by Vale Aida
He staggered to his feet and pelted after him.
This street was narrower, the doorways low and dingy. All the buildings were dark save one, from which the faint sounds of laughter and music issued. The windows were rimed in red paint, and a lantern cast a gentle roseate glow over the courtyard. At seventeen, he was worldly enough to know what the outside of a brothel looked like, though not the inside. A rickety switchback stair zigzagged across the side of the building from street level to the roof. Savonn must have known it was there. He made straight for it, with Emaris fast gaining on him.
It was excruciating. Their boots pounded like thunderclaps on every step, loud enough to wake the whole street. Someone giggled. Then a latticed window flew open, expelling a boy’s primped head like a cuckoo from a clock, along with a cloud of strong floral perfume. The boy laughed, and made to catch Savonn’s hand as he passed. “Hello, love! I knew it was you! Care to come in for—”
“I’m a little busy,” said Savonn.
He had almost reached the roof. The boy turned his attentions on Emaris, still staggering up the final flight of stairs. “And you, sunflower? Also in a hurry?”
Emaris did not reply, but Savonn faltered for a moment at the top of the steps, and he knew his presence had been betrayed. Savonn did not wait for him. He picked his way across the mess of chimneys and skylights on the rooftops, found another wayward stair three houses down, and descended to the street with Emaris on his heels. Daine’s house was at the end of the road.
When Emaris reached the gate, Savonn had already gone inside. He stopped in the yard for a moment, listening. His shirt was soaked through with rain and perspiration, and his breath seared his lungs in ragged, painful gasps. Savonn was saying something, and a woman was answering—Linn, Daine’s wife, who had looked after Emaris and Shandei when they were small. Emaris recognised the voices, and the urgent prosody of the words, though not their meaning. Cold dread pooled in his stomach. He forced his leaden legs to carry him through the garden, and into the house.
The air was viscous in his nostrils, reluctant to be inhaled. He followed the voices to a back room, the door ajar, a thread of light filtering out through the crack. It swam toward him with dreamlike slowness. His feet barely seemed to touch the ground. Then the door swung all the way open, and the light pounced, flooding over his boots in a wash of gold. The compact figure of his commander appeared in the doorway. “Emaris,” said Savonn softly. “Come with me to the garden for a moment.”
But Emaris, arrested by the smell of strong wine and blood, was looking past him into the room. The lamp was burning low, illuminating a basin of reddish water on the dresser and a pile of bandages on the floor. Hiraen was kneeling by a bed at the far side of the room, with Linn on a stool beside him. On the pillow was a gleam of honey-gold hair.
He pushed past Savonn and went through the door.
He glimpsed Hiraen’s eyes, hollow with shock; he saw the lifeless face on the bed, and the blood spilling through the shirt from the chest wound. Linn stood up abruptly, knocking the stool over. “Oh, gods,” she said, and came towards Emaris with her arms held out.
“Don’t,” said Emaris, much louder than he meant to. “Don’t—”
She moved out of his way. His knees hit the floor.
He had been in a hundred skirmishes. He knew the look and smell of a mortal wound, but all the same he found himself scrabbling at the bandages on the dresser, searching for needle and thread, medicine, anything, until Linn’s fleshy arms came around him and made him stop. The room stank of ruin. Hiraen was crouched beside him, saying something incomprehensible; Savonn was looking on from the foot of the bed, silent for once; Linn was still holding Emaris by the shoulders; and his father, his father was dead.
5
Returning to the manor with three trussed criminals in varying degrees of consciousness, Iyone caused quite a stir. At her command, her guards bound the prisoners to stakes in the yard, within sight of the street. The ensuing interrogation was loud and shrill. By the time Josit arrived, a sizeable crowd of rubberneckers had gathered to watch the proceedings, peering like bright-eyed gnomes between the struts of the front gate.
“This is distasteful,” said Iyone’s mother, looking on from the shelter of the portico. Her father had no stomach for such things, and so had remained indoors. “You could at least have brought them inside.”
“And ruin Father’s rugs?” asked Iyone. The deluge was beginning to lessen. Beneath the captives’ strenuous disavowals, they could both hear the tenor of the crowd’s eager speculation, and the names being bandied about. “Listen for yourself. This works in our favour. It doesn’t even matter who did this. Everyone’ll go to the vote tomorrow thinking Willon Efren paid a rout of third-rate hitmen to murder his rival in the street.”
“He’ll deny it,” said Aretel Safin. Tawny-haired and keen-eyed, she was not a woman to be crossed, though Iyone took inordinate relish from crossing her as often as possible. “And I for one will believe him. Willon isn’t stupid enough to stoop to this. He would find it vulgar.”
There were many things Willon Efren found vulgar, and very few that Savonn Silvertongue did. Iyone pursed her lips. “I know.”
There were a few other things she could have added. But just then a ringing voice shouted a command, and the guards began to chivvy the spectators aside so they could open the gate. “Oh, look,” said Iyone, as a knot of bedraggled figures struggled through the parting crowd. “The errant sons come in from the cold.”
In came Savonn and Hiraen. Between them was a soggy blond boy Iyone recognised, swaddled in both their cloaks. Savonn gazed across the yard, at Josit and the assassins, and Iyone and her mother in the portico. He said, “Do something for him.”
It was clear who he meant. Iyone gazed in fascination at the tearstreaked boy, who had been perfectly fine an hour ago. “He breaks all his toys.”
“Don’t be morbid,” said her mother shortly. She swept over to the trio, took the boy under her arm, and started to lead him towards the house, talking the whole time. “Porridge? A bath?” Iyone heard her suggest. “Both sound good to me. And then, if you like, you can tell me what happened…”
Iyone was not so patient when it came to explanations. She turned an expectant eye on Hiraen. Her brother was so ashen as to be cadaverous, and moved like a sleepwalker in a nightmare; she doubted if she had ever seen him so pale. “Rendell is dead,” he said. Then he drew her behind one of the tall golden columns of the portico, well away from Josit and Savonn, and gave her a concentrated digest of what she had missed.
After that she was no longer amused. By the time she saw him off, still reeling, to break the news to his officers, the audience at the gate was beginning to disperse. She saw why: the guards were carrying away three limp forms, and Savonn was heading towards the portico, wiping down a sword with a rag. Here and there, the wet grass was stained with patches of watery pink. Curtain call. The show was over.
It seemed this was to be a night of disasters. Irritated beyond belief, Iyone asked, “Why did you kill them?”
“It was kinder,” he said. “The Council would have put them to any kind of torture to exonerate themselves.”
“My concerns were more pragmatic,” said Iyone. “They were evidence. Lord Efren and his lot would have wanted to question them… or perhaps there was something you didn’t want them to know?”
She could almost see the cogs turning in his head. They understood each other perfectly. Born within days of each other, she and Savonn had practically been raised as siblings. His own mother, the sharp-tongued Danei Cayn, had had little love to spare for anyone in all her brief sickly life, least of all her son; and neither did Kedris have any patience for him. So he had gravitated to Iyone. Their childhood had been one long string of tricks, schemes and detonations, which Hiraen—a year older—occasionally extinguished, but mostly fuelled. Iyone had lost her taste for the more lavish displays, but Savonn, it appeared, had not.
He quirked a tired smile now, turning towards Josit, who had joined them in the portico. “Deliver me from her. They’ve already been questioned twice, loudly and conspicuously—”
“—like everything else you do,” said Iyone. With care, she added, “Did they kill your deputy?”
A pause. “No.”
This would be vexing. “You believe them?”
“Yes.”
He did not elaborate. “So do I,” said Josit. Her gaze lingered on Iyone, narrow and thoughtful. “The man Rendell, however beloved, was of no import. Willon Efren did not need to kill him.”
Before her rise to the Council, Josit had tutored them both. Hiraen, too, when he could be persuaded to sit still long enough. Languages, lore, mathematics, music: she knew it all. If she was honest, Iyone had to admit that she had fashioned herself in the mould of Josit Ansa, whose eyes had beheld Marguerit of Sarei face to face, whose perpetually unimpressed expression declared that she had seen and survived horrors worse than these. “Willon didn’t hire these men,” said Iyone. She would wager her life on it. “But if you embroil him in scandal, I’d be astonished if he didn’t encourage a second attempt. You should be careful.”
To her consternation, faint triumph lit up Savonn’s exhausted face. “Alas for Willon,” he said softly. “This time tomorrow, I shall be long gone with my army. In another fortnight, I will be far in the mountains…” Josit had taken a sudden step forward. “What, my lady? Does this astonish you?”
Having lived in each other’s pockets for so long, there was very little they could not say without words. With reluctant admiration, Iyone saw the pieces fall into place. “You never meant to be Governor,” she said. Of course not. Over the years Savonn had cast himself in a series of increasingly absurd roles to please his father, a military commander being the most hilarious of all, but this was far-fetched even for him. “All that noise and nonsense—the stunt at the funeral, the business with the Council—that was just a diversion. You’re mustering an army to take into the Farfallens.”
“Warmongering,” agreed Savonn, with profound satisfaction. “There is a killer to be caught, and I shall catch him.”
Iyone gazed at their old tutor. From the first, she had known that this ludicrous challenge to Lord Efren had been devised by Josit, the freedwoman he so despised, and sponsored and nurtured by her own father Lord Lucien. But even Josit, it was clear, had not expected this. “What about the one loose in Cassarah now?” she asked. Her voice was less tranquil than usual. “The one who murdered your friend? Do you not care?”
“Josit, my dear,” said Savonn. “You should know by now I only pretend not to care about things. Rendell had two children. This street thug is their jurisdiction. The one in the Farfallens is mine.”
“But why defy the Council then?” asked Iyone. It was an academic question, but one ought never leave a puzzle unsolved. “Why anger Lord Efren?”
Savonn regarded them both. He was about as tall as Iyone. Incongruously, Josit came just up to their chins, though Iyone felt she had been looking up to her all her life. “Because I needed to call an assembly of the citizens. Any other way, the Council would have found some pretext to arrest me before I could begin. I am, after all”—he smiled, cold-eyed—“something of a public menace.”
That was an understatement. They all still remembered the incident with the monkeys. “So what now?” asked Josit. She never shouted, but Iyone had made a study of her long enough to know the signs of anger: the stiffness of her carriage, the tightening of the exquisite mouth. “Who else will be Governor but Willon Efren?”
Savonn’s face was a peaceable mask. “Then I wish him the best of it. It was funny, but no longer.” He inclined his head to Josit. “Excuse me, my lady. I have to see to my squire.”
He headed into the house. Josit stared after him, her pale eyes wider than usual. Then she turned to Iyone. “I will not have that old fool as Governor of Cassarah.”
History books thrived on moments like these, thought Iyone. People like Josit multipled their chapters and fattened them on strife. “Why?” she asked. There was a strange thrill creeping along the rungs of her spine. “Because he looks down on you? Because he will afford you no power of your own? Or because he is not Kedris?”
Josit had loved the late Governor, she knew. Cassarah, with her graceful bridges and fragrant gardens, was the domain they had built together, side by side all these years. Iyone switched to Saraian, picked up in Josit’s schoolroom long ago. “Just because you ruled through the father doesn’t mean you can rule through the son,” she said. “Find another avenue.”
The anger was tidied away as fast as it had manifested, leaving Josit’s expression as smooth and impeccable as ever. “And what avenue will you use?” she asked. “My restless little hatchling?”
Here, in the lucid, canny eyes, was a puzzle Iyone had never been able to solve. “It has nothing to do with me. You want to rule.”
“And do you not,” said Josit, “when you were my pupil?”
She brushed some of Iyone’s wet hair out of her face, tucking it behind her ear. “I think,” she added, “between the two of us, we can deal with the Council.”
Iyone said nothing. Without waiting for a response, Josit turned towards the gate. “By the way,” she called, “someone should break the news to the dead man’s daughter.”
6
Shandei had had the news already, from Linn. By daybreak she was in the back room of the couple’s little cottage, gazing down at the man on the bed, while in another world the bells tolled to summon the city to the assembly. She barely heard them, nor could she have cared less. Her father was dead.
It had been the first truth of her life, held with iron-forged certainty, that he would be killed in battle someday. He was a soldier, and that was what soldiers did: they died. “And then, my pup,” he used to say, he who had taught her to fight and—if need be—to kill, “you shall be mistress of the household, and watch over your little brother, and the two of you will be fiercer warriors than I ever was.”
It was good and righteous to die in a fair fight. This, whatever it had been, was anything but fair.
“Hiraen found him,” Linn told her. “He sent for Daine, and they brought him here together. We did what we could.”
“Did he say anything?” Shandei asked. Her nose was blocked and swollen, and she sounded stupidly childish.
Linn shook her head. “He was beyond that, love. I’m sorry.”
There was only one wound, a small, deep puncture near the midline of his chest, the sort made with a narrow blade at close quarters. “But he was stabbed from the front. He would have seen who it was.”
“He didn’t fight back,” said Linn. She picked something up from the dresser and showed it to Shandei. It was her father’s dagger, the one with the long ivory handle, that he always kept in his boot. “It was in his hand, but not bloody.”
“The rain would have washed it clean,” said Shandei. They had found him in a side alley near the Hydrangea Bridge. He had had no reason to detour there on his way to the Efrens’ unless he thought he had been followed, and tried to shake off his pursuit. There must have been many of them. Her father, who frequently sparred with both his children at once and came away victorious, could not have been felled by a single man. But in that case, why had they not stabbed him again? Why flee before he was dead, knowing he had seen them, and might live long enough to reveal their identities?
Gently, Linn said, “It could be the same lot that assailed the Captain last night. Word is that the Council didn’t want him to speak today.”
Nobody with sense ever wanted Savonn to speak. Perhaps Willon Efren had been troubled by the rumours of Saraians in the Farfallens. Perhaps he wanted to silence the Silvertongue and his supporters once and for all. She heard again the diviner’s voice, echoing silkily in the stairwell. Who can guess? Why do people like him do anything?
Her jaw set, she took the dagger from Linn and put it on her own bel
t. “In that case,” she said, with a last look at her father, “we had better go and see what he has to say, hadn’t we?”
* * *
Approaching the Arena, she heard the noise from three streets away. Every bench was packed full, and people were standing or sitting on the steps, getting in the way as she tried to descend. These were the citizens of Cassarah, those—like her—born to at least one native parent, joined by the many denizens of the vassal towns and villages who had been granted citizenship for some contribution or other. The lowest rings, closest to the stage, were reserved for the councillors and their households. Next came the city guard, the mailed fist and shield of Cassarah, some ten thousand strong, spears and cuirasses flashing as the early sun kissed the lip of the Arena. With them were the men of Betronett, conspicuous in the black cloaks they had put on for their Second Captain, with their bows slung over their shoulders and their quivers at their sides. Civilians in silks and chiffon and cotton filled the rest of the theatre, every one gabbling to their neighbour. Their eyes followed her as she went down the steps, drawn by the mourning veil she had donned once more. She heard what they were saying. Killed by the Council, they say! And the Silvertongue assailed in the night!
Not long ago they had been gossiping about another death. But there would be no splendid funeral for her father, who was neither a great lord nor a rich man, only a soldier who had done his best for his family. No grandiloquent oration, no chorus of Ceriyes, the attendants of a wrongful death…
Someone said, “Shandei!”
It was Emaris. Under the deep black of his hood, his eyes were red-rimmed, but the rest of his face was blanched of all colour. He came up the steps towards her, and to her own surprise, she flung out her arms and embraced him. “They told me I could come,” he said into her hair, as if he thought she might turn him away. “We’re sitting over there.”