The Sword-Edged blonde

TWENTY

I ran as hard as I could back down the trail. I heard neither horses nor birds over Epona’s words rolling around in my head.

A bright orange glow appeared above the treetops, far brighter than the torches had been. At last, so winded I could barely see, I reached the edge of the forest and beheld what was left of the village.

It looked like an efficient, brutal army had been at work. All the cottages were burning. Bodies lay on the ground, most unmarked, but some decapitated. There was no discrimination: women and children had been butchered as thoroughly as men.

I knelt beside the closest body and turned it over. It was a man of about forty, with short hair and a paunch. His face was contorted in pain, and black foam collected at the corners of his mouth. The poisoned wine had taken him.

The roof of Betty’s little not-a-tavern collapsed in a big puff of sparks. My chest was on fire, too, from all that running, and from the agony of realizing Cathy had to be among the dead.

Unless…

I had to know. I ran through the village, heedless of the heat and danger. “Cathy!” I yelled. I dodged chickens and goats, free of their pens and frantically seeking shelter or escape. I did not look at the other corpses except to make sure they weren’t her. I saw familiar faces-the red-haired girl who owed me a kiss had also died from poison-but sought only one. “Cathy!”

“Give it up, hoss,” a voice called.

I turned. Stan Carnahan, bare-chested and blood-spattered, stood between two burning buildings like he’d been molded from the flames. If he’d been intimidating before, now he was downright terrifying. He looked capable of ripping a bull in half with only his hands. He carried a sword- my sword-also stained with blood. And he was smiling.

“The ones the poison didn’t get, I’ve already seen to,” he continued casually. “There’s nobody left alive here.”

Despite the pain in my chest from running, I managed to say, “You couldn’t have killed everyone.”

“Yes, I could,” he said, propping the sword on his shoulder. Blood dripped from the blade and hissed when it hit a fallen burning crossbeam. “I’ve been planning this for months. Even made a list so I wouldn’t forget anyone. Every person in the village is accounted for.”

We looked at each other for a long moment. I couldn’t just ask him about Cathy, so I chose the next obvious question. “Why?”

“Same as you. Andrew Reese paid me.”

That name, and the insidious rhyme, whirled through my head.

“He told me a year ago to come here, become part of the community and wait for delivery messengers to show up. When that happened, kill everyone in town. Simple job, really. And the pay was unbelievable.”

He’d poisoned the wine, and on a night of celebration only the children and a few teetotalers would have been spared. They evidently posed no challenge, for Carnahan wasn’t even breathing hard. “Simple job,” I repeated.

Another building collapsed. Neither of us looked at it. My pulse returned to normal, then continued to slow, as panic and horror dissolved into cold soldierly professionalism. I saw no reason to delay any longer. “Did you kill Cathy, too?”

He nodded, almost contritely. “She was asleep in the bathtub. It was quick.”

Now I was on territory I knew well. He was bigger, and stronger, and better armed, with my own sword no less. But I’d taken on worse odds before.

I let my jacket fall to the ground. After Eppie’s hut, and my mad run, and the heat from the burning village, I was drenched in sweat. Yet inside I was solid ice.

Carnahan lowered the sword into a casual defensive stance. I wouldn’t catch him on overconfidence. “No reason you can’t walk away from here,” he said. “I told you being with Epona was the safest place. You weren’t in the village, so I got no beef with you. My job is done.”

I knelt and drew the knife from the side of my boot. It was only about seven inches long, but it would be enough. I flipped it casually in my hand. “Mine’s not.”

I threw the knife accurately at his heart. I was good, as our dart game would’ve warned him, so he was ready and batted it easily aside with the sword. But he never saw the second knife, a mere three inches long, that I had secretly slipped out of a second hidden sheath and threw a moment after the first.

He almost avoided it, though. I misjudged the strength of his parry, so he moved more than I thought. The second knife went right by his head, ineffectually I thought at first.

Then I saw the first jet of blood from the big vein in the side of his neck. He had no idea he’d even been hit at first, until he felt the hot fresh blood spray down onto his shoulder and arm. By the time he put his hand to the wound, a quarter of his blood had shot into the darkness in ever-weakening arcs.

He fell to his knees and dropped my sword. I did not approach him. Blood shot through the fingers pressed against his neck. He said nothing, but I never saw any hatred in his eyes. He was a pro to the end.

When he finally collapsed, I sat and waited until I saw no fresh blood shining in the firelight. It took a while. By then most of the fires had burned down to glowing ruins, and their pops and hisses filled the night.

Finally I stood, retrieved my sword and neatly beheaded Stan’s corpse. Always pay the insurance.

The only person I buried was Cathy, in a shallow grave with no marker. I found her charred-boiled, really-body still in the metal tub inside one of the ruined buildings. Her unburned head lay on the ground outside. I put the rest of the corpses on the most active fire, and kept it going until they’d been consumed. The smell was as appalling as it sounds.

At dawn, I returned to Epona’s cottage. No horses followed me through the forest. No weird birds sang overhead. The house was exactly as I’d left it, but the woman-whoever she’d been-was gone. Perhaps the poisoned wine had driven her into the forest to die. I didn’t know, and didn’t really care. I considered torching the place, but I’d seen enough destruction to do me for a while.

NowI sat in the silent ruins of the cottage, the odor of burning flesh once more in the air. The dark-haired woman who once faced me here, who had become my lover and burrowed so far into my head that even now my skin tingled at the memory of her touch, had claimed to be a goddess. Her blond, blue-eyed twin now claimed to be a victim. I didn’t believe either of them, but the only way to get at the truth seemed to be buying into those delusions. Someone once hated Epona Gray enough to commit a massacre. If Epona really was Rhiannon, could this someone also be behind the disappearance of her son?

Andrew Reese is broken to pieces.

“Eppie,” I said to the air, “I sure wish you were here right now. I could use the advice of a goddess.”

A tiny bird sat atop one pile of debris and, just as I registered its presence in the corner of my eye, flew off into the woods. It seemed to leave the same sparkling trail as the birds I’d glimpsed in Rhiannon’s cell, but I couldn’t swear to it. Its departure dislodged the deer antler it had perched on, which now slid with a soft clatter down the side of the pile. It stopped when it dislodged something else, a small wooden box that traveled the rest of the way to land at the bottom with a thump that dislodged the lid. An object fell out with a solid, heavy thud.

I stared at the box, weathered and decayed but still obviously the one Cathy had carried, and the tarnished, rusted horseshoe that fell from it. “You have got to be kidding,” I said aloud.

I picked up the box. Still folded in the bottom was a neat piece of vellum that had evidently been treated with something to protect it from the rain, winters and other elements that might cause it to decay over time. I unfolded it slowly and took it to the door so I could examine it in the light.

The language was familiar Boscobelian, although the handwriting was atrocious. The text was obvious and, for the moment, inconsequential. But the name at the bottom gave me what I most needed at that moment.

The signature read, ANDREW REESE.

Andrew Reese is broken to pieces.

And my pieces were now falling into place. Cathy told me she’d been hired in Boscobel, and this was written in its language. I now knew my next step.

I got sudden chills. The chances of finding such a blatant clue after all this time were almost enough to make me buy into divine intervention. Perhaps another goddess heard my prayer and answered it out of professional courtesy.

I jumped as something moved within the pile of bones and sent several clattering to the ground. A big rat poked its head into the light, squeaked at me and withdrew. The disturbance had revealed a human skull, split along the top by a jagged crack. It seemed to laugh silently at me.

I carefully placed the note in my pocket; I’d have plenty of time to think it over on my way to Cape Querna. It wasn’t a short voyage.

I glanced up in time to see another bird flit away from a windowsill. Once again I might have imagined it, but it seemed, for a moment, to leave a glittering trail through the air.