“What about a blade with a crazy person swinging it? What about a hundred blades with crazy people swinging all of them?”
“Regon’s right,” I said. “You can’t fight the sea—or outrun it, or surrender to it. Given a choice, I’d always take the hundred maniacs. Douse the torch, Regon. Let’s not make this too easy for them.”
Light arced overhead, then vanished with a splash and a hiss as the torch hit the water and sank. Blinking away orange sparks and haloes, I ripped my cutlass loose from its sheath.
“I’ll see what I can do to keep them busy,” I said. “You two stay close to the cliffs, in the shadows, and as soon as you’ve got a clear path to the stairs, run like bunnies. Try to blend in with the rebels somehow—maybe wave some torches and curse my name. Get back to Lynn, if you can. Tell her that I . . . uh . . . you know what? Never mind. It’s fine. She’ll know. Also, she’ll be pissed. Try to stay out of garrotte range while you’re telling her.”
Regon breathed slowly, but didn’t speak. I was talking nonsense—they’d never reach the stairs—and I knew it and so did he. But what else could I say? Right, well, I guess that’s it; how about a rousing pirate song while we wait?
From the top of the stairs: a dull crack, then a dry splintering, and muffled shouts. The oaken planks and iron braces of the door had begun to split.
Ariadne squared her shoulders. “Someone give me a knife.”
I hesitated. “Are you sure?”
“Am I sure? Why wouldn’t I want to pull a weapon on these child-murdering shits?”
“Because you might hurt them.”
“Which would kind of be the point, you stupid pirate!”
“Three minutes, Ariadne. That’s all you’ve got. In three minutes, or maybe less, those child-murdering shits will be able to do whatever they like to you. Do you really want to spend that time making them angrier?”
“So drop your cutlass! Hell, let’s tie each other up before they get here. Let’s greet the bloodthirsty rebels bound and kneeling. Would that be a winning strategy, in your books?”
“There is no winning strategy here. If you haven’t dealt with that yet, do it fast.” I yanked a spare dagger from my boot and slapped the hilt into Ariadne’s hand. “Eyes, throat, or groin. Don’t bother trying for the heart. Stab until your knuckles meet skin, then twist.”
More splintering cracks from above. Pale yellow light spilled through the broken door onto the surrounding stone. As soon as the light appeared, it fragmented. Dark shapes piled on each other, boiling and seething as they surged through the gap. The rebels flooded down the steps, their shadows thrown huge and stark against the cliff. The forms of them blurred together until the mass of men was a great shadowy beast running the whole length of the stairway. Spines of pitchforks and pikes; horns of fire.
Fuck, shit, bugger and balls, this was going to be ugly and could we just not? I was terribly sleepy and, more than anything, I wanted to go back to bed.
The tide of men reached the bottom of the stairway, pooled there, then rushed forwards.
I licked my lips and tried to think of something to say that wasn’t too terribly inane. The only thing that popped into mind was “Here we go,” which didn’t seem like quite the thing.
I swore a few times instead. You can almost always find a cuss word appropriate to your situation. Here, I went with that good reliable standby, “Crap.”
Then I charged.
I crashed into the front line of rebels. It broke and spilled around me, a wave on a rock, but bodies pressed close, trapping me, gripping me, before I could swing my cutlass even once. I stumbled, and the packed crowd blotted out the sky. And then they had me.
THEY WEREN’T GENTLE.
The people in the crowd all fought to touch me, which might have been agreeable under other circumstances and which, under these circumstances, was not. At all.
Hard hands tore at my clothing, stripping away my coat and boots, belt and scabbard, purse and dagger and silver ear-cuff. A grinning man with no teeth ripped out a hank of my hair and thrust it up for all to see, howling in delight. One of them—fat-fingered, stone-faced—got a hand up my shirt and grabbed a fistful of what he found there. Others just spat on me.
I guess you’d expect me to fight at a time like that. Struggle, thrash, roar, bite, punch heads. But I went limp as a rag doll in their hands, and I didn’t make a noise. There were too many of them, milling around me in a swarming mound, maggots on a corpse. There were so many of them, and they were so fucking strong. Worse even than the touching was the sheer hatred rippling out of them, the venom in their taunts and their blows and their gropes and their spit. It’s exhausting, you know, to be hated with such total intensity, and it left me shaky and numb.
Once, just once, I caught sight of Ariadne through the throng. Two men had her by the wrists, two more by the throat, a host more by shreds and rags of her tattered night-dress. Her face looked nothing like you would expect. Not teary or frightened or even angry. She had a look of fixed, furrow-browed concentration, as if she was very close to solving a riddle that she’d been puzzling over for years.
And the butcher swings, and the hatchet hacks,
And the blood drools out like red red wax,
And the earth is pink with the dying sun,
As the chickens follow him one by one . . .
KONRAD HAD SAID, You can’t spend your whole life hiding. But I’d had a pretty good run, hadn’t I? Somehow I’d managed to convince everyone that I was a captain, a warrior, a leader—hell, a hero. The most pathetic part was, I’d managed to fool myself too.
No more. As they dragged me back through the empty nursery, I was brought back to myself, for what seemed like the first time in years. This was who I was, this shambling, clumsy woman, with shaggy hair and jutting elbows, eyes stupid with panic, tripping over her own feet. This was who I had always been, and I never should have forgotten.
They kicked me down a stairway and then another. I tried to shield my head with my hands as bits of me bounced off hard surfaces, but my torso hit the sharp edge of a stair with a dull meaty crunch. All the breath left my lungs in a violent huh and I fought for air. Twenty hands dragged me to my feet again.
The doors to the Great Hall swung open in front of us, the room cruelly bright with a hundred torches. I saw what was inside not as one single picture, but as a series of jagged flashes, reflections in the shards of a broken bottle. There was the high table, overturned, surrounded by smashed goblets and trenchers. The floor, its flagstones smeared with blood and crushed fruit. Hordes of rebels eating, gorging themselves on platters of meat and white bread, swilling cherry wine so fast that it ran down their necks.
And then the bodies. A woman’s corpse, sprawled across a chair, clothing in shreds, loose threads hanging where someone had ripped away the expensive lace trim. A heap of young men in a corner, stacked up like cordwood, with one white arm hanging free of the pile. I recognized the rings of pink jade that Konrad’s oldest son Karel had been wearing at dinner.
And then there were two large, dark-haired men—they’d both been stabbed in the back, so they must have tried to run, but they hadn’t made it anywhere near the door. I was too numb to feel much, even when I saw the dead men’s faces. Gunnar was on the left, Talon was on the right. Four blue-grey eyes, open and staring at mine.
Ariadne and Regon were behind me, yanked and kicked along in my wake. The rebels dragged all three of us past my brothers’ bodies, past leering men with mouthfuls of rotten teeth, all the way to the dais where the throne sat. That’s when I saw what was left of Konrad.
“Oh, hell,” Ariadne sobbed from behind me, and retched.
I only recognized Konrad by the gold buttons on his shirt-cuffs. The rest of him—face, neck, torso, limbs—was a black, ruined, half-liquid mess. They had doused his whole body in boiling pitch. Spikes driven through his wrists and ankles had held him to the throne during his murder, and, judging from the hideous wounds caused by his
efforts to wrench himself loose, he hadn’t died quick.
Scattered across the blackened body was a mass of white chicken feathers, some of them half-buried in tar, some drifting free.
“His eyes,” Ariadne choked out. “Did you see his eyes?”
“Don’t look, lady,” Regon said. He leaned forward against the arms that held him to block her view. “Just don’t look.”
The hall doors swung open. There were two more rebels, both with drawn swords, and in between them . . .
“Jada!”
My little sister stood two heads shorter than the man on her right. Both men together could have picked her up and pitched her over a barn roof. In spite of my panic and pain, the sight of her sent a jolt of lightning through me. I bucked mightily, flailing in my captors’ hands, kicking and biting at anything I could reach until I ripped my way clear.
“Jada, run! Go, get moving, I’ll hold them off—”
I lurched towards her, dodging between benches and corpses, all the while groping blindly for some kind of weapon. A dagger, a brick, a salad fork—anything. “Jada! Move! Don’t just stand there—get a grip! The balls, Jada! Kick them in the balls!”
A blow from someone’s burly fist sent me down to my knees. Then there was cold steel kissing my throat and someone’s hot breath in my ear, hissing, “This is how it ends for you, bitch, here and now—”
His forearm muscles bunched and the blade began to slide, but a voice cut the air, screaming, “No!”
The knife moved away. I blinked upwards to find Jada in front of me, staring down. No wounds on her yet. I tried again. “Jada, run.”
A smile flickered across her face.
Then came the kick.
It clipped me on the cheekbone, and my vision burst into burning points of light. When the first blaze of agony dimmed, Jada was crouching beside me, face inches from mine. “You don’t talk to me, dog. Not ever.”
Laughing hoots came from the rebels as Jada rose to her feet. I stared at her, unbelieving—her eyes narrowed and she kicked at me again. Her aim was off that time, and I managed to catch the blow on my uninjured shoulder. But the truth of the thing was sinking home.
So. On the plus side, Jada was in no immediate danger of being burned to death by an angry mob. On the minus side, what the fuckety fuck fuck fuck?
While I reeled, someone grabbed my arms and lashed my wrists together in front of me. I didn’t fight it, couldn’t fight it. My chest was shrieking with pain, no matter how shallow I tried to keep my breaths. Two broken ribs, I thought. No, three.
Another rebel hovered close. He was grizzled, his lean face daubed with charcoal, chicken feathers threaded through holes in his jacket.
“I’ll keep her from talking,” he said. His voice was scraped and raspy, as if he’d spent the whole night screaming. He probably had. “I’ll open up a thousand mouths all over her, and none of them’ll say a word.”
Everybody in the room seemed to feel pretty good about this idea, judging from all the shouts of approval, so it was a surprise when Jada snapped, “Not yet.”
Chicken-feather-jacket man bared his teeth. “We swore we’d purge the Isle clean of the Torasan scum! Smoke out the vermin, rip off their stinking hides!”
Howls of agreement met this, but Jada raised her voice over them. “Milo wants this one! You heard him! This one’s his! Once he’s finished with her, you can have her hide. I’ll tie her down for you and make the first cuts. But until then, hands off!”
Jada’s deep tone was identical to the one I used when I was trying to get people to take me seriously. In spite of everything, I almost laughed. She are boss.
“Excuse me,” Ariadne cut in. She’d regained her composure, somehow, even though a man with no teeth was holding her in an iron grip, a billhook quivering near her throat. “You all do know that Jada is a Lady of Torasan herself, right? One of those wicked little chickens you’re so cranky about? I just thought I’d mention it. Since nobody else was bringing it up.”
Jada wheeled on Ariadne. “Quiet, dog.”
“‘Quiet, dog’,” Ariadne repeated, thoughtfully. “Oh, that was really witty. That was just inspired. Do you come up with these clever remarks yourself, or does someone else write your material?”
Jada advanced on her, the skin under her right eye twitching. Just like when I’d met her back in the nursery the previous morning, her whole body was tight and tense. I’d thought then that she was scared. I knew better now. Every line of her was rigid with fury and hate.
“Do you know how many people here would jump at the chance to kill you with their bare hands?” she asked.
“I could ask you the same question. How did you convince these charmers to let you join their club? Did you promise that you would make yourself useful? If so—do you really think they’ll keep you around once your usefulness ends?”
Jada snatched a long knife from her belt. It wasn’t the blunt silver dagger of a Torasan captain, but a fisherman’s fillet knife, wicked sharp and hook-pointed.
Ariadne managed a rusty laugh. “Oh, sweetheart. It’s so easy to get under your skin. You should work on that, if you plan to stay in politics. It’s not all wacky hijinks like betraying your family and getting them murdered. It’s hard work.”
Jada inhaled. “When the time comes, bitch, I will gut you myself.”
“All by yourself? My, my, what a big girl you’re getting to be.”
Regon hissed a warning, but too late. Jada, face flaming, nodded at the man who held Ariadne; he grinned and shoved her hard. She stumbled forwards, straight into Jada’s path, and Jada’s dagger-pommel smashed into her face. Ariadne cried out—she had nerve, but she’d never had a chance to learn how to deal with pain. Jada dealt out more blows, now with an open hand, smacking Ariadne’s face from side to side, until she finally sputtered, “All right, stop it, all right!”
Jada halted and inspected her handiwork. Ariadne’s jaw was already swelling, her bottom lip split open and bloody. With her knife point, Jada caught a stray strand of Ariadne’s hair and flicked it out of the way, then drew the blade lightly down Ariadne’s face, past the corner of her eye and the side of her nose. Ariadne flinched—almost cringed—at the touch, and my stomach turned inside out.
“Jada, stop,” I said—my voice wobbled, I couldn’t help that. “Stop it. Please. You don’t have to go any further. She gets it. She’ll be quiet.”
“Maybe I don’t want her to be quiet yet.” Slowly, Jada traced a line across Ariadne’s throat with the tip of her knife. “Maybe I want her to spend some time begging for the chance to be quiet. Or maybe I want her to make some interesting noises.”
The tension stretched agonizingly, then slackened when Jada thrust her knife back into its sheath. With a deliberate swipe, she wiped her sweaty, bloody hand on the front of Ariadne’s nightdress. “We’ll finish this later. Don’t go anywhere.”
THEY DRAGGED THE three of us—Ariadne, Regon, and me—into a line facing Konrad’s blackened corpse. One by one, they kicked us to our knees.
“You have to stop it,” I whispered at Ariadne, not trying to hide the desperation. “Don’t piss them off. Please don’t piss them off. What in hell am I going to tell your sister if you get yourself killed?”
Ariadne kept her eyes fixed on the flagstones in front of her, where the blood and spit dripping from her swollen lips were pooling into a murky puddle. “Don’t worry about that, captain. I’m pretty sure you won’t have to tell Gwyneth anything.”
A wave of excitement licked through the crowd. Shouts became cheers; hands pounded together in wild applause, and the cheering became a chant: “MI-LO! MI-LO! MI-LO!”
And there he was: Milo, captain of the guard, a tall, muscular figure, loping towards the throne with an easy, unhurried stride. He walked like a man heading home at the end of a tiring day, in spite of the bloody crust that covered each of his arms past the elbow.
Milo mounted the dais, then turned. He said nothing, ordered nothing,
but the sweep of his gaze calmed the room. The crowd fell silent.
Once he had everyone’s full attention, he nudged the foot of the throne with his boot. “Someone get rid of this trash.”
It was no surprise that they jumped to obey him. If I hadn’t been on my knees with a soldier at my back, I might have jumped to obey him. His voice wasn’t very loud, but there was a calm assurance in it that was somehow more compelling than a shout.
Rebels came forward with crowbars and pried the throne loose from its place on the dais, tossing it down the steps. Konrad’s corpse came loose from the throne as it bounced down. Something broke off of it in the fall—a burnt, blackened arm.
They brought up a simple wooden chair for Milo, placing it where the throne used to stand. Seating himself, he pulled off his helmet to expose his bare face. I sucked in a breath when I saw what the helmet had covered until that moment: hooked nose, jutting cheekbones, and a short crop of dark hair, coarse as a horse’s mane.
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