The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [6]
“New thing for me,” he said, his voice going instantly from glib near music to clumsy, lumbering prose as he switched languages. “Not have in Avella. Very, eh, fullovonder.”
“Wonderful,” she corrected as Austra giggled.
In fact, the snow didn’t seem wonderful to Anne at all—it seemed a nuisance. But Cazio sounded sincere, and despite herself, it made her smile to watch as he grinned at the white flakes. He was nineteen, two years older than she, but still more boy than man.
And yet she could see a man in him now and then, just on the verge of escaping.
Despite the uncomfortable turn of the conversation, for a moment Anne felt content. She was safe, with friends, and though the world had gone mad, she at least knew her footing now. Forty-some men weren’t enough to free her mother and take back Crotheny, but soon they would reach the estates of her aunt Elyoner, who had some soldiers, and perhaps she would know where Anne could acquire more.
After that—well, she would build her army as she went. She knew nothing of what an army needed, and at times—especially at night—that gripped her heart too tightly for sleep. But at the moment she somehow felt as if it would all work out.
Suddenly something moved at the corner of her vision, but when she looked, it wasn’t there…
Leaning against the tree, Anne exhaled frost and noticed that the light was fading.
Where was Cazio? Where was everyone else?
Where was she?
The last she remembered. They’d just struck north from the Old King’s Road, through the forest of Chevroché toward Loiyes, a place where she’d once gone riding with her aunt Lesbeth many years ago.
Her bodyguard Neil MeqVren had been riding only a few paces away. Austra had dropped back to talk to Stephen, the young man from Virgenya. The holter, Aspar White, had been scouting ahead, and the thirty horsemen who had attached themselves to her at Dunmrogh had been ranged protectively about her.
Then Cazio’s expression had changed, and he had reached for his sword. The light had seemed to brighten to yellow.
Was this still Chevroché? Had hours passed?
Days?
She could not remember.
Should she wait to be found, or was there no one left to search for her? Could an enemy have snatched her away from her guardians without killing them all?
With a sinking heart, she realized how unlikely that was. Sir Neil certainly would die before allowing her to be taken, and the same was true of Cazio.
Trembling still, she realized that the only clue she had to her current situation was the dead man.
Reluctantly, she trudged back through the snow to the place where he lay. Gazing down on him through the dimming light, she searched for details she might have missed before.
He wasn’t a young man, but she couldn’t say how old he was, either—forty, perhaps. He wore dark gray wool breeches stained at the crotch with what had to be his own urine. His buskins were plain, black, worn nearly through. His shirt was wool, too, but beneath it bulked a steel breastplate. That was worn and dented, recently oiled. Besides the knife, he had a short, wide-bladed sword in an oiled leather sheath. It was affixed to a belt with a tarnished brass buckle. He wore no visible sign that proclaimed his allegiance.
Trying not to look at his face or bloody throat, she pushed and patted her hands through his clothes, searching for anything that might be hidden.
On his right wrist she noticed an odd marking, burned or dyed into the skin. It was black and depicted what appeared to be a crescent moon.
She gingerly touched the marking, and a mild vertigo reeled through her.
She tasted salt and smelled iron and felt as if she had plunged her hand up to the elbow into something wet and warm. With a shock she realized that though his heart no longer beat, there was still quick in the man, albeit leaking rapidly away. How long would it take for all of him to be dead? Had his soul left him yet?
They hadn’t taught her much about souls at the Coven Saint