by Matthew Ward
“It’s an ambush?”
“Half of one. The rest’ll be up ahead somewhere. Probably before the Three Pillars checkpoint.”
He quickened his pace. Viara’s cry called him up short.
“Wait! If it is what you say, shouldn’t we… you know?” She jerked her head towards the incomplete fortress, where the kraikon’s magic sparked and crackled through the snow.
They should. They really should, but then there’d be no chance of taking credit for stopping whatever was going on. “We’ll leave her out of this one.” Seeing Viara wasn’t convinced, he struck a winning smile. “But if you’d rather sit this one out, I’ll understand.”
Ambition won out, as he’d suspected it would, and she stalked on past. “Three Pillars isn’t far.”
They hurried on, following tracks that threatened to vanish at any moment. Bravado flickered as shuttered windows passed away overhead. For all that the city was home to thousands upon thousands, it was possible to be alone very quickly if you strayed down the wrong street. And in the frigid anonymity of the snows, every street could quickly become the wrong street. Especially in Wallmarch, where construction work had displaced so many and made potential lairs of most buildings.
A half-demolished warehouse passed away to Altiris’ right, a church’s lychfield to his left. The snows parted, strobing merrily in the light of a damaged lantern, half-hanging from its post.
The dray cart sat slewed across the road, crates jettisoned in its wake, horse staling into the snow as if nothing were amiss. Falling snow dusted motionless bodies, blood seeping scarlet through white.
“We’re too late,” murmured Viara.
Altiris crouched beside the nearest Drazina. The blood that had so alarmed ebbed from a bruise on the back of his head – his helmet lay a short distance away. “He’s alive.”
“This one too,” Viara replied from nearer the warehouse. “But she won’t stay that way without help.”
Leaving the unconscious Drazina behind, Altiris clambered up onto the dray. The attack had been too precise, too efficient, to have been without deliberate goal. The kind of robbery the vanished Crowmarket had once conspired to so well.
“All right. We head back to the Wayfarer and raise the alarm.”
Quicker to get the kraikon’s attention than to reach the Three Pillars checkpoint. Besides, Drazina were more interested in inspecting identification papers than helping those in need – even their own.
The cart itself looked almost untouched, its crates and strongboxes still wedged in place. A sword, half-unwrapped from a bolt of velvet cloth, lay atop a burlap sack of the sort used to transport mail. A highblood’s possession, if ever there was one, with golden wings as its hilt, and a large, many-faceted sapphire set in its pommel. Dulled through lack of care, and the blade’s tang pitted with rust – but still, too fine a prize to leave behind.
Unless the robbers weren’t yet done.
“Lieutenant? I think there are too many bodies.”
They rose out of the snow as Altiris spun around, four dark-clad figures armed with knives and cudgels. Two, he recognised from the Wayfarer. The others were strangers. Unremarkable men and women you could cross paths with anywhere. A cudgel crashed down. Viara dropped without a sound.
“No!” Altiris drew his sword.
He went utterly still as a sheen of steel slipped beneath his chin.
“Put it down.” The lilting voice was warm against his ear.
Gut seething sour, Altiris obeyed. The simplest of snares, and he’d rushed straight into it.
“That’s better.” The voice, maddeningly familiar, adopted a mocking tone. “I thought we were followed, but to find it was you? Been a long time, my bonny.”
Stray memory flared. “Hawkin?”
“The very same. Haven’t you grown into a fine young man?”
Hawkin Darrow. A southwealder like himself. Once trusted steward to the Reveque family, but in reality a vranakin of the Crowmarket. “I thought you were dead,” spat Altiris.
“Thought, or hoped?”
“Longed for.”
Bracing against the dray’s floor, he slammed back into Hawkin. She yelped, and then they were falling over the cart’s runners and into the snow. Altiris landed hard, his grab at her knife-wrist a hair too slow. But the wing-hilted sword, dragged from the cart during the fall, landed beside him.
He snatched it up. Hawkin shuddered to a halt, chestnut curls dancing and the tip of the pitted blade beneath her chin. Her eyes filled with poison, then bled into approval. “I always thought you showed promise.”
She’d worn the intervening years well. Thinner, perhaps, the vivaciousness of youth – of the mask she’d worn while spying on those who’d thought her friend – eroded until only whip-thin essence remained.
So easy to ram the sword home and avenge old betrayals. But movement in Altiris’ peripheral vision reminded him that Hawkin was not alone. Even if he fought his way clear after, her death would be Viara’s too.
“Enough. Let her go.” The speaker stood by the roadside, one elbow braced against the church’s lychgate. A sharp-accented voice, a shock of ash-blonde hair and a black silk dress that was in no way practical for the weather. She drew closer, skirts dragging at the snows, and halted level with the motionless Hawkin. “No one has died. No one need die. Not for the Lord Protector’s trinkets.”
A rolling whisper billowed beneath her words, a breathy not-quite song that itched at the edge of hearing. One that flirted with melody but never fully embracing it, like waves rushing across an unseen shore. What showed of her skin above frilled black lace was pale in the manner of highblood fashion, but to a degree well beyond the limits of cosmetic powders and lacking their fashionable sheen. Her face was younger than Altiris’ own. Ageless, blue-green eyes belied those slender years.
Altiris stuttered a laugh to hide his discomfort. “These belong to Lord Droshna?”
“They used to.”
“Then you’re a bigger fool than Hawkin.”
“One of us surely is. Put down the sword.”
The song’s intensity swelled, its whispers no longer the burble of the shoreline, but the roar of a storm-wracked ocean. Altiris drowned beneath their rushing waves. He fell to his knees, heart hammering, lungs heaving for breath, his sword hand spasming and empty.
“No!” snapped the pale woman.
Altiris forced leaden eyelids open. The pale woman stood above him, sword point-down in her right hand. Her left gripped Hawkin’s shoulder. The cart bucked and heaved as their companions completed the interrupted robbery.
Hawkin’s knife glinted in the lantern light. “He knows I’m alive. He’ll tell others.”
The pale woman held her back without obvious effort. “And whose fault is that? You know the Merrow’s rules.”
Hawkin snarled and followed the strongbox-laden robbers into the darkened lychfields. The pale woman squatted beside Altiris, the sword at her shoulder and the ghostly whispers on the edge of hearing once again.
“I could have let her kill you,” she breathed, her lips inches from his ear. “Think on that. Are you certain you’re on the right side?”
Her lips brushed his cheek. Then she was gone, rusted sword and all, lost in the snow, whispers fading behind her.
“Viara?”
Clinging to the side of the ransacked cart, Altiris made it to his feet on the third attempt. Viara lay where she’d fallen, face down in the snow. Alive, as the pale woman had promised.
But the rest? Hawkin Darrow back in Tressia? The Lord Protector’s possessions stolen? The Crowmarket resurgent? What more could the night throw at him?
A repeated, scraping thud sounded through the swirling snow. Metal feet falling on stone. Altiris’ heart, already at a low ebb, sank further.
One last humiliation.
A gleam of golden eyes presaged the simarka’s arrival. By the time the cast-bronze lion sat on its haunches before him and cocked its head in sardonic en
quiry, Altiris had almost reconciled himself to what was to come.
“I need your help.”
Tzadas, 27th Day of Wanetithe
Trust to the soldier who seeks no glory by the sword.
Tressian proverb
Two
Winter dawn crept in about the drapes, the memory of the pale woman’s blue-green eyes lurking on nightmare’s edge. All else was the sense of pursuit, of being quarry with nowhere to run, the reeve’s hounds howling behind. Usual, for all they were unwelcome. Old memories that only showed their face at night, when Altiris’ body slept and his mind wandered.
He banished Selann to the past, the sodden, weatherworn hovel of childhood yielding to his Stonecrest quarters. The attic room, while nothing to the expansive chambers enjoyed by the nobility, was larger than his family’s entire shack. Thick carpet, rather than packed soil and cracked tiles. A broad hearth, and beneath the window a garden, not a muddy vale of crops to tend until arms ached and fingers bled.
Proof that the past was the past, and the future held only promise.
But those eyes. When Altiris closed his own they were with him still. Watching him as if he were prey. No. That wasn’t quite right. As if she wasn’t yet certain whether he was prey.
Are you certain you’re on the right side?
The estate bell started him from reverie. Eight o’clock, and he still abed. Unacceptable, even if he’d been up long past midnight. Passing up a shave and all but the simplest ablutions in favour of haste, he dressed and took the stairs two at a time down to a hall resplendent with Midwintertide decorations. Not the wooden pendants of the impoverished Wallmarch, but glittering glass baubles and bright paper lanterns.
A nodded greeting to a maid – who bobbed a curtsey and hurriedly withdrew from his path – and Altiris quickened his pace toward the armoury.
“No call to be rushing around,” a voice drawled from the drawing room doorway. “How many servants are you planning to trip over, anyway?”
Altiris halted to face his tormentor. “The hearthguard—”
“Are managing agreeably without you, lad. Brass and Jaridav have the gate. Beckon and Kelver the streets. Stalder the front door and Jarrock the patrol.” Kurkas leaned against the door jamb and scratched beneath his eye patch. “What? Think I’ve lost the knack? Reckon my faculties are flaking?”
Not that. Never that. For all that Kurkas had traded a captain’s uniform for the more respectable waistcoat and jacket of Stonecrest’s steward – respectable, rather than presentable, because Kurkas could rumple good cloth with the merest brush of a finger – a lifetime behind the sword wasn’t soon set aside.
Years that had struck black hair steel grey had slowed him little more than had leaving his left arm behind on the battlefield, twenty years before. Of Stonecrest’s hearthguard, only Jaridav came close to besting him with any consistency. Altiris, for all that they sparred two or three times a week, counted victories on the fingers of one hand.
And they were good pairings. Jaridav’s diligence would keep grizzled old Brass from slacking at his duties, and his poacher’s eye would catch ill intent the younger woman might miss. And though Altiris hadn’t considered it until that moment, Beckon and Stalder were barely on speaking terms – the result of a friendly card game turned less so with wagers laid. Keeping them apart was to everyone’s benefit.
The realisation occasioned chagrin. He should have caught that. At least it had been Kurkas who’d covered his failing, rather than Anastacia, whose ratio of mockery to kindness was far steeper.
“And Viara?” Altiris asked, then remembered he’d used her personal name, rather than her family’s, as was proper. “Boronav, I mean?”
“So we’re on first name terms with all the nobility, are we? Or is it just the young and pretty ones?” Kurkas ignored Altiris’ glare and forged on. “Light duties. She has one of the carriages, a satchel of correspondence and orders to take it easy playing at herald.”
Altiris’ shoulders unknotted a fraction. “No complications?”
“A lump on the noggin and a fearful headache, but that goes with the territory, doesn’t it? You were both of you lucky last night.”
Altiris scowled. Nothing travelled faster than failure. Then again, Kurkas seemed to know everything. “Going to chew me out for it?”
“Count my arms, lad. Tell me I’ve never made a mistake.” He shrugged. “But I wouldn’t mind hearing about it direct from you. In my day, vranakin didn’t leave witnesses, and certainly not conscious ones.”
Altiris grunted. “Maybe things have changed.”
“Maybe. And as for being chewed out?” Kurkas levered himself upright. “It’s not me you need worry about.”
Tension returned to Altiris’ shoulders. “She’s here?”
“In the kitchen. Came home with the dawn in search of grub.” He shrugged. “You’ll have to speak sometime. Might as well be now.”
He nodded farewell and strode across the hall, the limp unmistakeable. A reminder that formidable though Kurkas was, the steward had lived long years hard. Little by little, time was laying claim to a victory that vranakin and a legion of Hadari had failed to achieve.
“Vladama?” Use of the personal name still seemed wrong, but was sometimes necessary. If for no other reason than he and Kurkas occupied the same curious station in the Stonecrest household, being considered as close to family as commoners could. “Thank you.”
The other halted, and offered a nod. “Just… Keep it civil. Lady Boronav’s not the only one with a throbbing head.”
Sidara was, as Kurkas had promised, in the kitchen, one elbow propped against the tabletop and chin against her palm. Even staring moodily down into the remnants of a bowl of oatmeal – without giving any sign of seeing it – with shadows gathered beneath tired, blue eyes, and the frayed, once-meticulous plaits sporting a wispy golden halo of rebellious hairs, she lit up the room.
Many disdained as improper that a young woman who was both the heir to the Reveque bloodline, and by adoption a daughter of Trelan, should lower herself to association with a mere hearthguard – who was not only a southwealder, but once an indentured slave into the bargain. But sneers had only bound them closer. She’d been his confidante – and he hers – in joy, in heartbreak and in mourning.
Indeed, soon after Sidara had earned the Drazina’s silver swan, she’d insisted Altiris accompany her to a ball at the Montesrin estate. One of the other guests – another newly elevated officer named Ivo Tarev – had loudly objected to Altiris’ presence, insisting the [R] replace with: “upstart southwealder” be banished to the kitchens, or else prove his worth with a sword. Knowing Tarev to be far more skilled with a blade than he, Altiris had resigned himself to a humiliating retreat.
Only for Sidara to accept the challenge on his behalf.
By rights, the matter should have ended then and there. Bad enough that the Lord Protector disapproved of the once-common practice of honour duelling. Worse to fight such a duel against a woman the Lord Protector considered his niece. To do so in the full knowledge that Sidara wielded Lumestra’s light in a way not seen outside of legend? Well, that took stupidity to soaring heights.
As matters transpired, Sidara hadn’t resorted to magic. Blood streaming from a cut on her brow – the result of a sloppy parry and mistaken footing on the rain-sodden lawn – she’d extracted apology with her sword at Tarev’s throat. Then, eyes shining and cheeks aglow, she’d taken Altiris’ arm in hers and marched away. They’d spent the rest of the night on the edge of the Hayadra Grove, a bottle purloined from the Montesrin wine cellar emptied to the dregs, staring at the moon across the flooded streets of the western docks.
Then, in the light of the rising dawn, she’d kissed him. And the new day was suddenly very different to the old. The future he’d thought before him washed away and replaced by something wondrous and unexpected.
Not even two years ago, but it felt like a lifetime. Longer.
How the wall between
them had arisen, Altiris still wasn’t sure. Brick by brick, he supposed, in the manner that all such walls were fashioned. Hastened by Sidara’s increasing responsibilities, mortared by words unspoken, and invisible until complete. He supposed it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that the wall existed, and was not for climbing. Were he honest, he didn’t even know when they’d grown apart, only that holding onto even friendship was a constant challenge. Anything deeper had long since been lost.
And for all that, Altiris still wanted to be near her. At least, until he was actually in her presence. Then all he wanted to do was leave before they fell to quarrelling. Living under the same roof would have been awkward beyond words, had either of them spent any more time at Stonecrest than necessity – or in Altiris’ case, duty – demanded. At least Lord Trelan remained as ignorant of the widening gulf as he was of what had come before. Bad enough that Kurkas knew.
And Kurkas was right. They had to speak sometime.
“So you do still live here?”he said.
Sidara jerked upright, hand fumbling at a dislodged spoon before it skittered to the floor. The corners of her eyes and mouth rippled, then set rigid as surprise yielded to composure. “You’re one to talk. Run dry of girls to impress with a Phoenix’s uniform?” For all the words’ barb, there was little in her tone. “Viktor insisted I sleep. He threatened to lock me out of the Panopticon and send me home under escort.”
The Panopticon was the sole completed tower of the city’s new defences. The uppermost floor was a triumph of engineering, more glazed than not, the multifaceted windows offering a view clear across the city. At night, firestone lanterns upon its pinnacle blazed bright against the firmament, birthing a more poetic name in those so inclined – the Tower of Stars.
Sidara set a hand to her mouth to stifle a yawn, undermining the righteousness of defiance.
“Maybe he’s right.” Altiris ventured past stove and pantry until he was level with the lopsided door that emptied onto the grounds. “You look awful.”
Lips softened almost to a smile, but never committed. “And you’re a fool.”