Liberty, p.1
Liberty, page 1
part #2 of Deliverance Series
Liberty
A Novel
Book Two of the Deliverance Series
By
Samantha Schinder
“Give me liberty or give me death!”
—Attributed to Patrick Henry
For my mother, who suffers through all my rough drafts. And for my little brother who probably has a ditch worn in his alma mater military academy from walking hours with his last name emblazoned on it.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PROLOGUE
Ivan, Prisoner No. 18556
He picked his teeth with the grime-encrusted knife he’d won in a fight with another prisoner earlier that week. His first few days in the Gulak were rough, but he was finding his footing after several weeks. How many days exacty he’d been in this icy hellhole in the middle of the Rusky tundra, he was not certain. It did not matter much to him. He was a hired thug. The Gulak would continue to hire him out. Eventually, he’d slip away when the opportunity was right.
For now, he focused on the game of Durak in full swing on the sticky makeshift plank table in front of him. The relationship he’d built over the weeks with this group of hardened inmates was tentative. One wrong step could flare tempers, put him at a disadvantage. Disadvantages meant food lost, warmth lost, and eventually catching ill. Illness meant death at the Gulak.
He traded glances with watery, wary eyes, as the men passed private jokes and hooted at their own cleverness. One of the men, a bulbous craggy sort who had been in the Gulak longer than any of them could remember had bribed a guardian for a bottle of vodka. It was shit vodka, but it was vodka all the same. They were playing for control of the jug of bathtub-brewed stuff. Tensions were high. Ivan shifted uncomfortably on the blocks he was using as a crude chair. The coldness of the tundra swept its icy tentacles even up through the cracked rubble masonry.
They laid their cards on the table. Ivan had won the round. He was inching closer to winning the full purse—the jug. Ivan smiled to himself, imagining how he was going to use the vodka to win himself favors.
“You think you’re pretty smart, newcomer,” one of the grizzled players railed at him. Ivan met his gaze, but only two eyes for one—the man had lost one of his in a Gulak assignment a couple years ago. A gnarled pit stood in the place of where his eye ought to be. It was uncomfortable to gaze upon too long, so Ivan looked back down at his cards.
Ivan did not want to be too pert with his newfound group just yet, so he opted to shrug, pulling the bits of stone in that they used to keep track of points.
The one-eyed man did not back down, however. “If you want to be one of us, you must show your manhood in a challenge,” he demanded. “Do you want to be one of us? If not…” He shrugged and bobbed his head in the direction of the peripheries of the large room. Lone outsiders huddled in the shadows, rocking, trying to keep warm, snarling over bits of scrap. It was hard to be alone in the Gulak.
Ivan returned to the one-eyed man. “And just what do you have in mind, Likho?” Ivan purposefully called him the name of a one-eyed mythical creature, evil, powerful…but also a woman. He could feel the jockeying for power come into earnest between them.
“See that girl over there?” One-eye gestured to a dark corner where one of the bleach-blonde, shorn girls was crouched, picking at a pile of indeterminate objects.
“Yeah, what about her?”
“We don’t think you can take her. If you can…well, then the vodka and our friendship is yours.” One-eye laid the challenge on the table. Several others in the group hissed.
She stuffs her mattress with the scalps of those who cross her.
She nailed a man’s testicles to the table.
She is mad as a hatter, that one.
The rumors floated around Ivan in a mist. He glanced over at the girl in question. She was young, maybe fourteen. Muscular, hair battle-braided, sure, but still just a girl. She rocked back and forth over her little pile, humming softly to herself. Yes, she seemed to be as crazy as people said.
Ivan stood and stretched. If taking the girl meant securing his position here, so be it. He was not above it. Nor was anyone else here. The only thing that gave him pause was the devious glint in One-eye’s one eye. He shrugged. Better get this over with.
He grabbed his belt buckle to undo it as he trudged over to the far corner and the maniacly rocking little girl, lost in her own world. Or seemingly so. As he approached, she stopped humming and cocked an elfen ear his way. It caused him to misstep, but only once. It was better this way, he reasoned. She would know it was coming.
Just as he almost reached her, a gravelly yet feminine voice crawled out of the girl’s throat in a definitive Rusky lilt. “They dared you to to take me. It would be in your best interest if you walked away now.”
The ethereal quality of the girl’s voice gave him pause. There was no tremble in it. No hiccup of terror. It was as solid as the stone walls keeping them from the great, white tundra. Ivan glanced back at the table, at the jug of vodka and his potential new allies who waved him on. No, the challenge had been laid. He took another step forward.
The girl continued to crouch, not looking at him. She seemed overly interested in the collection at her feet, which now Ivan could see were bones in various stages of cleaning. He was no expert, but they didn’t seem to be animal bones. Still, the girl could have scavenged them from anywhere. The rumors of her being off her rocker seemed to be true, but her bloodthirsty lethality? It had to be a myth. She was but a child. No, he would take his chances. He stepped forward and grabbed the girl’s sinewy shoulder roughly, and a pair of sea-green eyes shot in his direction, gleaming.
“I warned you,” she cooed simply.
With reflexes like a cat, she shot her hand forward to his belt, snatching his knife and rolling away before he could close his arms around her slippery little form. Growling, he lunged at her again, determined to squash the sprite in his clutches. Again, she swiftly sidestepped his advance and with a cold sneer—out of place on her ethereal childlike face—the knife sliced forward like lightning and then was lost again, tucked into the folds of the girl’s fatigues.
At first there was no pain. But when Ivan saw the sluice of blood, the pain ruptured in following. A howl erupted from his chapped lips as he clasped the side of his head, a crimson river flowing freely down his neck and drop drop dropping onto the floor in a steady stream. The girl had dropped into a c
Carelessly, she tossed it into her little pile in the corner and rounded on him, viciousness dripping from her teeth clenched in a sneering smile. She savagely grabbed a hank of his hair and wrenched his remaining ear to her pert little mouth.
Then she whispered to him, almost as a lover utters a caress into the ear of their paramour, “My name is Liberty Fields. If you cross me again, the next time it will be your testicles.”
CHAPTER 1
Deliverance
It danced from finger to finger, a flash of green ether turning to flame.
No, that couldn’t be. The hills in the background were those just beyond the cusp of Morwenchase.
The sunlight blazed down on her brazen display. If she wanted she could shoot the flame across the horizon, out to the blue-green foam-capped waves.
Maybe it was a flashback from…no, she had not visited Morwenchase before she had been cured. And yet the memories flickered, stuttered like a candle about to blown out.
No, she dare not cause a scene, even though, glancing over her shoulder, she was quite alone. Her husband and Effie were busy clearing fields for the plow, evidence of their flamework billowing puffs of smoke above the treeline on the other side of the estate.
Deliverance shook her head, trying to clear it. The fumes of Lontown must be addling her brain. What an odd daydream. It seemed real and fleeting at the same time. But it was not real. She hadn’t wielded flame since before she was married…before she was cured of her Narisi blood curse.
Maybe she was just missing their country estate. Lontown had that effect on her. Sometimes it felt like people were closing in all around her. Over the years—sixteen now, if she counted correctly—Lontown society had achingly caused her to feel more and more claustrophobic. The sideways looks, the ever-increasing magic restrictions. Yes, this must be what was causing her vivid daydreams.
Hands reaching around her middle startled Deliverance back to the here and now, the balcony outside their bedchamber at Hathaway in Lontown, where she stood beneath a falling twilight sky. It was a rare night in Arcanton’s capitol when one could glimpse even a peek of stars, as they were usually obscured by a combination of fog, soot, and gaslight pollution. Deliverance was loath to miss a moment of the rarely caught night sky.
“Christ, sorry love! Didn’t mean to startle you,” Jack murmured into her hair, pulling her so she could rest with her back to his chest. “You were a million miles away again,” he chided.
She gave him a small smile, still not tearing her gaze from the heavens. She would drink up these nights when they had to be in Lontown for Jack’s Senatorial duties…duties that had proven more and more exacerbating as time went on. One would think with nigh on sixteen years of living half in Lontown and half in Cornwall, she would have grown somewhat accustomed to the hustle and bustle of the capitol city.
“Aye, just saying hello to the God of Horizons. I miss the open sky when we are away from Morwenchase. ’Tis not the same here.” She sighed, finally giving up her post on the balustrade to come inside. At least the crickets sang here the same as they sang in Cornwall…the same as they sang on her home isle of Nar. As Jack led her back to their bedchamber, other thoughts besides sleep began to filter through her mind, and she decided Jack did not necessarily need to slumber. At least not quite yet anyway.
***
Pale fingers of early morning sun poured through the breakfast room at Hathaway. A small smile touched Deliverance’s lips as she noted Mrs. Potter was already hard at work on her lavender sedges, coaxing them into fullness before the sun’s spring rays turned to crisping summer burn. Though she was some seventeen odd years older than when Deliverance first laid eyes upon the greying lady, she seemed to not have aged a day. Mrs. Potter was just as spunky as the day her taser dropped a senator to his knees.
Deliverance was marveling at the condensation spreading from her fingertips on the leaden windowpanes, like little foggy halos, when Jack came grumbling and harrumphing into the room. He was not as readily an early riser as her.
“Stealing your quiet time while you can?” he asked, pecking her on the cheek with a mouth not fully devoid of toast crumbles.
“Aye, the children will be up before long. Johnny’s got a mathematics exam today. And Fortitude…well. You know how she is,” Deliverance replied, turning from the window to retrieve her cooling mug of coffee.
“Feral just like her mother.” Jack bit back a laugh.
Deliverance smiled, albeit a little ruefully. He was right. Fortitude had a wild streak a kilometer long and was stubborn as an ox even at her six years of age. Deliverance often worried what her gift would be. It would start to show itself soon. The last thing she needed was another fire breather in the house. Between Jack and her best friend Effie…oh. She always forgot to call her Madeline. Effie had had an unfortunate naming ceremony as an infant. Since emigrating to Arcanton she had chosen, wisely, to change her first name. Her last name was now Pennington, taken on from her wife and Deliverance’s other best friend, Adelaide. “Aunt Addie and Aunt Maddy,” as the children called them, were a fixture in the Quentin household.
“Do you think Eleanor will be around this weekend?” Jack asked Deliverance, glancing at his laptop sitting incongruously on the Victorian era, marbled maple table. He scrolled through the news every morning, mouth pressed in a grim line. Deliverance did not envy his work as a senator. The world was becoming more and more difficult to deal with…even at home in Arcanton.
“I think she may if she gets a night off from the conference. I may go and listen to her speak Friday night. She’s giving the keynote again,” Deliverance replied, inwardly bursting with pride for her younger sister-in-law’s accomplishments. Since graduating from Oxdale Medical School two years ago, Eleanor had been all over the world conducting research into magical maladies. Her precocious debut into the medical world at fourteen had set her up for fame.
“Ah, hopefully she’s moved on from magic illnesses that cause erupting pustules. That was a hard lecture to sit through.” Jack laughed, and Deliverance knew he was remembering one of Eleanor’s earlier conferences she had invited the pair to attend. She had been enthusiastic about her role as the keynote speaker and had entirely forgotten to mention exactly what the subject matter would be. The slides added a gruesome touch.
“Quentins cannot possibly have weak stomachs!” Deliverance teased him.
“It’s all the fire. It breeds indigestion…and feral daughters! Incoming!” Jack called as a blur zipped around the table. It was almost impossible to tell where the dog ended and the girl began. They were a squealing, barking mass of dark human curls and Alsatian shedding careening under the carved legs of the massive table. Deliverance lifted her mug just in time for the table to heave a bit and then resettle. In the six years of Fortitude’s raucous life, Deliverance had developed an uncanny motherly foresight for the girl’s mischief.
“Perhaps if I got Spots another dog playmate, he would not be half so interested in treating Fortitude like his littermate,” Jack mused. Spots was Fortitude’s name for the gangly Alsatian shepherd. Besides the two dark beauty spots on his distinguished muzzle, he was conspicuously lacking in spots. But such were the naming conventions of six-year-olds.
