The High King's Vengeance

by Steven Poore

  Attis snorted. “Believe what you will. He could not have loved her as much as I did.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cassia said.

  The old man’s shoulders slumped. “Oh Cassia, it is not your fault. How could it be?”

  “Everything else is,” she muttered.

  His hand touched her own tentatively. She tensed, uncertain how to respond, and Attis withdrew again.

  He meant no harm, she realised. Unlike Hetch, or even Rais, who she still did not completely trust. They both had other motives. But Attis . . . he was her grandfather.

  She reached out to him, and she could not hold back the tears any longer.

  There was no sunrise, only a lightening of the gloom, but it served to remind Cassia that time was not on her side. Her stomach cramped as she rose unsteadily. With no sleep, and no food since early the previous day, she was in no fit condition to even practice her forms and parries, let alone continue the march North. But there was no other choice. She had to descend and find the Emperor’s March, and hope that Rais had made good time on his own part of the journey.

  Attis had staggered off into the camp earlier, and Cassia thought he had looked less stiff, less burdened than before. Almost proud of what she had achieved, if such a thing was possible. He had said very little after his long explanation, and they had sat in awkward silence for the remainder of the night. Cassia was aware of his gaze upon her. It felt like he was examining her in minute detail, trying to fill his memories with all the years he had missed. She could not do the same. She felt awkward and unbalanced, as though Attis’s revelation had added an extra weight to her shoulders. At the same time she had been uprooted, left to drift like flotsam after a flood.

  The camp itself had shifted during the night. There was a change of mood here too: the council had passed their orders and soldiers moved about the hilltop with increased urgency. They filed past her, moving aside to give her room, and she had to duck away several times to avoid injury as the camp was dismantled around her.

  In the end she found Arca only by looking for the unmoving shapes of her quartet of shieldmen. The old man huddled on the ground near them, pale and shivering. The reunion with his half-captain had taken a massive toll on him, Cassia saw immediately. If only the grace of the gods had kept him alive this far, she had no idea how much longer he might last. Another march – this one, or the next – could kill him.

  “How much did you drink last night?” she asked, crouching by his side.

  “Too much,” Arca muttered. He spat onto the ground, his phlegm dark and unhealthy. “Not enough. Not your problem, girl. Help me up.”

  Cassia was alarmed by how frail he was, by how much weight he must have shed. She remembered that one night she had helped him back to the Old Soak, during her first stay in Hellea. He had been just skin and bones then, but he seemed even less now. She could have hoisted him up across her shoulders and carried him to Caenthell.

  “You should rest. Go back down into Lyriss.”

  “For your dragons to use my bones to pick flesh from their teeth? Not likely, girl. No. I belong here. In all of this.” He gestured up past the shieldmen, to the wakening camp. “Never realised how much I missed it.”

  “It’ll kill you.”

  He shrugged awkwardly. “Good if it does. No, I mean it. I’m ready, girl. Been ready for years. You hear it as well as I do. And what better way for a soldier to die than in battle, with his friends at his side?” He reached out and grabbed at one of the shieldmen for support, and Cassia saw how unsteady he was on his legs.

  “Arca, I can’t . . .”

  “You’re damn right, girl. You can’t. But you can make a hero’s tale of it.” He held her stare until she nodded reluctantly, reminded of the promise she had already made.

  “Better. Gods, is somebody cooking?” His attempt to lift the mood was feeble, but Cassia was grateful for the change of subject. She was hungry too, and she left Arca to work out the cramp in his muscles, promising to bring back a bowl of whatever was available at the nearest fire.

  The closer she came to the North, she realised as she edged between a pair of low shelters, the harder it became to justify to herself what she had actually done. Hundreds of men might die now before she even reached Caenthell. How much easier would it have been if she had just travelled on her own? She could have bargained with Craw, or with one of the other dragons, to bring her more quickly into the mountains . . .

  Someone caught her arm and she stumbled as she tried to pull away. “What-?”

  It was Hetch. The one person she had hoped to avoid this morning.

  “I can hold myself up, you know,” she said after a long, frozen moment.

  Hetch’s smile was sour. As he released his grip Cassia realised her childhood friend had finally dropped the mask of charm he had always worn before. Winning, boyish innocence had been replaced by calculation and a hard edge of anger. Now, more than ever, he was his father’s son. Cassia drew herself back up.

  “Have the commanders asked for me?”

  “Not yet,” Hetch said. There was an awkward moment of silence before he continued. “You’ve done this, haven’t you? You’ve killed us. Killed us all.”

  “What do you mean? How have I killed you?”

  “That old bastard. Baum. He wanted this to happen, and he took you with him, and now the North is risen – and you are back. It’s your fault.”

  She could hardly refute the allegation. Instead she stared back at him until he shifted his gaze. “Do you think I wanted this? Any of it?”

  “Of course you did. For revenge.”

  Cassia blinked. “You think I’d let the twisted spirits under Caenthell destroy thousands of people just because my father tried to sell me to you to pay his debts? Grow up, Hetch.” She hesitated. “Where’s your father? I haven’t seen him here.”

  Hetch’s eyes flared with anger. “He’s dead, Cassia.”

  “What?” At first she couldn’t believe it. Surely Rann Almoul was more determined than death itself? But Hetch’s expression did not change. And that sour twist was grief, she realised. She softened her tone. “What happened?”

  “He fought it. Or at least, he tried to. He refused to leave Keskor. Refused to leave the house. He said he wouldn’t abandon everything he had spent his life building. He wasn’t alone – others listened to him too. Him, the Factor, one hundred, maybe even two hundred men. They barricaded the streets and the gates, and they set fire to some of the outlying buildings to ward off the beasts that came with the mists.” Hetch looked away in pain. “I ran. I knew what was coming. I told him, but he wouldn’t listen. So I ran. At the last, he called me a coward. A disgrace to his name. And then the mists came over Keskor.”

  The drums echoed in her mind, laughing at him, but Cassia could see and hear the frustration and despair Hetch felt. She remembered Rann Almoul well enough to imagine him shouting such things as he readied weapons against Caenthell’s inexorable advance. He would never have been persuaded to leave his wealth behind, not when he believed himself to be as powerful as – if not more than – the Empire’s Factor. Cassia recognised his attitudes from some of the stories she knew; stories where arrogant kings railed ineffectually against the certainties of fate, or in which rash heroes came unstuck against the wills of the gods themselves.

  But Hetch would not want to hear that now. He and his older brothers would have consoled each other, and in doing so they would have reaffirmed and reinforced their own beliefs. Any child would defend their father – even one as cruel as her own had been.

  “You were not a coward,” she told him gently. Was that what he wanted her to say? Was that why he had collared her here, to unburden himself, perhaps even to ask for forgiveness?

  Hetch snorted. “Of course I wasn’t. Don’t be stupid. I wanted to live. I still do. I’m not as stubborn as my father, Cassia. I know when to turn and run for cover. He taught me well enough to do that. We brought everything that could be saved, but he want
ed to save everything else too. He taught us to be pragmatic and ruthless in our business, and in the end he was anything but that. He clung to his dreams and he died for them.”

  She was taken aback by that, and she didn’t know how to reply. Hetch had just proved her last thought wrong. Rann Almoul, she decided, would actually be proud of his son’s hardspoken attitude.

  “And you’re as bad as he was,” Hetch continued. “You want us to go back up into the hills and fight these things, whatever they are? You’re mad – just as mad as that old bastard who bought you, and just as mad as your father. You can’t fight these things, Cassia. Most of the time you can’t even see them! You’ll send us all to our deaths!”

  Oh, so that was it. She’d been wrong for the second time in as many minutes. It was about cowardice after all. Cowardice – and coin.

  “Well we can’t have that now, can we?” she snapped back. “What’s the point of carting away all that gold if you’re all too dead to spend it?”

  “That’s not what I meant!”

  “Isn’t it?” Cassia stepped up close to him and stared into his eyes, searching for the fear hidden behind his bluster. “Isn’t it? Then run away, Hetch Almoul. Take your wagons and your chests down the March, back into the Empire, away from all of this. Go and live in one of those grand houses that overlook the Castaria and count your gold. Pile the coins in even stacks and measure your wealth against your neighbours. Give thanks to Casta and Meteon and Saihri and all the others that you’re safe. But what will you do when the mists appear on the horizon again? Because they will. Run as far as you want, to the very corners of the world, but what good will all of Rann Almoul’s gold do you if there is nowhere left to spend it? Jedrell doesn’t just want to claw back command of the North, he wants the whole world. And he will take it, unless we all stand against it. All of us, Hetch.”

  Others were watching the argument. She saw them in the corners of her vision, lurking and listening. She ignored them, keeping her attention on Hetch’s taut features. Like his father, he was proving to be skilled in hiding his emotions, but there, in the twitch of the skin at the corner of his eyes, was the sign that she had hit the target. She did not need a staff to beat Hetch; she only needed words.

  Hetch shook his head. “All of us? That’s the part I don’t understand, Cassia. You’ve been telling us all that you’ve brought these sorcerous monsters to help us drive the mists back, but then you say you’re the Heir to the North too. Which side are you on, really?”

  Cassia had to cork her own emotions, breathing deep to give herself time to marshall a reply. “Why do I have to be on any side? I promised to Malessar that I would make right what I had done wrong, that’s all.”

  “But you need all of us to march back into the North with you to do that.”

  She sighed. “Yes. Look around you, Hetch. The decision has already been made. There’s still time for you to run south, or into Lyriss, if you want to.”

  Now he would not meet her eyes. “I have already run twice. At Keskor . . . and when it started, in Escalia, under the mountains. And that’s what I didn’t tell them, Cassia. He scared me too much. I couldn’t tell anybody about it.”

  “What? I don’t understand, Hetch.”

  He lowered his voice and leaned in closer. “He was there. Raving like a man possessed. The things he said . . . about power and glory and battle . . . it was like he was inside my head, prophesying death and destruction like the first stones of an avalanche. He brought lightning to destroy the temples of Escalia, and the drums pounded to the sound of his voice! I know which side he was on, Cassia, and may all the gods save us because he’s not on ours. And that begs the same question of you, Cassia. Are you leading us into a trap?”

  Suddenly she felt hollow. “How can you think that? You know me, Hetch.”

  “Because of him.”

  “Who? This . . . prophet of the North? Who is he?”

  Hetch blinked and shuddered, clearly recalling that encounter. “Your father.”

  Cassia’s thoughts exploded like a snowball against a high wall. Her world tilted, her vision seared by blotches of light. Hetch gripped her arm again, to keep her upright, and her shoulder ached with the strain. This time she was too shocked to protest.

  “He’s alive?”

  Hetch nodded. “He was, when I saw him in Escalia.” He sounded uncertain even of that much.

  Norrow. Her father. Strange how little she’d thought of him in the last months. He had been at the back of her mind of course – she could not have rid herself of him entirely – but he had become almost . . . irrelevant, ever since she had encountered Malessar. The warlock had supplanted him, she realised.

  And now he was back. Like the recurrence of a disease inside the town walls. Unwanted, unwelcome. Haunting her just as he had haunted her grandfather.

  Cassia levered herself back onto her feet again, gritting her teeth against the wave of nausea that passed through her. What was he doing? Was he mad? How could he be any part of Caenthell’s madness?

  Except . . .

  Except he already was. She had dreamed of him, dreamed his ragged cloak flew in the ruins of the castle. And with the nausea came a horrible sinking feeling – the knowledge that she had missed something vital. A connection that she should have made long ago.

  “Oh Ceresel, you bitch . . .”

  Hetch stared down at her, his face still troubled. “You see? Cassia, if you are right, if you are telling us the truth – if you really are this Heir to the North . . . then what in the Emperor’s name is your father?”

  17

  Something’s changed. What’s wrong?”

  Arca sat in his saddle, his stiff unbalanced posture a clear indication of his discomfort. His horse looked spooked, its eyes rolling, and Cassia guessed the beast was less than keen on the close proximity of her shieldmen. To judge by the muddy prints on their limbs – and all the way up the back of one of their number, she saw, Arca must have enlisted their help in mounting. The old man was prideful to a fault, and determined to not be left behind.

  “Nothing,” she said, hoping the lie sounded convincing. She passed him the bowl – the dregs of the stew she had managed to scrounge from one of the cookfires even as soldiers kicked dirt over it – and turned away quickly before he had a chance to question her further.

  “Phah. That’s a whole lot of nothing, girl. You look paler than a week-old corpse.”

  “Oh thank you very much,” Cassia muttered. Her hands seemed to belong to someone else as she gathered up her own belongings – so few, and so meaningless – and settled them over the flanks of her spare mount. The mocking rhythm of the drums would not let her mind settle on anything other than that fleeting dream of the ragged storytellers’ cloak skewered by the branches of a dead, blasted tree.

  The commanders were waiting for her, their subordinates waving and shouting hoarsely to form the troops into rough columns for marching. Bulked out as they were by untrained levies – by the townsfolk and refugees of the North – the columns were rough indeed, even more so when compared to the perfect lines of shieldmen that waited at the foot of the hill. Cassia looked at the troops and sensed their fear. It matched her own.

  She manoeuvred through the press to where the legion’s standards were held, high and unwavering, around the commanders themselves. The generals had impressive mounts, as befitted the nobility of the Empire: horses bred from the very best bloodlines, whole hands taller than those the captains rode. Yet they weren’t bred for battle, Cassia thought. That was what she had learned from Baum. Endurance, and travel, and show perhaps, but not for battle. The captains would lead any charge.

  Vescar Almoul glared at her with undisguised hatred, but he moved aside to make room for her with only a muttered comment she was glad she could not hear. Her grandfather, drawn and obviously exhausted but still in better condition than Arca, waited next to the man who had been the former quartermaster to the legion. The other commanders deferred to h
im as much as they did to Tarves Almoul.

  “Our scouts have pressed forwards some way,” the quartermaster said, after seeming to hesitate over a form of greeting. “The mists have not advanced overnight as much as they have done before. Perhaps the enemy knows we have been reinforced.”

  “Aye, and perhaps they’re just waiting for us to fall into the trap she’s set for us,” Vescar said.

  Attis shook his head, passing Cassia a wry, apologetic smile. She had already turned her back on Almoul, having decided her best course of action was to ignore him entirely.

  “We won’t go north just yet, sir,” she said to the quartermaster. “Better to head directly to the Emperor’s March. There are more reinforcements coming up the road from Lychor and Segrea. We have to meet up with them.”

  Even Attis looked surprised. “You’re certain? More men? Then our messages got through?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know that – I came through Lyriss. But Rais should have met them.”

  “Then why has he not replied?” the quartermaster asked.

  “Rais,” Vescar spat. “A foreign name. Somebody else we cannot trust, brother.” He addressed his words to Tarves, but they were deliberately loud. Cassia felt the muscles at the base of her neck tighten in anger.

  “The answers, sir, must be at the road.”

  The quartermaster shared a glance with Tarves and something unspoken passed between them.

  “Then let us see what the road has to say,” the quartermaster replied at last, with dry humour. “At least it can convey us in both directions. Vescar Almoul, you have the vanguard. Your sour looks alone should drive any enemy from our path.”

  Vescar was plainly disgusted by the insult, but Cassia knew he would not refuse command of the legion’s lead units – such a command was prestigious and was thus everything he strove for. He turned and issued orders to his own subordinates, and Cassia breathed out in relief.

  The quartermaster smiled at her and leaned over so Tarves could not hear. “If we die quickly, at least I’ll be spared his execrable presence.”