Assassin's Heart (Assassin's Heart, #1)(25)
“I apologize.”
He smiled. “It has been liberating. A nice change of pace. Sometimes, things can get boring.”
I yawned and regretted my lost rest. “What? At a monastery in the middle of the dead plains, surrounded by angry ghosts?”
“Yes, well. As you may have noticed, the ghosts aren’t very good conversationalists.”
He flicked the reins and we moved forward, leaving the monastery behind. “Where is it you’re headed?”
I paused. Faraday had only helped me. And he was a priest. Of course, I’d trusted Val, and look where that had ended.
But there was no point in lying, not if I wanted to reach my destination and find my uncle. He was the key to the Da Vias and my revenge. “Yvain,” I finally admitted.
“Then we’d better move a little faster.” He clucked his tongue and the horse sped up.
eleven
YVAIN WAS A CITY AS DIFFERENT FROM RAVENNA AS the dead plains monastery was from the palace in Genoni. Where Ravenna was a city of nightlife, masquerades, and carnivals, Yvain was tiny and quiet, more provincial, with fresh flowers in the window boxes of every house, and fragrant red mosses growing between the cobblestone streets.
I hated it immediately. There was no life to the people. No sea air and the sweet smell of the lantern oil. No fashion and pride in what they wore. In Yvain, the women didn’t even cover their hair, and beneath the cloying smell of the flowers, the warm stench of sewage from the canals drifted everywhere.
Walls divided the city from the dead plains, since Rennes was not a country that bowed to Safraella. Ghosts could not pass through walls, and the city walls kept the dead plains ghosts out, but anyone who died within the city, behind the walls, and became an angry ghost would be trapped inside the city with everyone else. So like the old days of Lovero, people stayed inside their homes once the sun set.
“Why doesn’t their regent simply bow to Safraella?” I complained as the wagon slowly made its way into town behind a line of people entering the city before the sun set.
Faraday shrugged. “It’s a question of geography. Lovero is pushed against the sea on the south and west, and bordered by the dead plains on the north and east. When the Sapienzas took the throne, the people supported a royal line that would bow to Safraella and free the country from the menace of the ghosts. But Yvain is the only city in Rennes pressed against the border of the dead plains. It’s more easily managed with the walls, and any ghosts inside Yvain can’t get farther into the country because of the canals. To the ghosts it’s a labyrinth of waterways.”
“It still seems it would be a good idea to follow Safraella.”
“The people of Yvain, and Rennes as a whole, find our devotion to a goddess who deals in death and murder to be macabre at best.” Faraday chuckled.
“She offers resurrection.”
“Yvain’s patron is Acacius, a minor god of crops and debts. It’s why they have flowers everywhere. And you will find honorable people here. If they accrue a debt, they will do anything to repay it. If they are devout, Acacius gives them their own version of eternal life, by making them one with the land and plants and animals.”
“I’m sorry,” I scoffed. “But I’d rather deal with blood and death and return as a person than water some pretty flowers and pay my debts and come back as a wheat field.”
“Well, you are biased. But for them, becoming part of the land is a form of immortality. They would rather try to live full lives here and now than be faced with death and murder only to be reborn and have to face it all over again. Acacius offers gardens and farms, trees and flowers. You will find little hunger in Rennes.”
We struggled to break free of the crowd, Faraday steering the wagon past the heavy gates of the city walls. He shifted in his seat. “You don’t have to go after the Da Vias, you know.”
I stiffened. I hadn’t told him my plan.
“Don’t be alarmed. It just seems your most likely course of action.” Faraday grinned. “But no one seems to realize you, Lea Saldana, survived the attack on your Family. Very few people get such a clean chance at starting over.”
I pushed my growing anger aside. “You’re suggesting I give up serving Safraella? You? Her disciple?” My whole life I’d been a clipper. If I gave it up now, no one would avenge my Family. Memories of the Saldanas would fade, until we’d simply become another of the lost Families. “Being a clipper is a calling.”
“Oh, I understand a calling. But can it truly be counted one if you’re born into it? Did your mother or father ever ask if you wanted to be something else?”
I snorted. “Who would give up a life of money and power and respect?”
“Those things are gone with the lives of your Family. Those things are fleeting, as you can see. Intangible.”
I looked away, scanning the faces of the crowd around us. They blended together until I didn’t truly see anyone. “I do not care for the turn of this conversation, Brother.”
Faraday held up a hand in surrender. “I apologize. I forget you are not of the church and unused to discussions of philosophy and faith. I spoke out of concern for a sister and that is all.”
“Whatever my plans are, they are well considered.” Find Marcello. Enlist his help. Kill the Da Vias before they realized I’d survived their attack. Simple.