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‘Father—’ I started. And again he cut me off. I couldn’t seem to rise above him.
‘Sageous, take the boy,’ he said.
And that was that. The heathen had his eyes on me and led me mild as a sheep to stand with him between the thrones. Katherine shot me a pale glance and hastened to her sister’s side.
Makin and Galen bowed to the King. They went out through the press of courtiers, breaking free and crossing to where an inlaid marble star, some ten feet across, marked the middle of the throne-room floor. They faced each other, bowed, and drew steel.
Makin bore the longsword Father gave him when he took captaincy of the palace guard. A good weapon, Indian steel woven dark and light, acid-etched with old runes of power. Our time on the road had left its history recorded in notches along the blade. I’d never seen a better swordsman than Makin. I didn’t want to see one here.
Sir Galen made no move. He held his longsword ready, but in a lazy grip. I could see no marking on the weapon, a simple blade, forged from the black iron of the Turkmen.
‘Never trust a Turkman sword …’ I spoke in a whisper.
‘For Turkman iron sucks up spells like a sponge and holds a bitter edge.’ Sageous finished the old line for me.
I had a sharp reply for the heathen, but the clash of swords rang out over it. Makin advanced on the Teuton, feinting low then swinging high. Makin had an elemental way with a sword. The blade was part of him, a living thing from tip to hilt. In a wild fight he knew where every danger lay, and where his cover waited.
Sir Galen blocked and delivered a sharp riposte. Their swords flickered and the play of metal rang out high and sharp. I could barely follow the exchange. Galen fought with technical precision. He fought like a man who rose at dawn every day to train and duel. He fought like a man who expected to win.
A hundred narrow escapes from death counted out the first minute of their duel. I found my right hand gripping the trunk of the glass tree, the crystal slick and cool under my fingers. By the end of that first minute I could tell Galen would win. This was his game. Makin had his brilliance but, like me, he fought in real fights. He fought in the mud. He fought through burning villages. He used the battlefield. But this dry little game, so narrow in its scope, this was all Galen lived for.
Makin swung at Galen’s legs. A touch too tight in the curve, and Galen made him pay. The tip of the Turkman blade sketched a red line across Makin’s forehead. A quarter of an inch more reach in Galen’s arm and the blow would have shattered Makin’s skull.
‘So, you open your game by sacrificing your knight, Prince Jorg.’ Sageous spoke close to my ear.
I startled. I’d forgotten about the man. My gaze wandered to the green canopy above us. ‘I have no problems with sacrifice, heathen.’ The tree trunk slipped glassy smooth under my fingers as my left hand moved up along the trunk. The clash of swords punctuated our conversation. ‘But I sacrifice only when there is something to be gained.’
The tree was heavier than I had imagined and for a moment I didn’t think I could topple it. I braced my legs and put my shoulder to the task. The thing fell without a sound, then exploded into a million pieces against the steps. I could have blinded half of Ancrath’s aristocracy had their eyes been on the throne rather than the fight before them. As it was I peppered their backs with shards of glass. The costumed throng at the base of the royal dais turned into a screaming mass. Noble-born women ran their hands through hair confined by diamond tiaras, and brought them out sliced and bloody. Lords in thread-of-gold slippers, coiled in the latest fashions, hopped howling on a carpet of broken glass.
Sir Makin and Sir Galen lowered their swords and watched in amazement.
When Father stood, everyone fell silent, cuts or no cuts.
Everyone except me. He opened his mouth to speak and I spoke first.
‘The lessons Makin learned on the road did not include tourney games. Wars are not won with jousting or chivalry. The lessons Makin learned are the same lessons I learned. Unfortunately Sir Makin would rather die than offend his king by demonstrating them.’ I didn’t raise my voice. That kept them quiet. ‘Father,’ I turned to face him direct. ‘I’ll show you what I’ve learned. I’ll fight your pet Teuton. If a man of my little experience can defeat your champion then you should be happy to reinstate Sir Makin, neh?’ I fell back into road-speak, hoping to stir his anger.
‘You’re not a man, boy, and your challenge is an insult to Sir Galen, not worthy of consideration.’ He spoke through clenched teeth. I’d never seen him so angry. In fact, I’d never seen him angry.
‘An insult? Maybe.’ I felt a smile bubbling up and let it show. ‘But I am a man. I came of age three days ago, Father. I’m fit for marriage now. A valuable commodity. And I claim this fight as my Year Gift. Or would you turn your back on three centuries of Ancrath tradition and deny me my coming of age boon?’
The veins in his neck stood proud and his hands flexed as if hungry for a sword. I didn’t think it safe to count on his good will.
‘If I die the succession will be clear,’ I said. ‘Your Scorron whore will give you a new son, and you’ll be rid of me. Gone for good, like Mother and William. And you won’t have to send dear old Father Gomst trawling the mire to prove it.’ I took a moment to bow toward the Queen. ‘No offence, your majesty.’
‘Galen!’ Father’s voice was a roar. ‘Kill this devil, for he’s no son of mine!’
I ran then, crunching emerald leaves under hard leather. Sir Galen charged from the centre star, trailing his black sword behind him, shouting for my blood. He came fast enough, but the fight with Makin had taken some of his wind. I knocked an old woman from my path, she went down spitting teeth, pearls spilling from her broken necklace.
I won free of the courtiers and kept on running, angled away from Galen. He’d given up the shouting but I could hear him behind me, the thud of his boots and the rasp of his breath. He must have been a hand above six foot, but lighter armour and fresher wind made up for my shorter legs. As we ran, I pulled out my sword. There were charms enough in its edge to put a notch in that Turkman blade. I threw it away. I didn’t need the weight.
Little space remained to me. The left wall loomed just yards ahead, Galen moments behind.
I’d been aiming for one guardsman in particular, a younger fellow with fair sideburns and an open mouth. By the time he realized I wasn’t veering away, it was too late. I hit him with the vambrace over my right forearm. The blow hammered his head back against the wall and he slid down it with no further interest in the proceedings. I caught the crossbow in my left hand, turned, and shot Galen through the bridge of the nose.
The bolt barely made it through his skull. It’s one of the drawbacks in keeping them loaded, but still it should have been tightened only hours before. In any event, most of the Teuton’s brain left by the back of his head and he fell down very dead.
The silence would have been utter but for the whimpering of the old woman on the floor back by the dais. I looked back over the crowd of nobles, cut and bloody, at Galen lying with his arms flung out, at the sparkling ruins of the glass tree reaching toward the throne-room doors.
‘Was the show to your liking, Father?’ I asked. ‘I’ve heard that the court has been quiet in Sir Makin’s absence.’
And for the first time in my life I heard my father laugh. A chuckle at first, then louder, then a howling gale such that he had to hold his throne to stand.
21
‘Get out.’ Father’s laughing fit left him without warning, snuffed like a candle. He spoke into the silence. ‘Get out. I’ll talk to the boy now.’ The boy, not ‘my son’. I didn’t miss that edge.
And they went. The high and the mighty, the lords and the ladies, the guards helping the injured, two of them dragging Galen’s corpse. Makin followed after Galen, crunch, crunch, crunch, across the broken glass, as if to make sure no life remained in him. Katherine let herself be led by a table knight. She stopped though, at the base of the dais, and gave me a look as if she’d just that moment seen me for what I was. I sketched her a mocking bow, a reflex, like reaching for a blade. It hurt to see the hatred on her face, pure and astonished, but sometimes a bit of pain’s just what we need: to cauterize the wound, burn out the infection. She saw me and I saw her, both of us stripped of pretence in that empty moment, newlyweds naked for their conjugals. I saw her for the same weakness I’d recognized when first we rode back into the green fields of Ancrath. That soft seduction of need and want, an equation of dependence that eases under the skin, so slow and sweet, only to lay a man open at the very time he most needs his strength. Oh, it hurt right enough, but I finished my bow and watched her back as they led her out.
The Queen went too, flanked by knights right and left, slightly awkward down the steps, a hint of a waddle. I could see the swell of her belly now, as she walked. My half-brother if Sageous’s prediction held true. Heir to the throne should I die. Just a swelling now, just a hint, but sometimes that’s all it takes. I recalled Brother Kane from the road, cut on the bicep when we took the village of Holt.
‘’T’ain’t nothing, little Jorgy,’ he’d said when I offered to heat a knife. ‘Some farm boy with a rusty hoe. It don’t go deep.’
‘It’s swelling,’ I told him. ‘Needs hot iron.’ If it’s not too late already.
‘Fuck that, not for some farm boy with a hoe,’ Kane said.
He died hard, did Kane. Three days later and his arm lay as thick as my waist, weeping pus greener than snot, and with a stench so bad we left him screaming to die alone. It don’t go deep – but sometimes the shallow cut bites to the bone if you don’t deal with it hard and fast.
Just a swelling. I watched the Queen go.
Sageous stayed. His eyes kept returning to the shattered ruin of the tree. You’d have thought he’d lost his lover.
‘Pagan, see to the Queen,’ Father said. ‘She may need calming.’
A dismissal, plain and simple, but Sageous was too distracted to see it. He looked up from the glittering remains of the trunk I’d toppled. ‘Sire, I…’
You what, heathen? You want something? It’s not your place to want.
‘I…’ This was new to Sageous, I could see that: he was used to control. ‘You should not be left unattended, Sire. The b—’
The boy? Say it man, spit it out.
‘It may not be safe.’
Wrong thing to say. I guessed the heathen had relied on his magics too long. If he’d truly learned my father’s mind he’d know better than to suggest he needed protection from me.
‘Out.’
Whatever else I might think of my dear father I always did admire his way with words.
The look Sageous gave me held more than hate. Where Katherine channelled a pure emotion the tattooed magician offered bewildering complexity. Oh there was hate there, sure enough, but admiration too, respect maybe, and other flavours, all mixed in those mild brown eyes.
‘Sire.’ He bowed and started toward the doors.
We watched him in silence, watched him pace across the sparkling carpet of debris, spotted here with a discarded fan, there with a powdered wig. The doors closed behind him with a dull clang of bronze on bronze. A scar on the wall behind the throne caught my attention. I threw a hammer once, hard, and missed my target. It hit there. It seemed to be a day for old scars, old feelings.
‘I want Gelleth,’ Father said.
I had to admire his ability to wrong-foot me. I stood there armed with accusations, burdened with all my yesterdays, and he’d turned away from me, to the future.
‘Gelleth hinges on the Castle Red,’ I said. It was a test. That was just how we spoke. Every conversation a game of poker, every line a bet or a raise, bluff or call.
‘Party tricks are well and good. You killed the Teuton. I didn’t think you had it in you. You scandalized my court – well we both know what they are, and what they’re worth. But can you do it when it counts? Can you give me Gelleth?’
I met his stare. I didn’t inherit his blue eyes, I followed Mother in that department. There was a whole winter in those eyes of his, and nothing else. Even in Sageous’s placid gaze I could dig deeper and find a subtext, but Father’s eyes held nothing but a cold season. I think that was where the fear lay, in the lack of curiosity. I’ve seen malice many a time and hate in all its colours. I’ve seen the gleam in the torturer’s eyes, the sick-light, but even there was the comfort of interest, the slightest touch of salvation in shared humanity. He might have the hot irons, but at least he was curious, at least he cared how much it hurt.
‘I can give you Gelleth,’ I said.
Could I? Probably not. Of all Ancrath’s neighbours, Gelleth stood unassailable above the rest. The Lord of Gelleth probably had better claim to the Empire Throne than Father did. In the Hundred, Merl Gellethar had few equals.
I found my hand on the hilt of my dagger. I itched to draw the tempered steel, to lay it across his neck, to scream at him, to bring some heat into those cold eyes. You traded my mother’s death away, you bastard! Your own son’s blood. Sweet William dead and barely cold, and you traded them away. A pax for the rights to river trade.
‘I’ll need an army,’ I said. ‘Castle Red won’t fall easy.’
‘You will have the Forest Watch.’ Father spread his hands over the throne’s armrests and leaned back, watching.
‘Two hundred men?’ I felt my fingers tighten on the pommel of my knife. Two hundred men against the Castle Red. Ten thousand might not be enough.
‘I’ll take my brothers too,’ I said. I watched his eyes. No flicker in the winter, no start at ‘brother’. The weakness in me wanted to speak of Will. ‘You’ll have Gelleth. I will give you the Castle Red. I’ll give you the head of the Lord Gellethar. Then you’ll give the heathen to me.’
And you’ll call me ‘son’.
22
So we sat, Makin and I, at a table in the Falling Angel tavern with a jug of ale between us, and the song of a cracked-voice bard struggling to be heard against the din. Around us the brothers mixed with the lowest of the Low Town, gaming, whoring, and gorging. Rike sat close at hand, his face buried in a roast chicken. He appeared to be attempting to inhale it.
‘Have you even seen the Castle Red, Jorg?’ Makin asked.
‘No.’
Makin looked at his ale. He hadn’t touched it. For a few moments we listened to the sound of Rike crunching chicken bones.
‘Have you?’ I asked.
He nodded slowly and leaned back in his chair, eyes on the lanterns above the street-door. ‘When I was a squire to Sir Reilly, we took a message to the Lord Gellethar. We stayed a week in the guest halls at the Castle Red before Merl Gellethar deigned to see us. His throne-room puts your father’s to shame.’
Brother Burlow staggered by, belly escaping over his sturdy belt, a haunch of meat in one hand and two flagons in the other, foaming over his knuckles.
‘What about the castle?’ I could care less about a pissing contest over throne-rooms.
Makin toyed with his ale, but didn’t drink. ‘It’s suicide, Jorg.’
‘That bad?’
‘Worse,’ he said.
A painted whore, hennaed hair, and red-mouthed, backed into Makin’s lap. ‘Where’s your smile, my handsome?’ She had good tits, full and high, pushed into an inviting sandwich in a bodice of lace and whalebone. ‘I’m sure I could find it.’ Her hands vanished into the froth of her skirts where they bunched around Makin’s waist. ‘Sally will make it all good. My handsome knight doesn’t need no boys to keep him warm.’ She flicked a jealous glance my way.
Makin pitched her to the floor.
‘It’s built into a mountain. What shows above the rock are walls so high it hurts your neck to look up at the battlements.’ Makin reached for his ale and fastened both hands around the flagon.
‘Ow!’ The whore picked herself up from the wet boards and wiped her hands on her dress. ‘You didn’t have to do that now!’
Makin didn’t spare her a glance. He turned his dark eyes on me. ‘The doors are iron, thick as a sword is long. And what’s above the ground isn’t but a tenth part of it. There’s provisions in those deep vaults to last years.’
Sally proved to be a true professional. She transferred her attentions to me, so smooth you’d think I’d been the object of her affection all along. ‘And who might you be, now?’ She came in close, running her fingers into my hair. ‘You’re too pretty for that grumpy sell-sword,’ she said. ‘You’re old enough to learn how it works with girls, and Sally will show you.’
She had her mouth close to my ear now, sending tickles down my neck. I could smell her cheap lemon-grass scent, cutting through the ale stink, and the dream-weed on her breath.
‘How many men would it take? To bring the place down around Lord Gellethar’s ears?’ I asked.
Makin’s eyes returned to the lanterns and his knuckles went white around his flagon. Somewhere behind us Rike gave a roar, quickly followed by the splintering sound of a body meeting a table at high speed.
‘If you had ten thousand men,’ Makin said, raising his voice above the crashing sounds. ‘Ten thousand men, well supplied, and with siege machines, lots of siege engines, then you might have him in a year. That’s if you could keep his allies off your back. With three thousand you might starve him out eventually.’
I caught hold of Sally’s hand as it slipped across my belly to the buckle of my belt. I twisted her wrist a little, and she came front and centre, sharpish, with a high-pitched gasp. She had green eyes, like Katherine’s but more narrow and not so clear. Under the paint she had fewer years on me than I first thought, she might be twenty, certainly no more.
‘And what if I found us a way in? What then, Brother Makin? How many men to take the Castle Red if I opened us a door?’ I spoke to Sally’s face, inches before mine.
‘The garrison stands at nine hundred. Veterans mostly. He sends his fresh meat to the borders and takes it back when it’s been seasoned.’ I heard Makin’s chair scrape back. ‘Which son of a whore threw that?’ he yelled.
I kept the whore’s wrist turned. I took her throat in my other hand and drew her closer. ‘Tonight we’ll call you Katherine, and you can show me how it works with girls.’
Some of the dream-haze left her eyes, replaced by fear. That was all right with me. I had two hundred men and no secret door into the Castle Red. It seemed only right that somebody should be worried.
23
My book shifted again. I say ‘my’ book, but in truth it was stolen, filched from Father’s library on the way out of the Tall Castle. The book lurched at me, threatening to snap shut on my nose.
‘Lie still, damn you,’ I said.
‘Mmmgfll.’ Sally gave a sleepy murmur and nestled her face in the pillow.
I settled the book back between her buttocks and nudged her legs slightly further apart with my elbows. Over the top of the page I could see the faint-knobbed ridge of Sally’s spine tracing its path across her smooth back to be lost in the red curls around her neck. I wasn’t convinced that the text before me was more interesting than what lay beneath it.
‘It says here that there’s a valley in Gelleth they call the Gorge of Leucrota,’ I said. ‘It’s in the badlands down below the Castle Red.’
