Free Cobweb Empire by Vera Nazarian

looking at Percy
directly.
    She nodded, not quite meeting the gaze of
his slate-blue eyes, and slowed down Betsy.
    The soldiers moved all around them, horses
were led off the road, and soon a fire-pit was fashioned out of
bits of twigs and frozen mossy earth underneath cleared snow.
    The girls scattered around the shrubbery to
answer calls of nature, and there was some friendly general
conversation, as the men-at-arms opened travel bags, and got out
the bread and cheese and leftover sausage. There was even a small
flagon of ale that started making rounds.
    Percy stood fiddling with Betsy’s feedbag
when she heard the Infanta’s measured soft voice behind her.
    “When you are done with your task, I would
speak with you, Percy,” said Claere Liguon, with unusual dignity,
standing upright with difficulty, one lily-white hand holding on to
the railing of the cart. At her side stood her death-shadow—a loyal
eternal sentinel, a faint human shape, billowing like a smoke-stack
of quivering darkness. . . .
    “Just a moment,” Percy mumbled, and turned
away, and continued handling the bag of grain, slowly, reluctantly,
then adjusting Betsy’s harness with dawdling movements.
    Vlau Fiomarre approached the Infanta from
behind.
    “Please . . .” he said in a
whisper, and reached out to place his hand on Claere’s slim
shoulder. His strong fingers dug into her skin, but her dead flesh
was unaware of the pain that she otherwise would have been feeling.
“Before you do this thing, I must speak with you. Come this
way!”
    The Infanta obeyed, or rather, was
maneuvered a few paces away, where they stood in relative privacy
near a tall hedge, while the campsite bustled around them in the
rising smoke from the cook fire.
    Vlau’s fingers were still upon her, holding
her shoulder in a vise.
    “What would you have me do or not do now,
Marquis?” she said, raising the gaze of her great eyes upon his
own. Her expression was blank, emotionless—truly dead now.
But her voice retained a tiny last vestige of life, as expressed
through a tone of bitterness and irony.
    He stared, his dark intense face leaning
over her, inches away. There was a rising fury there, barely
contained, as he observed this thing before him, this cold dead
thing that he himself had made . . . .
    Why did he bother with her now? What was it?
Was it not over now, everything, since the events of Death’s Keep?
Had it not been revealed that the Infanta was not the Cobweb Bride,
and hence had nothing left in the world to do, no reason to go on,
no damned purpose?
    She had sat down in the snow then, having
given up. And they had talked to her—Percy especially, had spoken
to her, words of encouragement and hope.
    While he—he, the murderer who had plunged
the accursed dagger into her poor fragile heart—he had no purpose
remaining to him also. Neither hate nor revenge for his family’s
foul maltreatment at the hands of her father the present
Emperor—none of it mattered any longer.
    “What would you have of me?” she repeated,
jerking him out of a dark madness, a momentary reverie of memory
and regret.
    “You cannot die!” he responded fiercely in a
near-whisper. “I cannot allow it!”
    Her eyes were impossible to describe.
    “I am dead already, Marquis. Enough! It is
too late to change it. And now, in the name of God, if there is any
honor left within you, you must allow me the only possible peace I
may yet have—oblivion.”
    “No—”
    “No indeed. We are done speaking!”
    And having uttered this, she forcefully
disengaged herself from his grip, then moved away with slightly
jerking movements, and retreated along the hedge in an even more
secluded spot, to await Percy.
    Percy was taking her time with Betsy, more
than usual, and overheard some of their pointed, strange
exchange.
    Lord, but she did not want to face the
Infanta, not for this . She just
couldn’t. . . .
    Percy braced herself, and turned around,
having tarried long enough.