by Vale Aida
Her brother had been a frequent guest at the Second Captain’s home, but Iyone herself had never visited. The walk across the city was vexingly long, and, after the events of the previous night, vaguely nerve-wracking in the dark. The white-roofed house that now belonged to Shandei was quiet, and all the windows were unlit; but as Iyone stood listening in the shadows on the street, a curious, regular beat of thuds and twangs drifted to her from the backyard.
Stepping cautiously, she went round the house, past the fragrant hedges and herb beds, and found Shandei shooting arrows into a straw man.
They had met but twice, both times under harried circumstances. She had never noticed how lively Shandei’s eyes were, how she moved from the hip and balanced her weight on the balls of her feet like a cheetah about to spring. Her bright hair was pinned in a bun this time, the pull of her arm straight and strong. Her bow was a recurve like Hiraen’s, and every arrow struck home in the chest of the straw target.
Without turning around, Shandei said, “I could teach you if you wanted.”
In her muddled memories, the Thorn’s voice was a gruff rasp. Shandei’s, sweet and clear, was incongruent enough to break Iyone out of her reverie. “Hiraen tried,” she said. “I’m afraid he gave up after I shot him in his hat-pin.”
“Accidentally?”
“That’s what I told him.”
Shandei lowered the bow and came, half smiling, across the yard. Her roving eyes took in the oversized labourer’s work-shirt and patched trousers Iyone was wearing, and her gaze settled somewhere over Iyone’s left shoulder, as if in a deliberate effort not to stare. Her voice was not as steady as her hands on the bow—on Iyone’s neck—had been. “I’m sorry. It was the only thing I could think to do, when I heard you were in trouble with the Efrens. I—I didn’t hurt you?”
This would be complicated. In a fair world Iyone would have met Shandei at a ball, or a play, or in passing at the bazaar, and Hiraen and Savonn would have had nothing to do with it. Perhaps they would have found themselves eyeing the same brooch; and Iyone, in a fit of star-struck generosity, would have bought it for Shandei and pinned it on her cloak just to make her blush. It could have been so simple. But she had stopped believing in fairness a long time ago.
“Not in the least,” she said at last. “In fact, it was the most fun I’ve had since Savonn left town.” Distantly, she remembered what she had come for. “I promised to call on you after Midsummer. How rude of me to be so tardy.”
“You were being followed,” said Shandei. Her eyes flitted up to capture Iyone’s, then darted away again. “Hence the disguise.”
“Yes,” said Iyone. “Surely you’ve worked out by now that Josit is the Thorn?”
She saw she was mistaken. The look on Shandei’s face transitioned from wrong-footed surprise to wide-eyed hurt to thin-lipped indignation, a fine-grained triptych under sterling moonlight. “But… she was kind to me. She even came to my father’s funeral. Why would she…”
Justice is not kindness, Iyone remembered. Particularly if the justice was not meant for you. “Is that a rhetorical question?”
“No,” said Shandei. “Yes. No.”
“Quite simply,” said Iyone, “she was stalling the Efrens.”
In the perfumed hush of the garden, she found it was easy to be patient. “Willon has been too distracted to make another bid for power. His supporters have all been scared off. If Savonn waltzed back home tonight, he would find himself declared Governor of Cassarah and High Commander of the army before he could so much as pull out one of his wigs. The only problem, really, is that the poor fellow has no interest in power except as a private joke.”
“I see,” said Shandei slowly, in the voice of one who didn’t see at all.
“What, it doesn’t make sense?”
“No,” said Shandei. “It makes perfect sense. That’s the problem.” She looked down at the bow in her hands. “I thought…”
“We all thought many things about Josit,” said Iyone. She could have gone on, but it was beginning to occur to her that she had been talking a lot, at volume, and rather breathlessly. That was the trouble with her. She knew too much, and wasn’t subtle enough. It came of being friends with Savonn. Bad chess, Josit would say.
“I thought,” said Shandei, “she fancied herself some kind of avenging spirit. But she just needed a scapegoat, didn’t she? Her ladyship’s put all her arrows in Lord Silvertongue’s quiver, and now she has to make him fire them, one way or another.”
Once more she met Iyone’s gaze, and this time held it. “If you ask me, she looked the wrong way. You would make a much better ruler than Savonn.”
“Most people would,” said Iyone dryly. Eager not to be sidetracked, she added, “You should also know that my father is leading a host into the Farfallens. The Council thinks there will be war.”
Shandei took a step forward. “Oh, gods.”
Instinctively, Iyone reached out a hand to reassure her. Then she withdrew it with a jerk, disconcerted, when it brushed against Shandei’s own, outstretched in the same palliative gesture. The look on Shandei’s face, which she had assumed to be fear, instead transpired to be concern. Off-balance again, Iyone realised what she had forgotten: that Shandei, a soldier’s daughter, knew exactly what it was to fear for her kin; that her own brother, so much younger than Hiraen and Savonn, was deep in the Farfallens himself, in far more danger than Lord Lucien was likely to see.
Iyone said, “It doesn’t matter. What I came here to say was—”
“Of course it matters, don’t be—”
“—was,” said Iyone firmly, “that this is a development that suits everyone. My father is concerned about Hiraen. Josit is concerned about Savonn. Willon is concerned about himself, and anyone who might impede his precious ambitions. It will please him only too well to see my father off to the Farfallens. So our brothers will get the help they need, and…”
“And you?” asked Shandei.
“And I,” said Iyone, “get to smuggle you away, far out of Josit’s reach.”
The cricket continued to scream. With Josit, one played chess. With Savonn, it was poker. With Shandei, whose idea of helping people consisted of stalking them down and strangling them half to death, Iyone was at a loss, feeling her way from toehold to toehold up a sheer rock face. Shandei said, “And if I don’t want to be smuggled away?”
“It would be annoying,” said Iyone, “to be thwarted on all fronts. I’m sure I’ll think of something else. I just thought, since yours was the life she was risking, you might like to help me strike a blow against her.” She paused. “Find some leverage, so to speak.”
Shandei frowned. “What leverage?”
Using as few words as possible, Iyone explained the situation with Josit. When Shandei stared, eyes alight with curiosity, she knew she had won. “Marguerit’s sister! Surely not!”
In spite of herself, Iyone was smiling. “If I’d known you liked gossip, I would have led with this,” she said. “I wonder which alarms you more: the prospect of Willon as Governor, or Josit as Queen of Sarei?”
“Both,” said Shandei flatly. She kicked off her shoes and sat down on the porch stoop, the bow laid across her lap like an infant. After a moment, Iyone joined her. The moonlight peered through the foliage to cast diaphanous shadow-webs at their feet, and overhead, a night bird hooted. “You want me to visit this convent. To dig out this child of hers.”
“That’s an indelicate verb.”
“But this is an indelicate job,” said Shandei. “Do you really think she’ll stop if we find the child? What if she was telling the truth, and it was stillborn? What if she doesn’t care either way?”
“She does,” said Iyone. At the back of her mind, the crash of the harpsichord still resounded. “I’ve never seen her so angry before.”
“That’s because you’re poking your nose into her personal affairs,” said Shandei, with the air of a schoolmistress haranguing a very slow student. “It’s a dead child, not
some riddle for you to solve. We’re being terribly rude.”
“So we are.”
Shandei scrubbed the back of her hand across her face. “It’s just,” she said, “do we need to get in her way? She’s tormenting the Efrens. They’re hardly innocent.”
Looking down at her booted feet next to Shandei’s bare ones, Iyone realised where she was going wrong. Shandei’s objection had very little to do with Josit, and everything to do with her blood feud. She did not want to leave Cassarah, because as far as she was concerned, she had to kill Willon. And it was beyond Iyone to explain that she didn’t have to, because it was not, in fact, Willon who had slain the Second Captain.
“She’s using you,” she said.
“I’m not innocent,” said Shandei. She drew her big toe in a vicious arc across the grass, and one or two blades went flying. “Vesmer died because of me. Josit did that too, didn’t she? I thought I saw someone on the Rose Bridge that night. If I hadn’t gone up there—”
“For heaven’s sake,” said Iyone. Shandei was beginning to remind her of Hiraen. “You can’t take the world’s ills on your shoulders. Josit does whatever she pleases. Sooner or later he would have died some other way.”
“Maybe,” said Shandei. “But I thought—”
She stared down at her hands. “I thought maybe the Ceriyes killed him for me. It all felt very righteous, even if it was horrible. But now I know it was just Josit, there’s nothing righteous about it at all. He’s just one more dead man.”
It took Iyone a moment to remember that—for many people—the gods were real, and existed outside of books and temples. So much about Shandei was unexpected. “No one’s innocent,” said Iyone. “Neither am I. So, as a rule, I don’t factor such things into my decisions.”
“Then why are you doing this?”
Gods, if she only knew. “It’s just like you said. I’m trying to solve a riddle. Besides, I grow enamoured of girls who knock me down in dark alleys and give me roses.”
Momentarily, Shandei struggled to keep a straight face, the curves of her mouth tightening. Then she gave in, and grinned, and dropped her face into her upturned palms. “That’s unfair. You’re no better than Josit.”
“Of course not,” said Iyone. There was a strange feeling in her stomach, akin to the sensation one felt when missing a step on the stairs. “I would be overjoyed to possess a thimble-cup of her brilliance. Will you help me or not?”
Shandei tore a hand through her hair, pulling some of it loose from its bun. “Fine,” she said, sitting upright again. “I’ll visit your convent. I’ll find this child. And then it will be your turn to give me roses.”
Victory: ever elusive, and sweet enough to always be worth the chasing. “My dear,” said Iyone, giddy with triumph, “right now, I could be persuaded to give you an entire rose hedge and all the thorns in it.”
17
Deep in the Farfallens, summer was feeble and quick to flee, and fall was unheard of. The yard at Onaressi underwent an overnight transformation from muddy and malodorous to frosty and hard, and by the time the garrison woke in the morning to find the crenellations of the ramparts gilded with fresh coats of glittering ice, Anyas already regretted agreeing to stay behind. The Captain must have reached Astorre by then, and no doubt he was safe and warm, going to a different fancy ball every night.
“Or dead,” said Poldam, his lieutenant, who was so dour it actually cheered one up to talk to him. They were warming their hands at a brazier on the ringwall above the postern gate, sourly eyeing the ballooning clouds. It was just before dawn, and the stars were warmthless pinpricks against a violet sky. “It’s hard work, it is, being dead. All them pleas and prayers to answer, and the odd haunting, and there ain’t no pay for that.”
Anyas did not like to think of Savonn being dead. Sure, things had been easier under the old Captain—one always knew where one stood with Merrott, even if he was blunt and irritable at the best of times—but Savonn had proven a frighteningly competent leader under the theatre-boy gilding, and it was hard not to admire him. “Huh,” he said, distracted. It was too cold for speech. The sentries he had posted along the wall were all walking fast to stay warm, breath puffing around their blue faces in waiflike clouds.
“And,” said Poldam, gathering steam for a good rant, “if the Captain doesn’t come back before the snow sets in, he won’t get through again till spring. We best hope them Astorrians are feeling hospitable. Else they’ll be living off their boot leather by then.”
“No one eats boot leather,” piped up young Cerris. “That’s only in stories. They’d eat each other first.”
“No one’d eat you,” said Poldam gloomily. “You’ve got no meat on you to speak of.”
Just then Anyas froze; or at least, the parts of him that were not already frozen did. He thought he had heard something. “Shut up for a moment.”
Trained to a fault despite their grousing, they fell silent at once. The coals sizzled in the brazier, and the wind, ever-present, moaned its dirge between the white-veiled mountains. The more imaginative men sometimes said they could still hear the voices of the Saraians they had killed on Midsummer, a sacred night, their death-cries trapped to echo up and down the Pass for all eternity. Perhaps Anyas, too, was growing superstitious. But then he heard it again—a broken call, faint on the wind—and all doubt fled.
They exchanged looks. Anyas fetched a lantern and leaned out over the ringwall as far as he could, peering out across the craggy overhang. “Who’s there?”
Illuminated and exposed on the wall, he knew he made a fine target for archers lying in wait. But the lantern-light revealed nothing besides the scrubby grass, pockmarked here and there by patches of frost. Then the shadows stirred, and a hand came into view near the door, stretched towards the light in entreaty. “Help,” cried a reedy voice, barely audible beneath the howling wind. “Help me!”
A fist pounded on the postern. Then it stopped, as if the supplicant had run out of strength. Anyas shoved the lantern into Poldam’s hands and headed to the stairs. “Open the door!”
The two sentries at the postern were already sliding back the bolts, spears couched, when he reached ground level with Poldam and Cerris jogging behind him. The door creaked half an inch ajar, then screamed all the way open as the wind caught it in its grasp. Anyas swore. As if released from a hatch, the gale sunk its claws into his face, coaxing tears from his half-blinded eyes. It was a moment before he could make out the figure crouched on hands and knees on the grass, cowering like a beaten cur under the spears. Between full-bodied shivers, a man’s voice sobbed. “Help me… milords…”
“Mother Above,” said Anyas. At his gesture, the sentries lowered their spears. The stranger was barefoot and dishevelled, his hose ripped, his tunic slathered with dust and brownish stains. He had no weapon, not even a sword-belt. “What is your name, sir? What befell you?”
He knelt beside the wounded man and reached for his arm, meaning to see where he was hurt, but the fellow made a keening noise and recoiled. He reeked of earth and sweat, and beneath that, something more primal, like blood. His muddy hair tumbled into his eyes, lending his stubbled face an oddly feral cast. “Sir,” said Anyas, “try to answer. What befell you?”
Without needing orders, Poldam and the others had fanned out to surround them, holding up torches in cressets so Anyas could see. The man lay sobbing in their midst, curled in on himself with his arms wrapped around his chest. Injuries aside, he must have been half frozen. “Bandits… just out of Astorre…”
He spoke decent Falwynian. A merchant, Anyas guessed, travelling on business from Astorre. He would have been ripe picking for the bandits, both in and out of Marguerit’s pay. “You are among friends,” Anyas said. “Where are you hurt? Let us help you.”
Delirious, the man did not seem to understand. He wailed when Anyas tried to lift the bloody tunic, and twitched away from Poldam and Cerris when they made to hoist him, scratching his hands and wrists on the brambles.
At length someone had the wits to fetch him a thick woollen cloak, and in the renewed warmth, the man came back to himself. Interrupted by frequent tremors, he told them his tale. His party of eight had been set upon near Astorre and robbed of all they had. Only he and his brother had lived, and come on foot through Forech’s Pass to Onaressi, which they had heard was garrisoned by the Silvertongue’s men these days. The brother was too weak to climb the winding track to the fort, so he was waiting below for help. All they had with them was a wagon of wine, which the bandits had left untouched.
By now, a throng had gathered at the postern. The men murmured, peering off into the dark. The prospects were grim. In this weather, it was unlikely that the brother would survive. But their wine ration was running low. Anyas snapped his fingers at Poldam. “Take your patrol down to the Pass and see what you can do. We’ll bring this fellow inside.”
Poldam and his men departed almost at once, their cressets bobbing like bright, disembodied eyes down the mountainside. “All right,” said Anyas to their supplicant. “Now you.”
The man did not want to be carried. He staggered to his feet, hobbled a few laborious steps, and fell down again on the threshold of the postern. Anyas was beginning to lose his patience. “Fetch a stretcher,” he said. “And the doctor.”
Cerris was gaping. “He won’t live through the night.”
“We have to try.”
But before he could move, one of the others seized Anyas’s arm, pointing. “Look!”
Anyas turned. One or two of the cressets weaving down the track had gone out, as if their bearers had dropped their torches. The remaining lights swayed erratically from side to side. Then came a shout, and the hiss of swords scraping from their scabbards; and the clamour, unmistakeable after all these years on the battlefield, of steel crashing on steel. “It’s Poldam, sir!” Cerris cried, his own sword already in hand. “He’s been attacked!”