gorilla with a stick trying to hit a butterfly.”

“Do you need a breather?” Sword feigned concern. “All that gymnastics looks awfully tiring…” He executed a flurry of slashes, weaving the sword in wide arcs with a single hand. Esme tumbled farther down the hallway and came up with her dagger drawn above her head, with her weight resting on her back leg.

“Don’t get too attached to that body. There’s a reason they’re called Fodders.”

Esme launched herself from the ball of her foot into the air, letting herself spin feet over head toward Sword. This time he stepped out of the way and readied himself for an attack as she hit the opposite wall of the hallway and launched herself at him.

And then she flickered and vanished from sight.

Jessa gasped as she saw Esme reappear behind Sword, still retaining her momentum, and drive her blade into his kidney. His brown eyes widened with realization as his chiseled jaw went slack and his arms fell limply to his side.

Esme twisted the knife as she pulled Sword’s head close to her ear and whispered something in a language Jessa didn’t understand. She flickered and vanished again, reappearing on his other side as she slashed his neck.

He sank to his knees as she flickered again and cut the other side of his neck. “Better luck next time.”

Jessa could take no more. She flung her hand and sent a blast of lightning toward Esme. The girl stepped to the side with inhuman quickness. But Jessa no longer felt the stupor of the poison. There was a reason they called them lightning reflexes.

Jessa threw out her other hand and tagged Esme in the shoulder with a secondary bolt of electricity. In fact she was just showing off at that point. Lightning, when not channeled, could go anywhere and often went everywhere.

Esme flew backward and flickered away. But Jessa had seen the agony on her face. Her secondary bolt wasn’t as powerful as the first, but a lightning strike always left a reminder. She turned to Heath and shoved him off her. “Help your friend! I’ll be fine. If she reappears, she’ll be outmatched.”

“Sword’s dead.” Heath kept his hands on her abdomen for a while longer while the Light faded. “There. Finished.”

“Did any of what they were saying to each other make sense to you?” Jessa tightened her night-robe and stood. “Who is she, and by what sorcery is she able to displace herself?”

“It looked like Asherai shadow technique,” Heath said. “Never seen it before…just know it from reputation. I do know that she works for a very powerful woman in the Orthodoxy who has access to a lot of forbidden arcana. This doesn’t look like something she’d sanction…but for now we can’t trust anyone. I need your help.”

“I owe you my life,” Jessa said. “And it’s my own stupidity that weakened me and led to the death of your friend. It’s a debt I fear I can never repay.”

She walked toward Sword’s body. “He was so brave defending me. I know Patreans don’t have families, but I’ll gladly pay his death gratuity and whatever stipend is required for you to replace him with another of equal quality.”

“I need to see your mother,” Heath said.

Jessa tensed. “You’re one of her agents?”

“Hells no.” He chuckled. “A friend of mine is being held in her cell. You’re the only one who can get access whenever you want. If you vouch for me as your spiritual advisor, then you can get me in.”