And then the woman raised her face towards him, and he almost fell to his knees in the street.
Light. A light in her, a light radiating out of her, that shone in Marith’s face and almost blinded him with its warmth. The sun rising. The sun on bright water. The sun through green leaves. Stabbed in his heart and his mind. Brought tears into his eyes and made his body tremble. The air screamed around him, hateful and cold.
Living and dying. Fear and pain.
Joy. Desire. Forgiveness. Love.
Marith stepped towards her. The four men turned, shouting at him. He came towards them and even though his eyes never left the woman’s face something in him made them run from him. Then suddenly he was alone with her in the lip of a filthy alleyway, the light pouring from her, her face filling his vision with light.
She almost fell into his arms, weeping. The light died out of her face and he saw that she was exhausted, her clothes dirty and torn. Her skin was dark rich brown, like sweet chestnuts, her hair long and black as night. Her eyes as she stared at him were brilliant deep twilight blue. The blue of oceans and storms at evening. The blue of the sky before dawn. The blue of weeping, and of joy.
Emmna therelen, mesereth meterelethem
Isthereuneth lei
Isthereuneth hethelenmei lei.
Interethne memestheone memkabest
Sesesmen hethelenmei lei.
In the midst of the desert,
You came to me like water,
Your face gazing, like water.
So quickly my love came, like flowers.
‘Are you hurt?’ he asked dully. His head spinning as he looked at her. She shied back, fear in her eyes. Oh, no. No, no, no. She couldn’t fear him. She couldn’t leave. He clutched her hand, afraid to stop touching her. A sudden horror filled him, that if he saw light in her face, she saw darkness in his.
‘I am Prince Marith Altrersyr,’ he said hurriedly. ‘I can help you.’ He saw her start at his name. Curse it. Curse himself. He had spoken in Pernish at first, unthinking, but switched to Literan, hoping it might reassure her. ‘I … I can help you. I want to help you. Are you hurt?’
‘They did not hurt me.’ She spoke Pernish back to him. Her voice soft and sweet with a heavy accent like thick honey. It made him shiver from head to foot. He held fast to her hand, warmth running into him from her skin, the light rising through her onto him. Everything was silent in his mind. Somewhere far away, things beat like wings.
‘I would have killed them, if they had.’ If she were harmed, he would search the city and kill everything living until he found them. But she did not seem to have been harmed.
Marith led her away from the alleyway down the street. A few people about, watching. A troop of soldiers went past and gave them a quick glance. She flinched from the watching eyes. She moved her body awkwardly, and he saw that her left arm was covered in scabs and scars from wrist to elbow, ugly and vile against her perfect skin.
‘You are hurt,’ he said, anger in his voice. Old wounds, slabby things that festered and did not heal, like his own hand. But it horrified him, that she should ever have been hurt. Linked them, both marked like that, and in almost the same place.
He was glad of his hurts, if it linked him to her. Almost glad of hers, if it gave him another moment to speak to her.
She cried out ‘No!’ and twisted away from him, trying to hide her arm. Her thin sleeveless grey dress was no cover at all for her, she could only try to tuck her arm behind her in such a way that it was more visible, for her trying to hide it. Her dress was dirty and ripped at the hem. Almost without thinking, Marith took off the cloak he was wearing and wrapped it around her, folding it over her to cover her arm.
The fear in her was clearing a little. She looked him up and down, taking in the pack on his shoulder and the water-skin at his belt. ‘You are leaving the city?’ she asked slowly.
Marith nodded. Rate was coming towards him, his face full of anger. They’d drag him away any moment now.
She looked hesitant. ‘If you are leaving the city, may I … may I accompany you? I …’ She blushed, looked at the ground. ‘I have nowhere to go and I … I need to get away. This is not a good place. And you … you have been kind …’
‘It would be my honour,’ he said, falling self-consciously into the court speak of his upbringing. A brave prince rescuing a lady, like a hero from a song. That was what he was, too. What he could be.
He turned to Rate and Alxine and Tobias, gathered around him grumbling. He smiled and he was a prince again and they would do as he commanded because he could not imagine they could do otherwise. ‘She will come with us,’ he said. ‘Come with me. Or I will kill you all. I swear it. On my blood and my name.’
A long pause. The girl stood looking from one to another, no longer afraid but with the light back in her face. She herself seemed now unsurprised that they would help her, four strange men with knives in their eyes. There was power in her. It radiated from her like the light. They would do as she wanted because she could not imagine they could do otherwise. She smiled at them.
‘This is insane,’ said Alxine. But he nodded. He had a kind heart, to help a woman in distress.
Rate didn’t say anything, but he looked at the girl’s face and her slender body in her thin dress.
And Tobias? Tobias didn’t have the strength left to argue.
The lordly voice, the voice that got in your head and made you obey it before you realized what you were even doing. Things in Marith’s face that said it probably wasn’t a good idea to argue. People were beginning to watch them with interest. Causing a scene. We really don’t want to cause a scene just now, Tobias thought. Just get out. Get out, and sort everything out later, when we’re safely away.
The girl was, he had to admit, almost breathtakingly beautiful. You could do a lot, a shameful part of him whispered, with a girl like that in tow. There was something in her face, too, that made him feel frightened of not helping her.
‘She is entirely your responsibility,’ Tobias hissed. ‘We don’t lift a finger to help her. She’s yours, you’re ours. Got it? You follow my orders, she follows you. And you don’t speak a word to each other that isn’t said loudly, and in Pernish. You even look at her like you’re plotting things, I kill her.’
Marith gave him a look, something unreadable, then turned his eyes back to the girl.
‘Come on then,’ Tobias said slowly. ‘Let’s get going.’
They walked on to the gates, the woman nervous, gazing about her and ahead of her. She flinched as they came to the soldiers waiting there. The gates were open, the city trying to pretend things were as normal. Things were as normal, almost. The Emperor hadn’t been murdered. Not in anybody’s interests to catch the men who hadn’t done it. Blame the Immish. Blame the dead. Blame the bloke who annoyed you a week last Lanethday by talking too loud. Blame demons and the dark. Just don’t even think to blame the men now running everything, and don’t even think to ask what anyone knows. The soldiers contemplated them uninterestedly and let them through.
And so Alxine and Rate and Tobias and the descendant of Amrath and the High Priestess of the Lord of Living and Dying walked together through the city gates into the desert, and nobody in all Sorlost even noticed them as they went.
Chapter Thirty-Three
They walked all day in the heat, slowly, two of the men limping, the third clutching his arm, stopping often to rest or drink. Only the dark-haired boy, Marith, did not seem tired. He walked close by her side, watching her with sidelong glances, his beautiful terrible eyes flickering over her face.
Thalia gazed at the country around her with disappointed awe. The vastness of it, the sprawl and stink and ugliness of it. The huge sky hazy blue overhead, the farmlands and villages spreading around. Sorlost had been terrifying beyond her imaginings, a chaos of shouting, dangerous, outside anything she could understand. The country she walked through now was worse, even, for she had never seen wide spaces, barren hills, emp
ty sky. Her world had walls and boundaries and doors.
‘We’ll stop here awhile,’ the man Tobias, the man who seemed to be the leader, said gruffly. He was exhausted, angry and in pain: she could see and feel it radiating off him, even more than the others. Older, weaker, filled with a sense of failure that bit at him.
They reached a small copse of scrubby trees, set back a little from the track they were following. They had left the road almost immediately, heading up slowly towards the hills before them where settlements were fewer. Best not to meet people just yet, Tobias had said. Thalia did not understand why he said it, but she was glad. She did not want to meet people just yet.
The trees gave a little shelter from a warm wind that blew grit into Thalia’s eyes and mouth and made her hair whip around her. She sat quietly while the men checked over the area then unpacked meagre supplies of food. She looked at the small trees, pale wood with pale, fine leaves that shivered in the wind, flashing silver undersides. The ground was half barren, thin yellow grass crowned here and there with brilliant pink flowers. Looking up into the sky, she saw for a moment a bird hovering away to the east, wings beating frantically to hold still in the wind, before it shot downwards and disappeared into the tawny landscape. A hawk, she thought. She had read of hawks, but never seen one. She had never seen a goat before she watched a flock of them meander across their path. She had never seen houses, or carts, or dried meat, or a horse. She had never seen the trees she was sitting under, or the scrubby yellow grass with pink flowers, or the afternoon sunlight filling the vast expanse of the sky. She had never seen running water.
The three men, the other three as she thought of them, ignored her. They ate their food, talking among themselves of small things. Marith and Thalia sat a little apart, though she was conscious that the others watched them – no, watched him – continually, as though afraid. Marith himself barely spoke to her, seemed to want to avoid her looking at him fully, but gave her his food and water, until she had to make him eat and drink himself, not give it all to her. ‘I don’t feel hungry,’ he said in a quiet voice, but when she made him eat some bread he ate quickly, like someone who had not eaten for a long time. She still wore his cloak; he had removed his jacket and spread it carefully for her to sit on. His eyes sought hers. She met them and he rubbed his face painfully, blinked and looked away.
After they had rested a little, Tobias made them get up and continue walking, for all that it was getting towards evening now. After a while a village came into view in a low valley ahead of them: Tobias made them turn aside, track back into the scrub. The ground was becoming barren scree. No trees. The desert came very close here; he was leading them into it, away from anything that lived. What are you so afraid of? Thalia wondered. She felt fear in all of them.
Past dusk when Tobias allowed them to stop again. That they had walked through the dusk was stranger than anything to her. Dusk was the time of terror, the time that was neither light nor dark, the time everything in her world stopped. She had stopped walking as she felt the twilight fall, staring around her, her voice stammering out the words of her prayer. Here in the desert the dusk was horrifying, an abyss swallowing her up, a physical pain. So huge. So hungry. The other three men muttered angrily, Tobias barking at her to be silent, to keep walking. Marith reached out and touched her hand, then drew back. He kept trying to touch her, like a child trying to touch a flame. She could feel him, strong and vivid like the hawk in the sky.
Tobias had chosen a good place. Trees. A small stream. Thalia liked the stream, only the third stream she had ever encountered, the water trickling over stones. In the firelight she could just see the water reflecting the flames, its surface smooth as skin. The fire itself was small, the dry sticks spitting as they burned, giving off a sweet-scented smoke. The youngest of the other three, the fair-blond one, Rate, made tea over the fire. The man with the copper-coloured skin, Alxine, sat against a tree and Tobias re-bandaged his arm.
Thalia got up and walked a little way away from them, into the dark beyond the circle of the fire, towards the stream. Marith got up and walked a little way away from them too, towards her. She heard Tobias call out to him sharply, Marith’s voice mutter something low and sad in reply. This seemed to satisfy them: Tobias grunted and she heard Rate laugh.
He came to sit beside her, his presence strong and clear in the dark. Even in the dark, even with his terrible eyes and his downcast face, she could see how beautiful he was. His face when he had first appeared before her, driving the men attacking her away, brilliant as cold light. The touch of his hand as he raised her to her feet, scalding her.
‘You are really … one of the Altrersyr? A descendant of Amrath?’ Thalia said hesitantly.
She felt him flinch, in the dark. ‘I shouldn’t have told you that,’ he said. His voice was very sad and very hesitant. He rubbed at his eyes. It was something about him that irritated her. The only thing about him that was not perfectly beautiful. He picked up a small stone and threw it into the water of the stream, and he told her who he was, and what had befallen him.
Thalia sat looking ahead of her into the dark. She saw the moon emerge from behind a cloud, a bright thin waxing crescent, and she realized she should have been fasting and kneeling in prayer before the High Altar, waiting to kill a man. She laughed, and he started at the sound, and in a sudden rush she told him who she was in answer. And then he laughed too, a wild sad laugh, and threw another stone into the stream.
‘I knew it,’ he said after a while. He dared look at her a little more, now. As though her knowing who he was gave him a confidence in himself. ‘I didn’t know you were … were that, of course.’ Child killer, her mind whispered. Child killer, murderer, as she was called across Irlast and even to the other side of the Bitter Sea. ‘But I knew you were something beyond … beyond everything. I can’t explain …’ He shook his head and sighed. ‘You must not tell the other men,’ he said then. ‘They … they won’t understand. They will fear you. You made them take you along with us. Or I did, I don’t know. But what they would do, if they found out what you are, I know that.’
They sat in silence a while longer, side by side with the water running before them. Thalia shivered with cold despite the cloak wrapped around her. A great, intense tiredness came over her, her eyes grew heavy, she yawned. She had not slept for a long time, another lifetime ago; all had changed since she had last slept.
‘Why have you come to me?’ Marith asked her.
She wondered at the question, as though she had fled her Temple and abandoned everything because he wanted her to. ‘I wanted to live,’ she said sleepily, as though that explained it all.
Marith made a sound that might have been a laugh or a sigh. He must have heard the exhaustion in her voice, for he carefully helped her to her feet and led her back to the low campfire flames where the three men sat. They had been watching them, she thought.
Marith took off his jacket, laid it on the ground for her. ‘You’ll be too cold,’ she said faintly, but she was so tired. She lay down on his jacket wrapped in his cloak and fell asleep, even with the cold and the hard ground and the men sitting around her. Marith lay down a little way away from her, face turned to the dark.
Grey dawn light, pink and gold streaking the sky in the east. Birds calling, a desert fox shrieking with a harsh cry, the scream of a hawk high in the thin air.
Thalia woke from fitful sleep to noises she had never known, cold like she had never felt. Not the death cold of the Small Chamber, but the cold of a world alive and living and brilliant with life. She sat up, pulling Marith’s cloak about her shoulders. Her eyes were dirty and gritty, her hair an itchy tangle, her throat dry, her body stiff and sore. But the beauty of the world awakening caught in her throat and made her gaze around her with wide, astonished eyes.
Marith was sitting staring into the ashes of the fire. His face was pinched, his lips almost blue from cold. His body in his rough shirt looked thin and crushed. He must be half-frozen, Th
alia realized, dressed only in his shirt. He looked up at her as she sat up and his face brightened, the weariness and the cold going out of it. He smiled softly at her.
‘I’ve never heard birdsong like this,’ Thalia said awkwardly, wanting something to say between them. It seemed half-natural as breathing, half-fearful as facing the men in the Temple come to kill her, looking at him and talking to him. ‘I’ve never … I’ve never seen dawn light like this. It’s so beautiful.’
‘You should see the sun rise over the winter sea,’ Marith said. ‘Or over a meadow in hoarfrost. You should hear birdsong in an oak forest on a midsummer morning.’ He smiled again. ‘You should see your face with the sun catching in your eyes.’
Thalia blushed and looked away.
‘I’ll build up the fire,’ he said. ‘The … the others will be waking. They’ll want to get on.’ He shivered in the cold. Thalia started up, handed him his jacket, trying to shake the dust out of it. He took it carefully, thanking her almost reverentially. How strange he is, she thought. He walked a little way beneath the trees, gathering up more sticks. He rubbed at his face as he did so, and she saw his body shake again, twitching as if in pain. So men had twitched beneath the point of her knife.
‘Lord Prince!’ A hoarse, angry voice: Tobias was standing watching Marith. Marith started, his shoulders slumping. Tobias waved at him. ‘Don’t go too far, remember, boy? Not where I can’t see you.’
He is their prisoner, perhaps, Thalia thought. But then if he was their prisoner why had they allowed him to bring her with them? What was going on between these four men was a mystery to her which she understood clearly she could not ask any of them to explain.
Marith returned with an armful of sticks and built up the fire.
The Court of Broken Knives Page 25