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‘I can’t lift curses,’ the captain restated. He retreated an irritable, dragging step, not quite fast enough to shadow his fingers, which were splayed rigid and quivering. Taskin’s stillness continued to jab at his reserve. Hazed like a fresh recruit, Mykkael found himself pressured to give far more than the simple answer. That loss of control ripped through his aplomb, raising temper just barely leashed. ‘With luck, sometimes, I can ground them.’
Ice-cool, Taskin queried, ‘At what cost to yourself, soldier?’
Mykkael flung up his head. The spark of trapped light in his eyes was chipped fire, under the crowding torches. ‘I don’t know!’ Anger doused, he had less success with his exhausted, recalcitrant body. The seizing cramp from his overstressed knee rocked his frame through a running spasm. ‘Trust me, if that mark had been a live cipher, you don’t want the nightmare of guessing.’
A torch wavered, behind, as a man shifted grip to make a sign against evil.
The commander cracked, ‘Hold that light steady! The man who just faltered, fetch this one a chair!’
Someone else muttered, ‘That malformed get of a desert-whelped bitch?’
Taskin stiffened. ‘No chair, then,’ he agreed, his tone like taut silk run over a sharpened sword blade. ‘My inept torchman will now fetch a camp cot from storage. The man who was insolent will run to the west wing and roust out Jussoud. In minutes, I want him down here with his oil jars, if he has to be hauled from bed, naked!’
The pair jumped as though whipped.
‘You can open the door without penalty,’ said Mykkael, hoping the diversion might snatch him the interval to quiet his chattering teeth.
‘I’ll carry on,’ Taskin stated, not moving.
The camp cot pulled from stores arrived seconds later. The men set up the frame by the corridor wall with no talk, only brisk and relentless efficiency.
‘You’ll strip, soldier,’ the commander rapped out, his nailing regard still fixed on the garrison captain.
A sudden movement, snatched still, preceded the rage that rekindled in Mykkael’s dark eyes.
Taskin stayed glacially immobile, throughout. ‘You will remove your harness and peel your clothes to the skin. Then lie flat and stay there! My orders, soldier. On that cot, voluntarily. Or else my men will do that work for you, followed up by a lashing for insubordination.’
Mykkael forced a smile through hackled fury. ‘You’d lose some. Not nicely. Let’s duck the unpleasantness.’ He reached up, slipped the fastening on the borrowed cloak, then the tang of the buckle that fastened his sword harness. ‘After all, I did promise I would be diligent, and you have a princess to search for.’ He undid the iron fitting, and removed his weapon with a crack of withering emphasis. ‘The door is safe. Open it.’
The captain jostled a path through the closed ranks of the guards, and tried not to let sore embarrassment show as heads turned in riveted curiosity. Faced toward the wall, unflinchingly straight, he compelled wooden fingers to loosen the belt of his surcoat.
‘You men!’ snapped Taskin. ‘Eyes forward! Whatever duty you have to this realm lies ahead of me in this closet.’
Exhibiting sangfroid enough to uphold his own order, the commander turned his back on the victim confined to the corridor. He positioned himself in front of the doorway and reached for the string latch, decisive.
‘Don’t trust that desert-bred,’ blurted the red-haired sergeant who held the torch lighting his way. ‘How do you know he’s not lying?’
‘You’ll volunteer, then?’ Taskin stepped sideways, inviting the man to approach the marked panel himself. The pattern’s chalked lines glared a sinister white under the flare of the flames.
Bared to the waist, still unlacing his trousers, Mykkael observed the exchange. Unsmiling, he watched the burly sergeant shrink into the packed mass of his fellows. Just as uncertain, the others edged back, none among them prepared to shield him.
Taskin folded his arms, and regarded his finest with a glare to blister them pink.
Until Mykkael spun about. Half stripped and insolent, he shoved his way forward, and tripped the latch in their place.
‘Thank you,’ Taskin said, almost smoothly enough to mask his wound thread of unease.
Justifiable anxiety, which Mykkael forgave freely. The mountain terrain of the Great Divide kept Sessalie’s subjects far removed from the horrors engendered by warring sorcerers. Folk here had likely lived their whole lives, and their parents and grandparents before them, never having experienced a live craftmark. They would not have witnessed the twisted devastation such workings brought down on the lives of the people they ruined. Hideous experience would make a man flinch. Given a backdrop of frightening tales and the gross distortions of rumour, such sheltered ignorance would be all too likely to invent conjecture much worse.
Brown eyes met blue, and locked through a moment of unexpected, spontaneous understanding.
Then Taskin said, crisp, ‘That’s one stripe coming for rank disobedience.’
Mykkael laughed, his other fist clutching at untied laces to stay the cloth that slipped down his hard flanks. ‘No mercenary troop captain worth his pay would have slapped me with less than five.’ He dodged back, beat a lively retreat towards the cot. But the move went awry as his bad leg gave way without warning under his weight. His clumsy next stride was reduced to a stagger that exposed him, full-length, to the torchlight. Since no man could miss the stripes on his back, laid down for some prior offence, he salvaged the gaffe with ripe sarcasm. ‘Since I already know how the punishment feels, there’s no thrill of anticipation. Let’s spare the boring detail for later, why not? Quarter that broom closet, first.’
The shame-faced sergeant recovered his poise. He called a man forward to carry his torch, then drew his sword and shoved through the open plank door.
Brooms met him, their straw bristles struck upright in a barrel. The surrounding floor held canted stacks of hooped wooden buckets with rope handles. The torch light speared in, leaped across a second barrel stuffed to the rim with frayed rags.
‘Search everything,’ snapped Taskin. ‘Slowly and carefully, one bucket and one rag at a time.’
To the rest, who continued to view Mykkael’s disrobing with stifled whispers and outright suspicion, the commander stated flat facts. ‘Our garrison captain is not your enemy. You will all stop regarding him as a tribal barbarian, or some sort of singing shaman. Mysh kael’s parentage is not known. His adoptive father was northern-born, a civilized merchant who picked him up by the wayside as an infant foundling. You can see the hard proof; he bears no tattoos. That’s a rigid custom in the south desert.’
Left utterly stripped, made the merciless butt of eight strangers who pinned him with blue-eyed, superior scrutiny, Mykkael banished his last shred of pride. He sat, then lay back on the cot, and compelled himself to keep discipline. This hazing was not worth the grace of reaction. He had suffered far worse as a recruit. Iron-skinned under pressure, he did his practised best to support Taskin’s tactical effort. Distrust, after all, could do nothing but impede the search to find Princess Anja. Better to disarm that fracturing influence before petty dissent could spoil troop unity, or someone got needlessly hurt.
‘Your commander did his background check thoroughly’ Dry, sounding far more weary than he wished, Mykkael offered his wrists. The flesh on his arms and over his bared heart was clear brown, marred only by battle scars. ‘As you see, my mother failed to mark me at birth with the blessing of her tribe. Tradition is strict. That sign proclaimed me unfit.’
Mykkael stopped speaking, shut his eyes, and braced in distaste to endure through the subsequent, scouring inspection.
Yet Taskin cut that embarrassment short. ‘Unfit, likely due to an unsanctioned union. Not for a blemish or unsoundness.’
As the captain bore up, each over-strung muscle defined in the pitiless torchlight, no one could mistake that his crippling limp had been caused by a ruinous joint wound.
Easiest to tie off the final loose end, and force the review to its sorry closure. ‘Fathers of infants who are not blessed and marked leave their get to die of exposure.’ Mykkael finished, ‘I survived because mine was inept, or a coward, or else soft-hearted enough to ditch me in the path of a caravan.’
He rolled over then, and masked his hot face behind the bulwark of his crossed forearms.
Left staring at the damp snags of his hair, and the welted scars crossing his shoulders and back, the crowding men quickly lost interest. They pushed ahead to explore the broached closet, drawn to pursue the more gripping evil that might lurk in the drudge’s rag barrel.
They found Anja’s beautiful, jewelled gown; her silver-capped shoes, her exquisite wire bracelets.
A shimmering chime of miniature bells trilled through the dust-laden air.
The sound touched Mykkael’s ears with a sweet, haunting clarity, as he languished, face down on the pallet. He shivered, seized up as a cramp ripped his leg into mauling pain. Bared teeth hidden behind shielding forearm, he endured, exposed, but not bitter. At least he had Taskin’s forethought to thank, that the paroxysm had overtaken him lying down. Had he been savaged while still on his feet, he would currently be sprawled under somebody’s boots, curled into a whimpering knot.
Naked and cold, but held prone under orders, he could more gracefully withstand the public humiliation. While his hearing tracked the excited commotion unfolding inside the broom closet, more steps approached through the corridor above, then thumped down the dusty plank stair.
The arrival reached his side and stopped next to the pallet. Glass clinked, to the wafted fragrance of astringent herbs steeped in oil. Then a huge, warm hand closed over his shoulder, its touch trained and firmly knowing. ‘I’m Jussoud,’ said a voice of deep, velvet consonants, bearing the accents of the east. Cloth sighed with movement, as the speaker bent his massive frame and knelt on the rough stone floor. ‘I serve as physician and masseur for the guard.’
No hesitation occurred over skin tone. Only the tacit, professional pause as the hand became joined by another, probing one wire-strung muscle after the next.
Mykkael turned his neck, opened one jaundiced eye. ‘I’m sorry Taskin dragged you from your bed.’
‘And so he should have,’ that slow, cultured voice resumed. ‘You’re a mess, soldier. That liniment’s for camels; did you know as much when you bought it? The gum’s caustic, brings blisters. You’ll have weeping sores, if you’re stubborn and persist with its use.’
An inquiring poke near the hip socket raised a grunted oath from Mykkael. He continued to stare, anyway. He had the right, knowing just how it felt, to be foreign and billeted among northerners.
The giant looming over him was yellow-skinned, with black hair braided down his back. He had the flat nose, broad lips, and silver eyes of the steppelands, which fleshed out the clues to his origins.
Another fingertip contact, this stroke moth-wing gentle at the back of Mykkael’s thigh; except the result woke a nerve end, screaming. The garrison captain sucked an involuntary breath, half strangling the impulse to whimper.
‘For pity.’ But this time, the voice held compassion. ‘You’re a great deal worse than a mess. Without help, you’re not going to walk out of here.’
The touch melted back. Mykkael pulled in a shuddering lungful of air, while glass jars chinked near his elbow. Then scented, hot oil splashed and flowed down his back, and the hands began work in earnest. Their gentleness almost wrung him to tears. He subsided, smoothed down by an expertise that made him wonder if he was back in a coma, and dreaming. His chest unseized. Shortly, he was able to speak. In the language Jussoud would likely know best, Mykkael murmured, ‘How can I ever repay you?’
Jussoud gasped, his strong fingers shocked to a stop. ‘How is this?’ he exclaimed, overcome. Oblivious to the drama contained in the broom closet, he swept a searching regard over the desert-bred captain before him. ‘How can you know the motherland’s tongue?’
‘Taught. As a child. My stepfather traded.’ Mykkael raised himself on one elbow, straining to see what Taskin’s soldiers had unearthed.
Jussoud’s arm swiped him flat. ‘Do not spoil my diligent efforts, you impertinent upstart.’
Working a bruised jaw, just banged on the cot strut, Mykkael grumbled a filthy phrase he had learned as a boy from a drover. Then he added, through bliss, as those hands worked their magic, ‘Just don’t ask me to write your distant relatives a letter. I speak, but I don’t know the ideographs.’
‘I do,’ Jussoud stated, his dignity in place. ‘They take half a lifetime of patience to learn.’ He caught Mykkael’s elbow, planted a fist, then pressed down on one shoulder until something tight popped free in his client’s upper back. ‘Do you have patience, Captain?’
‘Only as I choose. Thank you, for that. I’m much better.’ Mykkael let his head loll in the crook of his elbow, warned as an icy shadow encroached that someone else came to stand over him. The near soundless step most likely meant that inimitable presence was Taskin.
The commander addressed Jussoud. ‘Can you do aught with him?’
Sweet oil licked a channel down Mykkael’s buttocks. ‘Oh, I think so,’ said the easterner, detached as a butcher who sized up the heft and weight of a carcass. ‘If the muscles are eased, the pinched nerves will subside. The limp can be made much less noticeable.’ His tone changed. ‘Hold now.’
The hands grasped his leg, applied traction and torque. A reaming, white fire tore through his hip. Mykkael crushed his face to his forearm, and scarcely managed to muffle a scream.
Then something crunched and let go in his pelvis. Pain laced his bad leg, then subsided. On his face, slammed limp, Mykkael tasted blood on his teeth. For that, he said more words. Ones that had once made the incensed drover chase after a sprinting small boy, waving a lead-tipped ox goad.
‘I can’t make him civilized,’ Jussoud admitted. Then he chuckled. ‘No. Don’t ask. I won’t translate.’ His hands moved, pressed a scar, testing with ruthless accuracy until a sharp flinch recorded the damage past reach of his skill. ‘I can’t ease the half of this knot of stressed tissue, certainly not overnight.’
‘Who expected that miracle?’ Taskin bent aside, clipped off an answer to somebody’s question, then considered the prone body, stretched out at his mercy on the cot. ‘If I send Jussoud down to the Lowergate barracks, will you make time for his services?’
Mykkael tipped up his face, disgruntled to be caught strapped with oil, and flat helpless. ‘Yes. If Jussoud will agree to start teaching me ideographs.’
‘That’s Jussoud’s choice.’ Taskin tapped his chin with an immaculate thumb. ‘Now, my choice. The whipping I owe you will wait. Can you stand yet?’
Mykkael flexed his leg with tentative care, then flashed Jussoud a glance of astonished gratitude. He shoved erect like a cat about to be served with a dousing, snatched up his dropped cloak, and covered his grease-shiny shoulders. ‘I can stand,’ he responded, running fresh sweat, but no longer wretchedly shivering. ‘Exactly what did you wish me to see?’
‘This.’ Taskin moved.
Mykkael stalked after him, barefoot, and entered the crowded closet.
They showed him Anja’s clothes, every one, down to the delicate, lace-sewn camisole, the fine, scented silk that had only hours ago kissed the girlish curve of her hips.
‘What do you think, Mysh kael?’ Taskin demanded.
The garrison captain blotted his stinging, split lip. ‘She took those off without help. Most likely willingly. Nothing’s torn. The lace isn’t hooked, or unravelled.’
‘Is that all?’
As though the words goaded like searing hot wire, Mykkael knelt. He fingered a bangle bracelet, to a musical clash of gold bells. Then he picked up a silver-capped shoe, and arose with the dainty, scuffed sole cradled between his rough hands.
Princess Anja came alive to him in that moment.
Her presence combed over him, mind and spirit, and infused his rocked senses with the intimate essence of her exotic perfume. The aromatic blend of sandalwood and desert flowers framed a memory so vivid and distant, Mykkael knew of no tongue that had enough life in its spoken phrasing to capture it.
He sucked in a breath, overtaken by storm. The young woman, Anja, assumed tangible weight, a ghost presence spun from his living contact with the slipper cupped in his palms. Witch thoughts, Mykkael realized, then understood further: Taskin was deliberately testing him for wild talent.
Despite his fierce anger, he could not fight back. His fragmented awareness already dissolved, sucked down by a vortex of terror…
…clogging fear, filled with the sweat scent of horses, and fog, swirling dank off the river…Soaked clothes, dripping and clammy cold…A woman’s heart pounding, her breaths jerked in gasps as she runs through the dark in hazed flight. She is desperate. Her taut hands grip damp strap leather, while behind her, the horses bump and jostle, their eager hooves clipping her lightly shod heels, and crushing the early spring grasses…
Drowning in horror, Mykkael wrenched his mind clear. Wrung dizzy, then falling, he spiralled back into the dusty cellar, and recovered his spinning wits. Enclosed by stone walls, and the scouring smoke thrown off the oiled rag torches, he crumpled. The shoe dropped from his grasp. It tumbled, clattering. Curled in a tight and shivering crouch, Mykkael fought back nausea, his nostrils clouded by the oiled sweat reek rising off his own skin.
His eyes were dry. Not blurred by a young girl’s salt tears, shed in shattered panic as she fled headlong through the night.
Someone’s fist clamped his elbow, jerked him back upright. The bruising grip savaged Mykkael’s slipped senses with a wrench like the bite of cold iron.
‘What did you see?’ Taskin hissed in his ear.
Mykkael shut his eyes, still battling vertigo. ‘Dark. She’s outside. In flight for her life.’
‘Witch thoughts!’ someone gasped, close beside him. Light shifted as a torchbearer recoiled. Boots grated on gravel, as other men stirred and exchanged rounds of sullen whispers.
Then another torch, flaring, thrust into his face. ‘What did you see?’ the commander repeated.
‘Country clothes. Lightweight shoes. She’s wet. Swam the river.’ A shudder raked Mykkael. He thought about horses, then flinched as a sharp flood of warning coiled through him. Pierced by an icy stab of raw instinct, he closed his mind, hard, and shook off Taskin’s probing. ‘Witch thoughts,’ Mykkael dismissed. ‘Only fools trust them. I might be seeing a moment recaptured from the princess’s early childhood. Or nothing more than a fanciful shadow, pulled in from one of her nightmares.’
‘You claimed you weren’t a slinking shaman,’ the red-haired sergeant accused.
Mykkael shook his head. He swallowed back nausea. ‘No shaman at all,’ he insisted, his leaden tiredness pressing his scraped voice inflectionless. ‘Not trained. Not brought up in tradition.’
Taskin’s relentless gaze still bored into him. Mykkael sighed. He forced his scarred knee to bear weight, then reached out, very gently, and pried off the commander’s insistent grasp. ‘I never said, did I, that I had not inherited a pack of unruly, fresh instincts.’
Mykkael sensed sudden movement at the corner of his eye. He surged into a spin, hands raised, while the draped cloak gaped open at his waist. He caught a man’s gesture to avert evil spellcraft, full on, then the sight of another signed curse, not completed. ‘I am no sorcerer!’ he cracked in fired rage. ‘Don’t you dare, in your ignorance, mistake that!’
Stares ringed him, unwavering. From men fully armed, and impeccably turned out, while he stood weaponless, half unclad, slicked in stale sweat and the itching residue of beast liniment and medicinal oil.
Mykkael uttered a word Jussoud would have appreciated, had the huge man still lingered in the corridor. Then, disgusted, he shrugged the slipped cloak back in place. To Taskin, he suggested, ‘Find that drudge. Question her. She might have seen someone snooping here, earlier. If a witch thought bears weight, her Grace was not overpowered, nor was she smuggled out, naked. I’d guess your princess might have made her own way, masked in a servant’s plain dress. See if someone else noticed the clothing.’
The ruddy sergeant bristled with outrage. ‘Princess Anja would never indulge in foolish pranks! Nor would she be childishly stupid enough to leave Highgate without an armed escort.’
‘Perhaps not,’ Mykkael agreed. ‘No harm, though, in checking.’
Taskin’s searing regard on him lingered. ‘The drudge has already been sent for,’ he allowed. ‘She could arrive in my wardroom at any moment. You ought to get dressed, or lie down before you fall over.’
Still fighting queasiness, Mykkael shot back a racked quip. ‘No order, which?’
‘Your call, soldier,’ Taskin said, less generous than rigidly practical. ‘If you drop, I won’t waste a man, picking you up off the floor. Jussoud’s gone home. He’s sent back to bed. Can’t lose the edge off him to exhaustion. Respect that, since I want you upright and alert, and for that, you’ll need his attention tomorrow.’
‘You do keep the rust polished off your swords,’ Mykkael dug back without rancour. He rallied, gathered the trailing hem of the cloak, then ploughed ahead on unsteady feet until he won free of the closet. His scathing reply floated back from the corridor. ‘You would have made a first-rate field captain, if you weren’t cooped up guarding a citadel.’
