Robin skidded to a halt, her chest heaving, her whole body shaking for reasons utterly unrelated to the cold. She braced herself against the iron with a hand, bent almost double, and still felt herself starting to collapse….
She didn't see or even feel the hands catching her until she hung almost limp from their grip. “I've got you, sweetie.”
“F-Faustine?” Was Faustine even supposed to be here? Was that a good idea? She couldn't think past the pounding in her head and heart…
“It's me. Come on.”
Arms wrapped around Robin's shoulders, helping her stand straight once more. Slowly the spots began to fade from her eyes, the agony and nausea from her gut.
“Faustine, I—”
“It's her, isn't it?”
Robin had swallowed enough tears of her own to recognize them unshed in someone else; the tremor of a word, the twitch of a face. Fully cognizant of everything around her for the first time since she'd read those words, she lightly brushed a finger across the other woman's cheek.
“I think it is,” she said simply. “And I have to.”
“I know.”
“Will you…come with me?”
Robin hadn't known a human visage could twist in that many emotions at once, but when Faustine's finally settled, it was on a sad and gentle smile. “Came this far…”
Arms around each other, they passed through the gate and made their way along the snow-lined footpaths.
It was only a bit later that Robin finally thought to wonder why nobody had asked their business. The cemetery gates didn't precisely close at sunset, but they always picked up a guardsman or two to watch until they did shut, after dark.
Must've just missed them…. She was too exhausted, too distracted, to consider anything else.
She'd have known the resting place of Genevieve Marguilles even had she not been here multiple times before, both on her own and with…her. Unlike every other grave around it, the grasses that grew on that grave, the flowers that blossomed around the stone and the ivy that crawled along its surfaces, truly were evergreen. Something she and Olgun had done….
Except this time, it wasn't just a minor god's magic sustaining the foliage where Genevieve's body lay. It was the blood of four additional corpses, scattered across the grave and the nearby grass, their deaths recent enough that the wounds still oozed in the rapidly cooling air. Browning streaks marred the headstone; flowers lay crushed beneath the dead.
“Oh, gods…”
Robin staggered from Faustine's grip, reaching out as though she could somehow wipe away the desecration with a swipe of her palm. The world blurred behind burgeoning tears, which she could only just blink away.
She heard the rustle of the courier's skirts, a faint scrape of leather, and then Faustine was again at her side, dagger in one hand, small-barreled flintlock in the other.
The woman did run around Davillon day and night, after all.
“Aww, how cute. I didn't expect two of you.”
Both women spun to stare at a figure across the path, in the lee of a small mausoleum; little more than a smaller shadow in the larger. Robin had the vague sense of a hooded cloak, but precious little else.
“What have you done?!” That last was a shriek, but she couldn't contain it.
“Two pheasants with one shot,” the woman—woman? Yes, the voice was definitely female—informed them. “First, just a bit of a message.” A hand-shaped blur waggled at the bodies. “Recognize any of them?
“No? Huh. Must not be much family resemblance. That aristocratic and dignified corpse there on top is one Gurrerre Marguilles, patriarch of his house—until recently—and father of poor, rotting, beetle-infested Genevieve. Gurrerre declined an opportunity I offered him and, well, I think this rather makes a statement.”
Robin felt like she couldn't breathe, couldn't think, could only wait as two conflicting urges battled within her soul: to break down in tears, and to make every effort to strangle the stranger with her bare hands.
“Who are you?” She was startled that she'd managed to force the words out and only then realized it was Faustine who'd asked.
“Just a traveler finally come home.” Robin could hear the smarmy grin in her voice. “And by the way, if you take that shot, you will miss. And I'll be irritated.”
The barrel of the courier's pistol began to quiver.
“And your…second pheasant?” the younger woman finally demanded.
“Oh, getting you here, you skinny little worm. See, I have a second message—a very private, personal one—and you're going to deliver it for me.”
Robin would have sworn the woman didn't move at all, so fast was her lunge. It carried her from across the path to Faustine's side in the beat of a moth's wing, a bolt of lightning sculpted from shade.
The flintlock discharged harmlessly, batted to one side with a casual backhand; the woman's other fist drove hard into the courier's stomach, sending her to all fours, retching a sour-smelling sludge tinged pink with blood.
Robin's horrified scream had barely begun to emerge, little more than a piercing squeak, when the woman was on her as well. Steel glinted in her fist, reflecting the early moonlight from the snow, and Robin recognized Faustine's own dagger in the instant before it vanished from her line of sight, pressed against her throat.
Red. It was the strangest observation for her to make at the time, but a lock of the woman's hair had slipped from her hood; it was red.
And her eyes shone far too wide, and too white.
“I could just kill you,” she hissed, breath warm against Robin's face. “That'd be nice and agonizing. But it's not exactly clear, is it? I mean, so many people could just kill you….”
A smile, now, as white as those eyes in the blackness of the hood.
“The gunshot's probably attracted attention,” she said, “and your friend there might be able to stand in another few minutes. If you're lucky, little worm, you won't bleed to death.”
“Wh-what…?”
Fingers clenched in ragged brown hair, yanking the girl back and off-balance…and the cloaked woman plunged Faustine's dagger, hilt deep, into Robin's upper thigh.
Agony, like nothing she'd known, nothing she'd imagined; a thick and somehow-viscous nausea at the sight of the blood pumping from the wound, at the slick feel of the steel inside her flesh. She didn't remember collapsing to the snow, which swiftly grew crimson around her; didn't remember clutching, flailing madly, at her leg; didn't recognize the sound that stabbed at her ears and throat as her own voice.
“Yes…” the woman murmured almost sensually, sliding back into the darkness. “I'm pretty sure she'll understand that….”
Flashes of red and white: smears flashed across her vision, or blood and snow?
She saw Faustine dragging herself toward her, mouth agape in horror, reaching…
And then the pain, mercifully, began to fade. Consciousness fading, Robin found herself wondering, with disturbing calm, whether she would wake up again or not. And what she—what Widdershins—might think if she didn't.
Hooves pounded divots into cold-hardened soil; great flanks heaved and sweated beneath saddles of ornate leather. Cyrille Delacroix leaned forward, nearly standing in the stirrups, relishing in the feel of the chill air over his face even as he prayed to Cevora and the rest of the Pact that they might arrive before too much ground had been lost.
Mother hadn't wanted to send him out, to lead the quartet of household armsmen riding in a cluster around him, that much he knew. He was “too inexperienced.” “Too hotheaded.” “Too unreliable.” “Too young.” Plus a wide variety of other toos he'd heard from Mother and his older siblings more times than he could count. But none of them had been available, had they? When the field hand had come running into the main house at dusk, bellowing about another “cursed blight,” he'd been the only one of the Delacroix scions unoccupied elsewhere. And given how little they yet understood about these spreading pools of rot, and how many their fiel
ds had already suffered, Mother wasn't about to trust this outing to servants alone.
Well, good! This was his opportunity to prove his mettle, to stand equal to his brothers and sisters (well, most of his brothers and sisters) in the matriarch's esteem. He could only imagine the dashing figure he must cut; russet destrier galloping under him, his navy coat and night-black hair sweeping behind him, custom-fitted cuirass—unsullied, as yet, by any genuine use—gleaming beneath the gibbous moon. It was straight out of a storybook, or at least he imagined it to be. He glanced southeast, hoping for the silhouette of old Castle Pauvril against the stars and sky—it would've completed the illustration perfectly—but alas, the night proved too dark. No matter, though; he'd just—
“Master Cyrille, stop!”
The young aristocrat hauled back on the reins, painfully twisting his mount's head. The animal screamed, skidding to a stop, rearing violently. It was luck and tight stirrups, rather than any skill on Cyrille's part, that prevented an unscheduled and inappropriately strenuous dismount.
Once he'd guided the horse around in a tight circle, leaning forward to mutter soothingly at the beast and pat its neck—and, not coincidentally, to give his own breathing and heart rate the opportunity to slow from their own headlong gallop—he turned angry (and still frightfully wide) eyes on the guard who'd shouted.
“What was the meaning of that, Jourdain?!”
Clad in a much thicker doublet and a tabard boasting the masked lion sigil of House Delacroix, the soldier guided his mount forward a few paces and idly pointed with one hand, stroking his mustache with the other.
“Oh.” Cyrille desperately hoped the tint of moonlight made the sudden flush in his cheeks invisible, or else that Jourdain and the others would attribute it to the cold. Then again, it didn't much matter. He knew they laughed internally, though they were too disciplined to show it; and he know Mother would hear all about it.
“Good eyes,” he commented gruffly. Then, casually as he could manage, he slid from his saddle, took an oil lantern one of his guards had just lit, and knelt to examine the hard earth onto which, in his self-glorifying reverie, he'd almost blindly charged.
Or rather, what should—like the rest of the field at this time of year—have been hard earth.
Instead, the soil on the surface was a glutinous slop, seemingly an amalgam of pus and the residue left behind when vegetables were allowed to rot indoors. The vapors wafting from the morass stung the eyes and lungs like those of old cat urine. Cyrille gagged, his gorge rising and his throat tightening, a combination that could well prove lethal if permitted to go to extremes.
Worms and beetles of every sort, even those normally unseen in winter, lay scattered across the surface of the muck. A few still twitched. Most were long dead. Cyrille knew, from past example, that any grasses or plants to have survived the cold would have perished as well—and worse, that the soil would be dried, grainy, utterly unsuitable for farming of any kind.
And the longer he waited, the more land would be lost.
“It's definitely the blight,” he announced, rising from his knee and trying to command through scratchy voice and burning throat. He chose to interpret Jourdain's muffled cough as a result of the fumes, rather than cover for a mocking snort. “Send someone back to the house for more hands. The rest of you, break out the tools.”
For all their contempt (or at least what Cyrille assumed was poorly hidden contempt), the Delacroix guards snapped into motion at his command. Jourdain barked at one of them to ride for the manor, while the others began yanking open saddlebags that looked packed enough for leagues rather than a quick sprint across the property.
Shovels and picks from a couple; waterskins and bottles from others. The glistening around the mouths of those skins and bottles was evidence enough that they did not, in fact, contain water.
“You two, spread out. Figure out where best to start the trench.” He glanced down again at the vile sludge, which seemed almost to absorb the light of the lantern. Yes, it had definitely advanced a few fingers’ widths just in the moments since they'd arrived. A bit of very rough estimation, then, “I suggest you start at least five feet out. Probably more; we'll have help soon enough, but that ground is tough.
“Jourdain, you and I are on the oil.” He grabbed the straps of several waterskins and began to stride around the decay in the opposite direction, assuming the armsman would keep up. “I don't think we have enough to cover the whole contagion, but I think if we can sear it all the way around, that should do until—”
“Master Cyrille!” Intense but hushed, it was somewhere between a whisper and a snarl. The young man and older soldier turned toward the two guards they had just dispatched the other way, now jogging swiftly toward them.
“I believe I assigned the both of you a task—” Cyrille began haughtily.
“There's someone else here!”
Jourdain's hand was to his belt and then held out before him as fast as the stars twinkled, fist full of an ornately etched flintlock. Cyrille's rapier slid from its sheath only a second later, his fingers clutching the hilt in a textbook dueling grip. Then, after sliding shut the aperture on the lantern with a soft click, “Show me.”
All four of them, aristocrat and armsmen, slipped across the desolate field, allowing their eyes to adjust, the moon alone to guide their way. Careful, silent, barely a scrape of boot on rocky soil; it appeared, initially, that they'd caught their quarry unawares.
Clad in an ashen cloak and hood, presumably against the chill, the figure was otherwise unidentifiable, undefinable. Cyrille could tell only that it was shorter than he—and, if the muffled buzz drifting his way was any indication, softly mumbling to itself.
A mumble that sprouted, flowerlike, into articulate words just as Jourdain drew breath to speak.
“Hello, guys. Was wondering who'd come along. Any idea what all this is? It's not precisely natural, you know.”
Cyrille could only blink. How had she—at least, judging by the voice, “she”—known they were here? Who was she? And what in Cevora's name was she talking about?
“Dumb question,” she continued. “You'd have to be stupid or blind not to know, yes? Or maybe both. It looks like the bottom of a plague's chamber pot around here.”
The young aristocrat found himself utterly at a loss. “Who the hell…?”
“A sickly plague,” she added helpfully.
Jourdain raised and aimed his pistol. “Turn around and identify yourself!”
“An incontinent sickly plague.”
“I said turn and identify!”
“Wow, all right. Touchy. And loud.”
Slowly she turned, slowly she raised dark-gloved hands to lower the hood from her head…and Cyrille felt as though he'd just been punched in the chest. And the gut. And then each had turned and punched the other.
She wasn't the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen, not even close. Dwelling among the aristocracy, the young Delacroix had known women of noble blood and meticulous upbringing whose entire lives seemed devoted to the refinement and ultimate perfection of personal beauty.
This stranger? Pretty enough, certainly, but hardly exquisite. Features a little too sharp, hair a little too uneven. Her eyes and cheeks were just the tiniest bit sunken, touched by the ravages of recent travail.
And she talked funny.
But there was something about her, an allure of the genuine that Cyrille had never seen before. She was real, where every aristocrat he'd ever known, family or otherwise, wore at least a patina of the artificial.
It wasn't until the pain of the emotional blow in his chest grew even worse, and the roar of an excited crowd or perhaps an angry sea filled his ears, that he remembered to breathe.
“…any good if I gave you my name,” the stranger was explaining to Jourdain, clearly exasperated and apparently utterly unperturbed by the pistol pointing her way. “You don't know me. So what difference does it make? Wouldn't you rather talk about—”
 
; “Oh, for Cevora's sake!” Was Cyrille imagining things, or did the woman flinch at the guard's outburst? “That's it. You're coming with us!”
“I am?” She actually put her hands on her hips and cocked her head; Cyrille wasn't sure if he wanted to laugh or sigh aloud. “I don't seem to recall this particular discussion. Did I miss a meeting?”
“Until we determine your involvement in the poisoning of the House Delacroix fields—”
“Do I look like an incontinent plague to you?”
Jourdain actually sputtered to a halt, gesticulating wildly with the flintlock. Cyrille bit his lip to keep from guffawing openly. His whole body, even the blade of his rapier, quivered with his suppressed mirth.
Then the elder guardsman ordered “Take her!” and Cyrille wasn't amused anymore.
“Now hold on a minute. Surely that's not—”
Nobody was listening. Jourdain's weapon was shifting back to cover the woman once more. The other two armsmen were approaching from either side, hands raised, blades loose in their scabbards. The breeze kicked up over the field, sending shivers across every patch of exposed skin, as winter itself seemed to tense up.
And though he knew he must be mistaken, Cyrille could have sworn that he heard the stranger mutter something very much like, “Oh, figs.”
He could make even less sense of what happened next.
The hammer on Jourdain's weapon fell with a loud clunk when it was mere inches off target, discharging its ball harmlessly into the diseased bog. The guard jumped, wide-eyed, nearly fumbling the gun. The other two turned their heads to gawp his way, perhaps unaware it had been a misfire, wondering what he was shooting at.
In that tiny span of distraction, shorter than the twitch of a dreaming dog's paw, the stranger moved.
She crossed the distance between them at a pace Cyrille wasn't sure the horses could have hoped to match. Her hands closed on Jourdain's shoulders before he seemed fully aware she was coming. A short jump, braced with that grip, brought both her knees up, hard and fast. The first sank into Jourdain's gut, the second uncomfortably lower. The leather padding of his uniform absorbed the worst of it—but what remained was clearly bad enough. He tumbled to all fours, gasping and dry heaving.