The Traitor's Heir

by Anna Thayer

  “What do you seek?” Belaal’s words seemed both grossly loud and horribly intimate in his ear; the sensation disquieted him.

  “Service with the Gauntlet, captain.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw Ladomer smiling. He tried to latch on to his face for encouragement, but it slipped away from him.

  “And what is your pledge?”

  “I-I, Eamon Goodman, d-do hereby pledge my allegiance to the M-Master.” A series of paralysing chills ran down his spine. He pressed his quaking lips together.

  Had he not long dreamt of this? But something seemed wrong. “My blood, my blade, and my body are all given in his service.”

  “And do you swear this most solemnly to the Master, such an oath as may not be broken?” Belaal continued.

  Looking up, Eamon frowned. The words that he had so long sought to say – that he had fought and bled to say – stuck in his throat. What was the matter with him?

  He took a deep, shuddering breath to force down his strange misgivings. Surely it was simply a surfeit of emotion? “I do swear it.”

  “Then receive the mark of your allegiance,” the captain intoned. So saying he brought forward the staff, inclining the gilded pommel towards Eamon.

  As it came closer Eamon saw that an eagle was marked upon it. Its wings were spread wide and its head bowed down as it devoured a serpent. It was the mark of the Master; it was the mark Eamon would take as his own.

  Eamon watched the staff hanging in the air before him and slowly reached out towards it. The crown stitched on his jacket felt heavy on him; the emblem of the Gauntlet seemed then like an empty cage.

  He faltered. The eagle stared back at him, beckoning him to touch it; but something in his very soul railed against it.

  To serve in the Gauntlet was to protect the River Realm and its people. That had been his desire since his earliest childhood. He had always wanted this; why should a moment undo him?

  He mastered himself. “I swear,” he said, and laid his bare hand over the eagle.

  Suddenly the metal became hot and seared his skin. Eamon gasped in alarm and wanted to cry out, but something greater thralled him to silence. He felt something – unknown, but swift and terrible – flowing into his throbbing veins; his whole blood seemed on fire with its consuming poison. What was happening to him?

  Though he strained to tear his hand away he found that he could not move; yet to all outward eyes he would appear a feeling man sensing a moment of deep devotion to the Master.

  Suddenly the pommel was shorn from his hand. Eamon nearly recoiled but Belaal laid a firm hand on his shoulder, holding him immobile as if by some other will. The captain smiled as First Lieutenant Ellis set the pin at Eamon’s throat.

  “Thus are you sworn,” Belaal said. “Rise, Ensign Eamon Goodman; you belong to the Master.”

  Belaal removed his hand, and strength returned to Eamon’s limbs. Quickly he got to his feet and stared at the captain. His eyes felt dry and sore, yet he thought that he could see too sharply; things seemed unnaturally bright. He looked across at Ladomer, but his friend smiled – a broad, encompassing smile that showed no knowledge of what had happened.

  What had happened?

  Slowly, uncertain and driven by Belaal’s gaze, he saluted and turned to leave the platform. As he passed the next cadet who was to kneel he almost reached out to stop him, but the cry of his heart was not matched by the will of his limbs. He simply kept on walking to join the line of new ensigns.

  During the following hour he stood and watched young men that he had trained with kneel and touch the pommel. Outwardly he rejoiced – but inwardly he writhed.

  When at last the ceremony was over he endured the congratulations of the townsfolk as long as could be deemed reasonably polite. Though he searched the crowd for Aeryn, he did not find her, and Ladomer, evidently having business to attend to, was nowhere to be seen. Not knowing what else he could do, he left as soon as he was able.

  Night was beginning to fall when he found himself beyond the college walls. Sounds of merriment emanated from taverns filled to the brim with new ensigns drinking to their achievement.

  It seemed an alien celebration to Eamon; his hand ached still, his veins throbbed, and the pin at his collar seemed like a hangman’s noose about his neck.

  He had joined the Gauntlet. He should have been rejoicing, but his heart was empty. And still his palm burned.

  Angrily he stopped under a lantern and stared at his right hand. It was difficult to see in the swinging light but as his eyes adjusted his palm came gradually into focus. Suddenly he staggered, sick to the stomach.

  It was faint, and perhaps no man apart from him would ever be able to see it, but on his palm he bore the shape of the eagle. It glared back at him with mocking, dreadful jubilance.

  Eamon reeled. He bore the mark of the Master in his flesh.

  He didn’t know how long he stood there trying to grasp the fullness of what was on his hand; certainly it was long enough for his fingers to grow numb and pale with the increasing cold.

  At the sound of footsteps coming towards him, he quickly tucked his hands away.

  “Goodman!” It was Ensign Offley Barns.

  “Mr Barns?”

  “Duty calls,” Barns told him. “The captain wants us for an arrest.”

  Nodding, Eamon hurried to the young man and matched pace with him. He tried to steal a glance at his companion’s hands, but they were gloved. He wondered if they had both been given the same mark.

  As he was about to try to draw Barns on the subject they turned up Bury’s Hill. The windows of the Morning Star were all but obscured by a dozen men, all in Gauntlet uniform, standing outside it.

  Eamon froze. “The inn?”

  “Wayfarer trouble, the captain said. Maybe even something to do with last night.”

  “Wayfarer?”

  The word was dead on Eamon’s lips as they reached the inn. A crowd of evicted men and women stood huddled to one side, some still nursing mugs of beer in their hands and sullen looks on their faces. Eamon saw curious eyes peering from every window and door along the street.

  “Move along, move along!” yelled an officer. The man emerged from the empty inn and cleared a path before the door. More soldiers followed him. Two dragged between them a man whom Eamon did not recognize at first. He seemed middle-aged; his dishevelled hair was turning grey at the roots and his jaw was thick with untidy stubble. His shirt was torn and his left arm was bound tightly in a clean bandage.

  Eamon gaped. Suddenly he saw again the bleeding man huddled among the tree roots, felt the impact of the man who had attacked him, remembered drawing his blade across the arm that had seized him…

  Then he remembered the blood he had seen on Telo’s arm that morning, and understood.

  Two more soldiers emerged from the besieged inn. The innkeeper himself, bound, strode defiantly between them. Belaal came after them, a dark, satisfied smile on his face.

  “Telo, Telo!” The now captured fugitive called in desperation, as though blinded.

  “I’m here, Wystan,” Telo answered, his voice bewitchingly confident. “I’m right here with you.”

  “These men are traitors to the Master,” Belaal called, addressing the gathered onlookers. “They will be paid in the coin by which they pay.”

  He turned to his officers and ensigns, barking orders to them that were swiftly obeyed. Eamon did not hear them. Aeryn’s father and the man called Wystan were dragged roughly down the hill.

  Stunned, Eamon watched them. Telo… a traitor?

  “Goodman!”

  Eamon looked up. Belaal stood not a pace away from him.

  “Sir, I think there must be some mistake,” Eamon began. “I know this man –”

  Belaal’s eyes flashed in the torchlight. “I will not hear excuses for a snake from the mouth of a sworn man,” he hissed, stabbing at him viciously with a gloved finger. “You’re Gauntlet, Goodman; act like it.”

  Eamon felt his throat const
ricting. “Yes, sir.”

  Belaal held his gaze. “Go down to the square. We’ll light them both before the moon rises.”

  Eamon remained rooted to the spot, wishing that he could misunderstand the command. Belaal raised an irate eyebrow, then turned to the man next to him. “Mr Barns,” he snarled.

  Barns had none of Eamon’s qualms. “Sir.”

  “Take your friend Goodman to the square and see to it that he does his job. You both know where the necessary tools are.”

  “Yes, sir.” Barns gave Eamon a shove. “Let’s go, Goodman.”

  Numbly, Eamon walked down the hill in the wake of the arrested men. He knew full well what tools Belaal meant. He swallowed down his horror.

  The innkeeper might not even be guilty; what proof was there against Telo? A cut on his arm, a man who knew his name… But the more Eamon thought about it, the more certain the innkeeper’s crime became.

  Before Eamon knew it, he was in the square with a dozen other new ensigns, his hands helping to build the place where Aeryn’s father would be burned alive.

  CHAPTER III

  The kindling swiftly piled high, and men and women from the town began to gather in the shadowy corners of the square. They could not come too close; the Gauntlet needed room to work.

  Eamon felt the weight of the wood in his hands as he and a dozen other ensigns built the pyre. They worked in silence, and for a moment he was able to pretend that it was just an exercise, that the dry wood would not be lit.

  But torches lit up the square and two tall stakes had been set at the centre of the pyre. The Gauntlet’s work that evening was precise, diligent. All the grim totems lacked were their offerings.

  As the kindling went higher Eamon felt a churning sickness deep in his gut. He had been to public burnings and executions before but he had never felt as he did now: wretched, trapped, desperate. It was Telo whom they meant to burn, and Telo was a wayfarer.

  Death to the snakes! His mind was filled with cries from long ago. Death to the snakes!

  His mind’s eye opened in the cold, grey streets of Dunthruik, and though the streets seemed faint and dim to his memory the cries were not, and neither was the feel of his mother’s hands on his own. He vividly remembered the group of men that had been jeered towards the city’s heart. The crowd had called them snakes and wayfarers, enemies of the Master deserving of death. The condemned men had been pelted with stones as they were taken through the streets until they bled and staggered. Eamon remembered the crowd’s rage and the man falling in a swamp of hail and blood.

  Ceremonial pyres, much like the ones he now had a hand in building, stood high that day. The men had been bound and the kindling set alight while the whole city exulted in the flames that snatched about the Master’s enemies.

  His mother’s hands turned his face towards her so that he could not watch; he had heard her heart beating fast. He could still recall the soft touch of his father, smoothing his hair and caressing his brow as he had trembled with fear. And the smell: the charred, gruesome smell of burning flesh. The men and women of the city baying for blood and rejoicing in the screams. His ear burned with that moaning, stifled only slightly by the great knots of his mother’s cloak that he forced into his ears. It had been the time of the great culls. He had been nine years old.

  Death to the snakes!

  Tears stung at his eyes but still his hands moved. They moved until his task was done.

  “Good work, Goodman.” Barns’s voice struck him; looking up he saw that a ring of Gauntlet ensigns was forming up about the central part of the square. These soldiers had the double task of keeping back the onlookers and keeping the prisoners from fleeing should they somehow escape the flames.

  Eamon did not form part of that line; he followed Barns as more experienced ensigns hustled them out of the ring and into the crowd. Eamon knew the drill: Gauntlet men were always stationed among the masses to keep them calm in what followed. In a daze, Eamon took his place in the pressing throng. Barns moved farther on.

  Belaal and a group of lieutenants and ensigns came through the square in procession. Belaal marched proudly at the head of the line, leading his bedraggled, grim-faced prisoners as though he had won them by noble endeavour. A drummer, one of the college’s youngest cadets, marched by the captain’s side. With each stroke that he beat, the crowds of men and women lurched forward eagerly; some beat their hands along with it. Some spat at the passing prisoners. All jeered them.

  “Death to the snakes!” cried one. The whole square filled with the cry.

  The procession drew closer and came within the guarding ring; Eamon could clearly see Telo and the other prisoner as they were marched past him. He could only stare.

  What could he do?

  His mind raced as ensigns began fastening the two men to the stakes with irons. The Gauntlet knew how to use bands, and Eamon saw Wystan wince as the chains came tight about his injured arm. His pain was mocked.

  Eamon’s breath quickened; the chains were fastened and the fasteners withdrew, leaving the wayfarers open to the crowd’s jeers.

  He bit his lip hard. Even if he could release the men – a task that seemed altogether impossible… he had no right to. His duty was to the Gauntlet, and he was bound to that service now in ways more powerful than he ever had been tied to Aeryn’s father. What call had he to interfere in a matter of the Master’s glory? Snakes were snakes, and traitors deserved death.

  As the drum beat into his brain Eamon tried to pull himself together. He had known Telo since he was a child; the man was the closest thing to family that he had. Besides which, Telo was the beloved father of a friend. It was true that Eamon didn’t know the stranger, but it seemed unthinkable to him that a friend of Telo’s might be an evil man.

  Captain Belaal went to the centre of the execution space and turned to address the heckling onlookers.

  “Enemies of the Master are enemies of the River and enemies of the people!” he called crisply. “These men were taken whilst plotting against the Master and against his glory. Their crime is against you and against him.”

  Eamon barely registered what Belaal was saying; his heart was in his mouth and a gagged feeling lay slick all along his throat. It was no enemy bound to the pyre; it was Telo… Couldn’t he speak for the innkeeper?

  Guilty instinct told him that to speak out would be to barter for a place in the pyre. Belaal had declared them enemies, and both men appeared to be enemies, bound and wretched on the stakes… Could he give his life for such men?

  He looked desperately at them and saw Telo raise his head. Their gazes met and locked; it stole Eamon’s breath.

  “The men before you, people of Edesfield, are snakes: thieves, murderers, and traitors,” Belaal boomed.

  “They are thieves that serve a thief.”

  All eyes turned suddenly to the innkeeper as his voice resounded: “We do not serve the throned,” Telo called. “We serve the King.”

  He spoke out with dignity that surpassed him, shattering in a single moment everything that Eamon had ever believed about him.

  A terrible silence fell. Eamon gasped and stared. The innkeeper’s eyes were still on his and Eamon could not fathom what he saw there.

  “Snakes! Snakes, by their own admission!” Belaal howled, his words stirring fury in the crowd. “Traitors and defilers! They will be put to death as they deserve, to the Master’s glory!”

  The crowd erupted into hot-blooded yells: “Death to the snakes!”

  Stones began flying. The innkeeper received the blows in silence; he had said all that he meant to say. Telo’s companion wept and struggled, drawing breath for a cry that was neither defiant nor desperate: “The King!”

  King. Eamon’s heart beat fast as the strange word washed through him. The River Realm had a master, not a king. He remembered his mother once telling him that the Master had taken the realm from a king in a great battle long years past – an argument late at night when his father had told her not to sp
eak of it to their son. It had been long ago, if it had even happened, and what mattered was that the Master was sovereign in glory over the River. That was what his father had told him.

  As his thoughts churned in him he felt the strength of Telo’s gaze; the whole of time from the beginning to the end of days was distilled into the innkeeper’s eyes, in some knowledge or hope that Eamon could not understand.

  Telo smiled at him. “The King!” he said, and though there were hundreds of men and women around them Eamon knew that the words were spoken to him.

  “Light the pyre!” Belaal commanded.

  A lieutenant bearing a torch walked between Eamon and the condemned men, releasing him from the innkeeper’s gaze. Suddenly Eamon felt scores of people pressing around him, carried ecstatically forward by the moving torch. The Gauntlet kept them distant from the pyres. The yells were deafening. It was as he took in those around him that Eamon realized that scarcely a pace away was a face he knew.

  Breaking from where he stood he pushed roughly through the crowd, reaching Aeryn’s side just as the first crack of kindling marked the air.

  The crowd pulsed with a screeching cry. At the same moment his friend started forward. Eamon reached her just in time to jerk her back.

  “No!” he cried. Those around were oblivious to him as he hauled her backwards.

  “Let go of me!” Aeryn retorted. She seemed to neither see nor recognize him.

  “Aeryn –”

  “Filthy Glove, let go!”

  With a yell she twisted and turned hard to the side, nearly wrenching away from him; he strengthened his grip and tried to pull her farther back from the execution ring. Aeryn’s normally gentle hands clawed at him.

  “Let me go!”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing –”

  A victorious squeal rent the air. The next scream that Eamon heard was Aeryn’s.

  “Father!”

  It was the worst possible time for her to advertise her kinship. There was no alternative. Eamon threw his arm about his friend’s neck, stunning her, and jammed his other hand over her mouth. Shouts of primal violence rose from the crowd like flames. Eamon felt bile in his throat as he hauled Aeryn another pace backwards. There was another scream from the ring – long, high, agonized. Eamon found a sob on his own lips.