by Julia Knight
Something that felt like a hammer hit his hip, and he was pretty sure he screamed, and then Eder’s hot face was in his, spittle flying as he mouthed “Fucking guild, fucking guild” over and over. What was it with Vocho and lunatics? He seemed to attract them like jam attracts wasps. The gun butt came down again, knocking Vocho flat on his back, his bad leg twisting as he went. Eder stood slowly, propped himself against the door jamb, blood running from a cut lip that even now curled in distaste. He began to wind the gun again.
“I’m going to kill you,” he said as it clicked home. “And then I’m going to—”
A bullet took him in the cheek, splattering bone and blood and brains all over the door jamb behind him. The eye that was left briefly took on a surprised expression before it shut, and his body slid down, boneless and breathless, to crumple over Vocho. The gun fell barrel first into the snow.
“I’m pretty certain that puts paid to any promotion,” Carrola said behind him in a shaky voice. “I don’t think they like it when you kill your captain.”
She knelt next to Vocho and dropped the spent gun like it was hot. She looked sick to her stomach, much how Vocho felt.
“They may not,” he said at last. “I, however, am pretty damned glad.”
“Petri,” Kass shouted, “look at me. Me! Not his hands!”
She headed for him, even now unable to believe he wasn’t her Petri, that there wasn’t something of him left inside. A shot went off close behind her, and she turned. Vocho lay under Eder, blood over both of them, grappling for a gun.
A glance back at Petri. Something happening to him, something the magician was doing. Icicles glittered over his cheeks, bone and flesh. His breath came out in a burst of ice crystals that tinkled as they fell.
She stood, torn. Brother or one-time lover? Petri was turning to ice before her eyes, but Voch was turning to blood behind her. For once in her life a decision didn’t come easily. She wavered between the two, had just decided Vocho, no Petri, no definitely Vocho, when Eder’s face disappeared in a spray of blood and bone. Kass didn’t even stop to see who’d fired–Voch didn’t need her now, but Petri, and maybe everyone else in this valley, did.
She headed for him, calling his name, hoping he could break free, but a figure stood in her way. Scar. She towered over Kass, blood pouring from a cut along her arm, but she didn’t seem to let that bother her. A sword swung easily in the other hand as she settled into a low stance.
Morro murmured something which Kass didn’t catch but galvanised Scar into frantic action. She launched herself at Kass with a series of blows that she only barely parried, which numbed her arm, made pain shoot through her chest as the wound began to bleed again.
“You.” Scar circled, looking for another opening, but Kass kept her guard up, did her best to make sure there wasn’t one. “Petri would have been mine, would have followed me to victory, but for you. I loved him, but now I can’t trust him, and he’s going to die. Because of you.”
Kass didn’t bother with words of her own–there didn’t seem much point. Instead she feinted, tried to turn it into an attack but the movement dizzied her. Too long since food, since she had all her blood in her body. The feint was clumsy, the attack off point and left her wide open to the punch in the face she received. Everything whirled, white snow and black sky, and she was flat on her back, one hand reflexively holding her sword up to ward off any follow-up. She scrabbled to her feet, shook her head to lose the blood that leaked from her eyebrow and tried again.
Scar was quicker, had her blade scything around at head height as Kass regained her feet, making her slip as she dodged. The blade missed, but Scar didn’t stop, the blow flowing into another on the backstroke. The hilt of her sword caught Kass a stunning blow on her cheekbone as it passed. If Petri had been teaching them swordplay, he’d done far too good a job on Scar. Even so, on a good day Kass could have beaten her despite the other’s size, but this was very far from being a good day.
Kass staggered back out of Scar’s longer reach and tried to clear her head. Scar didn’t give her a second to breathe but came again, a series of crunching overhand blows that had Kass on her knees desperately looking for a gap to insert her knife into and not finding one.
“Petri,” she gasped out.
The sound of cracking ice and a wet sound followed by a thud stopped the pair of them in their tracks, and Kass risked a look.
Petri stood, bloodied sword in hand, looking confused and triumphant at the same time. The magician’s body seemed to take an age to fall at his feet, his precious blood arcing out of him.
Two heartbeats of utter stillness as everything changed. The snow stopped falling on the instant. The wind dropped to near enough nothing and lost its knife-edge. Clouds boiled away to reveal the moon.
Scar launched herself at Petri, Kass forgotten as she brought her blade around. Petri didn’t move, looked too stunned to care, but Scar never reached him. A fair-haired young woman appeared out of the shadows, a knife in hand. Scar roared at her to move, tried to bat her away, but the young woman sidestepped, was no longer there and thrust her knife into Scar’s back, dropping her like a lead weight.
Behind her, Kass heard Dom swear in surprise. She flicked a quick look Vocho’s way as he stood jerkily, Carrola under one shoulder to hold him up.
But Kass couldn’t keep her eyes from Petri for long. The icicles melted from his face, leaving him looking pale and ragged but calm. Calmer than she’d ever seen him. He turned a cold eye on her. It was Petri, as she’d known it had to be, but not him. She would never have found her Petri standing over a body, the blood still dripping from his sword. Her Petri would never have rounded on her, that same sword coming for her, a snarl on what was left of his lips.
She stood her ground, heart hammering and with her sword loose in her hand. She had to know if he had changed that much, if the man she’d once loved, maybe still did, was behind that ruined face. The sword came, and he was no slower than he’d been with his right hand, quicker than spit. The sword came so close that blood splashed her face, warm salty drops that seemed to shock Petri into pulling the blow at the last second. The sword tip hovered by one cheek, trembling.
“I didn’t mean for this,” Petri said at last, so quietly Kass only just heard it. The set of his shoulders, the way his hand moved on the hilt of his sword… there he was, the man she’d been in love with, still was. “I meant only to survive up here, with all the other outcasts. Find a bit of peace with myself.” He looked down at where Scar lay dead in the snow. “She didn’t mean for this either. She didn’t; none of us did. We just wanted to be allowed our little space to live. Only Morro, the magician…” A quick glance at the fair-haired young woman who’d felled Scar when Kass couldn’t, and it was Dom’s daughter, it had to be, looking so like her mother. Petri and Maitea shared a look, a brief smile. “We couldn’t do it again–live the life someone else chose for us.”
He turned back to Kass, the two parts of him at war. “I wanted to be strong, do you see? I was weak in the head. Always weak, and I wanted to be strong for once, and I was. Until he came, and they all fell under his sway and…”
He looked at her, a strange kind of pleading in his one eye, and dropped the sword. “It was only by hating you I could make myself strong enough, with enough rage to keep me warm up here, find the steel inside. But it was me who betrayed, me who failed and paid the price. Not you.”
“You were always strong,” she said. “You just never knew it.”
The realisation struck her that by saving him she would have ruined what little he had left of himself, would have made him see only his own weakness where she saw strength. He’d resisted a magician where the rest had not, had survived things which would have killed other men. She couldn’t save him–Dom was right–not if she loved him. But she could help him save himself.
“And a pretty trap we’re all in, even now,” Petri said. “Whatever I do, Bakar will want our heads. The Shrive or the gallows, tho
se are what my choices are reduced to now, but I’ll come quietly enough.”
“Unless the guild master makes your case. No gallows, no Shrive. Not for you, if I can help it. A chance, perhaps. But you have to save you.”
“I—”
She kissed him one last time on his ruined lips, a kiss to end all others, and she felt his hand at her waist one last time as he pulled her in. A long sweet kiss like those they’d shared when they’d been happy before it all turned to blood and dust, a last kiss to pay for all. Then she turned away and never once looked back. The Petri she knew was dead, but it hadn’t been her that killed him.
By the time Kass strode over to Vocho, the snow underfoot was starting to melt and Scar’s men and women were regaining their wits. Vocho rather fancied not being around when they were fully alert. He mopped at his twice-broken nose.
Kass spared what was left of Eder a glance that paled her ashen face even further, absently wiped away a trickle of blood from her eyebrow and cocked her head at her brother. “Glad to see you’re alive then.”
“Glad to be alive. Quite nice to see you too.”
But behind the banalities he could see it. She was his sister, after all, and he knew her better than anyone, could see how she tried not to shake, how her hands were determinedly still, her eyes dry as dust and her mouth pinched at the corners.
“Petri’s dead,” she said, and he nodded, knowing exactly what she meant. “And so is the Skull.”
She took a deep, shuddering breath and gazed up at the stars, hard and bright in a sky clear of snow clouds, through air that was becoming rapidly spring-like. When she looked back down it was Carrola she turned to, and a glance passed between them that baffled Vocho.
“Voch,” Kass said in a voice that sounded utterly unlike her, “I need you to do me a favour.”
“Could I at least get rid of the blood first? Maybe have something to eat? Get away from these nice people who might still want to kill us?”
Kass scanned around as though only just realising they were standing in the middle of a battleground. “Oh, I don’t think so. Not after what you’re going to tell them.”
He narrowed his eyes. “And what am I going to be saying?”
“You can start by saying that you’ll arrange a pardon for them all, provided no more thieving, no more killing. And that Bakar will let them have No Man’s Land. Imanol will have a fit, but he can go screw himself. You can tell him to think of it as a new trading opportunity. Maybe they can have a few of Kastroa’s upper pastures too–this valley’s not big enough, really. You tell them that, and that the guild will help get them going–livestock, seeds, that kind of thing. They can make this place their own. I think you’ll find they become quite friendly.”
“Maybe. But why am I going to be telling them?”
“Because I just quit, Voch. You’re guild master now.”
“Oh, hold on. You can’t do that! It’ll fall apart with me doing it–it almost did before! I mean, I’ll probably kill a couple of the more annoying masters within the week and, and, burn all the paperwork again and, and…” His brain dried up. “Carrola, tell her she can’t.”
Carrola’s frown was back, a thoughtful one. “I can’t tell her anything.”
“Voch, look at me,” Kass said. “You can. You can appoint someone else when you get back to Reyes if you want, but for now you’re in charge because I’m not coming back to Reyes.” Kass had that look, the one he knew all too well, the one that meant she was going to do it whether he liked it or not. “I’m leaving.”
He had one last try. “Please, Kass. Please. Reyes needs you.” Then an admission that didn’t come easily. “I need you.”
“No. It’s not the place for me. Not any more. And you don’t need me any more either. Vocho the Great, and not just in his own head this time. I’ll even pay a few bards to make up songs about you, if you like. How you risked your own life to let Carrola and the others escape. How you saved me from being shot in the back. You could be Vocho the Fabulous. You can be anything you like now, Voch. But I can’t go back.”
Vocho looked over at Petri, ready to hate the bastard, and saw him talking to his bald-headed giant friend, giving orders, making arrangements, before he crouched down by Scar’s body and gently covered her. Nothing left for Kass in Reyes, or here, or anywhere. Vocho was a selfish sod, and he knew it, but even he’d not go so far as to drag her back to nothing just because he wanted it, because he couldn’t live without what he got from Reyes. The adulation, the salutes, the comfort of being in streets he knew and loved. It was home, and where he belonged. His next words were the most painful of his life. “If you have to.”
“I have to.”
Funny, really. She annoyed the crap out of him at least half the time–he’d spent a major portion of his life alternately jealous of and competing with her–and here he was sniffling like a babe in arms. He was tired, that was all, and his leg hurt, and his nose was probably spread over half his face, ruining his dashing looks.
They sat for a while, truly brother and sister for one of only a very few times in their lives, until Kass stood up and wiped a hand across a suspiciously damp face.
“You don’t need me, Voch. But if you want me, then I’ll come running. I’ll never not do that. You know what and who you are; I… I have no idea, yet. The old me has cracked like an eggshell, and I don’t know who’s underneath, but she doesn’t belong in Reyes. Not any more. You can do this, Voch, if you try, but not with me there to pick you up when you fall. You have to do it on your own if you’re going to be any good. And you will be. Better, you’ll be great. Bet you a bull.”
And then she left him with nothing but a sad smile.
Petri crouched by Scar’s body, unsure how to feel. She’d taken him in, given him a reason to survive and then turned against him. He stood up and looked around. To one side Dom stood with his head bowed in front of something swathed in shadows–Maitea, Petri saw. Dom held her hands in his and their words were earnest and low, only for them. At last he dropped her hands, kissed her forehead and moved away into the darkness, and there were unashamed tears on his face and defeat in his shoulders.
Maitea stepped into the light, but it seemed even then that shadows were never far away.
“I thought you belonged to Morro in your head,” Petri said.
“He thought so too, more fool him.” She smiled, and Petri was struck again by how much she looked like her mother, but her father was in there too, in the shadows and secrets she walked with. “He wanted to train me. Scar said she freed me, but I earned my freedom a long time ago. Morro wanted to take that from me, make me a slave again, his slave, slave to the magic. I won’t go back to being told what my life will be.”
“But Dom… you said you hated him. Another lie?”
She grinned, more expression on her face than he’d ever seen, and looked more than ever like her father. “Yes and no. He was trying to help me, but then Scar came and… Morro wanted me to learn an important lesson in magic by keeping Dom here and twisting him to my own ends. My apprenticeship, in fact. An apprenticeship I never wanted.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
A glance over her shoulder to where Dom had disappeared, before she looked back up at him. “Because I want to stay.”
“You’re a magician.”
“I saved your life. Twice. I belong in the mountains. I’ve lived here all the life I can remember and I want to stay. Besides, you’re going to need my help.”
“Maybe,” he said at last because she was right. “But you keep your gloves on.”
She smiled again, and that was all her father, poised and secret, but Petri found he believed it nonetheless.
They stood for a time in the growing warmth, Petri savouring the feeling of having come home at last after a long and winding journey. Scar’s crew were now looking to him for orders, for direction, most looking lost and bewildered as Morro’s influence wore off. His crew now maybe, his family cert
ainly. Petri sent some off to check who’d lived through the night, others to look in all the huts. Kepa wandered up, shaking his head and muttering to himself.
“What now?” he said to Petri. “What do we do now? They’re going to know where we are, and without the magician there’s not enough of us against all the prelate’s men they’re bound to send. We got to run, I’m thinking, all of us. Find somewhere to hide.”
“Perhaps not.”
Vocho stood on the edge of the ring of questioning people, propped up on a bit of wood for a crutch, blood all over his face. One of the other hostages hovered near him, glaring at Petri as though daring him to try anything. She had a wound gun in her hand and the look of someone happy to use it, if she must. Cospel stood on his other side, but Kass wasn’t there. Petri got the feeling Kass was never going to be there again, and that twisted inside him but set him free at the same time.
Vocho limped forward, and the crew muttered and mumbled but no one said anything out loud.
“I’m not supposed to kill you,” Vocho said, “but frankly I’m quite tempted. You’ve made a total bugger-up of a perfectly good life–mine–not to mention put a few holes in me, which doesn’t incline me to be very well disposed towards you. And now I have to be bloody guild master and sort this mess out.”
“We could just kill him?” Kepa said hopefully.
“Appealing,” Petri said quietly, “but no.”
“Shame. He’s a right pain in the arse.”
Petri looked around at all the men and women looking to him, to see what he would say, what he would do. His little band of waifs and strays. Maybe there was more than one kind of strong in the head. He turned to face Vocho. “What did you have in mind?”
Chapter Twenty-nine
Two days later Kass pulled her horse to a stop as the sun rose over the mountains and tipped the hills below in gold. The snow had gone and, barring the rushing streams full of meltwater that crossed and recrossed the track, it was as if it had never been. Instead of knife-edged winds and the sharp taste of snow, now there was a balmy breeze from the south and the smell of green things waking up. The promised thaw, at last, to match what was happening inside her.