Page 6 of The Fury She Holds
Talwyn stalked back to the table and took the pint Carrick had offered earlier, still untouched. She chugged the drink whole and plopped down with a belch.
“What did he want?” Carrick asked, a hint of irritation still in his voice.
“He wants me to marry him,” she said flatly and was promptly showered with ale as Sybil spit out the swig she had just taken.
“He proposed? Here? At the tavern?” Egan asked, incredulous.
“How romantic,” Sybil added while wiping spittle from her chin.
Tal took a cloth from Carrick’s outstretched hand and wiped her face. “And he wants me to attend the king’s masquerade ball as his guest.”
“A king’s ball? This is the first I’ve heard of it.” Rainier prided himself in learning information first. He wouldn’t take it lightly that he wasn’t already aware of the event.
Talwyn nodded. “The king ended his engagement, and the ball is to help him find a new one.”
“Ah yes, because every lady wants to be paraded around like a goat at an auction for some greedy royal to decide if she’s ripe enough to sink his cock into.” Sybil stole her brother’s drink and ignored the incredulous look he gave her.
Talwyn snorted. “I told him as much.”
“I wonder what motivated the king’s decision,” Rainier considered aloud. “But an invitation to the ball could be useful.”
“I’m not going. I refuse to be dragged around on his arm like some sort of prize he’s won. And accepting such an invitation would also mean accepting his proposal.”
“You don’t want to get off the streets, Tal?” Egan asked in a tone that often came off as timid. But where Rainier observed hissurroundings, Egan silently controlled his impulses. He was the perfect ghost during jobs, but when emotions ran high, he lost himself to his own demons.
His exact ability remained a mystery. Nevertheless, in a fight, Tal wanted him on their side. When she accepted their last member, Egan confided his fear that he would one day give in to the rage and never find his way out. She promised she’d never let that happen, but now she wondered if the boy, only eighteen, hoped to find a way out of life by the docks. If he never had to fight, would he never have to worry about losing himself?
“I would never be accepted by them. I have no delusions about what I am and do not have the self-control to hide it.” Her eyes softened at her young friend who nodded and sat back.
Talwyn sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. Her head felt like it had split in two. Using her elemental fury shouldn’t exhaust her the way it did lately, but she had been distracted with Pochette’s betrayal. She had always planned to end his life, and her crew ultimately decided this summer would be the time to do it. The docks needed someone in power who would help the poor, not steal from them. They worked painstakingly among the shadows to put themselves on top, but the added surprise of the mages disrupted their plans.
She remembered what Pochette said about her hair color bleeding through and set a mental reminder to get more elixir from the alchemist. She’d finished the last of the eye drops after returning from the Kiln, her eyes now the same deep brown as Carrick’s. She would need to have a not-so-friendly chat with the old man. The blasted mixes he’d been giving her lately washed out sooner and sooner with each application. She suspected he altered the formula to rob her of her coin.
Something else bothered her, nagging at the back of her mind, but every time she reached for it, the thought slipped away. Something Pochette had said needed to be addressed.They needed to return to the tunnels and make plans for the retribution. They’d anticipated Pochette’s men taking revenge, but she needed to go over the plans again, needed to be sure they accounted for every lackey, every hired servant, until they were sure they wouldn’t be caught unawares. The nagging thought tickled her mind again, and she focused on it; a whisp of a word reached her tongue.
“Fire!” A man burst into the tavern screaming the word. “They’ve burned the docks! All of Pochette’s is in flames!”
2
By morning, nothing but ash remained where any establishment associated with Pochette once stood. Every man under his employ was either missing or growing cold in the gutters. Talwyn and her group of misfits had spent the better part of the last eighteen hours picking through the rubble. They had no death toll, having found the countless bodies were blackened and mutilated beyond recognition. They’d seen more death in one night than the last hailfire outbreak.
Smoke burned her throat as she walked through the remains of Pochette’s gambling den to the rectangle that used to be his office. The scavengers already scoured the place, leaving nothing but cinders and footprints. A bloody, charcoal-coated hand poked out from under a blackened wooden beam. Tal stepped around it, noting it ended at the wrist. She nudged the burnt seat of a heavy desk chair with the toe of her soot-covered leather boot, not sure whether to be angry or relieved. If her friends had their way, she would have woken up this morning as the queen of the docks. Now, she was queen of nothing but ash.
A light breeze sent more dust and sparks swirling up around her and she covered her face to avoid breathing it in. Her eyes followed the dancing embers as they aimed for the clouds. A large weeping willow stood sentinel on a distant hill, mocking the current state of the docks. As children, she and Carrick would trek to the base of the tree and watch life continue below them, a king and queen on their earth-made throne. The tree would listen as they exchanged grand plans of the future, plans that never came to be.
Behind her, Carrick bent down to a frail old man sitting on the ground, his blistered hands held before him. Carrick offered his waterskin and pulled a jar from his pocket, applying the pink healing salve to the burns. Tal doubted the old man knew Carrick used half the week’s salary to buy it.
Exotically sweet spice carried downwind. Without looking, she asked Rainier, “Did they leave anything behind?”
“Nothing important. Andno oneeither.” Rainier, along with the rest of their crew, had gone searching through another of Pochette’s establishments. “They were thorough. Destroyed the ships and the distillery too.” Unlike the gambling dens and whore houses, the ownership of the ships and distillery, were not public knowledge. Rainier, however, had known about all of Pochette’s endeavors for years. The crew should have taken control over it all that morning.
“Damn. They could have at least left the ale.”
“They got Greggs.”
Tal spat. “Good riddance.” Greggs tracked everyone’s debts for Pochette and, while he never carried out punishment, he most certainly enjoyed watching. He also happened to be their link to Pochette’s empire. “I don’t care if he sold us information. Once we were in, he would have been disposed of too. Any sign of Duncan?”
Pochette’s muscle and right-hand man wanted to end Tal’s life in the most drawn out and sadistic of ways ever since she permanently disfigured his boss. Pochette had held him back partly due to the violent promise Tal had left him with. His fear of her wasn’t far off, but she didn’t so much have a plan in place as she simply didn’t need protection.
