There was something in the air, in this summer heat, that felt … wrong. As if malice had a smell, a stink, and even the hot winds blew through it and left it untouched, and the sun could not beat it down and all the ripening crops could not burn it away.
Days like this were making his skin crawl. He’d seen lone riders skirting the estate grounds, cutting fast and hard across Dracons land. He’d caught the faint smell of bad smoke, the kind of smoke that came from burnt clothes, burnt possessions, burnt hair and flesh – but never enough to be entirely certain, to even so much as sense a direction or possible source.
He had taken to watching sunsets, wandering out into the trees or drifting along the forest’s edge, and in the failing of light he found moments of frightening stillness, as if even in a held breath some breath was lost, the faintest exhalation, smelling of something wrong.
If all life possessed a soul, then perhaps it too was a burning fire, and just as life burned out when it had used itself up, so too did a soul. But maybe it took longer to wink out. Maybe it took for ever. But just as life could sicken, so too could a soul – sometimes one could tell, if there were eyes to look into, if there was an easy focus to that wrongness. When he walked through the dusk, along the forest’s dark line, he thought he could feel the land’s soul – a soul made up of countless smaller souls – and what he felt was something sickening.
Ivis turned to Corporal Yalad. ‘Round everyone up and head back. Walk the horses on to the track, then everyone dog-trot up to the gate. Shake out those muscles. Everyone cleans up before mess.’
‘Yes sir.’
‘I’ll be in later.’
‘Of course, sir.’
The forest, preserved by an edict from Lord Draconus, ran like a curled finger between hills, following the line of an ancient valley’s riverbed. Its tip, where it was thinnest, was at this field’s edge, where it stretched to almost touch Dracons Hold. If he walked northward, up the track of that finger, the forest thickened, and if one persisted in the simile, spread out to form the hand where the valley opened on to a floodplain. This was the forest’s ancient heart.
It had been years since Ivis last ventured there. Few people did, as Draconus had forbidden the harvesting of its wood or the hunting of whatever animals dwelt within it. Ivis had been instructed to patrol its edges on a regular basis, but at random intervals. Poaching was always a risk, but the punishment was death and that punishment could be carried out by the patrols, and this discouraged the petty hunters and wood cutters. But the real deterrent was the Lord’s own generosity. No one starved on his lands, and no one had to brave the winter without fuel. It was, to the captain’s mind, extraordinary what was possible when those people who could do something, did. He knew that not everyone appreciated it enough. Some poachers just liked poaching; they liked working outside the laws; they liked secrecy and deceit and that sense of making fools of their betters.
Ivis suspected that there weren’t many of those people left on the lands of Lord Draconus, or they were biding their time. The last hanging of a poacher had been three seasons past.
He walked through the forest. The few game trails he came across had been made by small animals. The larger game had been hunted into extinction long ago – long before the arrival of Draconus. There was a kind of deer, no higher than the captain’s knee, but they were nocturnal and so rarely seen. He’d heard the eerie cries of fox and had noted owl scat, but even these signs could not disguise the impoverishment of this remnant forest. His senses felt the absence all around him, like the pressure of silent, unrelieved guilt. He’d once enjoyed wandering these woods, but no longer.
The day’s light was fading. As if searching for something he knew he wouldn’t find, Ivis pushed on, deeper into the forest, where it spread out and occasional ancient trees still remained, their black bark sweating in the shadows. He saw slashes of red here and there, from trees that had toppled and split. The flesh of the blackwood was too much like muscle, like meat, to the captain’s eyes. It had always unnerved him.
He wondered at his own impulse, at this seemingly thoughtless push to continue onward. Was he fleeing what he knew was coming? There was nowhere he could run to. Besides, he had duties. His lord relied upon him, to train these Houseblades, to prepare them for the sudden loss of control that was civil war. Lord Draconus did not make use of spies. Dracons Hold was isolated. Unknown events swirled around them.
He found himself upon a trail, this one clear to a man’s height. The boles of the trees lining it looked misshapen. Ivis stopped. He studied one, peering through the gathering gloom. The trunk made a shape, as if hands had moulded the wood itself. It bulged outward. He made out a vaguely feminine form, but bloated. He saw something similar in the next tree, and upon others, all lining this trail. A chill crept through him.
He had not known that there were Deniers living in this forest; but then, never before had he walked into its ancient heart. He knew that he had nothing to fear from them, and that they would probably hide from him. It was likely that he had already been seen. But that sense of sickness would not leave him.
Mouth dry, he continued on.
The avenue of trees opened out on to a glade studded with wooden stakes, driven into the ground in a tight pattern, impenetrable and threatening. They stood high as his hips. In the centre of this spiral was a body, impaled through its back, through its arms and its legs. The tips thrusting up through the broken flesh glistened in the faint starlight.
It was a woman, stripped naked. She was lying horizontally above a score of shafts; her head level as if it too had been pierced by a stake. He did not know why she had not simply slid down.
There was no obvious path to her. A stables cat might wend its way through but no grown man could. Ivis edged closer – he could see no one else about. With one boot he kicked at the nearest stake. His foot rebounded from it, proof that it had been driven deep.
‘I am not for you,’ the woman said.
Cursing in disbelief, Ivis stepped back. He drew out his sword.
‘Iron and wood,’ she said. ‘But iron never has anything good to say to wood, does it? It delivers the shout of wounding, and then it promises fire. Before iron, wood can only surrender, and so it does, each time, every time.’
‘What sorcery is this?’ Ivis demanded. ‘You cannot remain alive.’
‘How big do you imagine the world, Tiste? Tell me, how vast is darkness? How far does light reach? How much will shadow swallow? Is it all that your imagination promised? Is it less than you hoped for, more than you feared? Where will you stand? When will you stand? List for me your enemies, Tiste, in the name of friendship.’
‘You are no friend of mine,’ he growled. He had seen her breath in her words, pluming up into the night, and he could just make out the spike buried in the base of her skull. If that stake was the same height as all the others, then its tip pressed against the bone of her forehead, driven straight through her brain. She could not be alive.
‘It is, I think,’ she said, ‘the other way round. But then, I did not invite you. You are the intruder here, Tiste. You are the unwelcome guest. But I am here and that cannot be denied, and so I am bound to answer your questions.’
He shook his head.
‘The others are done with me,’ she said.
‘What are you?’
‘I am you when you sleep. When your thoughts drift and time is lost. I am there in each blink of your eyes – so swift, so brief. In that blink is the faith that all will remain as it was before, and the fear that it won’t. I lie with you when you’re drunk, when you are senseless, and your flesh meets mine and I rut with you all unknown, and take from you one more sliver of your life, for ever gone. And so you awaken less than what you were, each time, every time. I am—’
‘Stop!’
She fell silent.
He saw runnels of blood flow down the shafts beneath her, saw the gleaming pool those runnels flowed into. But none of this could be real.
‘Tell me your name.’
‘The Tiste have no name for me.’
‘Are you a goddess of the forest?’
‘The forest knows no goddess. The trees are too busy singing. Even as they die, they sing. They have no time for gods in the face of all this death.’
‘Who did this to you?’
‘Did what?’
He slashed with his sword, hacked through a broad sweep of the stakes. Splinters flew. He kicked at the stubs, pushed them aside, and stepped into the maze.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
He did not reply. Some things could not be countenanced. No decent man or woman could withstand the brutality of this apparition. Ivis no longer believed his own eyes. He did not think this night was his own. He did not think he was still in the world he knew. Something had happened; something had stolen his soul, or guided it astray. He was lost.
His blade scythed through stakes. He drew closer to her.
‘Iron and wood,’ she said.
Limbs aching, sweat sheathing his face, he reached her side. He looked down at her face and met the woman’s eyes.
She was not Tiste. He did not know what she was. Her eyes were slits, tilted upward at the outer corners. Her skin was white with blood loss. The tip of the stake piercing her skull had pushed through her forehead just above the eyes, breaking the skin. She smiled.
Ivis stood, chest heaving from his frenzied attack on the forest of stakes. He bled from splinters driven into his hands and forearms. This woman should be dead, but she wasn’t. He knew that he could not move her.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ he whispered.
‘There is nothing you can do,’ she said. ‘The forest is dying. The world comes to an end. All that you know will break apart. Fragments will spin away. There is no need to weep.’
‘Can you not – can you not stop it?’
‘No. Neither can you. Every world must die. The only question is: will it be you who wields the knife that slays it? I see an iron blade in your hand. I smell the smoke of woodfires upon your clothes. You are of the people of the forge, and you have beaten your world to death. I have no interest in saving you, even if I could.’
Suddenly he wanted to strike her. He wanted her to feel pain – his pain. And all at once he realized, with a shock, that he was not the first one to feel as he did. The anger collapsed inside him. ‘You tell me nothing I do not already know,’ he said, face twisting at the bitterness he heard in his own words.
‘This is my gift,’ she said, and smiled again.
‘And in receiving that gift, all we can do is hurt you.’
‘It is not me whom you hurt, Captain Ivis.’
‘Then you feel no pain?’
‘Only yours.’
He turned away then. A long walk awaited him, back to the keep; a walk from one world to another. It would take the rest of the night. He wanted to believe the best of people, even the Deniers. But what they had done appalled him. He could make no sense of the sorcery they had awakened, or what ghastly rites they had conducted in this secret place. He did not know how they had found her; if they had conjured her up out of the earth, or from the blood of sacrifices.
He reached the edge of the clearing, made his way up the avenue of deformed trees, feeling as if he was being spat out, flung back into a colourless, lifeless world. The forest was suddenly dull around him, and he thought, if he dared halt, if he dared pause and draw a breath, he would hear the trees singing. Singing as they died.
* * *
Malice sat with her sisters in the bolt-hole they had found under the kitchen. Directly overhead was the bakery, and the stone foundation of the huge oven formed the back wall of the tiny room. Where they crouched now, milled flour sifted down from the floorboards each time someone thumped past overhead, and in the low light from the small lantern set on a ledge, it seemed the air was filled with snow.
‘If only she wasn’t a hostage,’ Envy said. ‘I’d cut her face.’
‘Drop coals on it when she’s sleeping,’ Spite said.
‘Make her ugly,’ Malice added, enjoying the game even though they played it all the time, hiding in the secret rooms of the house, drawing close together like witches, or crows, while people walked above them all unknowing and stupid besides.
‘Poison would be perfect,’ Spite began but Envy shook her head and said, ‘Not poison. Malice is right. Make her ugly. Make her have to live with it for the rest of her life.’
Weeks past, they had hidden in the corner tower opposite the one Arathan used to hide in, and had watched the arrival of the new hostage. Envy had been furious when Malice had commented on how pretty the woman was, and this had begun things: the plans to ruin that beauty. So far, of course, nothing had been done – just words – since it was as Envy had said. Sandalath Drukorlat was a hostage and that meant she couldn’t be touched.
But it was still fun planning, and if accidents happened, well, they just happened, didn’t they?
‘She’s too old to be a hostage,’ Spite said. ‘She’s ancient. We were supposed to get a proper hostage, not her.’
‘A boy would have been best,’ said Envy. ‘Like Arathan, only younger. Someone we could hunt down and corner. Someone too weak to stop us doing anything we wanted to him.’
‘What would we do?’ Malice asked. She was the youngest and so she could ask the stupid questions without her sisters beating her up too badly, and sometimes they didn’t beat her up at all, or put things in her that hurt, and that was when she knew that her question had been a good one.
Spite snorted. ‘What do we do to you?’ she asked, and Malice could see the gleam of her smile and it was never good when Spite smiled. ‘We’d fill him up, that’s what, and keep doing it until he begged us.’
‘Begging never works,’ Malice said.
Envy laughed. ‘You idiot. Beg us for more. We could make him our slave. I want slaves.’
‘Slaves were done away with,’ Spite pointed out.
‘I’ll bring them back, when I grow up. I’ll make slaves of everyone and they’ll all have to serve me. I’ll rule an empire. I’d kill every pretty woman in it, or maybe just scar them for ever.’
‘It feels like we’ll never get older,’ Malice said, sighing.
She caught a silent look between her sisters, and then Envy shrugged and said, ‘Scrabal birds. Malice, you ever heard of scrabal birds?’
Malice shook her head.
‘They make small nests, but lay too many eggs,’ Envy explained. ‘All the chicks then hatch and at first it’s all right, but then they start growing.’
‘And the nest gets even smaller,’ said Spite, reaching out and walking her fingertips down Malice’s arm.
Envy was watching, her eyes bright. ‘So the biggest ones gang up on the little ones. They kill them and eat them, until the nest isn’t crowded any more.’
Spite’s walking fingers made their way back up the arm, edged closer to Malice’s neck.
‘I don’t like scrab birds,’ said Malice, shivering at the touch.
‘Scrabal,’ corrected Spite, still smiling.
‘Let’s talk about the hostage again,’ Malice suggested. ‘Making her ugly.’
‘You were too young to understand Father,’ said Spite, ‘when he talked to us about how we were going to grow up. Eight years, just like the Tiste, and nobody knows any different. We grow up like the rest of them. But just for those first eight years. Or nine.’
‘That’s because we’re not Tiste,’ said Envy in a whisper.
Spite nodded, her hand sliding round Malice’s throat. ‘We’re different.’
‘But Mother was—’
‘Mother?’ Spite snorted. ‘You know nothing about Mother. It’s a secret. Only me and Envy know, since you’re not old enough, not important enough.’
‘Father says it’s in our natures,’ Envy added.
‘What is?’ Malice asked.
‘Growing up … fast.’
‘Scary f
ast,’ Spite said, nodding.
‘Arathan—’
‘He’s different—’
‘No he isn’t, Spite,’ Envy said.
‘Yes he is!’
‘Well, half different, then. But you saw how he grew past us.’
‘After the ice.’
‘And that’s the secret, Spite. You have to nearly die first. That’s what I meant, before. That’s what I meant.’
Malice did not understand what they were talking about. She disliked the way Spite was holding her throat, but she dared not move. In case Spite decided to not let go. ‘We hate Sandalath Drukorlat,’ she said. ‘Who says hostages have to be special? Get her drunk and then cut her face, and use coals to pock her cheeks and forehead, and burn away her hair. Put a coal on one of her eyes. Burn it out!’
‘Do you want to grow up?’ Spite asked her.
Malice nodded.
‘Grow up fast?’ Envy pressed, leaning forward to stroke Malice’s hair. ‘Faster than us? Do you want to grow right past us, little one? If you did that, you could boss us around. You could make us lie with dogs and like it.’
Malice thought about the dog, the one that Ivis had to kill. She thought about what they did to Arathan when he was little, so little he couldn’t fight the dog off, not with the three of them holding him still. She wondered if he remembered all of that.
‘Don’t you want to make us lie with dogs?’ Spite asked her.
‘Jheleck,’ answered Malice. ‘Grown ones. And I’d make you like it, too, and beg for more.’
‘Of course you would,’ Envy murmured. ‘Unless we decide to grow right past you again, and make you littler than us all over again. Then we’d give you to the Jheleck.’
‘I wouldn’t let you!’
‘But there’s two of us,’ pointed out Spite, ‘and only one of you, Malice. Besides, we already make you like lots of things.’
But Malice only said that she did. The truth was, she hated everything they did to her. She wanted to kill them both. She wouldn’t be content with making them lie with dogs or Jheleck or old drooling men. When she grew up, she would murder her sisters. She would cut them into pieces. ‘Make me grow up fast,’ she said.