The Skylighter (The Keepers' Chronicles Book 2) (5 page)

“You weren’t getting anywhere. All this ‘Tell me about Jacaré’ nonsense,” the man said, imitating Vibora’s pitch. “Good Goddess, no one cares if he waited five minutes or fifty years before he moved on. He’s here. He’s powerful. And he’s keeping us from capturing the heir and taking down the wall.”

A face appeared in Pira’s line of sight. He wasn’t particularly handsome, but like Vibora, there was something striking in his uneven features. Dark hair, darker than most Keepers’, was held down by a braided
cadarço
. He had a long nose that hooked to one side. His eyes were narrow, but even in the half-light she could tell they were a light color.

Under one arm he held an enormous rat and stroked its blood-mottled fur like it was a beloved tabby. A flash of silver ringed its tiny ankle. “Though I can see why you were asking.” He leaned closer to Pira and studied her. “She does bear a remarkable resemblance. Prettier, certainly.”

Vibora finished the healing and leaned back. “Why are you here?” She sounded weary, though the power she used had been stolen. “We were supposed to meet in Cruzamento.”

“You were
supposed
to trap the heir in Santiago. I was
supposed
to make sure she couldn’t escape. There weren’t
supposed
to be other Keepers in Santarem.” He dusted off a log before he sat down, spreading his tunic wide and crossing his ankles. “There are many, many things that were
supposed
to happen, and we failed on every count.”

“We’ve been searching for sixteen years. There was no guarantee we were going to find her now. Or ever.”

Barrata sighed, his whole body slumping dramatically. “Sapo will know we got close, and that’s just going to make him angry, and then I’m going to lose fingers and maybe some toes—”

“Enough,” Vibora snapped. “Sapo’s not going to injure either of us. He can’t do everything on his own.”

Pira’s head rang with blood loss, but she tried to hang on to consciousness and focus on their conversation.

Who’s Sapo? Why are they so afraid of him?

“He gets a little closer every day.”

“He loves me too much to hurt me.” Vibora raised a trembling hand to her throat, belying her claim.

Barrata laughed at her words. The laugh rolled, continuing on and on until tears dripped from the man’s chin. “He doesn’t love anything like he loves his ideas. What’s worse is that you’re continually making yourself inconsequential. Every time you give him a collar, every time you bring him a new slave, you are bringing yourself one step closer to your grave.” Barrata wiped away his tears with a flick.

“He’s had years to figure it out,” Vibora said, her posture small. “He hasn’t done it yet.”

“Why would he?” Barrata whistled and a horse trotted into the camp, its reins dangling on the ground. Four more riders followed it, with collars around their throats. They got to work setting up a tent and cooking a meal without a command. “You’ve always done all the hard work, and if you continue to help him, then he’ll have no need to keep you around. He will rule Santarem unimpeded, and once he has everyone here collared, he’ll move beyond the wall.”

Dom smacked away the advancing sword with a quick flick of his wrist. The owner grunted, threw his weapon down, and followed it to the ground.

“Michael,” Dom said with barely contained exasperation. “We’ve talked about this. You can’t quit every time I score a point. You’ll never learn anything if you keep giving up.”

The child’s behavior was understandable. With the days stretching on, and no sign of Johanna and no word from Rafi or the other search party, the eight-year-old’s bright personality had become overshadowed with despair. Dom had hoped that teaching Michael swordplay would serve as a distraction and give him something to do besides stew, pout, and watch for riders to come in—all things Dom would have done if the choice had been his.

“Do you want to quit?” Dom flicked Michael’s sword into the air and offered the wooden blade to the child. “Or do you want to show me that you’re not a big baby?”

“I am
not
a baby.” Michael lunged for the weapon, but Dom raised it above his head.

“You’re sure?”

“Give it to me,” the little boy said, his blue eyes narrowing. “And I’ll show you.”

The victory was small, but Dom warmed with the success.

After a few moments of sparring, sweat beaded Dom’s brow, but it wasn’t from fending off Michael’s wild attacks. Dom had retreated into a dark corner of his brain where he kept his own worries. The rumors coming out of Belem and Maringa were disturbing. Threats that Lord Belem was going to close his borders to Santiago, forbidding any trade, if Johanna wasn’t delivered to him. And then the continued civil upheaval in Inimigo’s home state.

Neither of those events surprised Dom too greatly—Belem had left Santiago under ugly circumstances, and Inimigo was practically a demon in the flesh. It was about time his people finally recognized their oppression and did something about it. What shocked Dom the most was that his mother had learned the information from her
spies
. She had a whole network of them.

His
mother
.

She apparently received reports daily, shared the information with Rafi, cultivated responses, and took action. Dom had never known, never even guessed. Learning about it now, even though he was only a figurehead, terrified him.

Were there other important things he didn’t know? If something happened, and he was actually left in control of Santiago, would he be fit to rule?

He knew the answer, and he didn’t like it.

The flat of a blade slapped against his knuckles.

“Hey!” Michael sounded more chipper than he had in days. “I got you!”

Dom forced a smile to his face and ruffled the boy’s blond curls, while mentally berating himself for his lack of attention.

“Lord Dom!” One of the guardsmen dressed in his on-duty gear, a boiled leather vest over a long cotton tunic and knee-high boots, jogged across the training ground. “Riders.” He eyed Michael and didn’t say another word.

“Take Michael to the kitchens, please.” Barbs of worry ran down Dom’s spine, leaving a hint of nausea in their wake. He handed the practice sword to the guardsman with a few mumbled words about a promised treat, but his mind had already moved on.

Someone’s dead. Someone’s dead. What’ll I do if it’s Rafi?

•  •  •

Dom rested his chin on his knuckles, trying to sort through the accumulating emotions. Fear, anger, and confusion stacked one after the other as Raul Ortiz, the estate’s weaponsmaster and the leader of the second party that had gone looking for Johanna and her family’s killers, reported what he’d found.

“The trail looped east around the marsh. At first I thought it would turn north along one of the smaller trails, but it continued in a circle till it headed back to Santiago.” He paced across the room that had always been Duke DeSilva’s office, hands clenched behind his back, sword whisking against his leg as he moved. He took four steps, then pivoted and took four more. “We came across the site of a bandit attack. We found several bodies. They each carried military-style weapons, but they didn’t wear a uniform from any particular state. After that the tracks were muddled, and they all seemed to turn south.”

He stopped in front of the cold hearth and pressed one hand against the mantel, seeming to gather strength from the stone. Lady DeSilva didn’t make note of the pause in his story. She faced the citrine-colored windows, watching the rain that was quickly turning the training ground into a muddy mess.

Raul continued. “We followed them and found signs of a second skirmish . . . and a large grave site.”

Dom lowered his head to the table.

“Is my son dead, Raul?” Lady DeSilva’s voice was low and cool, devoid of emotion, as it had been when she heard of her husband’s sudden death.

“We don’t know, my lady. The bodies were . . .” Raul trailed off, reliving the moment. “We dug and dug, but they were so far down. We unearthed only one. It was Snout.”

There was a swish of skirts and Dom felt the weight of a familiar hand between his shoulder blades. “So you’re saying that someone took the time to bury our dead?”

“Yes, my lady.”

“Bandits don’t bury their own, let alone their victims. Am I correct?”

Dom raised his head, feeling a crease from the table’s edge across his brow. His mother brushed the spot with her thumb.

“And I’m assuming you found tracks away from the site?”

Raul sagged with relief. “Yes, two sets. One going north; the other to the west.”

“Then as far as I’m concerned, my son is alive. And until we
know
otherwise, we will continue to operate under that assumption.” She rubbed Dom’s neck gently. “Only my son, bound to his honor, would continue such a hunt and leave his mother to worry.”

It was a positive way to look at things. There was no guarantee that Rafi was alive, but the knot of anxiety binding Dom’s lungs loosened.

Until his mother said, “While we wait for Rafi to return, we’ll prepare for war.”

Only lovers and troublemakers visited Camaçari’s turrets. The wooden watchtowers stretched above the stockade walls, crowning the city with eight pinnacles, and offered an unhindered view of the surrounding countryside.

Strands of tattered garland dangled between the barbicans, fluttering under the gentle rain as the peddler’s cart rolled through the guarded gate. Raucous music and laughter mixed with the smells of cooking food and moderately good ale.

Camaçari was a town famous for parties and gambling. It was a place people came to get lost and forget.

Without her training as a Storyspinner, Johanna would never have guessed that the walls, splattered with vibrant murals and lines of crass poetry, surrounded what had once been a major stronghold of the Ten Years’ War.

The bones were there, she supposed. The iron-wrapped gate, the guardhouses at both entrances, the soldiers who nodded to cart drivers as they passed. But otherwise, the people were loud, their laws lax, and their morality questionable.

To put it nicely, she couldn’t imagine why any DeSilva—except perhaps Dom—wouldn’t have straightened out such a crooked town long ago.

“You didn’t tell me we were coming to Camaçari.” Johanna and Rafi sat side by side in the peddler’s cart. It was nearly empty now that the peddler was done with his route, and there was enough room for them both. “I love it here.”

He wrinkled his nose as if he’d stepped in horse dung. “Why?”

“It’s a fun place to visit. There is a lot to do.”

“It has the highest level of poverty of all the townships under my control, and a resultant amount of crime. But the inns, gambling halls, and entertainment houses are incredibly lucrative.” He nodded to a man lying on the front porch of a pub, passed out drunk. “Underlord Ceara is . . . he has . . . a very different style of administration. We don’t see things the same way.”

Neither do we.

Two days with the peddler had worn away some of the friction between them, but it hadn’t smoothed out the ruts caused by their disagreement. Rafi hadn’t brought up their supposed betrothal again,
thank Mother Lua
, but he was clearly frustrated with her unwillingness to accept the future their fathers had laid out. And she was equally exasperated with his inability to see her as a person, instead of some uncompleted contract.

It forced a physical distance between them, making Johanna wonder if what she felt for Rafi—a sort of anxious longing—was what she
should
feel.

Since the kiss at the inn,
and oh what a kiss it had been
, and the argument that followed, their conversations had become strained, their interactions too polite. But then there were moments of awareness, when she caught him looking at her from across the fire or as they bedded down under the peddler’s cart, and she found it impossible to break his gaze.

There was something hungry in his eyes. The girlish part of her hoped that his interest went beyond duty, but the world-weary part of her feared it might be something else. Maybe that desire was an unspoken longing to take the throne, instead of reciprocated emotion? Did he look at her and see an avenue to power or a girl he could fall in love with?

“Are we headed to Ceara’s manor?” she asked as they bounced over a particularly bad pothole, which made them both wince. Rafi clamped his elbow against his wounded side. Johanna hadn’t seen the scrapes, but she could tell the injury was plaguing him more than he’d like her to believe.

“Not unannounced. We’ll have to stop at an inn first and clean up.” Rafi brushed at his now-dusty but still-hideous shirt. “And even if Ceara lets us in, he won’t necessarily welcome my company.”

Though Santiago seemed like a quiet, content state, there was apparently a great deal of subterfuge and maneuvering beneath the surface. Two of Rafi’s underlords had planned to send underlings to his naming ceremony, instead of coming in person. Not attending and swearing fealty was a blatant act of protest, a show of no confidence, and a personal slight. In the end, one underlord had been convinced to change his position, agreeing to support Rafi in return for someone from his township being appointed to the Merchants’ Guild.

The other underlord held to his opinion that Rafi was too young to be duke, and wanted to head a council of underlords to fill the seat until Rafi was deemed “mature” enough.

Johanna felt guilty for having judged Rafi so harshly, assuming he was quiet and aloof out of arrogance. The honor gifts he’d sent as part of his Punishment hadn’t been an attempt to buy her forgiveness; he’d been overwhelmed with all his other duties.

“We don’t have very much money left, but we’ll need new clothes before we approach Ceara,” he said, and plucked a leaf from Johanna’s dress. “I can’t go to his house looking like a beggar.”

“Wait . . . Ceara was the underlord who refused to stand for you. Wasn’t he?”

Rafi didn’t respond, but she could tell by the set of his jaw that she’d guessed correctly.