Dark Jenny

FOURTEEN

Even indoors my newly bare cheeks felt the night’s chill, and my footsteps, despite my attempt at stealth, sounded loud against the stone.

The rush from the time spent with Iris, which left me feeling as if I could kick the whole world’s ass, had burned itself out by the time I reached the top of the staircase. I paused for a moment and listened for any movement or voices. Only silence reached me. I took the steps two at a time, knowing that I’d come out near the door to the great hall.

My typical luck held. At the bottom I ran smack into a trio of men starting upstairs.

They stared at me. I stared at them. Two of them were pudgy, dressed in expensive clothes a bit too small for their corpulence. The burgundy veins stood out on their noses and ears, marks of their long-term dissipation. I didn’t know them, but they seemed typical wealthy landowners and had no doubt been among the courtiers howling for my entrails for the past two days.

The third I recognized at once as my old pal Ken Spinkley, the Lord Astamore. But his face was as blank as the others.

A long moment passed when no one moved or spoke. “Well?” said the nearest man, who wore amber eye shadow. He humphed with impatience. All three were drunk, and one had to lean against the stairwell door for support.

“I think I’m going to be unwell,” the leaning man said, his voice thick from drink.

“Ladies are unwell,” Eye Shadow said. “Gentlemen vomit.”

“Would you kindly step aside?” Astamore snapped at me, making no effort to hide his annoyance. “We’ve been run out of the great hall.”

Suddenly I realized what was going on: they didn’t recognize me. I was clean-shaven and dressed differently, and they were pig-porking drunk.

The leaning man warned, “Watch your shoes, here it comes.”

“Oh, no, get out of the way!” Eye Shadow demanded, and pushed me aside. He grabbed leaning man under the arm and hauled him to his feet. They stumbled up the stairs toward the guest floor, but the retch-and-splash sounds that followed told vividly that they didn’t make it.

“Morons,” Astamore muttered. He looked at me again, and a glimmer of familiarity gleamed behind the drunkenness. “Say… I know you, don’t I?”

It was late, I was on the spot, and I pulled out the only name I could think of at that moment. With immense dignity I tucked my injured hand behind my back and looked imperiously down my nose at him. I let a bird twitter in my voice when I said, “I, sir, am Lord Huckleberry.”

Astamore blinked. “Oh. I’m sorry. Kenneth, Lord Astamore, at your service.”

I pursed my lips in annoyance. “If ‘my service’ includes roughing me up with your boorish gallivanting, then that is true indeed. Perhaps I should have a word with the king, whose company I have just left.”

“No, I assure you, we meant no harm,” Astamore quickly said. Nervous sweat popped out around his hairline. “We were simply looking for the way back to our rooms, there’s certainly no need to bother King Marcus about this. Is there?” He added the last so pitifully I almost laughed in his face.

“Perhaps not.” I swept past him. “But should you inconvenience me again, I shall certainly take measures.” I didn’t see the look on his face as I went through the door into the great hall, but I’m sure it was suitably aghast.

As promised, the room was empty. The only illumination came from moonlight through the narrow windows. I crossed the room to the Tarpolita Hill tapestry and slipped behind it into the designated serving room. I snagged one of the small table lamps, lit it, and went into the darkened corridor that connected the rooms. The drain cover creaked as I lifted it. I climbed down the ladder, paused to pull the grate back into place with my good hand, and dropped with a splash into an inch of running water. I turned the lamp up all the way.

As with everything else in this damned storybook kingdom, the tunnel was ridiculously clean. They must’ve sent people down here once a year to make sure no vegetation or wildlife was able to take hold. The lamplight reflected off the eyes of a lone pair of rats, but it was nothing compared to the horde I’d have found in any castle off this island.

How the hell did Marcus Drake do that? This went beyond any sense of duty, into a realm of pride in one’s kingdom that I’d never before seen. Sure, you could order men to clean these tunnels, even force them to do it. But they wouldn’t do it this well unless they felt they had a personal stake in it.

I realized, of course, that I knew exactly how Drake did it. He did it the same way he’d got me to take this stupid job.

Annoyed with myself, I looked behind me and saw the vertical bars that covered the cliffside opening. Beyond it stars burned in the clear sky. I turned landward and began to walk. The tunnel’s ceiling was about half an inch shorter than I was, which kept me in a crouch, and the passage sloped gradually upward. Steplike notches lined the floor just below the water, so that if you fell, you wouldn’t slide all the way to the spout. My lower back did not take long to express its disapproval, followed quickly by my knees and, in sympathy, my busted hand.

This distracted me enough that I didn’t spot the body on the tunnel’s floor until I was almost on top of it.

I stopped immediately and took in the scene before moving closer. The body lay on its side, the water trickling around it to continue downhill. Its feet were bare, and ropes tightly bound its ankles. I couldn’t see its face or tell its gender from its wet clothing. A handful of rats waited nearby, disturbed by my light but not frightened off.

I waved the lamp, and the vermin scattered. I knelt beside the body. Its hands were tied behind its back. The small fingers curled limp, and the ropes hadn’t bitten into the skin. That told me the corpse was bound after death.

I also saw it was a woman.

I slowly turned her over. The long, wet hair hid her face, so I had to brush it aside. I recognized her.

It was Mary, the serving girl.

Yet it couldn’t be. There wasn’t a mark on her face.

I stared at her for a long time. I was absolutely sure it was her. I’d watched her closely in the great hall, just before Patrice fell dead. Yet Agravaine had given her a black eye and a split lip just two days earlier. Those injuries simply couldn’t heal that quickly.

I ran my finger along her cold cheek. Her eyes were closed, and her features slack. She hadn’t drowned. Using just my good hand, I sought the fatal injury beneath her clothes and found it quickly enough: a single knife thrust between her ribs, no doubt angled toward her heart. The edges were white and puffy, washed clean of blood by the steady water.

Her joints were stiff; she’d been dead at least several hours. She could’ve been killed anytime after Iris said she left the infirmary.

But why was she here? I looked back down the tunnel toward the cliff grate, which blocked anything bigger than a rat. She couldn’t just wash out to sea, even if there was enough water flow to carry her. There weren’t enough rats to dispose of the body, or even render it unrecognizable. So the only explanation was that it wasn’t dumped here, but stored here. To be disposed of later.

I looked at her face, verifying the impossible truth that there was no trace of her injuries. The flesh was unmarked, unswollen, unsplit. There was still a touch of baby fat in her cheeks, and an innocence that had survived her death.

I’d mocked her possible future back in the great hall before the murder. At the time it had been the worst fate I could imagine for her.

I considered carrying her with me to meet Kay. She deserved better than this, lying facedown in a glorified sewer for the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But there were more undercurrents than just the water in this tunnel. Had I been set up to find this girl? Was a contingent of armed men waiting for me to emerge with the proof of my guilt tossed over my shoulder?

Against all my better instincts, I carefully put her back the way I’d found her. Wherever her spirit now resided, I hoped it understood.

The tunnel opened at the bottom of a small, empty pond. The even, bowl-like sides were lined with round rocks to prevent erosion when rainwater filled it. At the top of the slope, Kay sat smoking a pipe, eyes heavy with exhaustion.

He smiled as I emerged into the moonlight. “Well, hack off my legs and call me Shorty. You look ten years younger without the beard.”

“I’m in disguise.” I did not tell him about Mary’s body, or my run-in with the courtiers, or that I’d claimed to be the mythical Lord Huckleberry. Nodlon Castle was a surprising distance away, down the slight slope toward the cliffs. I hadn’t realized the tunnel was quite so long.

He fingered my jacket’s lapel. “You might be a little overdressed to be inconspicuous.”

“Once the road dust settles on me, I’ll be fine.”

“There’s your horse.” Kay indicated a nearby tree where the animal was saddled and tied. “She’ll do fine for a long, fast trip. And here.” He handed me a sword and scabbard.

“I guess you trust me now.”

“I’m not sending you out unarmed. But I should warn you: If you intend to leave Grand Bruan without completing your job, Marc will send Tom Gillian after you. And Gillian won’t stop until he’s found you, and one of you is dead.”

I sighed and shook my head. “I knew it was too easy.”

“Yeah. And here’s this.”

He tossed me a small money bag. From its weight I could tell it included more gold than I’d asked for. While the threat of Gillian’s retribution was definitely a factor, this was the real reason he could trust me. Not the money itself, but what it represented: my word. I said, “For what it’s worth, if I take payment for a job, I see it through.”

“I hope so. Because so does Tom Gillian.”

I put the money in my jacket pocket, then with great difficulty, thanks to the cast, I buckled the sword around my waist. Kay offered no help. When I finished, I said, “One more thing. Seriously, how will Spears take it when I show up and tell him to drop everything and come here?”

Kay snorted. “It’s Jennifer. If she says spit, he’ll ask how far.”

“So there is something to the gossip?”

He shook his head wearily. “Hell, I don’t know. Maybe, once. When we were all a lot younger, we all did things we’re not proud of now. But it’s old news, and the people involved have made their peace with it. Bringing it up now does no one any good.”

That comment set my mind working. “Bob… who would benefit if Marc lost the crown?”

“No one. He doesn’t have an heir.”

“Isn’t that unusual?”

Kay shrugged. “It’s not from lack of trying, believe me. Those two are all over each other. It just hasn’t happened yet.”

“Then he has no next of kin?”

“Just his sister. She’d never be accepted as a ruler, though. And neither would her son. I hope she’s dead in a ditch somewhere on the mainland.” He looked up. Although the moon was still overhead, the sky to the east was growing visibly lighter. “You should really get going. If anyone from the castle sees you, this’ll all be pointless.”

“All right. I’ll be back as fast as I can.”

“You’re coming back? I thought you’d drop off your message and then haul ass back home.”

“Well, with the threat of Tom Gillian hanging over me, I have to follow through to the end.”

“Right,” Kay said with a knowing little smile. “It has nothing to do with a certain feisty castle doctor, does it?”

“Nothing at all. But if you happen to see her, tell her to be sure to remember the ow until I get back.”

“Inside joke, I assume.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll tell her.”

We reached the horse. She was a beauty, dark with a few white patches. In the dim illumination I couldn’t see if her base color was brown or black. She tossed her head in either greeting or intimidation.

I was, in the estimation of my old riding instructor, a piss-poor horseman, probably because I hated horses. They were too big, too smart, and too enigmatic for me to ever trust. This began in childhood, and at the time nothing had yet changed my opinion. In fact, most of my experience reinforced it.

Once I’d seen a cavalry officer, Colonel Bierce, approach an obstinate stallion that kicked him in the head so hard it actually tore away his jawbone and sent it flying out of the corral. From the upper teeth to the throat it left a great red gap fringed with hanging shreds of flesh and splinters of bone. The worst part was that the injury wasn’t immediately fatal; the poor bastard never even lost consciousness.

The road was deserted as I started the long trip to Blithe Ward. Many things bothered me, not the least of which was that I still didn’t know who really killed Sam Patrice. I was sure Jennifer Drake didn’t, and that gave me the moral clearance to take this job; but the list of suspects had otherwise gotten no shorter. And how had Mary the apple girl ended up miraculously healed and dead in the sewer?

The greatest crimes are always the small ones; a man who kills his unfaithful wife in a moment of passion will arouse the outrage of all, while a man who orders the death of thousands will barely rate a comment for it. Before this was over, a relatively simple murder would become a legendary bloodbath. And I would always live with the thought that, had I been just a little bit smarter, I might have prevented it. Because I’d just seen the crucial clue, right in plain sight, and hadn’t understood what it meant.