By Divine Right Read online

  “Why don’t you ask your parishioners for a contribution to fix this place?” I asked. I almost always asked.

  It was a well-practiced conversation. “I want them to take care of themselves and each other,” Ealdor said. “We’ll fix the church when it’s time.”

  I dug at my waist for my purse. The pay of an assistant reeve wasn’t much, but a few silver pennies would buy some minor repairs at least.

  Ealdor’s hand came to rest on top of mine. “You know I won’t take your money, Willet. You’re on your way to the poor quarter, yes?” When I nodded, he went on. “Then save your money for those it will help the most.” He cast a look over his shoulder and his smile quirked to one side of his mouth. “There’s no one else here. Would you like to celebrate haeling?”

  I made a point of coming when no one else would be there. A thrill ran through me mixed of equal parts anticipation and the exhilaration of risk. I wasn’t a priest. I’d missed that distinction by a week. After I’d struck blows that could never be recalled and shed the blood of others, the orders of the Merum priesthood had been placed beyond my reach forever.

  He reached up and draped his stole across my shoulders. “The one who presides wears this.”

  I let my fingers brush across the purple fabric. It didn’t feel any different than my cloak, but I luxuriated in the sensation all the same. Stepping behind the time-worn altar I saw that Ealdor had the implements of haeling already prepared, and I smiled. I’d long ago given up trying to figure out how he always seemed to know when I would be coming. If my experience in the war allowed my sleeping mind to sense death, perhaps Ealdor’s station as a priest of Aer allowed him to foretell my arrival.

  Or maybe he always had haeling ready to celebrate. I didn’t bother to ask. Mystery intrigued me. Raising my hands as I’d seen other priests do thousands of times, I issued the call to Ealdor, the mice, the voles, and any other of Aer’s creatures that might be present. “Iosa be with you.”

  Later, Ealdor replaced the chalice and wafer cup beneath the altar and led the way to the confession rail. “How are you sleeping?” he asked.

  I knelt across from him, rolling my shoulders one at a time, as if I could shed the weight his question placed on me. “The same. It’s well enough, except when there’s been a death. Then I wake in my clothes and one of the watch guards will comment on my wanderings and I find myself checking my cloak for blood.” I shrugged. “Some of them must suspect that I’m a night-walker, but they don’t say anything. Everyone carries scars from the war.” I looked down at my hands, noticed my fingers absently tapping the weathered grain of the rail and curled them into fists so their wanderings couldn’t betray my thoughts.

  But Ealdor knew me as well as I knew myself, it seemed. “What about the women, Willet?”

  I stared at him. “What women?”

  He smiled, but his eyes contradicted the expression. “My point exactly. You’re almost thirty. It’s past time to surrender your dreams of the priesthood and find a wife.”

  I looked down at the time-battered rail. “I forfeited the priesthood with the first sword stroke that took another man’s life.”

  “Then why wait?” Ealdor pressed.

  “I don’t know who I am,” I whispered. “What if I’m not innocent?”

  Ealdor’s soft laugh mocked my self-pity. “None of us are.”

  “You know what I mean,” I said. “Sometimes I wake with blood on my cloak or sleeves. We don’t always find the killer.”

  Somehow, Ealdor’s posture grew serious enough to match his tone without moving. “Evil exists, but it can’t force a man to do what a man doesn’t want to do.” Then he relaxed. “Are there no women who have caught your eye?”

  I shrugged. “Of course there are. I saw one this morning on my way out of the keep.” I gave myself to the memory that I’d etched into my mind as though it had been carved into the most obdurate stone. “The sun was just above the roofline, the light soft and orange. I saw her in profile. Her hair was tied back. I wanted nothing more in that moment than to reach up and undo the ribbon that bound it so I could see it cascade across her shoulders.”

  Ealdor smiled at me. “I’ve always suspected there was a poet lurking somewhere with you. What could it hurt to say something to her?”

  I stared at him as if he were daft. “She’s a noble.”

  “She’s a woman.”

  “And completely out of reach,” I said flatly. I shook my head. “Besides, I think I rather prefer women at a distance.”

  Ealdor nodded. “That way the reality of them can’t disappoint you and you don’t have to risk anything.”

  “That’s a very annoying habit you have,” I said.

  “She’s not why you came here though,” Ealdor said with a lift of his brows. “You woke up in your clothes again, didn’t you.”

  I nodded. “It was an old man. Jeb is convinced he had a stroke, but there was a protruding nail on his boot and no marks on the wooden porch his body was on to match it. If he did have a stroke, why would someone bother to move him?”

  Ealdor looked at me without blinking, the way he did whenever I tried to dissemble or shade the truth. “That’s not what convinced you he was murdered, was it?”

  After a moment I shook my head. “No.”

  “You don’t wander every time someone’s died, Willet,” Ealdor said. “You’ve as much as told me.”

  “No,” I sighed. “Only when someone’s been murdered.”

  Ealdor nodded. “That sounds like a useful tool for a reeve.”

  “And something that could get me burned as a witch.” I laughed. “Especially if I tell anyone when it started happening.” A memory of trees—their trunks like the tortured shapes of men towering around me—painted itself across the backdrop of Ealdor’s church, and I shook my head to clear it.

  “The priest at the scene told me it was the second gift that had gone free this month,” I said.

  His eyes widened as if I’d finally found something to say that surprised him. “That’s unusual.” Then he shrugged. “But looked at in a certain light, Willet, the unusual happens every day. Did you night-walk on the previous death?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. I didn’t always have the confirmation of the morning guard to tell me when I’d wandered from my bed. “Something about this doesn’t smell right.”

  Ealdor patted my hand. “Then you should investigate. Isn’t that what reeves do?”

  “Jeb’s told me to stay away from it. He’s afraid of the attention it might attract if we even breathe the words gift stealing.”

  Ealdor smiled at me. “He’s the tall one with the fists, right?”

  I gave him a vigorous nod. “That’s the one.”

  He grew serious, the façade of amusement dropping from him, and he leaned forward across the rail that separated us until our heads almost touched. “Do the right thing first, Willet, and you may find the grace of Aer and his son, Iosa, and his spirit, Gaoithe, in some unusual places.”

  I deflected the command with a grin. “Let’s hope it’s in the poor quarter. That’s my duty assignment for the day.”

  Ealdor rose from his kneeling position, and I mirrored him. “The destitute are like servants, Willet. Even when they’re present most people never see them at all.”

  I nodded my thanks and left the church.

  Chapter 3

  Crossing the southernmost bridge of the Rinwash was like entering a world where the shroud of human despair, kept at bay with the distractions that wealth could buy, had at last managed to leach the color from the surroundings. All too often, what wasn’t faded was covered in dirt or grime, the residents too busy with the work of simple survival to worry with appearances. Yet in the smiles and greetings friends gave to each other across ramshackle fences or narrow spaces between buildings that leaned toward one another, I saw flickers of light and life displayed, fighting against the dark.

  For a change, there was nothing specifi
c in my duty assignment, no murders or high-profile thefts in the other sections of the city, and I breathed a sigh of relief. We didn’t bother trying to run down the pickpockets or women who walked the night, reserving our efforts for more serious crimes.

  “Good morning, Willet,” a woman’s voice purred from the entrance to a dark side street where I hoped to find a particular thief.

  I turned, the smile already on my face, at the greeting. “Constance.” The woman was perhaps a year or two younger than I, her story so common in our kingdom, it hardly merited a footnote. Her husband, Rolfe, had been conscripted after the last war and killed in a border skirmish. Constance, with a pair of children hardly walking, couldn’t find enough honest work to keep them fed, so she bartered what she had left, selling her body to keep them fed.

  I nodded toward the sun creeping higher. “It’s too early to have that voice on, you know.”

  She laughed a sound that came out an octave higher than the greeting she’d given. “It’s market day. If I get there early enough I can be back before the little ones wake.”

  I dug into the pocket of my cloak for a silver penny, one of the few I’d offered to Ealdor. “Here. Buy them some sweetmeats.” I folded her hand over the coin when she tried to protest. “And stay away from men who look or feel wrong.”

  She gave me a saucy smile at odds with the sudden unshed tears in her eyes. “You know you just bought a pair of nights, don’t you, Willet?”

  I shook my head, careful not to laugh. The people who lived in the poor quarter guarded the dignity that remained to them with banter and social rules the rest of the city could hardly understand. “No, I bought a pair of precious lads some sweetmeats.” What she did with the money would be up to her, but I needed to make it plain that it carried no obligation. “If you need to barter on their behalf, you could point me to Ilroy. I’d be grateful.”

  The poor quarter boasted a number of strange and illegal guilds. One of them, the urchins, comprised a collection of young pickpockets and thieves, a company of children whose parents had died or kicked them out. Life in Bunard—or any city, for that matter—could be cruel. Everyone knew it.

  But in the midst of such indecency, somehow, many people found a way to be decent. Ilroy was such a one. He searched the poor quarter each week for those who’d been abandoned or orphaned and brought them in to such shelter as he could contrive and taught them a trade. To Laidir’s credit, the king forbade the city watch from doing more than striping those who were caught— a punishment any of the urchins could easily withstand without endangering their livelihood.

  Constance’s face fell. “I’m sorry, Willet. Ilroy’s dead—last night. He fell off a roof and broke his neck.”

  I felt sick and my breakfast shifted in my gut like it wanted to visit from the other direction. “Who heads the urchins now?”

  She kept her face neutral. “Rory.”

  I didn’t bother to stop the sigh that whispered from me even though I’d known for a couple of years Rory would take over the urchins someday. Ruthlessly talented and fiercely dedicated to rescuing the children who ended up in the poor quarter, he nevertheless divided the world into two parts: the poor quarter and the enemy. More than once when I’d searched out Ilroy looking for information, Rory had made it plain he grouped me with the enemy.

  “Where can I find him?”

  Constance pointed west toward a particularly rough part of the quarter that guards in the city watch called the Gulch for the canyon-like feel of the tall buildings that kept the sunlight from touching the ground. “At the end of Butcher’s Alley. Be careful, Willet.”

  I nodded my thanks and checked the sun. A city watchman had to be an idiot to go into the Gulch at night—and close to it to venture there during the daytime. My shoulder blades itched with the feeling of being watched as soon as I entered the oily shadows cast by buildings that almost touched each other over the alleyway that ran parallel to Butcher’s Street. They didn’t slaughter animals there anymore, but the stench of other unsavory practices still made me gag.

  The first thing a newcomer to the urchins learned was how to hide. They practiced the art until a boy or girl of ten could disappear into a shadow no wider than the flat of a man’s hand. Then they learned how to throw a knife, practicing until their skill approximated sorcery. I’d seen urchins hanging upside down from their knees hit a target no bigger than a silver crown from ten paces away. If I startled the wrong person, I could end up dead before I realized I’d taken a blade through the eye. I kept to the sliver of sunlight in the middle of the alley. Most of the urchins knew me by now, but newcomers drew sentry duty often enough to make this dangerous.

  As if the thought had conjured it, a blade whistled within inches of my face to lodge in the wood of the wall on my left. I made a show of raising my hands and spoke to the air without turning to look for the owner of the knife. “If you’re part of the urchins, you should know me.”

  A girl with stringy hair and smudges on her freckled face stepped out of the shadows on my right. We’d met before.

  “Why the knife, Pogue?” I asked.

  “Rory’s orders,” she said, pulling the blade loose from the splintered wood. “He wants everyone to know the urchins can defend themselves.”

  “Ilroy made sure everyone knew that already,” I said.

  She shrugged. Like all of the urchins, she was a few pounds shy of well fed and I could see the top of her collar bones pushing against her dirty shirt. “Rory thinks someone might have given Ilroy a push off that roof.”

  I made an effort not to peer into the shadows around us. Rory could have ears on Pogue and me. He might be listening himself, and I’d already learned with Jeb that you didn’t dismiss a man’s suspicions if you wanted something from him. “It’s possible,” I said. “What do you think?”

  Pogue shrugged. “There might have been another thief up on the rooftops, but killing one of the urchins is hard. It was raining and the roof was made of slate. I’ve almost pitched off a time or two myself.”

  “I need to see Rory,” I said. I pulled the token Ilroy had given me from my pocket, a square of red cloth with a crude blue circle stitched into the center of it.

  She licked her lips, staring at the token before she nodded and turned toward the dead end of the alley. We descended stone steps into a low dirt-floored cellar, and I breathed a prayer that the ancient posts and beams supporting the structure above us would hold.

  Rory was about thirteen, tall for an urchin, with the hands of a musician and a thatch of brown hair that he kept combed. He carried a lot of the load of supporting the group by being one of the best pickpockets in the city, and he had a thousand ways of making the bump into his target look accidental. I concentrated on keeping my hands away from my purse, as if I had no suspicion whatsoever that he might try to lift it from me.

  “You let an outsider in here, yah?” Rory said to Pogue. His accent mimicked some of the southerners who traded in Collum.

  “He had the token, Rory.”

  “He can’t, yah? Because I’m the only one who’s given them out,” Rory said. He leaned forward, and the bend in his elbows suggested he might take a swing at the girl.

  “It’s Ilroy’s,” I said, stepping to the side a bit as I spoke so that I was partly between Rory and Pogue. If their conversation came to blows, I’d never get what I came for.

  “Ilroy is dead,” Rory said. “I run the urchins now.”

  I nodded. “Agreed. I’m willing to renegotiate the agreement I had with him.” Maybe if I conceded up front my willingness to deal I could get him to trade for information, but the look in his eye made me want to check my purse to see how much remained in it.

  He smiled. “Some things have more value than others, information included.”

  “I’ve always been willing to pay for it,” I said.

  He nodded. “Yes, but I will set the price.”

  I held up a hand. “Based on?”

  “How despe
rate you are for it,” Rory said, his smile growing.

  I stifled the flash of anger that brought heat up my neck at being held up by a thirteen-year-old despot. More than anything I wanted to walk out of that low-roofed cellar and tell Rory his option of ultimate destinations, but I couldn’t escape the obligation Bunard’s poor placed on me. Paying Rory for his information allowed me to check on the children under his care and make sure they were fed.

  But I needed to do my job. “I’ll pay,” I said, “but I need to speak with you alone.” I took an exaggerated look around the dingy interior of the cellar that could have hidden a score of urchins. “Really alone, Rory. I can’t afford this getting out.”

  He laughed! The little snot actually laughed at me.

  “I’ll be the judge of what you can afford.” Pointing, he directed me outside, and we retraced our steps until we left the cellar and the alley behind. Out on the street, my eyes watered in the light.

  “Now, Willet,” Rory said. “Let’s see if we can come to terms.”

  I checked to make sure no one was close enough to hear us before I ducked my head as if Rory stood in control of our conversation and I knew it. People in the poor quarter could read a man’s posture as naturally as a priest read liturgy. They were on the receiving end of all sorts of it. I kept my posture deferential. “Listen very carefully, Rory, because I’m not going to say this again. I won’t allow you to hold me up. I’m going to buy information because I need it and because I want to help out the children you care for, but if you cross me, I’m going to bring a slew of city watch here and root you out of your hiding place and throw you in prison.”

  I lifted my head just enough for him to see how angry I was. “And I’ll keep you there until the urchins find a new leader.” I dug into my pocket for a pair of silver pennies, twice what I usually paid for information and held them out. I allowed a hint of anger to touch my voice. “I brought you here so no one would hear us, but don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m a soft touch or that you can ever, ever, hold me up again. Do we understand each other?”