‘You are free with your advice, warlock. Whom then do you propose?’
‘Why, the one who would lose the most, milady, is surely the one who would fight the hardest.’
After a moment, Jureg spat.
Degalla stared at Resh in disbelief.
‘But then,’ Resh continued in a drawl, ‘Draconus is not well liked among the highborn, is he? Despite his fame as a commander and his prowess on the field of battle. Despite the zeal with which he would apply himself to the cause of maintaining things as they are. Despite his incorruptible nature. Alas, the poor man’s crime is being loved by your goddess—’
‘If loved then she would have married him!’
‘Oh? And that would sit well with you?’
Degalla said nothing.
His voice a rasp, Jureg said, ‘I trust you are eager to be on your way. Give our regards to the painted floor, warlock.’
Receiving the dismissal with indifference, the three set off once more, and soon vanished round a bend in the track.
‘He was baiting you—’
‘I know what he was doing!’
‘Something about the assassin …’
‘Never mind him,’ she said.
‘Wife?’
‘The woman, the Warden.’
‘What of her?’
‘Perhaps it was but a trick of the light, but for an instant there, I could swear she was wearing a circlet of gold. A crown.’
‘I saw nothing like that.’
After a long moment, Degalla shook her head. ‘Of course not. You are right.’
‘Still,’ Jureg said in a low murmur, ‘I cannot but wonder …’
‘What now, husband?’
‘If Caplo could indeed hear Manalle and Hedeg, from so far away … perhaps we must assume he has heard us just now, as well.’
She glared at him.
* * *
‘Why did you speak so of Draconus?’ Finarra Stone demanded, once they were well beyond the two highborn.
Resh shrugged. ‘They irritated me.’
‘So you sent a viper into their snug bed. Does being petty please you?’
‘Sometimes,’ he admitted.
Caplo surprised her by speaking. ‘I was once a man with few doubts, Warden. Until the day I looked into Father Skelenal’s eyes, and saw in them a truth I could not countenance. Our god has been slain, but in the time before that death – in the decade upon decade of service and worship – that old man was a monster in our midst. We knew it, and yet we did nothing. In his eyes, Warden, I saw us all reflected, and liked it not.’
‘I am not aware of anything monstrous,’ Finarra said, ‘but then, why would I be? Yours is a secretive temple.’
‘Secretive, yes. Curious, isn’t it, how that habit so quickly devours propriety, decency, integrity, and indeed love. Beware any congress, Warden, that indulges in secrecy – you can be certain that it does not have your interests in mind, nor will it accord you the proper respect as befits the innocent, or, as they might label you, the ignorant. The secretive mind starts at every shadow, for it has peopled its world with suspicion.’
‘You describe a poisonous pit, Caplo, one in which I have no desire to dwell.’
‘Such a congress assembles a world in which assassins are necessary,’ Caplo said. ‘Such a congress may speak and act in the name of justice, but in justice it does not believe. Its only faith lies in efficacy, and the illusion of control it offers.’
‘In your world, then,’ said Finarra, ‘hope is fruitless.’
‘Not at all, Warden. That fruit is well fermented, and given freely to the uninitiated, until drunks stagger down every street, sleep in every alley. Hope is the wine, forgetfulness the reward. We will pour it down your throats from the moment of your birth, until the instant of your blessed death.’
‘You propose an end to secrecy, Caplo Dreem?’
‘I have the eyes to pierce every shadow. The ears to track every footfall. I have the claws to carve out the hidden-away, huddling in their hidden places. But imagine, Warden, my bitter gift, and its grisly promise. Exposure. Revelation. The insipid laid bare, the liars dragged out into day’s light, all the venal creatures who so thrive with their secrets.’
Warlock Resh sighed, loudly. ‘He goes on like this, Finarra Stone. Promises of … something cataclysmic.’
She grunted. ‘I’ve seen the same promise countless times, warlock, in the eyes of the fort’s mouser.’
There was a pause, and then Resh laughed.
Scowling, Caplo made much of drawing his hood back up, once more hiding his face.
* * *
There had been a child filled with laughter, and though she possessed her name, Lahanis recalled little of that strange – and strangely frail – creature who had dwelt so blissfully among the Borderswords. It was a memory that dwelt in summer meadows, or racing beneath the shadows of massive trees, with insects buzzing in and out of startling sunlight, and the sound of a warm wind through leaves. Boys had chased her, but she was quicker than any of them, cleverer besides. Though young, perhaps impossibly so, she had made a game of their desires, and found it easy to mock their confusion, their troubled urges for something more. The awakening of mysteries must have haunted her as well, she suspected, but she had no recollection of that. Every scene pulled from the past found that laughing child at the centre of a web, in command of everything, but understanding nothing.
The girl, with her piping laughter, belonged in a world of delusion, not yet spun dangerous, not yet tangled and treacherous. The seasons fought wars in her memory, but each time, echoed by the shrill peal of the girl’s voice, summer emerged triumphant, filling the world left behind with scented air on soft breezes and stubborn flowers disdainful of spring’s bright but brief glory.
Laughter was lost now, and Lahanis could think of it only as a child’s toy, dropped on to the ground, forgotten amidst the tufts of yellowed grasses that rose unevenly above the snow like broken baskets. Summer too was dead, its death-cry fading on cold winds, its funeral made into its own season of leaves falling like ashes. And the child who had known both laughter and summer, who had dwelt in that lively, colour-splashed world, well, somewhere her bones hid beneath the glittering skin and lifeless muscle of ice and snow.
This new child belonged to winter, finding her voice in the rasp of knife-blades against a whetstone, drawn to the momentary heat of spilled blood and cut-open bodies, last breaths slipping out in thin white streams, and all the stains that fear and pain made in scuffed snow.
She cared little for Glyph and his reasons for this new war. She was indifferent to the bitter grief of the hunters, and their anguish at discovering that no amount of murder could fill the emptiness inside them. For Lahanis, it was enough that killing was taking place; enough that summer’s green forest was transformed into winter’s hunting ground, and she was free of the webs of the past.
For all that, and her habit of avoiding the priest with the scarred face, she had felt the man’s attention drawn to her, like threads sent out to ensnare her, and this made Lahanis uneasy. There were many kinds of hunting, she now understood, and one of them was intent, born of focus or even obsession. It bore the face of a boy grown past his confusion, with the lure of mystery beckoning, where all games vanished and suddenly everything was in earnest. Even the laughing Lahanis, in those lying summers, had known enough to be wary of such boys among the pack pursuing her.
But she did not think the priest desired her in that way. There was something broken in his study of her, something too weak to be calculating. Still, a part of him circled her in the camp, and again and again a glance would find their eyes meeting.
When he rose in the depth of night, with the air cold enough to bite the lungs, and walked out beyond the clearing, to stand beneath skeletal trees blackened with soot, Lahanis edged out from under her furs, her knives in her hands.
Priests did not belong in war. They had a way of reminding killers that their livi
ng was a crime, an abomination, that the world created by blood and fury was itself an act of madness. And though the priest might bless, though the priest might proclaim for his or her own side a certain righteousness beneath the eyes of their god, surely such claims crumbled to war’s incessant blows. Before the flickering knife, every face was the same, and every death delivered was another knot on the tally string. Knotted strings that grew into ropes and ropes into chains. Every tally a crime, every crime yet one more step away from any god.
Slipping past sleeping forms, the hunters huddled beneath furs, fast breaths riding unpleasant dreams, limbs twitching, or faces upturned in the promise of death’s simple semblance, she was silent as she crept up behind the man, drawing to within a few quick steps, her blades ready.
Then he spoke. ‘It wasn’t long ago, Lahanis, when someone cut away my mask.’ He turned slightly, only enough to make out her form on the edge of his vision. ‘He used fists to make his point. What point was he making, you wonder? I have long pondered that question. Night after night.’
She said nothing, lowering her knives to hide them as best she could.
After a moment, he resumed. ‘I was misusing a boy, because he was highborn. Mocking his innocence, in tones that promised some cruel future. Orfantal – that was the boy’s name. He deserved none of it. So, when I’d gone too far, the man entrusted with the care of the boy beat me unconscious.’
Still she made no response, wondering why he was telling her such things. The faces of those she killed were just a jumble of features meaning nothing, each one a thing of surfaces. The mask he dared speak of, and claim as his own, was the only one that mattered to her. What could he know of her mind?
Narad then continued. ‘But wouldn’t a single punch have been enough? Even a kick to my head, across that gap between us. The man was a veteran of the wars. He knew all about explosive violence, and he knew just how thin was that thread of civility holding him back, him and his kind. A few careless words from me, to a five-year-old boy, and the thread snapped.’
She could not move now, not even had she desired to finish what had been in her mind, here beneath the crooked branches and strewn stars. Narad’s words had reached through to something inside, tearing it free and shaking it so that it rattled. And before she could reconsider, she said, ‘That’s why, Yedan Narad.’
She saw him tilt his head. ‘What do you mean?’
‘A five-year-old child.’
‘What of it? I knew I was being cruel—’
‘It’s not what children are for,’ she said, a weakness coming upon her. She suddenly felt ill. ‘The boy,’ she continued, ‘was still in his summer. Not even seeing the mysteries. He was just alive, Yedan Narad, simple as a dog.’
‘I never laid a hand on the boy.’
‘Yes. And he was too young to understand your words. But that veteran wasn’t, was he?’
There was silence, until Narad sighed haltingly, and his voice was thick as he said, ‘Do such children still dwell within us, Lahanis? Do they simply wait, finally wise, finally smart enough to comprehend their old wounds? Until some witless fool jabs it all awake, and the boy inside fills the man he became, and one punch isn’t enough, isn’t even close to being enough.’
The boy inside. The girl inside, with her laughter and her summer.
Lahanis had thought the girl dead, countless versions of her huddled in all those broken baskets littering the past. The girl inside fills the woman she has become.
I saw them murder my mother, my aunts, my brothers and cousins. There, at summer’s end.
But that laughing girl, she has knives now, and tally strings, and she runs anew, through another forest, leafless and burned.
‘I doubt it gave him much comfort,’ Narad said.
You would be wrong.
He finally swung fully round to face her, and saw the knives in her hands. His brows lifted and he looked up to meet her eyes, before offering up an apologetic smile. ‘I was about to tell you something.’
‘Speak, then.’
‘The Legion will not ignore what we have done. They will come for us, and there will be a battle.’
‘Only one?’
‘If we are unlucky.’
‘And if we’re not? Not … unlucky?’
‘Well, yes, that is it, isn’t it. By fortune we would plant a single, bloodied tree, from which we would seed an entire forest.’
The image pleased her. ‘A new home for the Deniers.’
‘Indeed? Would you be pleased to live in it?’
She shrugged to hide a momentary dismay at the bleakness of the promise. ‘Enough battles to end the war. Isn’t that how it works, Yedan Narad?’
He looked away. ‘I hope to meet Orfantal again, one day, to offer him my apology.’
‘He won’t even remember the slight.’
‘No?’
‘No. If he remembers anything, Yedan Narad, it will be the veteran’s fists and boots, beating you unconscious. He’ll remember that.’
‘Ah … that is … unfortunate.’
‘The dog cowers at harsh words, but flinches at a kick. Of the two, only one of them will turn a dog bad.’
‘He struck me, not the boy,’ Narad growled, as if that made a difference.
She turned about, sheathing her weapons, and took a step before pausing to glance back over her shoulder. ‘Do not look at me any more.’
‘Lahanis?’
‘You can’t save me. There’s nothing to save. Nothing to bless.’
He said nothing as she walked away. Returning to her now chilled furs, she curled up beneath them and fought against the shivers of cold shuddering through her.
Priests still did not belong to war, but she’d begun to understand their presence in every army’s camp. It is not the day of fighting that needs blessing, but the night without peace that follows it.
Her wedding dress was rotting, but the smell of her violation was fresh, wafting over Narad as she appeared beside him. He had turned about, when he was certain that Lahanis had lost her desire to murder him, and once more he faced the forest.
She stood close, their arms almost brushing. ‘Someone wore the crown today,’ she said.
‘What crown?’
‘While another must be turned away, and so be made to fail. The royal blood must be thinned, prince.’
He shook his head. Obscure statements were irritating enough, but her insistence upon unearned and unwelcome titles was infuriating. He no longer stared out into a forest. Somewhere, in between blinks, the world was transformed. Before him, riding the coruscating waves of the silver sea, was the carcass of a dragon, rolling up on to the strand, then turgidly flopping as the waves receded. A trail of blood and gore climbed the white sands from the scaled body, wavering drunkenly, ending where Narad stood, punctuated by the point of his resting sword. He was breathing hard, oily sweat cooling on his red-streaked skin.
‘Her name was Latal Menas.’
‘Who?’
‘The dragon, my prince. She was all grief and rage. The path led her here, into our realm. Or, perhaps, through it. When Tiamath last sembled, when the conflagration awakened and all that they kept apart was now one, the Suzerain took the life of Latal’s mate. It was the death of Habalt Galanas, prince, that has precipitated this.’
He felt his jaw bunching, molars grinding, stirring to life the familiar ache in his neck muscles. ‘This? Nothing has precipitated this, my queen. A breach. Opportunity. Expedience.’
Her laugh was soft, but brief. ‘Yedan. You’ve a gift for brevity, and simple lines, sharp as that which divides sea from shore. Habalt Galanas was host to the proper blood. Proper to the Suzerain’s need. Darkness indivisible, until that blood spilled out. The kin should have known. Never trust an Azathanai.’
‘I felt that killer’s return—’
‘Not you, my prince.’
‘No?’
‘And even then, it was your spirit that trembled at his return, long after your
sister knelt at the side of your corpse, speaking words you could no longer hear.’
‘But … not me.’
‘Not you, not yet.’
He passed a stained hand over his eyes, seeking to dismiss the scene before him. ‘Grief and rage, you said? It seems I am cursed to stand in the way of such things.’
‘Even Tiamath has weaknesses,’ she said. ‘The host can be sundered by the killing of but one. The thing is, how do you choose which one? Each sembling alters the flaw. You must ask yourself, how did Draconus know which one?’
He snorted. ‘Simple. As you said, darkness indivisible. He knew his own. Had Galanas’s death not shattered the sembling, he would have died beneath the fury of Tiamath, and none of this would have come to be.’
She sighed. ‘Must we ever blame Draconus?’
Shrugging, recovered from his ordeal, Narad shook dragon blood from the blade of his sword.
‘Careful,’ she admonished, ‘lest some of that blood find its way into you. I’d not see you consumed by a stranger’s rage, a stranger’s grief, and memories not your own.’
‘No fear of that,’ he muttered in reply. ‘I’ve no room left inside.’
Her etiolated hand rested lightly upon his shoulder, and with the contact her voice changed. ‘My brother, there is so much I would say to you, if only I could. Your worship unnerved me. I well understood, if but dismissively, your odd aversion to capturing me on canvas. But it so sweetened my vanity—’
‘My queen, I am not that brother.’
‘You are not? Then tell me, please, where is Cryl? How he longed for a depth to me that simply did not exist! His love was a girthed thing, cast upon my shallow self, but how terribly the delusion strained his faith, his belief!’
Narad turned at last to face her, and saw clearly, for perhaps the first time, the young woman in her wedding dress, who was no queen, no high priestess, desired by many yet blessed by none. Her face was past its mask of pain, past the mask of shock that followed, past its last guise of life leaving. Her eyes looked out from a place only the dead knew, but the loss and confusion in them somehow reached across the gulf. Narad raised a hand, brushed her cold cheek. ‘I was a lover of men,’ he said. ‘But in my last days, I told no one how visions of you tormented me. How I stepped from one time into another, the only constant this perfect shoreline – oh, and the blood.’