Page 14 of Bitter Burn
“More than likely,” Melody concedes, “but what can you do about it, short of assassination?”
I don’t answer.
“Mark,” she says, irritated, like I’m a cat trying to lie down on her keyboard. “No.”
“I’m not planning on killing him. Yet.”
Another sigh. I think she knows that’s as good as she’s going to get from me. But waiting to kill Cashel is a practical decision, not an ethical one. Even I’m not good enough to strike at a Catholic cardinal in his own nest with no plan in place or support nearby. And I still don’t know how to stop Ys from rolling on despite his death, especially without knowing the identity of the Scales.
I thought I had?—
I thought I had longer to move one or two more pieces across the board, that’s all. A young man’s mistake, except I no longer have the excuse of being young.
“Tristan and Isolde are almost to Rome. I can’t have them tangled up in this, right in the middle of Cashel’s plans.” My free hand flexes at my side—a nervous habit I’ve never entirely been able to extirpate—and I shake it in irritation. I’m standing on the side of an empty French highway, staring at a bunch of dead trees and some pine trees that wish they were dead. “A saint in Morocco told me that Cashel plans to kill Isolde. But if Cashel thinks she’s useful to him still, then maybe he’ll spare her for the time being.” And the time being is good enough for me—long enough for me to make Isolde permanently safe.
“I’m not going to ask how you got a saint in Morocco to tell you anything.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“And I’m guessing you’re hoping you can leverage yourself as this usefulness somehow?”
“Yes.”
“She was told to kill you.”
“That’s right.”
“Are you willing to risk her trying again?”
My fingers find the scar at the base of my throat. I like the way it feels. A truer sign of her devotion than a ring on her finger or a collar around her neck. A testament in the flesh to what I’ve seen in her eyes. She could have killed me—easily, with my blessing and consent—and she didn’t.
“She won’t.”
“Okay, so you’re going to Rome, you’ll somehow…maneuver…Isolde into being useful to Cashel, and then after that? The florilegium?”
The florilegium is what Melody calls the meticulously assembled dossier and assorted documents on every member of Ys we can find. A florilegium is typically a medieval compilation of writings by Church fathers, a sort of Catholic anthology, but there is another meaning for the word: a collection of information and illustrations about flowers.
I rather like that idea. That Andrea and I are making a guidebook to all the poisonous, avaricious, and invasive flowers of the world.
“Yes, the florilegium. And Brittany Hill.”
“Oh, yes, the long-standing hunt for Brittany Hill. How’s that going?”
My silence is its own answer.
Melody tuts. “You realize when you punch a name out of someone, it’s bound to be a fake one, right?”
“Okay. Well. My options have been limited lately, so I don’t appreciate the judgmental tone.”
It’s technically true that the name Brittany Hill came after some persuasion, but I still think it’s genuine. The source I’d been persuading had been hired muscle of Filip Drobny’s—muscle that had been sloppily trained and not paid well enough for silence. Drobny—a Slovakian warlord who had an understandable, if annoying, vendetta against me—had been one of the power players on Ys’s weapons smuggling side until I killed him in Belgrade a couple months ago. And it probably goes without saying that the lower levels of any criminal organization aren’t generally filled with people known for their discipline or discretion…or courage…but that seemed to be especially true of Drobny’s little enterprise. It didn’t take much at all for Drobny’s man to tell me everything he knew, and with the desperation of someone who didn’t want to lose his molars for a boss who didn’t give a shit about him.
“My unexpected friend told me that Drobny knew if he found someone named Brittany Hill, he could exploit some vital weakness of Cashel’s,” I add. “You know at this point that I can’t ignore any information that might help me.”
“Your unexpected friend,” laughs Melody. “Okay, so you use the florilegium and the elusive Brittany Hill to bring down an invisible league of arms dealers and whoever else, and at the end of this, what? What happens to you and Lyonesse and your two cheating toys?”
I’ve never told Melody how I imagine the end of this playing out, because I know she won’t accept it. She doesn’t see sacrifice in the same terms I do—she thinks it’s stupid. I think sacrifice is stupid too, yet sometimes stupid is all we have.
I do tell her this: “My two toys would be happier together than they’d be with me. They’re well within their rights to hate me forever, you know.”
