A cannon had burst, that’s what Zuri told her. A splinter of metal had grazed her head, ripped her wig off and knocked her flat. A little lower and it would have sprayed her brains across the hillside. She had missed the chaos of the rout, bouncing unconscious in the back of a wagon. A lady of taste should appear to make no effort. The right things simply happen around her. She woke here in the woods, with the worst headache she’d ever had.
She could very easily have been dead.
But you know things are bad when you cling to that for comfort.
“Ah!” she grunted as Zuri’s needle bit again.
“Best stay quiet,” murmured Broad, squatting low beside the rotten carcass of the tree trunk, light flashing on his lenses as he peered off into the woods. His voice had a rough, hollow quality. “They’ll be hunting for us.”
Meaning they would be hunting for her. “Of course. I’m sorry.” Savine closed her eyes. How often had she said sorry before? Not often. And never really felt it. But this was a different world.
“How bad is it?” Her voice came very small. As if she hardly wanted an answer.
“Just a scratch.” There was no sign in Zuri’s face that she was lying. It was Broad’s face that gave it away.
“You’ve been stitching a long time for a scratch,” she croaked out.
“You know me, I will not stand for sloppy needlework.” Zuri leaned close to bite off the thread and sat back, frowning. “There might be a little scar. Something to add a dash of danger.”
As if they needed any extra danger. A scar was the least of Savine’s worries.
“Done?” asked Broad, standing over them. He offered one big hand. The one with the tattoo on its back. Savine noticed the knuckles were all scratched and scabbed. “Lady Savine?”
She stayed sitting. Watched the woodlice squirm among the rotten roots. Honestly, she was not sure she could get up. “Is my husband alive?”
“When I last saw him.”
She got the feeling there was more to that story, but she hardly dared ask. “He was hurt?”
Broad added no sugar to it. “Badly.”
“I see,” said Savine, cold all over. Broad, she felt, knew a bad wound when he saw one. He squatted slowly in front of her, baring his teeth as if moving was painful.
“We have to go. Can’t afford to wait for dark. Have to keep off the roads, make for the coast, then to Angland. We have to go now.”
“Yes.” Savine took a long breath. “But not towards Angland. I’m going back to Stoffenbeck.”
“What?” asked Zuri.
“I have to surrender. It’s my best chance to save Leo.”
Muscles squirmed on the side of Broad’s head. “Lady Savine, from what I saw, there might be no saving him—”
“It’s my only chance to save myself. We have no supplies. The king’s forces are everywhere. My entourage is down to two and it’s two more than I deserve. We’ll never make it to the coast. Not with me the size of a house.”
“You could go to your father,” murmured Zuri.
“There’s nothing he could do. He resigned. Difficult to shield the king from treason when you have a traitor for a daughter. I did this to myself.” She said it rather bitterly, for someone who had no one else to blame. “No one can undo it. Even if I could get back to Angland, do we really think the Inquisition would not reach me there?”
“We can try,” said Broad.
“You can.” Savine took his hand and gave it an awkward pat. “You should. Go back to May and Liddy.” She smiled up at Zuri. A queasy, hopeless smile, since she honestly had no idea how she would make it to the edge of the woods by herself, let alone back to the battlefield. “You, too, Zuri, you have your brothers to think about. The time has come for us to—”
“I will come with you.”
Savine stared at her. She had always liked to think of Zuri as a friend, but she knew she was a paid one. Knew someone of her taste and talents must once have had far higher ambitions than being a glorified maid. Ambitions that had been destroyed by whatever horrors she had fled from in Gurkhul. She had always liked to think of Zuri as a friend but had never imagined she would carry on being one if there was nothing in it for her. When it had become a terrible risk, in fact.
She felt as if she could have taken any amount of betrayal, danger, disappointment. But loyalty was somehow more than she could bear. There was no helping it. Savine put her hands over her face and started to cry.
She heard Broad give a weary sigh. “Reckon we’re all going back.”
No one challenged them on the way to Stoffenbeck.
Perhaps those searching for her were far to the North, watching the coast for her escape. Perhaps they were looking for someone fleeing her crimes, not limping meekly back through their very scene. Perhaps—bald, bloody and bedraggled—she bore little resemblance to anyone’s idea of the famous beauty Savine dan Glokta, and her own least of all.
As she toiled through the fields, sweat tickling at the burning scar on her forehead, she needed three hands. One to hold her bloated belly, one to hold her aching back, one to hold her throbbing head. She had no choice but to alternate between them, her shoulder aching with every step, breathing hard through her gritted teeth, while her baby quite literally kicked the piss out of her.
She cocooned herself in misery so she would not have to look right or left. So she would not have to see the scorched orchard, the trampled wheatfields, the smoke still crawling up from Stoffenbeck, pounded to ruins by cannon so meticulously cast in her own foundry.
All the while, she told herself she could not be blamed.
She had not wanted any of this, after all. She had wanted to marry Orso. More than anything. But she lost him because her mother once fucked a king. Curnsbick had been right, after Valbeck her judgement was no good. When Leo was served up to her, so handsome and celebrated and bursting with potential, just the delightful pastry her jaded palate needed, what choice did she have but to get her knife and fork out? And then, pregnant and puking and judgement even worse, what choice did she have but to marry him? And then, finding he was already balls-deep in conspiracy with Isher, what choice did she have but to join them and do everything to make a success of their preposterous scheme?
Making successes from men’s preposterous schemes was what she did, after all.
It was terribly unfair on her, when you thought about it, that she had lost everything because of who her mother fucked, by definition some time before she was born.
And then she thought of her father. Not King Jezal, the other one. The real one, blood or no blood. Sitting in his wheeled chair, tongue touching his empty gums and a brow critically raised. Perhaps after one of her arrogant overreaches in the fencing circle. Really, Savine?
“What have I done?” she whispered, and she sank down to one knee in the road.
If she had really tried, if she had truly wanted to, she could have found a way to stop this. There were a thousand moments when she could have found a way to stop this.
Instead, she had fanned the flames. Instead, she had rolled the dice. And what for? Ambition. That snake twisted tight about her innards whose hunger grew sharper the more it was fed. Whose hunger could never be satisfied.
The truth was, like all gamblers who suddenly lose big, she had only thought about what there was to win. Now she saw the scale of her loss, and it was no less than everything. And she had not only lost on her own behalf, but for thousands of others. What would it mean for Zuri? What would it mean for Broad? For Haroon and Rabik? For Liddy and May? By the Fates, what would it mean for her unborn child?
“What have I done?”
She felt Zuri’s light hand on one shoulder. “My scripture teacher would no doubt have said…” She was frowning doubtfully out across the battered battlefield. “That regret is the gateway to salvation…”
Savine gave a disbelieving snort. “Can you really still believe in God? That this is all part of some grand plan? That it means somet
hing?”
“What is the alternative?” Zuri looked at her, eyes wide. “To believe that it means nothing?”
Savine felt Broad’s heavy hand on her other shoulder. “No one makes a thing like this happen alone. We all had our hand in it.”
She slowly nodded. It would have been yet more appalling arrogance to suppose it was all her fault. She winced as she struggled to her feet, took a hard breath and, with one hand under her belly and one pressed into her back, struggled on across the wounded fields towards Stoffenbeck.
She had played her part in this.
All that remained was to pay for it.
She was not sure how long she sat there, waiting, in an agony of guilt, apprehension and, well, agony.
The pain in her head was getting no better. The pain in her bladder was most certainly getting worse. Her baby was endlessly shifting. Perhaps it was cursed with Leo’s impatience. Perhaps it was infected by her panic. Perhaps, like a rat scurrying from a foundering ship, it sensed she was going down and desperately struggled to wriggle free of her.
It must have had its mother’s instinct for self-preservation. Savine would have wriggled free of her own skin if she could.
From time to time, she heard guards outside the door. Muffled voices. Even laughter. She was a prisoner, then. Something she had better get used to, she supposed. Along with being universally reviled, all she had built ruined, her name used as a cheap joke or a warning lecture—
The door clattered open and she jerked up so suddenly she put a spasm through her back, nearly vomited and was trapped halfway to her feet, leaning on the chair with one trembling arm.
Orso stared at her, frozen. As if he had arranged an expression of righteous fury but on seeing her could not quite disguise his shock. Her belly, and her head wound, and her ripped and bloody clothes took some adjusting to, she supposed. The righteous fury soon returned, though.
“Don’t get up,” he snapped, though it was obvious she couldn’t have without block and tackle. She flopped back into the chair with all the grace of an ale keg with arms. Any trace of dignity she counted one of her least painful losses, at this point.
He shut the door, carefully not looking at her. He had changed, too. Harder. More purposeful. There was no hint of his old languid flourish as he stalked into the room with his fists clenched.
“I was surprised to hear you had given yourself up. I felt sure you’d be slithering away somewhere to hatch some new scheme.” The room was warm, but his voice was cold enough to make the hairs on her arms bristle.
“I knew that surrendering…” Her voice sounded pathetically weak. “Was the best thing I could do…” She was used to holding all the cards. Even with Orso, she was used to holding some. Now he had the entire deck. “For my child—”
“It’s a little late,” he barked at her, “to be thinking about that, don’t you think? Now the dead are stacked five high in the fields?”
Savine had not supposed they would trade quips like they used to. But she had never really seen him angry before. She began to wonder if this had been a terrible mistake. If she should have run while she had the chance, and never stopped.
“Were you a part of this?” He still refused to look at her, jaw muscles squirming on the side of his face. It came to her forcefully that with a word he could have her hanged beside all the rest. She would never have dreamed he would do it until that moment. Now she was not so sure.
Lies would not help her. It had to be the truth. “Yes,” she whispered. “I had a full part in it.”
“I would’ve been amazed if you hadn’t. But somehow I kept hoping.” Orso bared his teeth. “I received a letter, some time ago, warning me of a conspiracy to steal my throne. A plot by members of the Open Council. With friends in the North.”
Savine closed her eyes. Rikke. It could only have been Rikke. She had not merely let them down but betrayed them. Perhaps she really had seen the future. Savine might almost have admired her tactics, had she any emotion to spare. It was very much the sort of thing she might have done herself. Not that it mattered now. When she opened her eyes, Orso was staring at her with the strangest look.
“Why?” he asked.
Savine swallowed. She had planned the best way to frame it, how to subtly shift the blame, each word picked out as carefully as an ensemble for the theatre, but now the excuses burbled out in a half-baked rush. “They were already planning it. Isher, and the rest. I had no choice. I could only—”
“No.” Orso bit off every word. “I mean… why choose him… over me?”
She should have known he would ask. But she had told herself he no longer cared. That it was buried and would never need to be dug up. Now she realised her error, and she stared down at the carpet, her face burning, the breath crawling in her throat.
“What did I do? To make you turn on me?” He stepped closer, lips curling back from his teeth. “Have you even got a heart?”
She did, and it was pounding now. She felt as if her battered skull was going to split. He gripped the arms of her chair with white knuckles and she shrank back, turning her face away as he leaned down over her, snarling, spitting, stabbing at his chest with a finger.
“I loved you. I still fucking love you! How pathetic is that? After what you’ve done!”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, “I’m so sorry—”
“I don’t want your sorry, I want to know why!” He snarled the word over and over. “Why? Why? Why—”
“Because I’m your sister!” she screamed in his face. She was revolted. She was ashamed. She was terrified.
She was relieved.
She only realised then how the secret had eaten at her. She met his eye and gave a helpless shrug. “I’m your sister.”
Never had she seen a man’s face so contorted with different extremes of emotion within a few moments. From fury, to bafflement, to disgust, to disbelief. “What do you mean?” He flinched back. Jerked his hand from the arm of her chair and held it up as if to ward off a blow. “What do you mean?”
“I meant to say yes to you!” Her confession welled up, sickening as shit flooding from a broken sewer. “After Valbeck. That’s the truth. I wanted to. That’s all I wanted. You were the one good thing… the only good thing… I went to my mother…” She closed her eyes, felt tears burning at the lids. A little sadness. A lot of fear. “She told me… I couldn’t marry you. She told me… she, and your father…” She squeezed her eyes tighter shut, had to force out the words. “They were lovers! Before he became king. And I was the result. I’m your sister! Half-sister. That’s the truth. I didn’t—”
“That’s a lie.” Orso’s face crushed up in disbelief. “That can’t be true.”
“You know it is. I know it is. My father—” she gave a kind of cough, “Arch Lector Glokta, that is, he offered to marry my mother. So she would be safe. He raised me as his own. I didn’t know. Not until she told me. That’s the truth. And then… I didn’t know what I could do! I couldn’t marry you. I couldn’t tell you why. Then seeing how you hated me for it… it was torture!” She found she was leaning towards him, reaching out for him. “It still is torture.”
He stumbled back, clattering into a chair and sending it over backwards.
“I lost my way after that!” She struggled up somehow, took a wobbling step towards him. “I lost all my judgement. I was just… pretending… to be me. I was still trapped in Valbeck, somehow! I couldn’t see… past my own ambitions… I didn’t have anything else!” Pathetic excuses, mangled in her dry mouth. “Leo… he’s a good man. He could be… but he’s so easily led. Isher and the rest brought him to this.” She closed her eyes, tears welling down her face. “I brought him to this. Blame me. I wanted… I don’t even know what I wanted any more!”
She could hardly stand. She sank down on her knees. “I’m begging you for mercy. For my husband. For myself. For our child.” Hands clasped, face wet with tears, nose clicking with snot. What a fucking cliché. “I know I don�
�t deserve it, but it’s all I can do now. Please, Orso.”
He stared down at her, that hand still up as though to push her away. To push away what she was saying.
“Gorst!” he shrieked.
“No. Orso, please.” She almost clutched at his ankles. “I didn’t know. It’s the truth—”
The door burst open and Bremer dan Gorst strode in. Huge. Merciless.
“Get her out of here!”
Gorst took her under one arm. Oddly gentle. But utterly irresistible.
“Please!” she blubbed as he half-marched her, half-carried her out. “Orso!” She clutched at a table in desperation and dragged it over, a pile of books scattering. “Please!”
The door slammed shut.
Those Names
“There’s the beacon fire!” squeaked Greenway, pointing off through the mist. “It’s Ollensand!”
“Finally!” Stour stalked to the prow, shouldering Greenway aside for a better look. There was no missing the wriggling pinprick of light now, and there were smiles all around at the thought of land, and food, and warmth, Clover’s big as anyone’s. It had been quite the wearying voyage.
They’d scratched together a crew half his men, half Stour’s young bastards who’d lived through the battle. One had a wound in his back and died after a night of groaning on the water. They’d rolled him over the side, the only ceremony Clover’s observation that not everyone goes back to the mud after all. Some get the big drink instead. Greenway had looked green the whole way, and especially green at that, Rikke’s prediction that he’d die on water no doubt weighing on his mind.
“Home again.” Clover shook some of the salt dew from the old blanket around his shoulders. He glanced at Sholla, sitting beside him with her arm over the tiller. “Quite a feat o’ navigation.”
“Nothing to comment on,” she said modestly, though he knew she’d spent most of the nights awake, frowning at the stars and fretting over the course. Last thing they wanted was to land in the wrong place, after all, and one bit of sea looks much like another.
The Trouble with Peace Page 58