Oathbreakers' Guild (The Rose Shield Book 2) Read online

  “Why not?” He furrowed his brow.

  “I was mysterious.” She laughed. “For a year, no one knew my name. They called me Rose because of my eye.” Questions formed on his lips, and she hurriedly shifted the conversation. “Now you tell me something about you.”

  He sat back. “I used to paint. Before Ava-Grea. My mother has all my creations hanging in her chambers, including the dreadful ones.”

  “Will you paint again?”

  “Unlikely. I had mediocre talent.” He rested his elbows on the table to hold himself upright. “So you’re from Se-Vien?”

  She blinked at him, stunned that he could be so half-witted. “Mur-Vallis warrens.”

  His chin retracted into his neck. “I’m from Mur-Vallis, too.”

  “I know, you dolt.” She rubbed her face and forced a laugh, reluctant to head in that direction. “I saw you on the tier on hanging days.”

  “Oh.” The contentment on his faced soured.

  “I caused a lot of trouble for your uncle in the markets with my shield.”

  “You did that?”

  She nodded, and suddenly her control over her emotions crumbled. The drink combined with the day’s heady intimacy overwhelmed her, and the truth spilled from her mouth before she could quash it. “He hung my mother and killed my family.”

  Kadan’s face blanched, and he swallowed, his eyes glistening. “I should have—”

  “You couldn’t.” Her face flushed, and she wiped a knuckle under her eye. “Whatever you might suggest that you should have done, you couldn’t. You were a child, Kadan, a little boy. You had less power than I.” She reached across the table, tempted to touch his hand. “It’s all a mess, everything that happened to us, how we were tugged and shoved by the will of others. There’s a limit, isn’t there, as to how much they can expect?”

  He furrowed his brow. “I’m sorry anyway.” He sat back and freed a breath rivaling a southern wind. “My mother and I invented a hand signal to warn each other of danger. We’d use it when my uncle tired of us and words would have provoked him.” He pressed his thumb and fingertips together, forming a circle.

  Catling mirrored the sign. “Until I moved to the stead, I could make myself invisible.”

  “I learned how to mold myself to my uncle’s moods.”

  She shook her head. “You don’t need to do that now, do you?”

  “And you’re not invisible anymore,” he said, reaching across to gently cuff her chin.

  “Sometimes I wish I were.”

  “I didn’t want to come to Ava-Grea. I didn’t want to become an influencer and serve my uncle’s will. Even if Dalcoran finds no use for me here, I won’t return to Mur-Vallis.” He met her eyes with an unexpected intensity as if his ability to choose had flashed into his drunken awareness.

  She smiled as the implications played across his face with another flush of emotion. Envy claimed a space in her heart, and she tamped it down. Her fingers rose to her eye. “I’ve had few choices in my life, and the times I did, I was young and swayed by others. My path has never been my own, Kadan and never will be. Yet, I’ll wrestle the powers over me for every scrap of freedom I can manage. You’re different; you’re free to choose your future.”

  The sadness in his eyes belied the trace of a smile on his lips, his thoughts otherwise unreadable. A servant stopped at the table, eyebrows raised at the empty cups. “Another?”

  “No, my regrets.” Kadan offered Catling a hand up. “We’ve indulged enough. Let’s walk.”

  “If I can.” Catling smiled, and he pulled her to her feet, catching her as she swayed. He wrapped an arm around her waist, and they strolled the city’s long perimeter, teetering toward the tier’s edge and dizzy with laughter.

  At the southern end and slightly more sober, Catling paused to lean on the rail. Her gaze sought the swamp’s spillway where the Slipsilver widened and surrendered its banks. Beyond the swamp, far up river, lay the Fangwold Mountains, Guardian, and Whitt. The tipple made her weepy and lonely for home.

  Kadan’s forearms rested on the rail beside her. He leaned over and kissed her. She didn’t resist, her lips finding his soft and inviting. His hand traced the curve of her spine, landing at the small of her back. He drew her closer, and she relaxed into him, assured that whatever passed between them was genuine, their own to do with what they would.

  In the morning, when she rolled over in his bed, tangled in linens, and found him sleeping beside her, the world changed. It wasn’t love, perhaps, but it was hope.

  Chapter Nine

  Catling knelt beside the low cot on the sixth tier. Tunvise balanced on a stool beside her, hunched over, a wrinkled hand on the child peering up at them and smiling despite the pain in his bloated belly. She blanketed the boy with kindness, envisioning Mouser and Daisy as she had last seen them, innocent and trusting in a world steeped in cruelty.

  The child’s mother, one of the riverfolk, hovered at the wall, wringing her hands. “He doesn’t eat, and when he does, he slops up. He’s been shitting swill.”

  “Ah,” Catling said, “shall we learn what the trouble is?” She extended her palm, and the child’s frail hand slid into hers. Tunvise had already determined the source of the boy’s ailment, and she would attempt the same under his guidance. If she were able, she would cure him.

  The influence of the emotives, the power spanning the extremes of love and fear, proved easier for her to manipulate. In her mind, it shone outside the body just as light radiated outward from a flame. Emotions were perceptible, vulnerable and subject to her sway. Sensorist talents, those sensations ranging from ecstasy to agony, were far more internal, the energy tighter. Visible, yet closer to the body’s cells. Both emotives and sensorists relied a great deal on the imagination when manufacturing the influenced experienced.

  Of a different nature, the work of the mercys hid within the human shell, devoid of illusion. The healing or harm was unmistakably real, in addition to being the least of her talents.

  The woads on Catling’s back warmed. She probed, envisioning violet influence sliding from her fingertips into the child’s hand, seeping into his muscle and bone, and merging with the blood in his veins. Her approach required edging out of her own way and allowing the influence to lead her, to reveal the body’s secrets. If she tried too hard, her abilities faltered.

  The influence traveled up his arm, gravitating toward the heat of fever and swelling in his joints. She cooled and soothed through the blood, drawing out the inflammation in the tissues. No infection spread through the cells, yet the boy’s body lacked flow, dammed with rotting debris like a forest stream. The stomach had distended, the child’s ability to digest inhibited. She followed the influence into his lower belly, through the long ropey intestines. Without her assistance, influence repaired abscesses, drained blisters, and widened the constricted channel.

  She raised her gaze to Tunvise who nodded, whether with approval or on the verge of sleep, she couldn’t tell. He withdrew his hand from the boy’s shoulder and addressed the anxious mother, “He will be restored in a few days. Water and soft foods until the system clears itself.”

  The woman squatted beside the cot and smiled at Catling. “Thank you, Influencer.”

  Her work complete, Catling followed Tunvise through the labyrinth of beds lining the sick room. She unbuttoned her jacket as she stepped to the promenade, the Summertide swamps steaming and the buzz of insects persisting despite a breath of breeze.

  “Well done,” Tunvise complimented her.

  “May I ask, Tunvise-Bes, why we don’t use luminescent pools to heal the sick and injured? Why don’t we add violet pools to the sick wards in every city?”

  “Walk with me.” Tunvise clasped his hands behind his back.

  Catling swatted at a bug and strolled beside the old man.

  “What precisely does the violet pool do?” he asked.

  “Heals wounds.” She thought of her experience. “Heals pain as well as a troubled mind.” />
  “Principally through?”

  “Influence.”

  “Ah.” He nodded. “And would we want everyone to wield that power? Would we trust the common man to respect our source of influence? High Ward Algar is inventive. How long would it take him to discern for himself our secrets of distilling luminescence, to cut his skin and stain his flesh? What if he learned how to wield pain and hatred, to kill with a touch?”

  A shudder rippled up Catling’s spine. “I imagine he would be ruthless.”

  “And not all illnesses succumb to healing. The ailments of old age are particularly resistant.” He gave her a sideways glance, eyebrows raised to his wreath of white hair. “Dalcoran’s deformities are merely eased by influence. The Poisoner will never stand tall. I shall die soon enough. What of those who demand healing where there is none? What of those who would be best served by a peaceful death?”

  She sighed, his words well-reasoned. “So, it’s not simply to hoard our power?”

  “No, Catling.” He paused and gestured for a return to the sick rooms. “There are times when our choices seem cruel but only because the alternative is worse.”

  ***

  The day’s heat lifted, and Clio’s full face wore a plate of gold. Her sisters’ crescent smiles hooked the jagged horizon as if fishing among the treetops. Catling descended the spiral stairs with Kadan and Minessa. They had taken their turns at healing in the sickrooms, and though the results were gratifying, the failures stung. Catling’s talents paled in comparison to her companions’, especially to Minessa’s.

  Though her friends counted two years her senior, she was their equal in potential if not skill. She wondered what Kadan thought of the woads on her back, if he would choose one day to trace the curling vines with his fingertips. The night in his bed hadn’t tumbled into two. They had shared the secret words scripted on their cards, grasped Vianne’s ploy, and blushed with embarrassment. From then on, Minessa became the stool’s third leg when they ventured to the Bottled Sage intent on too much tipple.

  Catling hooked an arm with Kadan. Minessa mirrored her on his other side. They marched across the second tier promenade to the staircase which would deliver them to the rowdier level below. The markets bustled, even in the twilight moons, the last stretch of Summertide spirits in full play.

  The guards who formed a human barricade between the first and second tiers still prickled Catling’s nerves whenever she approached them. Her flight with Gannon into the swamps and her final escape into the slimy gloom below the city occurred a long year ago. Yet it lay fresh in her memory, an emotional scar, red and raw. Surely, the guards remembered her, the young woman with the rose eye.

  None of the sentries idled at their usual stations. Catling peered ahead as she approached, a disturbance on the stair rousing her curiosity. She, Kadan, and Nessa halted at the top step. Taller spectators walled off her vision, and farther down, guards bellowed orders at whatever threatened from below.

  “What’s happening?” She glanced up at Kadan, more than a head taller than she.

  He craned his neck. “The guards detained two rafters.”

  “Rafters?” Catling dropped his arm and began worming her way down the steps.

  He grabbed the back of her jacket. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  She squirmed and shot him a frown. “If they’re rafters, I need to know what’s happening.”

  “Not alone, you don’t.” Nessa pressed forward, dragging Kadan with her.

  Catling pushed through the inquisitive crowd blocking her path. On the lower steps, a cluster of six armed guards shouted and brandished bludgeons. By all appearances, none of the weapons had rained down on the targets of their intimidation. The man in charge barked orders, “No rafters beyond the first tier without an escort.”

  “Then I will go up and find one,” a man said, his voice thick with fenfolk inflections.

  “Jafe?” Catling balked and stole a glance at Nessa. “It’s Jafe. I’m certain of it.” She charged down the steps. “I will escort them!”

  The surprised guards opened a gap in their ranks.

  “We will escort them,” Nessa said as she and Kadan joined her.

  “Raker?” Below Catling, Jafe crouched on the bottom step, his white hair matted with clay, body smeared with blood. A long knife tracked the guards as they shifted around him. Raker hung limply at his side, an arm over the tall rafter’s shoulder. His head lolled, black hair lank and face ashen. He’d lost the patch that normally hid the gruesome scar puckering his gouged eye. Blood soaked through his crudely bandaged leg and left a serpentine smear across the tier’s smooth grayness. His gashed arm bled, and crimson beads dripped from his three-fingered hand. “What happened to him?” Catling asked.

  Jafe retreated from the step, dragging Raker with him. He lowered his friend to the tier, and Catling knelt by the wounded leg, afraid to touch it. “A crajek?” She shuddered at the thought of the reptiles’ jagged teeth clamping down beneath the swamps muddy luminescence.

  “Razorgills like the taste of his blood.” Jafe narrowed his eyes to slits as Nessa and Kadan joined them.

  “My friends,” Catling said in hasty introduction, “far more talented at healing than I.” The guards backed away, the presence of influencers removing the burden of decision from their hands.

  With a nod, Jafe tucked his knife under his belt, his gaze riveted on Minessa. Kadan began unwinding the cloth from Raker’s wounded leg, and Nessa laid her fingers on his gashed and bleeding arm.

  “How long ago?” Catling touched Raker’s hand freeing her influence into his veins.

  “Twilight,” Jafe replied. “He told me she said to bring him here.”

  Catling understood. He meant the river or the fog or whatever spirits Raker communed with in his madness. Raker and Jafe had saved her life twice; they knew Whitt. Raker’s life increasingly overlapped with hers, the meaning not yet revealed by the voice filling his head.

  When Kadan finally drew the cloth from the mangled leg, he winced at Nessa. Catling gasped. The crajek had shredded Raker’s flesh, rows of teeth scoring to the bone.

  Nessa shook her head. “We can’t heal this. We should deliver him to the sixth tier.” She glanced at Catling, the shadows in her eyes questioning if they could save him at all.

  “She said to bring him here,” Jafe repeated, searching Catling’s face, his faith in her irrefutable. His confidence speared her heart.

  “The twelfth tier,” Catling said. “The pools. Markim will let us in.”

  “They’ll punish us if we’re caught; that’s if we’re lucky.” Kadan sat back on his heels, staring at her.

  “You don’t need to help,” Catling said, well aware of the peril. “I don’t expect you too, but I haven’t a choice.”

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t.” Kadan’s eyebrows plowed together. “And we’re not the only ones at risk. They’ll kill these two without hesitation.” He cocked his head at the rafters.

  “I’ll help,” Nessa said, her slanted eyes dark with worry.

  “No.” Catling shook her head. “Kadan’s right. Neither of you should risk this. I’ll do it alone. I owe Jafe my life.”

  “There’s no time to argue about it.” Nessa climbed to her feet. “We go now or he’s dead.”

  Chapter Ten

  Kadan and the tall rafter supported Raker between them as the lift ascended the pylon. Since his arrival in Ava-Grea six years past, he’d become accustomed to seeing the swamp’s pale fenfolk, and his affection for Minessa had upturned all his suppositions and biases.

  The fenfolk tied up at the docks in floating islands and hawked their primitive wares: woodcarvings, lichens and pelts, fish, feathers, and bottles of rich luminescence. Every one of them towered over him, towheaded and spotted except for Raker. Like Nessa, Raker shared more than one of the race’s features. Kadan’s uncle hung their Farlander cousins every chance he got… men, women, and children.

  “Nessa and I will scout ahead,�
�� he said. They needed a basic plan, and no one else had spoken up. “We’ll influence anyone who stands in our way… without breaking our oaths.” He eyed Nessa, and when she nodded, he faced Catling. “If we meet an influencer, we’ll deflect as best we can. Deliver Raker to Markim and convince him to help. If he raises the alarm…”

  “He won’t,” Catling said. “I know he won’t.”

  The lift slowed, and the door glided open to the city’s top tier. Jafe hadn’t peeped the whole ride up and puffed a sigh as they stepped cautiously to the tier. Kadan doubted the man had ever ridden a lift, let alone caught a view above the market level.

  “I’ll go first.” Minessa winked at him, her smile sweet and determined as she scampered into the fountained garden.

  Kadan slipped out from beneath Raker’s arm as Jafe assumed the man’s full weight. The Poisoner’s hall bordered the garden, and he needed to be ahead of them for his influence to make a difference. He glanced at Catling and then loped onto the wending paths.

  Not far to his left, Nessa giggled. The masculine voices of two guards replied to whatever request for help she’d tendered, no doubt enamored with her sunny beauty… and her influence.

  Guards would be plentiful but of little concern. He could apply his influence down a number of channels, intimidation the fallback if all other means of persuasion failed. The chance of an encounter with the doyen made this stomach clench. This tier belonged to them, their quarters and private meeting salons sharing the sky with the Poisoner. He had no business up here unless at their request.

  Two guards approached him from the potted grove, startling him. “State your business.”

  “Kadan-Mur.” He thrust simultaneous barbs of fear and adoration in their direction. “I seek Dalcoran.”

  “Do you require assistance?” the shorter of the pair asked as both dipped their heads.

  “None,” Kadan replied, “unless you long to volunteer for my impending tongue-lashing.” He added a jolt of pleasure and smiled.

  The two guards chuckled at the humor. “We leave you to your errand,” the first said, and they moved on.