by Vale Aida
He could have been talking, or just making slurred sounds with his mouth. It probably sounded funny. With certain people, there was a vinegary satisfaction in making them hit you where the bruises would show. Later they would find it discomfiting. It demeaned them, the physical evidence of their brutishness. Kedris always fired the servants who left obvious marks on his son. People might talk, after all. He doubted the Marshal had the same scruples.
“Enough,” said Isemain sharply. “I said enough. You’ll kill him.”
So they wanted him alive. The blows ceased. His assailant receded from view. “Oh, don’t go!” he wailed, spraying blood with the words. “It was just getting to be fun!”
“He’s pretending, milord,” said the person attached to the fist, somewhere to his left. “That’s what the Empath said he would do. Pretend.”
“Fetch him, then,” Isemain snapped. “He speaks every language I’ve ever heard of. If Lord Silvertongue wants him, he can damned well have him.”
The door opened and shut. His eyes were still uncooperative, the room teetering at an angle not altogether congruent with the laws of nature. He warred with the twin urges to blow a bloody raspberry at the Marshal and to throw up, long and hard, all over himself. He wondered if the streambed under the ringwall was still passable. Then he remembered, to his annoyance, that he had personally instructed Anyas to board it up.
Anyas. What had happened to him?
The door opened again. Gods above, which one was it this time? The leering guardsman? That one was the worst. The fusty old stablemaster with the horse-whip wasn’t too bad. He had a weak arm, and was far too easily riled… Savonn struggled to recall what misdemeanor he was being punished for. Then it came back to him that his father was long gone, and who had killed him. “The king is dead,” he murmured, an aside to no one. “Long live the king.”
Making a grand effort, he pulled his head up and cracked his eyes open. Auburn hair. Clear hazel eyes. That, at least, had not changed. Maybe the hair still smelled like honey and woodsmoke. Face: symmetrical, frowning. Cloak: red on the inside, black on the outside. In his semi-conscious state this struck Savonn as an extraordinarily amusing detail, and his aching face manufactured a grin. Concentrating hard, he said, “Hello. How awkward to meet again like this.”
Frown: gone. Smile: violent, and genuine as steel. A long time ago, Savonn had spent a gratifying summer inventing new ways to coax forth that smile. “Did you like me as Ismil?” asked the Empath, taking the chair opposite Savonn. “I hope so. It was a pain, the crowd.”
That old, unforgettable tenor, versatile as a lute. Someone else said, “He claims not to understand Saraian. I can’t get an intelligible word out of him.”
The Marshal. Savonn had forgotten he was there. The rest of the world returned with vicious clarity—the faces milling above him, the obnoxious sunlight slanting in through the window, the furious throb of his head. “So you turned him red and purple,” said the Empath. “Your resourcefulness continues to impress. What did you want me to do, tune him like a lyrestring?”
Isemain’s scowl deepened. He got up, shoving his chair back with a scrape that sent nails pounding through Savonn’s cranium. “Make him the offer. Break a few bones for all I care. Just try not to kill him.”
He stalked out. The Empath looked at the others, still standing around like furniture. “Well? Why are you still here?”
They scuttled out in single file, heads hung, not a mutter to be heard. In Astorre the Saraians had prostrated themselves before the Empath as if to a god. They were scared stiff of him. The bandit chief Mordel had told Savonn as much, and it appeared to be true. The strangest thing about this man was how all the rumours about him were true.
He stood watching Savonn now, the long unbound hair stirring with each breath. Then he said, “You look unwell.”
He was speaking Falwynian. After all these years abroad, he could surely have shed his Dalissan accent—so deceptively charming—with a little effort. But to him it would have felt like making a concession, and that went against his very nature. He never made concessions. “I would imagine so,” said Savonn, in his sweetest, most sinuous tones. “Given the blood caked in my shirt, the impressive knots in this rope, and the fact that I can no longer feel my extremities. Your company shames you, Dervain Teraille.”
The heavy-lashed eyes, which had wandered down to take in the aforementioned bloodstains, flicked back to Savonn’s face. It was a look of appraisal, of comparison, recording the things that had changed and the things that had not. It was three years since the end of their idyll, when they had known each other only as Marguerit’s consul and Merrott’s errand-boy. And three years, for a spy, was a lifetime.
“I should have warned you,” said Dervain presently, “that Isemain will give you the back of his fist any time you ask for it. Gods bless him, he has nothing else to give.”
“And you?” asked Savonn. The old pattern of banter, so easy to fall back into. “What do you have?”
Dervain’s hand disappeared into his cloak, and Savonn’s disordered faculties warned him of an incoming flash of silver.
It was impossible to stop his flinch. He ducked with such force that the chair rocked onto its front legs and slammed back down with a stomach-churning thud. Every muscle in his body screamed. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. After four or five breaths, it dawned on him that the pain came not from having been impaled on a sharp object, but rather moving all his bruised limbs at once. As for the knife, it had embedded itself in the wall above his head with quite a bit of damage to the wood panelling, but none to his person.
He sat up slowly. Dervain was watching him with bland interest. He remembered the stories, and quashed his sharp flare of rage to a smouldering ember. The Empath. A fairytale. One could never be too sure. He worked his arms over his head, ignoring the strenuous objections of his back and shoulders, and found the knife-hilt with his fingers. Briskly, he jerked his bound wrists back and forth along the serrated blade, slicing his hands open on the sharp edge, until at last the rope gave way and he pulled his arms free. Blood flooded back into his fingers. His eyes watered. The knife, he saw without surprise, was his own.
“I am hearing,” said Dervain, “that you took this place from poor Mordel with five men?”
Savonn flung the rope-ends away. “I shan’t brag. You did, after all, provide me with one of them.”
Dervain grinned. “Yes. In any case, I have outdone you. Your friend Anyas is still alive, more or less, and will never again open the door to a bleeding stranger. Isemain thinks the remains of your garrison will make him a fortune on the auction block when we get home.”
“And my patrol?”
Hiraen’s patrol. Not his. Dervain gazed at him, his absurd lashes casting long shadows over the fine-lined geometry of cheek and nose. “Slaughtered to a man.”
He was not aware of having stood up. The room veered off centre, and the floor heaved beneath his feet like the deck of Ismil’s ship. Against all odds, the knife was still in his hand. Hiraen, beloved nuisance, start and finish of all things, in whose home he had first known kindness. Emaris, who would never see eighteen. O gazelle…
“Predictable,” he heard himself say. “They had to die, or they might have worked out that it was Nikas who walked them straight into an ambush. How much are you paying him? He must have had hundreds of chances to kill me… but no, you want to do that yourself.”
Was he still on his feet? He could not tell. A chair scraped, and then one of Dervain’s hands curled around his wrist—the slightest of touches, just firm enough to immobilise the knife. Iyone had dared him, as a child, to pass his fingers through a candle-flame; he had done so, and jerked his hand back feeling the same as he did now: deer-startled, not by any grievous hurt but by its absence, and so wide awake it was as if he had been comatose before. “To my grief,” said Dervain, “no one is about to kill you. Sit down, son of Kedris.”
The anger was harder to put away this time. Master your face, Jo
sit had taught him when he was small. Josit, who had protected him as best as she could from the whips and the cudgels and the scorn… He had seldom had to master his heart. “Do not touch me again.”
Instantly, the steadying restraint was gone. Dervain was six feet away, the knife in his palm. Savonn did not recall having relinquished it. “Nikas, snake and snake-charmer both,” said Dervain. “I was thinking you might like him. When did you guess?”
Savonn was seeing quadruple. He sat back down. If Hiraen was dead, nothing carried any more weight than a dream. “The moment I first saw him. When else?”
“And you feigned ignorance, knowing he would lead you to your father’s killer,” said Dervain. “See, I was right. You have a mind for games. But did you not guess whose spy he was?”
After the talk at Onaressi, he had begun to suspect. The Red Death. One could not easily forget that hair. But at the time he had dismissed, or tried to dismiss, the thought as mere fancy. “How could I? You never told me you belonged to the Sanctuary.”
“And you never told me your true name,” said Dervain. “I suppose you were loathe that I should find out whose son you were? Just as I did not want you to know I was… what I was.” His lips twitched. “The inevitable symmetry. What poets we are.”
And so Marguerit’s consul had turned out to be the Sanctuary’s slave, just as Merrott’s errand-boy was Kedris’s. Half-truths and white lies, the unspoken foundations on which their affair had been built. But now the Empath called himself what he was, even though Kedris’s son did not.
Talking hurt slightly less than thinking. Savonn said, “You also failed to mention your blood feud.”
Dervain laughed. It was a dangerous laugh, the hiss of a sword from a sheath. “It is a surprise to you? Half of Sarei has a blood feud with Kedris Andalle. His forces massacred my village when I was small.”
Savonn made the obvious guess. “The Battle of the Morivant.”
“Yes,” said Dervain. “Eighteen years ago. They all died. My parents, my sisters, my brother… I survived because I had gone to hide in the temple, under the altar. I used to go there when the world was noisy. For me the world is always noisy.”
His brow was lightly furrowed. Otherwise, he spoke as if he were considering a mathematical problem on paper. “The slavers came two, maybe three days later. I was past the age the Sanctuary usually prefers, but they bought me all the same, because of my gift.” The word was gnarled with irony. “It is an investment they have never regretted, though I have often given them cause to regret it.”
“And Nikas?”
“He has been telling you he escaped, yes? He, too, is a liar, though not as good as you. No one escapes.” He glanced up from the knife in his hands, looking rueful. “Slave children have no families, and so no compunctions. We are bought young and moulded into killers from earliest childhood. We own nothing, and need nothing, and fail at nothing. Kings and queens beggar themselves to hire our services. The High Priest receives the gold and gives us our assignments, and we go without question. Everybody wishes to run away at some point. But no one runs once they hear what happens to those who do.”
“Nikas seemed to believe otherwise,” said Savonn. “He kept lamenting about his mother.”
It was an invitation to elaborate, but Dervain was too shrewd to take it. “He has his own work. I borrowed him for mine. He kept sending me portraits of you… It was very vexing.”
Breathe. Breathe. Perhaps, if he tried hard enough, it was possible to feel nothing. “Kedris used to free slaves. It was Lady Josit’s idea. Surely you appreciate the irony.”
“Josit? The queen who should have been?” Again, the lethal laugh. The knife spun between Dervain’s fingers. “Oh, I see you know about that. If Kedris Andalle was a sword, she was the hand on the hilt. Be free, she preaches, all the while her chains rattle round our necks. How unlucky for her that this one ended up not in a brothel or a bath-house, but consecrated to the god of death himself.”
Symmetry and inevitability, thought Savonn. The pillars of stagecraft. “And you want me dead,” he said. “Because I am my father’s blood? Because it annoys your pride that you never guessed it? Or because I left you?”
Dervain took a step closer. The air seemed to have closed ranks around them, making it difficult to draw breath. “Do we call it that?” he asked softly. “You leaving me? I thought it was that I killed a man for you and you, having got what you wanted, abandoned your tools and ran back home to your father without so much as a farewell.”
This time it was not possible to will himself into numbness. “So it is that, then.”
“It is all the things you mentioned,” said Dervain. His smile seemed to reach into Savonn’s chest and do something savage to his insides. He had thought he was past this. “The proportions change from one day to the next. Alas, I have no orders to kill you, a fact which is causing me great torment. But you must not be overly surprised. Our brief dalliance was, you see, extremely profitable to the Queen.”
“I gave her nothing,” said Savonn. As falsehoods went, it was a particularly hollow one. He had bankrupted himself in several ways over this man.
“She disagrees,” said Dervain. “Shall I tell you why you are here? Because, in light of—what shall we call them?—past favours received, she has a number of rewards lined up for you. And possibly some new tasks.”
Abruptly, Savonn got up and went to the window. There was no glass pane, only the lattice of slender wooden slats. The crisp air was bracing, and his head was cruelly clear. He said, “I gave you nothing.”
Dervain sighed. “My dear,” he said. “This, even now?”
The twilit upper room of the consulate. The maps he had stolen from Merrott’s solar. The tickle of long red hair on his bare arm as they studied them together, and then the press of warm chapped lips against his own, a silent promise. You will be safe. Your friend will be safe. And then Merrott had died.
Savonn’s knuckles were white around the slats. “I have no need of a reward. My loyalties are where they have always lain, with myself and my friends. And if Marguerit wants payment for what you did for me, I have only my life to give.”
Having no preternatural powers of his own, he could not read the complex series of expressions that scudded across Dervain’s face. Surprise, perhaps. Or disappointment. Or respect. Dervain was as skilled an actor as he was. Maybe better. “Believe me,” said Dervain, “I have told her countless times. Every day since I found out who you were, I have begged her for the privilege of bringing her your head. But she still thinks she can find a use for you. So my blood feud will have to wait.”
What sort of use? A spy like Dervain, perhaps, if not quite of his calibre. A soldier. A court jester. Somehow, Savonn found it in himself to laugh. “Kill me now, and say I took a blade to myself. No one would know.”
Dervain met his eye. Then he lifted his hand, the one with the knife in it, and threw.
Savonn did not flinch again. This time, with Dervain’s forewarning, he did not misread the movement. The knife flew a clean trajectory away from them both, thudding hilt-deep into the door. From the other side came a startled squawk. Footsteps receded at a run. Dervain spread his hands in a helpless gesture. “You see, you are not the only one plagued by eavesdropping squires.”
On any other day, Savonn would have shared the joke. But not now, when he would have given anything for Emaris and Hiraen to have stayed at Kimmet, far away from him and Dervain and all the chaos that attended them.
“The point is,” said Dervain, turning to go, “Marguerit needs me enough that I may kill anyone I please in this fort, with two exceptions. You, and our poor, damnable Marshal Isemain.” He frowned. “No. Perhaps even Isemain. I may try it next time he takes a fist to you. But when I kill you I want to do it in the open, on my own terms. You deserve to die as you lived, with an audience, and fireworks, and streamers, and perhaps a little accompaniment on the lute.
“For,” he said, as he wrenched the kni
fe from the door and flung it open, “I was very fond of you, my songbird. You were very entertaining. You still are.”
21
“Emaris.”
He had not thought being dead would hurt so much. His neck was sore, his head a morass of screeching nerves, and his ribcage appeared to be on fire. Was it supposed to be this drawn out? The pain was so relentless and all-encompassing that it no longer felt like something applied to him by an external force, but a state of being.
“Emaris!”
Perhaps he had not died. But that was unlikely, when he could not feel the rest of his body. He was certainly dead. It seemed a shame. His sister was going to be very angry. Perhaps those were her urgent hands on him, turning him over to lie on his—front? back?—and fluttering at his throat to check for a pulse. “Emaris!”
It was not Shandei’s voice, which at present was the only one he wished to hear. Nor was it their father’s, which would have made more sense if he really were dead. He thought of himself as a man of reasonable virtue, and therefore it was odd that his afterlife should consist of so much pain, not to mention persons of unmannerly persistence. Perhaps he was still alive. He ought to check, just in case.
Slowly, as the person continued to slap his cheeks and call his name, he forced his eyelids open.
He was lying on his back. The sun was still up, glaring into his protesting eyes, and at first all he could make out was a head and a pair of shoulders. The air was thick with the acrid stench of smoke and burning… meat? He was hungry. Then he blinked, and took in the rumpled brown hair above him, and the anxious green eyes. Familiar relics from a life that did not seem to have ended after all.
“Get up,” said Hiraen Safin. “They’re gone.”
This seemed a preposterous order. Emaris rolled first on one elbow, every vein in his head pounding fit to burst. Then, with Hiraen’s help, he pulled himself to a sitting position. It was gradually coming back to him: the skirmish, the Marshal, the retreating horses. Everything hurt, especially the back of his head and the contusion blooming over his lowest rib. He did not remember sustaining either injury. “Where is everyone?”