The Bastard, page 11
25
It turned out that Ember wasn’t shy where it counted, and before I left, she pulled me into a back storeroom, behind a curtain. I leaned against her, pushing her onto a table crowded with bowls, cups, and various other utensils.
“You’re different than the other guys, Mordie,” she said, her mouth close to mine.
I smiled and touched that lock of hair that had fallen out of place. “How so?”
“I can sense things about people. You… listen better than most. And there’s intelligence behind your eyes.”
I laughed inwardly. It wasn’t exactly how I thought of myself. If I had been more intelligent to begin with, Rolf would have never bested me as he had. But I didn’t say that to Ember. She was in my arms, and I was pressed up against her willowy body. No way was I going to jeopardize anything with her in this moment. So I said, “I’m just a simple man. I don’t even have a last name.”
She laughed. “Normally, I would think that was a comment designed to get me to pity you, to get me into bed, but I think I believe you, Mordie. But what I said still stands. You are more than you seem. And it doesn’t matter to me that you don’t have a last name.” She leaned in and kissed me then, and her lips were soft and inviting.
I kissed her back, eagerly, thinking that she was a good surprise, as well. When we pulled away for air, Ember smiled and pushed her hips into mine. “I only have a moment…” She trailed off, leaving no doubt though about what she wanted. Her heart was beating so quickly I could feel it in my body. She shifted again and her hands went to my breeches, which she began loosening and pulling down.
Breathing heavily, with my own heart pounding away, I raised her skirts up to her hips, letting my fingers brush against the skin of her thighs. Then, I lifted her and sat her on the edge of the table, pushing the other items out of the way. A bowl fell off the other end and clattered to the floor, but neither one of us cared in that moment.
Stepping between her spread legs, I lifted her skirts all the way to her hips and pushed a thin undergarment aside. At the same time, she wrapped her hand around my shaft. She rubbed me against her entrance for a moment and then nodded. I slid into her carefully, not wanting to hurt her. But while Ember closed her eyes and seemed to be concentrating, when I was fully inside her, she smiled and looked at me.
“Only have a moment,” she said, urging me onward. “Jacob could come in at any time.
I didn’t need to be told again. I began moving inside her, thrusting against her while she wrapped her legs around my waist. The table was at a perfect height, and I leaned over her, bracing myself with my legs while increasing the pace.
And Ember seemed to be able to keep up with me, for very soon she was panting and moaning in a little breathy voice. I grinned as she gripped my arms in her strong hands and then leaned back to brace herself against the table.
“Harder, Mordie!” she said.
And I obliged. The table began to creak with the movement, but it held as she climaxed with a soundless cry. I watched her face tighten and her eyes close while I pounded harder into her for my own release.
It was exquisite and felt like an explosion. Maybe it was the location or the imminent danger of being caught, but I came with a wild, harsh grunt, holding onto her to steady my suddenly weak knees.
We took a moment to revel in our pleasure, and then, sadly, I had to let her go. After rearranging our clothing, Ember waited for me to exit, and then followed a minute later. Before leaving, I turned back to look at her. The woman was beautiful with her cheeks flushed and her hair messed up. She caught me looking and smiled before returning to her work. I left the tavern with a smile of my own, thinking that I really did like hot cocoa, but that it held nothing to the charms of its inventor.
26
Despite the flow of information from the various tavern girls, it was Samuel, the street urchin, who gave me the first piece of information I could really use.
I’d arranged to meet him at the edge of the market, behind the last row of tents before the more permanent stalls began. I waited for nearly an hour in a light drizzle, the hood of my coat over my head, and had just about decided he was not going to show when the furtive figure of the boy emerged from the shadows.
He sidled over, stood next to me, and began talking as if to someone else, never looking at me directly.
“Got something you might like to hear,” he said.
“Let’s have it,” I replied.
“Coin first,” he said, and held out his hand.
Without a word, I deposited a single silver piece in his hand, expecting him to make it disappear in the blink of an eye.
Instead, he simply kept his hand where it was. “It’s worth more than that,” he said.
I thought Samuel was either just trying his luck, or he really did have something good. Either way, he wouldn’t say another word unless I paid him his fee.
In the end, I had to laugh. I figured the boy to be no more than twelve. Even so, I couldn’t help but admire him. He was a born survivor and reminded me of myself at his age.
He even had a cheeky grin as I handed over another silver, which he clutched and snaked his hand away.
“If it’s something I already know, then you owe me,” I said.
“It ain’t,” he said, full of confidence.
“Well? What is it?”
But before he told me what he had learned, he first said something else.
“I was there, you know,” he said.
“What? Where?”
“At the gallows. On hanging day. That time when they strung you up.”
There was a peculiar tone in his voice that I couldn’t quite make out. At the same time, it seemed a surreal thing for Samuel to say. That day had, in a very real sense, marked the end of the life I’d led. The memories of it were clear my head, and decidedly unpleasant.
Yet, it hadn’t been the end after all, but rather the beginning of something different.
“Oh?” I said.
“Yeah,” he replied. He was silent for a time, as if chewing things over. “Did you do it?” he asked finally.
I knew what he was asking and felt the anger burning inside me. Of all the things that had happened that day, Rolf’s betrayal, the hanging itself, it was the King’s Justice’s words that stung the most.
The expectation that those words reflected what happened stung worse than the rope burn around my neck.
“What if I did?” I asked.
To my surprise, Samuel’s expression hardened. “Then I ain’t sure I want to tell you anything,” he said. “The way I figure it, most of us have it hard enough already, with people doing bad stuff to one another. Thieving is one thing. But I ain’t got no truck with those who hurt women. Raping and what not.”
I was liking the boy more with each passing moment. Even though he still wasn’t looking my way, I gave him a smile.
“Good for you,” I said. “And no, it wasn’t true. The reason I got caught at all was that I was trying to save her–a woman named Anwen–from others who would have hurt her.”
Then I grew serious. “That said, I was in part to blame. It was the woman you stole the coin pouch from, if you remember. I used it to start a conversation and led her into an ambush. The plan was to hold her just a short time and return her unharmed the moment we had our ransom.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “If even that crosses your line, then I understand. Keep your silver and be gone with you. But consider that if I hadn’t gone along with it, Rolf would have found someone else, and they might not have tried to act as I did.” I shrugged and spoke a disappointing truth. “They might even have chosen to join in.”
I lapsed into silence and waited for Samuel to respond. I knew I could have argued that his actions had also been part of the set up. And that if he was to hold me accountable for putting a woman in danger, then he should hold himself accountable also.
But I didn’t. Samuel was just a boy. And he wouldn’t have been involved at all if it weren’t for me.
After a moment, Samuel nodded. “I guess, if you’re telling me the truth, I can live with that.”
I wanted to tell him that he was doing it right, that it was good that he was already trying to define the type of life he would live. I knew that if I’d done the same at his age, then Rolf would never have been able to use me as he had.
In the end, I figured it was too complex a thought to convey and settled for something simpler, but one in which I hoped he would find meaning.
“You’re a good kid, Samuel. And you’re doing it right. Now, tell me. What have you found out?”
This time, the boy did turn toward me. He seemed almost excited to share what he’d learnt.
“I can’t say about Rolf or your friend Durstan. But your man Bryce? He has a pattern. Every Tuesday, maybe an hour from noon, he visits the dock master’s office. He’s got some sort of scam going where some of the smugglers don’t pay their docking fee. It keeps their names off the books or something, at the cost of a bribe. Bryce–he goes to collect it.”
It was just the type of information I needed.
“Every Tuesday?” I asked.
“An hour before noon. Like clockwork.”
Perfect, I thought.
I dipped into my coin pouch and handed over an extra silver. Samuel looked at me with surprise but took the unexpected offering without a word. I figured he would slink off back into the shadows, to continue his life as before, but it seemed he had something else he wanted to say.
I didn’t ask. Just painted a look of expectation on my face and waited.
Finally, it came out. “You ain’t the first person I know that got himself hanged,” he said. He seemed vaguely troubled as he spoke, as if he wasn’t quite sure what to think. “And part of me thought you deserved it. Because of you tripping me up in the mud. But I couldn’t watch as you bounced and jerked at the end of your rope. Couldn’t help but think it could as easily have been me there as you.”
He lapsed into silence. “And?” I asked.
“There’s been two hanging days since, and I ain’t been to either of them. Nor am I going to go again. They’re good pickings for a thief, as I figure you know. But I couldn’t bring myself to go to either one.”
There wasn’t much I could say to that, except to repeat what I’d already said.
“You’re a good kid, Samuel.”
27
The docks were full of people. Workers unloading cargo from the sailing ships that had made their way up the river. Passengers and sailors tasting dry land, perhaps for the first time in days, the latter as often as not heading swiftly away to enjoy whatever shore leave they had. Random townsfolk who had come down to the docks to view the large wooden boats in all their glory, and just to be part of the activity for a while.
And me.
I was loitering, doing my best to be part of the crowd, ostensibly watching the boats as they were unloaded. It was a typically drizzly morning, which meant I could hide my face beneath the hood of my coat, and for this I was grateful. I didn’t want anyone recognizing me before I was ready, and that included the man I was there to see. Rolf’s sidekick, and the man who had stomped on my face more than once.
Bryce.
Samuel had said he would be there at the docks to collect the dock master’s bribes, and that was good enough for me.
It went back to Rule Number Two—Know what you want.
I wanted Bryce dead.
Which led back to Rule Three—Make a fucking plan.
And so I had.
I was going to kill him. I had it all planned out in my head, and even now, I was running my thumb over the curved blade of the new, folded steel knife in my pocket, determined that it would be blooded long before this day was done.
I had played out the scene in my mind. Along with the dockworkers, sailors and the rest, there were too many random Blackcoats wandering about for me to attempt a public execution. This was just the first step in my quest for revenge, and that meant I had to get clean away.
My plan was simple. I would wait until Bryce had collected his coin, then follow him until we reached a likely spot. Only then would I reveal myself to him and let my blade go to work.
I was early. I knew it. And, despite everything, I was nervous. Of the three men who’d earned my ire, Bryce was the easiest target. Rolf carried an aura of power around with him the like of which few people possessed. Only Sir Lancelot, the King’s Blackcoat Captain, came close to Rolf’s physical presence, but even he might struggle against the younger man.
Rolf could be vicious, and he was stronger and quicker than he had any right to be. I knew I would be hard pressed to survive going one on one against him. Anyway, I didn’t have any information yet that I could use against him.
I didn’t have anything on Durstan, either, who was a different type completely. The biggest of the three by some measure, he was a brute, a monster. He looked powerful enough to break rocks with his bare hands and chew them into dust with his teeth.
In comparison, Bryce was more my own size, but wiry and mean. Judging by what I’d seen as he and Durstan worked to beat me half to death in the storage room, he could be nasty as well. All in all, he was dangerous in his own way.
Even so, I found myself almost grinning in anticipation as I kept an eye on the dock master’s office. I wouldn’t want to take Bryce on in a fair fight. But that was another lesson I had learned, courtesy of Rolf.
I had no intention of letting it be a fair fight. This wasn’t going to be some genteel competition with a referee judging the rules. Because now I made the rules. This was about me, getting revenge. And that was it.
Of course, I wanted to make sure Bryce knew it was me, and I wanted to rip his throat out.
That was it. Nothing fancy. Just get it done.
The fact that this would be the first time in my life I killed a man made no difference. This was the path I had chosen.
I was determined to see it through.
So I waited, watching the activity with Sir George perched on my shoulder, ignoring the drizzle and occasionally chirping his contentment at just being with me.
He wasn’t the only rat dragon in the area. The boat coming in seemed to be crawling with them, as did the docks. For some reason, most of the rat dragons seemed content to hop about as they scavenged for whatever tasty morsel they could find. They only flew for short distances, when a dockworker aimed a casual kick, or when fluttering across from the bow of a ship to land on the roof of one of the buildings.
Yet that didn’t mean they didn’t use their wings. They were flighty creatures, and seemed to be a heartbeat from being startled at all times. And when one or other found a prize that another valued, then there would be displays and hisses, little puffs of smoke, and even fights.
For the most part, the people on the docks ignored their antics, merely shooing the creatures away when they came too close. But for me, they helped in my waiting. Instead of losing myself completely to my seething anger at Bryce, I found myself enjoying the colorful antics.
And the rat dragons weren’t the only beasts of the dragon family about. A time or two, I saw a wyvern flying by overhead, and once I even caught the sinuous shape of a river serpent as it broke the surface of the water near the stern of a boat.
It was bluish green in color, and its girth was as thick as that of a horse. Likely, it would be three, four times my height in length. Hardly the biggest river serpent on record, but interesting enough to me.
I’d always felt a sort of affinity toward the wyverns and even the river serpents. A nameless feeling I couldn’t explain, but that felt comforting nonetheless.
I stepped toward the edge of the dock to see if I could get a better look. But that’s when I caught a first glimpse of my quarry.
It was Bryce. The wiry, hard-looking Blackcoat bore a satchel like mine. He was all by himself, just as Samuel had said, and as I watched, the river serpent forgotten, he entered the dock master’s office.
This was it.
“Are you ready for this?” I asked Sir George, but he just raised his head and looked me in the eye around the edge of my hood.
My free hand, the one that had been playing with the edge of my blade in my pocket, went to the amulet Meghan had given me, and I rubbed it for luck. Then, as nonchalantly as I could, I wandered over to the dock master’s office and waited, out of sight from the door, for the Bryce to re-emerge.
28
The first part of my plan worked perfectly. I fell into step behind Bryce as he left the dock master’s office and followed him casually as he strolled away.
Rolf’s henchman walked with a casual swagger and hummed tunelessly to himself as if he didn’t have a care in the world. I noted that since the last time we’d met, he had acquired one of the knob-ended clubs that so many of the Blackcoats and Graycoats seemed to favor.
And I could understand the appeal. I had one myself, although I hadn’t brought it along for this job. The dark, heavy wood had certainly made an impact when the Graycoat had smashed it into the back of my skull. I had no doubt that a man wielding such a weapon could do significant damage even against a man with a sword.
The clubs were just over half the height of a man and as thick as a wrist, and the knob on the end gave them heft. A single good swing would leave bruises at least, and broken bones weren’t out of the question.
And the club wasn’t Bryce’s only weapon. Like me, he also wore a sword at his waist, and he would likely have a collection of daggers as well.
All of which didn’t dissuade me in the least. It just meant I would have to use the element of surprise to negate all his weapons.
With my eyes boring a hole in the back of the Blackcoat’s head, and my teeth gritted in determination, I followed my target along the same network of alleys through which we had taken Anwen so many weeks earlier.
In the back of my mind, I thought it poetic that my first taste of revenge would be so close to the storage room where things had gone so badly. I could already taste my victory, and my heart beat quickly in anticipation.
It turned out that Ember wasn’t shy where it counted, and before I left, she pulled me into a back storeroom, behind a curtain. I leaned against her, pushing her onto a table crowded with bowls, cups, and various other utensils.
“You’re different than the other guys, Mordie,” she said, her mouth close to mine.
I smiled and touched that lock of hair that had fallen out of place. “How so?”
“I can sense things about people. You… listen better than most. And there’s intelligence behind your eyes.”
I laughed inwardly. It wasn’t exactly how I thought of myself. If I had been more intelligent to begin with, Rolf would have never bested me as he had. But I didn’t say that to Ember. She was in my arms, and I was pressed up against her willowy body. No way was I going to jeopardize anything with her in this moment. So I said, “I’m just a simple man. I don’t even have a last name.”
She laughed. “Normally, I would think that was a comment designed to get me to pity you, to get me into bed, but I think I believe you, Mordie. But what I said still stands. You are more than you seem. And it doesn’t matter to me that you don’t have a last name.” She leaned in and kissed me then, and her lips were soft and inviting.
I kissed her back, eagerly, thinking that she was a good surprise, as well. When we pulled away for air, Ember smiled and pushed her hips into mine. “I only have a moment…” She trailed off, leaving no doubt though about what she wanted. Her heart was beating so quickly I could feel it in my body. She shifted again and her hands went to my breeches, which she began loosening and pulling down.
Breathing heavily, with my own heart pounding away, I raised her skirts up to her hips, letting my fingers brush against the skin of her thighs. Then, I lifted her and sat her on the edge of the table, pushing the other items out of the way. A bowl fell off the other end and clattered to the floor, but neither one of us cared in that moment.
Stepping between her spread legs, I lifted her skirts all the way to her hips and pushed a thin undergarment aside. At the same time, she wrapped her hand around my shaft. She rubbed me against her entrance for a moment and then nodded. I slid into her carefully, not wanting to hurt her. But while Ember closed her eyes and seemed to be concentrating, when I was fully inside her, she smiled and looked at me.
“Only have a moment,” she said, urging me onward. “Jacob could come in at any time.
I didn’t need to be told again. I began moving inside her, thrusting against her while she wrapped her legs around my waist. The table was at a perfect height, and I leaned over her, bracing myself with my legs while increasing the pace.
And Ember seemed to be able to keep up with me, for very soon she was panting and moaning in a little breathy voice. I grinned as she gripped my arms in her strong hands and then leaned back to brace herself against the table.
“Harder, Mordie!” she said.
And I obliged. The table began to creak with the movement, but it held as she climaxed with a soundless cry. I watched her face tighten and her eyes close while I pounded harder into her for my own release.
It was exquisite and felt like an explosion. Maybe it was the location or the imminent danger of being caught, but I came with a wild, harsh grunt, holding onto her to steady my suddenly weak knees.
We took a moment to revel in our pleasure, and then, sadly, I had to let her go. After rearranging our clothing, Ember waited for me to exit, and then followed a minute later. Before leaving, I turned back to look at her. The woman was beautiful with her cheeks flushed and her hair messed up. She caught me looking and smiled before returning to her work. I left the tavern with a smile of my own, thinking that I really did like hot cocoa, but that it held nothing to the charms of its inventor.
26
Despite the flow of information from the various tavern girls, it was Samuel, the street urchin, who gave me the first piece of information I could really use.
I’d arranged to meet him at the edge of the market, behind the last row of tents before the more permanent stalls began. I waited for nearly an hour in a light drizzle, the hood of my coat over my head, and had just about decided he was not going to show when the furtive figure of the boy emerged from the shadows.
He sidled over, stood next to me, and began talking as if to someone else, never looking at me directly.
“Got something you might like to hear,” he said.
“Let’s have it,” I replied.
“Coin first,” he said, and held out his hand.
Without a word, I deposited a single silver piece in his hand, expecting him to make it disappear in the blink of an eye.
Instead, he simply kept his hand where it was. “It’s worth more than that,” he said.
I thought Samuel was either just trying his luck, or he really did have something good. Either way, he wouldn’t say another word unless I paid him his fee.
In the end, I had to laugh. I figured the boy to be no more than twelve. Even so, I couldn’t help but admire him. He was a born survivor and reminded me of myself at his age.
He even had a cheeky grin as I handed over another silver, which he clutched and snaked his hand away.
“If it’s something I already know, then you owe me,” I said.
“It ain’t,” he said, full of confidence.
“Well? What is it?”
But before he told me what he had learned, he first said something else.
“I was there, you know,” he said.
“What? Where?”
“At the gallows. On hanging day. That time when they strung you up.”
There was a peculiar tone in his voice that I couldn’t quite make out. At the same time, it seemed a surreal thing for Samuel to say. That day had, in a very real sense, marked the end of the life I’d led. The memories of it were clear my head, and decidedly unpleasant.
Yet, it hadn’t been the end after all, but rather the beginning of something different.
“Oh?” I said.
“Yeah,” he replied. He was silent for a time, as if chewing things over. “Did you do it?” he asked finally.
I knew what he was asking and felt the anger burning inside me. Of all the things that had happened that day, Rolf’s betrayal, the hanging itself, it was the King’s Justice’s words that stung the most.
The expectation that those words reflected what happened stung worse than the rope burn around my neck.
“What if I did?” I asked.
To my surprise, Samuel’s expression hardened. “Then I ain’t sure I want to tell you anything,” he said. “The way I figure it, most of us have it hard enough already, with people doing bad stuff to one another. Thieving is one thing. But I ain’t got no truck with those who hurt women. Raping and what not.”
I was liking the boy more with each passing moment. Even though he still wasn’t looking my way, I gave him a smile.
“Good for you,” I said. “And no, it wasn’t true. The reason I got caught at all was that I was trying to save her–a woman named Anwen–from others who would have hurt her.”
Then I grew serious. “That said, I was in part to blame. It was the woman you stole the coin pouch from, if you remember. I used it to start a conversation and led her into an ambush. The plan was to hold her just a short time and return her unharmed the moment we had our ransom.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “If even that crosses your line, then I understand. Keep your silver and be gone with you. But consider that if I hadn’t gone along with it, Rolf would have found someone else, and they might not have tried to act as I did.” I shrugged and spoke a disappointing truth. “They might even have chosen to join in.”
I lapsed into silence and waited for Samuel to respond. I knew I could have argued that his actions had also been part of the set up. And that if he was to hold me accountable for putting a woman in danger, then he should hold himself accountable also.
But I didn’t. Samuel was just a boy. And he wouldn’t have been involved at all if it weren’t for me.
After a moment, Samuel nodded. “I guess, if you’re telling me the truth, I can live with that.”
I wanted to tell him that he was doing it right, that it was good that he was already trying to define the type of life he would live. I knew that if I’d done the same at his age, then Rolf would never have been able to use me as he had.
In the end, I figured it was too complex a thought to convey and settled for something simpler, but one in which I hoped he would find meaning.
“You’re a good kid, Samuel. And you’re doing it right. Now, tell me. What have you found out?”
This time, the boy did turn toward me. He seemed almost excited to share what he’d learnt.
“I can’t say about Rolf or your friend Durstan. But your man Bryce? He has a pattern. Every Tuesday, maybe an hour from noon, he visits the dock master’s office. He’s got some sort of scam going where some of the smugglers don’t pay their docking fee. It keeps their names off the books or something, at the cost of a bribe. Bryce–he goes to collect it.”
It was just the type of information I needed.
“Every Tuesday?” I asked.
“An hour before noon. Like clockwork.”
Perfect, I thought.
I dipped into my coin pouch and handed over an extra silver. Samuel looked at me with surprise but took the unexpected offering without a word. I figured he would slink off back into the shadows, to continue his life as before, but it seemed he had something else he wanted to say.
I didn’t ask. Just painted a look of expectation on my face and waited.
Finally, it came out. “You ain’t the first person I know that got himself hanged,” he said. He seemed vaguely troubled as he spoke, as if he wasn’t quite sure what to think. “And part of me thought you deserved it. Because of you tripping me up in the mud. But I couldn’t watch as you bounced and jerked at the end of your rope. Couldn’t help but think it could as easily have been me there as you.”
He lapsed into silence. “And?” I asked.
“There’s been two hanging days since, and I ain’t been to either of them. Nor am I going to go again. They’re good pickings for a thief, as I figure you know. But I couldn’t bring myself to go to either one.”
There wasn’t much I could say to that, except to repeat what I’d already said.
“You’re a good kid, Samuel.”
27
The docks were full of people. Workers unloading cargo from the sailing ships that had made their way up the river. Passengers and sailors tasting dry land, perhaps for the first time in days, the latter as often as not heading swiftly away to enjoy whatever shore leave they had. Random townsfolk who had come down to the docks to view the large wooden boats in all their glory, and just to be part of the activity for a while.
And me.
I was loitering, doing my best to be part of the crowd, ostensibly watching the boats as they were unloaded. It was a typically drizzly morning, which meant I could hide my face beneath the hood of my coat, and for this I was grateful. I didn’t want anyone recognizing me before I was ready, and that included the man I was there to see. Rolf’s sidekick, and the man who had stomped on my face more than once.
Bryce.
Samuel had said he would be there at the docks to collect the dock master’s bribes, and that was good enough for me.
It went back to Rule Number Two—Know what you want.
I wanted Bryce dead.
Which led back to Rule Three—Make a fucking plan.
And so I had.
I was going to kill him. I had it all planned out in my head, and even now, I was running my thumb over the curved blade of the new, folded steel knife in my pocket, determined that it would be blooded long before this day was done.
I had played out the scene in my mind. Along with the dockworkers, sailors and the rest, there were too many random Blackcoats wandering about for me to attempt a public execution. This was just the first step in my quest for revenge, and that meant I had to get clean away.
My plan was simple. I would wait until Bryce had collected his coin, then follow him until we reached a likely spot. Only then would I reveal myself to him and let my blade go to work.
I was early. I knew it. And, despite everything, I was nervous. Of the three men who’d earned my ire, Bryce was the easiest target. Rolf carried an aura of power around with him the like of which few people possessed. Only Sir Lancelot, the King’s Blackcoat Captain, came close to Rolf’s physical presence, but even he might struggle against the younger man.
Rolf could be vicious, and he was stronger and quicker than he had any right to be. I knew I would be hard pressed to survive going one on one against him. Anyway, I didn’t have any information yet that I could use against him.
I didn’t have anything on Durstan, either, who was a different type completely. The biggest of the three by some measure, he was a brute, a monster. He looked powerful enough to break rocks with his bare hands and chew them into dust with his teeth.
In comparison, Bryce was more my own size, but wiry and mean. Judging by what I’d seen as he and Durstan worked to beat me half to death in the storage room, he could be nasty as well. All in all, he was dangerous in his own way.
Even so, I found myself almost grinning in anticipation as I kept an eye on the dock master’s office. I wouldn’t want to take Bryce on in a fair fight. But that was another lesson I had learned, courtesy of Rolf.
I had no intention of letting it be a fair fight. This wasn’t going to be some genteel competition with a referee judging the rules. Because now I made the rules. This was about me, getting revenge. And that was it.
Of course, I wanted to make sure Bryce knew it was me, and I wanted to rip his throat out.
That was it. Nothing fancy. Just get it done.
The fact that this would be the first time in my life I killed a man made no difference. This was the path I had chosen.
I was determined to see it through.
So I waited, watching the activity with Sir George perched on my shoulder, ignoring the drizzle and occasionally chirping his contentment at just being with me.
He wasn’t the only rat dragon in the area. The boat coming in seemed to be crawling with them, as did the docks. For some reason, most of the rat dragons seemed content to hop about as they scavenged for whatever tasty morsel they could find. They only flew for short distances, when a dockworker aimed a casual kick, or when fluttering across from the bow of a ship to land on the roof of one of the buildings.
Yet that didn’t mean they didn’t use their wings. They were flighty creatures, and seemed to be a heartbeat from being startled at all times. And when one or other found a prize that another valued, then there would be displays and hisses, little puffs of smoke, and even fights.
For the most part, the people on the docks ignored their antics, merely shooing the creatures away when they came too close. But for me, they helped in my waiting. Instead of losing myself completely to my seething anger at Bryce, I found myself enjoying the colorful antics.
And the rat dragons weren’t the only beasts of the dragon family about. A time or two, I saw a wyvern flying by overhead, and once I even caught the sinuous shape of a river serpent as it broke the surface of the water near the stern of a boat.
It was bluish green in color, and its girth was as thick as that of a horse. Likely, it would be three, four times my height in length. Hardly the biggest river serpent on record, but interesting enough to me.
I’d always felt a sort of affinity toward the wyverns and even the river serpents. A nameless feeling I couldn’t explain, but that felt comforting nonetheless.
I stepped toward the edge of the dock to see if I could get a better look. But that’s when I caught a first glimpse of my quarry.
It was Bryce. The wiry, hard-looking Blackcoat bore a satchel like mine. He was all by himself, just as Samuel had said, and as I watched, the river serpent forgotten, he entered the dock master’s office.
This was it.
“Are you ready for this?” I asked Sir George, but he just raised his head and looked me in the eye around the edge of my hood.
My free hand, the one that had been playing with the edge of my blade in my pocket, went to the amulet Meghan had given me, and I rubbed it for luck. Then, as nonchalantly as I could, I wandered over to the dock master’s office and waited, out of sight from the door, for the Bryce to re-emerge.
28
The first part of my plan worked perfectly. I fell into step behind Bryce as he left the dock master’s office and followed him casually as he strolled away.
Rolf’s henchman walked with a casual swagger and hummed tunelessly to himself as if he didn’t have a care in the world. I noted that since the last time we’d met, he had acquired one of the knob-ended clubs that so many of the Blackcoats and Graycoats seemed to favor.
And I could understand the appeal. I had one myself, although I hadn’t brought it along for this job. The dark, heavy wood had certainly made an impact when the Graycoat had smashed it into the back of my skull. I had no doubt that a man wielding such a weapon could do significant damage even against a man with a sword.
The clubs were just over half the height of a man and as thick as a wrist, and the knob on the end gave them heft. A single good swing would leave bruises at least, and broken bones weren’t out of the question.
And the club wasn’t Bryce’s only weapon. Like me, he also wore a sword at his waist, and he would likely have a collection of daggers as well.
All of which didn’t dissuade me in the least. It just meant I would have to use the element of surprise to negate all his weapons.
With my eyes boring a hole in the back of the Blackcoat’s head, and my teeth gritted in determination, I followed my target along the same network of alleys through which we had taken Anwen so many weeks earlier.
In the back of my mind, I thought it poetic that my first taste of revenge would be so close to the storage room where things had gone so badly. I could already taste my victory, and my heart beat quickly in anticipation.
