by James Stone
She’d never struck a man through his back before. His shoulders seized up and locked around the blade, and it took her what seemed a lifetime to drag it out of him. And by then, the contingent had found her.
‘My lady?’ she heard the guardsman call to her through the night, but she had already taken off, following Nurcia through the streets.
The mist was suffocating, and it was becoming harder by the minute to breathe, but some fire in her willed her on. And then sounded footsteps from around a wall, and so she followed them down an alleyway.
She found Nurcia in a small courtyard where roses grew in the summer, with an arrow in her back and enmity on her lips.
A lone bowman gave a cheer from atop a nearby building and turned back to her, nocking his arrow, but Magmaya protested and gestured to Nurcia.
She wasn’t dead yet. She was still useful.
‘Kharon sent you here to kill me, didn’t he?’ the turncoat asked, trying to pull herself up from the mud. But her back had forsaken her, and so Magmaya just watched as she collapsed again.
‘No, but I don’t have time to consider anything else now.’ She was trying to be brave like she’d been brave all those years ago when she had executed that prisoner. Remember how easily you put that sword through his neck, remember how quickly it was over, but this wasn’t quick, and this wasn’t easy, because the girl she was trying to kill was writhing and sad.
‘Why, you want to stop the Mansel from getting in?’ She spat blood. ‘They’ve been here for years.’
She narrowed her eyes.
‘You don’t quite understand, I know,’ Nurcia said, and Magmaya felt herself lowering Moonbeam to her neck. ‘Kharon Vorr truly is a fool if he thinks I turned to Vargul out of fear,’ she mumbled. ‘We’re not all like you, slut. Not everything we do is driven by our need to run away.’
‘Enough!’ Nurcia lifted her head, and Magmaya drew Moonbeam across her face. It laid her open from eye to chin, but even as she bled, she just smiled, knowingly.
‘Bow to him, Magmaya,’ she said. ‘Your city is lost. Bow to him, and you might finally find a cause you believe in.’
She was infuriated already. She just had to keep telling herself, remember how easily you put that sword through his neck, remember how quickly it was over.
Nurcia wasn’t making it easier, though. ‘Don’t you want to know who killed Albany Moore?’ she hummed and pressed her finger to her heart.
Magmaya’s eyes twitched, and she found herself stepping away, tripping over her feet. Her vision had become hazy, and all she could see was some pathetic thing, a thousand lifetimes away. A pathetic thing that might have one day advised her, befriended her. Now she was bleeding.
‘I should have you skinned and buried,’ she heard herself say, but her voice had gone shrill.
‘No, you wouldn’t,’ the turncoat spat. ‘You wouldn’t wish that on yourself. Kill me, and I’ll always be a part of you.’ She paused. ‘I’ll always be a part of your brothers.’
Brothers?
‘You—? Oh,’ Magmaya stuttered. And then she began to cry.
‘Does that displease you?’ Nurcia turned her head, smearing blood across her furs like an animal at the height of its hunt. ‘You would rather Rache be out here instead? I did you a favour with his legs.’
‘No more,’ Magmaya said, but there was impatience in her eyes. ‘Just shut up.’
‘I wouldn’t threaten me again, girl. You wouldn’t bring down Vargul Tul upon you.’
‘You really believe he’ll take this city?’
‘I need not believe in a god I see walk the world.’ Nurcia looked up longingly.
‘Your god has forsaken you,’ she heard herself say and struck her cheek. It was as soft as the snow around it, and the same proved true for the rest of her face. When she was done, Nurcia’s eyes were wide and frail, frantic and grey.
Magmaya stood back and watched in a sort of glee as she struggled to stand.
Good, she thought. She can die slowly at least.
She let her run and followed on quietly, tracing the trail of bloodied snow through the empty streets. She’d collapsed down an alleyway, so Magmaya dragged her by her furs into a small alcove where surely no one would bother to search and left her there. She would come back for her later, she vowed, but for now, she would let her bleed.
She returned to Kharon’s convoy shortly after, finding a myriad of corpses strewn about the streets, Mansel cavalrymen and Orianne guardsmen intertwined.
‘My lady,’ one of her father’s men started, ‘the traitor…?’
‘She escaped,’ Magmaya said. ‘Just take me back to the palace.’
They arrived at High Path in good time, collecting the plate of fallen men as they did—but then, a violent, animal scream brought her attention back to the harsh lights of the city, and she looked up across the rows of guardsmen making their way to the front. There she found the old knight, brittle and stricken.
But when she came face to face with him again, Magmaya had quite forgotten what Siedous looked like. Each time she went the palace, memories came to her in broken fragments, telling of how she’d once frolicked in the snow and how only the dead, white trees had known of her little chubby fingers. And with each memory, she recalled seeing a wolf move along the horizon and watching Siedous wield his sword against a thief in a dark alleyway.
It had been from then on, she wondered if there had ever been a child within Siedous; even when he was afraid, he never seemed to turn to a mother’s touch but to his chain-mail instead. He’d told Magmaya how a wise man had once said that a knight was nothing in light of love, but as she watched the ages betray him, she had forgotten what the story had even meant.
‘My lady,’ he said, concerned; there was something haunted festering underneath. ‘I thought you were in the hospice!’
Me too, Magmaya thought. ‘They expelled me.’
‘Are you hurt?’ He paused. ‘I heard a scream.’
‘No, it wasn’t me.’ She looked away, but when she turned back, she felt different, like her skin had turned to stone.
The old knight looked to her intensely, and she to him; his eyes were red, perhaps more so than they had been that night in the forest when she’d found Albany dead. But she could tell what he thought of her; it had been a long while since Kharon’s affair and her own infancy, but it appeared the years had betrayed her even more so than they had him.
‘You’re armoured…’ he said at last, quiet like a little girl.
‘There are a lot of dead men around here.’
Siedous ignored that comment. ‘The Mansel have already taken the east of the city,’ he told her. ‘The chancellor has sent his guardsmen there—’
‘But he’s left the palace exposed…’ She nodded.
‘Magmaya,’ he said, ‘I need you to go the stables and take a deer. Go to the Free-Peoples—you’ll be safe there.’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I’ll never make it in time, besides—Rache!’
‘He’s safe in the keep—’
‘No!’
‘Magmaya, listen!’
‘Siedous,’ she spoke up again, but it seemed no words she summoned would remedy the situation. ‘Nurcia.’
‘I know, I know—I made my way back to the palace as soon as I heard,’ he stuttered, ‘but then I heard—’
‘I found her.’
‘You killed her?’
Magmaya shrugged. She feared Siedous would never look at her again if she told him the truth. ‘She was on horseback,’ she explained. ‘But she ran into an arrow and…’ She paused, taking a heavy breath. ‘Siedous, she never turned her back on us. She’s been with them all along.’
‘What?’
‘She crippled Rache, she killed Albany,’ Magmaya insisted, remembering. ‘She let the Mansel in. She caused all of this.’
Siedous nodded, but she could tell he felt sick to the stomach. Something in thos
e sombre eyes she had known so well had been whisked away to dust.
‘Where’s Kharon?’
‘The boardroom,’ he fawned.
‘Damn him!’ Magmaya spat. ‘We can’t have him and Rache together.’ This is not how my brother dies, she cursed, I prayed. I prayed!
‘My lord,’ a breathless voice called out from wide eyes across the hall. ‘Vargul’s been spotted in the inner city. He’s already at the palace!’
‘We only just left the gate!’ Siedous’ eyes were wide. ‘There was no sign that he passed here—We assumed…’
His voice was wavering in her ears. Magmaya was already gone.
A distant hum rang about the halls as she ran, and her blood became one with the threaded carpets. Vargul had already made his way in and had surely taken the front, but at least the thermals would allow her to reach the palace without meeting any more of the Mansel than she needed to.
As she ran, the light from the chandeliers and candles above turned cold and dry and made her sick with every metre she left behind. Confronting Tul seemed all but inevitable, but if she was able to hold him off for a little while, perhaps Rache could escape the keep with the others.
She shook her head—it was madness to even consider keeping up with him—had she seen herself? Her chest was slick with blood, and her legs were growing weaker with every passing second.
Yet something drove her onwards still—something hollow in her veins that tasted like a vile liquor on her lips.
And then the wooden doors to the boardroom appeared before her like they’d always been there.
Magmaya froze and closed her eyes, reaching out to touch the scars in the wood, tracing her nimble fingertips across each splinter. When she was a child, she had once carved something into the oak (she couldn’t remember what it was now), spending hours etching away. Now she was carrying a bloodied blade—if only she could’ve just sat for hours and scratched away again, thoughtless and forgotten while Albany cruised the halls, naïve to all he had caused…
She began to lose track of the passing seconds until, at last, she realised time was running out—she couldn’t hold herself back any longer; she raised Moonbeam high.
There’s nothing to be afraid of, she told herself. Death will embrace you with all the lips of a lover.
It’s a dream, anyway, another voice told her. And this dream will soon become another.
Magmaya stole a breath and wrestled her fingers to Moonbeam’s hilt. It was cold, even through the light padding she’d been given. She couldn’t remember it being so cold before. It was glittering still, though, and that was all she needed to reassure her.
The doors opened with a jolt and Magmaya stumbled through, haloed in the moonlight and hacking at the air. Wrinkled eyes scanned the room, and a gust of wind blew hair in her eyes. The back of her head was pounding, and her arms were covered in goose prickles.
And then, a face lurched for hers.
Magmaya slashed at it without a thought, but Moonbeam missed its mark and was met with a flash of cold steel. That, and a pair of burning black eyes staring back at her.
He looked taller than he had before, but for the first time, Magmaya gazed upon Vargul Tul with eyes which she could claim were her own.
It was an ugly sight, though; his face was cold and red all at once, stricken with scars and throned with an iron gorget. But there was something else too—a crossbow bolt nested in his spine. No—there were three, she realised.
She was distracted. Something sharp grazed her thigh, and Magmaya collapsed into the embrace of some porcelain tower. An iron claw groped at her leg, tearing thread and silk.
Magmaya screamed and drove Moonbeam at the hand, gouging the fingers apart, but before she could move another inch, a second grizzly talon came for her neck.
Vargul stumbled forward, and Magmaya threw herself aside. She didn’t see her blood spill, but she felt it, running down her hands and neck. She swung again, cumbersome, and she heard a crunch as the sword bit hard.
But then, the Mansel’s shoulder met her chest, and she collapsed to the floor again. Pottery smashed. Papers fluttered. A golden vase shattered.
And then she found Kharon, weeping and holding his chest in some vain effort to stop the bleeding; it formed a pool around him, sheathing his stomach and flailing robes. He was still breathing, it seemed, as he clung to the air above him with wide eyes. There was a knife trailing from his palm.
Strength rose in her. She turned back and heard herself shout, ‘Nurcia is dead!’ The words felt warm in her belly, and the heat was flowing through her like a river.
Vargul ignored her, though his face contorted to something terrible.
‘I slashed her throat,’ she boasted again, feeling an eagerness overcome her, dizzy—the longer she made him talk, the more time Rache had. ‘I watched the snow fall as she pleaded. She was weak. Weaker than me.’
By the time he reached her, all her breath had been stolen. She felt for Moonbeam amongst the threaded floors but found her hands warm and lightless.
Go back, she told herself. Go back to the Sultide and get back on that beaten horse. Ride to Jayce; ride to the Free-Peoples and never be seen again.
But before she could, there was a crash. The Mansel pinioned her against the floor, and all her wind left her. She opened her mouth to scream, but a knuckle came searing across her lips. His ruptured face had become the world, it was all she could see, but there was something different about him. The crossbow bolts had to have hurt him. Otherwise, he would’ve killed her by now.
By gods, if that’s my dying thought, she cursed herself. Her nails jeered against metal, and her leg met a thigh, but the beast of a man was heavy like a corpse. And as a gauntlet closed around her throat, her face turned blue, and for a moment, there was peace. She still tried to scream, though, but nothing came out. She would’ve sooner pissed herself.
But then, there was a thump, and the Mansel’s back arched. He collapsed off her and pulled a crossbow bolt from the back of his shoulder, and then he was running, and the floor was shaking. He cleared the boardroom, finding the bowman at the doors. The chancellor’s daughter didn’t have time to catch her breath. She could only watch in horror as the bowman’s shaking hands were torn from him, and a shard of cursed gold was put between his eyes.
Magmaya had never moved faster. She cleared the boardroom with a quivering Moonbeam in her hands. Vargul was turning back around, but it was too late—the sword was in his knee and then his back where the bolt had struck him, searing and festering.
Whether he screamed or not, she didn’t hear. But as she stumbled away, she caught sight of the Mansel’s leg and admired her craftsmanship. And then, at last, he began to buckle.
Vargul Tul kneeled beneath her, and Magmaya couldn’t help but smile. He didn’t look at her; perhaps out of shame, or perhaps out of spite, but she didn’t care.
‘In the end,’ he wretched, holding his bloody stump of a knee, ‘your father wanted you dead more than I.’
‘I know,’ she said, sighing, and then she killed him.
For a moment, the chancellor’s daughter spared a glance at the remains, following the bloody lines in the carpets, the red that began to flood his summer furs and the fountain of black ichor where his head should’ve been. Whatever was left wasn’t quite a man anymore.
An urging came over Magmaya, to lie down and weep or slumber and die. Out the window, the fighting continued on; even without their castellan, the Mansel were taking the city. But a greater ache persisted still, so she stumbled over to it.
A lurid reflection of herself shimmered in his blood, and in it, Magmaya could scarcely recognise her own eyes. Streaks of red garnished her features as if she were a spoiled art form and the purple around her eyes and scarred jaw were only details on the canvas.
The chancellor looked no better, though; his eyes were sagging out of his skull, and each line and incision on his forehead was clearer so.
A white fringe settled over his red, venomous eyes like some wretched albino creature with a spotted cloak dyed a dazzling scarlet.
The pair shared a subtle look of innocence, and for a mere moment, the sins of the past seemed to have been forgotten. Maybe a moment will be enough, she told herself and said, ‘I don’t know if this is all over.’ Magmaya conceded, ‘But it is for us.’
She expected some sort of insult—some sort of cry of defiance. The chancellor had fallen! If she had ever feared a man, if she had ever feared a ruler, it was not anyone who she’d sentenced, nor Vargul Tul himself, but instead, the man that lay limp and bloody before her.
Magmaya ignored the sentiment and found his wounds beneath old, bony hands where she’d nuzzled him as a child, where the flesh was pink and spilling. His blood was a black patch around them, growing wider like the pulsating of a collapsing star.
And in it lay a small knife, rusted and chipped, sewn together with battered embroidery, and inhaling the blood around it like it was alive.
It was a little older but shimmered all the same as the light caught the engraved lettering that a fool might have mistaken for art. But it was scarred now and cut and broken at its point; it was fastened and carved to a sharper edge as if imitating the tips of Vargul’s own blades. It had felt like an age ago, but it was it the same—that much was certain. It was a ritual knife from the Free-Peoples—the very knife with which that old scribe had attempted Magmaya’s life all those moons ago.
It reeked of betrayal, more so than Nurcia ever had, and Magmaya realised at last how she felt—she was disappointed. Her mind went to Vargul—‘your father wanted you dead more than I,’ he’d said, but now, the very proof of it was glistening right in front of her like something heavenly.
Kharon Vorr had sent her to the Deadfields to die. How else could’ve a man defended his lineage? If Rache were to ever to succeed his father, she and Shalleous would both have had to be dead, all guised under the Mansel’s onslaught; why else had he fashioned the blade to match Vargul Tul’s?
Magmaya plucked it from the floor and let the chancellor’s blood lick at her fingers, filling the gaps beneath her nails. ‘Kharon Vorr.’ She shook him.