by Joseph Lallo
The boys stood there, white-faced, dirty, eyes downcast, not looking at one another, especially not looking at him.
“What the fuck did you think you were doing?” Carro yelled, replaying in his mind how the Tutors yelled at him, and trying to copy. “We were to stay together at all times. Isn’t that one of the things we learn?”
“We can’t fight when it comes to icefire,” Inran said, his eyes on the floor. “It’s not a fair fight.”
“No fight is fair!” Carro grabbed Inran’s collar. Just as well he’d learned so much from watching the Tutor. “I can’t remember fights being fair when I was at the receiving end of them. Did I run? No! Look at you lot. You decide to run off—by yourself. Deserting. Do you know what the punishment is for desertion?”
“There were two blue ghosts.” Inran’s lip was trembling.
“There were—what?” Spit flew from Carro’s mouth.
Inran cowered back. “There were two blue ghosts. I was scared. I thought you’d seen them, too.”
“Thought? You thought? Apprentices never think anything. You are not here to do any thinking. Your stupidity nearly got me killed. Is that what you wanted? Do you know who appointed me in this position?” Carro had to stop yelling to catch his breath.
Inran shook his head, blinking. He was one of the boys who used to egg on Jono and Caman when they teased Carro in the dormitory, but he didn’t look so brave now.
* * *
Isandor looks up at him with those strong, blue eyes.
All you need to do, Carro, is tell him you won’t do it. You have been accepted into the Knights and you will have your own income. Your father can no longer demand that you do things for him if he’s not paying for your upkeep.
It’s easy for you to say. You don’t have a father. That was a very nasty remark, Carro.
Isandor fell into a moment of silence.
Try it. Tell him you’re busy. What can he do?
Give me a beating.
Isandor shakes his head, and Carro notices how fuzzy his friend’s chin is becoming.
Carro, you’re sixteen. Your father won’t beat you. He’s an old man and you are stronger than he. He’s afraid of you.
* * *
They should be afraid of me.
Carro let Inran go and paced back to the middle of the room, then whirled to face the boys. Inran stared at him with wide eyes. Jono and Caman were quiet enough, but looked absent-minded. They hadn’t even listened to what he had said.
“What are you staring at? Get your rotten arses out of here.”
The boys saluted and made for the door. Jono and Caman glanced at each other, and Jono smiled, a smile that said, We haven’t been punished. Rider Cornatan would think had he been too soft. Not fit to command a patrol. These Apprentices should be so scared of him they wet their pants.
“Apprentice.” Carro made the utmost attempt to let his voice sound harsh. How did Rider Cornatan achieve that?
The boys stopped in the doorway, Caman furthest into the corridor.
Carro had not forgotten Jono’s taunts. The boys hated him all right; they had hated him from the moment he’d joined. They’d never hated Isandor, because Isandor wasn’t special in the same way he was. Isandor was never any competition in the eyes of those pampered noble boys. That’s why they hated him, because his presence threatened them. Then you must hate them back. Rider Cornatan’s words.
Carro joined the two at the door and paced around them, slowly and deliberately.
“Do you need to be taught a lesson?”
Meet violence with violence. Payback time.
“You.” He pulled Jono’s uniform by the neck. Why had he never noticed that he had grown taller than the bully?
“Hey! You can’t do that!” Jono squealed.
“Yes, I can. I’m your superior, like it or not, and you will respect me and obey my orders.”
“I was obeying—”
“You were not.”
Jono gasped a few words, trying to prise his fingers between his neck and the collar that cut into the skin. His eyes went wide.
* * *
A hand comes into Carro’s field of vision, a hand filled with snow. The next moment, the snow hits his face, and the hand rubs it into his stinging cheeks.
Carro screams.
Someone is sitting on his back, knees painfully pressing into his spine.
Stop it, stop it!
His mouth fills up with snow. Carro spits.
Someone pulls his hair.
Listen to me, you worthless runt, a boy hisses in his ear. Any time we meet you again, we will repeat this. Understood?
Carro nods. A cold lump of snow slides down his back between his clothes and his bare skin.
Understood? the boy says again, but louder.
Carro nods again.
The boy fumbles for the back of Carro’s trousers, lifts the waistband and shoves in the handful of snow.
The other boys are laughing.
* * *
Carro hated them, he hated Isandor, he hated everyone. No one ever respected him. No one. Even Isandor, a cripple, treated him like a weakling, like someone who needed help. He didn’t need help. He could punish these boys just as well as everyone else had always punished him.
He tightened his grip on Jono’s hair and slammed him face-first into the wall. Jono whimpered. His arm trembled under Carro’s touch. Yes, yes, this was how it was done. They had to fear him, or they would run circles around him. They would laugh at him behind his back.
He ordered the other two, “Hold him.”
They did as told and each grabbed an arm. Very quiet and obedient all of a sudden. Oh, they knew what was going to happen. They knew, and they didn’t want it to happen to them.
Slowly and deliberately, Carro undid Jono’s’s belt and let his pants whisper to the floor. His buttocks were scrawny and hairy, with a few angry red pimples. Goosebumps broke out all over his skin.
Carro squirmed and forced himself to think of Korinne—he repeated her name in his mind, saw her golden locks, her alluring eyes.
Come on boy, what are you waiting for?
She laughed, and her image faded. When he wanted the visions, he couldn’t hold on to them. His cock was at best half-limp. Panic gripped cold fingers around his heart. Now he started this, he had to go through with it; this was how junior Knights were punished. He could of course use the belt to hit Jono, but that would be considered a backdown. His . . . ability would be questioned. Carro the dud, he could just hear it. He had to do it, he had to, he had to . . .
Inran and Caman watched him, their gazes hollow. They’d seen it before. They’d switched off in the same way they had when Carro was receiving this punishment.
They knew what was required.
Carro felt sick. Felt himself standing in the dormitory enduring the humiliation with clenched teeth. Oh, by the skylights! He had to do this properly. Rider Cornatan wanted it. You must hate them back. Hate, hate, hate . . .
Carro undid his own belt and clumsily pressed against Jono’s backside. The skin was clammy with sweat. Carro remembered, felt the pain, his face pressed against the plaster of the wall. He ran his hands down Jono’s sides in a mockery of a loving gesture, breathed hot on Jono’s naked shoulder, and he grew hard. Jono squirmed away, but his fellows held him tight, white-knuckled fingers biting into purpling flesh, pushing him hard into the wall. Carro rammed in.
Jono screamed, his voice muffled into the wall.
“That hurts, doesn’t it?” he whispered into Jono’s neck. “You know what? It doesn’t hurt for me. I never knew that.”
He pushed harder. He was rock-hard now and should get this over with while it lasted, before he went limp and embarrassed himself.
“Ow! Stop. It hurts.”
Carro grabbed Jono’s hair from behind, arching his neck as far as it went. “Too right it fucking hurts. It’s meant to hurt. You hurt me. Ma
ny times. The tables are turned.”
Carro saw nothing, heard nothing. This was what he wanted to do to his father, his mother, to his sister, to the bullies in the streets. He was fighting, hitting them all back for pain they had caused him, slamming them into that wall. Carro won the fight, spilled himself with a triumphant roar. The feeling of ultimate power.
Carro withdrew, blood roaring in his ears. Jono was crying, and Carro tried to cut himself off from the sound. By the skylights, be a man! Even I didn’t behave like this when you did this to me.
But there was blood in his crotch.
Carro ignored it, did up his belt and maintained a stiff and angry pose while the boys scampered from the room. When they were gone, he slumped against the wall.
The sound of Jono’s cries would not leave him, and that feeling of power, and his unexpected lust. He kept seeing Korinne’s face, and the image of Farey’s eyes, the two Knights kissing in Rider Cornatan’s bathroom . . .
His nails bit into the skin of his palms. Tears burned into his eyes. Who was he and what gave him the right to do things like this?
* * *
He didn’t know how long he had been standing there when there were footsteps behind him. He whirled around to see Rider Cornatan coming into the room. The Supreme Rider said nothing, but approached Carro with quick steps.
“You’re back.” Carro heard a measure of relief in his voice.
Rider Cornatan’s face looked relieved, too, more relieved than a leader should be over the fate of a single young man.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He’d lost his quarry, then he’d found the invisible man, but had fled from him. And the other Imperfect, the older man, was still at large. He hadn’t achieved anything, except that he’d punished his patrol as Rider Cornatan wanted.
Rider Cornatan shook his head. “This is bigger than you. Bigger than all of us, I’m afraid.”
“Is that what’s going on? What those riots are about?”
“The whole of the Outer City is in uproar over the young Champion’s dismissal. They see him as their champion. There are a lot of troublemakers on the streets out for a fight. They seem to have support from locals.”
The black pit in Carro’s stomach grew. “Just like when the uprising against the king started,” he whispered.
Rider Cornatan stared in the distance. He nodded, once.
“We must stop this,” Carro said.
“I don’t know that we can.”
Rider Cornatan met his eyes. Carro could guess what would happen next. As only Knight from the Outer City, he would have to be involved in calming the people down. Except he could never do that. Didn’t Rider Cornatan know that Carro wasn’t exactly popular with many in the Outer City?
“I have an important mission for you.”
See? There it was. Rider Cornatan was expecting far too much of him. And he was going to fail.
* * *
Carro sits at the desk in the warehouse. His father is pacing the floor.
You, boy, when you’re here, you’re nothing but the lowest-ranking of my workers. You do not chat to the customers, or to other workers.
Carro nods and looks down to the columns in the book. For the last two pages, his handwriting has been atrocious, but his fingers are too cold to write properly. He wasn’t chatting to anyone; he was only accepting a warm drink from the girl in the office, who had felt sorry for him.
* * *
“Are you all right, boy?”
Carro shook the memory out of his head. By the skylights, he still hadn’t been able to get the ichina.
“I’m fine.”
Rider Cornatan frowned.
“Really, I’m fine.” Even to his own ears, he sounded nervous. “Tell me what you want me to do.” He might as well face the disaster head-on.
“I’m going to send you out of the city.”
“Sir?” That was the last thing Carro expected to hear.
Rider Cornatan looked away, almost as if he couldn’t bear to meet Carro’s eyes. The black feeling increased.
“The trouble started in the Outer City because we took the champion in custody for having lied about his condition. He used his evil power and escaped. At the same time, in a different part of the city, someone killed the Queen’s driver and her bears and destroyed her sled. When a new one arrived, Jevaithi and her escort were caught up in a riot. In amongst the fighting, we lost her. We’ve found no trace of the champion or the Queen. But someone freed the champion’s eagle. It took off for the mountains. We suspect that he released it himself, and that he’s with the Queen.”
Isandor with Jevaithi? Yet Carro had seen that look passing between them and he knew it to be true.
“I’m sending you with the hunters to go and find her. Understand that it’s a vital mission. If we can’t produce the Queen, the people of the City of Glass are going to turn against us.” He lowered his voice. “Unless we can find the Queen, the Knights will be slaughtered. The Brotherhood has become too strong, and understand icefire much better than we do. We must have the Queen, Carro.”
A vital mission all right, but why would Rider Cornatan send him with vastly more experienced hunters?
“Maybe you ask why I entrust you with such an important mission.”
“Yes, I’m not experienced enough—”
Rider Cornatan drew something from his pocket and he gave it to Carro: a bundle of velvet, heavy in his hand. “It is because I trust you like no other.”
“Sir, what. . . ?”
“Open it.”
Carro folded the material back.
Inside lay a golden medallion, with worked scalloped edges and patterns stamped into the flat surface. A finely-made gold chain hung from the eyelet at the top.
“Do you recognise this, boy?”
Carro ran his finger over the surface, depicting a Tusked Lion rearing on its hind flippers. He had seen this in his books. He swallowed. “Isn’t this . . . the crest of the Pirosian House?”
A smile curled one corner of Rider Cornatan’s mouth. “Very good. The crest of the Pirosian House indeed. You might have read, too, that there are only two of these medallions.”
Rider Cornatan took the medallion from the velvet, unfastened the clip on the chain. He looped both sides around Carro’s neck. He re-fastened the clip, and arranged the medallion on Carro’s chest, a satisfied look on his face. Carro held his breath, but still smelled the waft of musk and harness oil that hung in the Supreme Rider’s clothing.
“Only two. One of these medallions belongs to the male heir of Pirosians, the other, my son, belongs to his successor.”
His heart thudding, Carro looked up, into the wrinkled face. “You’re . . .” He hardly dare say it. “You’re my father? My real father?”
The smile grew.
“But why . . .” All that hostility, all those sniping remarks, the cryptic questions, the nastiness. The man he’d known as his father had been paid to look after him. Just like he knew Senior Knights would deal with their successors.
“Why have you grow up in the Outer City, with a man hardly worth his spit and a woman who would have been better off a whore?”
Carro flinched, felt a brief urge to defend the man and woman he’d known as his parents, but then a feeling of rightness descended on him. He had never fitted in. His father had always hated him. His mother, too. He’d looked too different from his sister to believe they were related. He’d just assumed that his father had used different breeder for him and his sister, but now . . .
“I’ve not shared my rooms with a woman; that is not possible for me since Riders have sworn off such pleasures. But as Pirosian heir, I needed a successor. So I paid a young virgin of the purest Pirosian blood to give me one, for good money, and then hid you in a place I knew my enemies would not look and would not recognise you. The Thillei are more slippery than you think.”
Yes, they were, Carro realised. The Thillei had tri
ed to subvert him by letting Isandor befriend him. How could he have been so blind?
He clutched the medallion in a white-knuckled hand. He’d been stupid, stupid. “I won’t let you down. I’ll find our Queen.”
Rider Cornatan’s face hardened. “Listen, son. I’ll tell you another secret. Jevaithi isn’t our Queen. When the Thillei emperor was deposed, the people didn’t want another dictator, so the Pirosian clan offered our female heir, since it was agreed that we should only have queens.”
“Does that mean you are Jevaithi’s father?” I am royalty?
“No, and that is where the problem lies. But we need to go further back than that. After the people had ousted the old king and instated the Pirosian queen, the Thilleians were desperate to recapture the throne. First, an agent infiltrated the palace and raped our queen. She fell pregnant, but the palace midwives managed to safely get rid of the child before it was born.”
A visible shudder passed over him. “That was probably just as well. The child was . . . not normal.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you heard of the legend of the crossbreed? The children of the purest Pirosians and the purest Thilleians?”
Carro did remember from the books. Old prints showed demon-like figures with claws and wings. He nodded. “But I thought those were all stories.”
“Some of it no doubt is untrue, but when we have the time, I will show you a sample preserved in a jar in the palace birthing room. It’s not just any sample, but this very child, as big as your hand, but already showing its animal nature. Old measuring equipment showed that the creature—I won’t use the term baby to describe it—attracted an inordinate amount of icefire. It even used the evil power to change its appearance into shapes too horrible to contemplate, before it had left its mother’s body.”
“The child was alive?”
Rider Cornatan nodded, once, pressing his lips together. “When the healers took it from the poor queen’s womb, yes. It took five people to kill it.”
Carro felt sick.
“Anyway, after that disaster, the Queen was shaken of course. We chose one of us to father the queen’s child as soon as she recovered. It was done, and she gave birth to a healthy girl. However, we had never caught the Thilleian agent who was the father of the abomination. Soon after the birth of our princess, he, or someone else, came back and took the newborn baby, replacing her with another of the same age, who looked exactly like her, but grew up nothing like the Queen. You do know that Maraithe’s mother killed herself?”