“Master General Ragna!” Sprenger bellowed.
Unlike everyone else in the monastery, Ragna did not immediately drop her prey at Sprenger’s command. Instead, her gaze simply shifted to him while she continued to hold the screaming man with both hands.
“Oh,” she said in that calm voice of hers, “Grand Master. I didn’t hear you come in.”
“Release him this instant!”
“Why, of course. He just startled me.” She released the monk and the second guard ran to his side.
“Take him to the healer,” Sprenger ordered.
“But, Grand Master—”
“I’ll be fine.”
His protection detail quickly left and Sprenger moved closer to Ragna. But not too close. He knew better.
“I wanted to talk to you about Gemma Smythe.”
“Ahhh, yes,” she said, scrubbing her skin raw. “The return of the great Gemma Smythe. I really never thought she’d show her face here again.”
“I want her executed but the elders do not agree with me.”
“Why not? It sounds good to me.”
“Excellent. So I can expect your support when the time comes?”
“Absolutely.”
“Good.” He turned to go.
“Of course . . . she hasn’t actually done anything to warrant execution. Thus—”
“Thus?”
“—I would never feel right about her being executed. Is there another route we can go? You know . . . to get your point across?”
Sprenger turned back. “Well . . . is she even part of our order anymore? She doesn’t wear her tunic. She travels with Amichai. She’s a princess now, you know.”
“All excellent points, Grand Master. And you’re absolutely right. She comes in here with her hoity-toity ways, forgetting she’s made a commitment to this monastery.”
“Yes. But how can we demonstrate that she has greatly disappointed us without actually taking off her head or burning her at the stake?”
“Good question. Good question.” They were silent for a moment while Ragna scrubbed and scrubbed, as if she was attempting to remove her skin completely. Finally, she said, “I have an idea. Maybe she needs to be stripped of her rank and tunic. Let her know that you, Grand Master Sprenger, are now in charge. Show her exactly who you are. And don’t let her forget it for one damn second. How does that sound?”
He grinned. “Why, Master General, that’s a perfect idea. How smart of you to think of it all on your own.”
She nodded. “Yes, I knew you’d like that.”
* * *
Ragna’s second-in-command popped up from her own horse’s stall, where she’d been checking her stallion’s legs.
“What in all the hells are you doing?” she asked, laughing.
Grabbing a long linen cloth and wrapping it around her body, Ragna stepped away from the water.
“A long time ago, someone once said to me, ‘It seems that your entire goal in life, Ragna, is to be nothing but the dark, unholy nightmare of man.’” She stopped the horse’s movement and unbuckled him from the water system so she could return him to his stall. “Perhaps it’s time I prove that belief correct.”
“Did your father say that to you?”
“No. It was my mother that time. She sobbed when she said it. I laughed, which she took rather personally. My father did once accuse me, though, of being the manifestation of true evil, which I felt was unnecessarily harsh.”
Ragna held the horse’s reins and asked, “Is everything ready?”
“Absolutely.” Bowing her head, Ragna’s second-in-command asked, “You sure it’s going to be tonight, Commander?”
“I’m positive. I feel it in my bones.” And her bones were never wrong. Not when it came to this sort of thing. “Make sure everyone is ready. We move on my orders. Understand?”
“Understood.”
“Tonight our god starts all this anew,” Ragna stated, leading the horse back to the safety of its stall. “And all we can do is announce his arrival with the blood of our brothers.”
CHAPTER 11
Gemma initially worried that Ragna would tell the elders about Kriegszorn. She still had no idea what had happened there. She had done nothing different with her spell to raise the dead. A short-term necromancer chant that should have worked for her as it had in the past: raising the freshly killed horse to do Gemma’s bidding, then twenty minutes later, releasing it to death. An hour or so after that, it would be nothing more than decrepit bones and decimated flesh. The spell had always gone that way and it continued so to this day.
Except for Kriegszorn.
The mare was the only one that had been unusual, but Gemma was positive she had done nothing different.
Except that . . . well, except that Kriegszorn had not been an enemy. She had been Gemma’s battle horse. As bound to her as one of her battle-cohorts.
Normally, Gemma would never have done such a thing as raise Kriegszorn, but she’d had little choice. They’d been in desperate straits. So she’d broken her own code and spoken the spell over the battle mare while tears had spilled from her eyes and her cohorts protected her back.
Could that be what made the difference? A broken heart and spilled tears?
It didn’t matter. If Sprenger found out, he would definitely use the mare’s existence to his advantage and have Gemma accused of witchery and unholy spell casting. And just the sight of the decaying but continually rejuvenating Kriegszorn might turn neutral monks firmly against Gemma.
But then Gemma remembered that in all this time, Ragna had not said one word about the horse to anyone but Joshua. Not even to Gemma’s battle-cohorts. Eventually she stopped worrying about Ragna revealing Kriegszorn’s existence and instead worried about her outing the centaurs. But that concern only lasted a few minutes. Ragna hadn’t seemed to care too much about them either. She’d simply sealed up the area where she kept Kriegszorn and made her way back to the monastery. She didn’t run back. She didn’t even look at any of the Amichais any differently. If she had any concerns, she didn’t show it.
And even after dismissing her main worries, Gemma couldn’t stop the feeling that something was amiss.
Which made the knock at her window late in the evening almost a relief.
Gemma opened the window and found Quinn hanging from a rope outside it. “I’m not even going to ask what you’re doing.”
“You should see something.”
She waited for him to climb back up and then followed him to the battlements on the monastery roof, where the rest of their group was waiting.
“There’s no one up here? No one keeping a lookout?” she asked. “Wait, you didn’t kill the lookouts, did you?”
Keran frowned. “Why are you looking at me?”
“You know why I’m looking at you.”
“There was no one here when I came up,” Quinn said. “Just needed some air. I find those tiny prison cells stifling.”
“They’re not prison cells.”
“Look around.”
“Look around at what?” Gemma asked.
“Everything.”
She did. Walking to one end of the battlements, she saw what had caught Quinn’s attention and what probably accounted for her having a hard time getting any sleep.
She gazed down at the amount of activity going on inside and outside the monastery walls. Everywhere, the monks were reinforcing what had stood for centuries.
Crossing the battlements, she watched the librarian monks—a special breed of fighting monks who would protect the monastery’s books and artifacts with their very lives—removing various items wrapped in plain white cloth. She wondered if those were weapons from the Chamber of Valor.
“Cyrus is coming,” she now realized.
“What?”
“Cyrus is coming. That’s why they’re taking out the artifacts. That’s what all this preparation is for.”
“Are you sure?”
“What else could it be?”
“Then why aren’t they leaving?”
Gemma shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Didn’t you say Sprenger has already accepted Beatrix’s help?”
“Yes, which means that if they’re leaving, they should just be heading off to her castle. I don’t know why they’re not.”
“Well, instead of standing around guessing, why don’t we simply go down and join in?” Laila asked, always the helpful one.
“No,” Gemma immediately replied.
“Why not?”
Gemma didn’t bother to answer. She simply pointed, and they all turned to see what she’d spotted moments before from the corner of her eye. Several monks waiting for her at the roof door to take her back inside to the grand master . . .
* * *
“What is the plan here?” Quinn asked as they all followed the silent monks down the stairs and through the barely lit passageways to wherever the grand master and the elders awaited them.
“Why do you sound so worried?”
“Because when it comes to this lowlife—that even I have to admit deserves a death of unmeasurable pain—you’re not the rational, calm Gemma I’ve come to respect and irritate. You’re more like your uncle Archie. Easily agitated and slightly hysterical.”
“I am not hysterical.”
“You are so hysterical. At least for you. And if that only meant you cried a lot, I would be okay with it. But you don’t cry. You’re not a crier. You are, instead, a crazy person who, like your uncle, does crazy things.”
“Such as?”
“That time you threw a fireball at your sister.”
“It was not a fireball. It was a slightly lit log from the firepit.”
“It set her clothes on fire.”
“Barely!”
“Could you two have this conversation later?” Laila asked softly. “I think you’re worrying the religious fanatics.”