Silvermay

by James Moloney

  ‘It worked!’ Ryall crowed in triumph and began a victory dance.

  Theron was certainly trapped. He bent double to clutch at the rope, the effort levering his body upwards until he stood out from the wall as though the room had suddenly been turned on its side.

  ‘Watch out,’ I called to Ryall.

  Too late. Theron might be trapped by his feet but his arms were still free, and when Ryall got carelessly close, Theron grabbed him.

  There was no release from the grip of a Wyrdborn, especially one as angry as this. Theron shook his captive like a rag doll and it was a wonder Ryall’s neck didn’t break in those first terrible jerks to and fro. But Theron wanted more than revenge; he wanted to break free of the rope.

  ‘Bring my dagger from that table,’ he shouted.

  The command wasn’t meant for poor Ryall, who was almost unconscious. Theron was calling to me. I stayed where I was against the wall, as far out of reach as I could manage.

  ‘The dagger,’ he cried again, ‘or I’ll break his neck.’

  He took hold of Ryall by one shoulder, his thumb sinking painfully into the flesh below his collarbone, the rest of his hand reaching onto the boy’s back. Ryall groaned in agony. Theron’s other hand threaded into Ryall’s hair, the iron-hard fingers locked over his skull. One savage wrench and I would hear Ryall’s neck break from where I stood.

  ‘Do it now, girl, or he dies!’

  I hurried to the table and the dagger I’d imagined cutting into my flesh. I closed my hand quickly over its handle and worked it free of the wood.

  ‘Yes, bring it here. Cut the ropes,’ Theron ordered, confident now that he would soon be free.

  What would he do then, I wondered. A broken neck, quick and final, might be a mercy compared with his revenge on us for trapping him. And what would happen to Lucien? Whether I told Theron of the mosaics, or he was traded to Coyle for his weight in gold, Lucien would become a monster and my pledge to Nerigold would have come to nothing.

  ‘Hurry, girl! The rope is crushing my feet.’

  I stayed free of his reach and went instead to the wall, close by the window.

  ‘Cut the rope!’

  Theron no longer held Ryall ready to snap his neck, but he wasn’t foolish enough to let him go altogether. He watched me, his cloud-grey eyes full of anticipation now that he was so close to release. There was something else, too; something I’d seen in Hallig’s eyes and in the eyes of the Wyrdborn who had so nearly stolen Hespa from our village. It was the naked evil that dwelt deep within the Wyrdborn, the hatred for all but themselves. It created a void that made them closer to wild beasts than human beings.

  I looked down at the dagger in my hand. To free it from the table, I’d grasped it with the blade extending down from my fist. The stabbing grip. In the forest, while Tamlyn had struggled with his brother, I hadn’t been able to stab cold steel into Hallig’s flesh. But that was a week ago, time enough to become more desperate. Before I could let myself think any further, I moved like one of my father’s hunters fixed on its prey, reaching Theron’s side before he saw I’d moved. With the same forceful beat as a hawk’s wing, I drove the dagger deep into his Wyrdborn chest.

  To my horror, it wedged between his ribs and wouldn’t budge. I staggered backwards, leaving it there with only the hilt visible above his shirt. There was no blood, and to kill something there had to be blood.

  Theron gasped and stared at me. There was no sign of pain in his face, just astonishment that I’d dared defy him so utterly. Astonishment soon turned to fury and, as his face darkened, he let go of Ryall, who dropped to the floor moaning and fighting for breath.

  His hands now free, Theron took hold of the dagger and used his unnatural strength to pull it free. There it was in his hand, ready to slice through the ropes binding his feet and, after that, cut me to pieces.

  But he didn’t reach for his feet as I expected. Removing the dagger had brought the blood my blow lacked, a red stream that quickly spread across his chest and dripped down his sides. It pumped out in rhythmic gushes that I recognised. The blade had pierced his heart.

  Theron looked for the first time at the dagger in his hand. ‘Mine,’ he said. Finding me with eyes widened by the first fear they had ever known, he added, ‘You’ve killed me.’

  The knife fell from his hand, his hand fell limp at his side and then his whole body slumped, his head striking the floor while the rest of him hung suspended by his ankles from the window. As though this were a signal that Ryall’s wonderful trap had done its job, the rope finally snapped and, no longer pinned by the strain of the waterwheel, Theron’s legs flopped to the floor as well.

  I watched all this with my back still hard against the wall. The fiend was dead but my fear of him was still alive, made all the more unbearable by what I’d done. The taking of a life from such close quarters had shocked me in a way I hadn’t counted on, no matter how much my victim had deserved to die.

  It was a while before I was aware of anything else. By then, Ryall had recovered from his ordeal enough to climb unsteadily to his feet. He stood massaging one of his shoulders and working his neck tenderly from side to side as he looked down at Theron’s body.

  ‘He’s dead!’

  ‘Yes. I killed him.’

  ‘But how? Commonfolk can’t kill a Wyrdborn.’

  I picked up the dagger, now slippery with blood, and held it between thumb and forefinger, as though it was the foulest thing I’d ever touched. ‘We can if we use his own weapon.’

  Ryall inspected the bloodstained dagger then looked at me. ‘You did kill him. We’re free.’

  ‘Free, yes, but we still don’t have what we came for,’ I told him. ‘All this has been for nothing if we leave Ledaris without the talisman.’

  ‘You said it didn’t exist. That it was just a tattoo on the skin.’

  ‘It’s a symbol, Ryall. We can’t save Lucien without it.’

  Where was Lucien? I wanted him back in my arms. He was what mattered. Ryall’s face showed he didn’t believe me any more than Theron had done, and I expected him to say, Let’s go now, while we still can. Only a fool would resist such common sense. But he surprised me, as he’d done many times since Tamlyn had left me in his care. He took the dagger gingerly from my fingers, and kneeling beside Theron’s body, slit open his shirt.

  ‘Nothing on his chest or stomach,’ he announced. ‘Help me turn him over.’

  I didn’t want to touch the body, but it had to be done. Theron might have been lying, after all.

  There was nothing tattooed on his back. Ryall ran the razor-edged blade down the seam of his pants and pulled off the boots. Nothing on his legs or hidden under his feet. Only the man’s underdrawers remained.

  ‘Could be on his bottom,’ said Ryall. ‘It’s not a place you can easily see for yourself, is it.’ He held the knife ready.

  ‘No, don’t,’ I said. ‘If Theron’s mother did tattoo the symbol on his backside, the first person to change his clothes after her death would have seen it and so Theron would have surely known it was there. Yet he seemed so certain it was nowhere on his skin. His mother needed to keep the tattoo out of sight and at the same time make sure it remained forever, in case her son did go to Erebis Felan …’

  I was a mother, too, not by blood but because of the tasks I’d performed so many times for Lucien. I’d cleaned the mess from his bottom, washed him from head to toe. Didn’t I know every part of a baby’s body?

  ‘Give me the dagger,’ I said to Ryall.

  He handed it over with a questioning squint. I set to work without a word. He’d get his answer soon enough.

  ‘Ah, of course,’ he said when he saw where I’d turned my attention.

  With my knee almost touching Theron’s ear, I sliced at his hair, cutting away long hanks with no care for the mess I was making. When there was just untidy stubble, I began to shave his scalp more carefully, and when I cleaned the hair from the back of his head, there it was: an intricate outli
ne no bigger than a coin tattooed just below the crown. Just as Ansuela’s mother had told me, it was a bird, although not one I recognised. Its wings and shoulders were like a hawk’s, but there were no talons on its feet and its beak was straight rather than curved. It was quite beautiful in a way, although this was no time to study it closely.

  ‘She must have planned to tell him about it when he grew older and could make his own decisions,’ I said, ‘but she never got the chance. Poor thing. She’s been dead fifty years, and now her son’s dead, too. But her love might still save a little boy from the life of a Wyrdborn.’

  Then I did something gruesome, something I could never have done if I hadn’t already plunged a dagger into a man’s heart. We’d found the talisman and we were taking it with us.

  ‘Silvermay, no, you can’t!’ said Ryall when he guessed what I was up to.

  This didn’t stop me, so he turned away and I could tell he was fighting to keep himself from vomiting. Somehow, his disgust made the task easier. Using the deadly blade, I made four long cuts in Theron’s scalp. They immediately leaked blood, but this was no time to be squeamish. Blocking the horror of what my hands were doing, I sliced away the square of skin, being careful not to damage the tattoo. Then I scraped the bleeding flesh from the underside and slipped the square into my pocket.

  ‘Now we can leave Ledaris,’ I said.

  24

  Miston Dessar

  Ryall bribed the gatekeeper with coins he’d taken from Theron’s pocket and, an hour after midnight, we passed once more beneath the grinning corpse of the thief.

  ‘If they catch us, I’ll die up there beside him,’ he whispered as we hurried away.

  ‘What do they do to murderers?’

  ‘I’d hate to guess, especially when they find his head shaved and a patch missing from his scalp.’

  Had I really done that? At the time I had forced the revulsion aside. Now, it rolled in around me and, like Ryall before me, I had to fight to hold onto my dinner.

  Fear of being captured was enough to keep us moving without a break until dawn. Lucien woke and began to cry with the cold. There would be no comfort for my little Smiler until the sun rose. Despite his constant complaints from the harness behind me, my thoughts were focused on what we should do next. Theron had sent a message to Coyle telling him we were in Ledaris. Would he set out after us himself? Hallig was closer. Coyle had probably sent his own message: You’ve been tricked, Hallig. Stop tracking Tamlyn and go after the baby in Ledaris. Hallig was probably on his way already so it was doubly important to be a good distance from that benighted city. But our escape brought a new problem.

  ‘How is Tamlyn going to find us?’ I said to Ryall as a rose-pink dawn began to bloom on the horizon. ‘He’s expecting to join us in Ledaris.’

  ‘We could leave word in the villages along the road,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but we’d risk Hallig getting those messages instead.’

  Ryall shrugged and made no more suggestions, and when we finally stopped to enjoy the sun on our faces, we still had no plan to warm our spirits.

  We slept a little in a clearing off the road after eating the bread and bacon that Ansuela had given us as a parting gift. ‘I wish I could give you more,’ she’d said. ‘You’ve freed us from the thankless servitude of this house.’ Along with the food for Ryall and me, Ansuela had included two little bowls of stewed apple for Lucien. One of those was already empty.

  We walked on through the rest of the day and by the time we settled into a different clearing deeper in the forest for the night, I’d made up my mind.

  ‘We’re staying here until Tamlyn finds us,’ I told Ryall. ‘No villagers know we’re here, and you must be more careful than ever when you steal from the farmers’ gardens. The rest of our food you’ll have to trap.’

  He grinned confidently as though this was no challenge at all. Once he’d made a fire, he set to work using its light to see by and the rope he’d brought with him from Theron’s room of torments to create his traps.

  I didn’t tell him the rest of what I’d decided until he’d returned from checking the traps the next morning.

  ‘It’s your turn to mind Lucien.’

  He looked as though I’d asked him to stand on his head.

  ‘I’m serious. I have a job of my own to do. Watch him until I get back.’

  We were camped at the base of a rocky knoll that rose steadily to the height of the trees surrounding it. Nothing much grew on the outcrops of granite and that was why I climbed to the highest point, which let me look out over the treetops to the horizon. More importantly, from there I’d be easily visible from above; a bird’s-eye view, you might say. On that first morning, I scoured the cloudless sky, but, apart from the occasional crow and some swallows darting playfully about as they chased insects, I saw nothing.

  With too much time for thinking, I began to remember what I had done two nights before and prompted by these ghoulish images my hands found the tattoo in my pocket. Talisman, tattoo, it was still a patch of skin that I’d sliced from the head of a man who’d been alive and breathing only minutes before — until I’d killed him. If I ever did return to Haywode, to my parents, to Hespa, would they see the blood on my soul?

  Suddenly I was afraid to be alone on this rocky perch in full view of the gods. The person I most wanted to see, to break that loneliness, to soothe away the loathing I felt for myself, was Tamlyn. But he would not come today.

  ‘Time to go back,’ I muttered, standing up from the hard stone I’d used as a seat. Lucien would be demanding the last of the apple by now, and there was always Ryall to talk to.

  I played with Lucien all afternoon and, more than talking with Ryall, it was Lucien who helped me forget the blood-red stains on the floor of Theron’s room.

  Feeding from a spoon meant he was eating more than ever. And growing faster than ever, as well. His grunts and cries were forming into sounds by this time, and I found myself chatting to him as though he could understand.

  ‘Do you miss your real mother, little Smiler?’ I asked him. ‘Or have you forgotten her?’

  To a hungry baby, the woman who posted food into his mouth was his mother.

  ‘Mmm, mmm,’ he said.

  ‘Not mumma, Maymay,’ I prompted him.

  He ignored me and tried different sounds, as though he was impatient to test them all.

  When he drifted off to sleep, I watched him for a few minutes, wondering whether I would stare down at my own baby one day. Would I love it as much as I loved my Smiler?

  The following day, I climbed the hill again and immediately sighted a hawk, which flew directly overhead, inspecting me with its arrogant eye. But it ignored my signals and again I had to fight disappointment.

  Ryall had bagged two pheasants and a woodpigeon overnight and dug up some turnips from an abandoned field. Turnips weren’t my favourite vegetable, but cooked in the coals to soften the flesh and mashed in one of Ansuela’s empty bowls, it proved a hit with Lucien.

  ‘Honestly, you’d eat anything I put on the end of a spoon, wouldn’t you?’ I teased him.

  He answered by grabbing at the spoon, and squealing with glee when I let him have it. Ryall laughed along with Lucien when he brandished the toy he’d won from me.

  ‘He tried to crawl while you were gone,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe how quickly he’s growing.’

  To Ryall it was just a statement of wonder, but to me it was a reminder of the things I was keeping at bay. How long before all those locked-away fears broke free?

  My third morning on the rock-strewn hill was no more fruitful than the days before, but on the fourth, when I waved to a distant speck in the sky, it began to grow, and when it was closer still I recognised the powerful beat of a hawk’s wings coming straight towards me.

  But when I took my eyes from the approaching hawk for a moment, I saw a figure hurrying towards me as fast as the slope would allow. It wasn’t Ryall. This was an older man; Theron’s age or clos
e to it. He had no sword in his hand but there was a knife sheathed inside his belt.

  He glanced up, saw the hawk rapidly swooping closer and quickened his pace. ‘Get down. Hide your face!’ he called.

  I’d stood here four days in a row to do exactly the opposite and so I remained where I was.

  Moments later he reached me and only then did I see how determined he was to make me obey. Before I could jump back, he grabbed me around the waist with one arm, used the other to flip the legs out from beneath me, and sat me on the hard ground. Ryall had taught me a few new curses in the days we’d spent together and every one of them got an airing on the hilltop as the man held me down with a knee on my chest. As the hawk fluttered majestically onto a boulder nearby the stranger slipped off the cloak he was wearing and threw it over me from head to toe, replacing his knee quickly to keep me pinned.

  ‘Let me go!’ I demanded.

  He pressed harder, using his hands on my shoulders to hold me down. It wasn’t painful enough to draw a scream, but it was unpleasant all the same.

  ‘Stay still and say nothing,’ he hissed. ‘I’m here to help you, Silvermay. In a few moments the bird will forget why it landed here and take off.’

  He knew my name! What should I make of that?

  I stopped fighting him and instead looked along a crease in the cloth of his cloak that let me see the hawk. It was staring quizzically at the man who held me down. Then, as quickly as it had arrived, the hawk was gone again and at last the man let me up.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I shouted while slapping the dust from my dress and hands.

  He offered no apology. ‘Thank the gods I found you in time. There are hawks searching half of Athlane.’

  ‘Yes, looking for me,’ I said.

  Then a terrible thought struck me. Tamlyn wasn’t the only Wyrdborn who could call birds of prey with his will. What a fool I’d been! Four days I’d shown myself on this hilltop and never once had I imagined that Coyle or Hallig might try to find me the same way.