by Matthew Ward
Redsigor’s spears against old swords and lumber axes? “It’d be suicide.”
“You know that. I know that.” Eckorov stared moodily up at the basement’s windows. “But out there? There’s a whole generation come of age who think things would have been different had they been old enough to fight. Too many remember only that we won the last war. They don’t remember what it cost. I fear Tarvallion is dry as Sommertide kindling.”
“Even kindling needs flame to catch.”
“Does the name Silda Drenn mean anything to you?”
It did, though it took a moment for Rosa to chase the memory down. “A southwealder, isn’t she? A wolf’s-head who fought at Davenwood.”
“This morning she arrived in Tarvallion, blown in on the Dawn Wind. She’s preaching a tale of liberation and fury too many are ready to hear. Claims she can do for the east what the wolf’s-heads once did for the south.”
A seductive message, especially with folk looking for someone who’d take action. “She’s a wolf’s-head. Have her arrested.”
“The trifling matter of the pardon aside, I’d like nothing more. But at least fifty swords arrived with her. More will take her side if I loose the constabulary. I’ve barely enough to keep order as it is. If there’s a riot…?” Eckorov shook his head. “No, I need someone to have a quiet word with Drenn. Persuade her, if possible. Warn her off if it isn’t.”
Rosa laughed bitterly. She’d expected a request for duelling tutelage funnelled from one of Tarvallion’s wealthier families, or perhaps an undertaking to train the town’s constabulary – who were certainly sorely in need of a soldier’s lessons. But this?
“You want Josiri Trelan, not me. I didn’t reach the Southshires until after Davenwood, and even then…”
She tailed off, memory bright with the flames that had reduced Eskavord to ash. Viktor’s orders – and desperately necessary – but she’d carried them out. A woman with Drenn’s reputation would remember that.
Eckorov set his back to the windows and fixed her with a level gaze. “I can’t afford the time. A day for a herald to reach Tressia, at least? And I doubt Lord Trelan will drop everything to soothe my fears. You’ll forgive me for saying so, but these days I receive more decrees from the city that I do tangible help, and more vagueness from Lord Trelan than action.” He spread his hands. “Even if he agrees with my assessment and comes at once, that’s another day, perhaps two. More than enough time for mischief, even if it’s well intentioned.”
That was the problem, wasn’t it? For all Eckorov’s obvious worry about riots, unspoken agreement with Drenn’s goals lurked beneath his words. The reeve was too canny not to recognise that the situation with the Contested Lands would reach a head sooner rather than later. What made Silda Drenn dangerous in days of uneasy peace could make her priceless in the war of reclamation that had to be coming. She was a link to a romanticised past, proof that tyranny could not triumph for ever. That the tyranny she’d once fought had been willingly abetted by the folk of the Eastshires – as it had all Tressia north of Margard – was a detail perhaps better forgotten.
Rosa might have resented Eckorov his reluctance, had she not shared it. “I’m not exactly a diplomat.”
“Drenn’s far more likely to respect your past than she is mine – even if you no longer hold rank. And there’s always going to be the tacit suggestion that you’re acting with Governor Orova’s authority.” He shrugged and glanced meaningfully about the basement. “And if all goes poorly and the mob rouses? Well, they’ll have no difficulty burning you in effigy, will they? Frankly, Roslava, you’re the best option if lives are to be saved.”
It really was that simple, wasn’t it? “There’s little less use than a broken sword,” she murmured. “Save for a shield that shelters no more.”
Eckorov frowned. “I didn’t catch that.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Decision made, the next words came easier. “Where can I find her?”
The sound of the crowd reached Rosa long before she arrived at the marketplace, borne by the same gusting Ash Wind that grabbed the tails of her jacket and tugged at her unbound hair. Quickening her pace through the snows, she steered north.
Even at that hour, the marketplace was crowded, the brightly coloured canopies of stall and barrow a reminder of what Tarvallion had once been. Far ahead, beyond the mismatched stone and tile of the houses, the ruined towers of Tremora Gardens pierced the skeletal winter canopy of Starik Wood’s western extent. Bonfires blazed along the divide between the new city and the old, the reclaimed and the forsaken. On the forest’s cusp, where firebreaks, iron fence posts and holy writ held forest demons and creeping vines at bay, folk slept poorly, each midnight rat-tat-tat on the windowpanes a reminder that not everyone who left Tarvallion did so willingly… or through ephemeral agency.
So easy to abandon the city entirely – certainly easier than constant vigil against the thornmaidens whose cruel, sweet song drifted through the reclaimed streets when the Ice Wind blew in from the north. But Tarvallion had long been the Republic’s opaline heart, and Sevaka’s first decree as governor was that it be reclaimed.
And so it had, after a fashion, but the new city was not the old. Its buildings had been raised over the course of months, rather than decades. Flagstoned streets had yielded to silted, muddy cobbles; firestone lantern-posts to braziers and oil-soaked torches. The Tarvallion of the present could have stirred no poet to consult his muse, nor minstrel to offer song. But it was there, and that counted for something. A rock upon the Toriana Plains, banners raised high at gate and tower to remind the Hadari of one, singular truth: we are still here, and here we mean to stay.
It took a special sort to meet the challenge of restoration. Hardy. Stubborn. And the trouble with stubbornness – as Rosa well knew – was that it respected boundaries little better than a thornmaiden’s song. Defiance became a habit, and habits muffled good sense.
Case in point, the marketplace buzz was not that of greeting and barter, but an intemperate growl, conducted by a woman who stood atop a wagon’s bench seat. Her left hand propped a strung bow against the seat. A quiver of red-fletched arrows hung at her thigh.
“Is the blood of the Marcher Lands so thin?” Drenn’s voice pierced the hubbub with ease. Confident. Angry. Hard as stone. A trace of the guttural Thrakkian accent shared by so many in the south. “Less than an hour’s ride from here our kin are suffering, penned in by spears!”
Rosa threaded closer, old instincts sifting purpose and intent. Most of the crowd were Tarvallion’s citizens, or else merchants and travellers from nearby villages. The old and the very young, for much of what lay between had already been subject to conscription. A handful were riotously drunk, the day’s takings already imbibed. Finer foods might have been scarce, but ale never ran dry. Blue-tabarded constables lurked on the periphery, watchful and with hands near swords they’d never have chance to draw if affairs turned ugly.
“In the south, we stood together,” shouted Drenn. “We taught the Hadari the folly of hubris. We’ll do it again in the east.”
Halfway to the wagon, the crowd thickened, the transition from the curious to the truly interested marked by the press of bodies. Rosa resorted to shoulders and elbows to forge a path. She marked those who carried weapons – whose aspect was rougher and more weatherworn even than was normal for Tarvallion. Drenn’s folk, seeded throughout the onlookers to prevent trouble, or perhaps provoke it.
“I don’t need the reeve’s permission, or the governor’s blessing,” Drenn continued. “The Eastshires cry out for aid. That’s the only sanction any of us require.”
Now three-deep from Drenn’s makeshift pulpit, Rosa was close enough to examine the woman herself. Wiry to the point of scrawny, and with a face so weathered by a life outdoors that she seemed a good decade older than Rosa herself. A misjudgement. Bounty posters ten years back had depicted a girl, not a woman. For all the romanticism proclaimed by playwright and poet, a brigand’s life counted
every year three times over. Her hair was cropped close, save for a single thin braid that snaked from beneath her hood to rest against a worn sunburst pendant.
As she opened her mouth to speak again, Rosa cut her off. “Tell them the rest, Silda. Tell them what it will cost.”
A rumble rippled across the marketplace. Rosa’s skin itched beneath unfriendly glares. Not just from Drenn’s followers, but elsewhere in the crowd. Drenn’s small gesture at waist height – easily missed, if Rosa hadn’t been watching for it – stilled the former.
“You’ve an advantage over me, northwealder.” Drenn levelled the last as a targeted insult – no easy feat amid a crowd of men and women no less northwealders than Rosa herself. Her eyes narrowed in examination no less thorough than Rosa’s own, a ghost of a sneer rising as she took in the good cloth of shirt, waistcoat and jacket. “Won’t you tell me your name?”
Was there a threat in the question? A reminder that a name made prey easier to find, especially in a denuded town like Tarvallion? If so, Drenn had severely misjudged.
“I’m Lady Roslava Orova, of Essamere and the 7th.”
While neither shrunken Essamere nor the conscript-thick 7th any longer had claim on her, both had made her as she was. She’d forged her reputation under their colours. A reputation well known.
“That right?” Drenn’s stare didn’t waver above a thin smile. A woman well pleased with the sound of her own voice, and a rare moment of power over one who was her better. “And what does the Reaper of the Ravonn want with a poor daughter of Kreska?”
Rosa’s lip twitched at the hated nickname. So Drenn did know her. “Only to talk.”
“Your wife afraid to speak for herself?”
The jibe coaxed a chuckle from the crowd. Rosa kept her face impassive, and resigned herself to another morning’s sculpture to banish reborn anger. “I’m here at my own behest. To greet a hero of Davenwood. I’ve always regretted that we never met. After all, we were so nearly allies.”
She leaned into those final words, for the first time grateful that Viktor had so muddied the events surrounding Eskavord’s burning that her own complicity was concealed even from rumour. She deplored the lie. Then, for his insistence of bearing the burden alone. The fires of Eskavord had been necessary. Every man, woman and child in the town had borne a fragment of Malatriant’s spirit – had even one survived, the Tyrant Queen would have done so alongside, and the shadowthorns would be the least of anyone’s worries. Now? Well, that was complicated, bound up in guilt and resentment. Rosa’s feelings about Viktor had complicated further in the year since they’d been at Darkmere.
But even as Rosa wrestled with old memories, a cold fist clamped tight about her gut. Malatriant had influenced Eskavord across centuries, nudging the populace to revolt and rebellion until she was strong enough to consume them, body and soul. But what if a piece of her had survived the fires? What if Drenn’s arrival in Tarvallion was more than it appeared? Her actions not entirely her own? Would she even know? So many of Malatriant’s thralls had not until it was too late.
Drenn nodded, her eyes tracking across the crowd, a woman weighing possibilities of her own. The balance of the crowd’s sympathies, perhaps. Then she offered a smile no less sharp than her tone, and jumped down from the wagon.
“Very well, Lady Orova. Let’s talk.”
Six
“Well,” said Drenn. “This is cosy.”
Cosy was one way to describe the back room of the Thief’s Bounty. To Rosa’s mind, cramped was more apt, the cracked plaster walls almost near enough to touch without rising from the table. A blazing hearth stacked high with wood and blackstone made the air closer still, and lent every breath the memory of battlefield pyres, blazing in the distance.
Drenn took another swig of her tankard and cast a pointed look at Rosa’s own untouched drink on the windowsill. “I thought we were being friendly?”
Friendly – like cosy before it – flirted with the truth, more than committed to it. The shadows of Drenn’s followers loomed large in the room beyond the door. As for the window? Twenty years ago, Rosa might have squeezed through into the gathering night and the marketplace’s flickering braziers, but certainly no longer. Unwise to trap oneself thus, but she’d never been good at backing down from a challenge. Besides, what skills she possessed had merely rusted, not atrophied beyond reclamation, and she doubted Drenn was so foolish as to offer harm to the Reaper of the Ravonn.
Still, Rosa took a mouthful of ale. “You said you wanted to talk, but you’ve said little.”
A slim, knowing smile. Drenn set her tankard down on the sill and leaned back in her creaking chair. “I’ve been thinking. We can do that, you know. Even in the south.”
“And where have your thoughts led you?”
“To something I heard a couple of years back about your wife, Governor Orova.” She leaned forward, dark eyes brimming with scandal. “That she died in the mountains, and that… thing… in your bed ain’t nothing but a tame prizrak. Or maybe she’s not so tame, eh? Maybe—”
The statues in Brackenpike Manor burning in her mind’s eye, Rosa lunged from the chair. Hands closing about throat and wrist, she slammed Drenn against the wall, occasioning a spill of plaster dust from a ragged crack above.
Two burly shapes gathered in the doorway, hands slipping beneath their cloaks. Rosa ignored them. The first regret crept in as her pulse steadied. Not at what she’d done – or why – but at being so easily provoked. Not a diplomat? As severe an understatement as ever there was.
“So we’re done being friendly, are we?” she murmured, her eyes on Drenn’s.
The other gave an urgent wave at hip height. The shapes in the doorway withdrew. “I don’t believe it, of course. Ain’t the Raven’s way, is it? Letting someone go. Dead’s dead.”
Rosa stepped away.
Released, Drenn coughed and rubbed at her throat. Then the smile was back – one more knowing than Rosa cared for. “So you do have a bit of fire yet. Go on, Lady Orova. Sit. I’ll behave.”
An impish flash of dark eyes threatened contradiction. Still, Rosa did as instructed. But her reasons for seeking Drenn hadn’t changed. “Why are you here, Silda?”
Drenn reclaimed the tankard and shrugged. “I’ve not exactly kept it secret. The Eastshires need help.”
“Your help?”
“Likely it’s not the aid they’re looking for, I’ll grant you. But what else is there?”
Rosa caught no hint of the demagogic tone so readily wielded for the crowd. Instead, Drenn spoke low and earnestly, with no hint of mockery in voice or expression. “They’ve needed help for years. What’s different now?”
“Little enough, and only for the worse.” She met Rosa’s gaze, lips scrunched in thought. “Months back, I ran into your friend. Lord Akadra. Well, Lord Droshna, as he styles himself now.”
She paused, perhaps waiting for a response. Receiving none, she forged on.
“First time I’d been back to Eskavord since… Well, you know. Point of fact, I’d not long been back in the Republic. Thrakkians pay well for blades, and their men are drawn to scars like you wouldn’t believe. But a girl gets bored even of that. It was like, I don’t know… Like something was drawing me north.”
Rosa stiffened, suspicions rekindled. Few of Malatriant’s thralls had recognised how they’d been manipulated. A yearning. A desire. Drawing them close enough until all were one in the Dark.
“There I was, walking the ash fields. Nothing grows there any longer. Not for miles. You know where you are, soon as you cross the threshold. You can hear ’em on the wind. The dead.” Drenn shook her head. “You reckon it’s cold out there? Sommertide, this was. Barely a week after Ascension, and there was ice on Branghall’s stones, and mist so thick you could barely see your feet.”
The back room’s warmth had become a distant memory, unable to contest the prickle of Rosa’s skin. Was a piece of Malatriant lurking behind Drenn’s eyes? If so, better to kill her now and r
isk the consequences, before Tarvallion inherited the chaos that had claimed the south.
Too late to regret coming to the marketplace unarmed. Not that she’d worn a sword since she’d woken on the hillside above Darkmere, her bandages sodden, Viktor a surly presence on the makeshift camp’s perimeter and hope vacant from the eyes of her fellow survivors. Besides, Drenn had a knife strapped to her boot. Likely another concealed. And surprise was a weapon all its own. From there, easy enough to cripple or kill the brigand’s minders…
She barely realised Drenn was still talking.
“I found Akadra not far from Branghall’s ruins. Well, stumbled over him really. Damn mist. One of his Drazina nearly slit me. Then Akadra grabbed me, like you did just now. Reckoned he was going to do the job himself. He stared right through me.” She shivered. “But I guess he didn’t find anything, ’cos he let me go.”
Rosa blinked, the choreography of murder unfinished. So Viktor had harboured similar suspicions about Drenn and set her free? Despite herself – despite shaken faith in her old friend – Rosa relaxed an inch or two. For all his failure of judgement at Darkmere, he’d surely take no chance with this? As for why he’d been at Branghall, on that day of all days? No need to speculate there. One failure hung heavier on Viktor than others. He’d made that Ascension pilgrimage for the last six years. A gesture granted to the dead of Eskavord and Davenwood. To one of their number, in particular.
She leaned forward, alert for trace of a lie. “He let you go?”
“You’ve somewhere else to be. That’s what he said. He was right.” The smile returned, if feebler than before. “Guilt brought me home. Tied and true.”