“Oh, for the Tide’s sake, will you stop!” Cayal cried.
Arkady looked at him in surprise. “Why, Cayal? I thought you’d be delighted to know your history has been so diligently preserved.”
“That’s not my history!” he snapped. “It’s a fairytale. It happened nothing like that!”
“It being you becoming an immortal, I suppose?” Arkady asked. “How did it happen, then, if the Tarot is so wrong?”
He turned to glare at her, his blue eyes blazing. From his cell across the hall, Warlock rose to his feet, sensing a danger in him that he hadn’t previously felt. Even Arkady could feel it. When she spoke again, her voice was gentle, conciliatory, soothing…
“Tell me the truth, then, Cayal.”
“What would be the point? You don’t believe me.”
“I’ll believe the truth.”
Cayal paced his cell, debating something within himself, and then suddenly he turned and grabbed the bars. “You really want to know, do you? Really? The truth?”
Arkady nodded. “The truth.”
“Then you’d better get comfortable,” he warned. “It’s a very long story…”
Chapter 19
If I had to point to a single incident—the one deed that set me on this path—it was the moment I killed Orin, son of Thraxis, in a duel defending the honour of some girl I’d never met until a few hours before and whose name, to this day, I still don’t know.
I remember what caused the fight well enough. We’d been sheltering from a blizzard in Dun Cinczi on our way to Lakesh, me and two of my older brothers. We were on our way home for a wedding. My wedding. I was twenty-six years old and only two days away from marrying the love of my life, Gabriella of Kippen, and I resented every moment of the damned blizzard that forced us to break our journey.
Dun Cinczi was tucked into a small valley in the Hotendenish Mountains in northern Kordana. It belonged to a vassal of my sister, Queen Planice. The lord of the dun, Thraxis, was happy to open his hearth to travellers caught by the storm, particularly to those related to his queen. I was only a younger brother—there were eight older siblings between me and the throne—but we were near enough to the seat of power for Thraxis to treat us as honoured guests.
Thraxis’s only son, Orin, and I had been friends since childhood, so we settled in for a pleasant evening around a blazing hearth quaffing vast quantities of mead with my brothers and the other men of the dun while the blizzard raged outside. From what I remember of it, the night turned into an impromptu bachelor party. Everyone was in fine spirits, boasting of their hunting triumphs and bragging about their conquests—highly exaggerated, I’m sure—of the opposite sex.
Orin was in the midst of one such lengthy and highly improbable boast when the last of the night’s travellers blew in. I remember looking up as a gust of icy wind announced the arrival of a nervous young couple, bundled up in ragged furs.
Tides, it could get cold in Kordana…
The chilly blast was cut off as the door was slammed shut and we all turned to study the newcomers. They looked tired and wary of a hearth full of drunken strangers. The husband seemed particularly protective of his wife, who was unmistakably in the late stages of pregnancy. With a belly almost swelled to bursting and clearly fatigued from her journey, we made room for her around the fire as Thraxis’s wife hurried in with a bowl of venison stew and a tumbler of what was—most likely—fermented mare’s milk.
She ate her meal hungrily, the pregnant woman, sitting next to Orin, who studied her curiously for a moment and then placed his arm around her shoulder. We all thought he was just being kind, you know…offering her the warmth of his body to aid the fire in taking the blue from her lips. The woman might have been pretty; probably was, I suppose, given Orin’s interest in her, but I couldn’t say. I only remember her belly. And the furs.
Odd, isn’t it? After all this time, how the little things still stick in your mind.
Anyway, the stories continued. The night wore on. We got drunker and the blizzard showed no sign of letting up. The young husband—I never learned his name, either—drank very little. He spent most of his time glaring at Orin, who was starting to act as if the wife was his woman.
Things came to a head when the young man rose to his feet and announced he and his wife would retire for the evening. I think the pregnant woman made to rise, but Orin pulled her down again beside him. He made some drunken declaration about her knowing a real man when she saw one. And then he announced she’d decided to spend the night with him.
Thraxis, who was probably more inebriated than all the rest of us put together, laughed uproariously at the proclamation. It was proof, he bellowed drunkenly, of what a great man his son was. Look at him! the old drunkard chortled. Her belly’s already starting to swell, and he’s only been sitting next to her!
I must have been too drunk to notice the tension in the hall, at least until things had gotten completely out of hand. I still can’t say what made me take notice. Perhaps it was the panicked look on the face of the young pregnant woman. It might have been watching Thraxis’s wife trying to coax the girl from the fire, a move Orin thwarted by dragging the girl onto his lap as soon as he realised what his mother was doing.
It was at that point the husband tried to intervene.
Laughing at his objections, two of Thraxis’s men held him back as he cried out, protesting Orin’s possession of his wife. The young woman struggled, trying to get away, but she was held fast, despite her best efforts.
“Help me!” she begged, looking straight at me, as Orin pushed her down and began to tear at the furs in which she was swaddled. “For pity’s sake, is there nobody here who’ll help me?”
She screamed as Orin pushed the furs aside and ripped apart the laces on her shift, laughing as her heavy breasts were exposed.
Even with eight thousand years to wonder why, to this day, I still can’t say what prompted me to intervene. I didn’t know the girl and Orin was a lifelong friend. In hindsight, I doubt it was out of a sense of chivalry; in those days chivalry was a concept still foreign to humanity, something they took another few hundred years to think of. And it wasn’t because I considered taking a woman against her will to be particularly wrong. Although my fiancée had been lucky—my engagement to Gabriella was a love match that suited both families so it had been allowed to proceed—there weren’t many wives in Kordana who’d gone willingly to their marriage bed. Stealing the woman of your dreams and taking her by force passed for a national sport in the country of my birth. There wasn’t even a word for rape in the Kordian language.
But something in the voice of the pregnant woman struck a chord. Before I knew what I was doing, I was on my feet. “Leave her alone, Orin.”
Orin took his mouth from her breast long enough to laugh at me. “Wait your turn, you greedy sod.”
“I mean it, Orin. Let her be.”
He looked up at me, astonished to realise I was serious. “Do you challenge me for her?”
“She’s not yours to give or take, Orin,” I remember saying, or something like it. I’m sure it sounded terribly noble to my mead-fogged mind.
Whatever I said, it was enough to infuriate Orin. He pushed the woman aside and staggered to his feet. Everyone scrambled clear as his mother dragged her out of the way while the other women started removing anything that might break—the inevitable result of two men disagreeing about anything around Thraxis’s hearth.
“You want her…you’re going to have to get past me first!” Orin declared, shaking his fist at me. Even then, I don’t think I appreciated how serious he was.
Or how serious I was, too.
“I don’t want her,” I tried to explain, beginning to wonder—somewhere in the dark recesses of my addled brain—what I’d started. “And she obviously doesn’t want you, either. Just let her be.”
“You can’t tell me what I can and can’t have in my own father’s hearth!”
“Orin, this isn’t worth fig
hting over…”
Famous last words, I’ve often reflected in hindsight.
The details of the fight are still unclear. I was drunk. There were fists at first and not much damage being done, I think, given the amount of leather and fur we were both wearing…
And then I got in a lucky hit, belting Orin on the nose. I remember the spray of blood, Orin’s howl of pain and outrage, the cheering circle of men, and the flickering light from the huge hearth, the smell of greased leathers, smoking timber and poorly cured furs…odd things like that. I remember Orin’s furious bellow as he charged…
But I can’t…not for the life of me…remember how the knife came to be in my hand.
Or how it finished up buried to the hilt in Orin’s unmoving chest.
Shocked silence descended over the dun’s hall when Orin fell. It wasn’t as if nobody had ever shed blood on this hearth before. In winter, with the men cooped up and feeling fractious, it was almost a nightly occurrence in Dun Cinczi. But it was all in good fun. There were rarely any weapons involved.
Until tonight. I’d crossed that unspoken boundary, even if I couldn’t recall exactly how I’d managed it.
My poor recall meant nothing to Thraxis. As Orin’s mother fell to her knees beside her son, keening with despair, Thraxis roared out with the agony of his loss. The next thing I knew, I was being dragged from the hall and thrown into the icy meat store, the only door in Dun Cinczi with a lock on it.
I stayed there for three whole days, certain my punishment was freezing to death.
Solitude is an interesting companion. It is both enemy and friend, comforter and tormentor. I spent a lot of time in Dun Cinzci’s meat locker trying to decide which. Fortunately, when I tired of solitude, I had guilt to keep me company. Guilt is an even more interesting acquaintance than solitude, let me tell you. Solitude is a harsh but essentially benign attendant. Guilt, on the other hand, is a living, breathing creature, cruel and remorseless. It eats you from the inside out; devours what little hope you have left. It feeds on you, growing stronger with every accursed replayed memory, every useless recrimination.
My guilt was a tangible thing, tinged with inescapable grief, Orin was my friend and I had killed him over some woman. What was I thinking? I didn’t know her. There weren’t words to describe how little she meant to me. Yet Orin was dead because I had leapt to the defence of a complete stranger. My stupidity was breathtaking, my guilt overwhelming, my future uncertain, every day spent in this icy meat locker another day closer to dying—I was convinced—either at the hand of Thraxis or of hypothermia, the former almost a welcome prospect given the nature of my confinement.
But death would have been too easy. The Tides had a far crueller fate in store for me, although it would be a while yet before I discovered it. The ultimate irony, of course, is that I would welcome it when it finally came, too foolish to recognise the danger.
So I froze, and I paced the small space between the hanging carcasses, and I fretted endlessly and on the fourth day, the door opened.
When I saw the silhouette standing there, I knew my life was in mortal peril. My guilt meant nothing. My remorse meant even less.
Orin’s death would be avenged with mine, I was certain, and there was probably nothing I could do to prevent it.
Chapter 20
“Your grace?”
Arkady started at the unexpected interruption. She glanced over her shoulder to find Timms standing behind her.
“The Warden would like to see you, your grace.”
It took her a moment to register what Timms was saying. Arkady stared at him blankly, still caught up in Cayal’s tale. “Um…er…of course…”
“Your grace?” Timms asked, looking rather concerned.
“Her ladyship seems a little confused,” Cayal noted.
Arkady forced herself to concentrate. Unbelievably, it was almost sunset. She rose to her feet, stuffing her notebook back in her satchel before Timms or Cayal had any chance to see it. The notebook was a waste of time anyway. She’d stopped taking notes about the time Cayal rose to defend the young pregnant woman, but didn’t want either the prisoner or his guard to know that. So she smiled condescendingly at the prisoner and said, “You missed your calling, I suspect, Cayal. You should have been a bard.”
Leaning on the bars, he eyed her curiously. “You didn’t believe a word of that, did you?”
“It’s certainly a fantastic tale,” she conceded.
“Why not ask your living lie detector over there,” he suggested, jerking his head in Warlock’s direction. “Ask him if I’m lying.”
Arkady didn’t want to ask Warlock’s opinion, because she was fairly sure she knew what it would be. “A five-year-old could tell you’re lying, Cayal. But you do weave a magical tale. Perhaps tomorrow,” she suggested, pushing the chair to one side after she’d put Tilly’s Tarot cards away in the satchel next to the almost empty notebook, “we can hear the rest of your remarkable story.”
“I’ve been around a very long time, Arkady,” he reminded her. “It’s going to take more than a couple of leisurely afternoons to tell you about my life.”
“Then let’s hope the hangman is patient,” she suggested frostily. It made her uncomfortable when he addressed her by name, but she usually ignored it, certain remarking on his rudeness would only give him more ammunition. It was a subtle if silent battle she was engaged in with Cayal, the Immortal Prince. She had no intention of arming him with anything he might use against her.
“I’ll see you gentlemen tomorrow, shall I?”
“You tell us,” Cayal replied, studying her closely, almost as if he could tell what she was thinking. “You’re the one with the freedom to come and go as you please.”
“Then I will see you tomorrow,” Arkady assured him, and then she turned on her heel and followed Timms as fast as she was able without actually breaking into a run.
As instructed by the Crown Prince of Glaeba, Arkady was required to repeat the essence of Cayal’s tale over the dinner table that night. There was no dinner party this evening, but Stellan, Jaxyn, Mathu and Kylia were all in attendance, so she gave them an abbreviated version. She told herself she was censoring the story for the sake of a good narrative, but she wasn’t. Arkady didn’t really want to share the details. Cayal had told his story to her. It wasn’t meant for strangers’ ears.
“So,” Stellan concluded when Arkady had finished telling her story. “He tells you just enough to make it seem real, without giving you anything you can verify or even deny. Our spy has been well coached.”
“A little too well, I fear,” she replied, frowning as she sipped her water.
“What do you mean?”
She shrugged, not sure how to put her concerns into words. “If this man is a Caelish agent—if he’s been sent here to stir up the Crasii—you’d think his tale would follow the known histories more closely.”
“I thought the problem was that we don’t actually have any proper histories of the Tide Lords?” Mathu said.
“Which is exactly my point, your highness,” Arkady agreed. “The Crasii oral history doesn’t deal in specifics, so given the dearth of factual information, if he wanted to prove his claim, logically, his story should follow the Tarot—the only known record besides the Crasii—as closely as possible. But it doesn’t. There’s a seed of truth in his tale, perhaps, but nothing more. And he speaks as if it really happened to him. It’s unnerving.”
“Have you considered the possibility that he’s insane?” Mathu asked. “Perhaps it sounds so real because he truly believes it?”
“Or the Caelish are more sophisticated than we give them credit for,” Stellan suggested. “Perhaps our spy is spinning a somewhat different tale to make it seem real, knowing any other path would be suspect.”
“Do you think he’s handsome, Arkady?” Kylia asked.
Mathu glanced at her curiously. “Why do you assume he must be handsome, Lady Kylia?”
“Well…he’s a Tide
Lord…or claiming to be one. I thought they were all supposed to be outstanding beauties.”
“He’s obviously outstanding at something,” Stellan chuckled, dabbing his mouth with his napkin. “But I’m not sure it’s his looks that deserve the credit.”
“What would you know, Uncle Stellan?” Kylia said dismissively. “You’re a man. You don’t know what handsome is.”
Jaxyn laughed aloud at Kylia’s declaration. “You’re absolutely right, my lady. What would a big, ugly brute like your uncle know about what makes a man attractive, eh?”
It really should be legal to murder someone like Jaxyn Aranville, Arkady noted darkly. Everybody laughed, of course. Kylia—and fortunately Mathu—had no idea that Jaxyn meant anything other than exactly what he said.
Completely oblivious to his double meaning, the young woman turned to her, grinning broadly. “Well…what do you say, Arkady? Is this Caelishman handsome enough to be a Tide Lord?”
Arkady shrugged. “I suppose.”
“You mean you haven’t noticed?” Jaxyn gasped in mock alarm. “How unobservant of you, your grace! And here you are doing all this remarkable intelligence work for the King’s Spymaster and you haven’t even taken the time to notice what our Caelish spy looks like? I’m shocked.”
Arkady smiled. “You’re right, Jaxyn, I should pay more attention. And now I come to think of it, he is very handsome. Compared to you, at any rate.”
Everyone laughed at Arkady’s retort, even Jaxyn, but she could tell he was less than amused by it. Their eyes met across the table for a moment, the look he gave her one of pure venom.
Don’t try engaging in a battle of wits with me, Jaxyn Aranville, she warned him silently as she smiled at him just as poisonously.
“Are you going to visit him again, Arkady?” Kylia asked, entranced by all this talk of mystery and espionage.
“I must, I’m afraid, Kylia.” She looked up at Stellan and added with a smile, “Your uncle won’t let me chop one of our immortal’s hands off to see if it grows back, so I’m going to have to do this the hard way.”
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