Catling's Bane (The Rose Shield Book 1) Read online

  “Do you always wear blue?” she asked.

  “I specialize as an emotive, and blue suits me. However, we aren’t restricted to one palette. As a rule, we have abilities in the other spectrums. I have woads of other colors.” He drew up a sleeve, revealing slashes of gold, emerald, violet, and vermillion extending like thunderbolts from his wrist. “I have more on my back.”

  “Did you betray me?” The question erupted from her lips, and she hung on the following silence. His answer would permanently decide her willingness to trust him.

  The influencer’s chin drew back, his smooth brow creased. After a thoughtful moment, he nodded. “Unwittingly. What occurred was beyond my ken with implications I couldn’t fathom. I sent word to Vianne that I believed Gannon was immune to my influence.”

  The assumption surprised her. “You thought Gannon blocked you?”

  “Logically, it made sense. He was the one who defied the influence.”

  “Did Gannon betray me?” She wanted the truth, to trust Vianne’s promise that they wouldn’t deceive her.

  “In essence, no.” Qeyon drew in a breath and sighed. “He was given no choice.”

  “Vianne?” Catling asked. She’d seen the doyen’s power to inflict pain and death. “Vianne tortured him?”

  Qeyon bent forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “Vianne is talented in all the spectrums, Catling. Her foremost skill, however, is focus. She swore an oath and has sacrificed more than she reveals. I trust her word that she prefers pleasure over pain, love over fear, and life over death. Yet, she will do as she believes is necessary.”

  “Then your answer is ‘yes.’ ”

  He nodded and gazed at the river.

  “Where is he?”

  “Gannon is in good health and well cared for, but he is not free, not yet.” Qeyon met her eyes, his reluctance etching his forehead. “His knowledge of your shield puts you in danger, and Vianne will not risk your life. He is also your ally, and in that respect, he is worthy of our safekeeping. If all proceeds as Vianne hopes, a day will come when he’s free.”

  “If I obey.”

  “Your cooperation will serve you both.”

  “Would she kill him? Like she did those guards?”

  “It is my sincerest hope, Catling, that we all live long, satisfying lives. You will learn that the Influencers’ Guild is a secretive, closed society, and our power is invaluable when directed toward the greater good. We influence war, trade, security, intrigue, politics, love, and health. Initiates swear a lifelong binding oath to the guild whose mission is to protect and preserve the realm. Oaths to the high wards are secondary.”

  Catling frowned as she considered his words. Even at ten summers, she sensed the fallibility of their oaths. She’d seen the wickedness of power. “High Ward Algar hung Farlander children while we laughed and celebrated. Were his influencers serving your guild and the realm?”

  “I can’t see how.” His gaze strayed again to the shadowy forests beyond the riverbank. “The interpretations of our oaths and responsibilities vary. What one sees as beneficial, another may interpret as detrimental. Many regard change as threatening while others assert that stagnation permits wounds to fester. Some will argue that serving the realm is achieved simply by doing no harm. Despite how vile Algar’s actions are, they may not actually harm the realm.”

  Catling clamped her mouth shut as anger flooded her veins. He was wrong, the arguments twisted to sound reasoned and thoughtful while justifying poverty and death. It was wrong to imprison Gannon. The influencers supporting Algar’s hangings were monsters stirring men to mutiny. The emotive who led the guards to her stead would have ignored murder. Perhaps the Mur-Vallis warrens would never change. Perhaps the well-being of her family made no difference in the span of centuries, but they were real people with real lives at stake, and those events had ignited something unexpected—her power to shield and a will to stop them.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Catling ducked into the lane between the merchants’ shops on the ninth tier. She scurried the length, slipped on a mirror of ice as she veered around a corner, and then flattened her body against the wall. Not far from one of the three central pylons, she crushed her cloak closed and hunched her shoulders against the bitter wind.

  “She went this way,” one of the boys called, Kadan most likely. Why he idled on the ninth tier on a freezing day was a mystery… other than to torment her. She patted the spool of silk thread in her pocket and pressed her lips between her teeth. Kadan and his duo of hoodlums prowled the lanes nearest the lift. Ahead of her lay two lengthy dashes that would deliver her to a pylon’s maintenance door and her secret way up.

  “Catling?” Definitely Kadan’s voice and nearer than she cared to admit.

  She crept to the lane’s end and peered around the corner. The tier’s greens had withered, and clay-potted trees had shed their Harvest leaves. Naked statuary with ice-coated skin made her teeth chatter. A score or more cloak-bound figures hurried up the lanes, rejecting the promenade, their heads bowed in the wind. She shivered; never were the Mur-Vallis warrens so bitterly cold.

  Her hand rose to her eye, the urge to burrow into her shield so fierce she growled with frustration. Of all Vianne’s rules and warnings, this was the first she’d etched into Catling’s skull. She must never, ever, under any circumstances, reveal her shield, or Vianne’s ability to protect her would vanish. She would play the victim in a powerbroker’s game if she didn’t first end up dead.

  The guild’s tenets forbade influencers from plying their talents on each other without express permission, a prohibition the four doyen enforced with physical violence—if not death. The same strictures applied to aspirants, though with gentler penalties.

  The threat of pain seemed to matter little to some aspirants, Kadan in particular. The other girls who served in the upper tiers had warned Catling not to report her persecutors, or her life was bound to become more difficult, not less so.

  “Caaaatling?” More than one voice this time. “Caaaatling?”

  With little choice, she slipped around the corner and ran, fully exposed to unrestrained badgering.

  A bolt of fear shot up her spine, drawing a gasp. She spun, the sensation gone as quickly as it came and replaced by an unbearable itching. Kadan and two of his grinning cronies approached from the side of a gem shop while she scratched her belly like old Scuff after a tipple. She ran awkwardly, tears streaking her cheeks and hands clawing at her thighs until she ducked into an alley and the influence ceased.

  Their laughter trailed her as she sprinted to the end, cloak open and winging in the wind. She careened around a corner, slammed her shoulder into a wall, and with a desperate leap, spun into the pylon’s alcove. Her stolen key popped the lock. She wrenched the door open, yanked out the key, and slammed it shut. Gulping breaths of warm air, she sank to the narrow walkway and cried.

  Warm drafts hummed up the pylon, thawed her fingers, and dried her tears. Her unpinned hair stuck to her wet face, Vianne’s careful administrations of the morning fallen into a windblown tangle. She brushed out the knots with her fingers, twisted an inelegant coil, and reset the pins. With a sigh, she rose to her feet and started up the spiral walk.

  On the twelfth tier, she slipped into the icy wind, stunned again by the frigid cold. Only three of the eight pylons reached this high, and the tier’s breadth was a fraction of the first, a mere twenty feet above the docks. No warrens crowded the darkness below Ava-Grea’s tiers, its underside an opaque cavern of flowing swamp.

  Chin tucked, she strode past the Poisoner’s door and through the garden to the doyen’s clustered quarters and intimate meeting salons. The door to Vianne’s lodging slid aside at her touch, and she sighed with relief at the enveloping warmth. Her cloak pegged, she went in search of Vianne, the silk spool in her hand.

  Though the home was Founder-made, Vianne had embellished the interior with symbols of Ellegeance and its provinces. She’d replaced the interior paneled
doors with white witchwood harvested from the waterlogged hummocks surrounding the city. The marbled slabs paving the floors were quarried in the Fangwold’s foothills. She’d purchased Dar-Callin carpets and slender vases from Lim-Mistral, a carved bench from Se-Vien, and floral paintings from Kar-Aminia. The abode reflected Vianne: elegant, feminine, and exacting in its standards.

  Catling padded down the central hallway to her mentor’s salon and knocked.

  “Enter,” Vianne called from within.

  A hand on the curved latch, Catling opened the door. Vianne stood at her serving table, pouring greenleaf into a delicate cup. Dalcoran and Piergren occupied two of the four carved chairs, steaming brews already in hand.

  “My regrets for interrupting.” Catling bowed and counted to three before straightening.

  “We await Tunvise as usual,” Vianne said. “You brought my silk?”

  “Yes, Vianne.” Catling offered the spool.

  Vianne inspected the silk and smiled. “You look disheveled.”

  “The wind.”

  “And your errand ran longer than expected. Why the delay?”

  “I lingered at the shop,” Catling replied, careful not to lie. She’d spent a few moments warming while the merchant located the doyen’s order.

  Vianne arched an eyebrow as she sipped her greenleaf. “I suppose you won’t disclose who these delinquents are."

  “I don’t know them,” Catling said. She knew one of them, Kadan, but she didn’t know them.

  “They’re none of mine.” Vianne turned to her peers.

  “Pranksters.” Dalcoran waved away the concern. The most severe of the doyen, he sat stiffly in his immaculate gray jacket, his dark hair slicked back and shining. Though far from elderly, his joints had prematurely aged, and despite the healing influence of the mercys, he was never free of pain. “Pranks have been tolerated among the uninitiated since we were students.”

  “If you recall, we tormented each other.” Vianne sank to her seat. “We never took unfair advantage of those without our talents. Guild rules expressly state that aspirants are forbidden from plying their skills, and this abuse is but one reason why.”

  Piergren’s dark eyes remained fixed on Catling, and she avoided his leer. The antithesis of Dalcoran, he was stocky and lacking in grace, his face ruddy, hair long and unkempt. Geometrical woads climbed his forearms and vanished beneath his cropped sleeves. “There’s nothing we can do if those who are plagued refuse to speak up.”

  “I doubt any of us are deaf and blind,” Vianne said. “And lenience is no favor. A warning dose of pain now is far preferable to death for oathbreaking once they become initiates.”

  “Your point is made,” Dalcoran said, his regard turning to Catling. She expected a dismissal, but the man’s gnarled fingers beckoned her forward.

  “No influence,” Vianne warned him. “She’s had quite enough for one day.”

  Dalcoran’s gaze settled on Catling. “You’ve served your aunt in Ava-Grea for over a year. How old does that make you? Ten?”

  “Eleven summers.”

  “From a farm outside Se-Vien,” Dalcoran mused. “I didn’t know Vianne had cousins outside Guardian.”

  “I’ve never traveled to Guardian,” Catling said, a truthful and extraneous reply.

  “How generous of Vianne to provide you with an education. She seems quite protective of you, as well as dedicated to your future.”

  “I’m happy to be here.”

  “Is that so? Strange how you rarely smile.”

  “Dalcoran,” Vianne said, her tone conveying no small rebuke. “The child misses her family, of course. Do you upset her merely to provoke me?”

  The man canted his head as if awaiting a reply.

  “Catling.” Vianne drew her attention. “Please see what keeps Tunvise. Inform him that we are eager for his presence. Wake him if necessary.”

  With a low bow to the three doyen, Catling retreated from the room. She leaned against the hallway’s wall, breathing through the emotion that churned in her chest. The loneliness of her life in Ava-Grea wore down her resolve. She longed for home, for her family, for Whitt. Steeling herself, she retrieved her cloak and opened the door to face the interminable cold.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Whitt brushed grime from the sack and worked it open. He slid three coppers inside. With the cords cinched, he dropped it back in the hole, smoothed dirt over the top, and rolled a lumpy rock into place to mark the spot. He kept Catling’s stash buried near the Mur-Vallis trenches where the stink alone would keep human vultures away. Another week collecting waste from the warrens’ dark interior and he’d have passage to Ava-Grea, almost a year later than he’d planned.

  The fact that he called the coins “Catling’s” would have brought a chuckle if his education regarding life in the warrens hadn’t been so brutal. A trio of boys, not much older than he, had robbed him within a day of his arrival and several times since. During the first month, he’d suffered bloodied noses and split lips more than he could count and bruises purple as plums. He’d nearly starved.

  He stole food in the market and picked from the spoiled rubbish of the tipple houses. When the barkeep of The Ship’s Fate paid him a clipped copper to clean the mess from his back door, Whitt started soliciting work hauling the reeking trash to the pits. After paying underlord enforcers for protection, the beatings stopped, and the remaining pittance stayed in his pocket.

  Animals scurried at the trench’s fringe, and a sound from the darkness near the warrens startled him. He lurched to his feet and wandered, kicking over stones, idling in the stench of rotting trash as if that’s how every boy of ten wasted his nightly hours.

  Above him Darkest Night was moonless, the Springseed sky a fathomless void pinpricked with stars. The tier city gleamed, strung with lanterns and wound with circulation tubes of luminescence. He crept back into the warrens, the alleyways nearly vacant this near the pits. The twitchers slumping in the dark corners didn’t worry him, most half dead from chewing down bits of godswell.

  After three seasons in Mur-Vallis, the world under the tiers was as familiar as his own skin, and he rarely took a wrong corner. Never found himself lost for long. He blended in—poor, grimy, and thin-wristed, clothes stained and short in the cuffs.

  “Where you off to?” a voice called after him.

  Whitt turned without flinching, the urge to run buried by sheer self-control. His three tormentors ambled up the alley. Cappy, the tallest and sturdiest swung a rapper on a short strap that could leave a knot on Whitt’s skull with a mere flip of the wrist. The other two were mean and scrappy as river rats, but skinnier than Whitt, and he’d beaten them off before.

  “Ship’s Fate,” he replied, refusing to back up or let his eyes stray from the boys’ faces. Fear could get a body killed in the warrens. “Touch me, and you’ll have enforcers feeding your fingers to you through the wrong hole.”

  “Who said we’re touching you?” Cappy stood between the other two, palms raised in innocence. “Just asking a friendly question. Seems you like picking in the pits for finds.”

  “What of it?” If they thought he dug for trash to sell in the warrens, it was the least of his worries. “The tiers toss scraps worth a couple coppers.” He turned his back and walked toward the busier interior where nighttime revelry drowned out the boys’ laughter. He couldn’t return to fetch his coins now, but they’d rest in a new hiding hole long before dawn.

  On Darkest Night, the Ship’s Fate attracted a surly lot. Superstitions put folks in a dour way, and the tipple pinched already foul moods. Most nights he helped out in exchange for a place to sleep behind the bar, but the racket ahead suggested a fight in progress. He leaned against the alleyway wall across from the entrance and watched a man’s face slam into the carved statue of the coupling gods.

  A flame-haired woman winced at the sight, and then she and a large man circled the unconscious fellow and headed for the door. Whitt had seen them both before, but this ti
me recognition straightened his back. She had accompanied Gannon when he first rode to the stead for Catling.

  The pair ambled through the doorway. The redhead noticed his stare and nodded without any indication she remembered him. The man, one of Maddox’s enforcers, scratched his square chin, not troubling to spare him a glance.

  “Where’s Gannon?” Whitt asked.

  The woman stopped, her eyes flitting between him and her frowning companion.

  “Where’s Gannon?” Whitt stepped forward, the question craving an answer. He hadn’t spotted the man once since arriving in Mur-Vallis.

  “Who are you?” the woman whispered. Then she shook her head. “Not here. Come with us.” She spun and hurried up a flight of stairs to the second floor above the Fate.

  Whitt hauled in a breath and followed, the enforcer stomping on his heels. Halfway down the hall, they crowded into a plain room.

  She shut the door and faced him. “Who are you?”

  “Whitt, from Scuff’s stead.”

  “Catling.” The confusion that initially creased her brow fled. “I remember you. I’m Farrow.” She gestured toward the beefy enforcer sitting on the edge of her bed. “This is Tiler.”

  “The influencers took her to Ava-Grea,” Whitt said. “Last Summertide after Gannon brought her back. I’m going there to find her.”

  Farrow’s shoulders slumped, and she shared a weary sigh with Tiler. Her eyes welling, she faced Whitt. “I’m sorry to say it, Whitt, but Gannon’s dead. We believe Algar killed him a year past, along with two other men.”

  Whitt’s stomach ached as a cold sweat beaded on his forehead.

  “You should go home,” Farrow said. “Go home to your family.”

  “They…they…” Whitt stammered. He’d never said it, not once, to anyone. “They…”

  “Oh, child.” Farrow sagged against the door.

  “I should go.” Whitt stepped toward her. Farrow hesitated, and with nothing more to say, moved aside.