Knight's Shadow

by Sebastien de Castell

‘Never tried that before,’ Kest said, withdrawing the bloody sword, his voice as calm and relaxed as if he’d just stepped out of a warm bath.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Brasti called out. ‘I can’t—’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said, holding my hand out to help Valiana up. ‘The Saint of Swords finally decided to show up.’

  Kest raised an eyebrow at me. ‘I was busy killing seven of them. How many have you killed?’

  ‘Not as many,’ I admitted.

  Brasti emerged from the mist carrying Intemperance in one hand and half a dozen arrows in the other. ‘I killed eight.’ I was fairly sure he was lying.

  It’s hard to describe my sense of relief at Kest’s arrival. He was my best friend and the deadliest fighter I’d ever known, and with him and Brasti at my side I felt as if the mists were about to fade. Together we could deal with Trin’s men. We could find Aline.

  Another figure emerged from the mist. ‘You!’ he called out, and as he came closer I was able to recognise him as one of the Tailor’s Greatcoats. His face suddenly became deathly pale and I realised that Kest, Brasti, Valiana and I all had our weapons pointed at him.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said, doing an impressive job of mastering himself. ‘The Tailor wants you.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To the horses – the rest of Trin’s Knights have fled and they’ve taken Aline.’

  Chapter Four

  The Deception

  In the few minutes it took us to reach the far end of the village, most of the grey-black fog had dissipated, as if the nightmist itself knew that its mission was complete. All that was left were a few wispy tendrils of smoke that made my lungs burn and the chaos that invariably follows a battle.

  Bodies were lying scattered along the village paths. I counted four fallen Greatcoats and nearly twenty-five of Trin’s Knights, but both sides were vastly outnumbered by the men from the village. Those who’d betrayed us had ended up trapped in the very fog they’d helped to create, caught between two fighting forces. The ground was littered with their bodies. Some were injured, crying out for help; a precious few still had enough strength to provide aid to those less able. But most were dying, or already dead.

  I found the Tailor surrounded by a dozen of her Greatcoats, a hundred yards from the rows of uneven posts where our horses were tethered. She wore her own greatcoat and her normally wild grey hair was tied back. Her eyes were bright and clear and she looked like a battle-hardened general rather than the enigmatic, bellicose tailor I’d known for so many years. There was no trace of urgency in her expression, nor in her men’s faces, and when I looked at the horses I noticed that none of them were saddled.

  ‘What in all the hells are you doing just standing here?’ I demanded. ‘Do you have any—?’

  ‘Wait,’ the Tailor said, holding up a hand to keep me silent.

  ‘Are you mad? They’ve got Aline!’ I started to push past her to get to the horses. Two of her Greatcoats stepped out in front to block my way, their hands on their weapons, and Kest and Brasti took up positions on either side of me. I turned back to the Tailor. ‘Would you try and stop me from rescuing the King’s heir? Your own granddaughter?’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten who she is,’ the Tailor said, her gaze moving to the village men nearby. ‘We have a plan and we’re going to follow it.’

  The calm in her voice – the utter lack of any sign that she shared the panic that was seizing me – made it difficult for me to keep my temper. It made it impossible for Brasti.

  ‘I have a thought,’ he said. ‘How about we beat your men senseless, get on our horses, save the girl, and then you can tell us all about your little plan when we get back?’

  She looked at the three of us with a kind of disdain that I hadn’t seen before, like a teacher who’s had enough of coddling a feeble-minded student. ‘Hold your tongue and come with me,’ she said. The iron in her voice brooked no dissent.

  ‘To the hells with that,’ Brasti said. ‘Come on, Falcio, let’s teach these fops in black leather why real Greatcoats don’t bow to anyone.’

  I wanted to, the Gods know how much I longed to. The Tailor needed to understand that even if she did rule her own little army of men and women who looked like Greatcoats and called themselves Greatcoats, yet behaved more like soldiers and spies than magistrates, she didn’t rule us. But something in her expression gave me pause. She knew something I didn’t.

  ‘We’ll come,’ I said to her, ‘but you’d best say something to prove your loyalty to the King’s heir very quickly.’

  She stepped into one of the nearby cottages without replying and I motioned for Kest and Brasti to follow me inside.

  A few dim rays of sunshine snuck through cracks in the walls of the room but they barely illuminated the darkness within. As the three of us entered, the Tailor motioned for me to close the door. ‘You’ll keep your voice calm and quiet in here, all of you.’

  I didn’t want to be calm or quiet. I wanted to scream my frustration, but then the Tailor pointed towards the far corner of the room. At first I saw nothing but shadows, my eyes not yet having recovered from going from darkness to light to darkness again. Slowly edges and lines became clearer and the shadows resolved into a figure sitting in a chair. A girl.

  I started to shout her name, but Brasti put a hand over my mouth. His vision is better than Kest’s or mine and he must have seen her a moment before we did. She rose from the chair and came closer. Now I could see the shoulder-length, messy brown hair, the worn and faded green dress, the pretty face with the features that, like her father’s, were just a bit too sharp to be called beautiful. It’s her, thank all the Saints. It’s Aline.

  Brasti removed his hand from my mouth and I knelt down and embraced her. Gods, stop the world from spinning, I thought, relief washing over me. Let me feel this happy for just a few moments more.

  ‘I was scared,’ Aline whispered in my ear.

  ‘Really?’ I asked, my own voice shaking. ‘I can’t imagine what you had to be scared about.’

  She let go of me and her eyes met mine. ‘I couldn’t be out there with you, keeping hold of your throwing knives for you like in Rijou. I was afraid you’d get hurt without me.’

  It always surprised me – the way that Aline, despite her keen intellect, could sometimes sound so much younger to me than her thirteen years.

  Brasti snorted. ‘That’s a smart girl we have here, Falcio. Terrific survival instincts. Can’t wait to put her on the throne.’

  ‘All right,’ the Tailor said, ‘enough of the lovey-dovey. The girl’s safe and we’re all friends again. Now let’s go back out there and you lot keep your mouths shut. Some of the village men are still alive and we can’t trust any of them any more.’

  ‘But who did the Knights carry off?’ I asked. ‘Your man said they took Aline.’

  ‘He saw them carry off a girl,’ the Tailor said, ‘one they think is Aline. That’s all you need to know.’

  ‘You gave them a girl they think is Aline? They’ll kill her!’

  ‘A few minutes ago you challenged my loyalty to the King’s heir. Now you say I do too much for her? Listen to me, Falcio, and listen well. There is one thing and one thing only that matters: Aline must be protected so that she can take the throne. Nothing else can stand in the way of that. Nothing will.’

  I thought back to the dead girl in the village, her pale hair dyed crimson with blood. Had she been another of the Tailor’s pawns? Had she died to try to put Trin’s Knights off the scent? How far would the King have wanted us to go to protect Aline? Not this far, I told myself. He would never have done this. Very carefully I said, ‘There was a child in the village. She was close to Aline’s age. Was she—?’

  ‘I had nothing to do with her. That idiot Braneth knew Celeste hated to be left alone. He should have made sure someone in their mountain hideaway kept an eye on her. The fool reaps the wages of betrayal now, may some forgiving saint guard him.’

  The memory of
the man’s grief as he held his child’s destroyed body filled me with equal portions of sorrow and confusion. ‘You prepared for this attack,’ I said. ‘You must have. But how could you have planned for this? How could you have known they were coming for her?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ the Tailor said as she walked over to the chair Aline had previously occupied and sat down. ‘But I knew something like this would happen soon.’ She looked over at the small counter and pointed. ‘Aline, dear, get me a cup of whatever’s in that jug over there, would you?’

  Aline nodded and filled an old battered metal cup with something that looked like it might have once been beer.

  ‘Trin’s weak,’ the Tailor said, and took a swig from the cup. ‘For all the vicious brilliance she inherited from Patriana, she’s still an eighteen-year-old girl, and more, one who everyone thought was just Valiana’s handmaiden, up until a few weeks ago.’

  ‘She has an army four times the size of the Duke of Pulnam’s,’ Kest pointed out.

  ‘Aye, she has an army: an army of men twice her age who have no reason to be loyal other than tradition and parentage. When Patriana ruled Hervor she did so with skill and cunning. Her army had won every battle they fought in the last twenty years and the duchy prospered accordingly. But Patriana’s dead now and we should all thank the Gods for that.’

  ‘And now they have Trin,’ I said, following the Tailor’s line of reasoning. ‘Young. Untested . . .’

  ‘No,’ the Tailor said, her voice on the edge of glee, ‘tested indeed! Nearly a month she’s been trying to force the Duke of Pulnam to bow before her, and what has she to show for it? Nothing but the dead bodies of her soldiers!’

  If Trin’s armies of Hervor ever met the wretched and under-trained forces of Erris, Duke of Pulnam, on the battlefield, I doubted Pulnam would last a day. But the Tailor’s Greatcoats had been launching buzzing attacks on her forces that had kept them busy trying to swat us: an army that had not known defeat in two decades was now being delayed from destroying its enemy by a mere hundred Greatcoats.

  ‘She had to attack us,’ I agreed. ‘But if the villagers had betrayed us to her, then why not send her whole army?’

  ‘They’re still too far away,’ Kest said, looking as if he were counting odds in his head. ‘Trying to move that many men so quickly would make them vulnerable to attack from Pulnam’s forces.’

  I imagined Trin, parading her beauty and arrogance before the military generals of Hervor. She could be a masterful actor when she wanted, as capable of simulating innocent and seductive need as she was of committing casual and merciless violence. She’d fooled all of us, playing the shy young girl even as she murdered Lord Tremondi and manipulated everyone around her. Trin loves games, I thought. There must be a way to use that when the time is right.

  ‘She needs to show her Knights that she’s as clever as her mother was,’ the Tailor said. ‘She needs them to believe she can lead them to ever-more-brilliant victories. It can’t just be sending ten thousand men to crush one hundred. To make an impression, she needed to do us great harm using just a few of her own men: a victory won with little cost to her. Murdering you, in some ingenious and theatrical manner, Falcio, was one of the more likely scenarios.’

  ‘Did you have some plan for protecting me?’

  She jabbed a finger at Kest. ‘I figured he’d deal with that.’

  ‘You realise I’m here too, don’t you?’ Brasti said.

  The Tailor ignored him. ‘But the biggest prize would be to take Aline. Imagine Trin, dragging King Paelis’ heir through the muck and mud as her generals watched, telling the story of her cunning victory to the cheers of her soldiers before she turned the girl over to them.’

  Gods, the things they would have done to her before finally slitting her throat. They’ll do those same things to whomever the Tailor has given them, I realised with a start. ‘The girl – the one you have masquerading as Aline—’

  ‘The one I sent knows how to protect herself,’ the Tailor said, cutting me off. ‘I’ll tell you no more than that. She’ll leave us a trail and we’ll send out the Greatcoats in an hour.’

  ‘Why not right now?’

  ‘In between here and Trin’s army there will be a smaller force – one sent ahead to support the attack. She’ll have taken over one of the smaller villages or perhaps set up an encampment. I want to know where it is. I want those men.’ The Tailor smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile. ‘The little bitch thought she’d play her tricks on me? Let her stand before her military commanders and explain how she not only failed to take Aline, but lost a hundred men in the process. See if that doesn’t give a few generals some ideas about the ducal succession of Hervor.’

  ‘And if they don’t wait to reach their camp before they figure out that they don’t have Aline? If they decide to . . . use her then and there?’

  The Tailor shrugged. ‘That’s the risk we all take. Besides, none of Trin’s Knights have ever seen Aline. They’ll likely take good enough care of her until they get back to their camp.’ The old woman rose from the chair and motioned for Aline to take her place. ‘Now, she’s going to stay in here and stay quiet. The rest of us are going to go back out there and keep silent about all of this.’

  I understood the need to maintain the ruse in front of the villagers, but it seemed cruel to hide the fact that Aline was safe from the other Greatcoats. I’d almost lost my mind when I thought she’d been taken – Gods—!

  ‘We’ve got to find Valiana! She doesn’t know your plan – she still thinks Aline’s been captured!’

  ‘Fine. You can tell her,’ the Tailor said, ‘but do it quietly. No screams of joy or—’

  ‘You don’t understand! She thinks it’s her sacred duty to protect Aline. Since she hasn’t already broken down the door to find out how we’re planning to rescue her, it means she’s already gone!’

  I ran out of the cottage and looked around, but all I could see were the Tailor’s Greatcoats. When I got to where the horses were tethered I saw one grey mare missing: Valiana’s.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see the Tailor.

  ‘Falcio, you can’t go after her. You’ll endanger our plans. Valiana has made her own choice—’

  ‘She thinks they’ve got Aline, damn you! She’ll be caught – what if Trin is waiting there at the camp?’ Saints, let it not be so. Trin’s hatred of Valiana knew no limits. The things she would do to her would make the tortures I’d experienced at her mother’s hands pale in comparison.

  ‘You can’t go,’ the Tailor insisted. ‘Even if you did, she’s too far ahead of you. You’ll never catch up. No, we stick to the plan.’

  ‘The hells for your plans!’ I said, pushing her away. There was only one thing I could do.

  I ran to the far side of the barns where a single horse was kept tethered, apart from all the others: a huge, scarred creature made of rage and hate. She was one of the legendary Fey Horses – or at least she had been, except Patriana, Duchess of Hervor, had spent years torturing her, trying to turn her into a tool of war, so now she was a massive, angry beast with sharpened teeth and a fury inside her that matched my own. We called her Monster.

  I untied her and she made the strange mixture of neigh and growl that signalled she had no intention of being ridden today.

  I braced myself and got onto her back anyway. ‘Valiana needs our help,’ I shouted into the horse’s ear. ‘She is of our herd. Dan’he vath fallatu. She is of your herd. She will be taken by Trin, the foal of she who tortured your young. Trin will strip the skin from Valiana’s flesh unless you and I go and fight for her.’

  An explosion of muscle and rage nearly shook me from Monster’s back, but I clung on for dear life as her hooves began tearing up chunks of dirt, sending dust and sand in the air as she raced across the burnt grass plains outside of the village and towards the mountains. The Greathorse had murder in her heart.

  So did I.

  Chapter Five

  The Captive
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br />   The Knights had made a poor job of covering their tracks. Wherever there was a fork in the wide dusty trails that passed for roads in this part of Pulnam, they’d gone a few dozen yards in the wrong direction before circling back. I wasn’t fooled, and from Valiana’s tracks I could see that she hadn’t been deceived either, which meant she was going to reach them before I caught up with her.

  We’d gone about ten miles from the village when I counted five horses off in the distance. I was fairly certain one was Valiana’s grey mare, which meant the body I saw in a heap on the ground must be Valiana herself. One of the Knights was holding her down with his foot while his fellows were fending off the sweeping attacks of a young girl wearing a yellow dress made brown by dust. The girl was swinging a blade nearly as tall as she was, which she must have taken from one of the Knights. She wielded it with impressive skill despite its weight, but there were four Knights and I doubted she could keep them off her for long and I was still too far away.

  ‘K’hey!’ I called to Monster, drawing one of my rapiers. Fly.

  The great beast gave a growl that broke through the distance between us and our quarry and I saw one of the Knights turn to us as we bridged the gap. He wasn’t wearing his helmet and by this time I was close enough to enjoy the wide-eyed look of fear in his eyes as he caught sight of the creature charging for him. He should have kept his attention on the girl. She swung her stolen warsword and, with a single stroke, the Knight’s head flew from his body.

  I leapt off Monster’s back and engaged with the man who was holding Valiana down, making a thrust for his face that forced him to step back. Valiana didn’t rise, and a quick glance told me that she was unconscious. The Knight evaded my next strike, only to be struck down by Monster’s hooves. I had to jump out of the way as the beast began crushing the Knight beneath her.

  One of the remaining Knights was gaining the advantage on the girl in the yellow dress. Strong as she was, I could tell she was beginning to tire from wielding the heavy blade. As he prepared for a downward strike, I grabbed his sword arm from behind and pulled it back as hard as I could, hoping to make him lose his balance. Knights in armour don’t do well on their backs. When he felt the resistance from my hand he struck back with his elbow. I turned my head – just in time – but he struck my collarbone with a force that made me thankful for the bone plates inside my coat.