by Sally Green
“New acquaintances bow, friends shake hands, close friends and family embrace.”
“Well, I can tell you’re relieved that we are still only at the bowing stage,” said Edyon with a wink. “Now, please don’t think I’m rude, or that I don’t want to talk to you more because I absolutely do and I will be furious if you don’t meet me later, but I really need to get out of these stinking clothes.”
“Where shall we meet?”
“The Duck. It has the best wine and the best food. I’ll come straight from the bathhouse.” Edyon leaned forward and stared at March again. “Do you get tired of people telling you your eyes are amazing?”
March wasn’t sure what to say. He shrugged.
Edyon started to limp away, but he turned to look back at March. “I hope you come. I’ll transform myself for you; you won’t recognize me.”
“I’ll be there,” March called, and added to himself, “and I’d recognize you anywhere.”
CATHERINE
BRIGANE, BRIGANT
Catherine, daughter of Aloysius II of Brigant and Isabella Birkbeck, was born on Sunday, May 24th at 2 a.m. The child was healthy. The mother was tired after the birth, which had been continued through the night.
The Family Record of the Royal Household
CATHERINE WAS in the castle library, making her farewells to the books—things she was more familiar with and felt fonder of than most of the people in Brigane. She had wept and cursed her frustration on hearing that Ambrose was killed. Part of her knew that it could be a lie, but she would never know for sure, would always wonder; only they would know the truth. And the way Noyes had smiled let her know he knew this. He knew that she would never be certain, could never know for sure if Ambrose was dead in a ditch or had escaped to freedom. That was Noyes’s power and he abused it as he abused everything else.
Men and power. They loved it and were addicted to it more than she could understand. And her love for Ambrose, her addiction to him, well, it was still there. She had him in her head, in her memory, and there he would stay, alive in her memory.
She ran a fingertip over the words that marked her birth, words that were as old as she was, and even in those scant lines she could feel the influence of the king. He was everywhere; it even felt like he was watching her now, though that was ridiculous, but still she looked around.
She suspected her birth was the first and last time she had been allowed to keep her father waiting, and that he probably wouldn’t have waited so patiently, probably wouldn’t have endured the wait at all, if he’d known that a girl was going to appear at the end of it.
The births of Boris and Harold were recorded in the book too, in greater detail—the joy of the king was described over several sentences!—but that was understandable: Boris was first in line to the throne, Harold second. Catherine, in theory, was third, though the king so much detested the idea of a woman ruling his kingdom that her mother had once told her it would be a close-run thing as to whether he would prefer Brigant be ruled by the sons of his hated brother Thelonius’s than by her. Thelonius’s boys had recently died, however; their deaths were also recorded in the Family Record, along with the observation that, following the young princes’ demise, “Calidor was one step nearer to being returned to the rule of its true king, Aloysius.”
It was strange to think that the future of nations depended as much on the health of royal children as on success in war. The deaths of Prince Thelonius’s sons proved how quickly fortunes could change. After defeating his brother’s invasion, Thelonius seemed to have secured his dynasty forever, but now the future of Calidor was uncertain. Equally, an illness for Harold and an accident for Boris, and Catherine would be the rightful heir to both Brigant and Calidor.
Of course her marriage to Prince Tzsayn would make that inheritance much less likely. Once she was married she would no longer be considered a Brigantine. Her loyalty would be to her husband and Pitoria. It seemed impossible that the lords of Brigant or Calidor would ever accept a foreigner as their ruler. Perhaps that was another reason her father was so keen on this marriage, because it was a way of removing her potential, tiny though it was, to ever challenge for the Brigantine throne?
Her mother had told Catherine many times that her father was a king but also a man. He didn’t understand women and thought of them as quite different from himself. “He believes women are weak, lesser. Don’t ever appear to be stupid—you are his daughter after all—but you must never seem to know more than him or your brothers, or know better than them.”
Advice Catherine had disregarded in their last audience, she thought ruefully, letting the pages of the Family Record fall back into place. They had made her suffer for it, and yet . . . she had survived.
She carried the book back to its shelf and took down an equally large tome: The Accounts of the Royal Household. Again her mother’s voice echoed in Catherine’s head: “It is one of the duties of a queen to know the incomings and outgoings of the court.”
Catherine had mostly found bookkeeping extraordinarily dull, but there was one section marked for the recording of the costs involved in arranging her marriage—and Catherine had been drawn to this since she’d first found it. There she could see in pounds, shillings, and pence the price at which her father valued her. And it was not an inconsiderable sum.
Over the last year there had been many payments for visits, deputations, and gifts. The first gift to Prince Tzsayn from her father—A stallion, black, fifteen hands, four years old, excellent gait—had cost him little, as it had been bred in the royal stables, but he’d valued it as a reduction in stock value of thirty pounds. Catherine wondered if she, also bred in the king’s household, would be recorded similarly. A girl, mousy, small, nearly seventeen years old, prone to willfulness. Reduction in stock value: fifty pounds and ten shillings.
But the horse was a mere trifle compared to the costs for the visits of her father’s representatives to Pitoria “to assess the suitability of a match”—hundreds of pounds spent on chartering ships and preparing gifts for Pitorian nobles. Then visitors were invited back to Brigant and hundreds more had been spent on lavish entertainment, food, and wine. Her father had been exceptionally busy and extravagant, especially given how dire Brigant’s finances were.
Catherine flicked back to the income and expenses section. It was grim reading. The monthly income from taxes was consistent but small, while the returns from the gold mines had dwindled to almost nothing. After the war had emptied his coffers, her father had increased the mining in the north, and there had been some extra income initially, but now the gold too was depleted. Meanwhile, the expenses covered pages and pages: wages of staff, the never-ending food bills, items from Cloths: 6 pence to 2 barrels red wine: 5 pounds and 7 shillings.
Catherine closed the book, letting the pages riffle through her fingers. As she did so, she glimpsed another page of writing. It was at the back, a few pages on from the wedding costs section. It was entitled “Fielding.” Where had she heard that name before?
There were only three entries, the first dated from the previous autumn:
Wexman—Uniforms: 60 pounds
Wright—Tents, tools: 32 pounds
Southgate—Smoke: 200 pounds
Catherine stared at the entries. The cost of uniforms and tents was nothing unusual, but two hundred pounds for smoke was both a huge sum and a very strange item. Could it mean demon smoke?
When Catherine had been reading about Pitoria, trying to prepare herself for her marriage, one of her books had mentioned demon smoke, which was rarely seen in Brigant. The book claimed it was the blood of strange creatures that supposedly inhabited the barren plateau north of Pitoria. In Tornia, the capital, she had read, there were illegal smoke dens, where people went to inhale the smoke and lose days of their lives to “the pleasure of the demon breath.” But why her father would want smoke she didn’t know. He hated
even wine and beer, saying it made men weak and stupid. She couldn’t see smoke appealing to him any more than drink. How much smoke did you get for two hundred pounds? It was a vast sum. Surely it couldn’t really be the blood of some magical creature?
And now Catherine remembered. Fielding was the place where Sir Oswald Pence had been killed and where Lady Anne had been captured. She had read that in the account of the arrest when she’d been trying to learn about executions.
So Lady Anne and Sir Oswald had been to this place. Had they seen the tents, the uniforms, and the smoke?
That’s when Catherine remembered something else. She got up in excitement and rushed deeper into the shelves of the library. She knew the book she needed: an old favorite that had first introduced her to the language of signs. She found the book and flicked through it quickly.
The sign that Lady Anne had made at her execution was a kiss with her right hand paired with a fist in her left, though it was a poor fist, her first two fingers extended because of her broken fingers. Well, Catherine had assumed it was because her hands were broken. But what if that wasn’t it? What if she had been saying something else?
Catherine found the page:
Kiss
A commonly used sign, now made with either left or right hand. Strictly, however, made with the left hand, it means “kiss,” while made with the right it means “breath.”
When “breath” is paired with a horizontal flat palm it means “life,” and with a vertical flat palm it means “air.” When paired with a closed fist it means “smoke.” Paired with a closed fist with fingers one and two held straight it means “demon smoke.”
AMBROSE
FIELDING, BRIGANT
AMBROSE WOKE to the sound of arguing.
“We can’t kill him. We just have to wait for the captain. He’ll know what to do.”
“He’ll tell us to kill him.”
“We’re supposed to be showing the captain that we can organize ourselves and be disciplined. For all we know, this is a test. It’d be just like him to send someone in.”
At that the others went quiet. Then one said, “Probably one of his best men.”
Another boy laughed. “It would be funny if we did kill him then.”
“Hilarious, Frank. Hilarious.”
“So what do we do with him?”
“Tie him up. Guard him. Wait till the captain’s back in the morning.”
Ambrose was dragged through the sand. He pretended to be unconscious as they tied his wrists and ankles. They were on the outskirts of a bigger circle of boys sitting around a fire. Ambrose recognized the voice of Rashford telling the story of his capture.
“He was riding fast. Good control of his horse, like the captain says the enemy will have. But, fuck me, Kellen was on to him, spotted him running for it, flipped his sword round to hold it by the sharp end . . . though as Fitz constantly points out”—and here everyone chimed in—“it’s wood; we can’t splinter them to death!”
There was much laughter, and when it died down Rashford took up his story again. “So, as I was saying, Kellen braved the splinters and threw his sword, and . . . it was poetry in motion . . . The soldier rode away, the sword whirled up, over and down, ending with a precise coming-together . . . a perfect smack on the back of his head. Bang! Our friend over there rolled off his horse like he’d fallen asleep.”
There was much cheering and laughter.
“Lucky you had Kellen with you. Most of you Reds can’t throw for shit.”
Ambrose opened his eyes a sliver to see that another boy, probably about fifteen or sixteen, had come into the circle around the fire.
“Stop your whinging, Gaskett. We won the last trials fair and square.”
“You cheated, Rashford, like you Reds always do.”
Rashford rose and marched over to Gaskett. Ambrose couldn’t hear what was said, but it ended with Gaskett pushing Rashford backward. Rashford shook his head and said, “You need to relax. After the invasion we’ll all have plenty.”
Gaskett shoved Rashford again, muttered something to him, and turned and walked away.
Rashford stuck a finger up at his retreating figure. “And fuck all of you Blues too. Dickhead.”
Ambrose tried to make sense of their words, but his head was throbbing, and for now all he knew was that he had to get away before the captain returned. He closed his eyes and concentrated on loosening the rope round his wrists. Fortunately the boys weren’t as good at tying knots as they were at throwing wooden swords, and by the time most of them had fallen asleep he had worked his hands free of the ropes and untied his feet.
The last boys awake were paying him no attention. He slipped into the bushes and crept away. He had his weapons but no horse. Skirting the camp, he saw that it was tethered with some others, but the boys guarding the horses were awake and talking to each other. It was too risky: he didn’t want another sword to the back of the head. Ambrose turned away. He’d have to walk.
TASH
DORNAN, PITORIA
THE SUEDE boots that Tash had seen a month earlier were, according to the cobbler, “sold to a charming young lady weeks ago.” Tash’s disappointment lasted only a moment as the cobbler said, “But I have these. Only just finished them yesterday.” And he lifted from the highest shelf a pair of delicate boots, pale gray, almost silver, suede, similar to the other boots but with finer ties, which ended in fur tassels, and instead of the top rims having an embroidered edge they were trimmed in fur.
Tash gasped. They were the most beautiful boots she’d ever seen.
The cobbler held the gray suede boots on the palm of his hand, stroking them like two baby rabbits. Tash stretched out her own hand to touch them. The cobbler half turned, holding the boots to his chest, saying, “Not with those.”
Tash looked at her hands. She had washed them that morning, but now she saw they perhaps weren’t perfectly clean. She’d wanted to try the boots on but now she wasn’t sure about the state of her stockings or feet either.
“How much are they?” she asked instead.
“Four kroners.”
“What? The others were three!”
And that was already an absurd sum for a pair of boots when most cost no more than two.
“There’s more work and more fur in these. They’re lined with fur too. Four kroners is the price. They’ll sell soon enough with all these people here for the fair. But I understand if you can’t afford them.”
“I can afford them. I just haven’t got the money with me. Can you keep them for me? I’ll be back later.”
“Keep them? As in, not sell them until you come back to try them on, cover them with your grubby fingermarks, and then say you don’t like them? Or more likely you won’t come back at all.”
“But I will be back. I love them!”
“Well, I’ll see you later then, when you have the money.”
Tash and Gravell had only arrived in Dornan the night before, but Gravell had already let it be known to his contacts that he had some good smoke: it wouldn’t be long before he struck a deal.
Tash folded her arms. “I’ll get paid today or tomorrow, and when I do come back I’ll expect a good price.”
“You can expect a clip round the ear. You’ll pay the right price, the fair price—that’s the good price. Do you know how much work went into making these? I don’t think so. You youngsters have everything so easy. So easy. No idea about craftsmanship or hard work.” The cobbler put the boots back into the display case, high out of Tash’s reach, and turned back to face her, folding his arms. “Anything else?”
Tash wanted to tell the cobbler where to shove his boots, but words always failed her when she was angry and now, just when they weren’t wanted, tears of frustration filled her eyes. She walked out, letting the door slam behind her, and marched back to find Gravell and demand her pay.
The roads through Dornan were dusty and dry, and everywhere was noise and people and smells. It was all the sort of thing Tash normally enjoyed: seeing people come together to sell, play, laugh, drink, eat, and party. It was fun to watch and Tash always felt pleasantly inconspicuous. Wherever she traveled with Gravell, people always stared. Gravell was so huge and hairy that he seemed like a giant, while people were always asking Tash if they could touch her dreadlocks. Here at the fair, where folk from all corners of Pitoria and even beyond came together, she didn’t stand out.
Gravell had made good use of his size yesterday, though, and of the smoke. He’d taken a room at the best inn, a small amount of smoke decanted into the innkeeper’s bottle ensuring that miraculously a room had become available by the time she and Gravell had eaten their evening meal.
It was still early. Gravell wouldn’t have traded the smoke yet. But even so he must have some money and surely he could give her a bit of what he owed her. Money was key. The cobbler wouldn’t have cared that she was young and dirty if she’d had money. If she’d had money he’d have been nice as pie. She should have asked Gravell for a loan for the boots and he could have taken it out of her cut for the demon smoke. Well, she’d ask him now.
Tash ran up the stairs of the inn and unlocked the door to their room. Gravell’s large pack and furs were there, as were his harpoons and Tash’s small bundle of furs and clothes. Gravell was not. Tash frowned. Gravell would not leave money or the demon smoke here unattended. He would keep it close by him at all times.
Tash asked the maid, “You seen Gravell? Tall guy. Big. Black hair. Beard . . . Big.” Tash held her arms up to indicate Gravell’s height, but the woman shook her head.
“Never mind,” Tash said, and she walked out and up the road. “He can’t be far. And he’s easy to spot after all.” She smiled at her own joke and began her search.
The fair was set up just on the edge of the town, with caravans and tents in ordered rows. The tents were mostly colored, though often sun-faded, and the caravans painted and decked with flags and banners. Tash wasn’t that good at reading but knew which banners meant what products were for sale—food, drink, jewelry, pottery, ironwork, silverware, and more. Tash knew Gravell would be eating, very probably drinking, and hopefully negotiating a sale too.