The Jaguar Knights Read online

  “The Pirate’s Son’s assigning Blades to the Hag?”

  “What business is that—” Vicious recalled who was Prime, and his eyes flashed like razors. “What if he is?”

  “I knew her before the King did!”

  Vicious stared at him for a long time. He was a dark-skinned man, showing surprising muscle when he had his shirt off, as he did then, and extreme menace when he had a naked sword in his hand, as he did then.

  “When?”

  “Before Ironhall. Her name is Amy Sprat. We were kids together in a hamlet called Sheese, in Westerth.”

  “Guardsman, you are being misled by a chance likeness.”

  Wolf shook his head. “We’ve spoken. She’s Amy. She has a birthmark on her thigh. About here. She claims it’s shaped like a heart, but that depends which way you’re looking at it.”

  Leader’s eyes shone brighter in the candlelight. “Spirits, man! She’s only fifteen now! When was this?”

  “Fifteen bullfeathers! She’s eighteen, ten months younger than me. I was fourteen then…I wasn’t the only one! Every boy on the moor was a close friend of Amy Sprat.”

  “Death!” Vicious advanced a pace. “Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?”

  Wolf retreated. “You told me…told Sir Terror to tell me…to keep my mouth shut.”

  “Not to me, you idiot!” Vicious muttered a curse. “It’s too late to catch them. Have you told anyone else of this?”

  “No, Leader.”

  “Then don’t, as you value your neck. If His Majesty assigns Blades to a friend, that is absolutely none of your business, Sir Wolf, brother or not. Is that clear?”

  Wolf could do nothing but mutter, “Yes, Leader.” Lynx was to be bound to a harlot.

  “You are telling me that His Majesty’s concubine is an imposter, vulnerable to blackmail?”

  “Er…I suppose so.”

  “Which means you withheld information relevant to His Majesty’s safety?”

  Gulp! “Yes, Leader.”

  Vicious looked him up and down. “And you ran all the way here from the gym looking like that?”

  “Yes, Leader.”

  “Present yourself after the morning muster with a written list of the regulations you have broken and a recommendation for punishment. Now get out.”

  Wolf got out.

  He had been thinking only of Lynx. Vicious could see not one but three men betrayed and must have been even angrier than Wolf was. Furthermore, Wolf had presented him with the ghastly problem of telling the King his paramour was a fraud and a potential traitor. If he didn’t, sooner or later the Dark Chamber certainly would, and even in those days Vicious hated inquisitors.

  He dropped a hint of his feelings the next morning. It was Guard tradition to have a malefactor recommend his own punishment, which Leader would then either accept, halve, or double. Like any man in this predicament, Wolf consulted experts and then set his penance unfairly high, as he thought, in the hope of having it halved.

  Vicious tripled it and added two five-league runs.

  11

  Inquisitor Hogwood slept the sleep of the innocent, no doubt, but Wolf must spend half the night in snail-pace reading, snug in Grand Master’s bed, working through reports by flickering candlelight. The other witnesses confirmed Lynx’s incredible story. One veteran man-at-arms had even witnessed his fight with the giant in the spotted helmet, if that is what the monster had been, and swore he’d never seen a man move so fast. Wolf read everything three times, wishing the other seniors had matched Tancred’s superb handwriting.

  But none of it made any sense. Why attack Quondam? Why the attackers’ bizarre costumes and weapons? Why Celeste? If her Blade said she had no lover, then she had no lover. She was no missing heiress; her father and grandfather had been shepherds, her mother a sister of one of Wolf’s stepmothers. Any secrets she knew would be years old. Celeste had been a stunning woman, but she was not worth scores of lives.

  She was not worth what she had done to Lynx, Fell, and Mandeville, either. Wolf had been sincere when he promised not to betray her, but how could a strumpet trust a man, any man? She had taken Lynx hostage for Wolf’s good behavior, turning up at the palace a few days later with three bewildered young Blades at heel.

  A week or so after that, when Wolf was alone in the junior Blade dormitory, changing to go on duty, Lynx entered silently, having always had a creepy ability to move quietly. Wolf looked up from straightening his hose and was startled to see his brother’s familiar grin overhead. He was arrayed in a bizarre livery of purple and gold, with Celeste’s arms outlined in seed pearls all over his chest.

  Wolf jumped up and hugged him. “Congratulations!” This was their first chance for a private talk.

  Lynx squeezed him till his ribs creaked, then chuckled and settled on the edge of Ivor’s bed. “Not commiserations?”

  “There are advantages to being a private Blade.”

  “Tell me about them some time.” Lynx normally took life as it came, so from him that remark was a scream of frustration. “Like not being thrown out to starve after a mere ten years?”

  “Like not having time to die of boredom. And I hear she appointed you Leader. Congratulations again!” Wolf had a low opinion of both Fell and Mandeville, and assumed Grand Master had guided Celeste’s choice.

  Lynx hesitated, glanced at the door as if you to confirm that they were not being overheard, then muttered, “She said I was the best. Almost as good as you, she said.”

  Wolf stared at him aghast, eventually whispered, “You didn’t!”

  Lynx bit his lip and nodded, still studying Wolf’s boots.

  “When? I mean where…I mean…Lynx, you mustn’t!”

  “Ironhall. The same night.”

  “Don’t you remember what happened to Sian and her Blades?”

  “Sian was Queen.”

  Wolf wanted to scream and could only whisper. “You think that would matter to the Pirate’s Son?”

  Blades bragged that their binding made them irresistible to women and rarely mentioned that the reverse was also true. They were the randiest of men and a Blade bound to a woman was notoriously prone to do his guarding at unseemly close quarters. Celeste was lusty, a skilled seductress, and Athelgar had let her bind three teenage virgins. It was easy to guess what had happened right after the binding, while they were still dizzy from the ritual, the excitement, the aftermath of danger. Likely Celeste was as inflamed herself, having just stabbed them all through their hearts, but even if she had been her usual calculating self, it would have been out of character for her to resist such a temptation. Of course she would have pled exhaustion and a need to rest after such an ordeal. Of course her Blades would have escorted her to her quarters, and of course she would then have sampled them. They would have been child’s play for her, mere nibbles.

  “He’ll kill you all,” Wolf said. “Who else have you told about this?”

  “Just you…” Lynx laughed sheepishly and forced himself to look up. “I’m only kidding, Wolfie! You really think we’d be such idiots as to bed the King’s private harlot? Just joking, Wolf.”

  “That sort of joke will laugh your head off.”

  They never discussed that subject again. From then on Wolf never saw Celeste without at least two of her Blades in attendance. He could always count on a smile whenever she caught his eye and a fiery glare when the King did. Vicious had passed on Wolf’s revelations, of course. The quarrel that had started with juvenile mockery would never heal now—Athelgar had made Wolf’s brother slave to a harlot, Wolf had enjoyed the favors of the King’s mistress.

  Yet Celeste was so skilled at her work that she kept her royal lover enraptured for months longer. Only as summer faded did Athelgar’s attention start to stray. In her desperation, Amy abandoned whatever conjuration she had used to block conception. By Long Night she was with child, royal child. No monarch wanted bastards complicating the succession, and by then Athelgar’s fancy was set on the shameles
sly underage daughter of the Duke of Finemont. Celeste had become a bore.

  As the King cast around to find a father for his spawn, into view tottered ancient Baron Dupend, a man with more ancestors than teeth, a widower whose purse was as lean as his shanks. He had come to Court seeking permission to sell off the last of his entailed estates, a desperate solution that would leave his sons paupers without totally banishing the threat of debtors’ prison for him. His Gracious Majesty was amused to offer the noble lord the wardenship of Quondam, which was located conveniently far away, plus the slightly used, visibly pregnant, but witty and lusty Marquesa Celeste, supported by a bribe handsome enough to save the old fool from bankruptcy. In Firstmoon of 391, the marriage was announced—not the betrothal, but the accomplished deed. After that day the Attewell brothers did not meet for four long years.

  Typical of Athelgar! He simultaneously infuriated the nobility by insulting one of the oldest houses in the land and the burghers by squandering a fortune in tax revenue to dispose of a doxy he could have given to a gardener. There never was a man with such a gift for making enemies.

  But none of this ancient history explained Quondam.

  Someone rattled the latch, trying to open the bedroom door. Wolf was off the bed in a flash of steel, Diligence in hand. He flipped the bolt and kicked the door wide. It hit someone.

  Lynx swore in the darkness. He came limping into the light, swaddled in a fleece bedcover that made him look like some huge half-melted bear, wearing the bemused smile of an amiable drunk.

  “Stubbed my toe,” he muttered. “Need talk…like old times.”

  “Sit and be welcome.” Wolf closed and bolted the door again, saw him settled on the hob, poked up the fire. Lynx had no shoes, no lantern. “How did you get through the study?”

  “Mm? Painfully. This like old times, middle of the night?”

  “It is.” Wolf pulled up a chair and beamed at him happily. “Spirits, it’s good to see you again! Had another healing?” Lynx had not been drinking. Intrepid had scrambled his brains with a blizzard of elementals.

  He nodded vaguely. “Shoulder’s better.” He demonstrated moving his left arm, flexed his right hand, and then tugged the rug around him again. He was wearing nothing under it. “Swordsman needs his arms, Wolf.”

  “Hard to hold a sword with your teeth.”

  “Got no sword. Lost Ratter!” His face crumpled like a child’s.

  “You dropped her in the fight. We’ll get her back for you. Listen, I need your help. Can you think of any reason at all why anyone at all would want to kidnap Celeste?”

  Lynx was incapable of serious thought just then, but if he’d worked out an answer earlier he ought to remember doing so. He sniffed. “Lost my ward, too. What sort of Blade loses his ward? Oh, Wolfie! What am I going to do, Wolfie? Wander the world forever looking for her?”

  “Start by working out who took her. Tell me about her missing years.”

  “Huh?”

  Wolf sighed. “How did Amy Sprat become the Marquesa Celeste? When did she leave Sheese?”

  “Week after we did,” Lynx said, as if that was obvious.

  His wits would return by morning, but Wolf could never be patient when a job needed doing. In four years of captivity, the languishing Baroness must have rehearsed her troubles to her Blades, drunk or sober, and Wolf set to work to drag her story out of Lynx, phrase by phrase. It took an hour.

  A lecherous old chapman peddling pots in Sheese had discovered Amy Sprat, flower of the moors. Recognizing her burgeoning beauty and natural skills, he had taken her away with him and set her up in Lomouth as a source of revenue for him and a benefaction to the young men of the city. Seeing how she was being exploited, she had run off with a ship captain, who took her across the Straits to Isilond. From there, somehow, she found her way farther south, to Distlain. For the next five years or so, while Lynx and Wolf studied swordsmanship at Ironhall, Amy had learned a different trade. Her story, as told to and by Lynx, involved a huge cast of villains, johns, pimps, sugar daddies, blackmail victims, crooked officials, and outright suckers, with herself always the persecuted heroine. Wolf inferred that she had been more puppeteer than puppet, deliberately scaling the social ladder until she could pass for nobly born.

  A few months before Malinda’s abdication, Amy had returned to Chivial with the express intent, so she claimed, of snaring Crown Prince Athelgar. She had acquired a husband for respectability and appropriated the name of Celeste from the notorious seductress in the Isilondian murder scandal. Whoever the supposed Marqués was, it had been child’s play for Amy to dump him in Clag Street, out of her way, as soon as the Prince nibbled her bait. She claimed that the first thing Athelgar had done to celebrate his mother’s departure had been to head straight from the docks to the palace and try out the royal bed, even before sitting on the royal throne. The royal bed with Celeste in it, of course.

  Clearly the spurious Marquesa had been absent from Chivial for years, which explained why she had been so shocked when Wolf recognized her. Secondly, her associates had been sailors, small-town doctors, younger sons of minor aristocracy—none of whom could have found the resources to storm Quondam. There had been no mastermind behind Celeste except Celeste herself, and Wolf had still not found a credible suspect.

  “Gone!” Lynx sniffed. “Lost my ward. No Blade’s ever lost his ward before, Archives says. I’ll go crazy!”

  “I think you’d have…” Wolf caught a spark of an idea before it could emerge in words. Playing for time to think, he said, “I don’t think Hogwood was completely satisfied with your testimony. Did you hold back anything? Is there anything you can tell me that you didn’t want to put on the record?”

  “Just that I loved her.”

  “You said she’d kept her legs together at Quondam.”

  Lynx sighed and a tear trickled down into his beard. “I don’t mean that sort of love. Oh, we had to be so cruel! I love her, Wolf! We all loved her.”

  “She’s a harlot!”

  “I know. But I love her.”

  “That’s your binding talking, chump!”

  “It’s my binding feeling it.” A tear trickled from the other eye. “The most beautiful woman in the world.”

  “No doubt,” Wolf agreed with a shudder. “You still say you didn’t swinge her when she was at Quondam?”

  “No,” Lynx said grumpily. “But not from want of longing.”

  “She’d have agreed?”

  Lynx just scowled. Stupid question.

  Wolf said, “I still can’t understand anyone sacrificing so many lives to carry her off. Have you thought of any sane reason why anyone should? Or any other reason for the attack on Quondam?”

  “Jewels?” Lynx muttered. “I told you she used to wear all her jewels. That’s what I’m afraid of, Wolf. It was easier to carry her away decorated than to strip her there. They took her to their boats, kept the jewels, and dropped her overboard.” He put his face in his hands and started weeping in earnest.

  “You’ve been conjured out of your wits. You want to lie down and get some sleep?”

  He grunted. “Can’t sleep.”

  Wolf said, “Good.” The spark of an idea was glowing nicely now. “You remember Quintus?”

  Lynx looked up with a sad smile. “Remember his fencing. He won the Cup twice, didn’t he? Remember his laugh. Always laughing. You could hear Quintus laugh right across Starkmoor.”

  Wolf would certainly never forget that laugh. “Ambrose gave him to Baron Elboro, him and Warren.”

  “And you killed them,” Lynx said, starting to show more interest. “Intrepid was telling me. Why d’you kill so many brothers, Wolfie? Why you, always? Why not let some of the others do some of the King’s dirty work? Or why not catch them in nets or something and revert them?”

  “Because reversion spells almost never work and you can’t catch a Blade with nets or anything else if he knows you’re coming for him, and they all knew. As soon as the Thencaster Plot crawl
ed out of the midden they all knew we’d be coming for their wards.”

  Lynx said, “Oh. Right.”

  “They were all half crazy from divided loyalty anyway. Elboro was the last. The King put me in charge…” There were details Wolf had never told anyone, not even including them in the infamous report he had filed after he’d done Athelgar’s filthy work for him.

  “Three Blades and two snoops,” he said, “but by that time I was wearing the sash on these excursions. We discovered a possible escape route over the rooftops and if we knew of it, we could be certain that Elboro’s Blades did. I set a trap. I thought it would be better to herd Elboro into the chokey than try a frontal assault.”

  Leaving his helpers to wait in ambush, he beat on the door in the middle of the night, the traditional hour for Death to come calling. He waited a minute, then opened it with an inquisitor’s golden key and went in. Elboro House was very opulent, all marble and thick rugs and gilt-framed mirrors. Warren and Quintus stood foursquare in the great entrance hall, barely visible in the moonlight. He had not expected both of them.

  “Look who’s come!” Warren said. “Your reputation has preceded you, brother.”

  Wolf gave them the speech he had ready. “We shall not be disturbed. You know you cannot escape and I know you cannot give up, any more than I can. I offer you a clean, quick end, or you can kill me and endure what follows. The choice is yours.”

  Warren laughed shrilly. “You plan to take us on together? My Leader is a dueler of renown and I certainly intend to defend myself.”

  “That is your right,” Wolf said, hoping they did not mean it. He drew Diligence. Two more swords flashed from their scabbards. He was gambling, of course, that their ward was already fleeing between the chimney pots and they would play for time, rather than fight seriously.

  He was wrong. Quintus stayed out, but Warren was recently married, unwilling to die, and a deadly fencer. The rugs made for tricky footwork and absorbed the sound, so only clattering metal broke the silence, just panting breath and starry gleams from the steel. They worked their way around the hall, with Wolf doing most of the recovering, but in the end he got his back to the light and used that advantage to find an opening.