The Bloodstained God (Book 2)

by Tim Stead

  She pulled the papers onto the bed and began to read.

  It must have been an hour later that someone banged on her door. It was not a polite knocking, and not at all what she would have expected in Wolfguard, but an insistent, almost desperate hammering. She picked up the sword. Caution, even here, was no bad thing. She went to the door and pulled it open.

  In the hall outside she saw one of the serving maids, clearly distraught. Her pretty face was streaked with tears and her blond hair was in disarray. For all her obvious distress she was clearly in awe of Pascha and struggled to regain her composure. Pascha put a hand on the girl’s arm.

  “Calm yourself and speak your piece,” she said.

  The kind gesture seemed to be enough. The girl managed a small bow.

  “We would have told you, Deus, but everybody knew,” she said.

  “Knew what?”

  “A death. There’s been a death.”

  “A death?” For a moment she did not understand. There were deaths all the time, but that moment passed and she knew the girl was speaking of one of Narak’s chosen, the people to whom he had loaned a portion of his never ending life.

  “Was it here?” she asked. “Was it in Wolfguard?”

  “No, Deus. The steward has spoken to all here, and all are well.”

  Elsewhere, then. Only two that she knew of were elsewhere. Cain Arbak and Narala. Narala was an old friend. Pascha had shared much with her during her time at Wolfguard, more than with Perlaine, but she found herself hoping that Cain wasn’t dead, because Cain was essential to the war. He was a trump card, a heavy weight on their side of the scales. She hated herself for thinking like that. What sort of person must I be to wish my friend dead? A pragmatic one, given the choice. That’s what Narak would have told her.

  “Tell Poor that I will find out who has died,” she said. The maid nodded. Pascha could not remember her name. She was new, at least new in the last four centuries she thought wryly. How one’s perception of time changes with age.

  She closed the door and went back to her bed, pushing the papers aside. She sat on the edge, still holding her blade on her lap. She could not herself discover who was dead. She knew that. Only Narak would know. He could enter the Sirash and touch each of his chosen, but Pascha herself had none – not one person was in her favour. She would have to ask Narak.

  She closed her eyes, and in spite of her agitation and not really wanting to know the answer to her question, she sank easily into the oily darkness of the Sirash. Narak was easy to find. She knew that he was in the Green Isles, knew that he was in the south, and so she was immediately there, and Narak burned brightly. He was brighter than any star in the sky, and yet there was no light.

  She touched him.

  Not now.

  There has been a death. Wolfguard is in uproar.

  I know.

  Who? Tell me who.

  Narala.

  Then she was pushed away, shut out as though Narak’s star had become a diamond, hard and cold. She had felt his bitterness, his anger. She felt that something was wrong. She wanted to know what had happened. How had Narala died? Now that she knew the knowledge weighed on her chest like a great stone, pushing the breath out of her. She could feel tears on her face. Narala was dead.

  She stayed there, looked around for something else, a sparrow, perhaps. She became aware of other dim presences, like red glows, warm and diffuse. They were not sparrows; that much was certain; but perhaps they were some other kind of bird, a pair of eyes that she could use to see what had happened.

  She dropped onto one of them, and in a moment she could see. Yet there was a strange feel to it. Her vision was perfect, not at all restricted, or even enhanced by the creature she had inhabited. She could hear birds, the sound of surf, and she could smell smoke.

  What she saw was Narak, and the Wolf looked grim. He was sitting in an ornate wooden chair, and he was speaking, and she could hear him.

  “… I will send a signal,” he was saying. “And when you receive the signal you must take the boats along the coast, being sure that you arrive before dawn…”

  He looked tired and grim. She could see that his clothes were spattered with blood, some it fresh enough to be red, and she recognised the smell of the smoke. She had smelt the same scent in the air when they’d burned bodies at the wall. So he had already taken his price for Narala’s death.

  She saw a hand rise in front of her, felt it rub the side of her nose.

  Gods, she was in a man! She pulled back as though burnt. It was not possible. It was just not possible. In a moment she was back in Wolfguard, sitting on her bed. A man! None of the Benetheon could get behind the eyes of a man. Men were shut off, impervious to their power, beyond reach, and yet she had seen it. She had felt it.

  What was happening to her? It was like the other time, when she had been shot at in the woods. For a moment she had been able to sense the entire forest, or it had felt that way. She had known that the assassin had gone. That was impossible, and she had been unable to repeat it. Now she had been behind a man’s eyes. These were powers that she simply did not possess. Nobody did.

  She reached for the cup of wine, and the sword fell from her lap. It hit the carpet with a dull thud and she stopped and looked down at it. Blood silver. Was that it? All the Benetheon shunned blood silver. They had been taught to. Why would you have anything to do with the one substance that could kill you?

  She picked up the sword and ran a finger down the side of the blade. The metal felt cool, smooth, dead. There was no magic that she could feel. She put it to one side and stood up. Duty. She had to bear the bad news to Poor and the rest of them. Narala was dead. The price had been paid. They were all diminished by it.

  20. Dinner

  Of all his duties, Tilian Henn feared dinner the most. His days were filled with excitement. He trained with the men, went into the woods with them and practiced a host of skills and techniques that he had never dreamed existed. And he was good at them. No lesser a man than Welcart had praised him. He was learning quickly. He was teaching, too. They spent hours practicing with blades in the open ground before the house, and he thought that at least the men of Latter Fetch had reached a level of proficiency where they would not disgrace their lord.

  Dinner was different. While the other men gathered in the kitchen by the fire and drank beer and told stories Tilian was required to eat with Sara. It was not something he had been told to do, but Sara invited him to dine with her. He could not refuse.

  It was not that he disliked her. Quite the opposite was true. He liked her a great deal, and admired her for her strength of character, for the way she had stood up to Elejine. She was very pleasing to the eye as well.

  Tilian was no virgin. He was not shy with girls and happy enough to flirt and kiss, and sometimes more, but here he was faced with something he had never known before. He was faced with blood.

  Sara was blood cousin to his lord, and even that was not the worst of it. The thing that rocked him most of all was that she did not seem to know it. She behaved just like all the girls he’d known in Bas Erinor. She laughed at his jokes, ate with her fingers, looked at him in the same way as they had. Tilian knew only one road with such a woman, and that road was closed by blood, and so he went nowhere. He was a mule, feet dug in, refusing to follow where his instincts led him.

  It was bizarre. He sat opposite this woman, and now that Lira had taken charge of her wardrobe she attended dinner dressed like a lady of blood, decked in silks and satins, ruffed with lace, and she seemed to like that, because she wore it well. Even her hair had been tamed by the maid’s attentions, and now rested in demur plaits that twined down her back. Sometimes she dressed with a lot of bare flesh below the neck, and she did not sit primly, but leaned forwards, elbows and hands on the table, displaying her quite substantial charms in a way that he found difficult to ignore.

  He, too, was required to dress more formally, though he had little enough to wear, and nothin
g to match Sara’s finery. He wondered where her clothes had come from. They had certainly not travelled with them from Bas Erinor, and so he guessed that they had always been here, resident, so to speak, at Latter Fetch. He had to bathe as well, every evening after a hard days work when all he wanted was a cool drink and the slump by the fire.

  Today was the last day. The men were ready. Tomorrow they would leave to rejoin the regiment, and Tilian was looking forward to that. Even though he thought some of his decisions with the men might raise eyebrows, he was sure that he could justify what he had done.

  He pulled on a clean shirt. At least there was no shortage of clean shirts for the captain of the Latter Fetch guard. At least they were dining in the parlour now. He pulled on clean trousers – the same clean trousers that he’d worn last night – and buttoned on a dark tunic that one of the footmen had loaned him. It hid a multitude of sins, and stains.

  He made his way downstairs. Sara had been walking for a week now. The physic had allowed her out of bed on the condition that she rested, and that seemed to suit her well enough, because she spent hours in the library reading and writing notes on what she read, or so the gossip said. He assumed that Lira was the source of the gossip, and so it was accurate, but who could be certain? All he knew was what passed over the dinner table.

  She was already there when he arrived, sitting at the table with a glass of wine in one hand, gazing at the fire. He could tell at once that her mood was sombre. She forced a smile as he entered, but it dropped away quickly.

  “So you go back to Bas Erinor tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Yes. We will leave early.”

  “I will not see you again before you go.” It was a statement, not a question, but he did his best to reply.

  “It is two day’s ride. I want to arrive as early as I can on the second day to see the men properly quartered.”

  She did not seem to hear him, but looked at the fire again, and gulped a mouthful of wine. “What will you do when you get there? All your pay is unspent.”

  Tilian shrugged. “I will rejoin my lord. I will serve him as best I can.”

  She looked up sharply. “Do you love your duty so much, Tilian Henn?”

  “I… yes, I suppose. I was nothing before I served my lord. Now I have purpose.”

  “Even if it is another man’s purpose,” she said. The words were not scornful. “I envy you that. I will remain here and be bored,” she added.

  “How can you be bored?” Tilian asked. “There is so much to do here.”

  Sara waved the question away and called for the food to be brought. The food was the one aspect of dining with Sara that he enjoyed. Tonight it was venison, but not the crude roasted lumps that he was used to having on those rare occasions when his purse had stretched so far. In Latter Fetch the meat was served lightly cooked with a pink centre, and sliced onto the plate in thicknesses less than the width of his finger, and drizzled with a berry sauce which added a pleasing sweetness to the meat. There were vegetables, too, and a good red wine, though not a Telan one.

  Sara did not seem to want to talk as they ate, so Tilian filed the silence with stories of the men of the woods, stories that Welcart and the others had shared with him. They were light tales, amusing anecdotes of the remarkable and the ridiculous, like the time when Brodan had stalked a great stag through the forest for half a day, employing all his skill and stealth to draw close to it, eventually stepping around a tree, bow in hand, to find the beast had stepped his way and now stood less than a foot from his arrow. Somehow, in the surprise of the moment the stag had hooked his bow with its great antlers and run off through the forest with the weapon borne aloft like a trophy, leaving Brodan with no meat and no bow, nothing but a sorry tale to tell.

  She did not laugh at his tales as much as she had done on other nights, but she did smile at the punch lines.

  They ate the main course, and this was followed by a confection of berries, sugar and cream, with some sweet spice that Tilian could not name. It was the very reason berries had been invented, he thought. In all his life he had never thought that food could be so rich and yet so delicate at the same time. The cook was a magician.

  “I will miss your company, Tilian Henn.”

  “And I shall miss yours,” he responded.

  “Will you really?”

  He looked up from the plate he was scraping, suddenly aware that the question was not a trivial one. She was staring at him in a peculiar and intense manner, and he sensed trouble.

  “My lady…”

  “I wish you would not call me that. I asked you not to.”

  “And yet I must. You are my lord’s blood cousin.”

  “There are times when I wish it was not so.”

  “Ah, my lady, if we could spend wishes…”

  “Do not be wise with me, Tilian. Do you not like me?”

  “I admire you very much, my lady. Your beauty and your courage inspire us all.”

  “But do you like me?”

  “My lady …”

  She banged the table with her open hand, hard enough to make the crockery jump, and Tilian jumped with it. He could feel the pressure of her gaze.

  “I do,” he confessed. This was dangerous ground. It was a conversation that he did not want to have because he knew where it might lead.

  “Then why are you so cold to me? Why do you push me away?”

  “It is a matter of blood,” Tilian said.

  “What nonsense,” she snapped back. “I know that you want me, Tilian Henn, I see it in your eyes, and I want you, too. Where is the harm in it? If your lord’s librarian and his captain of guard are more than friends, where is the harm?” She reached across the table and put a hand on his arm, and for a moment he let it rest there, wishing it might be so, but the moment passed and he pulled his arm free of her grasp and stood.

  “You do not understand,” he said. He held up a hand to stop her interrupting. “No. Listen to me. I am the captain of my lord’s guard. I stand at his back and protect his life. I do his bidding. You are his heir. If I should fail and he should fall in battle what would other men say then? You would be lady of this estate. It would be yours, and I would be captain of your guard. If I shared your bed other men would say that I had killed my lord to possess what is his, and even I could not be sure that it was not so, that I had not in some way neglected my duty, hesitated when I should have acted.

  “Besides the matter of my honour, I believe that my lord himself has some interest in you, and I cannot set that aside.”

  “Have I no say in the matter? What if I prefer you to your lord?” She was angry, too.

  “Indeed you have, Lady Sara,” he replied. “But I have not.” He turned and left the room, walked back along the dark corridors to his own bed. He was angry at himself, angry at Sara, even angry at the lord Hebberd for bringing her here, for leaving him here to be with her alone. He could not deny what he felt for her, but he had believed that he could set it aside, knowing that it was not his place, and that she would probably not have him anyway. She had torn that illusion top to bottom, and now he was damned either way.

  21. A Plot

  Skal had found his way back to the Seventh Friend, to the tavern of that name. This time he had insisted on paying. After all, he was no longer a poor colonel, but had the modest resources of Latter Fetch at his back. He had taken a room there, ate his meals there, and went up the divine stair only on the rare occasions that he was summoned to the castle. He was happier with the arrangement which had the dual benefits of being both more comfortable and more convenient to his duties with the regiment.

  There were other advantages. The people here had not known him before his father’s fall from grace. To them he was the hero of the wall, a regimental commander, the victor of Henfray. He preferred that. He did not have to continually remember the ass he had once been.

  He was getting to know Arbak’s people. The Durander girl, Sheyani, played the pipes each night, and he had learne
d to appreciate her exquisite skill. The general had given him a copper disk, marked in strange Durander characters and told him that it would shield him from the pipes’ power, but he rarely wore it. He liked to lose himself in her music, to feel the warmth and softness of belonging, the carefree pleasure that she played, even if it was false, even if it was temporary.

  Bargil, too, was a familiar face. The tavern’s head doorman, ex-dragon guard, and the general’s minder treated him with respect, especially since Skal had asked the man if he thought Skal had got the stick out of his arse yet. Bargil had clearly remember the comment he’d passed to Tilian, and had the good grace to be embarrassed, which made Skal laugh. Laughing was apparently the right thing to do, because things were easy between them now.