Thief's Covenant (A Widdershins Adventure) (12 page)

With a dismissive shrug—either the door would open or she'd pick the bloody lock—she rapped loudly on the heavy wood.

“We're closed!” came the immediate response. “Come back in about two hours!”

“Gen?” Widdershins called back. “Gen, it's me!”

A moment passed, then a moment more. Widdershins was just about to slink away in dejection when she heard the sound of a heavy lock—followed by a second, a third, and two deadbolts. The heavy portal swung ponderously inward.

“Hurry up before you're spotted!” Genevieve hissed. “If they see me letting someone in early, I'll
never
hear the end of it!”

Widdershins darted into the darkened room. The shutters stood firmly closed, the huge stone hearth bereft of flame. Only the lanterns burned merrily away, sucking greedily at their reservoirs of oil, but their light was sullen and cheerless, as though they, too, were drinking away their sorrows. In the maudlin illumination, even the white cross of Banin seemed gray and dour.

“Is it always this gloomy before you open?” Widdershins asked, her voice artificially light.

“It's usually worse, but I've sent the skulls and implements of torture out for cleaning.”

Widdershins blinked. “You're feeling better,” she observed, her tone almost accusatory.

Genevieve shrugged, and returned to stacking several bottles of her most popular spirits behind the bar, where they'd be well within easy reach come evening. “I suppose I am, at that,” the proprietor admitted blandly as she worked. “Who'd have thought it?”

Widdershins stepped to the bar, watching her friend work for a few moments. At which point Genevieve slammed down one of the bottles—Widdershins jumped at the sound—and spun to face her.

“Why haven't you been back to see me, Shins?” No anger, there, only the vague seeds of hurt. “After what happened, I really needed a friend.”

Widdershins swallowed, her throat suddenly tight as a noose. She looked down at the bar, shamefaced. “I thought you were upset at me,” she admitted, suddenly a berated child rather than the adult she strove to appear. “I didn't think you'd
want
to see me.”

She looked up at the touch of Genevieve's hand on her own, saw the blonde noblewoman smiling sadly. “Shins, I'm, um, not exactly an admirer of what you do. And the people you do it with scare the hell out of me. But you're still my best friend. Which,” she added with a sudden smirk, “may say more about me, or about this damned city, than it does about you, but there you have it.”

Widdershins forced herself to match her companion's own smile. “I'd say it just goes to prove how lucky you are.”

Genevieve snorted, returning to the bottles. Widdershins continued to watch her work, her mind a playful kitten pouncing briefly upon a dozen different thoughts.

Then, “I am glad you're here, Shins,” Genevieve said over her shoulder as she deftly stacked the glass carafes, “but I can't help wondering why.”

“Do I have to have a reason?” the thief asked her, her attention dragged back to the issue at hand.

“You said you thought I was angry at you. Why pick today to come here and risk being smote by my great and terrible wrath?”

Widdershins sighed. “I ran into some of those guys again.” Genevieve's widening eyes suggested that she needn't specify
which
guys she meant. “It's all right,” she added swiftly. “It'll be at least a few days before they're up to causing any trouble. And they can't even pin it on me, not for sure.”

“But they will anyway, you know.”

“Yeah,” the thief acknowledged. “They probably will. Anyway, it just made me think—about what happened, about what
could
happen. So…” A shallow shrug. “Here I am. Lucky you.”

“Uh-huh.” Genevieve reached out and poked her friend in the sternum. “Tell me another.”

“It's true!” Widdershins protested. “Also, ouch.”

“All right, it's true. But there's more. I'm a barkeep, Shins. I hear more half-truths every week than you've told in your life.”

“Well, uh, there is one thing…”

“It's always ‘one thing.'”

“I want you to come with me next week,” Widdershins confessed.

The other woman blinked. “With you? Where?”

“The procession. I was planning to go and watch the archbishop arrive.”

“Shins…”

“I'm not going to do anything! Honest, I'm not! I just want to see what all the fuss is about.”

“I see. And this is in no way a means of thumbing your nose at the guild? Basically chanting ‘I'm not touching him! I'm not touching him! Nyah, nyah!' and then running away like a little girl? Or maybe about seeing who's all gussied up in their finest to greet him, so you know who to rob after he's gone?”

Widdershins mumbled something unintelligible.

“I see,” Gen told her. “What'd we
just
learn about me and half-truths, Shins?”

“I'm not asking you to do anything wrong, or dangerous,” Widdershins insisted. “I just want some company.”

“Half the city's going to be there.”

Widdershins shrugged. “So all of a sudden you're uncomfortable with crowds? You own a tavern!”

“I prefer my crowds to be less…crowded.”

“You,” Widdershins said, rising, “don't get out enough. It makes perfect sense that you're my only friend. I'm a thief. I live in the shadows. I have no life. You, on the other hand, are a nobleman's daughter, even if he's not really all that noble, and you own a very popular tavern. So how come
you
don't have more friends?”

“I have lots of friends! There's Robin, for instance.”

“She works for you.”

“Well, how about Gerard?”

“Same as Robin. Employees don't count.”

“Ertrand Recharl!” Genevieve announced smugly.

Widdershins scoffed. “Ertrand's not a friend! He's a drunk who keeps trying to get under your skirts!”

“All right. Well, there's that fellow who always sits at the corner table over there, the one with the beaver-skin cloak. He's always fun to talk to.”

“If you don't know his name, Gen, you don't get to call him a friend. I'm pretty sure that's actually a rule, somewhere.”

“So what's your point with all this, other than chopping down my self-esteem like a fir tree?”

“My point, Gen, is that you don't get out often enough, and that the celebration tomorrow is the perfect place to start.”

Genevieve's eyelids lowered until they showed only thin crescents. “And you felt it necessary to point out that I should have more friends—besides you—as a way of convincing me to go to the celebration
with
you?”

The younger woman grinned widely. “You got it.”

“Widdershins, you have absolutely lost your mind. I couldn't think of a less logical argument if I sat down and worked at it.”

“Perfect! If it's not logical, you can't argue with it. I'll be at your place at noon.”

The door slammed, and she was gone.

Genevieve shook her head, bemused. There was a great deal to be done before opening. And as for next week…Well, she hated to disappoint her friend, but there was no help for it. She was absolutely, positively, not going to that stupid parade. Not a chance. No way. Under no circumstances. No.

“Isn't this fun?” Widdershins shouted happily. “I told you you should get out!”

Genevieve gritted her teeth and tried to think about something other than throttling Widdershins with her bare hands.

She still wasn't sure precisely how this had even happened. One moment she was flopped out blissfully in bed, sleeping off a hectic but profitable night of drink-filling and food-slinging at the Flippant Witch, without a care in the world, snugly cocooned against the late autumn chill.

The next, Widdershins was in her bedroom, having picked the bloody lock, and practically dancing with excitement, shouting at Genevieve to hurry up and get dressed. It was barely after noon—the depth of night, as far as the tavern keep was concerned. This was absolutely outrageous behavior, even from a close friend, and Gen resolved to berate the thief soundly, just as soon as she had a moment to fully wake up, to regain her equilibrium, to…

They were outside and halfway through the marketplace before Genevieve reassembled her scrambled wits sufficiently to speak. And by then, of course, it was far too late. Genevieve smiled a tight, closed-mouth smile, wondered briefly how Widdershins had managed to get her dressed (with most of the laces tied properly, even!), and then grudgingly went along.

A decision she now bitterly regretted as the inexorable press of the gathering crowds hurled the pair this way and that, two floating bottles on the seas of Davillon's populace. The crowd was a living thing, moving and even breathing as one. The sensation was unpleasantly akin to that of being swept away by a very loud and sweaty tide.

Speech was very nearly impossible: lean over, shout at the top of your lungs in your friend's ear, scream your throat as raw as if you'd gargled with glass shavings, and it was still necessary to repeat yourself two or four times before the object of your comment (which probably wasn't all that important anyway) wandered out of view.

It was hot, too. Not the heat of the day—it wasn't all that long until winter—but the heat of thousands of bodies, each pressed uncomfortably close in a macabre parody of intimacy. The miasma of perspiration and perfume was enough to fell an ox at thirty paces.

Sweating in unladylike rivulets, jostled by strangers, bruised in uncountable tender areas by the morass of accidental blows, Genevieve hunched her shoulders against the storm of sound and fury and struggled to imagine a worse sort of hell.

Widdershins, of course, seemed perfectly happy, but Widdershins was weird.

“Hey, Olgun!” Widdershins whispered, confident he could hear no matter what. “Isn't this neat?”

The god's reply felt vaguely patronizing. She felt very much like she'd just been told, in all maternal seriousness, “Yes, dear, it's very nice. Why don't you go play over there for a while?”

“You don't think this is impressive?” she asked incredulously, drawing a curious stare from a nearby merchant who, through some fluke of acoustics, heard her clearly. The flabby, pasty-faced widower, flattered that a young woman might look his way, had opened his mouth to reply when it finally dawned on him that the girl was talking to herself, not to him.

Lunatic.

Olgun, during this time, had expressed to Widdershins, in no uncertain emotions, that nothing humans did impressed him—present company excluded, of course—and that a larger concentration of clowns might make them funnier, but generally not any more awe-inspiring.

“Oh, so we're clowns, are we? Just put here for your amusement? A little different than the way the creation myth tells it, yes?”

Widdershins's private deity smiled an amused smile, and refused to emote any further on the topic.

The obstinate thief wasn't about to let the subject drop, but as she opened her mouth to shout some witty rejoinder at her little pocket god, she felt Genevieve's fingers clenching on her arm.

“What is it?” she asked, hoping her expression would be enough to carry her meaning, since the words almost certainly would not.

Genevieve, eyes wide with a contagious anticipation that she'd tried her damnedest to elude, pointed over the heads of the crowd toward the heavy, iron-bound gates that were Davillon's main ingress. Huge pennants slowly rose and unfurled to wave majestically over the nearby buildings. The Eternal Eye stared down from several banners, as though it could clearly see their every thought, and didn't much approve of a one of them.

The crowd surged ahead, prevented from becoming a stampede only by the lack of space to build momentum. Truth be told, it would be more accurate to say that the crowd
shuffled
forward, a glacier of clothes and flesh. Whispers, audible only because so many people repeated them, scampered through the ranks of the waiting masses.

“Did you see that?”

“The banners went up! He's here!”

“Here? He can't be here! It's but two hours past noon!”

“He's early! Did you hear? The archbishop's arriving early!”

And then the whispers were blown from the air like so much skeet by the blast of two dozen trumpets, announcing the arrival of His Eminence, the esteemed William de Laurent, archbishop of Chevareaux.