Isaak’s eye shutters flashed. “I will, Lady Winters. Good morning to you.” He inclined his head slightly, then turned and pulled her door closed as he left.
Winters tried to force herself back to her work but found herself restless. Instead, she turned to her office’s small bookcase and pulled down a volume of collected legends of the Age of the Weeping Czars and the Year of the Falling Moon. She turned the pages slowly, savoring the words she found there. She found the Last Weeping Czar, Frederico, the most compelling. Love out of reach, a lost throne, the end of a way of life. The resonance gripped her.
A rapping at the narrow window in the corner startled her, and she looked up to a muffled cry from outside. She’d seen the kin-ravens before, both in dreams and in the sky, but never one so close. It stood outside, filling the small window in its size, and pecked again at the thick glass. Then, it hopped back and cocked its head, regarding her with one blood-red eye.
The bird had seen better days. It was singed and missing feathers. One eye was closed over with scar tissue.
Her first inclination was the bell. Her eye darted to it and she raised her hand. Swallowing, she tasted the copper of fear in a mouth gone suddenly dry.
I should call for the guards. But something else asserted itself within her, and instead she stood slowly. “What business have you here?” she asked the kin-raven in a quiet voice.
As if hearing her, it hopped forward and pecked again at the glass. Then, it waited and watched.
Approaching slowly, she stretched up on tiptoes to reach for the window’s latch. Then, she paused as her fingers found it. What am I doing? she asked herself.
But a certainty grew within her that this bird at her window was there with intent, that it had come for her and bore some note that she must read, though she saw no colored thread tied to its foot.
Holding her breath, she worked the latch and pushed the window up. A cool morning wind wafted scents of wood smoke and evergreen into the room, but under the surface of those smells was a darker, older smell of carrion and dank earth.
For a moment, the kin-raven regarded her and then tipped its head to one side. Its beak opened, and a familiar voice whispered out from it.
“Winteria bat Mardic, my younger namesake, I send you greetings,” her sister’s voice said. “It grieves me that our meeting was not better orchestrated and that you are not now by my side working with me to establish our new home by the grace of the Crimson Empress.” Winters watched as the beak remained open and the kin-raven pulled in a deep breath. “But it is fortunate that you have remained with the Great Mother and the Child of Promise. Even now, my ambassadors approach to seek audience with Lord Rudolfo, but I fear he will not hear the dark tidings I bear. The Child of Promise is in grave danger. I have sent my kin-raven to you that you might bear word to your hosts and entreat them to take heed and accept my offer of aid in this matter.”
The bird paused again, and Winters felt the words taking root within her. Certainly, she knew she could not trust this woman who claimed kinship with her. If Lord Tam and Rudolfo were correct, her entire faith was a fabric of lies created by Jin Li Tam’s grandfather to bring down Windwir for reasons they were only just beginning to understand. She’d heard their speculation, late at night, of a foe beyond the borders of their New World.
The bird continued. “We are kin, you and I, and despite our differences I bear you nothing but deepest love. Bear this word to Rudolfo. Bear this word to the Great Mother: The Child of Promise was not saved to die at the hands of wicked men.”
The bird’s beak closed and it hopped back, away from her. For a moment, she thought she might leap up, reach out, grab it, hold it and cry out for the guards to assist. But even as the thoughts formed, the bird leaped up and unfurled its wings, pounding at the quiet morning air.
She watched it as it sped west, and then she went looking for her boots so she could climb down from Library Hill to seek out Aedric and Rudolfo.
Winters had no reason to trust this message or messenger, but the dark, cold pit of fear in her stomach was a feeling she’d learned to trust over these last years.
As she let herself out into the morning, Jakob’s tiny face and hands flashed across her memory; Ria’s words followed: The Child of Promise was not saved to die at the hands of wicked men.
Winters hurried her pace and wondered what new darkness awaited them now. As she walked quickly down the cobblestone road that led into town, the morning sun kissed the back of her neck and the top of her head with a warmth she could not feel.
Vlad Li Tam
The setting sun washed the clear water in a purple so deep that it was nearly black. Overhead, the first of the stars struggled against a sky that was still too bright for them to shine in, and Vlad Li Tam sighed.
Of late, he’d taken to fishing again, though he knew that it would be more effective if he went out in the boats with those sons and daughters of his working that particular shift. Rod and tackle from the high dock was not nearly as efficient as their casting nets. Still, Petronus had taught him as a boy that the art of it was to love the act of fishing more than the act of catching. And moreover, it gave him time alone to think.
Don’t fool yourself. It also gives you time to watch the water. Yes, he thought.
Behind him, the dinner bell sounded out from the halls of the Y’Zirite Blood Temple he and his family now called home. Rudolfo had rescued what few remained of House Li Tam from this place in a chaotic night some six months past. Vlad Li Tam had returned weeks later to take revenge on the Resurgence that operated the island temple, but they had found it abandoned.
Still, they spent months scouring the building for any clue they could possibly find. They’d dived into the wreckage of the ships Rafe Merrique and his men had scuttled in the harbor. They’d dug through the mass graves and refuse pits. They’d wandered every last span of the island to gather what little they could about the people who’d occupied this place. They’d even established regular scouting expeditions deeper into the Ghosting Crests in search of vessels he knew must be out there-vessels that did not match the line and trim of the New World.
And while they searched, Vlad Li Tam allowed each stained stone in the temple to remind him of the last words of the children and grandchildren he’d lost beneath the cutters’ knives while Ria whispered love into his ear and left her own scars upon his flesh and soul. He remembered each cry, each stanza of every poem they screamed to him while the Machtvolk queen extracted agony from him along with his blood and the blood of his family. Blood used for magick-making, to resurrect Petronus and heal Vlad’s forty-second daughter’s son. All to establish a gospel and a strategy that his own father had helped design in a grand betrayal that left Vlad filled with rage and despair at once.
He shifted on the dock and looked to his rod and line. He’d taken no fish this evening, but it was fine. There would be plenty of food. Some of his children harvested the plentiful island while others hunted or fished, and supply ships from the Delta, financed by the Ninefold Forest, kept them well stocked with other provisions.
No, he did not care so much about the catching. Or the fishing for that matter, if he were honest. His eyes went again to the water.
You want to see it again.
He closed his eyes and tried to conjure it up. It had happened in the midst of pandemonium and madness. Rudolfo, magicked, had freed Vlad’s children from the holding cells in the tower’s basement and had taken the woman Ria hostage. He’d loosed Vlad, and they’d fought their way down the hill to the docks.