Grave Mercy (His Fair Assassin #1)(2)
There is a loud crash as his half-empty tankard hits the wall behind me, sending a shower of ale into the room. He snarls and lunges, but something inside me will not — cannot — make this easy for him. I leap out of his reach.
But not far enough. I feel a tug, then hear a rip of cloth as he tears my thin, worn chemise.
Silence fills the loft — a silence so thick with shock that even his coarse breathing has stopped. I feel his eyes rake down my back, take in the ugly red welts and scars the poison left behind. I look over my shoulder to see his face has gone white as new cheese, his eyes wide. when our glances meet, he knows — knows— that he has been duped. He bellows then, a long, deep note of rage that holds equal parts fury and fear.
Then his rough hand cracks against my skull and sends me to my knees. The pain of hope dying is worse than his fists and boots.
When Guillo’s rage is spent, he reaches down and grabs me by the hair. “I will go for a real priest this time. He will burn you or drown you. Maybe both.” He drags me down the steps, my knees bumping painfully against each one. He continues dragging me through the kitchen, then shoves me into a small root cellar, slams the door, and locks it.
Bruised and possibly broken, I lie on the floor with my battered cheek pressed into the cool dirt. Unable to stop myself, I smile.
I have avoided the fate my father had planned for me. Surely it is I who has won, not he.
The sound of the bolt lifting jerks me awake. I shove myself to a sitting position and clutch the tattered remains of my chemise around me. when the door opens, I am stunned to see the hedge priest, the same small rabbit of a man who’d blessed our marriage only hours before. Guillo is not with him, and any moment that does not contain my father or Guillo is a happy one by my reckoning.
The priest looks over his shoulder, then motions for me to follow.
I rise to my feet, and the root cellar spins dizzily. I put a hand to the wall and wait for the feeling to pass. The priest motions again, more urgently. "We’ve not much time before he returns.”
His words clear my head as nothing else can. If he is acting without Guillo’s knowledge, then he is most assuredly helping me. “I’m coming.” I push away from the wall, step carefully over a sack of onions, and follow the hedge priest into the kitchen. It is dark; the only light comes from the banked embers in the hearth. I should wonder how the priest found me, why he is helping me, but I do not care. All I can think is that he is not Guillo and not my father. The rest does not matter.
He leads me to the back door, and in a day full of surprises, I find one more as I recognize the old herbwitch from our village hovering nearby. If I did not need to concentrate so hard on putting one foot in front of the other, I would ask her what she is doing here, but it is all I can do to stay upright and keep from falling on my face in the dirt.
As I step into the night, a sigh of relief escapes me. It is dark out, and darkness has always been my friend. A cart waits nearby. Touching me as little as possible, the hedge priest helps me into the back of it before hurrying around to the driver’s bench and climbing in. The priest glances over his shoulder at me, then averts his eyes as if he’s been burned. “There’s a blanket back there,” he mutters as he steers the nag out onto the cobbled lane. “Cover yourself.”
The unyielding wood of the cart presses painfully into my bruised bones, and the thin blanket scratches and reeks of donkey. even so, I wish they’d brought a second one for padding.
"Where are you taking me?”
“To the boat.”
A boat means water, and crossing water means I will be far from the reach of my father and Guillo and the Church.
"Where is this boat taking me?” I ask, but the priest says nothing. exhaustion overwhelms me. I do not have the strength to pluck answers from him like meager berries from a thorny bush. I lie down in the cart and give myself over to the horse’s jolting gait.
And so my journey across Brittany begins. I am smuggled like some forbidden cargo, hidden among turnips or in hay in the back of carts, awakened by furtive voices and fumbling hands as I am passed from hedge priest to herbwife, a hidden chain of those who live in accordance with the old saints and are determined to keep me from the Church. The hedge priests, with their awkward movements and musty, stale robes, are kind enough, but their fingers are unschooled in tenderness or compassion. It is the herbwitches I like most. Their chapped, raw hands are gentle as lamb’s wool, and the sharp, pungent smell of a hundred different herbs clings to them like a fragrant shadow. Often as not, they give me a tincture of poppy for my injuries, while the priests merely give me their sympathy, and some begrudgingly at that.
When I awake on what I reckon to be the fifth night of my journey, I smell the salty tang of the sea and remember the promise of a boat. I struggle to sit up, pleased to find my bruises pain me less and my ribs do not burn. we are passing through a small fishing village. I pull the blanket close against the chill and wonder what will happen next.
At the very edge of the village sits a stone church. It is to this that the latest hedge priest steers our cart and I am relieved to see the door bears the sacred anchor of Saint Mer, one of the old saints. The priest reins his horse to a stop. “Get out.”
I cannot tell if it is fatigue or disdain I hear in his voice, but either way, my journey is almost done, so I ignore it and clamber out of the cart, sure to keep the blanket clutched tight around me lest I offend his modesty.