A Kiss for Queens. Морган Райс
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bloody one, with many dead on all sides.”
He couldn’t help a note of satisfaction at that. After all, he was the main reason that so many would die.
“When do we strike, my lord?” one of his fleet’s commanders asked. “Do you have orders for us?”
“You are eager to attack?” the Master of Crows asked.
“I am, my lord,” the man said. He pounded a fist into his palm. “I want to crush them for the humiliation they inflicted last time around.”
“Me too,” a general said. “I want them to know that the New Army is stronger.”
A chorus of assent followed, each man seeming to strive harder than the last to show how committed he was to making up for the failures of the assault on the Dowager’s kingdom. Maybe that was the point. Maybe each wanted to show that they could do better. Maybe they thought that their hides were at stake if they failed again.
They weren’t entirely wrong in that guess. Even so, the Master of Crows held up a hand for calm. “Be patient. Return to your men and your ships. Ensure that all is ready for an attack. I will tell you the moment for it.”
They left as a group, each hurrying to prepare. The Master of Crows let them go. For now, his attention was on the blood red of the sunset and what it portended. There would be blood aplenty in the morning, he had no doubt. Thanks to his creatures’ efforts, there would be carnage on a scale that would make Ashton’s river run red. His creatures would feast.
“And when they are done,” he said, “we will add what’s left to our empire.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The assassin who went by Rose waited for full dark before she rowed out toward the ships waiting in the harbor, her oars muffled by cloth in the rowlocks. It helped that the moon was bright, and that she’d always seen well in the dark when she needed to. It meant that she didn’t have to risk even a thief’s lantern. Even so, fear ran through her with every stroke, pushed down only with an effort.
“This will be fine,” she said. “You’ve done this a hundred times before.”
Perhaps not a hundred. Even the finest of her profession who ever lived had never killed so many. She was not some butcher’s cleaver, sent to cut down as many in a war as she could. She was a gardener’s knife, sheering only what was necessary from the stem.
“Half the soldiers there will have killed more than me,” she whispered, as if that justified it.
There was always fear as she did it. Fear of discovery. Fear that something would go wrong. Fear that she might acquire the kind of conscience that stopped her from doing what she was best at.
“Not so far,” Rose whispered.
Gently, she guided her boat through the waiting boats. She wasn’t surprised to hear a voice call out into the night.
“Oi, who goes down there? What are you up to?”
Rose saw a soldier leaning over the prow of a nearby ship, a bow in his hands. Perhaps someone stupid would have tried to row to safety, and gotten an arrow in their back for their trouble. Instead, she took a moment to think. Accents were a skill she’d taken the time to work on, so now Rose selected a suitable one, not Ishjemme itself, but the rougher burr of one of the islands between there and the kingdom’s coast. That was better. The soldiers from Ishjemme might know one another. They couldn’t expect to know all their allies.
“Getting ready for a battle, you idiot. What are you doing? Trying to wake up all of Ashton?”
“Aye, well, you could be anyone!” the soldier called out. “It could have been a boat full of the enemy, for all I knew.”
“Do I look like a boat full of the enemy?” Rose shot back. “Now, can I get on with delivering the reports I’m supposed to? I’ve been scouting that excuse for a city for hours now. Can’t even find the flagship.”
She saw the man point.
“Over there,” he said.
“Thanks.”
Rose was good at pretending to be people she wasn’t. Some thought that assassins should be people who could fight their way through an army, or fire an arrow from further than a man could see. She liked stories like that. It meant that they weren’t looking at the innocuous figure next to them who had just put something in their wine.
“No chance of doing that this time though,” she said to herself.
She wasn’t sure that Milady d’Angelica had understood what she was asking when she’d sent her to do this. Frankly, she doubted the noblewoman cared. Yet there was a big difference between poisoning some rival in Ashton and sneaking onto a ship in the middle of a battle fleet.
Especially one where those who led it were rumored to have magic.
That was the part that terrified her in all of this. How was someone supposed to slip aboard a ship when people could read the murderous thoughts in her heart? When they could sense her coming and probably send phantasms shrieking after her soul? It meant that her usual strategy of disguise and lying was out, for one thing.
“I should just row all the way to the continent,” Rose muttered. What kind of idiot put herself in the middle of a battle like this by choice? She kept going in the direction of the flagship, though, for three reasons.
One was that she was being paid well for this. Too well to ignore it. Another was that, whatever her skills with a knife and a poisoned dart, she suspected that Milady d’Angelica would be a dangerous enemy to have. The third… well, the third was simple:
She was good at this.
Rose stopped the small boat well short of the flagship, in the space where it was just one more shadow against the dark. Taking off her Ishjemme colors to reveal black clothes beneath, she slipped into the waters of the bay.
The cold leached heat from her body, while she tried not to think of all the filth that spilled from Ashton’s gutters into its river and then the sea. She ignored the idea of the other things that might be in the waters too, the sharks and other predators that would be gathering to scavenge in the wake of a battle. Maybe their presence would even be a good thing, disguising her murderous intent with their own to any prying minds.
Rose crept forward with silent strokes through the water, ducking her head whenever she thought someone might be glancing in her direction, ignoring the foul taste of the seawater. It seemed to take forever to get close to the flagship, the roll of it pushing out a faint wash that buffeted her as she closed on it.
Finally, her fingers found the wood of the hull, searching for handholds the way someone else might have clambered their way up a rock face. Rose moved slowly, determined not to make any sound, even trying to still her thoughts so that they would not give her away to any of those there with magic.
She raised her head up enough to see a watchman moving along the deck. She ducked down, listening to the rhythm of his steps, letting him pass. Still, she didn’t move. Instead, she waited until he passed twice more, learning the pattern of it. Someone more foolish might have rushed out onto the deck the first time, and been caught for it. Rose had learned when to be patient.
The third time the watcher went past, she slipped into his wake, a length of garroting wire dropping from her sleeve. The man was taller than her, but Rose was used to that. She had the wire around his throat in an instant, jerking it tight and driving her knee into his back to bring him down. There was no time for him to scream as the wire cut deep, only for a brief gasp to escape.
Rose dumped the guard’s body in the water, trying to do it as quietly as possible. It was a shame to have to kill someone who was not her target, but the man’s watch had too few spaces in it, too few gaps into which she might slip when the time came to make her escape. She put her garrote away. She would not be using it for what came next.
“Quietly now,” she whispered to herself as she scurried below decks.
She might not have the magic that those here were said to