Cry of the Nightbird

by Tirzah Duncan

  “I haven’t got any coin,” Dania murmured.

  Wren stuck her tongue out at the woman, then turned back to the confirmed target. “What part do you hate least about the city, then?” she asked.

  Dania looked startled. “I… what?”

  Wren grinned. “You heard me. What part of this festering maze of stinking buildings do you hate the least?”

  Dania’s lips twitched, and she seemed to try not to smile. “Well, the fair itself is nice. Noisy and crowded, but well enough. I like the quiet shops, like these, and the pretty things, and the food. There’s food here as we don’t have back home. Though…” Her pretty pink lips twitched again, and she finished, “I’d guess my favorite part of the city is the Nightbird.”

  “The Nightbird is everyone’s favorite part of the city,” the shopkeeper put it. “The bards fashion new ballads of him every week. Though for all their efforts, the favorite song is still credited to some washerwoman.”

  “How’s that go, then?” Dania asked.

  “You haven’t heard it yet?” Wren asked. “How long have you been in the city? Well, never mind, here it goes…”

  The shopkeeper’s voice joined hers as she sang,

  “Look—it’s a shadow, creeping on the wall.

  Look—it’s a nightbird, feathered, black, and tall.

  Look—o’er your shoulder; think ye twice,

  Look—out, ye wicked rats, pray he finds ye nice.”

  Dania was smiling by the end of it. “Now I think of it, I have heard the tune around, this past week, but I’d not yet caught the words. It’s a fine song.”

  “A fine song for a fine fellow,” the woman said with a nod. “I’ll love anyone who drives the Perils so mad.”

  “The Graylads even more than the Perils,” Wren noted. “And it’s not like he’s a friend to the Highmarch Lords either. He doesn’t seem to be with any of the gangs, though the Graylads suffer from him more than the others. That’ll likely be the death of him.”

  Dania looked alarmed, but the shopkeeper shrugged, rearranging a display of patterned patches. “Graylads are the lowest thugs of the lot, preying on them as has the least, and preying more brutal-like, as the Law is less wont to do aught about it. But he makes the Perils wary as well, and for that I’m grateful.”

  “Be grateful while we’ve got him,” Wren remarked. “I hear he doused a Graylad good last night. At least, they reckon it’s him. Body was found caught with other channel trash this morning, knifed and drowned. No knowing it’s the Nightbird’s work, but the body wasn’t gang-marked, and who else has the nerve?” Wren shrugged, her fingers flitting to slip a copper into the pocket of the suddenly white-faced country girl. “With just him alone out there fighting the night, and no band to back him, he’ll probably die quick enough.”

  The shopkeeper gave a displeased grunt. “Granted. Still.”

  “Surely not?” Dania said, voice tremulous. “Over—over what happened last night?”

  “Well, not that only,” Wren explained. “It’s a bit of a tipping point, I’m guessing. He’s messed them up awful, but he’d not killed any yet. It was bound to come to it, and now it has.”

  “But—surely—” The girl, already pale, looked on the verge of fainting in distress. “He’s so—can’t he beat them?”

  Wren shrugged. “For a while, mayhap. I mean, he must be fair skilled, to be unbeaten in all these months. But eventually, they’ll find a way to make sure of him, unless he gets scared into not going out anymore.” Seeing her listener sag against the rolls of silk, she hastened to add, “Or mayhap he does have a band. If he’s others behind him, he might well make it.”

  “The Nightbird flies alone, as I’ve heard it,” said the shopkeeper.

  Wren gave an exaggerated roll of the eyes. “And hearing is knowing. Anyway, the buck might wise up and gang with the Highmarch Lords.” She gave Dania a winning smile. “There now. He may find some way to live. He seems clever enough he might manage it.”

  Dania nodded, looking several degrees calmer. “I’m sure he will.”

  Wren snapped her fingers. “Chance favor the Nightbird.” Dania and the shopkeeper followed suit. “Come now,” Wren went on. “I’m sure you’ve not seen the best of the market. I’ll show you.” She darted out the door, the country girl following her more slowly, and the shopkeeper’s eyes sharply scanning her for goods.

  “Don’t follow her down any dark side roads,” the woman called after, giving them both a wave. Wren rolled her eyes and made for the best sweets stand; a sure bet for a pair of girls with copper to spare.

  Joreth stood in shadow, as still and silent as the wall he leaned against. His eyes scanned the ground, lit faintly by the clouded and waning moon, but his mind wandered elsewhere. His back ached with pain remembered rather than actual, and his heart seemed to press outward, leaving little air in his lungs.

  Through his mind whirled memories of a girl, folded in on herself, sobbing by the waterside. Oh, Caip, the lovely young Caip, one more flower wrenched up and tossed aside to wither. Caip and Dania, blossoms of the same sweet breed, and the noble hands that twisted and tore, also doubtless of a kind.

  The prince lounged past his mind’s eye, dark-honey hair swept back, brown eyes light and cruel. Blast the nobility and their poise, thinly veiling the lack of humanity beneath. He better loved the street gangs, straightforward as they were in their wretched intent. Hag curse the smooth and icy highborn.

  The maid had been thirteen, and innocent as a calf as she danced about her work with the grace of one beyond her years. Her sparkling blue eyes and soft pink lips, the blonde tresses with slight curl escaping from under her kerchief as she bent her fair face to flowers that complimented but didn’t compare, the swing of her hips as she balanced baskets of garden tools or plucked weeds, the trill of her voice as she sang like a songbird, never seeming to count anything in her life to be a burden—Caip had caught the eye of many a palace lad, not least of all a fifteen year old whipping boy.

  Nor least of all the prince. But the prince didn’t see the treasure of delicate things; no, the only beauty he saw was in destruction, and he could not enjoy a good thing except by crushing it.

  Caip’s rape had not been brutal in the way of violence, but it had wreaked violent havoc upon her spirit—and it had been repeated, over and again. Joreth had watched her fade and wither, her song no longer sounding, the sparkle vanishing from her eyes, replaced by fear, and the swaying dance of her movement supplanted by mincing, flinching steps.

  Joreth had held her as she sobbed by the pond whose plants she tended so carefully, but she grew ever more distant in his arms, retreated more and more deeply into herself. And out of her sight, he had cried, and thrown up, and wanted to punch the prince in his icy smug face before cutting out whatever evil thing kept the blood pumping through his heartless body. But the prince was the prince, and Joreth could do nothing but hate.

  He could have. He should have. He should have done it, hang the hanging or boiling in oil or drawing and quartering that followed—and he would have, if he could have dreamed the future.

  The girl had gotten pregnant; repulsive enough, to know that the young incarnation of sweet goodness swelled with the spawn of a demon. But he’d not guessed—he should have guessed, he might have done—the prince’s reaction to finding out.

  Everything about that moment—the colors, the smells, the sharp blueness of the sky, the pulsing of his blood through his neck, through his wrists—was burned into his memory.

  He’d been looking for her, wandering the paths of labyrinthine garden. He’d rounded a deep-green hedge, leaf edges light and squared from recent cutting, and there, on the far side of the pond, was the prince, dressed in plain blues and wearing his mildest face, pressing something pink and yellow into the water.

  Joreth’s eyes couldn’t make sense of it for the first second, second and a half—was that a dress? Why was the prince washing a dress? What were those yellow weeds rippling in
the water under his hands? None of it made sense…

  And then it all made sense, too much of it made too much sense, and he was running, bare feet splashing, squelching mud, trampling water lilies, and he couldn’t hear any of it, couldn’t hear anything but his breath coming short in his chest, his blood pounding, pounding, and he could only see Caip’s hair rippling like yellow water weed, her face pressed out of sight under water and mud.

  And then he’d rounded the pond, and the prince was letting go and scrambling back already, and Joreth tackled him, driving him backwards, down to the ground, and he felt nothing but fury as he raised his fists to beat the young royal down—but the prince had not gone untrained, and the punches were blocked, and arms were grabbed, and they wrestled for a few moments, the prince shrieking for his guards in a cracking fourteen-year-old voice.

  Then Joreth released him and shoved him away—the prince ran—as he remembered something more important, and spun back around towards Caip.

  She lay still where the prince had held her, head under the water, body limp under pink cloth. He’d fallen to his knees and wrenched her up out of the water. Perhaps he’d cried out, perhaps that had been someone else screaming, a long, long way away. Her eyes were closed, her face as cold as the water that made it gleam, pale, in the sunlight. Bright and colorless and dripping, like a melting candle.

  Some part of him had known she was dead, but some part of him still hoped. And he’d leapt to his feet with the body in his arms, and started running. There hadn’t been any particular logic to it, just the sense that with the prince and the guards lay danger, and he had to get Caip to safety.

  He’d made it out of the palace swiftly, with help of varying degrees from this friend and that, this stranger and that. Looking back on it, he could only suppose that the strong and widespread loathing for the prince had made the guards not search or chase or watch so strenuously as they might have done. He had clung to the girl’s body the whole while, refusing to give it up in spite of sensible suggestions.

  And so did the whipping boy finally escape, with the girl he loved, too late. Away from the palace, he’d dug a lonely wilderness grave, and buried her deep. He’d wandered then, away from that emptiness, and onto the long, stumbling path that had led to a life of assassination—and the Nightbird.

  But how often he played it all over again in his head, every hated step of it—even more than a decade later, his mind would still pick it up and turn it over—wishing he’d done instead one thing or another, wishing he’d run faster or gone first to Caip instead of tackling the prince, wishing above all that he’d taken the prince on a walk in the garden before any of it happened, shoved the boy’s head into the mud of the pond, and held him there until long after he stopped moving.

  Joreth’s mouth tightened against trembling as he looked blankly at the black water of the canal, the moon’s faint light throwing strings of writhing silver on the inky surface.

  “Oh, Dania,” he sighed softly, his eyes tightening. They would never stop, would they? The nobility would always pluck out the best and most beautiful, crush it beneath their heels, and laugh. The only good thing about them was that they paid him to slay their own number. Cannibals and jackals. Even among their own kind, they had no honor.

  Small sounds from near shadows brought his mind snapping back to the moment, to the muted silver and black tones of the night that stretched before his eyes. His hand slipped under his cloak, finding the solid wooden hilt of his long knife. He held as still as a weather vane in dead air, listening.

  There were people moving out there, of a certainty. He could not tell how many, could only tell that they were a good number. His veins began to hum with fast-beaten blood, heating him with a different fire than the flame of memories of injustice. No more acute, but far more immediate. He debated whether he ought to press further back against the wall, or take a fighting stance, or continue to be still. He remained as he was, breathing near silent.

  The air, alas, did not breathe so quietly. It stirred the folds of his cloak and the feathers of his mask, and he winced behind it as he realized how they must catch the scant light, how they must have been rustling like this all the while… Chance and the Maidens, how could a few feathers sound so loud?

  The sounds and movements were too many and all-around, and his position was nowhere near secluded enough. Finally snapped out of the mirage of memories, Joreth heard the truth of his trouble as loudly as the rattle of Chance’s dice. Deciding to waste no more time trying to hide when he was already found, he turned to dart along the building’s shadow, his knife coming out as he did.

  The sounds and shadows sloughed off their stealth, men’s shapes charging him from every side with the hard-soft patter of worn boots and bare feet darting over cobbles. The sound and motion formed a quiet flurry like a flock of rising birds, but there was only one Bird in this flurry, and he was at the center of a pack of Graylads.

  His mind shook itself like a wet dog, flinging away the memories that still weighted him, that hobbled his clarity of thought. And then he ran into a low-crouched body, and there was no more time for thought anyhow, only the next action.

  He fell forward over his opponent, attempted to roll to his feet, but his roll was hampered by his cloak and the second body he struck as he tried to rise. The figure stumbled and fell atop him, raising a cudgel as it did, but they were too close for it to be any use. Joreth kept it that way, hugging the man around the neck with one arm as he stabbed him in the kidney with the other.

  Then another cudgel descended on his shoulder, a glancing near-miss of a blow, but stinging enough to make his breath catch. He tried to get to his feet, using the body as a shield, but the Graylads kicked and pummeled, not caring who they struck. The body absorbed many a blow, but his own body caught more than enough of the damage.

  He grabbed out at a kicking leg, seized it fast, cut the tendons as the owner tried to jerk back. A single cry rose from the muffled, grunting scuffle. Joreth rolled into the opening, clumsily tossing the body aside, but already more figures had piled into the gap. He struck out blindly with his knife, piling forward towards the waterway. Blows caught him from all sides, but bodies reeled back with sharp hisses of breath, and he felt the warm wetness of their blood on his knife hand. He tightened his grip.

  Joreth dimly felt blows slamming into him from every quarter. He had to get out before pain wormed its way past adrenaline and disabled him. The only thing to his advantage was that the press of bodies made it hard for anyone to strike effectively, and the darkness that made it difficult for them to target a single man.

  He slammed his shoulder into the gap between the men before him, stabbing at one as he did. The blade glanced off a rib, but the blow managed to weaken the man’s position, and Joreth drove through. The two of them toppled and hit the canal, the impact of bodies on water making the sharpest noise heard yet in the quiet beating.

  The thick cloak went immediately sodden, wrapping around the pair and dragging them down and towards the center of the current. Their limbs tangled in a panic, fighting the water and cloth as much as one another. Head under the water, unsure of which way was up, Joreth managed to reach a hand up to his throat, unpinning his cloak, and kicked his way free of entangling folds and foe.

  His head broke surface, and he gasped in a breath. Chance be thanked. Not waiting to blink the water from his eyes, he struck out away from the strong center current, reaching for the edge. His hand came down on smooth-worn cobblestone, and he scrabbled at it, beginning to pull himself from the water.

  A dark figure sprang from the shadows, the sound of his approach hidden by splashing water and ragged breathing. A club came down, and Joreth just managed to push back and sideways. The hard-swung cudgel caught his shoulder, but the blow was softened by the water beneath him, and all might have been well had not the wood been spiked with some ghastly sharp thing that sliced deep into the muscles of his back and ripped.

  He reeled back, open
mouth filling with filthy water. He coughed and spat, striking out for the opposite bank of the canal, pushing the panic of the too-familiar pain out of his mind. He fought his way through the water, swimming across and downriver, dragged himself from the water without fresh mishap, and ran.

  Wren sat with her back against the wall beside Joreth’s door, trying not to doze as she waited for the boss to get back. She’d poured some hot tea and arranged a tray of shortbreads to bring up to him when she made her report, hoping he’d appreciate the gesture and make good on his mention of Chance’s Daughters. But he hadn’t been in his room when she’d gotten back—a quick picking of the lock and a glance around had confirmed that—so she’d settled self and tray beside the door to wait.

  She didn’t think she’d been that long, but the tea and cups were cobble-cold. She must’ve been dozing. She rubbed her eyes, feeling foolish in her enthusiasm to bring a good report. He probably hadn’t meant for her to wait like this. What if he’d walked right past her when she’d nodded off? Chance take all, what if she’d been snoring? She straightened, blushing at the thought.

  A muffled rattling thump from inside Joreth’s room startled her. She flinched to her feet, hand going to the doorknob. “Sir?” she called very softly. There was another rattling, the thud of what sounded like a body falling to the floorboards, and breathing so loud as to be clearly heard. “Sir?” She jangled the knob, but got no answer besides continued broken breathing.

  She turned around, pressing her back against the door as she tried to decide what to do. What if he’d slipped past her with a lady? But that didn’t sound like fooling around. The rattle had sounded more like a window than a bed. The breathing still sounded, desperate and ragged, but there was no longer any sound of movement besides. Making a frenzied decision, she spun round, dug out her picks, and began unlocking his door once more. Her fingers trembled, and the job took half a minute longer than it should have.