Aurie set the basket down across the room from Alden’s bed. No, she reminded herself, Maud’s bed. She didn’t see them sitting at the table when she came in, didn’t hear Pierre’s greeting, didn’t see Maud, only set the basket down and went right back outside. Nothing would stop her from doing what she intended. Her eyes were on the fort, through its ferry gate and to the bridge on the other side.

  One of the Baron’s men with two other horses than the one he was riding came to the ferry at the same time she did. He leapt off his horse, shifting the other reins between his hands. He had a fair face beneath a scraggly beard and dirt.

  “Beautiful day,” he said with a nod to her as his horses crowded together. He was as out of breath as they were.

  Aurie looked up at the clear sky, then to him with a nodding, “It is.” She pointed to the horses, “Lose some friends along the way?”

  He chuckled. Must be about Maud’s age with that youthful smile. “Oh,” He pat one’s side and reached for another’s nose. That one didn’t seem interested in being petted. “Just in a hurry.”

  The ferryman tethered the rope with a toss and tugged the ferry to the boards they were standing on. Aurie ignored the ferryman’s expectantly opened palm and walked to the end that would reach the fort first. Behind her, the man led the horses onto the ferry.

  “No moving until toll paid,” the ferryman said with a distinctively Beronois accent.

  “I have post from Grande Prince Dietrich,” the horseman said.

  “And you, miss?”

  Aurie didn’t turn back to him, “I am Aurelie Clevlan. Bill it to the Grande Prince.”

  “Oh, well, in that case, you’re very welcome, Madame Clevlan.” And nothing further was said as the ferry was pulled across the lake to the fort.

  When the ferry knocked against the dock, Aurie stepped off with ease. She heard the horseman call out what a pleasure it was to meet her, but ignored it. She didn’t shift as she went through the wood archway of the gates. An axe leaning against the wall caught her eye. She grabbed it without missing a step.

  “Aurie?” Leta called from her stand. “Aurie!”

  Aurie didn’t stop. Her eyes were fixed on the bridge beyond the milling people, beyond the courtyard, beyond the opposite gate. The people were stepping around her, in front of her, always a breath away from her knocking into them. She didn’t slow her pace. She didn’t turn her eyes, shift her steps, only went forward.

  “Aurie, where are you going?” Leta hurried to catch up to her. “You finally come out and all you do is walk…”

  Aurie let the axe slide down her hand so the sharper edge pointed outward, ready. The people milling in the courtyard shifted before her as if she were parting them with only her unblinking gaze. Her nostrils were flaring, her lips were tight and lifted on one side in a snarl.

  The axe in her hand had the same kind of weight as the sword did in the dream.

  The other side of the bridge was the only part of the village that looked familiar. The only part that reminded her of what was taken from her. What had been her home. The pub on one side with the blacksmith’s forge beside it, Balthazar’s shop and home on the other. It wasn’t exactly as it was. Both had been flooded out and rebuilt, but they still had mostly the same look. Lucky them.

  “Is that Aurie?” She recognized one of Balor’s so-called friends from before with a flash of him carrying one of the pillars to crucify them on. Morin Greshon, the youngest of the former homesteaders of Talkro. The lake had swallowed his lands in whole. If she remembered correctly, the ferry follows his land’s border from one end to the other.

  “Balian! Balian! Aurie’s out and about! Look!” Another old and familiar voice. Her sister’s husband, Gregory.

  Her grip on the axe tightened. She kept from looking at him. He, too, had been there. His kick had landed her chest at least a dozen times along with Morin’s, along with Morin’s brother’s, along with every other man of this forsaken village. But she wasn’t here for them.

  They had already received their comeuppance.

  “Freider! Another,” Balian’s voice was the one that made her stop and turn.

  Unlike the others who were standing at the open window and on the covered front of the pub, he was hunched over his drink at the bar with his back to her.

  He only gave her a hesitant sideways glance over his shoulder and turned back to the filled stein Freider put in front of him. Aurie glared. The men watched.

  “Fine day for chopping wood, eh, Aurie?” Morin’s brother, Soran called. A flash of his fist striking her face and she gritted her teeth.

  She turned her back to their laughter. First, Balthazar.

  Aurie kicked the door into Balthazar’s shop and walked in to him shouting, “The plowing rivers do you thi…Aurie?”

  Balthazar barely took his hand from the bar before her axe came down on it with a split of the wood. He fell back into the wall behind him, stumbling.

  “What? You call Maud a whore to her face but not me?” Aurie growled as she pulled the axe free of his wooden bar to reveal that she had nearly split it in half.

  She swung it hard over her head and down again on the same spot. The blade nearly stuck to the thick of the wedge. “Tell me, Balthazar, what would it take for you to call me a whore?”

  She pulled the axe toward her. The bar between them fell open. Balthazar fumbled to get away from her, but she was faster. Her axe swing landed it in the frame of the doorway of his escape from her. He jumped back from her swing, landing on the ground in the corner of the bar and wall, a dozen tools and hooks flying over him. His face was twisted in fear as he cowered from her with his hands trying to block his bearded face.

  Aurie left the axe where it was. She straightened and looked around his shop. So many furs. Cured meats hanging from hooks. Corked bottles of oil. His shop was crowded, almost stifling with how much he had in it. She shook her head at it all.

  “Looks to me like you’ve been stealing,” Aurie smiled through her snarl. Her eyes blazed at him.

  “I have a permit! A permit! It’s there, I no been stealing!”

  “Oh,” Aurie tilted her head with furious excitement. “But you and I both know it was revoked by Draka.”

  She grabbed the axe from the wall with a hard yank that made him jump and pressed the blade to his neck.

  “The only reason,” she said through gritted teeth as she let the weight of the axe press into him, “I don’t kill you now is because you weren’t there the night they attacked us. But that was only because Bella begged you.”

  “Wha—what they did to you was wrong,” Balthazar raised his eyes to look at her even though his head was turned away from her. He was trembling. She could smell his fear. Truly smell it. “They should’ve never done that to one of our own. I said as much—I did.”

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Aurie tilted her head the other way as if she were still considering taking his head. She angled the handle upward so the axe blade scraped the side of his neck. “My daughter is no whore. Nor I. You will end that rumor. With blood, if need be.”

  She pulled the axe from him and let the wedge thud on the floor beside her. She leaned over so that her face was close to his, “You may not have been there, but you still wanted it to happen. Do you really believe that Draka doesn’t know? Know that you wanted him crucified, that you gave them the idea? That God Almighty wasn’t watching?”

  She saw her reflection in the whites of his widened eyes. She saw her own eyes glowing with blue light as they stared deep into his.

  His mouth gaped at her. He was shaking so much that the teeth at the back of his jaw were clattering.

  “I’m not allowed to kill you because your family is one of the only ones who never made offerings to the demons they call gods,” she snarled at him, close enough that she could bite his nose. “Because you’ve been granted mercy by Almighty’s command.” She let a pause linger. “For now.”

  She straightened and let the axe handle lean against her side so she could adjust her hair. With a huff, her snarl faded into a near expressionless gaze, she looked down at him. He was cowering like a child with his knees held close to him.

  “Draka knows. Not about you calling Maud and I whores, but about you wanting him murdered before, knows about you hunting without permits, knows about you overpricing your wares to anyone not from Talkro. In case you’re wondering, our God—the one and only true God—knows everything,” She shrugged, “You might want to see what you can do to not make Him change His mind.”

  Aurie left him there with a heft of the axe to her shoulder and stepped over all the remains of his bar that used to be where he made all of his transactions. She was confident he got the point. She quickened her pace once she stepped out his door and made her way across the road to the pub.

  The men jumpily parted as she rushed up to Balian, who was still hunched over his drink at the bar. She brought the blunt end of the axe wedge down on the hand he had resting on the bar top. He arched back with a roar, his other hand raised to swing at whoever he would turn to find. She grabbed his curly red hair in a fist and slammed his face hard into the bar top with a loud snap. His face launched the stein of beer that had been in the way across the bar to tumble between empty stools.

  A glare around the room was all it took to make the other men back away from her as she lifted Balian’s head and slammed it down again.

  In his ear, “You live on His land, you eat His food, you plowing breathe His air, and all I can do is taste the filth that you breathe out, knowing that. You were given mercy and you deserved none. Then you spit in His face after and think nothing of it.”

  “Wha—Aurie, what are you talking about?” Balian roared between pained whimpers.

  Preston, on the other side of Balian, started for her at the same time that Frieder moved. She brought the axe down so that its wedge stuck in the bar on the other side of Balian’s head, missing his ear by barely a hair. The handle pinned his face into the bar top. They backed away from her challenging glare.

  “All of you are guilty of murder if you weren’t so incompetent!” She jabbed a finger at every man in the bar. Bearing her teeth at Frieder, “Even you, for the want of it.” In Balian’s ear, though she was loud enough that the people outside, many of whom weren’t even in Talkro the last time she had been there, could hear, “Except you, Balian. You, even with Draka laying hands on us—saving our lives because of what you did—are still a murderer in the eyes of God.”

  Balian lifted his mangled hand to push himself away from the bar, to get his head from under the axe handle.

  Aurie pressed down on the handle with all her weight. She heard him shouting insults—whore among them—and waited until he stopped before relieving the pressure.

  In his ear, her voice as sing-song as Lilith’s once had been in her ear, when her throat was being slit, Aurie said so all could hear, “God destroyed the village for what you did. God took away your farms. God sank everything you had under the lake and washed it away. You’re alive because He commanded it.”

  Closer, into Balian’s ear so that only he could hear, “The only reason you’re alive.”

  Louder, she turned to the rest of them, “Of course, now you can fish, can’t you? Funny how that works, isn’t it? The Lord takes, and He gives. But being a fisherman is harder work, huh?”

  She put pressure on the axe handle, pinning Balian down, and turned back to everyone else. “Draka’s God did that.” To Balian, “Especially the mercy.”

  He whimpered. The others were frozen in disbelief. No one moved except Aurie, who looked into each of their eyes.

  “Draka provides you with houses, with livelihoods—I bet, somehow, he even is going to provide your daughters with dowries so they can marry real men and not the garbage you all have bred—and for what? For you to spit in his face and scheme and steal from him? For you to call his ward a whore behind his back?” She bounced a fist on the handle of the axe so that Balian squealed, growling through her teeth, “Did you forget she’s your niece?”

  “Make your point,” it was Preston who sent her a challenging glare. “No one cares. We lost everything that night. What did you lose because of us? That’s right, nothing. Now we slave every day for pennies while you and your—daughter live there all cozy like, under the blanket of a prince. I think we’ve been punished enough.”

  “Here, hear!” Everyone in the pub cheered in growls.

  Morin shook his head at her, “You want blood, fine. Get it from the boar. We’ve already been scraped of it on nets and pulleys.” More cheers. “And as for those houses, he can get plowed with them! My youngest ain’t stopped coughing for weeks from the storms. He might die because Charlotte and Senna can’t keep the house warm no matter what they do. He bloody had it built on pillars!”

  “Have the boy brought to you at sundown.” The voice thundered in her head.

  Aurie’s expression softened, “Bring Eli to my house at sundown.”

  “Why would I do anything you tell me?” Morin’s glare was fiercer than the rest, angrier. “Why would any of us do anything you want? You betrayed us for him.”

  Aurie raised a brow at him, “You mean our sovereign? You think that if Balor and I weren’t neighborly that he wouldn’t be our Prince? Better yet, Morin, or maybe one of you can answer me this—you think he would have stopped at the bridge that night and not cut you down? You have any idea what that man is capable of? Because I do.” She nodded toward Balian, saw that he was trying to get out from under the axe handle, and shook her head at him, “He does. Bare fisted, barefoot, with no armor, he beat Balian, Talkro’s champion fighter, nearly to death. Wasn’t Balian carrying a spear and shield when that happened?”

  They stammered, their faces reflecting the reminder their resurfacing memories gave them.

  “My God commands it,” Aurie said flatly. “Do it, do it not. I really don’t care. I’m not exactly excited,” her teeth clenched, “about having you in my home.”

  Aurie lifted the axe handle from over Balian in a swoop that loosened it from the bar top. She let the handle slide until her fingers were under the wedge end.

  Balian slowly lifted himself, “Your God? You a Cathol now?”

  Aurie shot him a wink, “You’re still alive. What do you think?” To the rest of them, with a heft of the axe onto her shoulder, “Your gods are the demons that killed my husband and son. If I see you making an offering to them, I will consider you one of them.” She tipped her head forward so that her hair fell over her face. She didn’t have to see her reflections in the windows or their eyes to know that the Holy Spirit had made her eyes blaze at them, “That won’t end well for you.”

  She stepped past them toward the door. With a half turn just as she was stepping out, she called over her shoulder with a malicious smile, “Though it would make me very happy. See you tonight, Morin. Bring the whole family. Be wonderful to share some tea with Charlotte again, I’ve missed her.”

  The end of the axe handle thumped the door frame and Aurie snapped her fingers at herself.

  “Almost forgot,” She leaned her cheek into the axe handle, “Balian, sweety, you’re on borrowed time. Consider this your little warning. You still have to ask to be forgiven. And, apparently, it isn’t for Balor or that night or whatever. It’s for someone else you murdered. The punishment for murder,” she shrugged her shoulders with a playful smile, “Will be incredibly fun for me.” Her expression softened nearly to tears, “But also terrible because we loved you. It’s time to let go of that pride of yours. You killed everything you had to be proud of.”

  She didn’t turn back again until she set the axe where she had grabbed it from and got back on the ferry to return home.