Session 5

The Valroux glared at the mob surrounding them and the shouts for the Watch, then glanced at Sebastien, bleeding on the floor. “Get him out of here. I’ll stay.” Euan and Rafael, pragmatic, nodded to each other and hauled Sebastien’s limp form up between them; Euan’s height pulling them off kilter as they moved as quickly as possible through the back alleys of Hainzl to the Three Owls inn.

They got back to find Lena hissing in pain from bruises and sluggishly bleeding cuts, and Ariadne barricaded in her room. Alexander, fresh from having slept the day almost away, looked over them and gestured to a free bed. “I will find someone who can heal you.” Euan started to argue, before he stood sharply and the pain in his shoulder caught him by surprise. “You all need rest; and I think no one has seen me here yet,” continued the Ussuran. “I will return. Wait for me.”

While they waited, Euan bandaged Sebastien with the last of the herb-wife’s bandages. The strange salves she used gave him the strength to open his eyes, hand automatically going to the hilt of his sword. Rafael, carefully reloading his pistols, snorted a faint laugh in recognition of the gesture. They rested, awkward and in pain, patching bloody wounds and cleaning dirt and splinters carefully, till Alexander’s wood-trained boots were audible on the stairs, followed by a quicker patter of city shoes.

The physick was irritable and tired, hauled out of his bed with what sounded from his complaints like a combination of brutal threats and promises of rich payment. Alexander, stoic, simply shrugged – the truth may have been different, but as long as his comrades were being healed, he wasn’t concerned about his reputation. In passing, as the doctor finished his work, he mentioned the Montaigne captured at the Eastern Rose, who would be executed at noon the next day for his crimes. A shared glance, and almost as soon as he had been ushered from the room, they’d agreed; the safest way to get him out was when he was transported from prison to the place of execution during the day to come.

Ariadne, quiet in her room, dressed herself properly as a Strega bride should do, to hide her injuries, and stepped quietly outside – to run into a lounging Rafael, resting by her door. “You can’t go to see him alone.” Her veiled face tilted down to the floor in stubbornness. “I have to see him before – before. Just so I know.” He sighed, and called Alexander out to the hall. “At least take him with you.” Her shoulders relaxed slightly as she shrugged acknowledgement; at least he wasn’t arguing. Though from his measure, he wasn’t the kind of man to let her go so easily…

This was truer than she guessed. In spite of his wounds, he moved parallel to her towards the keep; as she and her giant guardian entered by the gateway, he was scaling the wall with the skill of a sailor. He moved in the shadows around to the side of the keep and started the more dangerous climb, knowing where the Vodacce’s rooms were from their scout earlier that day. In the dark, no one saw his cloaked figure against the granite walls.

Ariadne and Alexander paced through the thick walls, and as they came to the courtyard, stopped for a moment at the sight of a pre-laid bonfire – with a man atop it, chained to a stake and slumped insensible. He was barely recognisable as human in the dark, but for his hat. There’d be no need to take Valroux to his place of execution tomorrow; and one more thing for them to think about.

They carried on past him, the guards watching nervously. As they got to the wing the count’s apartments were in, the man at arms on the door barred their way. “I am his betrothed bride.” Ariadne’s voice was quiet and clear in the darkened hall, the torchlight flickering the shadows darker around her veiled features. Alexander’s face was calm, with a faint smile as the guard moved his weapon aside. “If you really want to go in, ma’am… He’ll wait outside, though.” The strega nodded and waved a tiny hand, and Alexander paced behind her to the count’s door.

As they got there, her steps slowed, and he frowned in confusion. “Go on. He is your husband to be. Enter.” She stood, blank in her veils, nervousness manifesting in stillness rather than in action, before tipping the door open and sliding inside nearly silently. Alexander settled himself beside the door and waited calmly for what he thought would be a while; only to almost startle as Ariadne’s slight figure appeared almost silently behind him, shutting the door carefully. “He’s busy.” Even her toes oozed embarrassment…

“You are his affianced bride. If you do not knock and enter, I will knock for you.”

Her veiled face tilted towards him in brief appeal, before she twitched briefly, turned back to the door, knocked, and entered again.

On the balcony outside, Rafael balanced carefully out of sight. A knife slid into the crack of two windows opened them wide enough for him to hear, and the soft lamplight was enough to show him the black lace-covered figure by the door, waiting for the Vodacce in a loose robe sitting bored in a cushioned chair to pay attention to her. Instead, he focussed on the blonde Montaigne woman, now dressed in skin-tight silken black hose and breast band, chastising the bound and naked Eisenfurst of Hainzl as she educated him on his next political steps. Jaw clenched, Rafael waited, watching the scene with one hand wrapped tightly around his pistol.

Ariadne coughed politely, enough to bring her shadowy form to her betrothed’s attention, and he glanced around in confusion. He looked back at the blonde, with a brief “Carry on, mademoiselle,” and then turned politely to the strega. “Signorina…?” As Ariadne explained, he looked her shrouded form over. “Yes, very well. Go to the room at the end of the passage and wait for me there.”

Meanwhile, back at the inn, Euan, Lena and the still-battered Sebastien debated over the best way to get Valroux away from prison. With a bit of disguise, they decided, it shouldn’t be too hard. Then, all they needed were disguises. Fortunately, there were a group of people disguised as Musketeers staying quartered at an inn just down the road…

It was late enough that the streets were dark and almost empty. Even that barely hid their slightly limping passage back to the place they’d fled from. At the back of the inn, Sebastien slid down to sit with his back to a tree and settled his guitar on his lap. “If anything comes, I’ll start to play. You’d best be going.” The Avalon giant and the Eisen glanced at each other, at the wall, and started to climb. The beds by the window weren’t occupied; as he swept the Musketeer tunics out of the chests at the feet of the first two on the left, she picked through the first chest on the right, grabbing everything that looked interesting and bundling it up in a messy package in her cloak. Snoring from another bed set them on their guard; they, cuts still paining them, decided the best part of valour was being able to climb down the wall rather than being pushed out of the window.

Ariadne, waiting in the study alone, didn’t notice Rafael moving into position at the new balcony and delicately unlatching the window. When the Count entered, throwing a bag of money to Alexander for services rendered in bringing him his bride-to-be, she was standing in the centre of the room, looking like someone who would never dream of picking the locks on his desk and rifling through his paperwork. He lifted her veil casually and examined her face in the lamplight – and Rafael barely stopped himself reacting to the Count’s trespass. As they spoke, though, the captain’s temper turned from his first spike of hot anger to a cold, murderous rage. The Count talked casually of Ariadne as his new tool; something he would control and not care about or consider. When Ariadne, sharp-tongued, commented on the dangers of a strega who was mistreated, the Count slapped her, sipped his drink, and sat down in an ornate wooden chair, his back to the window.

The garrotte Rafael had taken from the sicario in the forest was loose and light in his fingers. The perfectly oiled hinges on the balcony doors were silent in the night. The moment was perfect.

Ariadne’s face was blank as she saw him come into the room – she didn’t give the Count any more notice than Rafael did, as the wire looped around his neck. The captain, his face white with controlled fury, simply pulled it sharply around the back of the chair for leverage – and tipped the whole mess out of the window. The chair went one way, the Count’s body another, and his head bounced bloodily onto the flagstones below them.

“You need to go, now; and I’ll scream in a minute. They know I’m here already – they shouldn’t suspect me…” Ariadne’s whisper wasn’t begging Rafael to save himself; a strega never begged.

“We both have to go – up, and out that way. There’s got to be a way.” Rafael’s hiss wasn’t refusing to leave Ariadne; a gentleman never denied a strega.

Alexander, hearing the strange silence after the Count’s brief conversation, slowly opened the door to the wrong two people staring at each other, inches apart; and only a slight spatter of blood through the balcony doors to show anyone else had been here. His entrance spurred the Vodacce pair into action; both of them grabbing book after letters, paperwork after scrolls, and piling them into Rafael’s cloak. “Away! Now is not the time for that.” He hurried them up the stairs, away from the chaos that was slowly developing out in the courtyard and infesting the keep.

On the roof, Ariadne grabbed blindly at the last raven to enter the coop which held the message birds, stripping it of its note with shaky fingers almost automatically as she stared out below them. “Where now?” Rafael, bundling the precious books up in his oiled wool cloak, pointed down grimly at the deep, black moat.

As the hue and cry in the courtyard reached out further into the town, Euan, Sebastien and Lena caught the tag end of it. With no idea other than to see what the opportunity brought them – and in the assumption that the Vodacce they’d travelled with were probably something to do with the furore – hurried into the keep. At the sight of the bonfire and Valroux’ slumped figure, Euan and Lena clambered up the pile; he slashing through the Montaigne’s bonds, she catching him where he fell into her arms and shoving a bundle of wood upright, planting his hat onto it to give the impression of a silhouette in the dark. They scrambled back down just before the guards arrived, shoving Musketeer tabards on and over Valroux’ semi-conscious body. He tried to slap it off weakly, but was too groggy to do more than stumble onwards and out. She stopped briefly, stooping to grab something off the ground, and then half carried him back towards the Three Owls.

Euan left him to Lena to take away, and went to find Sebastien, who’d danced off catlike into the dark, adrenaline spurring him to forget his wounds for the moment. As the Castillian stepped around the corner of the keep towards where he’d heard a splash, the blonde Montaigne woman was hurrying out of a side door. They looked at each other warily, then with a wink and a flutter of delicate fingers, she passed him by. As he worked his way around to the moat, he heard her scream add to the confusion. “The Eisenfurst! He’s been murdered!”

The Vodacce and Alexander scrambled to the edge of the moat, grateful for Sebastien and Euan’s hands hauling them out. The five of them hurried out of the keep – Sebastien pausing on the way with the sharp grin that only appeared when he was risking his life. “Where are you going? We need to leave town now!” He dipped a half bow and smirked. “I’ll be right back. Meet me at the inn…”

At the Three Owls, Lena was already grabbing everyone’s bags and packing anything left out as fast as she could, the Valroux laid out on one of the beds with a wet cloth over his forehead. The others helped, going through their rooms with the thoroughness of soldiers and smugglers and spies, and they stumbled downstairs to hear a clattering of hooves coming up the cobbled streets. Sebastien, riding the Lightning Guard’s glorious grey stallion and with a string of other horses in tow, gestured them towards the mounts. “I’m sure they won’t miss them. And if they do – well. They deserve no less.” Alexander, checking the horses for the ones most able to carry his and Euan’s giant frames, talked quietly in the dark. “I have a cousin who lives nearby. He will be glad to give us hospitality overnight, at least.”

When they approached the Irinavitch manor house, a single lantern was alight over the door. Their knock was answered by a sleepy servant, who, on recognising Alexander, gestured them around to the stables. Sebastien dismounted carefully and was about to start currying the white horse when Lena scowled at his half-healed wounds and sent him and everyone else up to the house. He glanced at the linen-wrapped bundle leaking blood at her feet and narrowed his eyes, before following the group to the kitchens.

As dawn broke, Rafael and Lena sat at a table in the corner of the kitchens, slightly away from the others, a vat of porridge spooned out in bowls in front of them; and Lena, bloody linen bag at her feet, broke the silence. “If you could ask the Count any six questions that he’d answer, honestly, what would they be?” Rafael looked to her feet, then back at her, then glanced at Ariadne. “Is that what I think it is?” Lena shrugged. “We need answers…”

She set up a rough screen and unwrapped the dead man’s head, then pulled out a greenish-meaty paste and took a mouthful. The smell of taint and poison mingled with the sweetish scent of fresh meat left out overnight in the summer heat as she started asking questions.

“Who do you work for?”

The dead man started listing names slowly; “Prince Caligari. L’Empereur…” A rogue’s gallery of names, each as disreputable and dangerous as the last.

Klippe Academy, he mentioned, was the prime recruiting grounds for the Kreuzritter, and there was a plot to corrupt as many of the academy’s graduates as possible in order to get a traitor in the ranks of the Knights of the Cross. Lena looked at Rafael sharply, and scowled. “If anyone asks, ever; there is no such thing as the Kreuzritter. They died, centuries ago.” The rest of the questions revealed more and stranger details of the politics of the region; how Montaigne and some of the Vodacce Princes were deliberately weakening Eisen to ensure they could take control of the trade routes overland, trying to strangle out the Vesten merchant lords.

The last question was quiet. “What do you know about Katerina de Ruiz de Navarone?” The dead man paused. “The Inquisition’s assassin. They say she killed that man, a year ago…”

As the final answer was given, Lena vomited with the long-suffering familiarity of someone who’s done this a lot before; hair already tied out of the way, bucket and mug of water set ready. Ariadne, drifting closer after the strange voices stopped, glanced at the half-hidden head and then to Rafael. “He deserves a proper burial, at least.”

The dawn broke bright and clean as they headed towards Klippe Academy, and Alexander’s brother; still tied to him by Fate. Ariadne’s vision pulled them onward, and the answers they’d got from the dead man spurred them faster. As they rode, the Klippe graduates separated themselves slightly from the others, and Lena told Sebastien what she’d heard Ariadne’s fiancé say about his wife. His face froze, and he pulled his horse further from the others.

In the edges of the trees, a flicker of movement showed a pale woman on horseback, all in black, watching him ride away.