“Let it bleed,” I said, passing the thorn to Argurh. “Easy to miss. The problem’s above the hoof often as not.”
I stood quickly, ignoring his thanks, and moved away from the camp, crouching to shred a poppy through my fingers.
“Aslaug!” The sun hadn’t touched the horizon yet but the sky lay crimson above the Gelleth hills rising to the west. “Aslaug!” I needed her then and there. “It’s an emergency.”
Kara hadn’t just wandered off into the meadow with her bedding. Hakon wasn’t just prettying himself up in case we met some Gelleth border guards, and the Danes weren’t being painfully slow to get ready just out of laziness. If there’s one thing I can’t stand about licentious behaviour, it’s when I’m not involved.
I glanced toward the west. The sun’s torturous descent continued, with it now standing a fraction above the hills.
“What?” Not the word, not even a whisper of it, but faint unmistakable sound of inquiry, deep inside my ear.
“I need to stop Hakon . . .” I hesitated, not wanting to have to spell it out. The devil’s supposed to know your mind, I always thought.
“Lies.” So faint I might have imagined it.
“Yes, yes, you’re the daughter of lies . . . what about them?”
“Lies.” Aslaug’s voice came on the very edge of hearing, the shadows reaching all around me. I wondered what had left her so mute and distant . . . It wasn’t temper that kept her from me—she had been shut out somehow . . . “Lies.” They have a saying in Trond—“lie as the light fails”—those lies were supposed to be the ones most likely to be believed.
“But what lie should I—”
“Look.” The word seemed to take all her strength, fading into nothing at the end. For a moment it seemed the shadows flowed, coming together with a singular direction. A direction that led my eyes to a lone and stunted willow growing beside the stream some two hundred yards from where Kara had been headed. Though I could see no sign of her—the hussy would be lying out of sight . . .
“There’s just trolls sleeping down there though.” Hakon wasn’t stupid and it would take more than stupid to go poking a troll.
No reply but I recalled not so long ago what Aslaug had said, crouching beside me, mouth beside my ear as the sun went through its death throes. “You would be surprised what I can weave from shadow.” I wondered if she were planning to do some weaving tonight. Some trickery perhaps? She could want for no better canvas than the black hide of a troll . . . A sense of urgency stole over me. It seemed as if Aslaug had warmed to the task. It was, after all, a wicked one.
I lurched to my feet. Hakon was already on the move, passing by the outermost of his men, pausing to swap a joke. Heart hammering, I hurried to intercept him whilst doing my best not to look as though I were hurrying. That’s pretty difficult. I don’t think I pulled it off. I caught him just beyond the camp.
“Yes?” Hakon gave me a distant look. He’d never accused me of malice over the affair at the Three Axes, or indeed acknowledged that the incident ever took place, but I could tell he had suspicions. Even now, with Kara waiting for him, he didn’t relax enough to gloat but regarded me with caution—once unbitten, twice shy, I guess.
“Just came to congratulate you, best man won and all that, spoils to the victor. She’s waiting for you over yonder.” I waved a hand toward the willow. As I spoke the words I felt Aslaug repeat them, wrapping the dark luxury of her voice about each syllable. It sounded as though she stood closer to him than I did—as though she whispered the last word into his ear.
For a moment Hakon just frowned. “You have very strange ideas about what is and what isn’t a game, prince. And no human should be referred to as spoils.” For a moment I worried he was going to hit me, but he stalked away toward the willow without sparing me another glance.
• • •
“A good night for walking!” Snorri hefted his pack. The Danes had purchased clothing, equipment and provisions for us in the last town we passed by. Using my money of course. “Across Gelleth and we’ll be back in Rhone before you know it. Jal loves Rhone, Tutt, just loves it.” Hennan looked up brightly from his bedding. “It’s good there?”
“If ever a country needed stabbing, Rhone is it.” I spat out a flying insect that decided to commit suicide in my mouth, possibly two, midges rising with the evening. Snorri seemed unaccountably cheerful. At least Tuttugu eyed me with a touch of sympathy.
“You’re not worried for our völva’s safety out there all alone with the night falling?” I poked at Snorri, wanting him to share my misery.
Snorri shot me a look under his brows. “She’s hardly alone, Jal. And it’s the things in the dark that should be scared of a völva, not the other way around.”
Young Hennan watched us from beneath his blanket, still not having bothered to rise. He shifted his gaze as we spoke, as though he were weighing us up and deciding what path to choose.
Somewhere out in the gathering gloom a shriek pierced the evening calm.
“I rest my case!” I said, spreading my hands. Snorri was already past me, axe in fist, Tuttugu hurrying along in his wake. For my part I was less keen to follow. The night holds all manner of terrors—and besides, the scream came from the direction of the willow. Hennan made to follow but I stuck a leg out in his path. “Best not.”
I have difficulty imagining the scene but all I can conclude is that Aslaug wove the shadow well. Very well indeed if she could make a reclining she-troll look like Kara’s inviting silhouette. Quite in what manner Lord Hakon offended the she-troll was never made entirely clear but it seems his advances were sufficiently impertinent to occasion the troll’s sticking of a sizeable willow branch into one of his orifices. Again the detail was never laid bare for us but suffice it to say that the escort ended in that meadow and Hakon was not riding when he left, but walking very carefully.
In the uproar immediately following the incident I took the opportunity to suggest to Gorgoth that he lead his people west rather than wait for the Danes’ outrage to reach boiling point. Gorgoth took the advice and I went with them, thereby avoiding having to hear all the names Hakon might call me, and of course avoiding the effort of trying not to smirk while he did it.
SEVENTEEN
Snorri and the others caught us up on the side of some desolate Gelleth hill, moon-washed and covered with low scrub. Quite how they’d followed our trail in the dark I didn’t know—I’d been expecting them to catch up by day. The old bond that used to bind the northman and me still gave a sense of discomfort and a gist of direction once we had a mile or two between us, but hardly enough to navigate through the night across treacherous country.
“You did that!” Snorri’s first words to me.
“I did indeed get Gorgoth and his pungent friends out of a potentially violent confrontation, yes.” Snorri opened his mouth again, wide enough this time to presage a shout, but I forestalled him with a lifted hand. “No need to thank me. The Red Queen raised the princes of her house to keep a cool head in a crisis.”
“I just want to know how you did it!” Tuttugu pressed past Snorri, a hint of a grin in the thicket of his beard. “Poor Hakon didn’t look like he’d be sitting in the saddle any time soon.”
The sight of Kara’s face in the orichalcum glow stopped the laugh in my throat. The funny side of the situation didn’t appear to be pointing her way, and going by her murderous looks I’d be safer sleeping with the trolls.
Up at the head of the column Gorgoth issued some silent command and once more his subjects began to move. Grateful for the excuse, I turned my back on Kara and, after repositioning my pack, set off walking. I’d already petitioned Gorgoth to have a troll carry my gear, but he held some odd kind of reservation about the matter as if he thought it beneath a troll to carry the baggage of a prince of Red March. I guess that’s the sort of madness that sets in when you spend your life liv
ing in a dark cave. In any event he finally excused them on the basis they were apt to eat my rations, and then the pack and my spare cloak.
I grumbled to Snorri about it but he just laughed. “Does a man good to carry his own weight in the world, Jal. It’ll harden you up a bit too.”
I shook my head. “Seems the concept of nobility ends north of Ancrath. That one,” I nodded to the front of the column, “probably wouldn’t bend the knee if they made a new emperor and brought him a-visiting. Reminds me of a beggar in Vermillion, Fussy Jack they called him, or at least Barras Jon used to call him that . . . anyhow, he’d hang out on Silk Street round the back of the opera house with his tin cup, showing off the stumps of his legs and shouting out for money at the honest folk passing by. Tossed him a coin or two myself. Probably. Barras told me he’d seen the man empty his cup on a cloth and clean each copper piece with a bit of felt, careful as all hell not to touch a single one of them until he’d wiped the stink off them. Barras said he tossed him a silver crown once, just to get him to catch it. Ol’ Fussy Jack, he let it fall, picked it up with his cloth and wiped it clean. Silver from the son of the Vyene ambassador just wasn’t good enough for him.”
Snorri shrugged. “They say all money’s dirty, one way or another. Seems this Jack might have had it right. We’ll find out for ourselves soon enough, headed for Florence.”
“Hmmm.” I decided to cover the fact I was going no further than Vermillion with a non-committal noise.
“All the money of Empire flows into Florence, sits a while in the vaults of some or other Florentine banker, then flows out again. I’ve never quite fathomed the reason why, but if money is dirty then Florence must be the most filthy corner of the Broken Empire.”
I considered educating Snorri on the finer points of banking, then realized I didn’t have a clue what they were, even though I’d spent a desperately dire year studying at the Mathema in Hamada—another torture heaped upon all the princes of Red March by the ruthless old witch who claims to be our grandmother.
And so we trudged on. The trolls might not have missed the Danes and their torches, and I didn’t much miss the Danes, but I did like it better when I could see where I was going. Kara gave the orichalcum to Snorri so we wouldn’t break our ankles, but even in his hands the light made little impression on the dark and empty spaces around us.
• • •
After many miles wending our way through wooded uplands, around villages with their barking dogs and hedgerows, and down through tangled valleys, we stopped in the predawn grey to settle ourselves in an isolated dell.
I went across to Kara to make some pleasantry but astonishingly she still seemed to be holding a grudge, turning on me so sharply I took a pace back.
“And what did you do to Hakon?” she demanded. Just like that, no circling around the subject, no insinuations. Most unsettling.
“Me?” I tried for injured innocence.
“You! He said you’d told him where I was.”
“You didn’t want him to know?” A little bitterness might have slipped into that one.
I should have stepped back two paces. The retort of her hand striking my cheek set a dozen trolls hissing at the night, taloned hands raised to strike. “Ah.” I touched fingers to my stinging face and tasted blood.
Discretion is the better part of . . . something. In any event I took myself out of arm’s reach and spread my bedroll down on the far side of camp, muttering something about the anti-witch laws I’d be passing when I became king. I set myself down and stared angrily at the sky, not even taking a moment to be thankful that it wasn’t raining. I lay there with the copper taste of blood in my mouth and thought it would be a long time before sleep found me. I was wrong. It dragged me down in moments.
• • •
Sleep pulled me down and I kept falling, into a dream with no bottom to it. I fell through the stuff of imagination and into the empty spaces we all keep within us. On the very edge of some larger void I managed to catch hold of something—I caught hold of the idea that a terrible thing waited for me at the base of this endless drop and that I might yet escape it. I clung to the idea, dangling from it by a single hand. And then I remembered the needle, Kara’s needle driven through my palm, and the blood glistening along its length. I remembered the taste of it as they had set the needle to my tongue and the völva’s spell wrapped me, that taste filled my mouth again. The pain of the old wound stabbed through my palm once more, fresh as the moment it first came, and with a despairing yell I lost my grip and fell again into memories—and this time they were my own.
• • •
“We’ll get Fuella to put some salve on that cut.” A woman’s voice—my mother’s.
I taste blood. My blood. My mouth still stings from where Martus’s forehead struck me. Martus makes no concessions to my age in our play-fights. At eleven he would happily flatten me or any other seven-year-old and declare it a great victory. My middle brother, Darin, is only nine but has a touch more grace and merely overpowers me, or uses me as a distraction while he creeps up on our eldest brother.
“I’ve told you not to get involved in their battles, Jally, they’re too rough.” My hand in hers as she leads me along the Long Gallery, the backbone of Roma Hall.
“Oh,” she says, and tugs me, changing course, back along the gallery.
I struggle to free myself from the boy’s concerns, the sting of his swollen lip, the fury at Martus for heaping yet another defeat on him, the hot certainty that in the next battle he will give better than he gets.
• • •
It takes an effort to untangle my thoughts from the boy’s but doing so offers considerable relief. I wonder for a moment if I’ve fallen into some other child’s mind for nothing here is familiar or comfortable: he’s got no caution in him, this one, no fear, no guile. Just a raw sense of injustice and a fierce hunger to throw himself back into the fray. Not me at all. This boy could grow into Snorri!
Mother turns from the gallery, leading me along the west corridor. The Roma Hall, our home within the compound of the Crimson Palace, seems unchanged by the passage of years that have redesigned me root and stem.
I wipe my mouth, or rather the boy wipes his, and his hand comes away bloody. The action is none of mine—I share his vision and his pain but have no say in what course he takes. This seems reasonable, if not fair, for these things are happening fifteen years ago, and technically I have already exercised my will in the matter.
In fact, as events unfold before me I remember them. For the first time in an age I properly remember the long dark sweep of my mother’s hair, the feel of her hand around mine, and what that feeling meant to me at age seven . . . what an unbreakable bond of trust it was, my small hand in her larger one, an anchor in a sea of confusion and surprise.
We think that we don’t grow. But that’s because growth happens so slowly that it’s invisible to us. I’ve heard old men say they feel twenty inside, or that the boy who once ran wild, and with the recklessness of youth, still lives within them, bound only by the constraints of old bones and expectation. But when you’ve shared the skull of your child self you know this to be untrue—a romance, a self-deception. The child carrying my name around Vermillion’s palace sees the world through the same eyes as me, but notices different things, picks up on different opportunities, and reaches his own conclusions. We share little, this Jalan Kendeth and me, we’re separated by more than a gulf of years. He lives more fully, unburdened by experience, not yet crippled by cynicism. His world is larger than mine, though he has barely left the palace walls and I’ve trekked to the ends of the earth.
We turn off the west corridor, passing a suit of armour that reminds me of the battle for Ameroth Keep, and reminds Jally of a stag beetle he found two days ago behind the messenger stables.
“Where are we going?” The boy’s mind had been so caught up with the fight—wit
h Martus’s forehead swinging down into his face . . . my face . . . that he hasn’t noticed until now that we aren’t heading toward the nursery and Fuella with her salve at all.
“To the palace, Jally. That will be nice won’t it?” Her voice holds a brittle tone, the cheerfulness forced past something so awkward that even a child couldn’t fail to see through it.
“Why?”
“Your grandmother asked us to visit.”
“Me too?” His first pang of anxiety at that, a cold finger of fear along the spine.
“Yes.”
I hadn’t heard my grandmother ask. The boy, whose thoughts I experience as a torrent of childish whispers playing behind my own narrative, thinks that maybe grown-ups have better ears than children and that when he’s grown he too may be able to hear his grandmother’s call across acres of palace compound, past a score of doors and through as many high walls. My own thoughts turn to the first moment of this dream, that “oh,” the tug of Mother’s hand, the sudden retreading of our steps. Had she in that instant remembered that the Queen of Red March wished to see her? That’s not the kind of fact a person misplaces. I wonder if instead she hadn’t heard a silent call of the type adults do not in general notice? I know my grandmother has a sister who likely can issue such summonses, but even so it probably requires a certain kind of person to hear them.
We are let out through the main doors of Roma Hall by the doormen, Raplo and Alphons. Raplo gives me a wink as I pass. I remember it now, clear and crystal, the wrinkling of his skin around the wink of that green eye. He died five years later—choked on a partridge bone, they said. A silly way for an old man to end a long life.