Chapter 1746: Unrecognizable (Part Two)
Chapter 1746: Unrecognizable (Part Two)
The servant’s passages through Lothian Manor felt like they didn’t belong to the same world Valeri Leufroy normally lived in.
Valeri had walked the bright halls above for thirty years and never once wondered what lay behind them. The low, soot-stained corridors were like hidden veins of a great beast, filled with servants carrying supplies and food to their destinations or removing filth from all corners of the manor.
Now, Valeri stumbled through them on a stranger’s arm, reeking of sour wine, and not one scullion or porter they passed spared him a second glance. He was nothing here. He was less than the laundry.
His mind, at least, was still his own, and it churned through the dark with a comforting heat. He catalogued his grievances the way a miser counts coin; the manservant’s insolence, the ruined finery, the silver hair curling black in Telent’s grate. He set a price against each one of them that he would draw when the Crown’s banners flew over Lothian again, and his ring was back on his hand.
Telent first, and Brighde too, for her part in all of this. Then the smug, unnamed servant whose fingers were even now bruising his arm. He wouldn’t spare the traitors within his own household either, he thought before he realized that they’d been walking much longer than they should have been, and the corridor had been empty of household staff for some time.
"This isn’t the way to the servant’s quarters," he muttered.
"Quiet," the nameless servant said, tightening his grip on Valeri’s arm.
They went down a short flight of worn steps, through a heavy door, and the air changed. It was colder and thick with the smell of leather, oil, and the pungent stench of men who all but lived in their armor.
Beyond the door, he heard laughter, the rattle of dice, and the long scrape of a whetstone against a blade longer than any kitchen knife. A barracks? Or some low guardroom set into the thickness of the outer wall, where the common soldiers of the manor garrison drank away their turn at watch rather than walking the walls above.
But then, since Ashlynn’s men had taken control of the walls, what were the surviving Lothian soldiers to do but drink and gamble their hours away?
Valeri balked at the threshold, and for the first time, warning bells that should have started ringing long ago resounded in his mind as he felt the jaws of a trap springing shut.
"Wait here, Leri," the servant murmured, before he propped him against the cold stone like a sack set down to be dealt with later. "Oi, can one of you lot watch over him? I need a word or two with your sergeant," the servant said.
"I’ve got him," a towering fellow with a nose that had clearly been broken more than once said as he stood up from a game of dice in the corner. "I’m all but out of snips anyway."
Any thought Valeri had of escaping from this trap died when the broken-nosed brawler placed himself between Valeri and the door, crossing his arms and glaring at the bald servant the way he’d look at a pile of dung he’d had the misfortune to step in.
Meanwhile, the servant who brought Valeri here crossed the room to a broad man with a sergeant’s knot at his shoulder, and from inside his coat he drew two things: a small bag that clinked faintly as it changed hands, and a tight roll of parchment. He bent close, and though he kept his voice low, the bare stone walls reflected every word of the conversation back to Valeri’s ears.
"This is the one," the servant said. "The one who was going to turn you in. Had a list, he did. Every man who stood watch on the dungeons while Lady Jocelynn was held there, and the cooks who made her food, too. Names and dates, all written out, and he meant to lay it in Lady Ashlynn’s own hand and collect a fat prize for naming the men who kept her sister caged and eating slop, even though it were what the Inquisitor ordered."
The sergeant scowled as he unrolled the parchment and squinted at it in the torchlight, and Valeri watched the slow furrow gather on the man’s brow.
"Half these men never went near the dungeon," the sergeant said as his frown deepened. "Donnel’s never pulled a watch down there in his life." His finger stopped near the bottom. His whole face changed. "This is my name. My name’s on here."
"Aye," the servant said softly. "Yours too."
And in that moment, with the wine roiling in his belly and his scalp bare to the cold, Valeri Leufroy understood the whole shape of the thing at once. Telent hadn’t just ’hidden him away’, he’d fleeced him of what secrets he could get and his signet ring besides, and then he’d sent him off to be murdered with a borrowed blade over a cheap lie.
Brighde, he thought, with a clarity that came far too late. It had never been Telent at all; the man’s stomach was far too weak for a scheme this violent. It had always been Brighde.
"It’s a lie," he heard himself say, and his voice came out cracked and slurred and small. "I wrote no list. I’m not..." he started to say, only to stop abruptly when a meaty fist the size of a ham hock slammed into his jaw with enough force for Valeri’s vision to swim while brilliant halos of light danced before his eyes.
"I did my part," the servant told the sergeant while the men in the barracks let loose with a low, ugly laugh at Valeri’s misfortune. "Told you I’d bring him here, drunk on Lord Bors’ wine and easy to handle," he said, as if he’d done these men some great favor.
"Mind, now, you can’t kill him," he added quickly. "A corpse means questions, and questions land on every man in this room," he said, pointing at the sergeant and then sweeping his arm wide to point at all the other men in the room.
"I know it," the sergeant said. "We won’t kill him, even if he deserves to die for tryin’ to sell us out. But a drunk servant who got above himself and had to be put out in the snow?" He asked rhetorically. "No one bothers to report on things like that. And if he can’t survive in the cold? Well, that’s hardly our fault, now, is it?"
"Just keep him here till the gates are opened, and I’ll come to throw him out," the servant promised. "Cause trouble in the kitchens, get expelled from the kitchens, as it should be. Just lend me a lad or two if he struggles or causes trouble."
"Oh, don’t worry," the sergeant said, cracking his knuckles and waving his men over. "We’ll make sure he causes no trouble..."
"You hear that?" the servant said to the dazed baron as he struggled to recover from the guardsman’s blow. "Don’t cause any trouble, and I’ll be back for you when the gates open," he promised. "Because if you cause these men any trouble, even your own mother might not recognize what’s left of your handsome face..."
"So that’s what it is," Valeri muttered, tasting his own blood on his split lip for the first time in many years. "Until I can’t be recognized," he said as a hysterical laugh burbled up within his belly.
The laughing continued when the first fist fell, slamming into his gut and driving the air from his lungs, and the laughter only grew louder when the guardsmen started grabbing at his stained, smelly tunic, fighting for the right to pummel the ’traitor’ next.
Reflexively, he brought his arms up to shield his face, but the reprieve it bought him only lasted until the burly man seized one of his wrists, twisting it around and all but wrenching Valeri’s arm out of its socket while another man grabbed the opposite arm, pinning it against the cold stone wall with strength that belonged to soldiers decades younger than Valeri himself.
"Keep laughing, traitor," the sergeant spat as he slammed a fist into the center of Valeri’s chest. "Let’s see how long you can keep it up."
"Traitor," Valeri spat, following the word with even more hysterical laughter. Here, in the barracks that housed Bors Lothian’s own soldiers, the very soldiers that Valeri might have led to battle in the next war now called him a traitor....
It was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.