by Anthony Ryan
“Redflower and Shade Bloom,” Master Henthal explained as Vaelin and Sollis entered. “He was raving when he came round. Gave the Aspect a nasty whack before we got him under control.”
Vaelin moved to the bed, heart heavy with the sight of his brother. He looks so weak…
“Will he be all right, Master?” he asked.
“Seen it before, raving and thrashing about. Usually happens to men who’ve seen a battle too many. He’ll sleep soon. When he wakes he’ll be shaky but himself again.”
Vaelin turned to Sollis. “Has the Aspect made judgement, Master?”
Sollis glanced at Master Henthal, who nodded and left the room. “Judgement is not warranted,” Sollis replied.
“We wounded the King’s soldiers…”
“Yes. If you had been more attentive to my teaching, you might have killed them.”
“The Lord Marshal…”
“Does not command here. Nortah disobeyed instruction, for which punishment should be levied. However, the Aspect feels punishment has been levied already. As for you, your disobedience was in defence of your brother. Judgement is not required.”
Master Sollis moved to the far side of the bed and placed a hand against Nortah’s brow. “His fever should fade when the redflower wears off. He’ll feel it though, feel the pain like a knife, sticking in his guts, twisting. Pain like that can either make a boy into a man or a monster. It is my opinion that the Order has seen enough of monsters.”
Vaelin understood it then; Sollis’s anger. It’s not us, he realised. It’s what the King did to Nortah’s father, what that did to Nortah. We’re his swords, he beats us into shape. The King has spoiled one of his blades.
“My brothers and I will guide him,” Vaelin said. “His pain will be ours. We will help him bear it.”
“See that you do.” Sollis looked up, his gaze more intense than usual. “When a brother goes to the bad there is but one way of dealing with him, and brother should not kill brother.”
Nortah came round in the morning, his groan waking Vaelin, who had stayed beside him through the night.
“What?” Nortah gazed around with bleary eyes. “What’s this…?” Seeing Vaelin, he fell silent, the light of memory returning to his eyes as his hand went to the lump on the back of his head. “You hit me,” he said. Vaelin watched the dreadful knowledge flood back, draining Nortah’s face of colour and making him slump under the weight of his sorrow.
“I’m sorry, Nortah,” Vaelin said. It was all he could think to say.
“Why did you stop me?” Nortah whispered through tears.
“They would have killed you.”
“Then they would have done me a service.”
“Don’t talk like that. I doubt your father’s soul would have dwelt happily in the Beyond knowing that you had followed him there so soon.”
Nortah wept silently for a while and Vaelin watched him, a hundred empty condolences dying on his lips. I don’t have the words, he realised. There are no words for this.
“Did you see it?” Nortah asked finally. “Did he suffer?”
Vaelin thought of the clatter of the trap and the exultation of the crowd. A fearful knowledge to take into the Beyond that so many rejoiced at your death. “It was quick.”
“They said he stole from the King. My father would never do that, he cherished the King and served him well.”
Vaelin seized on the only comfort he could offer. “Prince Malcius said to tell you that he grieves also.”
“Malcius? He was there?”
“He helped us, made the Hawks let us go. I thought that he recognised you.”
Nortah’s expression softened a little, becoming distant. “When I was a boy we would ride together. Malcius was my father’s student and often came to our home. My father taught many boys of the noble houses. His wisdom in statecraft and diplomacy was famed.” Nortah fumbled for the cloth on the table nearby and wiped the tears from his face. “What is the Aspect’s judgement?”
“He feels you have been punished enough.”
“Then I am not even granted the mercy of release from this place.”
“We were both sent here at the behest of our fathers. I have respected my father’s wishes by staying here although I do not know why he gave me to the Order. Your father also would have had good reason for sending you here. It was his wish in life, it will remain his wish now he is with the Departed. Perhaps you should respect it.”
“So I should languish here while my father’s lands are forfeit and my family left destitute?”
“Will your family be any less destitute with you at their side? Do you have riches that will help them? Think what kind of life you would have outside the Order. You will be the son of a traitor, marked by the King’s soldiers for vengeance. Your family will have burdens enough without you at their side. The Order is no longer your prison, it’s your protection.”
Nortah sank back into the bed, staring at the ceiling in mixed exhaustion and grief. “Please, brother, I must be alone for a time.”
Vaelin rose and went to the door. “Remember you are not alone in this. Your brothers will not allow you to fall victim to grief.” Outside he lingered at the door, listening to Nortah’s hard, pain-filled sobs. So much pain. He wondered if his own father had been on the gallows if he would have fought so hard to save him. Would I have even cried?
That night he collected Scratch from the kennels and took him to the north gate, where they played fetch the ball and waited for the boy Frentis to arrive for his knife-throwing lesson. Scratch seemed to be growing stronger and faster with each passing day. Master Jeklin’s dog feed, a hash of minced beef, bone marrow and pulped fruit, had put even more meat on his frame and his constant exercise with Vaelin left his physique both lean and powerful. Despite his fierce appearance and unnerving size, Scratch retained the same happy, face-licking spirit of an overgrown puppy.
“Don’t you normally take him to the woods?” It was Caenis, slipping from the shadows cast by the gatehouse. Vaelin was a little annoyed at himself for not sensing his brother’s presence but Caenis was unusually skilled at remaining hidden and took a perverse delight in appearing apparently from nowhere.
“Do you have to do that?” Vaelin asked.
“I’m practising.”
Scratch came scampering up with the ball in his mouth, dropping it at Vaelin’s feet and greeting Caenis with a sniff of his boots. Caenis patted him uncertainly on the head. Like the other brothers he had never lost his basic fear of the animal.
“Nortah still sleeping?” Caenis asked.
Vaelin shook his head. He didn’t want to talk about Nortah; his brother’s tears had left a hard knot in his chest that was taking a long time to fade.
“The coming months will be hard,” Caenis went on with a sigh.
“Aren’t they always?” Vaelin hurled the ball towards the river, Scratch hurtling after it with a joyful yelp. “Sorry you didn’t get to see the King.”
“No, but I saw the prince. That was enough. What a great man he’ll be.”
Vaelin gave Caenis a sidelong glance, seeing the familiar glint in his eye. He had never been comfortable with his friend’s blind devotion to the King. “He…was a very impressive man. I’m sure he’ll be a fine king one day.”
“Yes, he’ll lead us to glory.”
“Glory, brother?”
“Of course. The King has ambitions, he wishes to make the Realm even greater, perhaps as great as the Alpiran Empire. There will be battles, Vaelin. Mighty, glorious battles, and we will see them, fight them.”
War is blood and shit…There’s no honour in it, Makril’s words. Vaelin knew they would mean nothing to Caenis. He was knowledgeable and often frighteningly intelligent but he was also a dreamer. He had a mental library of a thousand stories and seemed to believe them all. Heroes, villains, princesses in need of rescue, monsters and magical swords. It all lived in his head, as vital and real as his own memories.
“I think we
have different notions of glory, brother,” Vaelin said as Scratch came bounding back with the ball in his jaws.
They waited for another hour but the boy didn’t come.
“He probably sold the knives,” Caenis said, after Vaelin had told him the story. “He’ll have tanked up on grog in a gutter somewhere, or gambled it away. Likely you’ll never see him again.”
They walked back to the stables, Vaelin tossing the ball into the air for Scratch to catch. “I’d rather believe he spent the money on shoes,” he said glancing back at the gate.
PART II
What is the body?
The body is a shell, the cradle of the soul.
What is the body without the soul?
Corrupted flesh, nothing more. Mark the passing of loved ones by giving their shell to the fire.
What is death?
Death is but a gateway to the Beyond and union with the Departed. It is both ending and beginning. Fear it and welcome it.
—THE CATECHISM OF FAITH
VERNIERS’ ACCOUNT
“It was Blood Rose, wasn’t it?” I asked. “The Lord Marshal at the Summertide Fair.”
“Al Hestian? Yes,” the Hope Killer replied. “Though he didn’t earn that name until the war.”
I drew a line under the passage I had just set down, finding myself nearly out of ink. “A moment,” I said, rising to open my chest and extract another bottle and some more parchment. I had filled several pages already and worried that I might exhaust my supply. I hesitated before opening the chest, finding his hateful sword propped against it. Seeing my discomfort, he reached for the weapon and rested it on his knees.
“The Lonak have a superstition that imbues their weapons with the souls of the enemies they kill,” he said. “They give names to their war clubs and knives, imagining them possessed of the Dark. My people have no such illusions. A sword is just a sword. It’s the man who kills, not the blade.”
Why was he telling me this? Did he want me to hate him even more? Seeing his scarred, powerful hand resting on the sword hilt, I recalled how Seliesen, after the Emperor formally named him as the Hope, had submitted himself to months of harsh tutelage under the Imperial Guard, becoming proficient, even skilled, with sabre and lance. “The Hope must be a warrior,” he told me. “The Gods and the people expect it.” The Imperial Guard had taken him in like one of their own and he had ridden with them against the Volarians the summer before Janus sent his armies to our shores, winning plaudits for his courage in the melee. It had availed him nothing against the Hope Killer. I knew the moment would come when the Northman would relate what had happened on that terrible day, and, even though I had heard many accounts of the event, the prospect of hearing it from Al Sorna himself was both dreadful and irresistible.
I sat down again and opened the ink bottle, dipped the quill and smoothed a fresh sheet of parchment on the deck. “The Dark,” I said. “What’s that?”
“Your people call it magic, I believe.”
“They might, I call it superstition. You believe in such things?”
There was a moment’s pause and I formed the impression he was considering his next words carefully. “There are many unknown facets of this world.”
“There are stories told of the war, stories that ascribe great and powerful magic to the Northmen, and to you in particular. Some claim it was with magic that you clouded our soldiers’ minds at the Bloody Hill, and that you stole through the walls of Linesh with sorcery.”
His mouth twitched in faint amusement. “There was no magic at the Bloody Hill, just men possessed of a mindless anger hurling themselves at certain death. As for Linesh, a shit-stinking sewer in the harbour hardly counts as sorcery. Besides, any Realm Guard officer who even suggested use of the Dark would most likely find himself hanged from the nearest tree by his own men. The Dark is believed to be integral to those forms of worship that deny the Faith.”
He paused again, looking down at the sword resting in his lap. “There’s a story, if you’d like to hear it. A story we tell our children to warn them against the dangers of the Dark.”
He glanced up at me, eyebrows raised. Although I consider myself a historian and not a compiler of myths and fables, such tales often shed some light on the truth of events, if only to illustrate the delusions that many mistake for reason. “Tell me,” I said with a shrug.
When he spoke again his voice had taken on a new tone, grave but engaging, a storyteller’s voice. “Gather close and listen well to the tale of the Witch’s Bastard. This is not a story for the faint of heart or the weak of bladder. This is the most terrible and frightful of tales and when I am done you may curse my name for ever having given it voice.
“In the darkest part of the darkest woods in old Renfael, long before the time of the Realm, there stood a village. And in this village there dwelt a witch, comely to the eye but with a heart blacker than the blackest night. Sweet and kind was the face she offered to the village, but mean and jealous was the soul behind it. For it was lust that drove this woman, lust for flesh, lust for gold and lust for death. The Dark had taken her at an early age and she had surrendered to its vileness with willing abandon, denying the Faith and winning power in return, the power to possess men, inflame their desires and have them commit dreadful acts in her name.
“First to fall under her spell was the village Factor, a good and kind man, grown wealthy through thrift and hard work, grown wealthy enough to arouse the witch’s lust. Every day she would wander past his place of business, flaunting herself in subtle ways, stoking the flames of his passion until they became a raging fire, burning away his reason, making him prey for her Dark-whispered plan: kill your wife and take me in her place. And so, one fateful night, he sprinkled the poison known as Hunter’s Arrow into his wife’s supper and, come the morn, she breathed no more.
“Being a woman of middle years with a history of illness, the passing of the Factor’s wife was taken as simply an act of nature by the village. But of course the witch knew better, hiding her delight with tears when they gave the poor murdered woman to the fire, all the time calling to the Factor with her Dark power: “Lavish gifts on me, and I will be yours.” And gifts he gave her, a fine horse, jewels and gold and silver, but the witch was clever and refused it all, making a great show of outrage at the impropriety of a man pressing his suit on so young a woman, and so soon after his wife’s passing at that. How she tormented him, calling to him and then rebuffing his every advance, it wasn’t long before her cruelty unhinged his reason and, seeking escape from the Dark enslavement of her lust, he stole away into the forest and stretched his neck from the high branch of a tall oak, leaving writ word of his ill deed and naming the witch as the cause of his madness.
“Of course the villagers wouldn’t believe it, so sweet she was, so kind. The Factor was clearly driven mad by his own delusion of love for a younger woman. They gave him to the fire and endeavoured to forget this dread episode. But, of course, the witch was not done, for her eye had alighted on the village blacksmith, a great, handsome fellow, strong of arm and strong of heart, but even his heart could be twisted by her Dark power.
“She had taken to living apart from the villagers, all the better to practise her vile arts away from prying eyes. As she could turn a man’s heart this witch could also turn the wind, and as the blacksmith burned charcoal in the forest, she called a northern gale to whip snow down from the mountains, forcing him to seek shelter under her roof, and there, although he resisted with all his mighty strength, she forced him to lie with her, a black, evil union from which her dread bastard would be born.
“It was shame that broke her spell, shame of a good man forced to betray his wife, shame that made him deaf to her sweet enticements the next morn, and deaf to the threats she screamed as he fled back to the village, where, foolishly, he told no-one of what had transpired.
“And the witch, she waited. As the black seed grew in her belly, she waited. As winter gave way to spring and the crops gr
ew tall, she waited. And then, when the scythes were sharpened for harvest and her foul creation clawed from between her legs, she acted.
“It was a storm unlike any seen before or since, heralded by ashen clouds that covered the whole sky from north to south, east to west, bringing wind and rain in terrible abundance. For three weeks the rain fell and the wind blew and the villagers huddled in fearful misery until, when at last it was over, they ventured into the fields to find every acre a wasted ruin. The only crop they would reap that year would be hunger.
“They looked to the forest, seeking game to fill their bellies, but finding all the beasts driven off by some Dark whisper of the witch. The children cried to be so hungry, the old people sickened and, one by one, began to pass into the Beyond, and all the time the witch kept to her small cottage in the woods, for she and her bastard always had plenty to eat, unwitting beasts could be easily snared by one so well versed in the Dark.
“It was the death of the blacksmith’s beloved mother that finally drove the truth from him. Confess he did to the gathered villagers, telling them all of the witch’s designs and how he had fallen under her spell to sire the well-fed bastard she carried through the forest, mocking their starving young with his happy laughter. The villagers voted and none disagreed: the witch must be driven out.
“At first she tried to use her power to assuage them, casting lies at the blacksmith, accusing him of the most terrible of crimes: rape. But her power had no effect now they could see the truth, now they could hear the venom that coloured every lie she told, the evil glint in her eye showing the vileness hidden behind her pretty face. And so with torches flaming, they drove her forth, her cottage burned by their righteous anger as she fled into the forest, clutching her vile whelp to her breast, all pretence gone as she cursed them…and promised revenge.