by Anna Thayer
It was that sound which stopped Aeryn from struggling. At last she saw him clearly.
She tensed in his grip, as though she wasn’t sure whether to strike him or collapse in his arms. Her face was haggard in the horrid light.
“Let go of me.” Her voice shook and rage smouldered in fierce eyes. Though the scream and roar of the spectacle went on all around them, nothing was as clear to him then as her face and words, and nothing seemed more terrible than what she might do.
“You can’t go to him!” He shook her, so hard that he was afraid he would hurt her – she had to listen to him. “Aeryn!”
There was a crack as a pile of kindling crumbled in the heat. The smoke in the square grew dense. Ash was cast through the crowd and the air filled with the horrendous smell that Eamon knew so vividly.
His stomach turned. He staggered and turned to one side, retching.
“Death to the snakes!”
Aeryn darted away from him into the crowd. He could not follow her: his throat was racked with bile, his eyes ran with the acrid sting of the smoke, and his ears boomed with the shouts of the crowd.
A hand grasped his wheeling shoulder. “You all right, lad?”
Eamon looked up dully to see a kind, weathered face above his: the smith’s. In that hideous moment it was a comfort to him.
Coughing and spluttering, he wondered if he was going to vomit up his lungs as well as everything else. He staggered on to the support of the smith’s willingly offered arm. The man helped him to move some distance from the crowd.
They reached the steps of the college and Eamon sat there, shivering. Away from the fire the air seemed clammy. He could see the crowd of men and women beating about the ring, creatures of shadow and smoke about a flaming heart.
The smith sat down by him. “Quite a first day,” he commented. Eamon couldn’t answer; the flames still held his eyes.
“Who would have thought it: Telo, one of them. Time was when Edesfield was safe from snakes, more or less.”
Eamon could feel grief working into the dark marks about his eyes. Black smoke tunnelled off the stakes. He didn’t dare look to see how much remained. How long had he staggered in the square, disgorging his stomach? A moan left his lips.
“Telo seemed such a good man.” Smithy’s voice was steady as he pressed Eamon’s shoulder in comfort. “Appearances can be deceptive, I suppose. A snake is a snake, lad, and the Gauntlet are just in dealing with them.”
Just? The vulturous word hovered in Eamon’s mind. What justice was this?
The wind blew ash into his face. People danced around the fires under the watchful eye of the Gauntlet, under his eyes. He heard Telo’s voice in his mind again and drove it away in terror.
But Aeryn. Where was Aeryn?
The smith briskly rubbed his hands and patted Eamon fondly on the back. “Go home and rest, lad.”
Eamon rose. Some of the Gauntlet had begun to disperse back towards the college and the barracks. Belaal and a few others remained in the square, encouraging the patriotic celebration.
Eamon was entitled to stay in the college barracks, but he knew that he could not that night. He would go back to the smith’s, to the small rented room that had been home since his own had burned down.
He looked once more at the dying pyres; the grim glint of the flames grinned back at him.
The smith disappeared back into the crowd to join the celebrations. With a dreadful shudder, Eamon turned for home.
Smoke permeated the streets, clinging with leech-like intensity to his lungs. His mind tossed over the day’s events, trying to force them to a logical conclusion, but there was none to be reached.
His steps wound towards the smith’s forge, past the wall where he had sat that morning picking mud from his dagger. Though not even a day had passed, he felt a year older.
He stopped at the building’s side door. The forge was cramped up against the wall of a fishmonger’s, and the smell of fish and smoke mingled uncomfortably. Scales and innards were mashed in among the cobbles in the yard. They would not be removed until rain came, and the smell would linger for some time thereafter.
Eamon fumbled in the small pouch at his side, searching for his key. Even if he could find it he expected that it would be difficult to locate the keyhole; then again, the door was a feeble thing and he knew it could be convinced to open without one. His father’s house had been warm and dry, with broad rooms of books which Eamon had read while his father worked at binding. Eamon sighed; it had been a long time since he had read a book, and longer still since he had bound one.
The lodging that the smith had offered him was made up of an old, disused storeroom that let out the warmth in the winter and did not keep cool in the summer. Eamon’s hands had gone from binding books to stoking the forge and polishing blades until he had joined the Gauntlet; then he had paid the smith rent from his slim wages.
His fingers found the stalks of his keys; they chinked as he grasped them in his aching hand. He stood, keys suspended uncertainly by the door, for a few moments. His hands shook. Everything had happened so fast…
Why Telo? The thought hounded him. Why? There had to be an answer.
He could not sleep, not like this. He shoved his key back into his pouch and returned to the streets.
Soon he neared the shattered windows of the Morning Star. No lights burned there that evening; the Gauntlet had doused them and smoke clung to the walls. As he approached, Eamon saw several figures with barrels and bottles fleeing from the doorway; rats that sensed the coming of a feline adversary.
Feeling oddly bruised Eamon watched them go. A smoke-clogged wind pushed the inn’s sign on mournful hinges; the doorway yawned blackly before him.
He went forward to the threshold and stopped for a long time there, peering inwards.
Why had he come? Staring at the unfamiliar black he wondered whether he should leave.
Tugging his jacket closer over his shoulders, he stepped inside.
A shred of moonlight followed him through the doorway, glancing off the remains of the inn. Night lay like iron sheets over the tables and chairs, which lay strewn over the floor amid pools of cracked ceramic made slippery by spilt food and drink.
As he passed the bar Eamon saw Telo’s wiping cloth laid carefully over three tankards; the struggle had not come from the innkeeper. He stopped and took the rag in his hands. It was the tool of a diligent man.
Swallowing, Eamon laid it back.
He followed the bar to the doors in the wall behind it. Some led into the kitchen; he smelt the fire burning itself to ashes in the grate and saw an open sack of flour spilt over the floor.
A slim corridor led to the stairs, which creaked beneath him. The Star had upstairs rooms for guests – he had sometimes played in them as a child – but the innkeeper and his family had also slept there.
Eamon’s curiosity led him to Telo’s room. Though small and sparse, it was comfortable enough to receive a weary man at the end of each day. The bed, Eamon knew, had been one of Telo’s prized possessions, handcrafted years before by a carpenter who worked in the city. Not many people in Edesfield slept in a real bed, rather than a motley assortment of hay and blankets, but Telo had been one of them.
Shredded linen lay everywhere, pitchers and basins had been cracked on the floor, and the great bed was out of place, wrenched to one side. Eamon was not the first from the Gauntlet to have been there that night. The room had been ransacked.
But he knew something they did not: as a child Aeryn had often boasted that her father’s bed could be used to hold secrets. After he had repeatedly refused to believe her angry assertions she had triumphantly shown him the secret compartment that her father had had built into the bed. If Telo really had something to hide, it would be there.
What could Telo have had to hide?
The bedposts were thick and sturdy, the grain majestic in the moonlight. He leaned over to look at the base of the bed and accidentally banged his elbow, hard, a
gainst one of the posts. In the split second before he leapt away to nurse a numb bone he heard the reverberation of a hollow.
Shaking his arm to coax it to forget its hurt, he knelt by the post and ran his hands over the smooth wood. In the back of the fourth leg there was a small groove about the size of his thumb. Just as Aeryn had shown him a decade before, Eamon pressed it hard and listened to the answering click. A portion of the bedpost swung open against his hand.
He had to crawl under the frame and peer awkwardly up into the gap to see, but, straining his eyes, he made out the slim shape of a piece of parchment in the hidden hole.
Getting his hands into the compartment was difficult; the bed was only about a foot off the ground, and he had to slide under it on his back before he could take his prize. After several awkward attempts, parchment touched his fingers. He groped at it in the dark before threading it out.
It was as he seized the parchment that he heard a step on the landing.
He stilled his breathing to almost nothing and tuned every sense to the noise. His Gauntlet uniform would protect him from looters and other Gauntlet, but if there were more snakes about…
He held himself still. Another step. His arms were heavy where he held them suspended; he could not risk resting them. A step came closer. He hoped that he might pass unnoticed by the pile of blankets.
The pressure of a bladepoint rested sharply on his unguarded midriff.
“Up,” a voice demanded. It was thickly muffled. He didn’t move.
“Up, now; keep your eyes closed.”
For a few seconds Eamon stayed very still, trying to think of a way to hide the paper. He realized at once that it would be impossible. He was caught.
He edged out from under the bed, his eyes held firmly and obligingly shut.
“Sit up. Not a word or I will kill you.”
Eamon sat in silence as rope was put about his hands. The skin that brushed past his own surprised him; it seemed too soft for a man’s. As the knot was tied he pulled curiously against it. It was by no means tight enough.
“You bind very poorly,” he commented.
The paper was snatched out of his fingers. From the silence that followed, he inferred that his captor was reading it.
“Clearly, I mean you no offence,” he added. The silence continued.
He heard a sigh and a rustle of cloth as his captor knelt next to him.
“I have half a mind to leave you here, Eamon!” Eamon recognized the now undisguised voice with a start.
“Aeryn?” Angry words bubbled up in him – he had had too many surprises for one evening. “River’s sake! What are you doing here?”
“I live here,” she replied curtly. “What are you doing here?”
“You threatened to kill me!”
“You could have been anyone.”
Eamon opened his eyes and fixed her in a steely glare. He noted uncertainly that his friend still held a small, sharp knife in her hand.
“Someone is going to get hurt if you don’t put that down,” he told her, eyeing the blade. He refrained from adding, “Most likely you.”
“I know how to use a knife, thank you,” Aeryn snapped.
“You wouldn’t be holding it like that if you did.” He thought he saw a look of embarrassment cross her face but her grip on the knife didn’t lessen in the slightest. “You’re not going to put it down?”
“Answer my question,” Aeryn rejoined, prodding none-too-gently at him with the blade. “What are you doing in my house?”
Eamon rolled his eyes. “I saw everyone else helping themselves and thought it a fine idea!”
She glared at him. “There’s no need to be sarcastic.”
“Who said I was being sarcastic?” Eamon’s voice quivered on the verge of violence. “Damn it, Aeryn! What did you think you were doing?”
“What did I think I was doing?” Aeryn stared at him. “You swore to the Gauntlet; you built that pyre; you put my father in it; if anyone is doing anything today, it’s you!”
The words were keener against Eamon’s heart than the knife that she held there. “I didn’t kill him, Aeryn,” he tried.
“You’re such a Glove,” she told him viciously. “No, Gloves only ever follow orders. Accountability wasn’t in your training, I suppose?”
“Do you have any idea what they did to me?” Eamon yelled. Tears stung at his eyes; flames danced before them and fire was in his palm once more.
For a moment the moon became free of cloud; its beams showed two tear-marked faces watching each other wrathfully in the dark.
Aeryn held his gaze for a moment. “I tried to warn you –”
“‘Red isn’t your colour’? You call that a warning?”
He glared at her. With a deep sigh, Aeryn lowered her blade then unbound his wrists, carefully bringing his hands out where she could see them. Snuffling with tears, she turned his right hand over between her own.
The mark of the eagle was still there; in the dark it seemed to glow embers.
Aeryn traced it with delicate fingers; the gesture caused excruciating pain to run up Eamon’s arm. Agonized, he snatched his hand away.
Aeryn looked at him with alarm. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. Her eyes were fixed on his palm. Eamon saw that the glow there filled the whole flesh of his hand.
He looked at her with horror. “What have I done, Aeryn?”
“You have sworn a powerful oath.” Eamon recoiled; the words seemed to spell an inescapable doom over him. “The throned does not give up his sworn,” Aeryn added quietly.
Eamon glanced at her. “You mean the Master,” he whispered uneasily.
Aeryn matched his gaze. “He is no master, Eamon; he took what was not his to take and sits where it was never given to him to sit. I mean the throned.”
Eamon began to shake. “You’re a wayfarer… a snake…”
Aeryn sat very still before him. “It is as you say,” she answered. A sad smile crossed over her face. “Will you execute me, too?”
For a long moment, Eamon said nothing. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?” he breathed at last.
“Why didn’t I ever…?” Her mouth hung open incredulously. “You were set on that uniform!” she cried, gesturing to his jacket in disgust. “The Gauntlet would have found out or you would have had to kill me. Even if you didn’t, one of the others might have killed you for fear that you might betray me.”
“Others… other wayfarers?” Eamon’s glance flicked to the shadows, as though he expected strange creatures to leap out from them. “How many of you are there?” He shook his head. “No, a better question – and for River’s sake, Aeryn, you had better answer me this one – who are these wayfarers? No stories: I want the truth.”
Aeryn watched him closely, carefully assessing every aspect of his face. He wondered whether she might be weighing up every second of the years they had known each other, to judge whether the signs of their friendship pointed to him as meriting her trust. Eamon matched her scrutiny steadily.
She reached her decision. “What is this town called, Eamon?”
Eamon stared. Was she mad? “Edesfield,” he said.
“It should be pronounced Ede’s Field, not Ed-es-field,” Aeryn told him.
“Ede’s Field?” Eamon repeated the new pronunciation dumbly. “Why should it be pronounced like that?”
“Because Ede was the King who fell in battle here. The battle is remembered, even though he is not. He was of the house of Brenuin, the house of kings.”
Eamon felt a weight in his stomach. His mother had talked of kings; his father had tried to drive such thoughts from him. “There has never been a house of kings over the River, except perhaps in the dreams of small boys.”
Aeryn watched him for a moment. Then she began to recite something. As Eamon listened he felt something old and deep, like distant music, hidden in her words.
“Silver the glint as the midnight hills
Of the King’s spear.
Dark,
dark the foes of the throne,
Sly in the mere.”
Eamon gazed at her. “What is that?” he whispered.
Aeryn smiled at him sadly. “A poem not read by bookbinders’ sons. It tells how Ede was betrayed and how the throned unlawfully took the River Realm from him.”
“What happened?” Eamon breathed.
“The throned moved both people and land against their rightful king, Ede, promising power to those who went to war with him. The land had to swallow the swollen corpses of many of its own before the last battle was joined. At Edesfield, King Ede and the throned met for the last time.” She paused. “Ede was killed, and the throned marched down the River to take the city that you call Dunthruik.”
“Ede can’t have been much of a king if he lost,” Eamon ventured. “Power changes hands, Aeryn; it’s natural, and the fact that it is sometimes done in battle isn’t ‘unlawful’. Besides which,” he added, “Dunthruik is a great city and the throned is a good master of this land.”
“A good master?” Aeryn shook her head with an angry laugh. “Look at your hand, Eamon. What kind of master gave you that?”
Eamon looked uncomfortably at his palm.
“The throned has done much that is evil, Eamon,” Aeryn continued, “and in more ways than I can explain to you now – probably in more ways than I understand. The mark on your hand is just a reflection of it. Dunthruik is a darkened city, built on suffering and founded in blood.”
“Freedom is bought by blood.”
“I suppose you’ll be telling me that that’s why your uniform is red, next!”
Eamon fell silent. It was taught in the Gauntlet colleges that red, the Master’s colour, was one of sacrifice and glory.
Aeryn reached out and touched his shoulder, drawing his eyes back to her. “Believe me when I tell you that the throned works evil in Dunthruik, as do his Hands and his Gauntlet.”