Fired

by Liam Reese

  He wondered how long he had been hearing only that — an echo.

  He got to his knees, feeling panic jump and pull at his innards, and with difficulty managed to roll Karyl over onto his side. His own breath was shallow, and Karyl’s was almost nonexistent. He chanced a glance upwards at the door, which was still ajar, but he could hear nothing beyond a few distant footsteps. He could not tell, with his own pulse roaring in his ears, if anyone was heading his way.

  “Karyl!”

  The big man let out a small sigh like a child who has fallen at last to sleep in his illness and was still.

  Thorn dropped his head and closed his eyes.

  “Karyl —”

  No response. Karyl’s eyes were still open, still unclouded, but they stared at nothing.

  Thorn crouched over him, held his breath, and peeled the bandage away from the weeks-old arrow wound at his side.

  At first, he thought it was thread, holding the edges of the skin a little closer together, though nothing could make them join — too much was missing. But there was a clump of twisted black, like a large knot, in the middle of the sewing, and as he watched, it moved, and one of the threads lifted, twisted, felt for the edge of the skin like something blind, and curved in again, latching itself to the torn edge of the wound and pulling it taut. It was a spider, all eight legs ending in curved, barbed hooks, holding the wound as closed as it would go. As Thorn watched, the head bobbed again, up and down a little, side to side like a serpent, and then down towards the exposed flesh, like something drinking from a pool.

  It did not even seem to realize that it was uncovered. He dropped the bandage, scrambled to his feet, and backed away.

  “Thorn? What is it?” said Irae, appearing from the inner courtyard of the castle and hurrying to his side, and then she got a good look at what, exactly, it was, and a startled cry wrenched from her. Karyl moved slightly at the sound, but he made no noise of his own, only continued to stare at nothing with dull eyes.

  “She warned us,” said Thorn, rubbing at his mouth with the back of his hand. His throat was achingly, fiercely dry. “Braeve warned us that her specialty was illusions.”

  For it was clear, despite the fact that the spider was holding him together, that Karyl was not healed at all, but had only been dying a little more slowly. The flesh of the wound was discolored and exsanguinated, and there were faint purple streaks running up his back and around to his chest, which must once have been red. His skin everywhere, now, was pale.

  In Thorn’s head, he heard the dream-Lisca say, clearly, Karyl is dead, but I am still here.

  Through numb lips, he managed, “Is his heart still beating?”

  Irae’s eyes were wet and streaming, her tears as ready as a waterfall, and her hands were trembling.

  “I’m afraid to touch him,” she whispered, but she went to him nonetheless. He continued to stare straight ahead as she bent over him and placed a hand on his heart.

  After a moment, she said, “Yes, but only just.” Her voice was weak and shaky, and she was moving like a young child woken from a dream.

  Thorn clenched his hands into fists, felt the tug of the snare wrapped around his left.

  “Then,” he said, “I can save him.”

  Slowly he bent down again next to the prone man, dying the slowest of deaths, and put his right hand on Karyl’s barrel-like rib cage. The flesh beneath Thorn’s hand was soft and spongy to the touch, not at all like it should have been on a man as clearly muscular and strong as the former guard had always been.

  “Wasting away,” whispered Thorn.

  Beside him, Irae fumbled for Karyl’s hand, wrapping both of hers around it. She bowed her head and closed her eyes.

  Thorn said, so low that it was almost impossible to hear, “You’ve always taken orders, Karyl. So here are some more. Live, change, and grow.”

  The glow came more easily, more quickly than it ever had before. The lines of the body’s potential rose and twisted and twined, and Thorn snatched his hand away almost before it was over, because there was more heat than he had ever felt. Between him and Irae, there lay the body of an eagle, enormous, half the size of a full-grown man; still, but with the wings already starting to move, to start to beat.

  There were a few awkward movements, and then the eagle was standing, stretched up on his legs, claws digging into the cracks between the cobblestones, head lifted; a moment to regain himself, to learn himself, and then the wings were beating, with a powerful downdraft. The eagle lifted himself from the ground and was gone before they knew it.

  Thorn looked at Irae, who was still weeping. She was crouched down low, and her hands were flat on the ground in front of her, palms down.

  She looked at him.

  “You’re probably cold,” he said. “You’re getting all muddy.”

  “Thorn,” she whispered, “Karyl was the next step. He was to protect us when we got in the castle. What do we do now?”

  He chewed on his lower lip for a moment.

  “Where is the one they call Berren?” he said.

  12

  His Majesty Will See You Now

  Berren ran through the streets. Somewhere within, he found the strength to sing.

  “Oy oy oy!” he called. “All the boy oy oys! Mairie in the meadow singing oy oy oy!”

  It was late, even for the city of Balfour. And his singing was terrible, calculated to annoy. He was counting on it. He continued on, cupping his hands around his mouth to sound even louder.

  “In the meadow, Mairie asked me plain as day — whoever shall I sing for, when you’ve gone away?”

  It had been years since he had done anything like this. He was nearing forty-five — he had thought he would never do anything quite like this again. Well, he had been wrong.

  “Away I go from Mairie, leave her with the boys — leave the boys with Mairie, and all of Mairie’s noise!”

  The streets fairly rang with it. He was in a corner, and the echoes were fantastic, if he did say so himself. Windows crashed up and open, and there were shouts from up and down the street.

  “Take yourself off home and sleep it off!”

  “Ought not to be allowed!”

  “Go home, mate, your wife’s waiting for you!”

  Berren stood in the middle of the street, flung his arms out at his sides, and screamed, “Chorus!”

  Far off in the distance he heard a man’s voice answer.

  “Oy oy oy!”

  In the other direction, a series of violent hoots and an off-key holler. “Mairie in the meadow singing oy oy oy!”

  Berren allowed himself a grin from behind his beard, which he thought was finally coming in nicely. If this didn’t get the attention of the guards in the castle, he didn’t know what would.

  He fancied he could hear the tramp of their feet now.

  “Whose idea was that, anyway?” panted Lully.

  “Your friend Berren came up with it,” said Irae. She had wiped her tears away with the back of her hand, two or three times, and they were finally starting to slow. Thorn could understand it — the last thing she wanted was to appear crying before her traitorous uncle. She must not appear weak. She must appear every inch the queen she was meant to be.

  He had the strangest urge to take her in his arms and hold her, but he thought that was probably due to not eating any supper.

  Lully had managed to wrangle them in, sneaking them past an unsuspecting Tom, who was also understandably distracted by all the noise that was going on just on the other side of the castle walls. In the distance, there was also the noise of the guards being raised along with the alarm; it wouldn’t account for all of them by any means, but it would account for enough.

  Or so Irae claimed to believe.

  She was pushing past the sadness and the horror of Karyl’s near death and Forging — she must have taken it and put it on the shelf, was all that Thorn could think. He knew, simply from the last few weeks, how close Irae had been with Karyl, how much sh
e had relied on him. Now she was in desperate need, and he was not there. It was just the three of them, and Lully was still injured and healing.

  He stopped her where she stood, before they reached the door that led out of the kitchens.

  “Are we sure this is wise?” he said. “Even with some of the guards out of the way. Even with the distractions —”

  “Wisdom is a bit beside the point now,” said Lully, “it isn’t as though we have any other choice.”

  “Wisdom is never beside the point when you can end up getting killed,” said Thorn, who objected strenuously to that point of view.

  “She’s right, though,” said Irae. “Even if it is just us. There are seventy men running around outside causing a ruckus, and we are in the castle with only a few floors and a lot of doors between us and my uncle the traitor. We will never be in this position again.”

  “We could wait,” tried Thorn, “and sneak up and hide somewhere, and wait till the opportune moment arrives —” He could see from the expressions on both of their faces that this was not going to work and trailed off. “Oh well,” he said unhappily, “I suppose death is like anything else that happens. It will make me uncomfortable, until it is over.”

  Irae managed a watery smile at him, and reached to pat his arm, but apparently thought better of it and withdrew her hand at the last moment.

  “That’s the spirit,” she said.

  “No, not yet,” said Thorn.

  “But,” Irae went on, ignoring this, “I do have one thing to request.” She turned to Lully, who was fairly vibrating with her eagerness to get on with the plan. “Karyl would have known who was loyal to me within the ranks of the guards. But only you will know who is loyal among the servants.” Her eyes were soft, her voice pleading. “Please, Lully. Please, find them, rally them. Carefully, quietly. We need all the support we can get.”

  Lully stared at her.

  “But,” she said, “the throne room. You’ll need help in the throne room.”

  “Indeed, I will,” said Irae. “All the help that is offered. But we won’t know unless we ask for it, and I cannot take the time to wait. Even now, our loyal friends outside the castle walls may be being rounded up and taken to sleep their drunken routs off in the dungeons.” She shook her head and was only moderately successful at hiding a small smile. “We can’t let them down after such a splendid performance.”

  Lully hesitated, and Thorn could see her uncertainty. She didn’t know whether to believe what Irae said, or not.

  Finally, after what seemed like hours but was only a moment or two, she closed her mouth firmly and nodded. She gave a deep curtsey to Irae.

  “As my queen commands,” she said. “You want the left door. I’ll take the right.” Another curtsey, as though she couldn’t help herself, and then lastly, she bobbed forward of a sudden and leaned up to kiss Irae on the cheek. “Take care,” she murmured hastily, and then she was gone.

  Thorn looked at Irae, who had to swipe at her eyes again with the back of her hand to get rid of the tears.

  “You sent her away on purpose, to keep her out of harm’s way,” he said.

  “Perhaps I did, perhaps I didn’t.”

  “But now there are only two of us.”

  Irae smiled at him. “Yes, Thorn. Just you and me now.”

  “But I’ll be busy Forging! You’ll have to fend off any guards he has with him!”

  “I know it, don’t shout.”

  “You can’t do this on your own!”

  She raised her eyebrows at him archly. “I’m going to have to, aren’t I?”

  What he wanted was for her to be angry, for her to shout, for her to find the passion she needed to do what needed to be done. What he got was a strange and terrible calm, which gave him an equally strange and terrible feeling in the pit of his stomach. He swallowed hard and tugged once at his hair.

  “Jelen,” he said, “are you sure about this?”

  She smiled at him, wordlessly, and pushed open the door.

  Outside the castle walls, things weren’t going too well.

  Both the upside and the downside of pretending to be boisterous, rambunctious drunks was the unpredictability. Yes, Berren could run down the middle of the streets calling and shouting and laughing, and yes, he could lead the castle guards on a merry chase; but it was also astoundingly difficult to put together any particular plan and coordinate any of the efforts of his fellow drunks. Especially since hardly any of them had any knowledge of the city’s layout. They really should have done more research before they headed off on this foolhardy plan, he thought, but then it wouldn’t have really qualified as foolhardy anymore, would it?

  A handful of his fellows, from what he could tell, had been caught, and he was grateful that it wasn’t more. There was an astronomical amount of guards out there on the streets. Used to a very tiny village, Berren couldn’t quite fathom the need to have this many to police the relatively small area. But then again, perhaps dozens of drunk men and women going on a rampage all at the same time was not an unexpected occurrence. Perhaps the guards were specifically trained for exactly this time of need.

  Whatever the case, they weren’t as bumbling as he had hoped.

  With patience and perseverance, and a superior knowledge of the city streets, they had caught a number of the rebel army between the ranks, and were closing in. At one end of the street, twenty guards. At the other end of the street, thirty or forty. Between them, caught in the middle, a large group of the rebels, all milling about, some still pretending to be drunk, others realizing that the game might well be up. There was nowhere to go. There was no one to help them.

  The mission was doomed to fail.

  Except —

  He cracked a smile before he could quite catch himself, and before he could think too long and hard on his chosen course of action, he caught the two rebels nearest him by the arm, threw back his head, and shouted wordlessly at the top of his voice.

  They looked at him for a moment, somewhat befuddled. Then one caught on, then the other, and gradually it spread from man to man to woman to man, until all of them were making a tremendous noise, as loudly as they could. One of the men had a particularly impressive scream.

  Their throats were raw by the time that they heard running footsteps. The guards, who had been advancing — but warily now, confused by what seemed to be going on — were suddenly set upon by newcomers, attackers in the dark, who rushed in blindly and just kept going.

  Berren breathed a sigh of relief.

  Ruben, no doubt from long practice and many performances, had recognized a disaster when he heard one.

  The halls of the castle were eerily silent, apart from some far-off echoes. They were so familiar to Irae, had once been so dear — and she still had to fight against the tendency to crumble into an emotional heap of reminiscing over her childhood, even under these circumstances — that she would have tiptoed through them even had they not been trying to avoid attracting attention. These were the halls she had grown up in, her home for nearly all her life. Through these halls, she had followed her father as he went about the business of being king. She had been led by her uncle, as he trained her to one day follow in his footsteps —

  Through these halls she had run, blinded by tears, escaping into the night while her betrayers settled comfortably into the life she had been born to live.

  She tread carefully, afraid of waking up the ghosts of her childhood. She drifted a hand

  along beside her, almost but not quite touching the cold stone of the walls, stirring the heavy tapestries that hung there only a little.

  “How far —” began Thorn.

  “Not long now,” she whispered back at him.

  His voice brought her back from the brink. He had no place here, not with the dusty hallows of her memories, not among the echoes of her father’s voice. He did not belong in her home; and thus, she did not either. It was not her home any longer.

  Not yet.

  They
reached the giant double doors of the throne room, and she hesitated a moment longer, her hand just drifting over the grain of the golden wood.

  “Whatever happens, whatever awaits us in there,” she whispered, “I need to you to know, Thorn — I don’t know how you feel, but I am glad that I met you.”

  She didn’t look at him. She didn’t want to see him smile, or cry, or do anything, really. She was afraid of her reaction, no matter what he was doing.

  But all he said, mildly, was, “I’m not entirely sure yet how I feel. I’d like the chance to find out. Let’s not die, shall we?”

  She took a deep breath and pushed open the doors.

  She wanted to walk into the throne room like a queen. She wanted courtiers, an escort, soldiers and guards, but what she had was her own sword and the strange man at her side with a snare that he sometimes used as a slingshot, and which he had not even unwrapped from his wrist. Well. It was what she had, and so it would have to be enough.

  And the throne room, the throne room! So dear and so hated, at the same time. The room in which she had last seen her father, the room in which her uncle had turned from someone she loved and trusted to someone who had taken everything from her. The room was just as she remembered, enormous and stately. And there was hardly anyone in it.

  A few guards, barely standing up straight, clearly not too pleased with being up so late, and not as rigorously trained as they should be. An advisor whom she recognized as Sir Merundi, seated near the throne at the end of the room with his legs crossed and his chin on his hand. And her uncle, her uncle the traitor, slouched on the throne, looking for all the world as though he had never lost any sleep at night, as though nothing he had ever done had stung his conscience even a little.

  She gritted her teeth.

  “Run!” she shouted.

  She charged hastily forward, forgetting the door in her haste. Thorn slammed it behind her, startling her, but by the time she whirled around with eyes wide, he had already bound the heavy handles together with his snare.