by K J Taylor
But he couldn’t see any guards, or indeed see much at all. The entire world was turning dark. His feet felt like a pair of granite blocks. When he thrust out a hand to try and support himself, he half-expected it to touch the sky. Meanwhile, people around him were bumping into him, sometimes painfully. He wanted to ask them for help, but his head was in a whirl, and none of them seemed to stay long enough to speak to. Finally, one of them ran into him hard enough to send him staggering sideways and into a wall. He hit it, and then groped his way along it until he found a corner, and peered around it. It looked dark, and he could see another wall, but he couldn’t tell whether it was another street, or even if it was an open doorway.
A hand grabbed him by the arm. He resisted, but the hand didn’t let go, and he stumbled after it until it released him and something shoved him violently in the chest, sending him to the ground, which he hit with a bone-jarring thud.
An instant later, something heavy pinned him down and he saw a face looking into his, wavering sickeningly through the haze. It looked small, but the mouth was twisted and horrible, the eyes staring.
Arenadd groaned and mumbled something.
The stranger reached down and took hold of the cloth wrapped around his face. “Now let’s see who’s behind the mask,” a voice rasped.
The cloth came away, and Arenadd felt air on his face. “Let go of me,” he managed. “I . . . order you . . .”
The stranger’s leer widened, turning his face into a hideous mask. “At last,” he breathed, and his voice was a strange lisping thing. “At last, I’ve found you.”
Arenadd shoved at him, but all his strength had gone. “Leave me alone. I swear, if you don’t let me up and call the guard, I’ll make you suffer.”
A laugh. “Too late!” the voice almost screamed. “Too late!”
And then something hit him.
It felt as if he’d been punched in the chest. But only for a moment.
The stranger rose, breathing harshly. “This time, no-one will be there to take it out,” he said. “Not this time. In Gryphus’ name, die.”
Arenadd’s breath came in short gasps, and he reached up and clutched feebly at the dagger embedded in his chest. Blood bubbled up between his teeth, and he coughed and moaned. If he could only take it out . . .
But he didn’t have the strength, and he could feel it sapping his energy, shutting down his senses. The last of his vision faded to black, and his ears filled with a roaring sound that blotted out all else.
He felt his attacker roll him onto his front and tie his hands behind his back. His ankles were tied, too, and after that, something was stuffed into his mouth. The blood welling up in his throat had nowhere to go now, and he choked on it, gagging and retching. It was filling his lungs . . .
Above the roaring in his ears, he heard the stranger say something.
“For Gryphus. For Lord Erian. For justice.”
After that, he fell into the void.
11
Learning
Laela had had a long day. The morning had been spent with Yorath, as usual, learning to write her first words. He had also taught her several more Northern phrases—she was learning how to ask for food and how to say “I am the King’s companion.” Yorath had told her she had very good pronunciation, which surprised her.
Once the lesson was over, Yorath began to excuse himself as he usually did.
“Wait,” said Laela.
He stopped. “Yes?”
She resisted the urge to stare at her boots. “I’m goin’ for lunch now, an’ I was wonderin’ if . . . er, if yeh’d like to come an’ have it with me, like.”
Yorath looked uncertain. “I dunno . . .”
“Yeh don’t have to come if yeh don’t want,” Laela said in a rush. “I just . . . sorta . . . thought I’d ask.”
“Oh, I want t’come,” Yorath said, just as quickly. “It’s just that . . .”
“Why? Yeh got somewhere else to be?”
“Well, no, but—”
“Come, then,” said Laela. “I’ll be eatin’ on me own otherwise.”
Yorath scratched the back of his neck. “Well . . .”
“The King won’t mind,” said Laela. “He really won’t. He told me I could do whatever I wanted.” This wasn’t actually true, but she said it anyway.
“I thought he’d be eatin’ with ye,” said Yorath.
“No, he never does,” said Laela. “C’mon, hurry up—I’m hungry.”
He paused a moment longer, and then smiled. “All right. I’ll be glad to.”
Laela smiled back, and they left the library together, side by side. Up in the dining hall, food had been laid out for her as always, and the serving-woman, seeing Yorath, silently left to bring a plate for him.
Laela sat down, gesturing at him to sit beside her.
He did, looking around at the room. “I’ve never been up here before, ye know.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, usually only the King an’ his officials use it,” said Yorath. “Teacher’s apprentices like me’d never come up here. Not without an invitation, anyway.”
“I gave yeh one,” said Laela. “Want some beer? It’s not bad.”
“Thanks.”
They drank together in companionable silence.
Laela’s heart was pounding. I wonder what’s goin’ on in his head. What does he really think about me? I’d never get him to tell me . . .
She paused, holding her cup. Well, be damned with that.
“Yorath?”
“Yeah?”
Laela put her cup down and looked him in the face. “What do yeh think of me?”
The question obviously caught him off guard. “What do I think of ye?”
“Yeah,” said Laela. “I mean, yeh got yerself a good job tutorin’ me—probably got yeh some favour with the King an’ all—an’ yer nice to me, but that’s probably just ’cause of me livin’ up ’ere with the King. So I was wonderin’—what do yeh actually think of me?”
“Look, Laela—”
“C’mon,” she said more softly. “I ain’t gonna bite yer head off. I’m just . . . curious.”
He brightened slightly as he looked her in the face. “Ye’re direct, ain’t ye?”
“Er—”
“I like that,” he added. “I always liked that about ye, Laela, since the first day we met.”
Laela smiled. “Me dad always said that the best way to get somethin’ off someone is to stop foolin’ around an’ just ask for it, ’cause it’s amazing what people’ll do if yeh put them on the spot.”
Yorath took a sip from his cup. “That’s very true. I’m curious myself, though.”
“About what?”
“Everyone’s curious,” said Yorath. “About ye. Where ye really came from. Seems ye just appeared in the Eyrie one day, an’ no-one ever saw ye come in or knows how ye got into the King’s favour so fast.”
“Oh.” She had a feeling he had wanted to ask her about it for some time.
“Ye don’t have to tell me,” Yorath added. “I just thought I’d ask.”
The rest of the food arrived at this point, and Laela had a few moments to think while they ate. Well, why not just tell him the truth? She couldn’t think of anything else to tell him, anyway, and she didn’t want to be rude to him.
“I came ’ere from the South,” she said eventually, and braced herself for the reaction.
He started. “The South? Where in the South?”
“Nowhere special,” said Laela. “Little village not far from the Northgates. Sturrick, it was called.”
Yorath was looking at her with a new interest. “I thought yer accent sounded . . . different. But if ye were born in the South, how did ye get here? An’ why di
d ye come?”
“I bribed the men at Guard’s Post,” said Laela, as casually as she could.
Yorath stared at her, and then laughed. “Ye gods! An’ then ye came to Malvern, eh?”
“Yeah.”
“Why, though? I mean, why come North if ye had a home?”
“I didn’t,” said Laela. “I grew up there with my dad . . . well, he was me foster father, really. Never knew me mother. Then he died, so I sold our house an’ came North.”
“Shadows, that’s rough,” said Yorath.
Laela shrugged. “These things happen. I ain’t got it so bad.”
“So why did ye come North?”
Laela tried to smile. “’Cause I’m a darkwoman, that’s why. An’ where else can a darkwoman go?”
“True.” Yorath smiled again. “How did ye end up in the Eyrie, then?”
“I got into some trouble in the city,” said Laela. “An’ the King rescued me.”
“What? The King?”
“Yeah. He was passin’ an’ saw me.”
Yorath looked surprised but not overly so. “Didn’t know he’d been down into the city. He doesn’t do that much any more.”
Laela tore a piece of bread in half. “He brought me back here, anyway. We talked a bit, an’ he asked me a bunch of questions about what’s goin’ on in the South, an’ I told him what I knew, an’ afterward he said I could stay here.”
“That’s all?”
“More or less,” said Laela. “He just took a likin’ to me.”
“Huh.” Yorath rubbed his chin. “Well, he’s got eccentric over the years, no-one’d argue with that. I guess maybe he was impressed about how ye’d come all this way just t’live in his Kingdom.”
“Yeah, he said that,” said Laela.
“It’s just a bit odd, though,” said Yorath, half to himself. “All the mistresses he’s had before, they were all . . . well, high-born. An’ they were . . . well . . .”
Laela gritted her teeth. “I know. Yeh can’t understand why he’d be wantin’ a peasant girl now. One with filthy Southern blood in her.”
Yorath jerked as if she had slapped him. “Laela—oh, gods, please, I didn’t mean—”
“Well, don’t worry about it,” said Laela, more sharply than she meant to.
Silence.
“Listen,” Yorath said eventually, “I’ll go. I didn’t mean . . . I’m sorry. I’ll leave ye.”
Laela grabbed his arm. “No. Stay. Yorath, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell at yeh, I’m just . . . feelin’ a bit out of sorts, like.”
He looked thoroughly awkward and unhappy to be there. “Gods, what would my dad say? He was over the moon when I told him I’d been asked to be yer tutor. Said it was the best opportunity I’d ever had. Told me a hundred times, ‘Don’t say anythin’ out of turn! Be polite as ye can! If ye put one foot wrong, ye could lose it!’”
To her own surprise, Laela took him by the hand. “Yorath, listen. Yeh’ve got it wrong. I ain’t angry with yeh. I . . . well, I like yeh.”
He tried to pull away, but gently. “Laela, don’t. We can’t—”
“Yeah, we can,” she said impulsively. “Look, it’s fine for us to spend time together. The King won’t care.”
“Laela, if I do somethin’ to make him angry—”
“Yeh won’t,” said Laela. “Yorath, it ain’t . . . we ain’t sharin’ a bed. The King an’ me ain’t lovers. Actually . . .” She looked shyly at the tabletop. “Actually, I ain’t never had a lover. Never. Who’d bed a half-breed?”
Yorath gaped at her. “What? But the King said—”
“He was lyin’,” said Laela. “An’ yeh’ve got to keep it a secret. He told me never to tell anyone else. He said if I wanted to stay ’ere an’ be looked after, I should pretend t’be his mistress, ’cause it would be simpler, an’ everyone would leave me alone. I asked him if he wanted t’make it . . . real-like, an’ he said no.”
“I’ll . . . I’ll keep quiet,” Yorath promised.
“Thanks.” Laela let go of his hand. “The King an’ me ain’t . . . well, we ain’t lovers, an’ we ain’t friends. He just decided he wanted t’take care of me. I dunno why.”
You remind me of myself.
She shut the memory out.
“The King doesn’t have friends,” said Yorath. But he looked less surprised now, and more . . .
Laela blinked, puzzled. He looked oddly . . . disappointed.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“What? Oh . . . nothin’.”
“Yeah, there is,” Laela said firmly. “So tell me. I hate liars.”
“It’s not important,” said Yorath. “I was just thinkin’. . .”
“What?”
“The King’s done a lot for ye,” said Yorath. “Ye do know that, don’t ye?”
“Of course I do,” said Laela, more than a little taken aback.
“Do ye?” He looked her in the eye. “Do ye really?”
“Well—”
“He’s never done somethin’ like this before,” said Yorath. “An’ if he’s done it for ye now, without askin’ for anythin’ in return . . .”
“What?” said Laela. She felt the same sick, frightened feeling in her stomach that she had felt the night before, by the tomb.
“I dunno,” Yorath said abruptly. “It just seems like . . . maybe he is expectin’ somethin’ back from ye. An’ if it’s not yer body, then I dunno what it could be.”
Laela didn’t reply, and the rest of the meal passed awkwardly, with neither one of them seeming to know what to say. She wanted to talk more—about things other than the King—but a strange feeling of guilt and shame had come over her, and it was so powerful, it made her keep her silence.
When the meal was done, they took their leave of each other and began to go their separate ways. But at the last moment Yorath stopped and hurried back.
“Laela!”
She started. “What?”
“I nearly forgot—ye’re supposed to go to the Moon Temple after lunch.”
“What? Why?”
“So ye can start learnin’ about the Night God,” said Yorath. “There should be a priestess waitin’ for ye up in yer room—hurry up there, they don’t like to be kept waitin’.”
Laela cursed and darted off.
• • •
Sure enough, when she entered her room, she found a woman sitting by the fireside with a slightly bored expression.
The woman rose when Laela came in, saying, “There ye are. I was about to come looking for ye.”
Laela smoothed down her skirts. “I’m sorry, I didn’t get told yeh were here until just now.”
The woman shrugged. “There’s no great hurry. I’m Aderyn. And ye would be Laela, the half-breed?”
Laela growled. “Yeah. Do I go to the Temple with yeh?”
“Yes.” Aderyn was already moving toward the door. “Let’s go.”
Her new companion, who was stoutly built and looked about thirty, took Laela down the endless ramps and stairs to the ground floor of the Eyrie, where an impressively large door took them out of the building. Laela hadn’t come this way before and looked around with interest as they crossed the open courtyard to the outer wall. The gates set into it had a pair of alert and well-armed guards stationed on either side of it, but they stood aside immediately when they saw the priestess coming, and she and Laela passed out and into the city.
It looked different in the light of day, and Laela thought it looked friendlier, too, now that she was more or less one of its citizens.
Aderyn walked briskly toward a building that Laela saw almost instantly, mostly because it was the largest one in the city that wasn’t the Eyrie. It had a domed roof and looked much like one
of the Sun Temples in the South. Laela had never been inside any sort of Temple before, and she felt deeply excited to be going into one now. The fact that the Night God was said to be a cruel and savage deity only added an extra thrill.
The doors had been carved with a massive triple spiral that had been inlaid with silver, and the handles were also spirals—double spirals, in this case, made from what looked like bronze. Aderyn grasped one and pulled one of the doors open.
She gestured at Laela. “Go in.”
Laela hesitated ever so briefly on the threshold. Gryphus is your god, her memory whispered. To flirt with any other god—even to enter a heathen temple—is to risk the corruption of your soul by evil.
She took a deep breath and went in.
Inside, the Temple was dark—but not gloomy. There was light in there, but it was dim and cool, and she quickly spotted the blue glass lamps that produced it.
She had an impression of the enormous space around her, and she saw the strange pillars made to look like trees. The floor was covered in a mosaic of leaves of all kinds, picked out here and there with silver and chunks of crystal. It was like standing in a forest, but an otherwordly forest. Perhaps a forest in the afterlife.
A memory came to her without any warning—a memory of her dream of Gryphus, in the field of flowers and sunlight, and she had the strange but absolute certainty that while Gryphus had his sunlit meadow, this moonlit forest belonged to Scathach.
In its way, it was just as beautiful.
Aderyn came up behind her. “What do ye think of it, Laela?”
“It’s incredible,” said Laela, and she meant it.
The woman smiled for the first time since they’d met. “It took our people nearly ten years to make. This was a heathen temple once. Built by sun worshippers. When we took this city, we took the temple, too, and remade it to serve the Night God. There has never been a Temple like this for her.”
“Really?” said Laela, genuinely surprised.
“Yes.” Aderyn nodded. “In the past, we worshipped the Night God in the open air, under the stars. Our temples were stone circles, built by our ancestors long ago. When the sun worshippers came, they knocked down our stones and commanded our people never to worship the Night God again. Those of us who defied them were burned alive.”