Errant, p.8
Errant, page 8
He bellowed as his nose cracked. Blood gushed. She shoved him as hard as she should, a hand on each shoulder, and he stumbled backward out the front door and collapsed.
She turned in time to see Unity trying to sneak up behind her. He must have come in the back. She stepped sideways into the kitchen, grabbed a frying pan off the floor, and swung it at his face.
Unity dodged, but since he was still bleeding from her shot, he was a touch slow. Aspen was brutal in her attack, aiming for his bad shoulder with the frying pan and hitting him with all she had. She thunked him on the head with the frying pan, dropped it, and then drove her elbow into the wound with cruel precision.
He passed out.
She tied his hands behind his back and left him prone in the room opposite the kitchen. Someone grabbed her from behind.
Cooperation.
He dragged her out of the house. He’d recovered faster than she anticipated, and now she was going to pay for her moment of inattention. His arm pressed against her neck, cutting off her airflow. She gripped his arm in both hands, one above his elbow and one below. She moved until her neck was in the crook of his elbow. The pressure was less there, and she could take a full breath.
She crouched and threw him so he landed on his back. It was his turn to have the wind knocked out of him. He didn’t stay down for long. He came at her with quick fists and the occasional kick to keep her on her guard. Aspen guided the fight back toward the house. If she could get inside, she’d have the advantage. She knew the space. The walls would curtail his longer reach.
On one kick, she grabbed his ankle and twisted until she could use a combination of his momentum and her own strength to throw him to the ground. Aspen dashed into the house. Cooperation braced himself on the threshold and coughed a wad of bloody mucus into the ash on the floor.
She grabbed a charred chair leg, but when she turned to use it, Cooperation was already on his feet and too close. He ripped it out of her hands. She jumped back and he swung at her. The piece of wood was too long to dodge and it slammed into her right side, lighting her up with pain. She staggered backward, and Cooperation advanced. He hit her again, this time because she was too slow.
He hit her a third time, and she lost her footing. They were in the remains of the kitchen now, and he tossed the wood aside and straddled her body. He fitted his hands around her neck and pressed down.
She tried to twist him off of her like last time, but he’d learned, and his knees tightly gripped her sides. One of his knees dug into her stab wound so hard that she saw black. Her nails scrabbled against his arms, but he didn’t stop applying pressure to her throat. Shit, shit, shit. She needed out. She needed to hurt him.
Her hands groped for something she could use. There was no air. She couldn’t think. Cooperation had told her once that he preferred hand-to-hand combat over weapons. He liked the intimacy of the kill.
He leaned in until their mouths were almost touching.
“I like to breathe my victim’s last breath,” he told her.
An explosion, like a crack of thunder except louder and sharper, shook the entire house. Through the missing roof, Aspen could see the shimmer of fireworks as they sparkled and faded into the sky.
Or maybe that was the lack of air.
But the explosion startled Cooperation, too. He glanced up. His grip loosened. With his attention elsewhere, Aspen was able to rally and buck him off of her. She stumbled out of the house into a cloud of smoke. When it parted, there was Charm grinning and lighting another firework. She ran away as it started to burn.
Back toward the wagons.
The theater troupe. Charm’s theater troupe. Half a dozen wagons loaded with shouting actors and stagehands as they lit fireworks.
“Spread out! Search the grounds in groups of three!” That must be a constable shouting.
Aspen had asked Charm to find the Cheyford constabulary. She’d gotten more than she’d bargained for.
“Niwa’s in the barn and Unity’s in the house,” Aspen called out. She turned just in time to see Cooperation running at her.
They slammed into the muddy grass and rolled. He pinned her. Aspen tried to knee him in the balls, but his leg took the impact. He didn’t even grunt.
She worked one arm free and had just enough space to jab him in his broken nose. A liquid burst of red rained down on her, and for one perplexed moment, she thought it was blood.
She took advantage of the confusion to flip their position. Once she was on top of Cooperation with a hand on his throat, she wiped her face with her free hand and spat. The taste was wrong for blood. Too sweet, not coppery.
Some Traveling Harstead Player had pelted Cooperation with a bladder of fake blood.
Both of them were covered, slick and sticky with dirt, sweat, and blood both real and fake. Cooperation bared his teeth, a white gash in all the red.
“I’m going to kill you in front of them,” he said, his voice a thin rasp, and stabbed two fingers into her wound.
Aspen roared in pain. She fumbled for the small knife in her boot. There would be no tying him up, no knocking him unconscious, no handing him into the magistrate’s custody. Only one of them was coming out of this alive.
It had to be her.
The knife came free. Aspen removed her hand from his throat and killed him with one fast slash. Blood spurted. His hand dropped away from her wound. Cooperation gurgled and died.
Aspen spat on the ground and then collapsed. Everything hurt. One last firework screamed into the sky and shattered into blue sparks. She closed her eyes.
Charm’s voice rang out. “Don’t put him away yet, that one’s mine!”
Aspen squinted into the lingering smoke and the dimness of dusk. Charm marched across the ground toward a small group of people, two standing constables with torches and Mort on his knees with his hands cuffed behind his back.
“This is for grabbing me in the tavern.” Charm punched him in the face. She shook out her fingers, remade her fist, and punched him again. “And that one is for Aspen.”
That was sweet. She needed a lesson in good form, but it was the thought that counted.
“Aspen?” Charm loomed over her. “Oh, thank Gods, I thought you were dead!”
“Not me. Him.” Aspen hacked up some blood. “S’not that bad. They get the others?”
“Unity and Niwa are in custody,” Charm said. Her skirts poofed as she sat on the disgusting ground right next to Aspen. “The constables wanted Mort taken to the magistrate in Ilgate, too. I don’t know if they’ll keep him, but apparently he’s got a wife and two kids who’ll inherit this place—whatever that’s worth. The neighbors might take up a collection to help them out. Flick, bring me some water! Aspen needs a healer!”
“M’fine.”
“Lying is a sin, Aspen,” Charm said. She’d acquired a wet cloth from somewhere and was sponging at Aspen’s face.
“You gotta put your thumb on the outside and hit with your knuckles,” Aspen said. She demonstrated weakly. Her arm hurt too much for more.
“Are you trying to teach me to throw a punch while flat on your back and covered in blood?”
Aspen’s throat was scratchy and her mouth tasted foul. She wanted to spit again, or maybe throw up, but Charm was right there, so she forced a few words out instead. “Not all mine. If you’re gonna punch people, you gotta do it right.”
“Correct my form later, when we’re sure you haven’t died of blood poisoning,” Charm said. “I can’t even see where your wounds are.”
“Worst one’s in my side. Needs one of Tescui’s poultices.”
“I don’t know who or what that is.”
“A friend. A Rain healer. She makes good stuff. Keep some in the saddlebags. It’ll stop the wound from going bad.”
Charm briefly stopped nagging her, so Aspen was able to enjoy her full array of cuts and bruises in all their sharp, throbbing intensity. Underneath, there was the ache of what she’d done. She’d killed Cooperation. Slit his throat. Ended his life.
He would have killed her, Aspen knew. He would have taken sick pleasure in it. She didn’t regret his loss, exactly—she wasn’t suffering under the impression that he’d ever change for the better—but she regretted the kill. Sometimes you had to. But if you didn’t carry the weight of it, killing got easier and easier.
Aspen didn’t want it to be easy.
Charm returned. She sat down again and began to go through one of Aspen’s saddlebags. There was the rustle of fabric and the clink of glass jars. “Somehow you look worse than when I left you. Are you sick?”
“Just don’t like killing, that’s all.”
“You don’t?”
Aspen grunted. Being mistaken for someone as cold-blooded as Cooperation hurt. So did Charm jostling her wound. As Charm deftly undid the buttons of her vest, Aspen said, “M’good at it. Don’t like it.”
It was a poor explanation, but Aspen’s head was full of drying mortar and her side was on fire. Charm pulled up her shirt and began to clean out her wound, her hand soft against Aspen’s side. Still, Aspen hissed at the sting.
“Can you sit up?” Charm asked.
“Yeah.”
Aspen let Charm pull her upright. She didn’t stop Charm from slipping the vest over her arms and the shirt over her head. The band of linen around her breasts was little more than a rag. Charm carefully cleaned around it. Her touch was gentle. She said nothing inappropriate.
Charm pressed the moss poultice into Aspen’s side. The magic hummed on contact with her skin. It took a talented healer to craft one of these. Luckily, Tescui was the best. Her poultices could stay fresh for months, and the magic only started working when they touched a wound.
Charm asked, “Does… Tescui usually do this for you?”
“I go see her if it’s bad. But usually I clean myself up.”
“You’re close, you and Tescui.”
Aspen huffed with laughter and then with pain. “She’s seventy-seven and mean as an alley cat.”
“There are as many ways to live as there are lives,” Charm said. She was quoting a play, Aspen thought, but not one Aspen knew. “And I don’t know what you like.”
“Not that,” Aspen said. “Not like you mean, anyway. She’s a friend.”
It took a long time before Aspen was patched up. By then, some of the constables had dug a grave for Cooperation and the troupe had circled the wagons and started a bonfire. Aspen didn’t feel up to joining, so Charm fetched her a fresh shirt—mustard yellow, far too big—from some box of costumes. She and Charm stayed where they were, side by side, blanketed by darkness, and then Charm fished a metal flask out of her skirts, took a drink, and offered it to Aspen.
“Don’t know what you usually do after a fight, but this was my best guess,” Charm said. Even with the whooping of the actors a dozen feet away, Aspen heard her soft voice clearly.
When she’d worked with Ayzeh, back before, she’d usually pressed him into the mattress—or any convenient wall—after a victory. Ayzeh had liked it that way. Hard, fast, a lot like sparring, usually Aspen on top. Charm seemed like she’d be bossier.
Aspen choked on her swallow of the fiery alcohol in the flask, coughed, and hoped they were far enough from the fire that Charm couldn’t see the color of her face.
When she could speak again, she said, “Usually I just get back on Mouse and ride away.” That was more or less true for the years since she’d left the Scale.
“A classic ballad ending,” Charm said.
Aspen had never heard a ballad wrap up with the hero battered, limping, and hoping the pay from the job would cover the cost of healing as well as food and lodging until the next wealthy widow needed escort or the next rabid bear needed dispatching. Tales rarely represented reality.
There were a few details from tonight’s story that Aspen didn’t quite understand. “Why did you bring the troupe instead of just the constables?”
“Are you disregarding our brave contributions to the fight?” Charm asked. “I know my people. I don’t know the constables. I wasn’t sure they’d help. Besides, the troupe had already agreed to get involved.” Charm touched the mirror-shard necklace hanging from her throat. “Flick and I can always talk to each other. When I got out of jail, I let Flick know. They were heading for Ilgate anyway. But I asked them to stay near Cheyford when it became clear we were coming back this way.”
“And the fireworks?”
“The troupe always has some powder on hand for special effects,” Charm said, and Aspen remembered the explosions in their performance of Calamity’s Dance. “I may have requisitioned a few other things from the Ilgate commons.”
“Requisitioned,” Aspen repeated. “Care to explain how you got out of jail, or why you fainted afterward?”
“Nope.”
Despite herself, Aspen laughed. The motion hurt. She took another drink, grateful for the numbing burn.
As she passed the flask back, she examined Charm’s hand, running the pads of her fingers carefully over the scraped knuckles. Everywhere else, Charm’s skin was soft, plump, smooth. “You need salve on those.”
Aspen pulled a pot of salve out of her bag. She held Charm’s hand and dabbed at her knuckles. When Charm didn’t recoil at her rough, callused touch, Aspen curled Charm’s fingers toward her palm. “Like this. Thumb on top.”
“You know I don’t intend to make a habit of punching people,” Charm said.
“It’s good to know how,” Aspen insisted. It was important. Everyone should know how. Sometimes you were your only defense.
“In your life, maybe. I don’t have time to start fistfights, I have to star in Calamity’s Dance in Ilgate the night after next.”
Aspen paused at this reminder that they had separate lives. “Right.”
“Where are you headed?”
“I don’t know, exactly. I need to stay in the area to investigate all the other pins on Napier’s map. If it’s the Scale causing so much trouble around here, I… I don’t know what I’ll do, but I need to know.”
“You know, the troupe’s scheduled to perform in Ilgate for the next two weeks. There’s probably lots to investigate around there. And you could see me perform again.” Charm scooted closer and then laid her head on Aspen’s shoulder.
In the distance, the troupe’s conversation had coalesced into song. Someone was drumming a beat. Some of them were dancing. The fire painted their colorful wagons with long, twisting shadows. Laughter rose into the air.
Charm was warm against her side.
“You know,” Aspen said. “I think I’d like that.”
II
FOR ALL THE HARVESTS TO COME
1
The Traveling Harstead Players kept late hours, but Aspen continued to rise with the sun. It was hard to break the habit.
Besides, her morning stretches and sword practice were more peaceful when Charm was asleep. Aspen was a thirty-seven-year old woman. It should not make her giddy to be whistled at, even if the whistler happened to be stunning. If anybody asked, Aspen preferred to exercise without an audience.
She certainly did not miss Charm in the hours between dawn and late morning, which was when Charm usually emerged from one of the troupe’s painted wagons demanding pastries and tea. That would be absurd. Aspen was trying very hard not to be absurd.
Her travel with the troupe was only temporary. They were performing in a few different towns in the valley where it just so happened that Aspen had business. Having worked as a guard for many rich widows journeying alone, Aspen knew the dangers of the road. Syndicates charging exorbitant bridge tolls, bandits, giant ohla birds on rampages—even for someone as skilled as Aspen, it made sense to travel in groups.
And Charm had suggested that Aspen accompany them.
Gainsaying Charm was futile. That was why Charm was on the road beside her on this crisp autumn day, riding a cantankerous mare named Ruby, complaining vociferously about the hour and otherwise critiquing all of Aspen’s choices.
Aspen ignored her. It was the twelfth day of Bare Branch Moon, but the early morning fog had cleared and the sun had emerged. A nice day for a ride if you liked that sort of thing, which Charm, who bumped along on her horse like an especially lovely sack of potatoes, did not. But she’d insisted on coming, even though Aspen’s investigation into the Hanging Scale’s presence in this valley had nothing to do with her.
Well, almost nothing.
“I think when we find Hope, you should let me do the talking,” Charm said. “I’m better at people than you.”
Hope Earby Bingham was a farmer who had been coerced into paying protection to some members of the Hanging Scale. A few days ago, Aspen had violently interrupted the protection scheme by putting two of its thugs in jail and killing the leader in self defense. She needed to know if those three were the only members of her former secret society in the area, or if she’d have to hunt down others.
It made Aspen sick to think of how low the Scale had stooped. They used to stand for something.
“What gender is Hope?” Charm asked.
“Mort said ‘he’ in his interview,” Aspen said. Mortification Cooper Leighton had been another farmer caught up in the protection scheme, though by the end he’d been almost as much perpetrator as victim. She studied Charm. “Are you trying to figure out if you can seduce information out of Hope?”
“His gender wouldn’t tell me that,” Charm said. “And it’s nicer to seduce people than to loom over them with a sword.”
Aspen wasn’t sure about that. Using her height and her strength and her sword was honest.
And here she went, thinking about the kiss again. The wondrous, mind-addling kiss that Charm had used to rob her. Aspen hadn’t been kissed like that in years. The memory stirred longing—followed swiftly by crushing humiliation.
It was a problem. Aspen thought about the kiss every time Charm curved her full lips into an inviting smile. Every time she twisted them in disgust or mock anger. Every time she opened them to complain that Aspen was impossible, or boring, or impossibly boring. Every time she ate a pastry, which Aspen was convinced she did in a deliberately sexual manner.
