Felt like an age they stood there, then finally the Union man spoke, that strange high voice again, horribly shrill in the silence. ‘Are you … all right?’
A pause. Then Tinder gave the slightest nod. ‘All fine,’ he said, surprised how firm his voice sounded with his heart going like a busy smithy.
‘I’m … very sorry.’ Gorst looked down, seemed to realise he had a sword in his hand, moved to sheathe it, then, maybe seeing it was bloody as a slaughterman’s knife, didn’t. He stood, posed awkwardly, sideways on. ‘About … this.’
Tinder swallowed. The axe-handle felt slippery with sweat in his palm. ‘Sorry about what?’
Gorst shrugged. ‘Everything.’ He took a step back then, just as Tinder was allowing himself to relax, stopped in the doorway, reached out and put something down on the corner of the table. ‘For the milk.’ Then he ducked under the low lintel and hurried down Tinder’s creaking steps.
Tinder closed his eyes and breathed for a moment, revelling in the feeling of having no fatal wounds. Then he stole over to the door, easing it nearly closed with his fingertips. He picked up the coin the Southerner had left. A disc of silver, edge gleaming in the shadows, heavy in his palm. A hundred times what that cup of milk had been worth. A thousand times. Enough to replace all Tinder’s lost chickens and maybe even some of his lost crops into the bargain. He slowly closed his fist around it, hardly able to stop himself from trembling now, then wiped his eyes on the back of his sleeve.
He turned to his children, both staring at him from the shadows. ‘You’d best get in the back,’ he said softly. ‘And stay out of sight.’
He narrowed his eyes against the brightness as he peered around the doorframe again. The big Union man was walking away, head down, trying to wipe his sword clean with a rag much too small for the task. Beyond him it looked like they’d already started digging graves. Digging ’em right in the middle of Tinder’s field, of course, and ripping up what was left of his barley doing it. Tinder set his axe gently down on the table, and shook his head, and spat.
Then he stood in his doorway, and watched the Union ruin his crop.
Talins, Autumn 587
Shev propped her elbows on the parapet, shoulders hunched around her ears and her fingers dangling, and gave a soft whistle. ‘You’ve got quite an audience for it, anyway.’
She was about as well travelled as any woman in the Circle of the World. As well travelled as only a woman who’d spent half her life running can be. But even she’d rarely seen such a crowd. Maybe in Adua, at the presentation of the firstborn son and heir of the King of the Union, though her mind had been more on her empty belly than his full streets. Maybe at the execution of Cabrian when she passed through Darmium, though she’d passed through in too much pain and far too much haste to be sure. Definitely at the Great Temple in Shaffa, when the Prophet Khalul himself had come down from the mountains to speak the prayers at the new year pilgrimage, and even Shev had felt just the tiniest bit pious, if only for a moment.
But she’d certainly seen nothing like it in Styria.
The whole of Talins was down there and plenty more besides, a multitude so vast and so tight-pressed it hardly looked as if it could be made up of individuals, but had become a single formless, mindless infestation. The steps of the ancient Senate House seethed and the great square boiled over into the adjoining streets, every window packed with faces, every roof lined with onlookers. On the Ringing Bridge, and the Bridge of Gulls, and the Bridge of Kisses, and the Bridge of Six Promises, you couldn’t have fitted one more person without squeezing another off into the water. A couple had dropped in already, only to drag themselves out downstream and force their dripping way back to a spot where they could witness the ceremony.
It wasn’t every day you witnessed a ceremony like this, after all.
‘Let’s hope it turns out better than the last time we crowned a King of Styria,’ said Shev.
Vitari ducked out onto the balcony with a glass of wine in one hand. ‘Oh, I think that turned out well enough.’
‘The five most powerful nobles in the land lying dead on the stage?’
‘Nothing could be better. If you backed the sixth.’ And Vitari grinned down at her employer, the Grand Duchess Monzcarro Murcatto. The most powerful woman in the world stood rigidly erect in the centre of the great platform below, still as the statues of her that were springing up across Styria, while her two chancellors – Scavier and Grulo – competed with each other to wail out the most overblown praise to her stewardship of the nation.
Her tailors and armourers must have been working towards this joyous moment as hard as her soldiers and spies. She wore something that neatly split the difference between queen’s gown and general’s armour, breastplate twinkling in the sunlight, long train stitched with gilded serpents snaking behind her and a bright sword at her side. She went nowhere without a sword. Shev had heard she slept with one. Used one for a lover, some said. They didn’t say it to her face, though.
Wise people took great care over what they said to the face of the Serpent of Talins.
Shev sighed. ‘It’s a dark tide that lifts no boats at all.’
‘I’ve made my living picking through the flotsam left behind by other people’s dark tides,’ said Vitari. ‘But I’m confident this crowning will go smoothly.’
‘No doubt you’ve made sure of it.’ There were soldiers down there, with burnished armour and ceremonial weapons, but few of them, and purely for show. A naïve viewer might have supposed the Grand Duchess Monzcarro and her son needed no shield beyond the love of her people. Shev was not naïve.
Not in this, anyway.
From up here she could pick out the agents in the crowd around the platform, in the windows with the best views, at choke points and on corners. There a sharp-eyed boy waving a little flag of Talins. There a woman offering pastries with less enthusiasm than you might expect. There a man whose coat did not quite fit. Something in their watchful attitude. In their ready stance.
No doubt there were others that even Shev’s eyes, filed sharp as needles by years of constant danger, could never have picked out.
Yes, Shylo Vitari left as little to chance as anyone Shev had ever met.
‘You should be down there.’ She nodded at the triple row of soldiers and sailors, bankers and bureaucrats, leading citizens and smirking aristocrats at the back of the platform, basking in the warmth of the grand duchess’s power. ‘No one’s done more than you to make this happen.’
‘She who takes the credit also takes the blame.’ Vitari glanced sideways at Shev, and hers was about as sideways a glance as you could find. ‘Those of us who work in the shadows are better off staying there. Windbags like these can strut about in the light.’
Scavier and Grulo were finally reaching the end of their address, both sweating through their cloth of gold from their oratorical efforts. A somewhat tedious double-act, in Shev’s opinion, a reshuffled deck of the usual quarter-truths about loyalty, justice, leadership and standing united. Folk stood united precisely as long as it suited them, in her experience, and not one instant longer.
The restless crowd stilled as they stepped back. The boy rose from his gilded chair, dressed all in pure and simple white, and strolled with utter confidence to the front of the platform. His mother followed him, close as a long shadow, a crown of golden leaves in her gloved right fist.
While her son smiled beneficently upon the crowd she swept them with a chilling glare, as if determined to pick out any one person among those thousands who might dare to meet her eye. Might dare to challenge her. Might dare to raise the slightest objection to what was coming.
Grand Duke Orso would no doubt have raised objections if he’d been in attendance, but Murcatto had killed him, and both his sons, and both his generals, and his bodyguard and his banker for good measure, and taken his city for herself.
The great noblemen of Etrisani and Sipani, Nicante and Affoia, Visserine and Westport had objected, and one by one she had bribed them, cowed them or crushed them beneath her armoured boot.
Several leading citizens of Ospria had aired doubts that Murcatto’s child really was the son of their dear departed King Rogont, and their flyblown heads had ended up spiked above the city gates, where now they aired the much more eloquent stink of rot.
His August Majesty the King of the Union had objected most of all, but Murcatto had outmanoeuvred him politically and militarily, stripped away his allies one by one, then beaten him three times in the field and proved herself the greatest general of the age.
So it was far from surprising that no one chose to object today.
Satisfied by the utter silence that only abject fear can produce, the grand duchess raised the crown high over her son’s head in both hands. ‘You are crowned Jappo mon Rogont Murcatto!’ she called out as she slowly lowered it, her voice ringing from the faces of the buildings around the square, picked up as an echo by announcers scattered through the crowd. ‘Grand Duke of Ospria and Visserine, Protector of Puranti, Nicante, Borletta and Affoia, and King of Styria!’ And she settled the crown among her son’s brown curls.
‘King of Styria!’ chorused the crowd with one thunderous voice, and there was a mighty rustling, a ripple through the press of bodies as every man and woman knelt, Murcatto stepping back and sinking stiffly herself. Evidently those clothes had not been cut for kneeling in.
Shev’s eyes picked out only one figure who did not kneel. An unremarkable man in unremarkable clothes, standing beside a pillar on the steps of the Senate House, arms folded. It looked as if he glanced up towards Vitari and gave a nod, and she gave the slightest nod in return.
King Jappo himself stood and smiled. Seven years old, and already as calm and controlled before that mighty audience as Juvens himself might have been.
‘Oh, do get up!’ he shouted in a piping voice.
Laughter rippled out through the throng, turning quickly to a thunderous cheer. Startled birds showered up from the roofs as every bell in the city began to toll in celebration of the joyous event. Vitari raised her glass in a silent toast and Shev knocked her ring against it with a gentle ping. Down on the platform, the grand duchess embraced her son, and she was smiling. A sight only slightly less rare than the crowning of a King of Styria. Still, one could hardly begrudge her a grin.
‘She has done what couldn’t be done!’ Shev had to lean close and shout over the noise.
‘She has united Styria!’ Vitari drained her glass in one long swallow.
‘Most of it, at least.’
‘For now.’
Shev slowly shook her head as she watched the leading citizens of Styria file past King Jappo to offer their obsequious congratulations under the hawklike glare of his mother. ‘How many people had to die to give that boy a golden hat?’
‘Exactly the necessary number. Console yourself with the thought that the war might have been a great deal bloodier without your work.’
Shev winced. ‘It was more than bloody enough for my taste. I’m glad it’s done.’
‘The swords may be sheathed but the war goes on. We will move to darker battlefields now, and subtler weapons, and the Union’s general will show far less mercy.’
‘The Cripple?’ muttered Shev.
Vitari’s jaw muscles worked as she frowned down towards the new King of Styria. ‘His hidden legions are already on the move.’
Shev cleared her throat at that. ‘Before they get here … might I ask if her Grace has prepared something for me?’
‘Oh, her Grace has quite the memory for debts, as Duke Orso and his sons would testify, if they were able.’ Vitari slid out a rolled-up paper. ‘Murcatto always pays in full.’
Now the moment was on her, Shev found herself suddenly, absurdly nervous. She plucked the scroll from Vitari’s fingers with feigned confidence, ducked out of the sunlight and into the gilded shadows of the chamber and unrolled it on the table, revealing several blocks of densely written script.
‘On this the third day of blah, blah, blah … witnessed by blah, blah … I, Horald Gasta, also known as Horald the Finger, of Westport, do hereby extend my full forgiveness to the thief Shevedieh ul Kanan mut Mayr—’ She looked up. ‘Thief?’
Vitari cocked an orange eyebrow as she stepped from the balcony. ‘Would you prefer spy?’
‘I would prefer …’ What would she prefer? ‘Acquisitions specialist, maybe?’
Vitari snorted. ‘I would prefer that my arse was as tight as it was twenty years ago. We must tackle the world as it is.’
‘Your arse looks excellent if you … ask …’ Shev cleared her throat as Vitari narrowed her eyes. ‘Thief will do, I suppose.’ She began reading again. ‘For any and all offences towards me, including but not limited to the cowardly murder of my son Crandall … Cowardly? The only bloody cowardly thing about it was him turning up with four men to kill me! I axed him in the front, which was better than he bloody deserved, I can—’
‘Wording, Shevedieh, let the man have his wording.’ Vitari waved it away, heavy-lidded. ‘It doesn’t do to get worked up over trifles.’
‘Fair point.’ Shev took a breath as she looked back to the document. ‘I hereby give up any right to vengeance or recrimination and do solemnly swear, in the absence of any further significant offence, not to cause personal harm to the aforementioned Shevedieh or any of her associates.’ She scanned down to the bottom, peered closely and gave a snort. ‘The awe-inspiring Horald the Finger makes a mark?’
‘Awe-inspiring or not, that bastard can’t write any more than I can sing.’
‘You can’t sing?’
‘I used to torture people for a living, but I’d never be heartless enough to sing to them.’
‘And this is binding?’
‘This is flimflam. But Horald gave his word to the grand duchess. That is binding, or he will become another debt to be paid. He’s no fool. He understands.’
Shev closed her eyes, and took a long breath, and felt herself smiling. ‘I’m free,’ she whispered. Could it be? After all these years? ‘I’m free,’ she said, blinking back tears, and she felt her knees weaken and had to flop down in the nearest chair. She just sat, eyes shut, thinking about how she could just sit, eyes shut, not glancing over her shoulder, not startling at every noise, not picking over the routes of escape, not planning where she’d run to next.
God, she was free.
‘So …’ She opened her eyes. ‘That’s it?’
Vitari was pouring another glass of wine. ‘Unless you don’t want that to be it? I can always find work for the best … acquisitions specialist in Styria.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Shev, rolling up the scroll and turning for the door. ‘From here on, it’s the quiet life for me.’
‘I tried the quiet life.’ Vitari held her wine up to the light, a splash of blood-red across her frown as the sun shone through it. ‘For about a week. I was bored as hell.’
‘God, to be bored!’ Shev had to shout over another world-shaking wave of applause for the young King Jappo. ‘I can’t wait!’
She took the steps two at a time, footfalls clattering in the echoing, flaking, mould-stained stairwell. She clutched the paper with Horald’s mark at the bottom as if it was a pass to a brave new life – which indeed it was – smiling so wide her face hurt as she wove pleasing fantasies of all the fine things that’d happen when she burst through the door and Carcolf looked up.
‘I’m done,’ Shev would cry, breathless and appealingly tousled.
One of those golden brows would arch, just so. ‘Done with this job?’
‘Done with all of them. Horald the Finger gave his word. I’m out. I’m free.’ She’d saunter over, their eyes never leaving each other. ‘We’re free.’
She thought
of the happy lines around Carcolf’s eyes when she smiled, the creases at the corners of her mouth. The pattern of them, each one scored into her memory like a prayer learned by heart.
‘We’re free.’
Carcolf would plant her hands on her hips, her tongue in her cheek, and beckon Shev over with a flick of her head, and they’d fall into each other’s arms, Shev’s face full of that scent – loitering on the edge of too sour but somehow all the better for it. God, Shev could almost smell it now, tickling at her nose. Maybe they’d tickle their noses with some pearl dust and dance together, Shev leading even if she was half a head shorter, both laughing at the melancholy sawing of that violinist playing for coppers in the square outside.
Maybe there’d be a serious moment as they looked into each other’s eyes, and Shev would coax her out with just the right soft words like you coax a nervous cat through a gap in a fence. Carcolf would tell her stories of who she really was, and what she really felt, and she’d let that smirking mask slip and give a glimpse of the beautiful, vulnerable secret self that Shev had always been sure was in there. Maybe she’d even whisper her first name. A special name, which only Shev would get to use. Didn’t seem likely, but what’s the point of likely fantasies?
Then they’d kiss, of course, nudging to begin with, nuzzling, nipping, feeling each other out like a pair of master swordsmen fencing. Then hungrily, messily, tongues and teeth, Shev tangling her fingers in Carcolf’s hair and dragging her face down to hers. She was getting pleasantly warm in the trousers thinking about it. The kissing would lead to fumbling, and the fumbling would lead by a trail of shed clothes to the bed, and they’d stay in the bed until the room smelled of fucking, making up for all those wasted years, only getting up for a pinch more dust and maybe to make tea naked with Shev’s very fine tea set, and in the morning …
Her eager hand froze halfway to the doorknob, smile slowly fading and the warmth in her trousers with it.
In the morning, the grey, early morning, while Shev was still sprawled snoozing in the sticky sheets, Carcolf would slip out, pulling the hood down over her smile, probably with Shev’s very fine tea set in a bag over her shoulder – along with any other easily transported valuables – and vanish into the mists, never to be heard from again. Until she needed something.