I had trouble imagining the haughty, condescending Countess Mariadne as a doe-eyed maid. “What happened?”
Erras chewed on his lip a while before answering. “A year after they got married, Arafas was attacked by Zhuban raiders on his way home. They strung him up from hooked wires set across two trees. Ritual murder it was. No reason for it. The Zhuban, well, I guess they just decided it was his destiny. My lady… when they brought her husband’s body, it was like all those sharp hooks we took from his flesh became embedded deep into her soul, still pulling at her long after we lay Arafas to rest.”
“Shoulda killed ’em all or else quit whinin’ about it,” Reichis muttered as he curled up on my lap. It’s not that squirrel cats aren’t sympathetic—I mean, they aren’t really—but mostly it’s that they don’t grieve for the dead the way humans do. That’s what Reichis says anyway.
Erras went on. “I didn’t think my lady would ever recover, but Tasia, she was like a lioness looking after a wounded cub. Never left her alone, never let her give up. Refused to heed anyone who tried to stop her, even the countess herself.”
Reichis gave a little grumbling growl. “Exactly. That’s how you do it. Fight for the livin’ not the dead.” The last part came out more a snore than anything else.
The old retainer’s mythologising of the maid raised an obvious question. “You think Tasia might have slept with Leonidas of her own accord—maybe to get him to leave Mariadne alone for a while?”
Erras scowled at the mere suggestion, but then the breath went out of him. “I’ve been asking myself that question since this whole mess started. But it doesn’t make sense. Does Leonidas strike you as the kind of man who would settle for a lady’s maid?”
No, I thought, not one bit. He seemed like he was after more than just Mariadne’s virtue. Leonidas struck me as an ambitious man, hungry for power. He was a soldier with a rising star, to be sure, but still a soldier. No great name, no wealthy household. A marriage to a widow like Mariadne, cousin to the queen, would open up a lot of doors for him. Sleeping with the maid was an embarrassment, and gave Mariadne an excuse to keep him at bay for a while. I couldn’t believe a military commander would make that big a tactical error. As much as I would’ve liked to pin everything on Leonidas, someone else had a hand in all of this. So had Mariadne pushed Tasia into pursuing Leonidas? Or had the maid done it herself to protect her employer, knowing it could end her own life?
23
The Jail
One glance at the lavish, indigo-peaked stone towers of the settlement of Urbana Sarrix was all it took to understand why it was the target of Zhuban raids. The town stood high atop a mountain ridge, a flower in the snow, begging to be plucked. As Daroman outposts went, it wasn’t especially big: three large keeps, like little castles, surrounded by a hundred smaller buildings. A population of two thousand souls split between the town proper and the smaller homes on the outskirts. The streets were flagstone, likely imported from the south to remind people that the queen’s roads extended from the capital to all parts of the empire. Flowering trees grew in pots along the main street, requiring constant care to survive the harsher northern climate—another insult to the Zhuban for whom enduring the rugged terrain of their lands was a matter of individual struggle.
“This was once a place of peace, if you can imagine it,” Mariadne said as she guided me down the avenue towards the marshals’ garrison.
Erras kept a polite distance behind us. Reichis didn’t care about etiquette and skittered around as he pleased, taking special care to piss on every statue and monument we encountered. The mid-morning sun was bright, though the air was chill, a nasty combination for my left eye so I kept my hat low on my brow. “I’m not sure the Zhuban got the joke,” I said.
“You don’t understand. Sarrix was built as a place for the Zhuban to visit, to wander our streets and receive food, supplies, even books without paying for them.”
“Get to know the Daroman way of life? Maybe start to see how they might benefit from assimilation?”
She smiled, just a bit, but enough for me to think that maybe she didn’t actually despise me any more. “Perhaps. But I prefer to think of it as a gentle place where two cultures could meet without hunger or thirst or fear of violence.”
Reichis snorted. “Well, I’m hungry and thirsty and I may get violent if I keep having to listen to this.”
“Shut up, Reichis.”
Mariadne looked at me and shook her head. “I still… No, leave it aside. You did us a great service yesterday, master card player.” Then she eyed Reichis. “And your… squirrel cat too. He is a fierce creature.”
“Got that right, lady,” Reichis said.
She leaned into me. It was an odd sensation that I found I liked. “Have I angered it?” she asked.
“‘Him’, not ‘it’. And no—he just growls when he’s boasting.”
She smiled and started to laugh before composing herself.
“What?” I asked.
“Oh, it’s nothing, really. Tasia sometimes claims I sound as if I’m barking when I become angry.”
The thought made me smile. My sense of self-preservation made me keep my mouth shut. That, and the fact that she was still walking very close to me. Her unassuming grace and elegance were intoxicating.
“Hey,” Reichis said, pulling at my trouser leg. “No making hump-hump with the stuck-up bitch, all right?”
“I wasn’t—”
“What?” Mariadne asked.
Reichis tapped his snout. “I can smell it, Kellen. I can also smell her, and she’s just playing you.”
“It’s nothing,” I said to the countess. “Just remembered I haven’t bathed the squirrel cat in a while.”
“Well, that will have to wait,” Mariadne said. “We’re here.” She pointed to a set of four nearly identical single-storey buildings, each made from the same dull grey stone. One for the barracks, one for the jail cells, one for the magistrate’s chambers, and one for the gallows. I’d travelled the length and breadth of the borderlands in the past couple of years and I swear every Daroman marshals’ garrison looks exactly the same, including the spiked iron fence surrounding the compound with the gate bearing their six-pointed star and the phrase “Trajedam necri sodastium frigida”. The trail never runs cold. The only difference I’d ever noticed was the number of marshals stationed there. This one had two: a big, senior marshal named Bracius, and her junior, named Fen. Unfortunately, both seemed to know the countess quite well.
Bracius came right up to the gate and held a meaty hand out in front of her. “I’m telling you right now, your ladyship,” she intoned, a surprisingly smooth contralto voice making her jowels flutter as if they were about to take flight, “under no circumstances are you going to meet with the prisoner again.”
Mariadne’s fury ignited instantly. “How dare you! How dare you hold that poor girl with intent to take her life, and refuse me the chance to give her what little comfort I may!”
“My lady, I’m going to ask you to take your hands off the bars and step back. You violated the law when you tried to break your maid out, and we’re not letting you in again for a second try.”
“The queen—”
“You’re the queen’s cousin. We know.”
Her partner, Fen, nodded. “You’ve certainly reminded us enough times,” he muttered, and wiped a dirty handkerchief across the oily surface of his pockmarked forehead.
Bracius gave the younger marshal a dirty look. “My lady, we know your rank and your relationship to Her Majesty. You should be glad we do, otherwise you’d have been arrested by now. The prisoner has rights, and one of those is to refuse visitation by anyone, no matter their rank.”
“Wait,” I said. “You’re telling me Tasia doesn’t want to see the countess?”
Marshal Bracius gave me a warning look as if I’d just brought a match to a mountain of dry tinder.
“It’s a lie!” Mariadne cried, slamming her palms against the bars. “Wh
y would Tasia refuse me?”
“You’ll have to take that up with the magistrate, your ladyship,” Bracius said, not unkindly.
“Garran?” Mariadne spat the name. “That fool won’t even let me see the writ of judgement against her. He just spouts on and on about the ineffable majesty of the law and how even the highest among us must accept…” The rest of that sentence died on her lips. She turned away and leaned into Erras, who embraced her sympathetically while giving me a look that made me feel as if this were all my fault. What is it about old people that makes them think that just because they’re willing to die for a cause, you should too?
I sighed. “Any reason why I can’t see the prisoner?” I asked Marshal Bracius.
She looked through the bars at me appraisingly. “Depends. Who the hell are you?”
I pulled the credentials the queen’s social secretary had given me out of my coat, and handed them to the marshal. She took the papers and rubbed the vellum between thumb and forefinger before reading them. When she was done, she gave a snort before passing them to Fen.
“The queen’s tutor at cards?” Fen asked. “Seriously? You teach Her Majesty to play card games?”
“It beat the only other means of employment they offered me.”
Bracius took the credentials from him and handed them to me through the gate before pulling out a set of iron keys and opening the lock. “Fine. Fen, check him for weapons and let him in.”
Fen stood back as the gate opened, eyeing Countess Mariadne warily and then looking down at Reichis, who was following me in. “That thing bite?” he asked.
“Yeah, but he ate a guy’s face yesterday, so he’s probably not hungry.”
Fen’s reaction made his partner snicker. Finally the junior marshal made a sour face and stepped aside. “Fine. You and your weasel’ve got an hour.”
“Does no one in this brain-dead country know what an actual weasel looks like?” Reichis chittered as he walked by him.
24
The Maiden of Cards
Tasia’s cell was as plain as a grey cloud on a dreary day—stone walls, iron bars set into the frame of a small window that was too high to provide any view of the town beyond an equally grey sky. A small sleeping pallet occupied one wall and a little wooden table with two chairs took up the rest of the floor space.
“Who are you?” the maid asked, once Fen had left us.
“Wait,” I said to her, holding up a hand.
Reichis sauntered over to the door and squeezed himself with some difficulty through the bars. I resisted the urge to comment on his weight. “It’s clear,” he said.
“Go check out the rest of the jail. Find out how many other prisoners are here and how well secured the place is.”
Reichis left and the maid looked at me quizzically. “Are you a mage? You don’t look Jan’Tep to me. Who are you?”
“No, I am, and Kellen, in that order.”
“May I ask why you’re here?”
I looked at this woman who was a few days from execution. Tasia was maybe a few of years older than me, taller too, with skin as pale as mine would be were I not tanned from two rough years on the road, most of them spent in deserts. She was pretty, though not as conventionally beautiful as her mistress. But she had an unassuming charm that was just as alluring.
Stop looking with your eyes, I imagined Ferius cajoling me. If you want to see what’s going on, look with everyone’s eyes but your own. It was the typical Argosi nonsense she traded in, but at this particular moment it made a lot of sense. How would Leonidas see her?
I didn’t know the major particularly well. I’d never been a soldier, I’d never been particularly big or strong. My ambitions had never been towards any kind of political advancement. See, Ferius? I thought bitterly. Another Argosi trick that doesn’t work.
Had she been there, no doubt she would’ve pulled out a smoking reed from her waistcoat, made a match appear from her shirtsleeve to light it with, let out a long puff of smoke and said, Kid, if you’re just gonna stand there tellin’ yourself tall tales, surely you can come up with fancier ones than that?
She’d’ve been right too.
I may never have been in the military or aspired to any kind of courtly position, but I knew what it was to want things. To want power. To want people. Had I never lost my magic—more importantly, had I never met Ferius and Reichis—I’d’ve turned out just like the rest of my fellow initiates back in the Jan’Tep territories. I’d’ve become my father’s son.
Appealing enough, I could hear Ke’heops saying, as if he were standing right there beside me. The shape is reasonably trim and womanly. The face doesn’t turn the eye away. Worthy of an evening’s entertainment, though not much beyond that, and only for a young man seeking distraction, nothing more.
The way Ke’heops would have viewed Tasia was foul. Clinical. Unfeeling. Yet I was almost positive he’d be right in at least one sense: a man like Leonidas, so carefully cultivating his future, wouldn’t risk his ambitions on her. Not if it meant jeopardising his chances with Mariadne.
“Seen enough?” Tasia asked, crossing her arms.
“Sorry,” I said. “Occupational hazard.”
“And what is your occupation?”
“Mostly people try to kill me,” I said, pointing at the shadowblack mark on my left eye. “When they fail, I take their money.”
“How noble,” she said, her tone reminding me of Mariadne. For a second I could see the spark Erras had alluded to back at the inn.
“Beats prison,” I replied.
She stuck her tongue out at me, which caught me off guard and made me laugh. “Is that how you greet all your visitors?” I asked.
“I’ve discovered that a death sentence can be somewhat liberating for someone who’s spent their life curtsying.” There was an edge to her voice—like the first stirrings of one of Reichis’s warning snarls—before she shook her head. “Forgive me. My manners quite escape me. Why exactly are you here, Master Kellen?”
“Mister Kellen,” I said, since Reichis wasn’t there to complain. “Or just Kellen. I’m the queen’s new tutor.”
“How is Her Majesty?” Tasia asked. Her voice carried more concern than I would’ve thought a condemned maid would have about her monarch.
“You know the queen?”
“She came often to my lady’s home when she was younger. I cared for her during her visits. The last I saw her was a few months ago.”
“Her Majesty’s fine,” I said. “Though a bit low on tutoring these days.”
The maid’s eyes flared. “Koresh and Arrasia…?”
“Took a leave of absence. From life.”
She nodded and the smile that passed over her face definitely reminded me of Reichis. “Long overdue.”
“Karanetta’s still there.”
Tasia snorted. “Karanetta.”
“Seemed nice enough to me.”
“She’s an ignorant cow. That snivelling craven. She let them—she let Koresh and Arrasia—do those awful things! To the queen! To a little girl trapped in a stupid, stupid world!”
“What was she supposed to do?”
Tasia came to her feet and got in my face. “Take a knife and slit their damned throats. Take them in their sleep. Take them when they were having a bath, or when one of them was sick and couldn’t defend themselves. Find the opportunity and end them! She’s the damned queen of Darome. Someone should have killed them for her.”
I was surprised by the vehemence of her reaction. She took in a deep breath and let it out again before sitting back down. “And yet,” I said, thinking back to Shalla’s reference to the queen’s having a weakness that could be exploited, “no one did.”
Tasia shook her head. “Oh, we are a proud and honourable people, we of Darome. Far too noble to ever do the hard thing when it needs to be done.”
“Is that what you tried to do with Leonidas?” I asked. “Do the hard thing and end him?”
Her eyes were suddenly as
unyielding as the iron bars of the cell.
“Were you protecting Mariadne?” I asked.
Her expression was flat. Not even a trace of anger or fear.
“Were you protecting yourself? Did he attack you?”
“Why are you here?” Tasia demanded.
“The queen sent me.”
“I don’t believe you. The queen would never do anything so foolish.”
“Why wouldn’t she?” I asked. “And why won’t you allow Countess Mariadne to visit you?”
“Both questions have the same answer.”
Her eyes glared back at me with the same unyielding grey resistance as the walls of her cell. She wasn’t going to reveal anything to me, not yet. Pushing her further would get me nowhere, and I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of asking a second time.
Tasia’s expression changed, just a little as she watched me. “Not without wits then,” she said finally.
Our staring contest came to an end when Reichis squeezed back in through the bars. “No other prisoners. Security’s tight though. We aren’t breaking in or out of here without a lot of help.”
I nodded.
“Does your felidus arborica really talk to you, Master Kellen?” Tasia asked.
“Mister,” I said. “Just Mist—”
She cut me off. “Do you correct people every time they make that mistake, Mister Kellen? And if so, has anyone taken the time to inform you of just how annoying it is?”
Reichis started chortling so hard he fell back on his rump.
“Is he all right? He seems to be having some kind of seizure,” Tasia asked.
“He’s fine. Probably just has worms again.”
“Oh, I doubt that. He seems a handsome and well-groomed little warrior to me.” Tasia sat down on one of the two chairs before reaching out a hand towards Reichis, who got up and sauntered over to sniff her.
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