Madness Everthorn's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Madness Everthorn read the name on the warning board before she read the warning. The board stood at the harbor gate, where every captain and porter passed at dawn. Someone had nailed a small painted apple to the wood beside the hazard notice. The apple was red with green veins, and she had not seen one like it in twenty years. The man who used to grow them was supposed to be dead. She had paid to make sure of it. She pulled the apple from the nail and walked inland without hurrying. Two lords still sat between her and the high throne of Everland. The eastern one was clever, and she meant to take him first, before he learned her face. She had spent three years in the capital under a borrowed name, buying clerks, placing cooks, mapping the eastern lord's routines. One loose tongue at the harbor could undo all of it. The apple in her pocket meant the tongue already had a shape and a memory. Her informant found her by the fountain at midday and told her where the rival held court. He sat each evening in the tavern across from the black-towered castle that loomed over the lower city, buying drinks for any dockhand or maid who had served her in the old country. He asked careful questions. He showed a second apple from his coat, smiled, and waited to see whose eyes changed. Two of her placed servants had already been seen at his table. Madness listened, paid the informant, and told him to invite the rival to a private supper in her name. She sent the painted apple back with the message, so the rival would know she had come herself. He came. He sat across from her in a rented room above a chandler's shop, set his apple on the table beside hers, and began to name the village they had both left. He did not finish the second sentence. She had coated the rim of his cup before he climbed the stairs. He reached for his throat, then for the knife at his belt, then for nothing. She took both apples from the table and dropped them into the fire. She burned his coat and the papers inside it. By the time the watch found the body, she was back in her rooms, writing the next week's orders for the eastern lord's kitchen. The harbor board still carried the nail. She would have it pulled down in the morning. The rival was gone, but two of her servants had sat at his table, and she did not yet know what either of them had said.