Thief's covenant wa-1 Page 9

  “Shins…”

  “I'm not going to do anything! Honest, I'm not! I just want to see what all the fuss is about.”

  “I see. And this is in no way a means of thumbing your nose at the guild? Basically chanting ‘I'm not touching him! I'm not touching him! Nyah, nyah!' and then running away like a little girl? Or maybe about seeing who's all gussied up in their finest to greet him, so you know who to rob after he's gone?”

  Widdershins mumbled something unintelligible.

  “I see,” Gen told her. “What'd we just learn about me and half-truths, Shins?”

  “I'm not asking you to do anything wrong, or dangerous,” Widdershins insisted. “I just want some company.”

  “Half the city's going to be there.”

  Widdershins shrugged. “So all of a sudden you're uncomfortable with crowds? You own a tavern!”

  “I prefer my crowds to be less…crowded.”

  “You,” Widdershins said, rising, “don't get out enough. It makes perfect sense that you're my only friend. I'm a thief. I live in the shadows. I have no life. You, on the other hand, are a nobleman's daughter, even if he's not really all that noble, and you own a very popular tavern. So how come you don't have more friends?”

  “I have lots of friends! There's Robin, for instance.”

  “She works for you.”

  “Well, how about Gerard?”

  “Same as Robin. Employees don't count.”

  “Ertrand Recharl!” Genevieve announced smugly.

  Widdershins scoffed. “Ertrand's not a friend! He's a drunk who keeps trying to get under your skirts!”

  “All right. Well, there's that fellow who always sits at the corner table over there, the one with the beaver-skin cloak. He's always fun to talk to.”

  “If you don't know his name, Gen, you don't get to call him a friend. I'm pretty sure that's actually a rule, somewhere.”

  “So what's your point with all this, other than chopping down my self-esteem like a fir tree?”

  “My point, Gen, is that you don't get out often enough, and that the celebration tomorrow is the perfect place to start.”

  Genevieve's eyelids lowered until they showed only thin crescents. “And you felt it necessary to point out that I should have more friends-besides you-as a way of convincing me to go to the celebration with you?”

  The younger woman grinned widely. “You got it.”

  “Widdershins, you have absolutely lost your mind. I couldn't think of a less logical argument if I sat down and worked at it.”

  “Perfect! If it's not logical, you can't argue with it. I'll be at your place at noon.”

  The door slammed, and she was gone.

  Genevieve shook her head, bemused. There was a great deal to be done before opening. And as for next week…Well, she hated to disappoint her friend, but there was no help for it. She was absolutely, positively, not going to that stupid parade. Not a chance. No way. Under no circumstances. No.

  “Isn't this fun?” Widdershins shouted happily. “I told you you should get out!”

  Genevieve gritted her teeth and tried to think about something other than throttling Widdershins with her bare hands.

  She still wasn't sure precisely how this had even happened. One moment she was flopped out blissfully in bed, sleeping off a hectic but profitable night of drink-filling and food-slinging at the Flippant Witch, without a care in the world, snugly cocooned against the late autumn chill.

  The next, Widdershins was in her bedroom, having picked the bloody lock, and practically dancing with excitement, shouting at Genevieve to hurry up and get dressed. It was barely after noon-the depth of night, as far as the tavern keep was concerned. This was absolutely outrageous behavior, even from a close friend, and Gen resolved to berate the thief soundly, just as soon as she had a moment to fully wake up, to regain her equilibrium, to…

  They were outside and halfway through the marketplace before Genevieve reassembled her scrambled wits sufficiently to speak. And by then, of course, it was far too late. Genevieve smiled a tight, closed-mouth smile, wondered briefly how Widdershins had managed to get her dressed (with most of the laces tied properly, even!), and then grudgingly went along.

  A decision she now bitterly regretted as the inexorable press of the gathering crowds hurled the pair this way and that, two floating bottles on the seas of Davillon's populace. The crowd was a living thing, moving and even breathing as one. The sensation was unpleasantly akin to that of being swept away by a very loud and sweaty tide.

  Speech was very nearly impossible: lean over, shout at the top of your lungs in your friend's ear, scream your throat as raw as if you'd gargled with glass shavings, and it was still necessary to repeat yourself two or four times before the object of your comment (which probably wasn't all that important anyway) wandered out of view.

  It was hot, too. Not the heat of the day-it wasn't all that long until winter-but the heat of thousands of bodies, each pressed uncomfortably close in a macabre parody of intimacy. The miasma of perspiration and perfume was enough to fell an ox at thirty paces.

  Sweating in unladylike rivulets, jostled by strangers, bruised in uncountable tender areas by the morass of accidental blows, Genevieve hunched her shoulders against the storm of sound and fury and struggled to imagine a worse sort of hell.

  Widdershins, of course, seemed perfectly happy, but Widdershins was weird.

  “Hey, Olgun!” Widdershins whispered, confident he could hear no matter what. “Isn't this neat?”

  The god's reply felt vaguely patronizing. She felt very much like she'd just been told, in all maternal seriousness, “Yes, dear, it's very nice. Why don't you go play over there for a while?”

  “You don't think this is impressive?” she asked incredulously, drawing a curious stare from a nearby merchant who, through some fluke of acoustics, heard her clearly. The flabby, pasty-faced widower, flattered that a young woman might look his way, had opened his mouth to reply when it finally dawned on him that the girl was talking to herself, not to him.

  Lunatic.

  Olgun, during this time, had expressed to Widdershins, in no uncertain emotions, that nothing humans did impressed him-present company excluded, of course-and that a larger concentration of clowns might make them funnier, but generally not any more awe-inspiring.

  “Oh, so we're clowns, are we? Just put here for your amusement? A little different than the way the creation myth tells it, yes?”

  Widdershins's private deity smiled an amused smile, and refused to emote any further on the topic.

  The obstinate thief wasn't about to let the subject drop, but as she opened her mouth to shout some witty rejoinder at her little pocket god, she felt Genevieve's fingers clenching on her arm.

  “What is it?” she asked, hoping her expression would be enough to carry her meaning, since the words almost certainly would not.

  Genevieve, eyes wide with a contagious anticipation that she'd tried her damnedest to elude, pointed over the heads of the crowd toward the heavy, iron-bound gates that were Davillon's main ingress. Huge pennants slowly rose and unfurled to wave majestically over the nearby buildings. The Eternal Eye stared down from several banners, as though it could clearly see their every thought, and didn't much approve of a one of them.

  The crowd surged ahead, prevented from becoming a stampede only by the lack of space to build momentum. Truth be told, it would be more accurate to say that the crowd shuffled forward, a glacier of clothes and flesh. Whispers, audible only because so many people repeated them, scampered through the ranks of the waiting masses.

  “Did you see that?”

  “The banners went up! He's here!”

  “Here? He can't be here! It's but two hours past noon!”

  “He's early! Did you hear? The archbishop's arriving early!”

  And then the whispers were blown from the air like so much skeet by the blast of two dozen trumpets, announcing the arrival of His Eminence, the esteemed William de Laurent, a
rchbishop of Chevareaux.

  Music blared, banners waved, and thousands of people shouted their unbridled joy (even if most were celebrating not the archbishop's arrival-which meant little to them-but simply the opportunity to celebrate). Only those who'd waited since the earliest hours of the morning, ensuring that they got a street-side view or high vantage, would actually see the pristine white carriage, flanked by a dozen horsemen and followed by another seven or eight coaches carrying the archbishop's staff. The rest of the crowd would see nothing more exciting than the back of someone else's head.

  One hand locked with bulldog determination on Genevieve's wrist, Widdershins slipped, slid, twisted, squeezed, weaseled, pushed, shoved, elbowed, and otherwise forced her way through the living barricade isolating her from her goal. She even went so far, on occasion, as to call on Olgun: here a woman broke into a sneezing fit, forcing her to stagger aside and allowing Widdershins to slip through the gap; that fellow there felt his belt buckle give way, once more clearing a path as he fled, red-faced, holding his pants up with his hands. In a surprisingly brief span, the barkeep and the burglar forced their way street-side, gaining an unobstructed view of…

  “A carriage,” Genevieve muttered in her companion's ear, shaking her head. “All that, and you get to see a carriage. I hope you're happy, Shins. I know I haven't been this excited in minutes.”

  “It's not the carriage, Gen!” Widdershins announced gleefully, refusing to look away from the snowy stallions, the luxuriously curtained windows, the ponderous gilded wheels. “It's the passenger!”

  “But you can't very well see the passenger, now, can you?” Sometimes I just don't understand that girl!

  “No, but I know that he's-oh, figs.”

  Genevieve tensed. “What? ‘Oh, figs' what?!”

  “There.” Widdershins pointed at one of the soldiers: not an outrider who'd ridden from Chevareaux, but one of the eight or so Davillon Guardsmen who'd fallen in with the ostentatious procession as an additional honor guard.

  “That's Julien Bouniard,” she whispered softly. “Right out in front.”

  Genevieve raised an eyebrow. “Oh, come on, Shins. It's not as though he's going to just pick you out of a crowd like this. The man's got more important things on his mind, don't you think?”

  Widdershins chewed her lower lip and said nothing.

  The young constable, whom she'd first watched from the rafters on that awful day two years ago, insisted on intertwining himself back into her life with all the persistence of a recurring dream. Now a major himself after a meteoric rise through the ranks, he was one of the city's best, his name cursed by many of Davillon's extralegal entrepreneurs. Good as she was, Widdershins had been arrested a handful of times over the years-and more often by Bouniard than anyone else. He always made her more than a little nervous, even though he couldn't possibly know that Widdershins was also Adrienne Satti.

  But Genevieve was right. No matter how skilled, how experienced, how observant he was, he'd not likely single her out of a crowd of thousands. With a deep exhalation, Widdershins forced herself to relax and enjoy the parade.

  Julien Bouniard sat ramrod-straight, hands loosely clutching the reins. His tabard and uniform had been pressed and steamed, their lines crisp enough to shave with. The sterling fleur-de-lis and polished medallion of Demas glinted in the sun, and the feather in his flocked hat had been supplemented with the blue-and-green staring eye of a peacock plume.

  Charlemagne, his gray-dappled steed, whickered in impatience at their plodding pace. He wanted to run, to prance ahead, at least to canter. Even a brisk walk would be nice. But no, here he was, trudging down the cobblestones, surrounded on all sides by other, inferior equines and the gargantuan wheeled contraptions, at roughly the pace of a mule with gout.

  “Easy, Charles,” Julien comforted him, laying a steady hand alongside the animal's neck. “I don't like it either.”

  The horse snorted once more, unimpressed.

  Julien couldn't help but smile beneath his thick, walnut-brown mustache (an affectation he'd adopted along with his promotion to major, hoping it would make him look old enough for the part). He understood the beast's frustration-shared it, in fact. Ceremonial duties like this were enough to make him long for a fast-paced day of paperwork.

  The Guardsman, ever alert for ambush, scowled as he spotted familiar features in the crowd. He knew, even without asking, that he'd never get permission to leave the procession. He was the ranking officer, and it was essential, or so it had been drummed into his head a million times over the past weeks, that the city make the best of all possible impressions on its revered guest.

  So what sort of impression would it make on His Eminence if a street thief swiped his mantle off his shoulders, or used him as bait for some other, local catch? She wasn't the first known criminal he'd spotted in the crowd, and he'd deal with her as he had the others.

  By taking no chances.

  Pulling very subtly on the reins, Julien urged the warhorse to fall back a few paces, drawing even with the white-enameled carriage door. Leaning over, he rapped with leather-gloved knuckles on the rickety wooden portal.

  The shade rose smoothly, the curtains drew back, and a kindly old face peered outward. “Is there a problem, Major?” William de Laurent asked curiously.

  “Nothing serious, Your Eminence,” Julien told him politely, bowing his head in a curt show of respect. “I've spotted a known criminal in the crowd, and-”

  “Another one, Major? Had a bumper crop this year, did you?”

  Julien frowned. He was walking a tightrope here, and he knew it, trying to balance the archbishop's safety on one hand, his impression of Davillon on the other.

  “No more than any city's plagued with, Your Eminence. Crowds offer a lot of opportunities, though, so here they come.”

  “Of course. And you would like to dismiss a guard to run off and apprehend this criminal, as you did the last one?”

  “Ah, perhaps two guards in this instance, Your Eminence.”

  The archbishop raised an eyebrow. “Is that necessary, Major? Might he not simply be here to enjoy the spectacle?”

  “She, Your Eminence. And she very well might be, yes. On the other hand, I've experience with this particular thief. She's extremely resourceful, a ghost when she wants to be, and absolutely unencumbered by the weight of common sense. I'd feel better knowing that she was out of the way, and thus not planning to rob you blind-pardon me for saying so-for the duration of your visit. At the very least, I'd like to encourage her to move out of your general vicinity.”

  Julien was fully prepared to argue his case further, as politely as possible, but de Laurent simply smiled. “I believe you're worrying unnecessarily, Major. But I'm hardly qualified to tell you how to do your job. Dispatch your men if you think it best. I think I'll survive the hordes of assassins without them until they return.”

  Julien smiled broadly. “Thank you, Your Eminence.”

  William de Laurent nodded and closed the shade. Julien gestured to the nearest two guards, both of whom broke ranks and approached. As their horses plodded sluggishly forward, Julien growled his instructions.

  When the two Guardsmen wheeled their horses around in her direction, Widdershins could no longer share Genevieve's confidence.

  “Move!” she shouted, grabbing her friend by the hand and pulling her back through the crowd they'd battled moments earlier. “Gods, I don't believe this! What are the odds?”

  “I'd have said pretty slim, but under the circumstances…,” Genevieve told her, eyes slightly glazed.

  “There must be hundreds of known thieves in this crowd! Why is he singling me out?!”

  “How many of those hundred thieves put themselves at the front of the crowd?”

  “Well now's a fine time to point that out!”

  Genevieve twisted, owl-like, glancing nervously behind her. The Guardsmen moved quickly, though there was insufficient room for their mounts. The crowd parted, shoved with swi
ft-moving hands where the black-and-silver tabards weren't enough to clear the path.

  With a sudden jerk, Genevieve yanked her hand from Widdershins's grip. “They're not after me, Shins!” she shouted, already separated from her friend by several layers of the milling assemblage. “I'll be fine! Run!”

  “But-”

  Genevieve pointed at the oncoming guards, moving through the throng far faster than she could match with her bad leg. “Run!”

  Widdershins ran, first plowing through the crowd with all the grace of a runaway yak, then, once she'd calmed, more nimbly, dancing around people rather than knocking them aside. The Guardsmen gradually fell behind, and Widdershins burst from the mob and bolted for the nearest alley. All she needed was to get out of their sight for a handful of seconds and they'd never see her again.

  Olgun screamed at her as she rounded the corner, but for once, even the great Widdershins's feline reflexes weren't fast enough. Something whistled from the shadows of the alleyway, crashing hard into her stomach. The thief doubled up, the agony a blade stabbing through her. She heard a strangled cry echoing from the darkened alleyway, and only faintly recognized the voice as her own. She found herself on her hands and knees in the garbage, violently retching up the contents of her stomach.

  Vomit, she realized with a dull horror, mingled with blood.

  A thoughtful look on his face, Brock materialized from the alley, his hammer swinging casually in a one-handed grip. “Oh, that doesn't look good for you, Widdershins,” he commented, poking with one booted toe at the unpleasant mess she'd heaved up. “I think you may have ruptured something.”

  “Brock…,” Widdershins croaked through filth-encrusted lips, glaring with pain-deadened eyes.

  “Are you upset, Widdershins? You're speaking in Chicken again.” A look of rage twisted the enforcer's face just before he kicked his victim in the stomach, the force of the blow lifting her from the ground.

  Widdershins screamed. Her stomach felt as though she'd swallowed a brimming mug of molten iron, and she spat up another mouthful of bile-tinged blood even as she landed, shoulder first, on the cobblestones. Unable to act, to think, she curled into a tight ball around the pain, gasping, lacking breath even to fuel the anguished sobs that racked her chest and throat.