Mother shakes her head, keeping the orichalcum in her grasp. “A moment.” She turns away from me, goes toward the doorway that opens onto a chamber I call the Star Room, and steps inside. I follow to the threshold, peering through the crack in the door that she failed to close properly. She has her back to me. From the motion of her arm I can see she is moving her hand down from her chest to her belly. The glow gets brighter, throwing black shadows in all directions, brighter still, and suddenly it’s a glare, like a flash of lightning, painting the whole room with an intensity that allows no colour. Mother drops the orichalcum cone with a shriek and I burst in through the door after her. As I run around her to discover what she’s hiding I see she has both hands folded over her stomach, one atop the other. Tears are running from eyes screwed tight.
I stop, the orichalcum forgotten. “What is it . . . ?” Jally hasn’t the slightest idea. I know though. She’s pregnant and the child has a thousand times more talent in the womb than Kara has after all her years of training as a völva.
We stand there in the drawing room beneath a ceiling studded with star-shaped roundels, and watch one another.
“It will be all right, Jally.” A lie, whispered as if even Mother doesn’t believe it enough to say out loud. She smiles, pushing aside her hair and bends toward me. But I’m looking over her shoulder at the face of a man looming behind her. No smile there. I half recognize him but with the light streaming through the doorway to his rear his features are shadowed, offered only in rumour, hair so black as to be almost the blue of a magpie’s wing, with grey spreading up from the temples.
“J—” The rest of my name comes out bloody. Both of us look down at the blade that has emerged from her belly. In the next second she has fallen forward, pulling clear of the sword, now dripping in the man’s hand. Blood flows along the curves of the script set into the steel.
“Ssssh,” he says, and sets the cutting edge against the side of Mother’s neck where she lies bleeding on the Indus rugs. The man stands revealed now in his uniform, the tunic and breastplate of the general palace guard. His face is somehow blurred, for a broken second it wants to look like Alphons—the younger of the doormen—and when I refuse that it shifts toward old Raplo who winked at me that morning. I shake both away and see him clear, just for a moment. It’s Edris Dean, without the scar along his cheekbone, and too young for the grey, but greying even so.
Jally’s thoughts, that have for so long bubbled behind my own, childish and wide-roaming, have now fallen silent. He looks at Mother, at the sword, at Edris, and his mind is a smooth void.
“I knew you were coming . . .” I say it with Jally’s mouth.
“No you didn’t.” Edris pulls back his blade, slicing Mother’s throat. She starts to thrash, trying to rise. “No one ever does. That’s my talent, sure enough. Given by God Almighty himself. The future-sworn can’t see me, boy.” He holds the point of his sword toward me. “I cast no shadow on the days to come. Bedevils the fortune-tellers no end, to be sure. Keep telling me I won’t live to see the morning.”
“I’ll kill you myself,” I say, and I mean it. A strange sense of calm enfolds me.
“Do you say so?” Edris smiles. “Maybe. But first you have to die.” And he thrusts his sword into my chest. Some deeper part of Jally had us moving already, throwing himself backward, and a last twitch of Mother’s leg, either by accident or design, puts Edris off his attack. Even so, the point of his blade cuts between my ribs and I hit the ground screaming, blood soaking my tunic. Even as I scream the thrust of the blade toward my chest is replayed across the darkness behind eyes screwed tight. I glimpse runes, half-visible on the steel beneath my mother’s blood.
I hear a distant cry and as my head rolls to the side I see a huge guardsman tumble past Edris, his arm spurting blood where the assassin’s blade has cut him as he sidestepped. It’s Robbin, one of Mother’s favourites, a veteran of wars before I was born—perhaps before she was born. Edris moves to finish him but the man sweeps the blow aside with his longsword, bellowing, and launches his own attack. The sound is terrifying, the crash of blades, staccato footsteps thudding, harsh breaths rasped in. I can’t track the flickering swords. It’s growing dim, the sounds more faint. I meet Mother’s eyes. They’re dark and glassy. She doesn’t see me. Her hand is open, reaching for me in her last moment, the orichalcum cone sent spinning by a kick as the men fight and vanishing beneath a long couch against the far wall.
Over Mother’s head I see Edris is already carrying a wound in his side, something he earned on the way in. Now the tip of Robbin’s blade opens his cheek to the bone, painting his face scarlet. Edris repays the wild blow with a chop deep into the meat of Robbin’s thigh, just above the knee. The man staggers but doesn’t fall. Hop-stepping to stand between Edris on one side and my mother and me on the other, though we must both look dead. In fact I think we are. I hear faint shouts in the distance. Edris spits blood and shoots a disgusted look at Robbin, his glance falls quickly to the bodies on the floor. Decided, he spins on a heel and is out of the door with remarkable swiftness.
It’s dark now. Cold. Big hands lift me up but it’s all so far away.
• • •
It’s dark now. Cold. Big hands lifted me.
“I’ll kill him myself!” It came out as a whisper though I’d tried to shout it.
“Kara! He’s waking up!” Snorri’s voice.
I opened my eyes. They felt sore. The sky above us lay deepest purple, shading into night.
“I’ll kill the fucker.” Someone must have given me acid to drink—each word hurt.
“Who are you and what have you done with Jalan Kendeth?” Snorri loomed across me grinning, thrusting a water flask at me.
I would have hit him but my arms had no strength, none of me did.
“H-how long?” I asked.
“More than a week.” Kara moved in looking concerned, holding the orichalcum up to inspect my face. She stared into each eye, lifting my brows with her thumb to make them wide.
“Give me that!” I managed to get my hand on hers and with a frown she let me take the metal bead.
“Odin!” Tuttugu just arriving with an armload of deadfall dropped it to shield his eyes. Hennan hid behind him. The orichalcum pulsed and guttered in my grip, lancing brilliant beams out into the night and sweeping them randomly across the nearby tree-line, sending strange bright shapes sliding across the grass. I dropped it and let my arm fall.
“It was true . . .” Something reached up along the rawness of my throat and choked me so I could say no more. Instead I rolled to the side, face to the ground, buried in my arm. Young Jally’s emotion still filled me—the little boy I didn’t know any more—he still watched Mother’s eyes, glazed and unseeing, and the sorrow of it, the red hurt, just flooded me, bursting my chest, so much misery I hadn’t anywhere to hide it. I couldn’t remember ever knowing a feeling so deep and so terrible, leaving no room for air.
Kara’s hands found my shoulders. “Get more wood, Tutt. Snorri help him. Take the boy.”
“But—” Snorri began.
“Do it!”
At last I could draw breath and hauled it in with a shuddering sob. Snorri and Tuttugu hurried away, Hennan trailing after.
“Jesus!” I hit the ground hard as my strength allowed. “Make this stop.”
Kara demonstrated a völva’s wisdom by not saying anything for the longest time.
Great emotion, it turns out, is a fire, and like a fire it needs fuel. Unfed it dies down to a hot and banked glow, ready to ignite again but leaving space for other matters. When Snorri and Tuttugu finally returned with half the forest piled in their arms, the night lay dark enough to hide the shame of my red eyes.
I found myself painfully thirsty and drained the water flask I’d been given. Snorri and Tuttugu set to work on the fire and preparing food. I saw Snorri anew now, understanding perhaps for the first tim
e the kind of hurts he must have been carrying within him the whole time that we’d journeyed together. I understood in part what lay behind the man I’d looked down on in the blood-pits, what lay behind his “bring a bigger bear.”
I drew a deep breath. “Where are the trolls?” I noticed the absence of that pungent fox-stink of theirs rather than the lack of menacing giants looming on all sides.
“Renar Highlands.” Snorri broke a branch and fed it into the fire. “We said good-bye to Gorgoth two nights back.”
“Which puts us in . . . ?”
“Rhone. The province of Aperleon, ten miles south of the ruins of Compere.”
I sniffed, imagining I could smell the ashes of that city. “I’ve got to kill him.”
Snorri and Tuttugu looked up, faces painted with firelight. “Who?”
“Edris Dean,” I said, aware that a desire for revenge—a need—would prove a great inconvenience to a professional coward like myself. An inconvenience on the scale of a poker player afflicted by the compulsion to grin broadly every time he turns up an ace.
“Edris Dean needs killing right enough. I’m with you there.” Snorri turned to face me, hidden in shadow now with his back to the fire. “But did it take two weeks of sleeping on the matter to reach that conclusion? He’s tried to kill you twice already. And me.”
Snorri knew I’d learned something in my dreaming—this was him asking how much I’d tell him. I rubbed my nose on my sleeve and sniffed again. The aroma of Tuttugu’s stew reached me along with the realization of just how ravenous I was. They must have fed me something while I was dragged along all those days, but whatever it was it wasn’t enough. Even so, I pushed the hunger aside, met Snorri’s gaze.
Tuttugu spoke first. “Dean’s only tried to kill me the once and I’d be happy to push him off a cliff.” He stirred the stew. “Why does Jal need a new reason to be angry? The man’s already attacked him two times.”
“Three times.” I lifted up my shirt. And there, just below the left pectoral muscle, a white scar an inch and a half long. I used to say that Martus cut me with a kitchen knife—and I believed it. More recently I claimed it as a war wound from the Aral Pass. I knew that one to be a lie. Now I knew it for Edris’s, the thrust of the same sword that ran my mother through, her and my unborn sister both. And cut her throat. Sister? I couldn’t say how I knew the child would have been my sister . . . but I did. A sorceress to play the role that the Silent Sister foresaw for her, a key piece to put into play on the board of Empire, sitting between the Red Queen and the Lady Blue.
I touched my fingers to the scar, remembering the pain and the shock of it. How long they had tended young Jally on his deathbed I couldn’t say, but I’m sure a different boy left it. A boy who either had no memory of the past weeks or who set whatever wild talent that lay within him to burning out all trace of the events. I had sympathy with that choice, if it was a choice he’d made. I would make the same decision even now if I knew how. Or at least be tempted to.
“And the first time? When he gave you that scar, who else did Edris cut?” Snorri asked, Tuttugu and Hennan moving in behind him, stew forgotten.
“My mother.” I gritted my jaw to say it but a breath hitched in as I saw her fall again and the word cracked.
“I’ll kill him for my grandfather.” Hennan sat cross-legged, looking down. The child had never sounded so serious.
Snorri looked down too and shook his head. A moment later he patted his chest where the key lay beneath his jerkin. “He’ll come for me soon enough. Then I’ll kill him for all of us, Jal.”
EIGHTEEN
Nearly six months spent north of Rhone had improved my opinion of the country considerably. For one thing they knew what summer was about here. We walked south through long hot days and I basked in the sunshine whilst the others turned red and burned. Tuttugu proved the worst of them with the sun. At one point it seemed as though most of his exposed skin was attempting to peel off, and he moaned about it non-stop, crying out at the slightest slap on the arm—even going so far as to suggest some of them weren’t entirely accidental.
The sun also burned off the dark mood that had enfolded me for days after I woke. It didn’t reach the cold core of certainty that I would have to kill Edris Dean, but it rolled back the shadows the memory cast and left me with recollections of my mother that would have been lost forever if not for Kara’s magics. Whilst we kept moving it seemed that the past was content to trail behind me, not forgotten but not getting in the way of each moment. For the first day or two I thought the dream’s discoveries would drive me mad, but oddly with the passing of a week I felt more at ease in my own darkening skin than I had for years. Almost a form of contentment. I attributed it to the ever-narrowing gap between me and home.
Perhaps it was spending time trapped in my own head with the younger me but I seemed to have more of a rapport with Hennan on the last weeks of our journey. We started to pass through actual towns and I taught the lad a few tricks with a pack of cards I picked up. Just simple finesses, enough to bilk Snorri and Tuttugu out of their few coppers and some chore duties around camp.
“I’m sure one of you is cheating . . .” Snorri rumbled that evening when saddled with an extra night watch and the task of gathering firewood for the fifth time in a row.
“That’s a common misconception among losers,” I told him. “If you call the application of intelligence and a shrewd assessment of the statistical odds cheating then yes, both I and Hennan are cheating.” In fact if you called “not playing in accordance with the rules” cheating, then we would both have to raise our hands to that also. “The rules of poker, Snorri, have outlasted the most basic information about the society and age in which they were constituted,” I continued. The important thing when denying cheating is to continue—to not stop speaking until the conversation has travelled so far from its roots that none of the listeners can remember what the original point of contention was. “What a civilization manages to keep from that which went before says as much about it as what it leaves to the next age.”
Snorri furrowed his brow. “Why is there an ace up your sleeve?”
“There isn’t.” It was a king, and there was no way he could have known it was there—just a lucky guess.
Continuation is a good policy, but sometimes it turns out that a barbarian is too stubborn to be led and you end up doing two night watches and gathering firewood all week. Snorri asked me what sort of lesson I thought my behaviour might provide Hennan with—a rather better one than would be taught by seeing a prince of Red March reduced to manual labour I thought, but at least I took satisfaction in the fact that my pupil’s cheating went undetected, a credit to my teaching.
Another benefit of a return to sun and civilization was that the summer once more restored the gold to my hair, bleaching out the drab brown. Additionally the reappearance of people helped me remember at last that there were women other than Kara in the world. I purchased new clothes in the town of Amele and spruced myself up. I considered a horse but unless I bought at least four steeds then having a saddle under my arse wouldn’t get me home any quicker. I did consider just riding on ahead by myself, but even in Rhone travelling alone can be a risky business, and even if our enemies were focused on finding the key I didn’t like the idea of having to explain to them on some country lane isolated in the middle of a thousand acres of Rhonish cornfields that I didn’t have it. I toyed with the idea of getting a nag for Snorri, Tuttugu, and Kara, with Hennan up behind me, but Mother’s locket had started to look threadbare and I wasn’t sure I could stand all the moaning and falling off the Norse were likely to do.
I visited a barber and had my beard shaved off—a ritual shedding of the north if you like. The fellow with the razor and snips declared it an unholy tangle and charged me an extra crown for the job. With it gone I felt strangely naked, my chin tender, and when he showed me the result in his mirror it too
k me a moment to accept that the man looking back out was me. He looked a lot younger, and vaguely surprised.
Walking through Amele in my new outfit—nothing fancy, just outdoors clothes that a country squire might wear—and my chin still stinging at the slightest breeze, I will admit to turning a few heads. I smiled at a buxom peasant girl off about whatever business it is that occupies peasants, and she smiled back. The world was good. And getting better by the mile.
• • •
“Bonjour,” Hennan greeted me when I returned to the tavern where I left the others—the King’s Leg, sporting a wooden stump above the door.
“Bon-what?”
“Snorri’s been teaching me the language the locals speak.” He looked up at Snorri to see if he’d got it right. “It means good day.”
“The locals all speak the Empire tongue well enough.” I sat down beside Tuttugu and stole a chicken wing from his plate. “Sometimes you have to wave a coin at them before they’ll admit it. Don’t waste your time, boy. Awful language.” I stopped talking in order to chew. Whatever Rhone’s failings—and they are many—I’ll call any man a liar who says they can’t cook. The lowliest Rhoneman can make a better meal than all the north put together. “Mmmm. That’s worth the trip south on its own, hey, Tuttugu?” Tuttugu nodded, mouth stuffed, beard full of grease. “Where was I now? Yes, Rhonish. Don’t bother. You know what the literal translation of the Rhonish word for defence is? The-gap-before-running-away. It’s a hard language to lie in, I’ll give you that.”
Snorri made a warning face and Tuttugu became still more interested in the rest of his chicken. I noticed a few locals aiming hard stares in my direction.
“A wonderful brave people though,” I added, loudly enough for the eavesdroppers to choke on.
“You look different,” Snorri said.
“I think ‘even more handsome’ was the phrase you were looking for.” I filched another piece of Tuttugu’s chicken. He tried to stab my hand as I pulled it back.