The girl gave the obstructions a respectable berth, but it was apparent it took all the attention she didn’t give to breathing evenly. She measured her steps carefully, noticing where she had to turn on her toes to continue the circle she was inscribing on her cell floor. With the room so dark she had to make the symbols in her mind. If nothing else it was good practise.
The dirt floor crunched under her leather slippers. She held her skirts up around her knees, and she measured her breath and her steps. Her hair was unwashed and fell heavily against her cheek when she stumbled, skinning her knee on a broken stool. She would have to start again, she thought.
The hot trickle of blood down her shin made her smile, it’s not enough, she thought, considering the way the guards had treated her- locking her into the dark, but it was a start.
She quickly tore a strip of her underskirt free, it was tattered enough that it came away easily, and tied it around her knee to catch the blood. She would hide it under her clothes later. Then she went back to the chink of light under the door, to the place where she started the ritual. She took a pair of quick short breaths and a longer one and started walking the circle again.
She measured the steps and twisted, her skirt caught on one of the broken pieces of furniture in her underground cell, forcing her to tug it free, berfore she dragged her feet across the ground and turned again. With each step she took a long breath making sure that she was ready to inhale before she takes the next step. She brought her foot down hard on something raised with a curse, falling back against the wall to hold her foot, and rub the pain away through her leather slipper.
The door slammed open bringing with it a lantern, as she stood leaning against the wall, with the broken furniture and other detritus around her, as the man appraised her. He was probably wondering if they’ve made a mistake, because this slight girl surely couldn’t be the right prisoner. His eyes were calculating in a perfectly non descript face. She imagined she could see it in his eyes, this simple girl with her unwashed hair and simple dress can’t be the Kingslayer- could she?
He held up the lantern, appraising her greasy hair, and the smears of dirt on her face and the way her ragged hem hung around her ankles, torn away to stop it snagging on the worst of the rubbish strewn across the floor. This wasn’t a cell, she knew, they couldn’t trust her in one of those, so they had just stuffed her into an old unused cellar under the keep ruins around which the army camped. “Are you coming or not?” he asked and his voice was gruff.
She faked a stumble and took the opportunity to grab the rag she had tied around her scuffed knee. She had a feeling she’d need the advantage even a few drops of blood could give her when meeting this man.
She was careful of her footing when she followed him up the stairs. She knew she could take the blood in the rag, hone it to an edge, and then fake a stumble. She could be halfway up the stairs before anyone realised his throat was slit and with a body’s worth of blood she could have easily dismantled the palace, never mind this abandoned keep. However something stayed her hand. Perhaps it was just how much blood she has seen recently.
He opened the door to the old dungeons, there were a few soldiers caught for desertion lingering in the cells, waiting to be hung. The old keep was too conveniently located near the battlefield to not use, even if the upper floors were dangerously derelict, but the soldiers when they saw her flinched back. She smiled at the way it stiffened her spine. She had been drugged when they brought her down here and either they feared old wives tales of what she can do, which was by her reckoning the least of it, or she had done something then.
She walked past them like a queen descending into her admirers, with a slight smile on her face as even the biggest of them, a man with muscles like coils of rope and an inkvine scar dismembering half of his face, reacted to her presence. Her skirt fluttered around her ankles as he tried to push himself down on the stone floor, and for a moment she thought it was fear and then realises it was reverence and the smile, if anything, became colder.
By the time she left the abandoned fort that was being used as a prison she felt like a goddess, with a mocking half smile, despite the stained and torn dress, the scuffed and ruined slippers and the greasy weight of her hair. When she raised her hand to block out the immediate burn of sunlight she wasn’t surprised to see the soldiers who line the path stomp the base of their spears in her path in terror.
The man led her to a large well appointed tent with a collection of comfortable furniture. She was blind to most of it because behind a screen was a steaming hot bath, with soft linen laid across the metal to prevent it burning her skin and the refreshing smell of perfumed oils. It was too much to hope, she thought, that it might be for her.
A dark haired girl stood beside the brazier, the hot coals casting golden shadows on her dark simple dress. “You’ve done well, Ves,” the man told the girl, and the servant beamed with a child’s bright innocence although she appeared to be slightly older than she herself. “I imagine you’d like to bathe,” the man told her, “there is food and fresh clothes, we can talk when you’re ready.”
“Who are you?” she asked. She was not nearly niave enough to think this kind of kindness came without a price. She was not as young as she wanted them to think her.
“You can call me Fox,” he answered calmly, sitting down on one of the campaign chairs in front of the desk on the opposite side of the tent. She was not nearly stupid enough to think it is his name. It just suited him for now. She untied the laces of her gown and pushed it off her shoulders, letting it pool around her feet as she toed off the leather slippers, using the swaying lantern light in the tent to look at the mottled grey of dirt on her skin before she stepped into the water, like the Goddess returning to the sea. The water was blissfully hot, as the girl, Ves, brought her a cup of hot spiced wine and she took it with a grateful nod to the girl. “Take your time, Anezka,” Fox said without looking up from his papers. “We have a lot to talk about.”
The bath was heavenly and Anezka sighed in pleasure as Ves rubbed sand and soap into her hair, humming to herself. The wine was perfectly sweetened with herbs and honey. The dirt, which was beginning to feel like a suit of armour it was that thick, sluiced away into the water as she rubbed herself down with a soaped rag. The scuff on her knee was completely gone now. Healing was the least of what she can do. Fox she was unsure of, but she still had her scrap of fabric.
It was a misconception that one of her kind was powerless without blood to call on, but it made her feel better when it was available.
She climbed out of the bath and into a pair of fleece lined slippers and a heavy red velvet robe as Ves wrapped up her hair in a second piece of cloth, forming a turban and bearing her neck. “I’m ready, Fox, for you to tell me what you want with me.”
At that he turned. “Are you sure you don’t want to eat first?” he asked, pushing across a plate of bread, hard cheese and cold sausage.
“I want to know what the chief of intelligence of Vengerberg wants with me.” She said, lowering herself into the other campaign chair and sat facing him. It was an educated guess. His clothes were fine but utilitarian and not chosen for fashion. He had a large tent and a servant but there is little evidence of war in here, despite the army gathered outside. He wore no sigils or house signs and no signet on his thumb. This meant he was a commoner who had risen to power, which narrowed the avenues substantially. He couldn’t be the Arch Duke’s doctor because his tent carried none of the accoutrements of medicine, he was not his advisor, because that had been the man to condemn her for the Arch Duke’s murder, which left his spy master.
He raised an eyebrow but other than that does not look impressed. His dark eyes gave very little away. “You are, according to what I have learned, a Third of the Blood.” He used the old terms, not the ones that the Iifa used in their pogroms or the peasants in their hovels when they made the signs against evil. He doesn’t call her Venae or a leech or a bloodwitch, although all the terms were accurate. He used the terms that the use amongst themselves and were probably the least insulting. Although it had been a long time since she had had anything to do with the other Blood.
“First.” She corrected him automatically.
He leant back in his chair, templing his fingers against his chest as he considered this. “The Guild list you as a Third.” He said bluntly, “but I suppose that it’s in their favour that they list you as less than you are to preserve their own power.”
“They are a bunch of lower level witches gathered around a turtle stone and aping politics.” She spat out the familiar words, before she reached across and poured herself more wine. She leant back in the chair making sure that the robe parted just enough to bare her thigh. He ignored the gesture, other than noticing it, cataloging it in what he knew of her.
“They are rather inept.” He agreed, “but it is in no one’s favour if it is known that a First is loose in the world, why you could easily become another Lady Blood.” She tilted her head, it was the old familiar lie, it was what the Guild used to maintain what power that they had. “So why was it that I found you working as a surgeon in an army camp? no more than three hours before you were arrested on the charge of regicide.”
“I didn’t kill him.” She maintained firmly.
“I know.” Fox shrugged it off. “But that doesn’t answer my question.”
She moved her head so that the turban started to loosen, falling away to reveal her dank wet hair as it fell around her neck and over the dark red velvet of her robe. “Because a bloodwitch can’t be surrounded by that much blood without trying to take over the world?” It’s a rhetorical question and he left her enough of a pause that she’s uncomfortable. She doesn’t rise to it though, maintaining the silence until he spoke.
“Miracles in the surgery tent are something of a giveaway.” He says, “as is going into the Forest Sauvage for herbs and other miscellany.”
“I’m hardly likely to find the ingredients I need here.” She remained blithe. It was a simple defence to maintain. “And I am a skilled surgeon without having to use Blood to do so.”
“True,” he said calmly, “but of course since you were outed as a Blood things have altered considerably. Even a fifth or sixth can create a thrall so all the men you saved were incinerated.”
“I didn’t.” That surprised her, she had worked hard to save those men and to learn that they had just had their throats slit before being thrown into a pit and burned horrified her. She also knew her protestations were too late to do any good, and even if they weren’t they wouldn’t have listened.
“I know.” Fox answered, cutting her off. “I also know you were perhaps the best doctor here without using your powers, so here’s my first question, who knew what you could do enough to want to bring you to the Arch Duke’s attention?” She ground out the name of another doctor, one who had suggested that she sleep with him or else. Clearly this was the or else she conceded. He looked at his papers, “The Guild have ransomed you.” He said.
“Those bitches would use any excuse to get me as part of their coven.” She almost growled, she could feel his blood now as her anger fuelled her ability.
“Yes, I imagine so.” He answered calmly. “But I have another question. Are you a facedancer?”
She blinked in shock at the question. Very few knew of the ability. Even fewer were capable of it. A facedancer could shifttheir appeareance totally, taking on whatever look that they decided that they wanted within the bounds of their own body mass. “What makes you ask that?”
“Curiosity.” He lied. She didn’t need to know his tells to know that it was a lie. He wanted something of her and if she was a facedancer it made things easier for him.
“Your girl already looks like me.”
Fox looked over at Ves, where she was draining the bath with buckets that she rested against her hip, humming softly as she carried them. “I worked with what I had.” He told her. “Ves is a rather remarkable girl.”
“Who did that to her?” Anezka didn’t need to be a First to recognise the docility in the girl, or the way she hummed tunelessly and smiled with her mouth shut. The two perfectly round scars in the inside corners of her mouth and her careful motions of her mouth said as much. She had had her tongue cut out and was trained to keep her mouth shut, then someone had taken a spike and driven it into her brain, just deep enough to gentle her.
“It wasn’t me, if that’s what you’re thinking. She was part of a group who sought to breed another Lady Blood, she didn’t need those things for what they wanted so they took them.” She could feel the anger in his voice, “I” he paused looking for the words, “was not so kind to those who did it.” His tone was obliquely angry. “But I find myself in a rather precarious position and what is best for me is not what is best for Ves.” His words were carefully chosen. “And I have a suggestion,” he stopped, “no, an offer, for a Facedancer.”
“And if I’m not?” she pressed.
“Things become slightly more complicated. But I have taken those things into consideration. The Arch Duke’s murder has altered my intentions.” His words were careful, he considered them on his tongue. “This army is going to fail, the young prince has invited a delegation of both Iifa and their puppet empire. I imagine this will be a footnote in the Empire’s glorious history.”
She didn’t blanch as she said. “They will execute you.”
“Without a moment’s hesitation, but I can still serve my crown, if not the idiot sat on it. I fully intend to vanish, but the emperor is young, he rebels in petty ways against his Iifa instructors because he is young, and a pretty girl can catch his eye, a pretty girl I can use, there are things I have to do for the benefit of Vengerberg.”
“Then why me?” At that he finally smiled.
“That is probably the simplest aspect, my dear, you want to destroy the Empire and the Iifa just as much as I do, if our reasons are different. A facedancer implanted at the heart of the Imperial court, both influencing and manipulating court politics, and even a Third could hide her nature from the Iifa.” She paused. “And Ves will be ransomed in your place to the Guild.”
“And if you’re information is wrong, and I’m not a Facedancer?”
“Then there are plenty of things a pretty girl can do without that ability.”
She shifted in the chair, her brown hair becoming darker for a moment before settling into a brighter, ash blonde, the shape of her eyes shifted, the colour becoming a soft chocolate brown. “It is painful to do more, and I would need to feed my ability,” she said calmly. “But yes, Fox, I can see that we might have some things in common after all.”
“A common goal.” He corrected, “to survive the hangman, and possibly, if we’re able, bring down the empire of Hesse and the Knights of Iifa with it.”
Toruviel - a fantasy novel 
Leave a comment