Queen of Swords
Page 3

They waited for the guide, ten minutes, twenty, and then Dieppe came back, sweat covered, trembling. Scott asked him a question in rapid French, and got a nod in answer.
“A child? Did you see an infant?”
“Non.” Sure of himself, of what he hadn’t seen.
For the first time tonight, Wyndham saw Scott hesitate. No doubt he had been hoping to find the woman and her child together. If there was a child.
Again he felt Hannah Scott’s gaze on him, as if she were reading his thoughts, and answering them.
It was an argument they had had too many times: whether or not the information they had about the woman’s condition was to be trusted. Scott believed it was true; Wyndham was doubtful. The old woman who had told them that the lady they were after was heavy with child might simply have been looking for more coin.
In a few minutes they would know. Scott sent some of the men around to the back, and gave them orders to wait for his signal.
Wyndham saw the room for a split second before the battle started. Tables cluttered with dice and cards and cups, a long bar on the far wall, and men who had been enjoying themselves. A dozen of them, dirtier and rougher than many, but still just men burned by sun and wind and erratic fortune.
The one man who concerned them most sat at a large table in the corner, his dark head thrown back in laughter. It had been more than a year since Wyndham had last seen the false priest, but he recognized Dégre. And on the other side of the room, sitting behind a small table with cards laid out before her, the woman. She was much changed, thinner and drawn and her eyes shadowed, burning with fever, or anger long held in check. Her belly was flat. If she had been with child, she was no longer.
It took less than a second to see all that, and then his rifle found its target and things happened very fast, and all at once.
There were very few things that Jennet Huntar could be sure of, but one of them was this: For as long as she lived, she would dream of palm trees. Spindle-fingered against topaz skies or storm clouds, dancing against bloody sunsets and bloodier sunrises, always beckoning: They would be with her forever. Right now she could look up and see them against the sky as the night leached away, if she just lifted her head.
But she was at work, and it was the work that kept her wits intact. She had a little table of her own, and two stools. On the table she dealt out her cards for anyone who could pay the price.
When there were few men interested in the cards she laid them out for herself.
The Hangman. The Tower. The Knave of Swords.
Tonight her steadiest, most devoted customer was drinking at the bar. He was called Moore, one of Thibodoux’s men off the Badger. When the old Irishman was here, he spent half his coin on drink, and the other half he gave to hear her read him the cards. The other men spent money on the women in the back rooms, but Moore was content to sit and look at what he could not have.
Tonight he waited until the moon had set and he was so full of liquor that he would fall off his chair if Jennet leaned forward to prod him with one finger. And yet he was not so drunk that he forgot what he wanted from her.
He sat with filthy fingers laced into his long, tobacco-stained beard. The low forehead was remarkable for its deep reddish color, set off by a thick twisting white scar in the shape of a cross. His mouth made a perfectly round circle in the middle of his beard, and his tongue flickered when he talked, snakelike.
“Tell me, Lady Jennet, when will I get me a good wife?”
It was the question he always asked.
Moore was no better and no worse than the other men who drifted through this place. Always hungry: for drink and release and excitement, for sleep, and beyond all those things, for advantage. Hungry and not particularly worried about how he came by what he needed.
“Not tonight, Mr. Moore. But perhaps sometime soon. Let us look.”
She took her time. Moore would not complain. It was mostly what he was paying for, the right to sit close enough to imagine the texture of the skin he could not see, would never see. She was the daughter and sister of an earl; surely her skin must be as soft and white as milk. Many of the men who came here would have delighted to quench their curiosity by taking her apart like a crab, cracking open what she tried to hold back. But she was Dégre’s pet creature, and they must keep their distance unless it was to sit across a table and hand over coin.
As long as he came no closer and kept his hands to himself, Jennet was content to take Moore’s money, and sometimes, when he had drunk enough, the one thing she really wanted from him.
“It’s been a good while since you last came to see us, Mr. Moore,” she said as she shuffled the cards, slowly, carefully. “A long voyage, then?”
He looked about himself nervously, one eyelid fluttering. Fear cut through the drunken fog. “Aye. Long enough, missus. Long enough.”
She had misjudged the timing, and put him on his guard.
The Three of Swords. The Six of Cups. The Moon.
His gaze shifted to the table in the far corner, where men sat bent over their game. The one he feared was not looking in this direction, but that meant nothing at all.
He’s got eyes in the back of his head, does Dégre.
She had heard men say such things too often to count. The man they called the Priest, or more rarely, Dégre—the man who owned this place and claimed the island itself—was a legend, a force as inevitable and ungovernable as the winds. None of the hard men who frequented L’Île de Lamantins would cross him.
Jennet had crossed him, and she lived still. Because in the year since she had begun traveling with him, she had come to understand the way his mind worked. She had planned very carefully, and moved fast when the time came, and she had succeeded. She was alive not because she had got the best of Dégre, but because he had plans for her that promised more satisfaction than a quick death dealt out in the anger of the moment.