The Disappearance of Winter's Daughter Page 10

  “She’s right, you know,” Hadrian said. “You should eat more if you want to grow up to be big and strong like me.” He grinned.

  Royce pulled up his hood. “Don’t talk to me.”

  They climbed a hill that granted an expansive view of the city, most of it dominated by roofs and smoking chimneys. Yet with the rain gone and the fog restricting itself to the area around the harbor, Hadrian was finally able to form a mental map of the place. Rochelle straddled the Roche River as it poured into Blythin Bay—most of which was lost to the fog. Split in two as it was by the waterway, the city had been built with one half on either bank, the big harbor dominating the mouth of the river. In the middle of the Roche, a long thin island was joined to the two banks by a pair of stone bridges.

  The island, aside from its role as the only means of traversing the river from one bank to the other, appeared to be reserved entirely for the duke. This was evident by the imposing wall that ringed the palatial estate. The areas nearest the bridges on both banks were the most affluent. The farther away from the river, the more destitute and neglected things became. The area just on the east side included the cathedral and its huge plaza. Hadrian suspected this was what people referred to as Old Town. Just east of there was another square surrounded by shops. Hadrian guessed it was the Merchant District—although the far side of the river had just as many shops, so he couldn’t be sure.

  Royce headed south toward the foggy bay and into narrower, dirtier streets. Hadrian remembered the area from the night before, and daylight only made the neighborhood worse. The Meat House was just ahead on the right.

  “What are we doing back here? We just ate.”

  “Not looking for food this time. Need to find . . . there!” Royce pointed at the building next to the Meat House.

  A ghastly looking two-story structure of gray mottled wood was fashioned in the general shape of a barn. A tall double door was stained with red handprints near the edge and along the latch. A row of wagons was parked in a line out front. They rocked and jiggled from hosts of restless passengers—mostly pigs that snorted and squealed.

  “It’s a slaughterhouse.”

  Royce nodded. “The cook said they got their supply fresh from next door. The wagon that nearly killed us yesterday was a livestock wagon, just like those.”

  “Royce, I’m sure there are hundreds of wagons like these in and around the city.”

  “But none as conveniently available to someone who overheard our conversation.”

  Royce approached the wagons and began walking up and down the row, studying them. They were old and worn. The sides were tall and bleached by the sun. The big spoked wheels had manure and straw stuck to the rims. Hadrian imagined what it might have felt like having one, or perhaps two, roll over him. Death by slaughterhouse wagon wasn’t on his list of best ways to go.

  “Is there a problem with my wagons?” A man came out of the building wearing a blood-splattered apron and a dingy leather skullcap. He held a bloody rag in one hand and a dripping hatchet in the other.

  “Yes,” Royce said. “I think there is.” He pointed to the third in line. “That one’s axle hub—see it? The metal looks raw, like it was recently filed, or perhaps scraped against a brick wall.”

  The butcher didn’t bother to look. “That’s not a problem.”

  “It is for me.” Royce took a single step toward the man. “Was it stolen? Did it disappear last night? Did you have to search for it this morning?”

  The butcher mused a moment with his lips then spit on the ground between them. “Nope. Been there all night. Hasn’t moved. How is that a problem for you?”

  “You’re right. It’s not.” Royce smiled as he took another step closer. “But it just became a problem for you.”

  Hadrian was fascinated by just how catlike Royce became when preparing to kill; his eyes became dilated, his pupils growing with his excitement. Hadrian didn’t know for certain if Royce would kill the butcher. He generally didn’t murder in plain sight on a busy street in daylight, but the body language was unmistakable.

  “Someone tried to kill me with that wagon last night, and since it wasn’t stolen”—Royce took another step—“I’ll have to assume it was you.”

  While the butcher processed the accusation, Royce rushed forward.

  With Royce, half seconds mattered. Luckily Hadrian had seen the attack coming even if the butcher was oblivious, and he stepped between the two. The butcher finally realized his peril and shuffled backward.

  “Out of my way!” Royce snapped as Hadrian extended his arms, blocking the thief from dodging around him.

  “Keep him away from me!” the butcher shouted. “That guy is crazy. I didn’t do anything.”

  “He’s not crazy,” Hadrian tried to explain. “He thinks you tried to kill him . . . err . . . us, actually.”

  “Help! Help!” the butcher shouted, backing up.

  Royce shifted left then right, but Hadrian blocked him both times. To the butcher—to anyone watching—it would have appeared that Royce was doing his best to get past. He wasn’t. Royce could dance with an angry rattlesnake and never get bitten. He once boasted about his ability to dodge arrows; Hadrian had never seen him do that but believed he could. If Royce really wanted to get around, Hadrian probably couldn’t stop his lithe partner.

  “Step aside,” Royce snapped. “I’m going to kill him.”

  The butcher’s eyes widened, and his pleas became frantic, “Somebody . . . anybody . . . help me!”

  “Calm down, both of you,” Hadrian said.

  A number of people on the street had stopped and were staring. An elderly man and two women took the most interest but posed no danger. Two laborers stacking bags of feed farther up the street, on the other hand, were worth keeping an eye on. They, too, had paused and turned. At that moment, everyone’s expressions displayed puzzlement, but it wouldn’t take long for that to change.

  Hadrian addressed the butcher, “Look, we just want to know who tried to run us down last night.”

  “It was him,” Royce insisted, and, reaching into his cloak, he drew out Alverstone. “And I’m going to treat him like one of his pigs. Time for the slaughter, you rat-tailed sow!”

  The butcher looked at the gleaming white dagger, and with a squeak, which sounded a bit like the squeal of a pig, he turned to flee.

  Hadrian tripped him. “Don’t run! Whatever you do, don’t run! He really will kill you then. Your only hope is to stay near me.”

  This was only partially a lie. Royce was intentionally scaring the man in the hope of getting information, but Royce was still Royce, and the cat analogy was a little too perfect. There was a good chance this man had been involved in the attack, and if he proved unhelpful, if he stopped being a potential lead . . .

  “Help! I didn’t do anything,” the butcher cried from the ground where he lay on his back. He dropped the meat cleaver and rag, both hands up to fend off the expected attack. “I don’t know how the wagon got like that. I didn’t watch the thing all night. I was asleep. Maybe someone did take it. Maybe they took it and put it back. I don’t know. But I didn’t do anything!”

  “Hold! In the name of the duke!” Running up the street were a trio of men in chainmail and blue-colored tabards—city guards.

  Hadrian frowned as he realized that Royce’s theatrics had taken a potentially serious turn. He had seen the guards around the city, but previously only in pairs. The reason there were three became instantly apparent. The lead man wore a helmet with the yellow horsehair crest of an officer, his face vaguely familiar.

  “What’s going on?” the officer demanded while trotting up. He spotted Royce’s dagger, and his hand moved to a sword. His fellow soldiers followed suit.

  Royce dropped into a full crouch, the ruse ended. The thief was poised to fight.

  “Roland Wyberg?” Hadrian asked. “By Mar! Is that really you?”

  No one moved.

  The officer’s eyes narrowed as he stared. His mou
th opened in shock. “Blackwater?”

  Then to the utter amazement of everyone, including the spectators on the street, the two clasped hands.

  “You’re still alive.” Hadrian clapped the officer’s back. “Who would have thought.”

  “Me? You’re the one who disappeared. I expected—well, everyone thought you were dead. Rumors said you were knifed by a Warric patrol.”

  “Excuse me!” the butcher shouted from where he still lay on the ground. He pointed at Royce. “This man is about to kill me.”

  Roland glanced from Hadrian to Royce. “Friend of yours?”

  “He is.” Hadrian nodded. “We think the butcher might have tried to kill us last night.”

  “No,” Royce said, putting his dagger away. “He’s just an idiot.”

  “You saw him. He was going to kill me.” The butcher pointed at Royce.

  In a fair imitation of Evelyn Hemsworth, Royce said, “It’s not polite to point.”

  “What’s this all about?” Wyberg asked.

  “Someone tried to run us down with a slaughterhouse wagon,” Hadrian replied. “That one over there.”

  The officer studied the wagons for a moment, eyes narrowed in contemplation. “Sure it wasn’t just an accident?” He focused on Hadrian with a new scrutiny. “Is there some reason why someone would want you dead? What exactly are you doing here, Blackwater? And for that matter, what made you disappear in the first place?”

  Royce nodded at the crowd, which, despite the diminished chance of violence, had grown. A dozen people stood in the street, and more were arriving. “Is it possible to continue this conversation somewhere less public? The central square, perhaps? A community stage, maybe?”

  Roland looked around and frowned at the audience. “There’s a guard post just up the street.” He hooked a thumb at the two other soldiers with him. “I was checking up on these two when we heard the shouts. I can offer you some coffee, not allowed to have anything stronger.”

  “Aren’t you going to arrest them?” the butcher asked, still lying on the ground as if unable to get up.

  “For scaring you?”

  That made the butcher huff dramatically.

  The officer pointed to the Meat House as they passed by. “If you’re hungry, we could grab something to eat. Doesn’t look like much, but the food is good.”

  “No!” Royce and Hadrian said together.

  Chapter Eight

  A Tale of Two Soldiers

  The kid Hadrian remembered was a lean seventeen-year-old with deep dimples that attracted women like a bowl of candy drew children. He hadn’t seen Wyberg in six years, not since Hadrian had left the service of King Reinhold. He didn’t look much different. Heavier, but Roland had always needed a few pounds. The slender boy had become a solid man, but the dimples were still there, and in his eyes, Hadrian saw a vague reflection of another young soldier whom time had also changed.

  The guard post was a typical one-room shack. Nothing more than a place to check in, store shackles and weapons, and provide a little warmth when it got cold. Much of the room was given over to stacks of wood, but there was an ink-stained desk in the corner on which was laid a stack of mangled parchments held down by a horseshoe. The floor creaked when stepped on, the fire hissed, and the whole place smelled of smoke and damp wood.

  “So, Blackwater, what happened to you?” Roland snapped off his chin guard and tossed the big helmet on the desk, where the weight of the horsehair brush caused it to roll halfway to the edge.

  “Went to Calis.” Hadrian took a seat on a crude bench that looked to have been banged together from two unsplit logs and a wide board. Royce showed him an uncomfortable face before sitting alongside, enveloping himself in his cloak the way a proper woman might check the skirt of her dress.

  Roland moved to the fire, where a blackened metal kettle sat on a wrought-iron grate, forming a bridge over glowing coals. “Why?”

  “You probably don’t remember, but I came to Alburn from Warric. Had friends serving in Chadwick’s First Regiment. Didn’t want to be here to welcome them and couldn’t get a transfer, so . . .” Hadrian didn’t bother finishing.

  Roland lifted the kettle’s lid. He shook his head and scowled. “No one ever puts a new one on after draining it.” He took the pot outside, filled it with water from the rain barrel, struggled to latch the door, then set the pot back on the fire. He was still fussing with the lid when he said, “You were right. They attacked. A few weeks after you vanished. Nasty battle.” Roland reached up to a shelf at the left of the desk and took down a large tin box. “Richard, Brick, and Mel were all killed. You remember Mel, don’t you?”

  “Swell Mel? Sure.” Mel had been an older fellow who cut his hair short and made a habit of helping new recruits and adopting stray animals.

  “The First Regiment hit us from two sides.” With difficulty, Roland popped the top of the tin off. Some of the coffee beans fell to the floor. He poured a small pile onto the desk. “Captain Stowe and most of the officers died. Warric crippled us in short order.” He took a hammer that hung from a peg and proceeded to smash the beans. “I sent Brady on a horse to Caren. Told him to ride his ass off and get help,” he said in between hammer strikes. “The rest of us fell back to the Narrows. We held them there. Lost almost everyone doing it. We were four hundred when the sun came up, forty-two when it set. Afterward, I got a promotion and my choice of station. Picked Rochelle. Had my fill of fighting.” Roland scooped up the crushed coffee and dropped handfuls into three cups, then checked the water and scowled. He looked back. “How was Calis?”

  “Bloody.” Hadrian left it at that.

  Roland looked over. Their eyes met, and he nodded. “Guess we both woke up with hangovers.”

  Royce kept his attention on the single window that faced the street. The interior pane was covered in flies that relentlessly butted the glass. A large number of them were dead on the sill.

  Roland took a pair of split logs off the stack and placed them among the coals beneath the grate. Damp stains indicated they had been left out in the rain, and the logs hissed. Smoke escaped the draft, and Roland cracked the door a couple of inches to allow it an escape.

  “And who is this?” Roland nodded toward Royce.

  “My partner in crime,” Hadrian said with a smile that garnered a look from Royce, who otherwise hadn’t moved. “We’ve been working out west. Taking odd jobs as we could find them.”

  Roland spun the desk chair around and sat. “Is that why you’re here? An odd job?”

  Hadrian glanced at Royce, who provided no help. Discussing an assignment with the city guard was as likely as a pair of mice consulting a house cat about dinner options. But Roland was a friend, a decent man, in a position to help, and Royce’s methods had failed to turn up anything except a near-death experience. Knowing he’d hear about it later, Hadrian took the gamble. “Yeah,” he said. “We were hired to find a woman named Genny.”

  Royce shifted on the bench.

  Roland, who was just about to peek under the lid of the kettle again, stopped. “You mean Genevieve? The duchess who married old Leopold?”

  Hadrian nodded.

  “Who hired you?”

  Royce coughed into his hand. “Sorry. Think I’m getting a cold.”

  Hadrian felt Royce looking at him, but he didn’t turn to verify. He’d already committed himself to the path. “Her father.”

  Hadrian imagined Royce to be mentally screaming at him, or gasping in horror, but the reaction of Roland was anticlimactic. He turned back to the pot with a sniff.

  “Her father seems to think she’s dead, although a note said she’s only missing.”

  “We’ve looked for her. Tore the town apart, really. The duke had us going door-to-door, searching shops and private homes. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “She’s been missing for two weeks. No one has seen or heard anything about her.” He nodded. “I think her father has cause for concern.”

 
; Roland dipped his pinkie into the kettle and jerked it back. Then he poured steaming water into three cups. “This is one of the best perks of this post. We get great coffee shipped over from Calis. Be sure to wait until the floating bits settle before you drink.” He handed them the cups.

  “Well then,” Hadrian said, cheerily, “it’s a good thing we arrived. Maybe we can help. Can you tell us what happened? How’d she disappear?”

  “Not much to tell. She and the ducal cofferer, a fellow named Devon De Luda, were returning from a meeting with the city’s merchant guild. On their way back to the Estate—that’s the duke’s residence—the carriage was attacked. De Luda was killed on the spot, and the duchess was dragged off.”

  “Where’d this happen?” Royce asked.

  “Just before the bridge to the Estate, on the far side of Central Plaza. That’s the big one with the cathedral.”

  “Seems like a pretty public setting for a murder,” Royce noted.

  “Usually is, but that night it was deserted.”

  “Deserted? A little odd, isn’t it?”

  “Not really. The town is filled with folk right now because of the festival. Two weeks ago, things were quieter. And Rochelle residents are a superstitious lot, tend to stay in at night.”

  “So, no talk, no rumors?”

  “Plenty. Always are. But that’s just gossip and ghost stories. No mysterious monster killed the duchess, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  Hadrian glanced at Royce, puzzled. “Okay . . . I wasn’t, but I guess that’s good to know. Do you usually suspect monsters?”

  “No, but that doesn’t stop the tongues from wagging. De Luda was stabbed, plain and simple. His heart was in his chest, and he still had a face.”

  Hadrian opened his mouth but didn’t quite know what to say.

  Roland sighed. “I’m just saying it wasn’t a monster, okay?”

  Hadrian nodded. He glanced at Royce, who stared at Roland with a concerned look.

  “Okay, so lately we’ve been finding mutilated children, most of them mir. Kids with their chests torn open and hearts ripped out. But their faces have been fine. No one’s lost a face in years—if they ever really did.”