A Kiss for Queens

He reached out to the fluttering birds around Ashton. His mind sought the spots where a few well-placed words might do the most, and corvids of all kinds came from the sky to croak them.

A raven landed near the commander of Ashton’s city watch at his command, black eyes staring up at him.

“Northerners on the river,” it croaked as the Master of Crows uttered the words. “Northerners on the river, disguised as merchants.”

He didn’t wait to watch the man’s shock as he tried to make sense of what was happening. Instead, the Master of Crows shifted his attention to a rook in the graveyard, having it land on a headstone near the would-be conspirators who planned to flee.

“Be brave,” his bird croaked. “You are watched.”

To balance it, he sent another bird to a man by one of the main walls, having it caw a premonition of death. He sowed courage and cowardice, gave truths and told lies, weaving them into a spell of known and half-known things.

Not all of the birds were successful. He sent a blackbird winging its way to Prince Rupert’s window, only to find it barred. He sent a crow winging out toward the ships that waited in the harbor, circling lower over Ishjemme’s flagship, only to find his attention caught by the sight of a young man looking up. The Master of Crows knew that young man. He was the one who had thrust a blade into him back in Ishjemme. He stared up at the bird now, and his hand went to his belt, coming up with a pistol almost inhumanly fast…

“Damn it all!” the Master of Crows snarled as he jerked his attention back from the bird just in time.

He left the invaders’ fleet alone. Instead, he focused his attention on the city, finding small things that might give men courage or take it, that might fuel their rage or make them careless. He had a magpie steal a wife’s wedding ring as she washed glasses, then drop it at the feet of the soldier she was married to. No doubt the man would spend the battle wondering why it was not on her finger, and if he should be home. He had a raven lift a lit candle, dropping it in a set of abandoned buildings where the flames would lick.

“Let them choose if they want to save their homes from invaders or from fire,” he said.

There were a hundred other birds about a hundred other errands, each one taking a flicker of power, but each one an investment in the chaos that would flow from it. Some spoke to soldiers, others to men and women he’d sent for this moment, who stood to tell stories of the horrors of Ishjemme to those who would listen, or suggested bloody rebellion against the Dowager’s line, or both.

The Master of Crows took a battle that should have been an easy victory for the invaders and wove it into something more complex, more dangerous, and more deadly.

By the time he came back to himself, he was smiling with what he had achieved. Men thought of the great workings of magic and they thought of symbols or ancient tomes, yet he had just worked something far greater, with far less. He looked around at his officers, still watching the crows pecking at the dead with dutiful expressions.

“The enemy will have their battle for Ashton tomorrow,” he said. “It will be a 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.