Bloody Rose

by Nicholas Eames

That caught him by surprise. “Really?”

  Tam shrugged. “Fable’s going to finish the last leg of their tour. They’ve got fights in every town between here and Highpool, and a contract in Diremarch after that.”

  “Diremarch? What’s the contract?”

  “I don’t know. But whatever it is, I’ll be a thousand miles away from the Brumal Horde.” She had no idea whether that was true or not. She wasn’t even sure where Diremarch was. Her father seemed halfway convinced, however, so she didn’t bother mentioning Rose’s warning: that whatever they were going up against might be just as dangerous as the Horde itself.

  For a while her father’s gaze remained fixed on the floor, roving the scatter of clay shards as though trying to decide whether or not he could piece them together again. As the silence stretched, Tam dared to hope she’d found the chink in the impenetrable armour of Tuck Hashford’s embittered cynicism.

  “No,” he said finally. “You’re not going.”

  “But—”

  “I don’t care,” he said leadenly. “Whatever you’re going to say, whatever reasons you think will justify leaving … None of them matter. Not to me. You don’t get a say in this, Tam. I’m sorry.”

  I should have listened to Bran, she thought. I should have left without saying good-bye. The fire inside her was waning, and Tam feared it would go out forever if she didn’t act now.

  She stood and set out for the door. Chips of clay crunched beneath her boots.

  “Tam …”

  “I’ll stay at the Cornerstone tonight.” She pulled her cloak off its peg.

  “Tam, sit down.”

  “We’re heading for the arena first thing in the morning,” she said, doing her best to keep the tremor from her voice, “and we start east the morning after. I doubt I’ll see you before then, so I guess this is …” She turned, and froze.

  Her father was standing, staring down at the object in his hands: the lute she’d left behind on the table. It looked small, so impossibly fragile, as though her dream of joining a band and following in her mother’s footsteps—of escaping this city, this house, this prison of sorrow and its grief-stricken jailor—were but a toy in the grasp of a malevolent child.

  “Dad …”

  He looked up. Their eyes met. In hers, a plea. In his, a black rage rising. Something—another apology, perhaps—died on his lips, and then her father took her lute by its neck and smashed her dream to splinters.

  Chapter Four

  The Wyld Heart

  Tam had a vague recollection of falling to her knees amidst the wreckage of her lute. Her father stood over her, his shadow thrown by lamplight in every direction. He was speaking, but she couldn’t make out the words over the shrill roar in her ears. She was hoisted to her feet and dragged down the hall to her room, where she collapsed on the bed like a prisoner granted rest between sessions of torture. She glared at his silhouette framed in the hallway’s dim light, and whispered (because she, too, was capable of monstrous cruelty), “I wish you had died instead of her.”

  His shadow slumped. “So do I,” he said, and shut the door between them.

  She cried for a while, great racking sobs that soaked her pillow, and once she screamed at the top of her lungs. Somewhere beyond her window a lonely trash imp echoed her cry.

  Shortly after, Tam could have sworn she heard the muffled sound of her father’s voice from his room on the other side of her wall. At times, when he was wildly drunk, he would rant at length, cursing himself and everyone he’d ever known. This was different. It sounded as though he was pleading with someone, arguing a lost cause against an intractable judge, and then he, too, fell to weeping, which wasn’t uncommon at all.

  Eventually, she slept.

  When Tam awoke, the door was ajar. Threnody was nestled in the crook of her chin; the cat’s tail tickled her nose, and when Tam dared to move the little jerk swatted her cheek. Dawn light filtered through the frosted pane of her window, painting the opposite wall in whorls of light and dark.

  Tam lay there for a time, wondering if she would ever escape this place. It wouldn’t be today. Her lute was destroyed, and she wasn’t about to ask Edwick if he happened to have another she could borrow. She couldn’t go to Fable empty-handed, and it wouldn’t matter anyway, since Tam doubted even Bloody Rose could (or would) stand in Tuck’s way when he came to take her back.

  Instead, she would work at the Cornerstone or at the mill with her father—it didn’t matter. She would squirrel away every coin she could spare until she had enough to get herself as far from Ardburg as possible.

  She could hear Tuck bustling around the house: chopping in the kitchen, scraping something raw on the washboard, sweeping splinters and shards off the kitchen floor. Soon she smelled bacon frying and gods-be-damned if her stomach didn’t demand she get up and eat. She clambered out of bed, got dressed, and padded out into the kitchen with the cat at her heels.

  She spent a confused moment taking in the scene: laundry—her laundry—hissing itself dry on the flat top of the woodstove, a rucksack half-packed by the door, her father kneeling before the hearth doing his best to manage two pans at once. He glanced over his shoulder when Threnody announced their arrival with a tentative meow.

  “Morning.”

  “What is this?” she asked.

  “This,” said Tuck, “is breakfast.” He set a slab of toasted bread on a plate and heaped it with twists of almost-burnt bacon. He topped that with diced tomato and altogether too many brown onions, then set it on the table. “Sit. Eat. Please,” he added, when she remained exactly where she was.

  She sat. She ate. Snakes on Fire had been her mother’s specialty, though she’d made it with considerably more finesse than this. Was it supposed to be a peace offering? Sorry I dashed your hopes and ruined your whole life, dear. Here’s the bottom half of a bacon sandwich …

  Her father vanished before she could ask him about it, or about the rucksack, or why he’d decided to wash her socks at the crack of dawn. Threnody nosed the door and whined until Tam let her out. When she turned back her father was standing across the table with a sealskin lute case in his hands.

  “Is that …”

  “Hiraeth. It belonged to your mother.”

  She knew that. Of course she knew that. Her mother once claimed that Hiraeth was her third favourite thing in the world, after Tam and Tuck. What about uncle Bran? she remembered asking, which had earned one of her mother’s musical laughs.

  I love Hiraeth more. But don’t tell him, okay?

  Her father laid the case on the table, unfastened its ivory toggles, and drew it open to reveal the weathered whitewood face of the instrument inside. Hiraeth was a thing of beauty. She was a hand longer than most other lutes, with polished bone tuning pegs and a shallow, heart-shaped bowl.

  Tuck cleared his throat. “I want you to have it. To take it with you. She would want that, I think.”

  And then everything fell into place. The breakfast, her laundry, the pack waiting by the door.

  She was leaving. He was letting her go.

  Tam practically flew across the kitchen. She slammed into her father and flung her arms around him. It was like hugging a great big oak, and when his arms encircled her she squeezed her eyes shut and loosed a breath she’d been holding for what felt like years. “Thank you,” she murmured. “Thank you. I’ll come visit whenever I can.”

  “No you won’t.”

  “I will. As soon as we finish this contract in Diremarch, I’ll ask—”

  “No,” he said. “Tam, you must never come back.”

  She backed off, bewildered. “What? What does that mean?”

  “It means I never want to see you again.”

  The words hit her like a smack. “Do you hate me so much?” she asked coldly.

  “Gods, no! Tam, I love you. I love you more than my life. But when your mother died … It hurt so bad it nearly killed me. It would have, if not for you.” He reached out and took her face in his hand
s. “When you smile, I can see her. When you laugh, I swear to the Summer Lord I can hear her, still. As long as you’re alive, Tam, then so is she. Can you understand that? I don’t want you to go, but I can’t keep you here. I know that now.”

  She took one of his big, scarred hands in hers. “Then why?” she asked. “Why can’t I come back?”

  “Because what if you don’t? What if you never do? If you leave, and … and you die, I … I couldn’t forgive myself. If never seeing you again means believing that you’re alive, that you’re out there somewhere, happy and free … then I can live with that. I’ll have to. But I can’t wait here wondering whether or not you’ll return, worrying if you’re gone too long that you’re … I can’t—” He stopped abruptly, choking on a sob. “Please, Tam. Don’t make me live like that. It has to be this way.”

  “So I just … go?” she asked. She wasn’t crying—not really—but she could feel tears spilling hot down her cheeks.

  “Go,” he said quietly. “Wherever your Wyld Heart leads you, go.”

  She ate the rest of her breakfast while Tuck folded her laundry and finished packing her bag. They talked all the while, but afterward she couldn’t remember a thing they’d said to one another. Eventually they ran out of words, and before Tam knew it she was standing with her pack over one shoulder and Hiraeth on the other.

  Threnody was outside when she opened the door. Tam scooped her up and buried her face in the cat’s soft fur. “You take good care of Dad,” she whispered. “Don’t fight with the other cats, and watch out for trash imps.” When her father wasn’t looking, Tam snatched the piece of ribbon he’d been toying with the night before and tied a pretty little bow around Thren’s neck.

  She’d have tarried longer, soaking up a few more precious moments with her father, but Rose had said they were heading out first thing in the morning and Tam feared she might already be too late.

  They embraced one last time. Tam clung to her father as if an abyss had opened up beneath her feet. It took all the courage she had to let go.

  She was ten feet from the door when Tuck abandoned his sentimental stoicism and began dispensing fatherly advice. “Stay dry,” he called to her. “And warm. And don’t start smoking, or scratching, or drinking.”

  “Dad!”

  “Okay, but don’t drink too much. And don’t sleep with anyone in the band!”

  That turned her around. “You’re joking, right?”

  He shrugged, and then tried on a smile that didn’t quite fit. “I’ll always love you, Tam.”

  “I know,” she said. Then she turned and ran without looking back.

  The Rebel’s Redoubt was still parked outside the Cornerstone when Tam arrived, short of breath, her shoulders chafed raw by leather straps. She doubled over, hands on her knees, and pressed a fist to her gut where a nasty cramp was settling in and hanging up art. She nearly yelped (okay, she did yelp) when the door to the argosy banged open.

  A man dressed in a pale pink blouse and voluminous yellow trousers stomped down the rear steps. He wore a silk scarf—the same garish yellow as his trousers—tied beneath his pointed beard, and a farcically large hat that looked to Tam like a tree stump stuffed with white fox-tails.

  He leaned against the wagon and watched her gasp for a while. He was holding a steaming teacup in one hand and a long-stemmed pipe in the other. After a few languid puffs he tipped the hat from his eyes and peered at her. “You must be the new bard. Tom, was it?”

  “Do I look like a Tom?”

  His eyes narrowed as he sucked the stem of his pipe again. “You people all look the same to me.”

  “What people?”

  “Bards,” he clarified. “Every one of you reeks of false confidence, blind optimism, and”—he sniffed the air—“is that bacon? Did you bring bacon with you? Because if that’s the case then you and I have started off on the wrong hoof entirely.”

  “I—”

  “Foot,” he said. “I meant foot.”

  Rose came strolling out of the Cornerstone with Freecloud behind her. She wore a plain white tunic tucked into a pair of black leather trousers so tight Tam nearly bit her tongue off to keep it from lolling out of her mouth. The merc tossed a stunted halfpipe between her lips and slapped around for a light until Freecloud struck a match and lit it for her. “Morning, Roderick. I see you’ve met the new bard.”

  “What happened to the old bard?”

  “Dead,” said Rose.

  “What?” Tam and Roderick voiced their surprise as one.

  “She’s kidding,” the druin assured them. “Kamaris took umbrage with our decision not to rush off and fight the Brumal Horde. He’s found a new band now. And we have Tam.”

  “Roderick’s our booker,” Rose explained to Tam. “Handler of contracts, wrangler of wranglers, arranger of lodgings, and lord of the Outlaw Nation.”

  “Also he bails us out of jail,” said Freecloud.

  Tam looked dubiously at Fable’s booker. “What’s the Outlaw Nation?”

  “You’ll meet them tomorrow,” Roderick said, and then hollered, “Brune! Cura! The wheels are a-rollin’! Get your asses out here!”

  Within moments Fable’s final two members emerged from the inn. Brune was sporting a black eye and a broad smile. “Morning, Tam. Rod, what’s brewing today?”

  The booker helped himself to a noisy sip from the teacup in his hand. “A bracing green leaf from Lindmoor. It’ll help with the hangover, but not the eye. Dare I ask how the other guy looks?”

  The shaman dipped his head toward Cura. “She looks fine to me,” he said, and hauled himself up the argosy steps.

  The Inkwitch, meanwhile, was engaged in a protracted good-bye kiss with a man wearing a flail on his hip and a dead fox draped across his shoulders. She tore her mouth free like a jackal lifting its gory maw from a fresh kill. When the man leaned in, Cura slapped him, kissed him again, then pushed him off and strode away without looking back. The man—a merc, Tam supposed—stood dazed. He touched two fingers to his lower lip and frowned when they came away bloody.

  Cura graced Tam with a wink as she passed, then plucked the teacup out of Roderick’s hands and climbed aboard.

  Rose took a final drag of her smoke before handing it off to Freecloud. “How long have we got to sleep?” she asked Roderick.

  “The Ravine’s an hour west of here. Call it two, accounting for traffic.”

  Freecloud sucked the dregs from Rose’s halfpipe before flinging it into the snow. “That’ll have to do, I suppose.”

  “Sleep?” Tam looked between the three of them, incredulous. “Didn’t you all just wake up?”

  Rose started up the argosy’s steps. “Wake up?” she called over her shoulder. “We never went to bed.”

  Chapter Five

  Necessary Vices

  Tam had been to the Ravine once before, about a year ago. She’d been seeing an older girl named Roxa, who swung an axe for a band called Skybreaker, and had tagged along (without Tuck’s knowledge, of course) when they auditioned for a big-time booker in search of new talent. A few hundred bystanders had been in attendance as Roxa and her bandmates dispatched a sleuth of underfed bugbears, but the booker had left unimpressed. So, too, had Tam. She’d heard tales of the great stadiums down south, like the Giant’s Cradle, the Blood Maze of Ut, and the recently constructed Megathon, which was said to hover on tidal engines above the city of Fivecourt. By comparison, the Ravine was little more than a glorified canyon.

  Her opinion changed the moment she stepped out of the argosy. Uncle Bran had told her once that the arena could hold up to fifty thousand souls, and she guessed it was over capacity today. Tam had never seen so many people in one place. The noise rolled and crashed between the steep canyon walls, which were riddled with cave mouths crowded with spectators. Higher up, daring Kaskar masons had hewn wide balconies of stone and timber that clung like fungal shelves to the sheer cliffs. Spanning the sky above those was a haphazard web of rope bridges and viewing platforms
teeming with people pressed shoulder to shoulder and shouting at the tops of their lungs.

  The mob surrounding the war wagon had been driven to frenzy by Fable’s arrival. Everywhere Tam looked were ecstatic faces and waving arms.

  “Stay with me, Tam.” Brune laid a hand on her shoulder as they stepped into the throng.

  “Is it always like this?” she yelled over the din.

  “Pretty much.” The shaman swiped his soiled hair aside and favoured her with his gap-toothed grin. “Welcome to the jungle.”

  The fights were already under way. Tam could hear the clang of metal on metal and see the occasional flash of spellcraft light the canyon walls. They skirted the sheer face of the northern bluff, escorted by two dozen men bearing cudgels and round wooden shields. Roderick was out front in that silly hat of his, strutting like a noble’s pet peacock. The booker led them into a tunnel that climbed and curved until it opened into an expansive (and expensively furnished) armoury with a commanding view of the Ravine.

  The place was bustling with bands, bookers, and bards. There was a bar near the entrance, and several games of cards or dice in session. Tam had expected to see mercenaries preparing for battle with focused calm, sharpening swords and polishing armour. Instead, she found a scene not unlike the Cornerstone commons on any given night. Fighters awaiting their turn in the arena were steeling their nerves with liquor, while those who’d fought already were celebrating in kind.

  There was a broad window overlooking the Ravine, beside which a ramp descended to the canyon floor. The band that had just finished fighting was slogging wearily up it. Their leader wore a red cape and a comically large tricorne hat. He was limping on a bloodied leg, but smiling and waving enthusiastically at the crowd. The moment he entered the armoury, however, he wheeled on the man behind him.

  “What the fuck was that? I told you to put those lizards to sleep!”

  “I tried!” said a harried-looking man in mud-drenched robes. He was holding a broken stick that might once have been a wand. “It’s the crowd, Daryn. They’re too loud!”