by Vale Aida
“I still can’t believe you’re going through with it,” said Emaris, buckling on his own sword. “Have you written a speech?”
“On my shirtsleeves, like Willon Efren? Heaven forfend.”
Emaris grinned. “Recite a bit for me.”
Savonn arched a single brow. It was a trick Emaris frequently tried to approximate in the mirror, with little success. “Lightning in a bottle, my dear. If I let it out, you’ll have to catch it and put it back.”
Everyone said Emaris was insolent, the Captain most of all. But Savonn had gotten rid of two other squires before him, claiming they bored him to tears, so perhaps insolence was not a bad thing. Bearing his father’s constant admonishments in mind, Emaris had outlasted his predecessors at the Bitten Hill, where the Betronett company was based; become the veteran of a hundred skirmishes (if one rounded up), and received a promise that he would be promoted to patrol leader as soon as he came of age. Born the year of the great victory at the Morivant, eighteen had always seemed a long way off to him, and longer than usual tonight.
He arranged his face into a sulk. “I’m not supposed to be there tomorrow. You might at least let me hear a little. Or I’ll just assume Willon out-talked you.”
“False assumptions,” said Savonn, “are the most dangerous thing in the world. Also the most useful, but that’s beside the point. Anyway, you’re going to sneak in.”
“How do you know?”
“Because that’s what I’d do.”
“I thought of disguising myself, like you,” said Emaris, as they stepped out into the drafty hallway. “But Shandei said I could just get there early and hide in the catacomb before anyone else arrives. Like a stowaway.”
Savonn considered him, his head cocked like a bird’s. Laugh lines were mustering around the arches of his mouth. “Your whole family terrifies me,” he said. “Escort me to the Safins’. Then you have my leave to make whatever dispositions you please.”
The citadel was a hollow hulk of thick stone walls and echoing hallways, reaching as far below ground as it did above. Built in Ederen’s day to house the colonists who had come to Falwyn in their ships a thousand years ago, it could probably have sheltered the entire city’s populace with room to spare. But these days it was uninhabited, though the Council still convened on the premises. The Governor had lived here, but he was dead; and it was well known that Savonn preferred to spend his nights at the Safins’ rather than use his own apartments down the hall. They moved through the silent rooms without meeting anyone, ghosting past dark doorways that led into empty offices, archives full of forgotten books and solars dusty with disuse. A pair of sentries saluted Savonn as they crossed the drawbridge over the spiked moat, and passed beneath the portcullis into the square.
It was a starless night, cloudy and overcast. A sharp-edged wind was just beginning to pick up. The watchmen’s lamps bobbed on the walls, tiny and indistinct, like ghost-lights on a marsh. Emaris drew his cloak more closely around him. “Do you believe in spirits, Savonn?”
The Captain glanced at him sideways. He hadn’t far to look down now. By the end of the year, Emaris was sure to surpass him in height. “Scared?”
“Curious.”
He had been thinking of the Ceriyes, and the bier he had escorted from Medrai with its grim burden. He had wept at the dead Governor’s side. So had his father, and everybody else. Except Savonn, of course, who had merely been harder to read than usual, and displayed the annoying tendency to vanish whenever Emaris or anyone was looking for him.
“No,” said Savonn, after a pause. “I don’t.”
The rain began to fall as they left the main street. Over the generations, as the people grew less reverent of their rulers, the shops and houses had crept closer and closer to the citadel. Savonn led them onto a knock-kneed alley that ran between jumbles of buildings, tailors and glaziers and fletchers piled almost on top of one another like the crates they had just seen packed. The upper stories leaned so close together that in some places they almost touched, keeping the street beneath dry. A boy pushed past them, carrying a long wooden plank on his shoulder; a woman with a wagon shooed them out of the way. They passed under the Lily Bridge, fragrant as perfume, and voices and laughter began to drift to them from the nearby night bazaar.
They were on the Street of Figs. Most of the windows were dark, but here and there an eye of light looked out over the variegated outlines of roofs and chimneys where someone was sleepless in an upper room. Savonn had drawn ahead, his head bent against the drumming rain. Emaris kept his eyes on his feet, picking his way across the wet cobbles. If he fell on his face, Savonn was sure to laugh unmercifully.
“Sir,” said an unexpected voice several feet off, muffled by the downpour. “Spare a copper? Copper for my sick child?”
Emaris looked up, his wet hair dripping into his eyes. A hooded figure had detached from the shadows under the slanting roofs and approached Savonn with its palm out. In the dark, this was not the sort of place where one ought to fumble for one’s purse, as Savonn well knew. “I haven’t any,” Emaris heard him say. The lines of his silhouette were pithy and taut. “Try the bazaar.”
The panhandler caught at Savonn’s arm. To Emaris’s dismay, two other figures coalesced from the darkness farther down the street. “Just a copper, sir,” said the first man. “Just the one. Have a heart.”
“Unhand me,” said Savonn pleasantly. “Or I will unhand you.”
Emaris was running, skidding and sliding on the cobblestones, even before the beggar’s blade was out. Savonn side-stepped. The blow went wide. Emaris barrelled past them, yanking his sword from its sheath to meet the foremost of the other assailants. Under this man’s hood were wide-set eyes and flaring nostrils, and in his hand was a long-handled knife that flashed up towards his face. Emaris ducked under the blade. “Get back from him!”
He brought his own sword down in a controlled arc, not meaning to hit anything vital, just to hurt and scare the ruffian off. The blade tore through the man’s cloak and overshirt, and bit into mail.
Emaris recoiled as the knife descended again, nearly lancing his eye. Only this afternoon Shandei had knocked him into the dirt half a dozen times. “Help!” he shouted. “Help! Murder! Assassins!”
The yell gave his enemy pause. Emaris danced away from the blade, put his head down, and charged like a bull. He was not yet tall, but in the past year his shoulders had started to fill out. He smashed headlong into the man, knocking the breath from his own lungs, and allowed the momentum to carry them both into the wall of the nearest house. His sword clattered away somewhere. Savonn would give him hell for that. Shandei, too. His foe drew back his arm, so close Emaris could see the specks of rust on the edge of his knife. As he prepared to stab, Emaris caught his wrist in both hands and forced it back, slamming it against the wall again and again in a grip slippery with sweat. The man grunted. A booted foot interposed itself between them, sharp against Emaris’s shin, but he held on. Then at last the man opened his hand with a cry, and the knife fell twinkling to the road.
Thereafter Emaris fought like his sister: a hook to the jaw, a knee to the groin, an elbow to the back, and the man dropped like a millstone to the ground. Emaris kicked the knife away and turned back to Savonn.
Someone was hollering from a window, and people were running down the street towards them. His shout must have brought them from the bazaar. The first man was on the ground, with a slim silver knife sticking out of his thigh. Savonn always kept a good number of sharp objects on his person. The other fellow was staggering to his feet several paces away, bleeding from the nose and favouring one ankle. Emaris came up behind him and kicked him in the bad leg. As he went down with a howl, Emaris kicked him again in the head, for luck.
Savonn came over, surveying the scene through half-lidded eyes. “You dropped your sword,” he observed.
A throng of gawkers was gathering around them, and doors and windows were opening, tesselating the cobbles with squares of lamp
light. “It’s Savonn!” someone shouted from above. “Lord Silvertongue!”
Savonn’s gaze strayed upward for a moment. Then it returned to settle on Emaris, unrelenting. “I let it fall,” said Emaris. “Not enough room to swing.”
“Good call.”
The crowd was stirring, the bystanders jostled aside by an influx of new arrivals. These men were clad in steel cuirasses, swords gleaming at their sides. Emaris took an involuntary step towards Savonn. Then the ranks parted as their leader came forward into the light, and he saw that it was a woman.
In the first moment of recognition, he let out a sharp exhale, light-headed with relief. It was Iyone Safin, one of the pillars of Savonn’s constantly changing group of friends. Under the canopy two maids carried to shield her from the rain, she was tall and full-figured with fair, freckled skin, the brown Safin hair tossed in careless waves over one shoulder. She looked around, taking in the three prone forms, the open windows, the excited faces. “Your man Daine’s just called at the manor, looking for you,” she said. “What have you got up to now?”
“A little street brawl,” said Savonn, with the air of a local guide pointing out the obvious. “Behold me in my hour of victory, sister, surrounded by the bodies of the slain.”
They were not, in fact, brother and sister. It was an endearment the Captain afforded Iyone, and Iyone alone, sometimes with the gravity of an honorific, other times—as now—with the lilt of a shared jibe. “Slain?” she asked, brow lifted. “And then risen again, I suppose?”
One of the assassins was groaning. Savonn grinned, like a child caught in a lie. “No, they’re not dead. My squire just got a little overzealous.” He narrowed his eyes at Emaris. “You’re not hurt?”
Emaris had gotten his breath back. “No,” he said. He retrieved his sword from where it had fallen, and tried not to clutch it too hard.
At Iyone’s command, someone brought a cresset. She held it high over their heads, illuminating the would-be assassins. “Who are they?”
The onlookers stirred and murmured, unsettled by the sight. “Let’s ask them,” said Savonn.
Emaris had knocked two of the men unconscious. The third, the one Savonn had knifed, lay in a puddle of rain and other things. Savonn held out his hand, and Emaris hurried to place his sword in it. He watched, uneasy, as Savonn spun the blade with a theatrical flourish and rested it point down on the man’s exposed throat. “Do you try to knife everyone who doesn’t give you money, or am I the exception?”
The man moaned. The knife-hilt was a wicked glitter against the rough fabric of his trousers. Again, Iyone said, “Daine is looking for you.”
“Oh, come on, there’s an audience,” said Savonn. “Let me play. Go on, sir. I asked you a question.”
He bore down on the hilt of the sword, and a crimson bead appeared on the man’s neck, growing lengthwise and spilling like a tear onto his shirt. The crowd oohed and sighed. The man gibbered a little, trying without success to wriggle away from the point of the blade. “Move, and I’ll take off an arm,” said Savonn, utterly cordial. “Stay silent, and I’ll take both. You will run out of limbs before I run out of patience.”
The sweeter the voice, the greater the danger. Emaris stared, his heart in his teeth, as the man wheezed. “Gods have mercy. Never meant—never meant no offense—”
“You never meant to kill me?” asked Savonn, incredulous.
“I think he means it wasn’t personal,” Emaris suggested. Savonn looked at him, and he clamped his mouth shut.
“Offered me money,” the man rasped. “So much money—twelve drochii, and twelve more when the deed was done—”
“What deed?” asked Emaris.
The man swallowed hard. In the firelight, Emaris saw the lump in his throat bob up and down. Whatever he had been paid, it was insufficient to buy his silence when confronted by Savonn Silvertongue with death in his hand. “To see that you were dead by dawn tomorrow, milord. He said you went to the Safins’ every night, and we were to waylay you in the street. This street, he said, before the bazaar.”
A gusting wind had started up, blowing the rain sideways and making the shadows rear and dance in the struggling firelight. Emaris found he had stepped close to Savonn again. “Someone didn’t want you to speak at the assembly,” said Iyone, looking far more amused than the situation warranted. “The Council couldn’t afford decent assassins?”
At this, the buzzing of the spectators rose sharply to a drone. The Safin guards exchanged looks. Emaris shifted his weight from foot to foot. Since nobody seemed to be asking the obvious question, he said, “Who paid you?”
“I don’t know, sir,” the man sobbed. “Some man in a cloak and hood. Didn’t give us a name, and I couldn’t see his face. He was only a go-between, I reckon. Rich folk don’t talk to the likes of us.”
“His voice?” asked Iyone. “Describe it.”
A long, hiccoughing breath. “How do you describe a voice? It was a regular man’s voice, milady—a bit soft, I’d say, because he didn’t want to be overheard. I’d know it if I heard it again.”
Iyone gave Savonn a satirical smile. “And if he can change his voice?”
The man wrung his hands. “Only d-demons can change their voices, milady. Please, please have mercy. I have children.”
“I,” said Savonn, after a long look at Iyone, “am worn to the bones from hearing about your children. Iyone, will you have your men bind these creatures and take them away? Not the citadel dungeon. Someplace secure.”
“My house,” said Iyone, sounding resigned. Someone had tossed down a length of rope from above. As the guards swung into action, she stepped out from under the canopy and put her head close to Savonn’s, not quite touching him. Emaris was just close enough to catch her words. “Josit is there, and my father. They’ll want to question this fellow.”
“He is all theirs,” said Savonn. His eyes were crinkled in bemusement. “I am offended, sister dear, that you think I would be so obvious.”
“Just testing a conjecture,” said Iyone. “It would be so handy for you if Willon Efren were accused of murder. We should always be thorough, shouldn’t we? I will be at the house.” And releasing him from her owlish, smiling gaze, she turned to go.
Emaris stayed where he was, confused and uncertain, until Savonn stepped back and collided with him. The Captain frowned, though not angrily. “And you were so talkative just now. Scared?”
It was the second time that night the question had been asked. “No,” said Emaris, so quickly he knew he might as well have said yes.
“Remind me one day,” said Savonn, “to teach you how to lie.”
The crowd had not dispersed with the Safins. On the contrary, more windows were coming open, and people in nightgowns had come out to watch from their doorways all along the street. There was a flurry of activity at the junction, and then someone pushed their way to the front. “Savonn? Savonn?”
“Here,” said Emaris.
It was Daine, one of Savonn’s officers: a dark, thickset man about his father’s age, his bald pate gleaming in the rain. He shoved through a cluster of protesting silk merchants and made straight for them. At the first sound of his voice, Savonn had already begun to move towards him, Emaris’s sword still in hand. “Iyone said you wanted me?”
Daine glanced at Emaris, and then took Savonn’s arm as Iyone had not done, drawing him aside to whisper in his ear. Savonn went rigid, and Daine let go. Already chilled, Emaris felt another cold pincer wrap around his insides. This was not the Betronett way. Orders were shouted across the cookfires; gossip was shared liberally; even wounds were bound up under the open sky. He moved closer, needing to know. “—got to come,” Daine was saying, urgent and rapid. “Hiraen took him to my house. It was the closest. My wife’s with him now.”
Savonn had gone very still. “Is it bad?”
“He hasn’t much time,” Daine said. “It might be over already.”
Savonn turned. Emaris fell back a pace, but no
admonishment came. Savonn only looked at him blankly, eyes unfocused. He put his hands in his pockets to stop them from shaking.
“I’ll run,” said Savonn. “Stay with the boy.”
He thrust the sword hilt-first into Daine’s hands and was gone without another word, stepping past Emaris and slipping silently through the mass of bystanders. Hands caught at his sleeves as he went, and someone called his name, but he paid them no heed. As he got free of the crowd, Emaris saw with inexplicable terror that he did, in fact, break into a run.
“Come on, boy,” said Daine.
But Emaris was not listening. He had started to shiver. No one had called him boy since his first skirmish, no one but Shandei and their father. Something had happened.
“Excuse me,” he said, and set off at a sprint.
Savonn had had a good head start, and some superstitious fear, cold and insidious, prevented Emaris from calling out. They had reached the junction. But instead of cutting through the bazaar towards the Safin manor, Savonn turned right, heading for the sleeping houses of the Street of Vines. Emaris pounded after him, vaulting a cart full of hay and nearly falling over a homeless vagrant and his mat as he rounded the corner at full tilt. Savonn was running lightly, his booted feet making no sound as he swung up onto a low brick wall and down the other side. If they were headed for Daine’s house, it was not far. Why the hurry?
Savonn ducked into a narrow lane behind a row of big houses and swarmed over a fence into somebody’s courtyard, and Emaris followed suit, skidding on the wet grass. The air here smelled like moist earth and blooming rainflowers. Emaris tripped over a loose brick in the dark, flailed, and managed to catch himself against the wall of a shed. A dog barked at the racket; a guard burst out of the shed with a spear. Emaris swerved around him, narrowly missing the gaping mouth of a well, and threw himself up the opposite fence. He landed hard on a knee in the grass on the other side. Savonn was twenty paces away, maybe thirty—too far for Emaris to help if there were more assassins waiting in the shadows.