Lost Covenant: A Widdershins Adventure Read Free

eaves, it ought to provide sufficient shadow to conceal Widdershins from any passersby.
    Well, it might provide sufficient shadow, anyway. That'd have to do.
    Back pressed into a corner beside the door, the young thief slid downward until she sat, legs crossed, staring out at the other tombs, at the snow, at everything and nothing at all.
    “Hello, William.”
    Unlike Widdershins's god, William de Laurent, archbishop of Chevareaux, declined to answer.
    “You probably didn't expect to see me again, did you?” she asked the mausoleum at her back. Her voice was fuzzy, almost but not quite echoing in the recessed doorway and then flattened by the snow-choked air. “Long ways between Davillon and Lourveaux, yes? Bit of a hike just for chat with…. Oh, this is stupid !”
    Olgun let loose a startled bleat—or the emotional equivalent of a bleat, which was rather like a sudden urge to think about sheep—as Widdershins shot to her feet, pressed her shoulder to the side of the alcove, and began to peer about for guards.
    “Because it's stupid,” she repeated, in answer to his unspoken but hardly unfelt question. “He's dead. He's been dead a year! I'm talking to a wall, Olgun. And a door. And possibly a stoop, although I'm not sure, because I've never been clear on the difference between a stoop and a porch. So maybe a porch.
    “Who I am not talking to is the only clergyman I ever met who was worth more than a mangy goat!”
    An image floated toward the surface of her mind, rippling into focus. An image she didn't care to see.
    “An old mangy goat!”
    Olgun wouldn't stop; for all her efforts, the vision insisted on crystallizing, and Shins had nowhere to turn.
    “An incontinent old mangy goat! An…Oh, figs…”
    Once more she slumped to the stoop—or porch—this time with her legs splayed out crookedly before her, the image of a curly haired blonde woman foremost in her thoughts.
    “Yes, I spoke to Genevieve a lot after she was gone. That was stupid, too.”
    It was petulant, and she knew it before Olgun could point it out, before the words were even out of her mouth. “I know, I know…” A long sigh, then, steaming in the cold. “It wasn't, was it? And she'd be cross with me for saying so. All right, well, we're here anyway, yes?”
    She scooted a bit, so that this time she might at least address the mausoleum directly.
    “Sorry about that, William. Haven't…really been myself recently.” She chuckled, soft and blatantly forced. “Guess the fact that I'm here proves that, yes? I mean, I'd never been out of sight of Davillon's walls when we met. Now…
    “Gods, how the hopping hens did I even get here? I didn't set out for Lourveaux. I just…walked. Didn't plan to come visit you; I decided to when I realized how close we were.”
    The back of her head rattled with what could only be called the clearing of a divine throat. Olgun's way, perhaps, of jogging her memory over the fact that it had been his suggestion, one that Shins had dismissed until she realized he wasn't about to give up.
    She, of course, acknowledged no such thing and kept speaking, voice growing as brittle as the slender icicles hanging overhead.
    “I had to get out. I had to, I…don't think you'd have been very proud of me, William. I messed things up. I tried to take care of everybody, I swear I did!” Her shoulders, indeed her whole body, had begun to shake, through no influence whatsoever of the winter chill. “But I let them all down. Robin, Renard…Oh, gods…Julien…”
    Whatever was about to break loose, whatever torrent of whitewater emotion might have overspilled the dam in that moment, for good or for ill, never had its chance. Her reverie, her fragility, shattered as though they, too, were stained glass, at the crunch of a footstep on the frost-covered stone behind her.
    A footstep belonging to someone that Olgun hadn't warned her about!

“Maurice?!”
    “Is this just how you normally greet people, Widdershins?” His