The Court of Broken Knives

by Anna Smith Spark

  I’m sorry, he thought. He had a dull, confused memory of her trying to help him.

  ‘Marith,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said afterwards, looking at the lamp. ‘For the light.’ Days, he’d been in the dark. The light anchored him, like a sun. The dark is all there is, he thought. The dark is all that’s real. But the illusion of light is beautiful.

  Silence. The lamplight flickering.

  ‘I killed Rate,’ said Thalia. ‘I killed him. Stabbed him. And now we’re here. What are we going to do?’

  Marith sighed. Not think about it. Fuck some more. Sleep and hope his hangover went away.

  He poured himself another cup of water, surveyed the room. Small. Empty. The windows shuttered and he’d guess high up anyway from the way the sounds drifted in. The door locked and guarded: he could hear the tread of feet outside, never moving far beyond the edges of the doorframe. Boring job, though the sounds of them at it had possibly livened things up a bit. An inn, probably, some kind of lodging house, a stop-over on the way back home to die.

  ‘Very little we can do,’ he said at last. Thalia looked at him sharply. ‘What did you expect, beautiful girl? That I’d cut our way out of here? Whistle up a dragon? I haven’t even got a sword. And even if I did, my hands are shaking too much to hold one. I’m sorry,’ he said.

  Unanswerable. He pressed his face into her hair. It still had a sweet scent to it, faint and fragile, like dried roses. He nuzzled his head into her shoulder. His head ached.

  ‘Some day soon, we’ll sleep in a silver bed with silk curtains, and you’ll wear dresses of gold. You can hear the sound of the sea, from my chambers in Malth Elelane. The seabirds calling. The windows face east. Into the rising sun. Into the sea. You’ll like the sea.’

  ‘Some day soon, we’ll be dead.’

  Marith said nothing, staring up at the light.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

  A little time later. He’d perhaps been asleep. Footsteps in the corridor, a woman’s voice barking out commands.

  ‘Someone’s coming,’ said Thalia. The flame of the lamp flared then died.

  The door opened. Landra Relast, accompanied by two men armed with knives. She stood facing them, her eyes cold and sad.

  ‘Prince Ruin.’

  Marith tried to smile at her. ‘Hello, Landra.’

  Her face wrinkled at the vomit on the floor, the filthy state of Marith’s clothes. ‘Your father swore you were dead. If I hadn’t been walking down that street and seen you, if I’d been looking the other way … Your father must have been laughing, lying to us about you! Filth and liars, you are. You and your kin. But now I’ll kill you as you deserve. The old ways. Slow and painful. So now perhaps I’m glad he lied.’

  So strained. Trying so, so hard to seem as cruel as she wanted to allow herself to be. You always hated me, thought Marith. The gods only know why. I never did anything to hurt you. As though you hated me because I let Carin ruin me as your father wanted. That’s your guilt. If you’d been blind to it. If you’d been looking the other way.

  He almost laughed.

  Landra said, ‘We leave in a little while. You’ – a glance at Thalia – ‘will be mounted with one of my guards. You’ – another scowl at Marith – ‘will ride on your own. If your horse moves out of line for anything, the man will cut her throat. Then we’ll cut you down. I have five armed men with me. So don’t even think it. When we stop for the night, you’ll be taken straight upstairs again. If you make any noise, she dies. If you make one move I don’t like, she dies. We’ll be in Skerneheh soon enough. Then a ship home to Malth Salene. Then you die.’

  ‘Going to cut my throat on Carin’s grave, are you? Libations to the dead?’ A pain stabbing through him as he spoke Carin’s name. He scratched angrily at his face. ‘He understood why I killed him, you know. I saw it in his eyes.’

  Landra spat at his feet and went out.

  Silence.

  Thalia said suddenly, ‘Was she your lover?’

  ‘What?’ Marith looked at her in astonishment. ‘Landra? Gods, no.’

  ‘The way you … the way you spoke to her …’

  ‘Jealous?’ He tried to laugh. ‘I’ve known her since we were children, that’s all. The sister of my best and dearest friend. She hates me. Always has. As you may have guessed.’

  I should have begged her to let Thalia go, he thought.

  The door opened again. Two armed men entered, followed by a frightened looking maidservant and then two more men carrying a bathtub.

  ‘You’re to be washed and dressed,’ one of the men said gruffly.

  Servants brought cold water in large, heavy buckets. One bucket seemed to have pond weed still floating in it. Charming of Landra to go to so much trouble.

  ‘Strip,’ the man commanded them once the bath was filled. ‘Both of you.’ Thalia went pale. Her hand clutching at Marith’s arm.

  ‘Strip.’ Anger in the man’s voice. Hands jerking on swords.

  Marith slipped off his filthy shirt. ‘Better just do as he says.’ I’ll cut his eyes out and make him eat them in front of you, one day, he thought. I swear it. On my name and my blood, I swear it. He stepped into the cold water, shivering. The maidservant scrubbed them both down with lye soap while the men leered at Thalia.

  The least erotic bath with a woman he could possibly imagine.

  ‘Now walk.’ They walked together down the corridor, Thalia in front of him. He tried to take her hand but the men pulled him away from her. And she flinched away from him, too, her face fixed on the floor.

  Ruined.

  In the courtyard of the inn people bustled around loading baggage onto packhorses. A dog ran underfoot and was kicked away, a small child peeped through a doorway, eyes wide. A guardsman pulled Thalia roughly towards him, lifted her up into the saddle. She looked so fragile, twisted awkwardly between the horse’s head and the body of the man who held her. A wounded child or a captive bird.

  You did this, a voice echoed in Marith’s mind. You. You.

  A man led a horse towards him. Marith vaguely recognized him. Mandle. The man’s name was Mandle. Landra’s man. Carin’s, once.

  ‘My Lord Prince.’ The man’s voice grey and icy. ‘Your horse.’ His eyes laughed cruelly. Marith turned and saw a broken-down packhorse.

  Mandle had seen him crawl out of enough squalor in his time. The man couldn’t really think he’d feel insulted by a piss poor horse? He swung himself up into the saddle, which creaked alarmingly under his weight. Mandle mounted up too, moved his own horse until it was pressed up so close Marith could feel the heat coming off it. The packhorse snorted and shied back. Marith struggled to control it, cursing as he ended up scraping his left leg against the stable wall. The dog yelped.

  ‘Keep that bloody horse under control,’ Mandle shouted at him. ‘We ride shoulder to shoulder like this all the way to Skerneheh, Prince Ruin. So your bloody horse better get to bloody like it. You too. Horse does that too many times, it dies and you’re walking on the end of its rein.’

  Marith sighed and shifted himself around, trying to get comfortable. The horse snorted again.

  Landra swept into the courtyard, her face set hard. She glanced over at Marith, still struggling with the horse, and her lips curled. Her own horse was black, beautifully saddled in rich dark colours, its mane tied with ribbons, bronze ornaments on its head. Her cloak was the brilliant deep green and gold of her family, embroidered in a pattern of swirling flowers. The colours stood out vivid against the glossy black. Beneath it, she wore a travelling dress of dark grey velvet, gold thread work snaking around her breasts and waist.

  Thalia should wear a dress like that, a cloak like that.

  Marith’s horse snorted, the saddle shifting nastily. The party began to move forwards, two armed men in front, then Landra and her two women, three servants leading packhorses, then another three men, Marith in their midst. Thalia let out a cry of terror as the horse she was on started moving. The ma
n she was mounted with cursed and struck her and she cried out again, making the horse shy.

  ‘You shut your mouth,’ the man shouted. He yanked the bridle hard: the horse shied again, skittered sideways. Thalia swayed in the saddle, crying out and weeping; the man let loose his grip on her and she almost fell, screaming in fear.

  ‘Whoopsa!’ Pulled her upright, repeated the trick to the other side. The horse reared up, its hooves treading air, then kicked back, and he almost let go of her again. The men around them cheered. Landra watched impassively, her eyes far away.

  ‘Don’t you go falling off there then, girl.’ The man squeezed her breasts and Marith heard her choke out a cry. ‘Want me to hold you nice and tight now, do you?’

  Mandle grinned at Marith, closing his hand on his arm, nudging the horses ever closer together. ‘He’ll do worse than kill her, Prince Ruin. So you do as you’re told.’ He raised his voice. ‘That’s enough, Jaerl. Don’t want your horse wearing itself out.’

  They rode out through the streets of Reneneth, stinking of rot and rubbish, heavy with flies and filth. The crumbled buildings looked leprous, raddled and eaten away, green and rank with mould. Walls bulged like abscessed wounds. Sickness and death. Sickness and death. I looked forward to reaching this place, Marith thought slowly, trotting on his broken-down horse. I thought there would be freedom here.

  Let the fires come. Let the fires come to burn it clean. Faces watched as they passed, this procession of wealth and power and pain. Die, he thought. Every single one of you. Every single one of you who sees me here like this. I’ll kill you all. Kill you all and hang your corpses up for the crows, I swear it. On my name and my blood, I swear it. He rubbed at his eyes and wished he was back in the wagon, drugged and uncaring and at peace.

  All morning they rode in the hot sunshine. Cooler than the desert, no longer the same dry, desiccating air, but hot and wearing, on a bad horse with no water. The guards passed water-skins among themselves but did not offer them to Marith or Thalia.

  The landscape was richer than the country around Sorlost, trees and flowers, fields of crops, orchards growing small wizened apples and glossy black cimma fruit. Goats ran everywhere, bells on their necks clanking; there were cows too, thin and dark-eyed with great heavy horns and grotesquely dangling throats. Little shrines at the roadside: they had left the rule of Great Tanis and come into the domain of smaller deities, the old bitter blind gods of the human world. Jaerl spat for luck as they passed one, a grey hump of rock, formless, but with a gaping mouth like a frog. Flowers had been laid before it, withered now and skeletal.

  Around noon they stopped, the women sliding off their horses, chattering excitedly, the servants hurrying to spread rugs, prepare drinks and food. The land around was scrubby woodland, no houses or even chimney smoke visible; they had stopped at the bottom of a shallow incline, where a stream flowed lazily among willow trees. There was a scent of mint, and a brackishness from the water over it, rancid-sweet. Marith looked at the water and the willow trees and saw Thalia looking back at him, eyes filled with pain.

  One brief moment of his life, brilliant as birdsong. Only a few days, since he had last sat beneath a willow tree beside a stream.

  Mandle jerked his arm, pointing at a patch of rough ground away from the women, where the men sat with drawn swords. ‘Dismount, Prince Ruin. Sit down on that stone and don’t move.’ He fingered the hilt of his own sword, a shining thing of yellowed metal, green enamel on the hilt. ‘Don’t speak, either.’

  Jaerl pulled Thalia down and pushed her to sitting a little way away from him. She moved stiffly, hunched and bent over, shaking. She looked like the little grey hump of rock they had passed that was a god. Formless. Worn to nothing. Empty.

  ‘I said, want a drink, Prince Ruin?’ Marith blinked, the sunlight hurting his eyes. Mandle’s face swam before him. He reached up gratefully, took the skin the man offered, taking a long drink.

  Not water. Spirits of some kind, strong and harsh. He gulped it down, tears streaming down his face. When they came to remount he staggered, barely able to stand, fell in the dust and lay there dizzy until they hauled him up. Sat slumped in his saddle, face lolling forward into the horse’s filthy, matted mane. The men laughed at him, the sound swirling around him like bells.

  By the time they stopped again he had sobered a bit, his mouth tasting filthy, bile in his throat. He almost fell from his horse, begged for water in a cracked voice, then begged for more of whatever they’d given him before. They laughed at him again and refused. And then he was remounted, and they were going on, and evening was coming, the first stars visible in the deep blue of the sky.

  They stopped for the night in another caravan inn, smaller than that in Reneneth but better kept, cleaner with a smell of warm brick and horse manure rather than decay and rotted stone. Lamps flickered in the doorway. A plump young innkeep’s wife, pinkcheeked and smiling, her smile fading as Marith and Thalia were hurried past her up creaking stairs into a room at the very top of the house.

  ‘Don’t want no trouble,’ Marith heard her protest in the strong, ugly accent of Immish.

  ‘And you’ll get none, you shut your mouth and close your eyes,’ someone growled back. Then Mandle’s voice, kinder and softer, lilting with its Whites accent that made Marith almost weep: ‘They’ll be no trouble, mistress. A bad thing, he is. Just leave him be. Leave them both be.’

  Another small room. Another locked door. No shutters, this time, just a window too small and high up to climb out of. Water, and bread, and cheese. A tiny candle in a clay dish. Not the dark again. He was grateful for that, at least. Not having to see her light. He didn’t want to see her light. It would burn him, now. His eyes could no longer bear it.

  ‘Marith?’ Thalia sat on the bed and looked at him. Pity, and anger, and something else. She placed her hands on his forehead. Cool hands. Soft. Carin used to do that, too. It helped, sometimes. Take things away. Things he didn’t want. Things he couldn’t stop. Good things, that hurt him.

  ‘I could try …’ She looked so weary. ‘I could try to put the fear on them. When they come next with water, or to check. If you … If you killed them. We could maybe run …’

  ‘Run where? There’s nowhere to go. I can’t kill everyone in the place.’

  Maybe I could, he thought. Maybe it would be fun to try … Kill them all and burn the inn down around them, feeding the flames with human fat. His mouth still tasted of dust. His head hurt like he was dying. He was so tired. Not tonight. Tonight he would sleep. He put his arms around Thalia and kissed her. She shuddered and then embraced him back. Their shadows danced on the wall behind them. Moonlight came in at the window, silver and clean. Even when the candle died, there was a little light.

  The next day the same, riding slumped in the saddle, jerking uncomfortably on the broken-down horse. They didn’t give him alcohol again, just warmish water and dry bread. He ate and drank mechanically, rode mechanically, hoped against hope every time they gave him water that it was something else. In the night, locked together in a bedroom, he drew Thalia into his arms and felt briefly that there might be some kindness in the world. She made the light, once or twice, but it burnt him so that he cried out and hid his eyes from her. They did not speak.

  Only ten days, it was, he realized later. Only ten days, from Reneneth to Skerneheh. It felt like an eternity. And like no time at all. No rhythm, no sense, no awareness of anything. Just light, too bright to bear, and dark again, and Thalia’s hands on his face.

  They had come to a stretch of forest, ash and elm and holm oak, the land rising into hills that met the sea coast in a jumble of black cliffs. A few hours outside Skerneheh, but wild country, the woods dank and untouched. Too steep for habitation, hard rock jutting up through the soil. Few birds but crows.

  The horses drew close together, nickering edgily. Mandle called out to the men to keep wary, told Landra and the other women to keep close. Hands rested on sword hilts. Going slowly, uphill. Hanging silence
.

  A scream of animal pain. A horse reared up, treading the air, its eyes wild. An arrow in the curved lines of its throat. White feathers crawling with lice. The horse staggered and fell sideways with a crash, bringing its rider down with it.

  Another arrow grazed Mandle’s shoulder. Another, from the other side of the road, struck one of the servants in the neck. He fell forwards slowly, clawing at Landra’s horse as he died.

  ‘Bandits!’ Mandle shouted. One of the women screamed, her mount rearing as she let go of its reins. Marith’s horse shrieked and collided with the one next to it, almost knocking both riders to the ground.

  Ten armed men burst out of the trees on either side of them.

  The guardsmen moved forward. Trying to surround the women. Landra pulled her horse around. She drew out a long knife. Mandle’s gaze flicked from Marith to Landra and back again. Thalia was seated on Jaerl’s horse, in front of Jaerl’s body like a shield, getting in the way of his sword arm. Marith looked back at Mandle for a moment, their eyes meeting.

  Keep her alive. Please.

  Then the killing began.

  Everything was hacking and stabbing, the packhorses frantic in the middle of it, one of the women still screaming on and on. Marith kicked wildly at one of the bandits coming towards him, missing entirely, wrestling to get his horse to move. They should have such an advantage, mounted men defending against foot, but the road here was narrow, rough, pot-holed, sloping steeply up. Everything a confusion, nowhere to move, no space, men ducking under the horses’ heads, the injured horse kicking and dying, two servants dead and underfoot, attackers, defenders, defended all caught up together. And he was unarmed, against a heavy broadsword that lashed out at his horse’s flanks.

  Mandle skewered one, twisted round to block another coming up on Landra. Landra’s knife was bloody: a large dark-bearded man grabbed at her bridle and she stabbed his hand, hard and vicious, pulled her horse back round to crash into him as he leapt back. Two closed in on Jaerl. Jaerl’s horse reared, he brought it forward a few paces, swinging with his sword, missing one. The other jumped out of the way of kicking hooves, came in again on Jaerl’s left where Thalia was between him and Jaerl’s blade. Oh gods and demons, Thalia! Thalia! Jaerl wheeled the horse, kicked at his attacker, then pushed Thalia from the saddle. She screamed as she fell, the horse’s hooves stamping around her. Jaerl’s sword coming down at the bandit almost on top of her.