by Ben Galley
Farden let his shoulders rise up, helpless. ‘Orders are orders.’
‘Only if you follow them,’ she smiled, a vacant sort of smile, sad, resigned, yet one that still curled in a way that was reminiscent of brighter days of wit and charm. Farden found himself smiling back, but it was then that he noticed a slight smudge of yellow on the angle of her jaw. Half a week old maybe. He reached out a hand to examine it, but she flinched away. The brat by her side coughed noisily.
‘I thought he had stopped coming to see you?’ Farden asked, ignoring Timeon. The boy was one big scowl. He spared a quick glance at him, and spied the faint shadow of a bruise on his pale wrist too.
Moirin made her excuses. ‘A banquet for one of his Fidlarig friends. He was drunk.’
Farden clenched his fist so hard that one of his knuckles clicked. Moirin moved her dark hair forward to hide the bruise. Farden had first met her a long time ago, a year or so before Timeon had been born. She had been a striking, sharp-tongued lady of Kiltyrin’s court, well-known for her activities during banquets, and after them too. In the first few years, when Farden had been invited to accompany the Duke to banquets with more than a dubious guestlist, he had often found her outside, roaming the gardens. They had spent the nights talking. Only talking. It had been all Farden could manage at the time. The thoughts of Cheska were still rawer than a battlefield. He had long suspected that his past inaction nettled her, but they had never spoken of it.
Now, however, Moirin was more like a rusty trophy than a wife, one that had been assumed gold, but found to be brass, and thus locked in an attic. Kiltyrin usually ordered her confined to the sanctuary in the eastern corner of the castle, kept out of sight, just as he liked her to be. That way she could be ignored, summoned when needed, and in the meantime keep Timeon out of the way until he was old enough to be interesting. The little brat might have been a boil on the cheek of Castle Tayn, but giving birth to him had been Moirin’s saving grace.
Farden looked at the stairs he had come down, as if contemplating going back up them, but instead he just grunted, and shrugged. ‘Drunk,’ was all he could say. Moirin pursed her lips, almost as if disappointed.
‘Gods, Farden, it’s not the first time in this world that a husband’s taken his hand to his wife,’ she said. And not the last, Farden inwardly hissed.
Timeon piped up again. ‘So, Four-Hand, what’s my father making you do now, hmm?’
‘None of your bloody business, Dukeling.’
Timeon went as red as his hair. ‘You can’t speak to me like that.’
Farden contemplated flicking him in the face, hard, just on the bridge of his nose where it would make his eyes water. The idea of the wailing wretch fleeing down the corridor almost made him smile. But he didn’t. He restrained himself, out of respect for Moirin. He prodded the boy in the chest instead. ‘You aren’t Duke yet, Timeon. ‘Til you are, I’ll speak to you how I please.’
‘One day…’ Timeon burbled. ‘One day you’ll… you’ll…’ but he lacked the cerebral wherewithal to finish his threat. This time, Farden did smile.
Moirin pointed her son up the corridor. ‘Timeon, go wait for me on the stairs.’
‘But…!’
‘Go!’
Timeon sullenly did as he was told and stalked off, stumbling for a moment over his own laces. Farden heard the faint hiss of a snigger from the guards behind him.
Moirin watched her son stamp across the floor. ‘He will be Duke one day.’
‘Now there’s a scary thought.’
There was a moment. Moirin leant a little closer. ‘So what has my husband got you doing this time?’
‘You know he’d beat you for asking me that. Better if I don’t say. Better if…’
‘…If I don’t know.’ Moirin nodded. ‘I understand. Just make sure you don’t get yourself killed doing my husband’s dirty work. Somebody might miss you,’ she sighed, and slowly turned to walk away. Her long velvet skirts made it look as if she were floating across the stone. Farden’s eyes followed her to the stairs. She didn’t turn back to look at him. Only Timeon looked back. He had the gall to flash a pair of fingers at the mage before his mother slapped him across the cheek. Farden grinned at that. Make hay while the sun shines, why not.
He heard more sniggering from behind him. The guards again, up to something. Farden turned around to find one of them busy humping the shaft of his spear, making his armour rattle, while the other was trying, and failing, not to laugh.
The sight of Farden marching towards them soon put a halt to their little joke. They tried their hardest to ignore the stony-faced mage as he walked up to them, lips tight, holding back the laughter. Farden brought his face within a hairsbreadth of the nearest guard’s face, so close their noses almost touched. Farden’s eyes flicked to the man’s spear. ‘How about we shove that thing up your arse, and see how funny you feel then?’ he growled. ‘Fancy that?’ The guard quickly shook his head, his laughter dead as a stone. ‘I thought not,’ Farden said, jerking his hand up to brush a stray bit of hair from his face. It made the guard flinch, and Farden walked away, chuckling.
Farden walked out into the twilight of the town and the timid stars. As his boots hammered the endless, knee-jarring steps that led down into Tayn, he found a little calm in the buzzing of the fattened insects and clatter of the town. Music spilled from the open windows of taverns. Alleys and streets murmured with hushed conversation. He passed a house, and heard somebody screaming, in the throes of passion by the sounds of it. Alittle idea blossomed in Farden’s mind then. He gnawed his lip at the thought of the nevermar in his pocket. No. It can wait for now. Perhaps he would make one quick stop before he left town.
When he took the next turning, so did the silent shadow lingering behind him.
1569 years ago
A Dagger.
Fast and blunt yet bright as sunlight, it slipped behind the tendons of his knee and deftly pulled the earth out from under him.
Korrin hit the sand with a crunch and a wheeze. He wasn’t surprised to find the same dull blade tickling his windpipe when he lifted his head to breathe. The scarlet-headed woman squeezing its handle threw him a contemptuous look and stood up. Exasperation glinted in the russet shards that were her eyes. She gazed down, lip curled, at the wan figure sprawled at her feet.
Korrin had rolled onto his stomach. He lay there like a beached whale, tasting sand. It tasted of disappointment. It tasted the same as the last time.
‘Again?’ brayed a nearby man, a giant of a figure, and even more so looking up from the sand. ‘Estina, I owe you a mug of valtik after all!’
‘Peasant,’ snorted Estina, from a little distance away. She had gone to fetch a white towel from a barrel by a door.
‘Hope for him yet,’ advised another voice, finding time to speak in between the sharp clack and clatter of spear shafts repeatedly colliding with a pole. ‘He was chosen, after all.’
‘Well, maybe the Smiths and the Pens made a mistake,’ asserted the woman, Estina, a thin switch of a warrior, topped by a shock of bright red hair.
‘Easy now,’ warned the huge man who had spoken first.
‘I’ll make the same wager I made with Balimuel, Gaspid. One more time.’
Gaspid shook his bald head. ‘I do not wager on the futures of other men.’
While the others debated his apparent uselessness, Korrin pushed himself wearily to his feet and sauntered to the edge of the tabletop of stone atop which the circular training grounds perched.
Barely a knuckle of brick sat between his feet and the shingled precipice. Even the ivy that embroidered its grouted edges seemed to cling on for dear and hallowed life. Korrin had often taunted that edge, late at night when he was given an hour, two at best, to sleep and to watch the wolves caper across the ice below. What was an hour of sleep in those days, when all it did was make the aching more obvious? The others didn’t sleep, so why should he?
Korrin put a bare, blistered foot on a brick he knew
to be trustworthy and looked down at the vista spread like a knobbled carpet below him; a carpet of white and brown, bronze and blue.
Scalussen was a dismembered town. Many who lived in the Frostsoar, its towering heart, claimed it was a city, but those clinging to its skirts snorted and said otherwise. It was more a collection of towns, villages, and the occasional fort, spread out roughly and randomly as if they had been thrown there in the wake of an ice-flood. But despite its jumbled nature, Scalussen was a jewel in the ice. The top of every building glinted with the morning frosts, as though the roofs had been scattered with diamonds. Blue, red, and yellow flags shivered atop poles. Seagulls, rimelings, and berghoppers flew in swarms of hundreds, all dancing and wheeling around the taller towers, skimming low over the river that snaked through the settlements. In the day it was a curving band of the deepest blue. Broken chunks of ice, flowing west, joined flotillas of sea-birds to speckle the smooth sapphire waters with spots of white and grey and black. On the pure white ice, lingering just a fraction to the north of Scalussen’s edge, tiny black dots covered the ice. Penguins, or waddlefoots as the locals called them, gathered in ranks of thousands. Korrin had yet to see them up close. He had heard stories that they were as tall as a man, with a beak so sharp they could punch through a foot of ice in one peck. Behind them, in the distance, where the ice rolled and cracked like foothills, mountains rose from its clutches. Black mountains forged of dark, jagged rock. Here and there, Korrin could see plumes of yellow and black smoke leaking from the earth. The Spine.
Korrin had never been this far north, where the blankets of permanent ice jostled shoulders with the rocky earth, and this wild, cold land fascinated the young lad. The animals of his father’s farm seemed drab in comparison to the strange creatures that called the ice fields home; patchwork whales with spears stuck in their noses; seals with horns and others with teeth like those of sabre-cats; white bears that vanished into thin air like mist on a sunny morn, rainbow-beaked birds; foxes as white as the snow they hid in; hares and rabbits the size of baby deer; and huge furry monsters that walked in never-ending lines, with curving tusks and trunks like snakes, beasts that the Scalussen called mammoths. And wolves. Always wolves. Korrin could hear them calling to each other at night, under the ethereal light of the Wake. Perched on the edge of his precipice, he would listen to their faraway songs and wonder at their meaning.
The beauty of it all was swiftly interrupted by a sharp slap on the cheek. Korrin whirled around, face stinging, to find Balimuel standing behind him, one knee forward and leaning on it, peering over the edge of the precipice. ‘What was that for?’ Korrin snapped.
‘To wake you up, lad.’
‘I was already awake…’
‘Really now? Doesn’t look like it. Staring off into space, getting turned on your arse every other second by Estina and the others. Piss-poor job, if you ask me.’
Korrin opened his mouth for a retort, but both his brain and his tongue failed to come up with anything.
Balimuel must have had giant blood in him. No man got that big by chance or training, and food made a man grow out, not up. Balimuel nudged ten foot on a bad day. His arms and legs were as thick as young oak trees, and his hands were so large he could have wrapped his fingers around a man’s thigh and still touched his fingertips. His head seemed to be one part face and two parts beard. A very dark brown, almost obsidian black, the big bushy thing rested lightly on his chest, the odd bit of sand and droplet of sweat hiding in it after the morning’s training. His eyes were a rain-cloud grey, like the hue of his fingernails, and that alone hinted at his unusual bloodline. He had fixed Korrin with those overcast eyes.
Korrin looked over to the seven others. Each of them was a whirling blur of blade or pole, and each of them frightened him intensely. He was nothing compared to them, these seasoned, trained, and deadly fighters from across the Scattered Kingdoms and beyond. Each of them had seen a war or two in their time, for war was easy to find in those years, and each of them had come out grinning and shining with blood. The only blood Korrin had ever spilt had been from the throats of his father’s mudpigs.
Ain’t no difference between a soldier and a fool, Korrin, and there ain’t no pride in either, said the voice that had plagued his thoughts since he had first set foot in Frostsoar tower. Korrin wiped the sand from his lip. ‘Estina’s right. They made a mistake with me, didn’t they?’
‘Did they now?’ mused Balimuel, in a voice as deep as a bear’s. He combed his beard with his hand, eyes still fixed on the young man slouched before him. ‘I saw you, you know, in training? Yes. Caught you in the corner of my eye. Hard to miss if you ask me. You were clenching your teeth so hard I thought they might crack. Beat me through most of the tests, did you know that? No, I don’t suppose you did. Never seen a boy nor man with so much grit in their face, and I’m not talking about this.’ Balimuel reached out and cuffed Korrin on the cheek again, where a streak of sand clung to the man’s skin. The blow was softer this time but still painful. Korrin flinched away.
‘Hey,’ he cried. ‘Stop it.’
‘Never seen a man with so much anger hiding under his skin. So much to prove.’ Another swipe, and this time it caught Korrin on the back of his head, waking up a number of old bruises. Korrin jumped out of Balimuel’s reach, but the giant stood up and stretched to his full height. His shadow enveloped Korrin as he took a step forward, hand raised to strike again.
‘Enough!’ yelled Korrin, but Balimuel did not halt. He swung again and Korrin ducked. The young man reached for a pole that had been left propped up against a wall, but Balimuel batted his hand away.
Korrin winced. ‘Leave off! What’s wrong with you?’
‘What’s wrong with me? What about you? Where’s that fire I saw in the tests, eh? Where’s the fire that brought you here, farmboy?’ Balimuel kicked out and caught Korrin in the shins. He was fast for a ten-foot tall man. Korrin hopped backwards. The others were watching now. Gaspid frowned, while Estina looked on with a mixture of sneer and grin pasted on her scarlet lips.
‘Where is it, lad? Show me!’ Balimuel grabbed the spare pole and began slapping Korrin on the thighs and forearms with it, sharp, stinging blows that went straight to the core of his tired muscles. Korrin managed to fend some of them off, his training doing some good, but he was running out of room. Balimuel was slowly trapping him in the corner of the training yard.
‘Have they made a mistake then?’
‘Leave me alone, Balimuel!’
‘Got the wrong farmboy, did we?’
Whack! The pole connected with his knee and Korrin half-fell to the ground. ‘Stop it!’
The pole poked him hard in the chest. Gaspid moved forward to interrupt the two men, but Balimuel waved him back. He knew what he was doing; he could see the first tinges of rage blossoming in Korrin’s cheeks and in the corners of his eyes.
‘Stop wasting our time, lad!’ he shouted.
Whack! This time to the side of the head. And this time Korrin snapped.
He bellowed something drowned in unexpected rage, a raw scream that made all eight of the others jump. Korrin snatched the pole from Balimuel’s giant paw and lunged at the man. Balimuel managed to fend him off for a few moments, strike after vicious strike glancing off his arms and ribs and thighs, until, very unexpectedly, the end of the pole snaked under his heel and Korrin yanked, hard. The giant toppled like an ancient oak and landed in a cloud of sand. There was a whisper of shock from the others. Not in ten weeks had any of them managed to fell the man. And here was Korrin, the farmboy, the supposed clerical error, beetroot-red and breathing heavy, brandishing a dusty pole inches from Balimuel’s left eye.
For some reason, the man was smiling. Korrin was shaking. ‘What is your problem, Balimuel?’ he gasped.
The man lifted up a hand, gently moving the pole to the side, and then lightly prodded Korrin in the centre of his chest. ‘There’s our number nine,’ he said.
A faint smile might have appe
ared on Korrin’s lips then, but it disappeared as quickly as it had ventured out. Instead, he threw the pole to the sand and tottered over to the edge of the training grounds, where he sat down and stared out at the ice and smoking mountains in the distance.
Gaspid stood beside Balimuel as the man got to his feet. He was still smiling. ‘I say, what was that about?’ he asked.
Balimuel wiped the dust from his rolled-up sleeves. He was sweating ever so slightly. ‘That boy’s got a fire in him. Just needed to let it out.’
‘So what? A lucky shot,’ said a woman. Her hair was short and cropped.
Balimuel sighed. ‘Did anyone see him during the testing? Gaspid? Estina? Rosiff? No? Well I did. Barely a scrap of muscle nor a season of battle in that lad and he beat most of us in half the tests. Beat us with his mind, he did. Roll your eyes all you want, Estina; I saw it. I’m glad the Pens did too.’
‘Doesn’t mean he can fight. He’s useless,’ muttered a tall man standing nearby, a wiry fellow from the east, with a beard like a dagger.
‘And how many times have you toppled me, Chast?’ challenged Balimuel, crossing his huge arms. The tall man didn’t reply. ‘Thought so. Ten weeks he’s kept at it, ten weeks he’s been thrown on his arse and had dust kicked in his face, and today’s the first day I’ve seen him waver. There’s a passion in him that you can’t train or buy. If it were up to me, I’d get rid of all of you and pick another eight just like him. He wants this more than any of us. Longs for it. Like a prisoner longs for the kiss of freedom.’
‘We don’t even know what this is yet,’ said Gaspid.
‘We’ll know soon enough,’ hummed the giant. ‘We all will.’
How wrong he was.
Chapter 6
“To say that the Grimsayer is a rather special book is as to say that the sea is somewhat wet. The eddas tell us that the book was once a ledger of names; names of dead dragons that had passed to the other side, recorded in way of remembrance. Started by the very first Siren, millennia ago, it held the names of dragons like a tearbook holds memories. But, as those few who have ever laid eyes on it will know, the Grimsayer doesn’t just hold the names of dragons, but of all sentient creatures since the dawn of time, and their faces too. Ask their names and the Grimsayer will show them to you. How? Legend suggests a few explanations. One, that it was a mistake. A miscalculation of a spell. The Grimsayer is a spell book, after all. Its keys are the names that are uttered to it. Another speaks of a goddess, her name and purpose forgotten, spilling her own blood on the book, infusing it with her power. Yet another suggests the book simply sprang into being. This last suggestion, of course, I hold to be utter rubbish.”