Queen of the Night (The Revanche Cycle Book 4) (26 page)

He took a step closer, standing just behind her left shoulder.

“And I’m afraid this is another hard lesson to learn. The College controls the purse strings of the Church. You can ask them to dance, but you can’t force them to march. And if you alienate these men by pushing too hard, you’ll get nothing at all. They said no fifteen times today…but they said yes twice. You should be proud of that.”

Livia responded with the faintest bob of her head.

“I just…thought we’d won,” she whispered.

“We have. Perhaps you need to temper your expectations of what ‘winning’ means. No one’s asking you to abandon your dreams, Livia, just to…rein them in, a little. In five, maybe ten years, we can get a good slice of these proposals approved. With modifications, here and there, to make them easier to swallow.”

“Ten years,” she echoed.

“It’s a long hike, not a short sprint. You need to learn how to relax. To enjoy yourself. The position has perks, you know. Ease into it. Take a stroll in the garden, and smell the roses.”

“I’m here to
work
, Marcello. The cold and the hungry won’t stop being cold and hungry while I’m ‘smelling the roses.’”

“All right, all right. I’m just trying to be helpful. I’ll go convey your effusive thanks for their generosity. Oh, just one thing. Everybody’s talking and I’m dying to know: how did you do it?”

She looked back at him. “Do what?”

He pointed at her face. “That. It was a brilliant move, and I have to say I’m impressed. The whole city’s buzzing. Now, faking a miraculous cure, that’s easy: a quarrel shaft with the head removed and a sheep’s-bladder filled with blood, and suddenly you’ve got a nasty ‘wound’ to lay your healing hands on. I was going to suggest it myself, if you hadn’t come up with the idea on your own. You dyed your hair and eyebrows, of course. What I can’t figure out is your
eyes
. What
did
you do to them, to make them look like that?”

Livia stared at him.

“You don’t think it was a miracle?”

“No,” Marcello said with a faintly smug smile, “because I’m not six years old, or an imbecile. I understand, you want to keep your secrets, that’s fine. However you pulled it off, you have my admiration.”

Livia felt hollow inside. Exhausted. “Thank you,” she said. “I think I’d like to be alone now.”

He left her there. With her throne and her thoughts. With her Browncloaks out of control and her cardinals in polite rebellion. She felt like the ruler of a castle of cards, all that she’d done and all that she’d built ready to buckle under a single puff of wind.

*     *     *

She couldn’t stay. It was risky foolishness, she knew that, but Livia needed two things: to be away from the manse, and away from everyone she knew. Just an hour to herself, to be alone, someplace far from trouble.

Memories surged back as she stepped into her old suite. Her hearth, long gone cold. The mattress where she’d hidden Squirrel’s spellbook between furtive reads. Her scourge, the instrument she’d so desperately used to try to purge her sinful thoughts with pain, its knotted leather strands still flecked with dried blood.

And in a corner of the hardwood floor, gathering dust, a single yellow parakeet feather. A reminder of the sacrifice she’d performed too late, condemning the Alms District to burn in the wake of Amadeo’s desperate rescue.

It was all a part of her, but it wasn’t. The painful memories felt like they belonged to someone else, mute and faintly aching but alien all the same. She’d passed through tests and trials and walls of fire; this room belonged to a young woman who hadn’t seen the things Livia had seen, hadn’t done what she’d done. She felt if she turned around fast enough she might catch a glimpse of herself. But if she did, what could she possibly say to that other, younger Livia? Would she shout a warning? Tell her to turn back?

There’s nothing I could tell her
, Livia thought,
and no warning she would hear
.

In her closet, beside the wall of tacks and notes and blue yarn—the chart of conspirators she and Amadeo had woven just before her father died and the world went mad—she found one of her old burlap cloaks. She tugged it on, pulled the hood low, and slipped out into the hallway. It was an ironic disguise: the Browncloaks had modeled their uniforms off that very garment, and now they barely gave her a second glance, just another of their number making the rounds. She left the residential wing, left the manse, and stepped out into the fading sunlight alone.

Not far from the manse, a prayer hall stood at the end of a sleepy road. Most of the city preferred the opulence of the White Cathedral, rising up over Lerautia like a pure white gull with its wings spread wide, but a few smaller halls like this one—built long before the cathedral was a gleam in its architect’s eye—still kept the lights burning.

The front door squealed behind Livia, and her eyes adjusted to the gloom. It was a humble place. Just a few weathered pews and a moldering green runner between them, leading to the Gardener’s Tree. Not a real tree, fed with a skylight and tended by devoted priests like you’d find in a bigger church, but a gnarled wooden sculpture with gold tinsel for leaves.

Livia was alone. The tattered runner was soft under her slippers as she crossed the empty hall and knelt before the tree. She folded her hands and bowed her head in prayer.

In the leaden, dusty silence, the words wouldn’t come. Livia felt an icepick jab of pressure behind her left eye. Another migraine coming on. A reminder of the occult toxin in her veins, her contamination, her self-inflicted curse.

It was funny. They compared her to Saint Elise. A genuine miracle worker. A woman anointed by the hand of the Creator. A leader and a heroine, who healed the sick and fed the hungry.
Tricks
, Livia thought.
Tricks that are slowly killing me. That’s all I have to offer.

She pulled her hood back, ice-white hair cascading down her shoulders, and looked up at the tree in silent reverence. The tinsel leaves glimmered in the faint light from the stained-glass windows.

I’m just a cheap imitation
, Livia thought.
No wonder I can’t succeed. I thought I could do the Gardener’s work. Heal the Church. Make things better. Maybe that’s why I can’t find the words to pray. I’m nothing like Saint Elise. Why would the Gardener even want to talk to me?

“Your Holiness?”

She blinked, torn from her thoughts, and looked to her left. A potbellied priest in a cassock, his hands clasped tight before him, stared at her in shock.

Livia nodded, her shoulders sagging. “Don’t tell anyone I’m here, all right? I just needed some time alone.”

“Of course, of course. If you’d like to talk…”

“No, I just needed…it doesn’t matter.” She rose to her feet. “I should get back.”

The priest, still wide-eyed, took a step back.

“Well, thank you. I mean, thank you for gracing our home. I—I assumed if you came by at all, it’d be to see the art collection. Your…people, the ones in the cloaks like yours, they’ve been visiting all day.”

Livia paused in midturn. “Why?”

“You don’t
know
? Oh my. Oh dear. Can I show you? It’ll just be a minute, and you’ll be pleased, I promise you!”

“Show me,” Livia said.

He kindled a lantern and led the way down narrow cellar steps. Beneath the prayer hall, yellow light glowed over canvases and statuettes on wooden plinths, tarps, and lashed-down crates.

“I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s been quite a bit of trouble in Mirenze,” the priest said. “Just before they locked it all down, the clergy managed to smuggle the antiquities from the Cathedral of Flowering Grace out of the city. They were afraid of looters.”

“Why store the art here, and not up at the White Cathedral?” Livia paused at a painting of her father, captured in his younger years. Strong, chin high, the sun a golden halo behind his head.

“Normally it would have been. No idea why we were asked to keep it all here, to be honest. But a happy duty is a happy duty.”

“Is this what you wanted me to see?”

The priest glanced at the painting and shook his head. “Oh, no, something even better. Come, come.”

She followed him on a winding trail to the back of the cellar, his lantern held high.

“Given what people are saying, Your Holiness, I thought you might find this, um, relevant. Part of the Flowering Grace collection was a real gem: the only known portrait of Saint Elise to be painted during her lifetime.”

They rounded a corner and stood before the canvas. Saint Elise gazed out at Livia from her gilded frame, painted large as life. She was a crusader saint, a warrior queen bearing a flaming sword. Livia froze, paralyzed. Taking in her fearless stance, her blazing eyes.

And her hair, white as the freshly fallen snow.

“I thought,” Livia said, barely able to speak, “that Elise had dark hair.”

“According to most of the histories, yes, but this was apparently painted just a couple of years before she died at the Battle of Westbridge. The way I read it, she’d been summoned to the home of a desperate family whose only child was dying of plague. She laid her hands upon the child’s brow and prayed, and the Gardener granted a healing miracle. Saint Elise fell into a slumber, and when she awoke, her hair had turned white.” He nodded at Livia. “Proof of her purity and the Gardener’s will.”

Livia stared at the portrait, feeling the room slowly spin.

“May I have a moment?” she asked. “Alone.”

“Of course. I’ll leave the lantern.”

She waited until he’d left, until she heard the cellar door click shut, until she was alone with history.

Then, Livia laughed.

Slowly at first, a tittering giggle on the edge of madness, and then she couldn’t hold it back any longer. She fell to her knees under the righteous gaze of Saint Elise, beating her fists against the stone floor, howling with laughter as tears streamed down her face.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The Empire had come to Mirenze, to reclaim what it had lost and to punish the defiant.

General Baum’s crusade regiments, no longer needed in the Holy City, marched two days to the east. They moved slowly, crossing the open fields in great box formations, banners flying and trumpets blaring. There was no intent to deceive; they wanted the people of Mirenze to see the doom that was coming for them. Baum himself was gone. He’d sprinted to the western front to lead the fight against the Terrai, but his lieutenants had their orders.

They made camp outside every gate and rolled the battering rams up front.

There was no assault, not yet. Just a quiet statement. A warning of things to come if Mirenze didn’t open its gates and offer an unconditional surrender.

A graveyard hush fell over the streets, an entire city holding its breath. Mothers pulled their children indoors and shuttered their windows long before nightfall. The
partigiani
massed in hunch-shouldered, dark-eyed mobs, grumbling against fear and roving with naked steel in their fists. Waiting.

As the sunlight died, the Imperials kindled cook fires. Their lights blazed against the dark, crackling and red as a murderer’s knife. Weiss stared down from the top of a curtain wall, keeping a lonely watch with his bland face and his strangler’s hands, and turned up his collar against the chill night wind.

That was it, then. Kappel had failed. Why and how? Didn’t matter. He wasn’t coming, and neither was the pope. Holding Carlo hostage was Lodovico Marchetti’s last desperate plan to keep the Imperials from pounding his “free city” into blood-soaked rubble, and now it was too late.

Weiss struck a match against the rampart. It flared to life and he cupped his hand over it, shielding the tiny light from the wind as it slowly burned its way down. The flame singed his fingers and he flicked the wooden nub away. It landed at his boots beside twenty of its cousins.

“You got a name?” he asked.

The silent, gray-veiled creature at his side had come to the ramparts an hour or so ago. She hadn’t said a word, standing watch just like Weiss was, lingering a few feet away. She didn’t seem to want company, but she didn’t seem to want to be alone, either. Weiss was bored enough for idle conversation.

“Sister Rose,” she hissed.

“Rose. Pretty name. I’m Weiss.”

“I know.”

He didn’t have anything to say to that, so he went back to lighting matches. Once the thrill wore off, three singed fingers later, he tried again.

“It’s all good and fucked, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Rose agreed.

The brisk wind ruffled his hair. Weiss took a deep breath, tasting sea salt in the air.

“Anybody could end this, you know. Just grab Lodovico, march him out there, and hand him over. The Imperials would install a new governor, slap a few wrists, and that’d be the end of it. That’s all they’re here for. But these poor bastards are convinced that the Imperials bombed the Ducal Arch and planned an invasion all along.” Weiss shook his head. “Hell of a lot of people about to get killed over a lie. What do you call that, a self-fulfilling prophecy?”

“Why don’t you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Hand him over,” Rose said. “End the slaughter before it begins.”

Weiss snorted. “Sure, and then when he tells them it was my men who delivered weapons to the Terrai rebels, they’ll hang me right next to him. What about you? Why don’t you do something about it?”

Rose turned her head slightly, staring at him from behind her lace veil.

“The current course of events,” she said, “does not displease us.”

Weiss looked her over from head to toe.

“What
are
you, anyway?”

“A sister of a holy order. A servant of the King of Rust.”

Weiss chuckled and hooked his thumbs in his belt. “I’ve been a lot of places and seen a lot of kings. Never heard of a king of rust.”

“You worship him as we do, though you know it not.”

“Sister, I don’t worship anything or anyone. Never met anyone deserving the respect, myself included. Know what kneeling down buys you? A kick in the teeth, every time.”