Thorn frowned at the overgrown yard beside the temple, crammed with marking stones wonky as a beggar’s teeth, each one, she guessed, with a corpse beneath it, rotting. Hundreds of them. Thousands. A charnel pit right inside the city.
She gave a sweaty shudder at the thought, squeezing at the pouch that held her father’s fingerbones. “Damn this city.” He might have loved talking about the place, but she was starting to hate it. Far too big, the size of it was crushing. Far too noisy so you couldn’t think straight. Far too hot, always sticky and stinking day or night. Rubbish and flies and rot and beggars everywhere, it made her dizzy. So many people, and all of them passing through, no one knowing each other, or wanting anything from each other but to claw out a profit.
“We should go home,” she muttered.
“We only just got here.”
“Best time to leave a place you hate.”
“You hate everything.”
“Not everything.” She glanced sideways and caught Brand looking at her, and felt that tingling in her stomach again as he quickly looked away.
Turned out he didn’t just have the puzzled look and the helpless look, he had another, and now she was catching it all the time. Eyes fixed on her, bright behind a few stray strands of hair. Hungry, almost. Scared, almost. The other day, when they’d been pressed together on the ground, so very close, there’d been … something. Something that brought the blood rushing to her face, and not just her face either. In her guts she was sure. Just below her guts, even more so. But the doubts crowded into her head like the faithful into their temples at prayer time.
Could you just ask? I know we used to hate each other but I’ve come to think I might like you quite a lot. Any chance you like me, at all? Gods, it sounded absurd. All her life she’d been pushing folk away, she had no idea where to start at pulling one in. What if he looked at her as if she was mad? The thought yawned like a pit at her feet. What do you mean like? Like, like like? Should she just take hold of him and kiss him? She kept thinking about it. She hardly thought about anything else anymore. But what if a look was just a look? What if it was like her mother said—what man would want someone as strange and difficult and contrary as she was? Not one like Brand who was well-made and well-liked and what a man should be and could have anyone he wanted—
Suddenly his arm was around her, herding her back into a doorway. Her heart was in her mouth, she even gave a little girlish squeak as he pressed up tight against her. Then everyone was scrambling to the sides of the lane as horses clattered by, feathers on their bridles thrashing and gilded armor glinting and tall riders in tall helmets caring nothing for those who cowered to either side. Duke Mikedas’s men, no doubt.
“Someone could get hurt,” Brand muttered, frowning after them.
“Aye,” she croaked. “Someone could.”
She was fooling herself. Had to be. They were friends. They were oarmates. That was all they needed to be. Why ruin it by pushing for something she couldn’t have, didn’t deserve, wouldn’t get … then she caught his eye, and there was that damn look again that set her heart going as if she’d rowed a hard mile. He jerked away from her, gave an awkward half-smile, strode on as the crowds pressed back in after the horsemen.
What if he felt the same as her, wanting to ask but scared to ask and not knowing how to ask? Every conversation with him felt dangerous as a battle. Sleeping in the same room was torture. They’d just been oarmates on one floor when they first threw their blankets down, laughing at the state of the great ruin Yarvi had bought, daylight showing through the roof. But now she only pretended to sleep while she thought about how close he was, and sometimes she thought he was pretending too, could swear his eyes were open, watching her. But she was never sure. The thought of sleeping next to him made her miserable, and the thought of not sleeping next to him made her miserable.
Do you … like me? Like? Like?
The whole thing was a bloody riddle in a language she couldn’t speak.
Brand puffed out his cheeks and wiped sweat from his forehead, no doubt blissfully unaware of the trouble he was causing. “Guess we’ll be gone soon as we strike a deal with the empress.”
Thorn tried to swallow her nerves and talk normally, whatever that meant. “I’m thinking that won’t happen.”
Brand shrugged. Calm and solid and trusting as ever. “Father Yarvi’ll find a way.”
“Father Yarvi’s deep-cunning all right but he’s no sorcerer. If you’d been at the palace, seen that duke’s face …”
“Sumael will find a way for him, then.”
Thorn snorted. “You’d think Mother Sun was up that woman’s arse for the light she’s shining into everyone’s lives.”
“Not yours, I reckon.”
“I don’t trust her.”
“You don’t trust anyone.”
She almost said, “I trust you,” but swallowed it at the last moment and settled for a grunt.
“And Rulf trusts her,” Brand went on. “With his life, he told me. Father Yarvi too, and he’s hardly the trusting type.”
“Wish I knew more about what happened with those three,” said Thorn. “There’s a story there.”
“Sometimes you’ll be happier for knowing less.”
“That’s you. Not me.” She glanced over at him and caught him looking back. Hungry almost, scared almost, and she felt that tingle deep in her stomach and would have been off on a mad argument with herself yet again if they hadn’t come to the market.
One of the markets, anyway. The First of Cities had dozens, each one big as Roystock. Places of mad bustle and noise, cities of stalls choked with people of every shape and color. Great scales clattered and abacuses rattled and prices were screamed in every tongue over the braying and clucking and honking of the livestock. There was a choking reek of cooking food and sickly-sweet spice and fresh dung and the gods knew what else. Everything else. Everything in the world for sale. Belt buckles and salt. Purple cloth and idols. Monstrous, sad-eyed fishes. Thorn squeezed her eyes shut and forced them open, but the every-colored madness still boiled before her.
“Just meat,” said Thorn plaintively, weighing Father Yarvi’s purse in her hand. “We just want meat.” Safrit hadn’t even asked for a certain kind. She dodged as a woman in a stained apron strode past with a goat’s head under her arm. “Where the hell do we start?”
“Hold up.” Brand had stopped at a stall where a dark-skinned merchant was selling strings of glass beads and lifting one so Mother Sun sparkled through the yellow glass. “Pretty, ain’t they? Sort of thing a girl likes as a gift.”
Thorn shrugged. “I’m no expert on pretty. Girls neither, for that matter.”
“You are one, aren’t you?”
“So my mother tells me.” She added in a mutter, “Opinion’s divided.”
He held up another necklace, green and blue this time. “Which ones would you want?” And he grinned sideways. “For a gift?”
Thorn felt that tingling in her stomach, stronger than ever. Close to actual vomiting. If ever she was going to get proof then here it was. A gift. For her. Hardly the one she would have chosen but with luck that might be next. If she picked out the right words. What to say? Gods, what to say? Her tongue seemed twice its usual size of a sudden.
“Which ones would I want, or …” She kept her eyes on him and let her head drop to one side, tried to make her voice soft. Winsome, whatever that sounded like. She couldn’t have been soft more than three times in her life and winsome never, and it came out a clumsy growl. “Which ones do I want?”
The puzzled look, now. “I mean, which ones would you want brought back? If you were in Thorlby.”
And in spite of the cloying heat a coldness spread out, starting in Thorn’s chest and creeping slowly to her very fingertips. Not for her. For someone back in Thorlby. Of course they were. She’d let herself get blown away on her own wind, in spite of Skifr’s warnings.
“Don’t know,” she croaked, trying to shrug as if
it was nothing, but it wasn’t nothing. “How should I know?” She turned away, her face burning as Brand talked prices with the merchant, and she wished the ground would open up and eat her unburned like the southern dead.
She wondered what girl those beads were for. Wasn’t as if there were that many in Thorlby the right age. More than likely Thorn knew her. More than likely Thorn had been laughed at and pointed at and sneered at by her. One of the pretty ones her mother always told her to be more like. One of the ones who knew how to sew, and how to smile, and how to wear a key.
She thought she’d made herself tough right through. Slaps and punches and shield blows hardly hurt her. But everyone has chinks in their armor. Father Yarvi might have stopped them crushing her with stones, but casually as that Brand crushed her just as flat with a string of beads.
He was still grinning as he slipped them into a pocket. “She’ll like them, I reckon.”
Thorn’s face twisted. Never even occurred to him she might think they were for her. Never even occurred to him to think of her the way she’d come to think of him. It was as if all the color had drained out of the world. She’d spent a lot of her life feeling shamed and foolish and ugly, but never so much as this.
“I’m such a stupid shit,” she hissed.
Brand blinked at her. “Eh?”
The helpless look, this time, and the temptation to sink her fist into it was almost overpowering, but she knew it wasn’t his fault. It was no one’s fault but her own, and punching yourself never solves anything. She tried to put a brave face on but she couldn’t find it right then. She wanted just to get away. To get anywhere, and she took one step and stopped dead.
The scowling Vansterman who had stood beside Mother Scaer in the palace was blocking her path, his right hand hidden in a rolled up cloak where, she had no doubt, it held a blade. There was a rat-faced little man at his shoulder and she could feel someone moving over on her left. The big Lowlander, she guessed.
“Mother Scaer wants a word with you,” said the Vansterman, showing his teeth, and far from a pretty set. “Be best if you came quietly.”
“Better yet, we’ll go our own way quietly,” said Brand, plucking at Thorn’s shoulder.
She shook him off, hot shame turned to chill rage in an instant. She needed to hurt someone, and these idiots had come along at just the right moment.
Right for her. Wrong for them.
“I’ll be doing nothing quietly.” And she flicked one of Father Yarvi’s silver coins to the holder of the nearest stall, covered in tools and timber.
“What’s this for?” he asked as he caught it.
“The damage,” said Thorn, and she snatched up a hammer, flung it underhand so it bounced from the Vansterman’s skull, sending him stumbling back, all amazement.
She grabbed a heavy jug from another stall and smashed it over his head before he could get his balance, spraying them both with wine. She caught him as he fell and dug the jagged remains of the handle into his face.
A knife came at her and she dodged it on an instinct, jerking back from the waist so the blade hissed by her, eyes wide as she followed the flashing metal. The rat-faced man stabbed again and she reeled sideways, lurched over a stall, its owner wailing about his goods. She came up clutching a bowl of spice, flung it at Rat-face in a sweet-smelling orange cloud. He coughed, spat, lunged at her blindly. She used the bowl like a shield, the knife-blade buried itself in the wood and she wrenched it from his hand.
He came at her with a clumsy punch but she got her arm inside it, felt his fist scuff her cheek as she stepped in and kneed him full in the gut, then again between the legs and made him squeal. She caught him around the jaw, arching back, and butted him with all her strength in his rat face. The jolt of it dizzied her for a moment, but not half as much as it did him. He flopped onto his hands and knees, drooling blood, and she stepped up with a wild swing of her boot and kicked him onto his back, a table going over and half-burying him in an avalanche of glistening fish.
She turned, saw Brand being forced backward over a stall stacked with fruit, the big Lowlander trying to push a knife into his face, Brand’s tongue wedged between his teeth, eyes crossed as he stared at the bright point.
When you’re training, fighting your oarmates, there’s always a little held back. Thorn held back nothing now. She caught the Lowlander’s thick wrist with one hand and hauled his arm straight behind him, screamed as she drove the heel of her other hand down into his elbow. There was a crunch and his arm bent the wrong way, knife tumbling from his flopping hand. He screamed until Thorn chopped him in the neck just the way Skifr taught her and he fell jerking onto the next stall, sending broken pottery flying.
“Come on!” she spat, but there was no one left to fight. Only the shocked stall-holders and the scared bystanders and a mother holding her hand over her daughter’s eyes. “Go quietly, will I?” she shrieked, lifting her boot to stomp on the Lowlander’s head.
“No!” Brand caught her under the arm and dragged her through the wreckage, folk scrambling to give them room as they half-walked, half-ran into the mouth of a side-street.
“Did you kill them?” he was squeaking.
“With any luck,” snarled Thorn, tearing herself free of him. “Why? Did you plan to buy ’em beads, did you?”
“What? We were sent to get meat, not make corpses!” They took a quick turn, past a group of surprised beggars and on through the shadows of a rotten alley, the commotion fading behind them. “Don’t want to cause trouble for Father Yarvi. Don’t want to see you crushed with rocks either if I can help it.”
She saw he was right, and that made her angrier than ever. “You’re such a coward,” she hissed, which surely wasn’t fair but she wasn’t feeling very fair right then. There was something tickling her eye, and she wiped it, and her hand came away red.
“You’re bleeding,” he said, reaching out, “here—”
“Get your hand off me!” She shoved him against the wall, then, when he bounced off, shoved him again even harder. He shrank back, one hand up as she stood over him with her fists clenched, and he looked confused, and hurt, and scared.
It was a look that gave her a tingle, all right, but not in a good way. In that look she saw her silly bloody hopes as twisted and broken as she’d left that Lowlander’s arm, and it was no one’s fault but her own. She shouldn’t have let herself hope, but hopes are like weeds: however often you root them out they keep on springing up.
She gave a growl of frustration, and stalked off down the alleyway.
RUINS
He’d ruined it.
Brand leant against the crumbling wall of the courtyard between Rulf and Father Yarvi, watching Thorn give Fror a pasting. He’d spent half his time watching her, since they reached the First of Cities. But now he did it with the mournful longing of an orphan at a baker’s stall, taunting himself with the sight of treats he knows he’ll never have. A feeling Brand knew all too well. A feeling he’d hoped never to have again.
There’d been something good between them. A friendship, if nothing else. A friendship a long, hard time in the making.
Like the blundering oaf he was, he’d ruined it.
He’d come back to their room and her things were gone and she was sleeping with Safrit and Koll and she hadn’t said why. She hadn’t said one word to him since that day in the market. She must’ve seen how he was looking at her, guessed what he was thinking. Wasn’t as though he was any good at hiding it. But judging by the way she looked at him now, or rather the way she didn’t, the thought made her flesh crawl. Of course it did.
Why would someone like her—so strong, and sharp, and confident—want a dullard like him? Anyone could see at one glance she was something truly special and he was nothing, and would always be nothing, just like his father used to tell him. A cringing dunce who’d begged for scraps, and picked through rubbish, and dragged sacks around the docks for a pittance and been grateful to get it.
He wasn’t sure
exactly how he’d done it, but he’d found a way to let everyone down. His crew. His family. Himself. Thorn. He’d ruined it.
Koll slid back the bolt on the door and Sumael stepped into the courtyard. She had two others with her: a small servant in a hooded cloak and a big-shouldered man with a watchful frown and a scar through one gray brow.
The servant pushed her hood back. She was slight and dark-haired, with quick eyes that missed no detail as she watched the fight. If you could call it a fight. Fror was one of the best warriors on the crew, but it only took Thorn a few more moments to put him down and she wasn’t even breathing hard afterward.
“I’m done,” he groaned, clutching at his ribs with one hand while he held the other up for mercy.
“Most encouraging,” said Skifr, catching the wooden blade of Thorn’s ax before she could hit him again regardless. “I delight in the way you are fighting today, my dove. No doubts, no conscience, no mercy. Who will be next to face you … ?”
Dosduvoi and Koll found the corners of the courtyard suddenly fascinating. Brand held up helpless palms as Skifr’s eyes fell on him. The mood Thorn was in, he wasn’t sure he’d come through a bout alive. The old woman gave a sigh.
“I fear you have nothing left to learn from your oarmates. The time has come for stiffer opposition.” She pulled her coat off and tossed it over Fror’s back. “How did you get that scar, Vansterman?”
“I kissed a girl,” he grunted, crawling toward the wall, “with a very sharp tongue.”
“Further proof that romance can be more dangerous than swordplay,” said Skifr, and Brand could only agree with that. She pulled out a wooden sword and ax of her own. “Now, my dove, we shall truly see what you have learned—”
“Before you begin,” said Sumael, “I’ve—”
“Red-toothed war waits for nothing!” Skifr sprang, weapons darting out quick and deadly as striking snakes, Thorn twisting and writhing as she dodged and parried. Brand could hardly count how many crashing blows they traded in the time it took him to take a breath. Eight? Ten? They broke apart as suddenly as they met, circling each other, Thorn weaving between the columns in a prowling crouch, Skifr swaggering sideways, weapons drifting in lazy circles.