B3Ch52-Margaret POV (Patreon)

This is probably one of my favorite chapters I have ever worked on. ___________________________________________________________________

Margaret watched Harold lean out over the rail of his box, and thought, not for the first time, that the most dangerous man in the Landing had no idea how many people were currently at work keeping him alive.

The solstice had turned the city into something she hardly recognized. Josh's people had cut an amphitheater into the south hillside over the autumn — one could not hand that man a slope without him improving it — and packed it now to the lip with every soul in the basin who could walk and a good many who oughtn't have. Down in a ring of raked sand, two adventurers were attempting to remove one another from the tournament and, possibly, from the general population. The winner would take the last mana body token Harold possessed. Every Crafter and Adventurer in the bracket knew it, which accounted for the enthusiasm.

Harold sat above it with a cup he wasn't drinking from. He looked very nearly relaxed. It was a good look on him and a rare one, and she intended to preserve it as long as circumstances allowed, which was the entire reason she had not yet told him about the ship.

It had come in four days ago: a trader out of the southern ports that had landed at Henri's ramshackle town. Unremarkable manifest, six passengers who were not traders. Her people had eyes on them inside the hour — she kept watchers on every hull that touched the docks now, a habit that had been called excessive, and it had taken a further day to be certain of what she was looking at. A small, disciplined cell of adventurers who did not fly a guild banner. Their work wasn't monsters. It was other people's deaths, arranged in advance and paid for in coin. They were good too, and a group of people that had been known on earth.

By the third night she had it confirmed, from an informant who hadn't been wrong yet and priced himself accordingly. There was a contract on Harold. Paid for by a consortium of various Lords who wanted to see him dead.

She had spent the days since coordinating with Bethel, which was, as ever, a small and bracing lesson in humility. The older woman, as if she could call someone old, ran a small charity — soup, blankets, a kind word held out to the grieving and somewhere in the ladling of it had assembled an intelligence network inside the Landing better than Margaret's own. It was simple fact, and Margaret had made her peace with it. People told a nun things they would never set down on a forum or breathe where it could get back to her. It was deeply unfair, and she had said as much, and Bethel had patted her hand and given her a biscuit and poured her tea. Frustrating old woman indeed.

Between them, the six had been cataloged. She knew where four of them slept, what two of them took for breakfast, and she was reasonably confident which of them gave the orders. She would be certain shortly, though.

A runner came down the row at her back — one of hers — and set a folded square of paper beside her hand without breaking stride. Good. She had trained that. She finished her tea before she touched it; one did not lunge at one's correspondence, and then she opened it and read the four words inside.

All six. The Count's Rest.

Ironic considering what they were there to do. The pub had been named that because on opening night Harold had passed out drunk there trying to outdrink Josh, who made drinking a competitive sport. Men, she scoffed. Margaret stood, smoothed her coat, and went down into the crowd, and let it take her.

This was the part the adventurers had never grasped, the ones who believed stealth was a perk you purchased and a shadow you stood inside of. Stealth was not stillness. Stealth was being exactly the correct person, in exactly the correct place, moving at a wholly unremarkable pace, so completely ordinary that the eye slid off you and went looking for something worthier of its concern. She was a woman past her middle years in a plain grey coat, carrying nothing, bound nowhere in particular, and she moved through the largest crowd the Landing had ever held the way water moves through a field — downhill, without hurry, into every low place at once. Her own guard, assigned by Harold, moved with her. It was frustrating, but they had none of her subtlety. Then again. Their job wasn't subtle.

People underestimated crafters. They always had, and she had stopped resenting it around the same time she started using it. They were used in other towns and villages. Here, they were celebrated. Her craft threw no fire and split no shields, and so the world filed her under clerk and turned its attention to other things, and that was precisely the advantage. If she could examine the raw numbers, her stealth fell a hair short of a good adventurer's. Except, in her opinion, in every way that mattered it left them in the dust, because while an adventurer disappeared into a rooftop, she disappeared into a conversation.

Behind and above her a roar went up as something decisive happened in the sand — a shout, a wet crack, the whole amphitheater shouted at once. She turned to look to blend into the crowd who was doing the same thing. But it was just a very large person striking another very large person as hard as he was able, and the crowd adored it. There was, she would concede, a certain honesty in the thing. But there was no art in it. A blow landed or it did not, and the few thousand that were here could see which; the result was writ enormous in the open air for anyone with eyes.

She preferred her own work, where nothing was ever visible and the room for subtlety was infinite. It was the most stimulating occupation she had ever found, and she had found an intensely stimulating man to play the game with. She had several lifetimes of duller ones to hold it against.

Ahead, one of hers was leaning against the post of a cider stall with a cup he also wasn't drinking, and as she came level his gaze traveled once, unhurried, to a long table beneath the eaves of an alehouse where six people sat around a sweating pitcher of beer. Margaret adjusted her heading by a few degrees.

She closed the last of the distance at the same ordinary pace, lifted a chair from a neighboring table as she passed it, set it at the head of theirs, and sat down among the six of the most dangerous people in the Landing as though she had been expected all evening.

"Good evening," she said. "I'm told you've come a very long way, and at considerable expense, to kill the Count of the Landing."

The man across from her — lean, grey at the temples, a face that had spent years being unmemorable on purpose looked at her. Really looked, the way she had looked at the six of them for days: the plain coat, the nothing in her hands, the fact that a woman her age had sat there without a flicker of nerve and said something as audacious as that. She watched him do the arithmetic and watched the answer arrive.

He sighed. It was a very tired, very British sigh.

"Ah, bollocks," he said. "Game's up, lads."

"Yes," Margaret said. "It is." She folded her hands on the table. "I would suggest you come with me. I have my people spread through the crowd, and the Legion standing just behind them."

The lean man's eyes narrowed a fraction. "And what's to stop me putting a knife in you before any of them get here?"

"Ah." She did not move. "That would be them."

Four knights came out of the crowd.

They did not hurry. They came in full battle rattle, plate and half mail that had been to real places and come back, and the crowd peeled off them like water off oil. One carried a two-handed axe the way other men carried a walking stick — she knew that axe had beheaded a troll without slowing down. Sir Caswell strolled at the head of them with his thumbs in his belt, and grinned down at the table like he'd found it in the bottom of a cracker box.

"G'day," he said. "Right, here's how this goes. You lot get up nice and quiet, you walk where the lady says, and nobody has to explain to the Count why there's brains on his solstice. Sound good? Sounds good."

One of the six did not think it sounded good.

He came up off the bench and sideways in the same motion, a blur that would have lost him in any ordinary crowd — and an arrow cracked down out of the rooftops and he swatted it out of the air without looking, some deflection perk lighting the space around his hand. He got half a step further before the second arrow came. This one did not deflect. It came off a higher roof and a heavier bow as it shone with mana, and it punched through his shoulder and put him in the mud and kept him there.

The lean man didn't watch him fall. He shut his eyes for a second.

"Bloody idiot," he said, to no one.

The crowd had noticed now. A crowd notices a man dropped with an arrow, and it began, slowly, to turn — and then there were people in plain clothes moving quietly among them, a word here, a hand on an elbow there, and Margaret recognized Bethel's touch in it. Nothing to fret over. The Count's men are collecting some folk he's been wanting a word with. Enjoy the tournament.

And the crowd looked at the six strangers, and then it looked at the knights, and they made their decision. There was not a soul in the Landing who did not know exactly what would be without the Count. They ate. Their children were warm. They had homes and good pay. They were protected. Nobody sold them. Their eyes turned on the crowd of five now, and it was a colder thing than any blade.

The lean man felt it land. He looked around at all of it — the knights, the archers he couldn't see, the crowd, the prim old woman with her hands folded — and laughed, short and rueful, and got to his feet.

"Right," he said. "Lead on, then."

Margaret stood. "Follow me."

The knights closed around the five of them, and more came out of the mouths of the alleys as they went, until it was less an escort than a slow tide carrying them out through the gate and down the road and off it, into the trees where the noise of the solstice thinned away to nothing.

The lean man tried her twice on the walk.

"Long time to be in this line of work, a woman your age," he offered. "You must be very good."

She said nothing.

"Where'd they find you, then? Somebody's gran with a filing system?"

She said nothing to that either, and he gave her up as a bad job and turned to Caswell instead, which went about as well.

"You're a long way from home, mate. That an accent, or did somebody hit you?"

"Careful," Caswell said. "Wanna-be Aussie talks like that, he might hurt himself."

The lean man stopped walking for half a step. "Wanna-be — you were a British colony, you great dumb oaf."

"Yeah." Caswell grinned. "And look how we turned out." He thumped his chest with a mailed fist. "You lot shipped every crook and bastard you had to the far side of the world, and we made a country out of 'em. Kept the leftovers for yourselves." He walked on. "You're just off-brand Australians who never left the shop, mate. Now shut it."

The lean man opened his mouth bewildered, thought about it, and — to Margaret's quiet approval — shut it.

The clearing had a table in it, a few more knights standing at its edges keeping everyone else away, and a small fire someone had thought to lay.

The knights sat the five of them down and disarmed them. Not roughly but thoroughly. Blades came off forearms and out of boots and from between shoulder blades, an impressive quantity of edged metal that grew into a small pile on the grass, along with two garrotes, a folding crossbow, and a number of small glass vials that Margaret had the fire-tender set well away from the fire.

"I am not fool enough to imagine that leaves you harmless," she said, taking the seat across from the lean man. "Which is why these large young men are going to stay exactly where they are."

"Now. Here is the arrangement. You are going to tell me what sources you cultivated inside my town, and you are going to tell me the names of the Lords who paid for this. And then I am going to send you on your way — because, technically, you have not yet broken any of our laws." She smiled. "Yet."

Off to the side, the knight at the fire had a small travel kit open and a pot on, and was, with great care, making tea.

The lean man watched him do it, and something like wonder crossed his face. "Is he — is he making you tea?" He looked back at Margaret. "Can I get some of that? It's not a pint, but it'll do. Been a rough few—"

"No," Margaret said. “The tea is mine.”

She said it the way one closes a door.

"Now. Are you going to tell me what I want to know, or not?"

He had the grace to look apologetic. "Sorry, love. We all swore we wouldn't. You know how the oaths go out here — nasty business, breaking one." He spread his hands. "Nothing personal."

"Mm." The knight set the cup in front of her, the tea steeping dark in the hot water, and she took it up in both hands and breathed it in and let her eyes close for exactly one second. "Indeed. I do know how the oaths go."

She opened her eyes.

"Which is unfortunate. Because if you have nothing to tell me, then you have no use to me."

She said it in the same prim voice she had said everything else in, and she watched the words land, and watched him understand precisely what they meant.

He surprised her. He smiled.

"It's always nice to work with professionals," Margaret said, before he could. She turned the cup in her hands. "You know, I hunted you once. Years ago. Across the better part of Morocco."

His eyebrows went up. Then he grinned, delighted, and glanced at the man beside him. "Did you now?" He looked back at her. "Who with, then? MI6? No — too tidy for Six. Mossad? Too polite for Mossad. Not the Yanks, God, the Yanks couldn't find their own backside with both hands—" He stopped. "KGB? You were KGB."

Margaret sipped her tea. "You know how the oaths go," she said. "I couldn't possibly break one."

He barked a laugh, loud in the quiet clearing, and one or two of his people almost smiled with him.

"Fair," he said. "Fair enough. Right, let's get on with it, then — I'm not fool enough to think you're actually letting us walk. Should've known. Whole world frightened of the Count of the Landing, and it turns out the frightening one is the nan running his post office." He shook his head, almost fond. "Should've turned this one down."

"You should be glad my fiancé isn't here," Margaret said, mildly. "He takes this sort of thing most unkindly. This is a great deal gentler than his version would be."

She set the cup down.

"Now. Should you ever find yourself in want of better employers — a real network, real support, a Lord worth the name — do endeavor to work out how to reach me." She stood, and smoothed her coat. "We'll call that your audition."

She nodded to Caswell. Caswell nodded back.

Five weapons came down at once. The five of them were fast; they were blurs to her own senses. Faster than any ordinary man alive, and they came up off their seats trying to scatter, and it did not matter in the slightest. Nothing they had ever hunted moved the way a tier-two knight of the Landing moved, let alone a tier three. It was over between one breath and the next.

The clearing went quiet again, but for the fire and the small sound of Margaret picking her tea back up.

She drank it while it was still hot. One should never waste a good cup of tea.