But here, light was everywhere, so garish and thick it was impossible to see the stars. Ropes of radiant light marked streets stretching out into the night, as if there was nothing precious or rare about it. Every part of Cathedral Square was ablaze. The windows of all the buildings within his view were glowing, illuminating nothing as they spilled all that precious light down on the people below.
It was a waste. It was a deliberate show of strength and wealth, he was sure of it. Fuck you lights. It made something in his gut twist into a hard knot, and it only got harder when he dropped his gaze to take in the fancy aristocratic party going on below him.
“Maybe we thank you for your warning and exterminate your douchebag father here and now,” Riordan gritted out, a world of fury in his low tone.
“Now you’re talking a religion I understand,” Eiryn agreed in an instant. Her dark eyes glittered. “Blood.”
Kathlyn moved to the window, keeping to the darker parts of the hall—so no one could look up and see her, Riordan figured. It suggested she’d spent some time spying on people—another little fact he filed away.
“Look,” she said when they both joined her. She nodded out at the crowd below, all of them moving around and around the fountains and the patches of sculptured green as if they were performing some large-scale, intricate dance. “Between the party and the gates, what do you see?”
“Cathedral guards,” Riordan said, studying the men who stood in formation there, moving at prearranged signals to maintain their perimeter. He’d watched them last night, too, and concluded that while they were certainly not a raider-level defense, they were infinitely better than, say, the joke of the fools manning the Louisville wall.
“The Cathedral guards stand at the entrances,” Kathlyn corrected him gently. Somehow, he knew what she was going to say next. He felt it in that same gnarled thing twisting up his gut. “They’re more interested in protecting the building and the bishop than the guests. That’s my father’s personal guard detail. The small cadre he travels with, to places he feels safe.”
“There are at least fifty men,” Eiryn muttered. Which meant she’d counted them at least twice and knew there were more than that, just as Riordan had.
“There are five more who surround him wherever he goes,” the princess said. She pointed to a thick knot of shiny nobles. “And five others who prowl around him when he’s out in public like this, looking for potential threats. Look.”
Riordan looked. He saw the prowling guards first, noticeable because everyone else danced and swayed to the currents of the gathering except them. Then he tracked back to the five bodyguards, all jacked up and dripping in guns and blades. And in the center was . . . a man. Just a little man. He’d probably come up to Riordan’s shoulder. And yet he stood there in a too-bright robe, exuding the kind of confidence that no man without a visible weapon ever should.
Beside him, Eiryn muttered a curse. Riordan knew why. Every raider loved going up against the odds. It was satisfying in the extreme to prove, yet again, why the brotherhood lived up to every scary story ever told about them. But there was a difference between bad odds and straight-up suicide. He and Eiryn could do a lot of damage. But they couldn’t withstand fifty guards plus the ten near the king plus whatever variables all those aristocratic assholes and the various priests might bring to the situation.
And if the two of them died here in a failed attempt to nip this shit in the bud, what would happen to the clan in March?
Kathlyn turned to look at the two of them, her expression somber.
“Please listen to me. I understand that if even a third of the stories people tell about raiders are true—”
Eiryn’s smile was deadly. “They’re all true.”
The princess nodded. “When I tell you my father is gathering an army, I don’t mean a small one.”
Riordan eyed the guards again. The paranoid tool of a king who thought he could bring a fight to the raider city when he couldn’t even stand in a party without half an army at his side. He took in all that offensive light, so intensely bright it made it seem as if the rest of the world wasn’t right there on the other side of this untouched, untested city. He caught Eiryn’s dark gaze for a moment and understood the searing thing that passed between them then. The certain knowledge that everything that mattered to them, everything they’d pledged their lives to protect, was at risk. That nothing mattered more than that.
Then, finally, he studied the woman who stood before them, handing over the kind of information he had to assume could wreck her own life if she were discovered.
“Tell me this,” he said after a long moment. “Why would you risk this? If your father finds out you gave a few raiders the head’s up on his plan—”
“He would kill me without hesitation.” Kathlyn’s voice was too brisk to be truly bitter. “After he auctioned off my virginity for a high price, of course, because a betrayal shouldn’t be permitted to get in the way of profit. He’d enjoy that. He likes to drag things out and really make them hurt.” She smiled, but it only made the bleakness in her dark gold gaze that much more apparent. “My father is a very creative man, especially when it comes to anyone he feels has wronged him.”
Riordan didn’t like any of that. He was a man of honor, however tarnished by his own selfish decisions in the past. He didn’t like leaving vulnerable people behind to get picked on by predators if he could prevent it. But this woman’s relationship with her prick of a father wasn’t his problem. His clan was. Clan first, clan always, clan forever, and no western king was going to take them down while Riordan drew breath. No way in hell, no matter how many armies the asshole gathered.
“Then why risk it?” Eiryn asked her. “Surely it would be safer to keep your mouth shut.”
“Because,” the princess said, her voice suddenly fierce and her eyes no longer bleak at all, “there has to be something worth believing in out there. It can’t all have drowned. I choose the one thing that’s ever scared my father. You.”
The light from the city outside seemed like a deliberate blaze, raucous and loud, as if to echo her.
Kathlyn gathered her gold dress in her fists. She didn’t look at either one of them, and Riordan wondered what she felt she had to hide after everything she’d already shared.
Hope, maybe. He got it. Because there was nothing that could mess someone up more than hope. And it was worse if it was visible, right there on her face, where others could see it and use it against her. In a place like this, they’d eat her alive.
“But now I have to go or they really will come look for me, and they’ll be armed.” She nodded in the opposite direction of the way they’d come, deeper into the shadows. “The bishop’s confessional is the big black door at the end of this hall. The one with all the metal reinforcements. It’s appropriately dramatic. He’ll be in there until the clock strikes midnight.”
And she didn’t say goodbye, she simply walked away, cool and elegant, as if she hadn’t just committed high treason and betrayed her own father to two strangers.
Riordan decided he liked her.
When the princess disappeared down the stairs, he moved away from the window. Eiryn shadowed him, falling into step with him as they made it past the span of the window and headed down the hallway. It was less ornate the farther they walked, with small rooms off to each side.
“Are these bedrooms?” he asked, testing a door. It opened easily and he looked inside to find a small chamber, fairly stark and completely empty. There were a few church teachings hung on the wall, but otherwise there was nothing but a bare floor, a severe-looking armchair, a locked closet to one side, and a strange little bench with a flat, faintly cushioned top. “Here’s a philosophical question. Do priests sleep or does all that god keep them awake?”
“I don’t think these are bedrooms,” Eiryn muttered as she shoved open the door across the hall from his.
Riordan waited until she let it shut again and turned back to him, then indicated she sh
ould come into his little cell by angling his head. She obeyed, her gaze moving up and down the hallway as she came.
He shut the door behind her, marveling at how thick it was.
“I think these are soundproof rooms.”
“Well, that’s enough to make your blood run cold,” Eiryn murmured, moving farther into the room with her hands on her lean hips, taking in the almost entirely bare walls and the two unwelcoming pieces of furniture. “What do you suppose priests need to do in soundproof rooms?”
“Maybe they pray really loud.” He was kidding, but as he said it he realized he knew exactly how they prayed in this place. Maud had showed him earlier in the summer. He looked around the room again. If he assumed this was a place for sex and punishment, it all made a lot more sense.
Eiryn appeared to have reached the same conclusion. She reached out to test the padding on the bench with one finger, then smirked. “I bet they do.”
Then she turned back to face him and for a minute they just looked at each other, as if neither one of them wanted to be the one to say the word. War. Or to start figuring out what that meant. All the different complexities of that issue—not least of which was the fact they were standing in the Great Lake Cathedral, half a world away from the raider city, and the September equinox was tomorrow.
“Okay,” she said after a moment, and she was already changing again, right there before his eyes. The compliant, quiet Eiryn of the past week was gone. And this wasn’t even the brooding bodyguard with a chip on her shoulder he remembered so well, mad at the world and him and Tyr in particular. It wasn’t even that ferocious prospective brother she’d been long ago after he’d cut her loose, hurling herself into every scenario like it was a blood insult she was personally called to answer with her blade. Or it was all of them, and cool under pressure besides. “We both know the ramifications. We don’t need to spell them out.”
Bloodshed. Chaos. The clan would fight the way the clan always fought, but the enemy would have an advantage. It could make all the difference. Wars were lost for less.
It was unthinkable.
Riordan shook his head. Then spat the word out like a curse. “March.”
“Isn’t there a faster way to get back to the Mississippi Sea?” she asked quietly. With a deep, black fury underlying every word. He could see it in every line of her taut frame, though she didn’t let it boil over.
“There is. Gunnar did it in a straight shot. Not even a full day’s drive if we take the right road. All we need is a fast truck and the ability to fight off bandits.” He nodded at her. “I think we have half of it covered already.”
Eiryn frowned, a look of fierce concentration on her face.
“The boat will be an issue. What they call a boat here, I mean.”
He scoffed at that. “We’re raiders. We can sail anything.”
“Some clunky-ass tub if we’re lucky. A piece of shit raft if we’re not.” She shook her head. “That kind of bullshit would be a problem in high summer, much less now.”
The raiders were all hunkered down in the eastern islands or the raider-held settlements in the east by now, their sleek, fast ships pulled to shore and put up for the winter. The season was changing even as Riordan and Eiryn stood here in this stark little cell. The ravenous seas were getting pissy and wild, ushering in the killer swells and pounding storms that would dominate the world for the next six months. If anyone was dumb enough to try to sail through that shit, they hadn’t lived to tell the tale.
But this wasn’t about what either one of them wanted or even about what was safe. Or wise. It was about what was necessary.
It was about the clan.
They each wore the same sigil stamped deep into their skin. They’d both dedicated their lives to the exact same cause.
There was no need for any discussion. There was no debate.
This was who they were.
“I want to connect the dots,” Eiryn said after a tense moment, as what they had to do seemed heavy like lead in the air and deep in Riordan’s bones besides. “We have to be absolutely sure. We can’t blow off our mission on the word of some pretty girl in a gold dress. All we really know about her is that she came out of nowhere and threw some stuff at us. There’s no way Wulf would accept that at face value and neither should we.”
Riordan agreed. He nodded toward the door.
“You know where the bishop is. Let’s ask him.”
* * *
Everything inside Eiryn went hot and still, as her body readied itself for the battle she’d been craving for what seemed like forever.
It was like shedding skins, one after the next, until she hit the truth of things down there inside her. Herself. Battle-honed and ready. She grinned and felt the power in it.
Vacation was over. She was ready to do some harm.
She pushed silently through the door of their little cell then banked to the left, following the dimly lit hallway in the direction Kathlyn had indicated. Her feet barely touched the floor, she made so little noise. She was aware of everything and nothing at the same time. Riordan behind her, almost soundless. The ticking of a loud-ass clock through the wedged-open door of one of the rooms they passed. The farther-off sounds of the aristocratic party below and the widespread equinox celebrations in the street.
But her gaze was trained on the door at the end, black and covered with steel.
It was exactly the kind of imposing door a dick like Bishop Seph would think made him seem important. The trouble was, it also looked real, like maybe that steel wasn’t entirely for show. Unlike the rest of the Cathedral, which was apparently wide open for anyone to stroll in as they wished, this door looked like it was designed to keep people out. Or in. Or on whatever the side of the door the bishop preferred.
Eiryn reached out to try the oversized handle when she reached it—
“Two guards at the other end of the hallway,” Riordan said in an undertone from behind her. When she glanced back, she saw he’d pulled his blade from his boot and held it loosely in one hand. Ready to party. “They’ll see us in five seconds.”
It took her one to make the call. Maybe less. “I can hide in plain sight. You can be a little extra surprise.”
Riordan nodded. Then he melted away, slipping into one of the cells they’d just passed without even seeming to open one of the heavy doors. Eiryn waited where she was, outside the bishop’s dramatic door like a penitent.
Three seconds.
She made herself small and a little bit lopsided, rounding her back and sinking down a bit into one bent knee. She imagined herself helpless and overwrought like so many of the compliant women she’d seen in the past weeks. She imagined herself seized with the holy fervor she’d seen in all those people out in the streets and even the old woman who’d given them their room.
Four seconds.
Eiryn ducked her head and shivered at the door.
“Hey!” came the cry from far down the hall, sudden and alarmed. “You! Don’t move!”
She turned around anyway, still making herself shiver. She saw a too-dense, motionless shadow in the crack of the nearest cell door and knew Riordan was there, watching. Waiting as the guards hurled themselves down the length of the hall toward her. Ready to take his turn.
Eiryn even mustered up a little squeaking sound, the closest she could get to the way the princesses had screamed when they’d seen Nasally and Breathy laid out on that couch.
And as the guards charged her, the door behind her swung open. She had to remind herself to jump, and she did, while yet another guard slammed his way out in the hall. This one was all beefed-up shoulders, a face of red jowls and beady eyes, and a shiny Uzi at the ready. Of course.
All three of them were all shouting about breaches and intruders and private floors and not to be disturbed, but none of that mattered. Eiryn was still and hot and centered, like a pointed blade. She thought of Gunnar’s little nun, and smiled the same way Maud always did, serene and faintly creepy.
Then she mimicked her half-brother’s woman more fully and dropped down to her knees. The hall floor was hard beneath her and it hurt, but Eiryn didn’t react. She pictured Maud in her head and tried to shift into that graceful pose the other woman used when she knelt at Gunnar’s feet—which was often, now that she thought about it, the kinky fuckers.
“I’m so sorry,” she told the guard with the gun in her face, forcing her voice into a higher octave. The bloodlust raging inside of her wanted to take that gun and shove it down his throat, or somewhere even more satisfying, but that would come. Right here, right now, she channeled her half-brother’s woman who she’d never really understood so well before. She tipped her head back and gazed up at the guard, still smiling in that same Maud-like way. If she came across only a quarter as unnerving, she’d count that as a win. “I only wanted to pray for the bishop on this holy night.”
It was the kneeling that did it, Eiryn was certain. She made a mental note to thank Maud for her sterling example of creepy-ass submissiveness as the guard in front of her put his gun back in its harness and jerked his chin at her.
“Get up,” he told her, in a deep sort of voice that matched the rest of him, big, thick, bulky muscles that were all for show. Not to fight. He probably lifted heavy stones in the privacy of his sad bedchamber and pretended his physique was natural.
Men like this were invariably giant assholes. And big old pussies besides.
The two other guards reached the door as Eiryn rose, guns out and eyes blazing like they’d pinned her here with the force of their pointless shouting. Or maybe they thought their little sprint down the hall had made all the difference, and no matter they’d made such a racket that Riordan could have been singing raider war songs and they wouldn’t have heard him.
“Are they just wandering in off the street at will now?” the first guard asked. Clearly rhetorically, as he grabbed Eiryn’s arm in a tight, borderline painful grip. He hauled her toward him. “You’re lucky this is the one time of year he likes a little variety.”