Kushiel's Dart - Jacqueline Carey [265]
Near to the bottom, our impatience took its toll; the wagon, lurching too fast, ran off the road and got hung up on a ridge. The racket of scared, squalling Tsingani children bid fair to outdo the gulls. Gisella and her sister, sighing, counted heads and checked limbs, while Neci and the men rode back shame-faced to prod at the wagon and mutter.
"Go ahead, chavi" Gisella said kindly to me, adjusting the scarf on her head and watching the Tsingani men with a practiced eye. "They'll get it loose. You and the others go make the trade. Go make a name for Neci's kumpania, who rode to the outermost west for gold."
I nodded, gathering Joscelin and Hyacinthe. We picked our way down the remainder of the cliff road carefully. By the time we reached bottom, the Admiral himself had arrived, a burly, imposing figure who parted a path through his men as surely as the prow of one of his ships.
"What vagabonds have we here?" he bellowed, roaring out the question, bright blue eyes squinting. "Elua's Balls! Have the Travellers decided to push their Long Road across the sea?"
He was not, like Caspar Trevalion, nearly an uncle to me, but he was Delaunay's friend and a figure from my childhood, and unexpected tears choked me.
"My lord Admiral," I managed, dismounting and curtsying with some difficulty, "my lord Admiral, I bear a message from the Queen."
I looked up, then, and he looked down, and an expression of astonishment split his scarred face.
"By the ten thousand devils of Khebbel-im-Akkad!" he thundered, causing his men to grin and the nearest to cover their ears. "Delaunay's whelp!" And with that, he grabbed me in a bone-cracking embrace that drove the wind from my lungs, leaving me unable to gasp with pain as his mighty arms enfolded my fresh-welted back. "What in seven hells are you doing here, girl?" he asked when he released me. "I thought those justice-mad idiots in the City convicted you of murder."
"They did," I said, wheezing. "That's . . . that's one of the reasons I'm here and not there."
Quintilius Rousse looked calculatingly at me, then at the Tsingani wagon stuck on the cliff road. "Go help them down," he said to a handful of his men, who set out grumbling. "What's the other?" he asked me.
I had regained my breath. "I speak Cruithne."
"Aahhhh." One long syllable, and a gleam of understanding in his shrewd eyes. "Come along, then. We've a great deal to discuss." He looked at Hyacinthe and Joscelin. "You too, I suppose?"
Both of them bowed.
"Let's to it, then." He glanced up the cliff road once more, rubbing his chin. "Glad you brought them. I could use a few horse, you know."
"We were counting on it," Hyacinthe said.
The Queen's Admiral received us in his tent, which was large, mainly to hold the vast number of chests filled with maps and books that he had accumulated; that, and treasure, which he had in abundance. "No time to stow it or even buy a respectable mistress," he grumbled, sweeping aside a King's ransom of jewelry from atop one of the chests. "Sit. And tell me why you're here. Starting at the beginning. Who killed Anafiel Delaunay?"
We told him, Joscelin and I, starting at the beginning, in the marquist's shop.
"My lad Aelric Leithe made it back with his skin whole," Rousse interrupted us. "I knew as much. S'why I knew it wasn't you, child, or the Cassiline either. That, and the fact you always doted on him like a babe on a sugar-tit. Delaunay was already being watched. So who was it?"
"Isidore d'Aiglemort," I said, then took a deep breath, and told him the rest. This time, he listened without interruption, his face growing dark with outrage. When we were done, he sat gathering fury like a thunderstorm.
Until it broke, and he roared about his tent, raging, breaking and throwing things. One of his men poked in his head, then hastily withdrew it as a piece of crockery