She was also happy to talk about the Whites, Morr Town and Malth Elelane.
‘My brother’s seen the king,’ she said, ‘tall man, he said he was, dark-haired like they all are, very stern. Rode a huge horse and dripped with jewels. And the queen: beautiful, he said she was, all golden and pink and sparkling. He married her for love, after all. But stern too. Didn’t see them very close, mind. And it was years ago, too. He doesn’t leave Malth Elelane much, now, King Illyn.’
‘No?’
‘Not been a happy place, they say, the court, these last few years. And San says the mood in Morr Town’s bitter as knives, since the prince died. The story is the king’s quicker to anger than ever, now, and even the court fears him. Not that it was unexpected,’ she went on, ‘the stories that went round about him. The prince, I mean. San had it on good authority that— ’
‘Yes, yes.’ The last thing he wanted was to sit here being told gossip about bloody Marith.
‘Most people are interested,’ said Raeta irritably. ‘Kind of thing you have to take pride in.’
Tobias shook his head. Suppose you did, in a strange kind of way.
‘But he’s dead now.’ She sighed almost wistfully. ‘My mother met the last king, Nevethlyn. Claims he stuck his hand up her dress, in fact, which really isn’t the kind of thing a woman wants to hear from her aged mum.’
Tobias must have looked disbelieving, because she frowned at him and went on, ‘My mother was a maidservant to Lord Reven before she married. When King Nevethlyn paid a visit to Fealene, she brought his bath water every night.’
‘Charming man.’
‘You wouldn’t do that, of course, you were king?’
‘Course I bloody would. Can still hold it against someone else for having the power to do it, though, can’t I?’ Tobias thought a moment. ‘Nevethlyn’s the one who … you know?’
‘Opened his own throat on the eve of the current king’s eighteenth birthday, five days after his army had been routed in Illyr? Bled to death slowly over the course of the next three months, rot setting into the wound and making it ooze black pus? Oh yes. That’s him. My mother wasn’t exactly upset, as you can imagine.’
One of those hilarious military debacles a professional never heard about without shuddering. The most recent of the long line of attempts by Amrath’s descendants to take back Amrath’s kingdom. Or the blasted wasteland of barely civilized sheep-shaggers it now consists of, anyway. Assembles a crack army, a couple of mages, warships, the works. In the face of all evidence to the contrary, sails off kind of expecting said sheep-shaggers to either fall to their knees in rejoicing at the return of their rightful king or at least just give in and die horribly. Kind of ends up totally wrong, like always. Nobody could ever really say what the fault was, even. The army just … didn’t win. Somehow ended up penned in between a cliff top and a swamp with half the soldiers dying of marshfever. And, curiously enough, being penned in between a cliff top and a swamp with half your soldiers dying of marshfever turns out to be a really bad place from which to attempt a panicked midnight retreat.
And the king, heart-broken and alone with his failure, shamed in the eyes of his people and his ancestors, but cursed with the Altrersyr propensity not to die easily …
Got a couple of good ballads out of the mess, at least, same as the last four times they tried it. The kind that made you either weep copiously or piss yourself laughing. Hadn’t really clicked it was Marith’s grandpa.
Raeta nodded at the darkening sky. ‘It’s getting late. I’m turning in. We’ll pass Third, tomorrow, if the wind holds. Could reach Seneth by next dawn. Night.’
‘Night.’ He sometimes wondered if she’d be interested in fucking him. Had concluded almost certainly not.
Tobias sat up a little longer, looking at the sky. It still felt strange, having no role on the ship, no jobs to attend to. No men looking to him for orders or reassurance or a good bollocking when they fucked something up. No need to keep looking out himself for someone in need of a good bollocking for fucking something up. Just sitting around, waiting. Waiting, with Prince Marith and King Illyn ahead of him. Gods only knew what that would bring. Gods only knew why he was doing all this.
A nice little house in the sunshine, a nice little girl to clean it, beer every evening, a fat soft bloated gut …
Gods only knew what he’d been doing getting into any of this. It had all seemed so easy, at the time. Neat and clever and give yourself a big pat on the back for initiative. Now he was fucked and fucked and fucked again. Revenge. Futility. Prince Marith. The ultimate pointlessness of everything in his life, that he’d come through near-on twenty years of war and killing and ended up like this. Absolutely nothing to do to take his mind off it all, either, apart from chat away to a pretty woman who quite obviously had no interest in sleeping with him and was just as bored as he was. He rolled himself up and went to sleep, still with his sword next to him and his knife under his pillow in case Raeta decided she’d got bored of talking to him.
Three days later the ship docked at Morr Town, and he set off slowly up the hill to Malth Elelane, the Tower of Joy and Despair, to see the king.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Orhan walked across the Court of the Fountain, watching the water dance. No one was fighting there tonight. Very few people about. A street seller was offering candied rose petals; he bought a bag and ate them slowly. Pale pink, like the dawn. The crystals of sugar crunched in his mouth. He’d walked here with Darath, meat fat dripping nastily down his chin, sighing at his beloved’s elaborate overdramatics. He wondered if their desire would wane again, now Darath no longer had the game to play with him. Building up was always less erotic than tearing down.
He rested against the lip of the fountain, his guards stopping puzzled around him. He had more, now, six large men, hard-faced, who had cost him a huge amount to hire in order to cost him a huge amount more to keep. Cold, like metal. He couldn’t imagine Bil bedding any of them. They had been taken on at short notice: he felt nervous around them, in a way he never had with Amlis or Sterne.
Would this, too, become tedious, having to be flanked everywhere by armed men, trapped by the idea of others doing to him what he had done to others? He had raised the possibility in people’s minds again, after these long years of peace. Conspiracy and murder.
The twilight bell sounded. A sacrifice night again. That poor child. The city held rigid, breathing in the silence of a man’s death. Then the spell broke, the moment of danger passed. Across the square a sudden commotion: a woman, young and ragged, falling into the dust, not rising again. Someone shouting. Orhan’s men drew closer around him, swords out. Orhan sent one over to investigate. He came back shaking his head: just another street girl, dropping dead of something vile. Unlucky omen, Orhan thought, for her to have fallen there. It was the Court of the Broken Knife that usually claimed them. A better place to die. The Court of the Fountain was for the living, and those who died for glory.
I’d better take care not to die there, then, he thought.
‘Send someone to clear away the body,’ Orhan ordered. No one else would bother, not a corpse with nothing worth taking to make it worth the while. He did not like to see it there, in the beautiful square with the fountain playing and the lamplight bright.
When he got home, Bil was sitting in the inner courtyard, eating grapes and watching the ferfews chasing moths. In the gloom her hair blazed. She was dressed in yellow and green, like flowers, a loose dress to cover her growing belly.
‘You’re working too hard,’ she said. ‘You’ll be worn out.’
‘I enjoy it.’
She sat up, almost took his arm. She’d heard what he had had proclaimed today, then. Of course she had. But he had somehow hoped she might not have heard. Closed herself off into baby things. It repelled him, her swelling belly and her knowing this.
She said, ‘Will you really burn Samerna Rhyl alive?’
‘It has to be done.’
‘Burn Samerna? Burn the children alive?’
Even to his own wife, he could not risk telling the truth. Even to his own wife, he would be the man who killed them, who burnt them. No one could ever know he’d spared them. Of all the things he had done and all the reasons for doing them, those around him would condemn him for this above all. And he wouldn’t even have actually done it.
Just killed someone else’s family instead, to make his own conscience slightly easier to bear. Nothing important, on top of all the rest. But bitter.
‘It would have been me,’ Bil said. ‘If you’d failed.’
‘It still could be.’
‘You can’t … you can’t pardon them?’
Wearily: ‘No.’
‘But they didn’t do anything. It’s cruel.’
Wearily: ‘Yes.’
She looked at the walls. ‘When?’
‘Next week. Tearday. You’ll need to be there. We all will.’
She seemed about to speak, then nodded silently.
A servant called them in to a late dinner. Roasted lamb dressed with honey, warm bread, cold greens cooked with onions. Orhan ate absently, planning the work he needed to do tomorrow. Letters to Chathe and Tarboran. Ith. The White Isles. Elis’s wedding. That needed doing fast, to bind March to them. Before Elis mucked it up and the girl refused him. And his nephew: pity the poor bride there, too.
After they had eaten, Orhan wondered about going to see Darath. Or even going back to the palace, work again at the endless tasks. He went out into the gardens, looked up at the sky. Ferfews called around him. Ghost birds. Souls of the dead. The dead had no souls. But if they did, they were here, with him, calling in sweet low voices. The scent of jasmine was very strong. He’d finally got the stink of blood and burning out of his mind. Smell it again, in a few days’ time, when women and children and a roomful of servants died.
I did it for the good of the Empire, he thought heavily. One day everything will rise again, the people happy and triumphant, the gold pennants of the city catching the wind, the kings of Irlast bowing down before us. Hope and power and new purpose. I will remake the world, or a small part of it at least. I will be praised, afterwards.
Clouds came again, blotting out the moon. No stars apart from the red gleam of the Fire Star. The call of the birds in sweet low voices. Ghosts.
Orhan went into the house and up into his bedroom, and tried to sleep. All he could think of was the proclamation he had had made and the next things he needed to do. He woke early, went down to the palace and sat with the maps and the ledgers and the letters, planning changes, planning improvements. Fewer children starving. Fewer women dying unmourned in the street. Hope and power and new purpose. The good of the Empire. Written down in gold ink in books bound with human skin.
Chapter Forty-Eight
They were dragged up on deck, blinking at the light. Marith stared around him shakily. The great golden cliffs of Third loomed before them, crested at the top with the brown of raw, turned earth. The morning sun blazed on the peak of Calen Mon, picking out the birds circling it. A jagged ravine broke the line of the cliffs below the mountain, darker rocks running with water and deep green vegetation, goats picking over the sheer falls. To the north of the peak, woodland, sweeping down to meet the sea in low cliffs and a little shingle beach. The trees were almost bare now. Like bones. Seals lay on the beach, their dogs’ heads raised, watching. A few fishing boats bobbed on the choppy water, sails red or pale blue.
Landra appeared on deck, wrapped in a heavy fur-trimmed cloak against the cold wind. Her hair was braided with gold, though her clothes were creased and crumpled after weeks at sea. Her eyes looked tired as she gazed out at the land rising before them.
‘Home. I thought you might like to see it, Prince Ruin.’
Marith nodded slowly. The most beautiful place in the world. He felt Thalia shiver beside him, staring at the water and the cliffs. The first time they’d been allowed out of a filthy compartment in the hold for two weeks. The sky and the light were painful, the air stank of sweet cleanliness. She looked half-frozen in her thin dirty gown. The wind whipped her hair, made it fly out around her. Black fire, burning. Bare branches tearing at the sky. I said I’d show you my home, he thought. And so we’ll die there. Better than living, perhaps, knowing what will come to me. And better here than anywhere else.
‘Where are we making land?’ he asked Landra. ‘Escral? Or Toreth?’ To see Malth Salene again, rising above the dark waters of Torlan Bay, its walls painted green and gold, apple trees crowning the headland upon which it stood …
‘Neither.’ Her hands gripped the rails of the ship. ‘We make land here, Prince Ruin. Go across country. Honoured guests disembark from their ships at Toreth Harbour and ride the golden road to Malth Salene. Murderers and outcasts and dead men take the lich way, come in through the back gates where the middens are piled.’
The old roads. Older than Malth Salene. Older than the Relasts, or the Altrersyr. Nothing more than a thin line in the earth, leading from the tumbled rocks below Calen Mon in winding paths over the moors towards the fortress three days’ walk away. Ended as they began, nowhere anyone went to, nowhere anyone needed to go. Such roads ran all across the island, leading from nowhere to nowhere, ending blank and pointless at the cliff edge and the sea. Roads one could walk to kill oneself, pockets filled with yellow stones. Roads the dead might walk, if they cared to walk in the wild places. He’d ridden them with Carin, trying to understand them. Found only that there was nothing to understand. Landra was such a romantic, to think of it.
Couldn’t have anyone recognizing him, either, Marith thought. That was the real reason why, of course: you could hardly take the heir to the kingdom into a major port town and not have someone notice. People would recognize him, in Toreth. Predominantly tavern keepers, hatha merchants and the men employed to sweep the gutters, in point of fact, but still, people who would recognize him.
They came ashore in another rowing boat, splashing out into the shallows, cold waves breaking around their legs. Gods, it was sweet. The sound of the water breaking on pebbles was perfect music. Gulls again, wilder than most in this wild place, angry at being disturbed. The seals looked at them with eyes as dark and smooth and uncomprehending as the shingle. A rough scramble up into the woods behind the beach, Landra’s eyes fierce and laughing as Thalia struggled and stared, haunted by the sea and the stone and the earth and the sky, cold and frightened, seeing this land only as something terrible, cruel and empty as the desert had been. The old gods must lie heavy on her, she who was sworn to another god. And her eyes widened, when they came to the lich road. She felt it, Marith saw. Felt it as he had done, once.
Marith and Thalia walked bound, led on long ropes. Landra strode ahead, Mandle beside her grim-faced, holding the ropes like leading reins. Just the four of them: Landra’s women, all Landra’s things, had been left on the ship. It was madness, to do this. Landra would be punishing herself more than she could possibly humiliate him.
He’d promised Carin he’d marry Landra, once. The closest he could come to giving Carin his crown. Carin had wanted it. Or rather, Carin’s father had wanted it. Made Carin ask him. Marry my sister, Marith. Marry her and make her queen. Their fingers curled round each other. Carin’s plain face smiling down at him. Everything fractured and bright behind his eyes. You have to marry her, you know. Anyone else will be jealous. But she loves me almost as much as she loathes you. Neither of them cared, really. But it had been good, to give something Carin could give to his father without pain.
They walked on, into the wind. Cold. He could still hear the sea behind them, pounding on the stones of the shore.
After a short while, Thalia was shaking, seemed ready to collapse. Her hair whipped around her face in tendrils that blocked her vision, her lips and face and hands looked blue and dead. Marith stopped walking as she stumbled and gasped, her ankle catching in a hole and making her trip awkwardly.
‘She needs help. She
can’t walk.’ He turned to Landra, striding angrily back to him. ‘Please. Please, Landra.’
Pale blue eyes flicked between his face and Thalia’s. ‘Help her, then.’ The voice cold and bitter. You’re jealous, Marith thought. Jealous for Carin, that I love her. That I could love anyone other than Carin. He came over to Thalia and she fell into him, gasping. Her body shook with cold.
‘Untie me,’ he said slowly to Landra. ‘Please, Landra. I …’ He paused, licked his lips, steeled himself. ‘I swear I won’t try to run. I swear I won’t try to fight. On my name and my blood, I swear it.’
‘The Altrersyr lie,’ Landra said.
Of course we do. You don’t hold a kingdom and a legend as the vilest family in Irlast without lying occasionally. ‘Yes,’ he said wearily, ‘we lie. My father lied to you. I’ve lied to you. I’ve lied to Carin. I’m a worthless lying drunk and a murderer. But in Amrath’s name, I swear. I—’ He went down carefully on his knees. ‘Just let me help her, Landra. Please. Please.’
Landra snorted. She looked confused, to see him at her feet. A long pause; he could see her thinking, weighing up everything in her mind, her anger at his love for Thalia, her anger at his humility to her, the danger of him running, balancing them with the suffering of this poor woman whom she was killing as surely as he’d killed Carin. ‘Untie his hands. He can hold her.’
Mandle twisted uncomfortably. ‘My Lady—’
‘Untie him. We won’t get much further, if the girl can’t walk.’ Landra raised her hand impatiently at the man’s muttering. ‘Place the rope around his neck. If he tries to run, tighten it.’
Mandle grinned as he changed over the bindings, making a lengthy show of knotting the rope so that it hung heavily at the point on Marith’s throat where the pulse beat between his collarbones. The man had carried him drunk and sobbing out of a tavern somewhere in Toreth, once. Seemed a nice enough bloke then, a good steady shoulder to lean on.
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