Carefal, I thought. She’s talking about Carefal. Was it really just because of me, of one stupid speech given in the heat of desperation as I’d looked for a way to get Aline out of there alive? ‘My Lady,’ I said, ‘what is it you want to tell me?’
‘I told you, Falcio of the Greatcoats, the nobility – we are less secure than we appear. What must a weak man with a sword do when those around him begin to question his strength? The weak man with the sword must kill quickly, mercilessly, or else it won’t take long before someone decides to take the sword from him. My husband made a deal, Falcio: a terrible deal. He needed to regain control and he let his Knight-Commander decide how to do it. Carefal sits on our border. If the village were allowed to flout Ducal Law, others would do so as well; the duchy would fall into chaos. They have weapons – steel weapons. Duke Roset had no choice, Falcio. You left him none.’
‘What are you saying?’ I demanded.
‘The Knight-Commander sent his men to Carefal,’ she said.
Suddenly the veil lifted from my eyes and I understood what she was telling me. ‘No—’
‘You needn’t feel rushed,’ she said. ‘It’s far too late. I imagine Carefal is already in flames by now.’
I let go of her hand and stepped back.
Beytina looked at her hand. ‘Say what you want about that grey-haired old gasbag, she brews an awfully good painkiller.’ She held her hand out to me. ‘I do believe you’ve broken my hand, Falcio.’
I was horrified and disgusted by what I’d done to her. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why did you tell me this?’
‘I’m sorry. You seem like a genuinely decent man and you’ve been kind to me, so far at least.’
‘Then why?’
Beytina sighed, a little sadly. ‘Because I married the Duke and despite everything else I am a loyal wife. He was angered by what he had to do and he would have wanted me to say this to you: every dead body you find in that village, every dead body to follow as other Dukes are forced to put down rebellions with blood and steel – each one is on your head, Falcio val Mond. You have driven us to murder.’
She began coughing and wheezing again, and despite my promise to her, I fled the room.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Carefal
The smoke and stench began to suffocate us almost half a mile before we entered the village; the tale of Carefal’s destruction was told long before the bodies themselves came into view. The closer we came, the more our horses resisted, and in the end we dismounted and walked the final hundred yards. We needed to see for ourselves what had become of the people of Carefal.
‘Keep an eye out,’ Kest told Valiana and Dari. ‘Whoever did this might have left someone behind, just in case.’
‘What are we looking for?’ Valiana asked.
‘Knights,’ I replied.
‘There might be children,’ Brasti said, his voice airy and fragile, as if he were half dreaming. ‘Sometimes the children go to gather berries.’
It was a foolish thing to say. Kest and Brasti and I all came from villages no bigger than Carefal and we all knew full well that the picking season had passed weeks ago; no children would be coming back to the village. But the tightness in Brasti’s jaw and the tremor in his voice kept me from saying any of this.
The first visible sign of what had taken place greeted us at the entrance to the village: seven corpses, their bodies charred from the smoke and flame of now burned-out fires, hung from ropes tied to branches of the tall trees. A slight breeze made the bodies spin, ever so slowly, as if some invisible hand were turning meat on a spit.
Why bother burning them if they had already been hanged? I wondered.
Dariana, standing next to me, anticipated my question. ‘Look at the knots in the ropes,’ she said, pointing above us. ‘Those are trunk knots – they don’t tighten, not unless you pull against them. So they hung them there and lit the fires and waited until the heat and smoke made them twitch.’
The need to retch was almost overwhelming. I had to lean against a tree to keep from falling to my knees. These people had died terrified, in pain, and horribly, torturously slowly.
‘Why?’ Brasti asked, his shortbow in hand and an arrow nocked at the ready. ‘What was the point?’
The point is that Dariana isn’t the only one who can recognise a trunk knot, I thought. The point is that others will come here and see what has happened to these people, and the story of Carefal will spread, and everyone will know that there is a price beyond death to pay for rebelling against the Dukes. I knew all this but couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud.
Inside the village the carnage was less staged but far more prolific. Men, women and children, the very young and the very old, were all lying together, piled in untidy heaps. Some had died from sword thrusts to the belly, some had had their heads taken off. A few showed signs of being trampled by horses. All of them had been burned.
The thatched roofs of the houses had been pulled down onto the dirt pathways between the houses and set fire to, then the bodies had been thrown on top. I could see the charring of the flesh was patchy, incomplete: some limbs had been burned black while other parts were still pink. In my head I watched the killers forcing the villagers at sword-point to tear off the roofs of their own homes, only killing them after they had built their own pyres.
‘How many?’ I asked Kest.
‘Villagers?’ He looked at the piles of corpses. ‘Close to two hundred, I think.’
‘No, how many did this?’
Kest looked around the village. ‘I see hoof-prints and boot marks. They worked methodically, going through the streets while maintaining a perimeter around the paths out of the village. So thirty or forty, I’d say.’
‘Were they Knights?’ I asked. A small part of me wished it had been bandits of some kind – it wouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference to the dead, but it might have made the bounty on my soul a little smaller.
Kest seldom wastes words, so he didn’t bother to answer. The footprints on the ground were heavy; the men were obviously wearing armour. Anyone could see that the killers were Knights. I cursed Duke Roset again, as I had every mile from the palace to this place. There was a sobbing sound behind me and for an instant I hoped there might be someone left alive, someone who could tell us for sure what had happened, but it was Valiana. Tears streamed endlessly down her face even as she wiped her eyes over and over again. For a brief, ignoble moment I wanted to shout at her for her useless tears, but then I realised, She doesn’t look away. She just keeps staring at them.
‘You don’t have to—’
‘Of course she does,’ Dariana said, her voice flat. She stood in the shadow of another set of hanging corpses. Her eyes were as black as coal. ‘This is the world we live in now.’
‘I don’t believe that. I can’t believe—’
‘Falcio,’ Kest said, his arm on my shoulder, ‘you’ve got to talk to Brasti.’
‘What are—?’
He pointed a little way down the path to where Brasti was hauling corpses off one of the piles. By the time I got there he was kneeling on the ground and digging at the dirt with his fingers, only inches away from a big pile of bodies.
‘Planning to dig your way to the Shan Empire?’ I asked, my voice as gentle as I could make it.
‘I just want to bury them,’ he said. ‘It won’t take long. I know we can’t stay.’
There were thirty, maybe forty, corpses in this heap, their limbs tangling with one another. Like the rest, their skin was crusted and burned black in places. There were several such piles around the village. ‘Brasti, you can’t bury them all. Even if we had shovels, it would take us days, maybe weeks,’ I said softly. ‘We can’t stay here.’
‘I know,’ he said, but went right on digging.
I knelt down and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Brasti, this won’t work. You can’t dig a grave with your fingers.’
‘Sure I can,’ he said. ‘Just watch me.’
The wind shifted and the full force of the stench from the bodies hit me again. There was a soft rustle and I looked up, fearful one of the corpses was about to fall on us. Their faces pulled me in. Some of the heads were turned away, as if they were terrified of the living; others were watching Brasti’s efforts with a kind of mute terror, their eyes wide open and mouths gaping. One woman’s face caught me by surprise, the anger and outrage of her expression making her known to me. Vera, I thought. The farmer who’d helped lead the rebellion. In the end she’d just been stacked on the pile with the rest of them.
I turned back to Brasti and noticed his fingers. They were already bleeding.
‘Stop,’ I said.
‘It’s not going to take long, Falcio. Just let me—’
‘Stop. You’ve got to stop.’ I grabbed his wrists and forced them up to his face. He’d broken through the skin and every one of his fingertips was bleeding. ‘Look at what you’re doing!’
He tried to pull his hands away. ‘It doesn’t hurt, Falcio. Just give me time – I can do this.’
I thought perhaps he was going mad, but neither the look in his eyes or the sound of his voice betrayed any hysteria; it sounded as if his actions were the result of calm, collected reasoning. ‘You’re going to rip through your fingers, Brasti.’
‘Don’t need them,’ he said, and broke free from my grip.
‘You’re an archer, you fool. You can’t very well pull a bowstring if you’ve worn your fingers to the bone.’ I kept my voice light, setting him up to make some retort about how he could shoot with his toes if he wanted to. Brasti loves to get the last word in when he can.
But he just went back to digging with his hands again. Then he muttered something under his breath, but I couldn’t make out what it was.
‘What did you say?’ I asked.
‘I said, “The arrow only strikes true when it’s pointed in the right direction.” ’
‘I don’t understand. Brasti, stop digging – stop, or I’m going to get Kest and the two of us are going to tie you up until you start making sense.’
His hands stopped moving and he went completely still, like some old painting of a man mourning at his wife’s grave. Then I noticed his breathing was getting faster and faster, and I could hear the hiss of the air coming into his mouth and the whoosh as it left. I was starting to worry that he would pass out, so I reached out to put a hand on his shoulder again, but before my hand even touched him he spun on his knees and faced me. His bloodied hands reached up and he grabbed the lapels of my coat. ‘What does it matter if I’m an archer? What difference does it make if I can hit a target when I’m never aiming at the right one? Who would know the difference if I cut my hands off here and now?’
‘Brasti, calm down. Let’s get out of here and talk—’
‘Talk!’ he shouted. ‘Talk! That’s what you do, Falcio! You talk and you talk and you talk, but you never say anything. You have us running around the countryside trying to find the answer to questions no one but you cares about! You think anyone really wants to know who killed Duke fucking Isault? Or whether the same people also killed Duke fucking Roset? Or if someone wants to start a war amongst the nobility?’
‘The King would care. He’d—’
Brasti pushed me so hard I fell backwards into the pile of bodies, and arms and legs shaken loose from their position fell over my shoulders and face as if they were trying to draw me into the pile with them.
‘Maybe the King wanted it this way, Falcio! Have you ever even considered that? Winnow was right there, in Isault’s throne room, and she hated the Dukes, Falcio, you know that! So she killed herself one – it’s that fucking simple. But you? Oh no, you have to believe there’s some other secret reason. Why does everyone think you’re so damned clever when all you do is twist the evidence to fit your own personal beliefs?’
I pushed myself back up to my feet, the feeling of dead flesh still clinging to my skin. ‘She wasn’t there to kill him,’ I said, trying to make him understand. ‘Nile said he was sent by the King. He was there to—’
Brasti started laughing hysterically. ‘Did it even occur to you that maybe Nile was lying to you? Maybe the King planned it this way all along – he told the others to wait until one of his heirs revealed themselves, and then they were to kill off the Dukes and clear the path to the throne. And you know what else? I’ll just bet you he told every one of the other Greatcoats, “Don’t go telling Falcio about this. He wouldn’t understand. Falcio’s a sensitive lad, wants to save the world, don’t you know.” ’
My skin was growing hot. ‘I think I knew the King better than you did, Brasti—’
‘Really? Is that what you think? Because I think almost everyone in this damned country knew the King better than you did.’
‘Enough,’ I said. ‘You’re angry, I get that. What happened here is . . . It’s like nothing any of us have ever seen. But now we have to think. We have to have a plan.’ Even to my own ears the words sounded trite.
Brasti dismissed me with a wave of his hand. ‘A plan? The hells with your plans, Falcio. I have my own plan now: I’m going to kill every Knight who walks the earth. I don’t care if they’re as base as brigands or as noble as your fucking friend Shuran.’
‘Brasti, if we don’t uphold the laws, then what—?’
He spun back to me. ‘You want laws? Here’s a law: no man wears armour. Ever. There’s only one reason why a man puts on armour, Falcio – because it means he can beat and kill and rape anyone too poor to afford their own.’ He pointed at the corpses on the ground. ‘Look at these poor bastards! Some of them even had swords – and what good did it do them against armour, the kind a Ducal Knight wears? You can’t get through it unless you’ve spent your life training for it. Well, guess what: I have a cure for that. I’ve got Intemperance, and she can send an ironwood shaft through even their thickest steel plates. I can make as many arrows as I need, and I’ll keep making them until there isn’t a man left alive with the balls to put on another suit of armour.’ Brasti spat on the ground between us. ‘You want laws? That’s Brasti’s Law.’
I struggled to find something to say, some way to counter both his logic and his anger, but I couldn’t, because he was right, in a way. I looked at the bodies. The skin on the palms of those holding swords had bubbled and blistered from the heat of the flames transferred through the steel.
Kest came down the path towards us, Dari and Valiana close behind. He murmured, ‘Give Brasti time. This . . . this isn’t something he can deal with.’
It was true. Brasti loved the simple things in life, especially those simple things which came from being with other people. Kest was driven by a need to master the sword, and me? Well, I was driven by something else. At heart Brasti just wanted to be around people – but somehow that angered me right at that moment. There were people I wanted to be with, too. Most were dead. The few who remained I probably wouldn’t see before the neatha finally claimed me. The hells with Brasti and his anger.
The smell from the corpses was overpowering. Damn you all, I thought. Why did people without even minimal training take up swords against armoured Knights? I looked down at the bodies again.
Saint Dheneph-who-tricks-the-gods. ‘Why’ wasn’t the right question. ‘Why’ didn’t matter at all. The question was ‘How’.
‘What is it?’ Valiana asked.
‘The swords,’ I said. ‘We took away their swords, remember? Shuran paid for them and brought them back to Isault’s palace to ensure they couldn’t be used against them.’
‘You think they bought more?’ Kest asked. ‘With the money Shuran paid them?’
‘No – remember what Shuran said? Those weapons would cost him twice what he’d paid for them if he’d had to buy them new. How could they even afford it? In fact, if they’d bought them in the first place, why didn’t they know the price of a forged sword?’
‘So someone is supplying the peasants with weapons,’ Dariana said, ‘but why? Out of the go
odness of their hearts?’
‘No.’ Valiana looked thoughtful. ‘No, this is like something Patriana would’ve done: arm your enemy’s peasants and foment rebellion so you can force the Duke’s soldiers to waste their resources. You use three times as many men as there are civilians just to keep the peace and weaken them from inside their own borders – and that makes them easier to defeat on the field.’
‘Only the Dukes aren’t trying to keep the peace, not this time,’ I said.
‘They can’t – that woman, Duke Roset’s wife? She was right, Falcio. The Knights have to create so much fear that once word spreads no peasant will even think about rebelling against their lord – otherwise how will the Dukes be able to resist Trin’s armies when they come?’
Beytina’s words echoed in my mind. What must a weak man with a sword do when those around him begin to question his strength? I turned and looked back down the path where Brasti was walking slowly, looking closely at each corpse, like a painter planning to create a portrait of each one. ‘Kest, go and get him.’
Kest’s expression was uncertain. ‘Falcio, I’m not sure he’s—’
‘Now,’ I said. ‘Brasti can lose his mind later, but right now I need him and his bow and his anger. He wants to kill Knights? I’ve got dozens for him.’
Kest took off at a jog down the path.
Valiana knelt down next to a boy no older than twelve years old, his face cleaved by a single blow. In his hands was a steel sword that was probably too heavy for him even to lift properly. Valiana carefully pried his fingers apart and took the blade, then she drew her own weapon and placed it in his hand.
‘That’s a lot heavier than yours,’ Dariana said.
‘I’m stronger now, and if we’re going to fight men in armour then I’ll need something heavier.’
‘Well now,’ Dari said, a little smirk on her face, ‘glad to hear you’ve finally discovered the virtue of revenge.’
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