Free Terms of Surrender by Craig Schaefer Page A

three to one. You can’t stand against us all at once.”
    Nessa’s lips curled in an amused, lopsided smile.
    “I don’t plan to,” she said. “I’d prefer to hunt you one by one at my leisure. And
hunt I will
.”
    She snapped her fingers. A tiny spark, like the tail of a lightning bug, drifted from her fingertips. And as it simmered to the grass, Mari understood why Nessa had led her loyalists to stand at the far edge of the clearing.
    The ground erupted. Flames roared up, a burning wall five feet high slicing the glade in half. Through the fire Mari saw Fox jump away in sudden panic, his followers stumbling back.
    “I’ve been treating that strip of grass for two months, waiting for something like this, and she never even poked her head out of that tomb to see what I was doing.” Nessa’s nose wrinkled. She brandished her Cutting Knife. “
Inadequate leadership
. Watch my back while I carve us a door, Mari. We are
leaving
.”

Chapter Eleven
    In certain wealthier corners of Lerautia, the Holy City, stood rough wooden pylons about the height of a man. Citizens were welcome to tack up notes for their neighbors—at least, the ones who could read—such as reminders about local events and warnings of troublemakers and missing property. More daring wags sometimes took advantage of the pylons’ relative anonymity, posting scraps of vulgar doggerel.
    The seven pages that appeared on a pylon one cold morning, nailed up overnight in secret, were something entirely new. New enough to draw a crowd of onlookers who murmured and pointed and read bits aloud to their illiterate friends, spreading the word, until a red-faced militiaman shouldered his way through to see what the fuss was about.
    He tore down the pages, but copies had already appeared on four other pylons scattered across the city. And they were drawing crowds of their own.
    *     *     *
    Some days
, Cardinal Marcello Accorsi mused,
it’s better to be the kingmaker than the king
.
    From the way Carlo had been ranting, storming back and forth across the green-veined marble of his papal throne hall, this was definitely one of those days. Marcello watched quietly from the edge of the room, taking sanguine sips from a cup of red wine and measuring the situation.
    The tall double doors to the hall rattled open and two knights from the papal guard strode in, dragging a prisoner between them. Their ivory tabards and gleaming mail didn’t comfort Marcello a bit; he knew now that Carlo’s “knights” were nothing but mercenary killers, hired by Lodovico Marchetti to protect his investment in the new pope. The cardinal kept his head down and his ears open when they came around. He still hadn’t worked out Marchetti’s game, and that irked him. He only knew they both had a leash around the same man’s neck and if they pulled the wrong way, one of those leashes might snap. Or Carlo’s neck might.
    The prisoner squinted, his nose broken and one of his eyes swollen over like a rotten grapefruit. The knights forced him to his knees as Carlo approached.
    “Was it him?” he demanded.
    One of the knights handed Carlo a sheaf of papers.
    “We caught him red-handed, tacking these up to replace the ones that got torn down this morning. It took some convincing, but he led us back to his rented rooms. He had over two
dozen
copies. Every copy is perfect, down to the ink color. He didn’t do this alone; you’d need an entire team of scribes to pull this off.”
    Carlo stared down at him, imperious.
    “What is your name?”
    The prisoner lifted his head, spitting his answer through broken teeth. “Iago.”
    “Iago,” Carlo repeated. “Can you
read
, Iago?”
    “Aye.”
    Carlo paced, clutching the copies in his hand.
    “So you know what these letters say. What they
claim
.”
    “Aye.”
    Carlo stopped pacing. He turned, incredulous.
    “These letters call me a bastard. Ineligible for my rightful post as the Gardener’s emissary. Why would you spread lies