Marith had been lying with his head in her lap, letting her stroke his hair. He sat up and looked at her. It had been a very hot day riding: his face was tired and drawn. Perhaps this wasn’t a good time to ask, she thought. But she had to know, and she had waited long enough. She had a right to know. The night air was still and harsh; she felt something in it approaching, some fear, and the words burst out of her.
‘Ah.’ He sighed. ‘So we come to it. Nobody has yet dared ask. Whether I want to tell you … What could I have done that was so very terrible my father would cast out his son and heir? All the things my family have ever done, and what offence could I have committed that was so terrible it couldn’t be forgiven?’ He frowned. ‘I’m rambling. I’m sorry. You truly want to know?’
Thalia nodded, slowly. Marith drained his wine cup. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them they seemed darker. ‘I killed someone. A man. The heir to the richest and most powerful of my father’s nobles. Carin Relast, his name was.’ He shut his eyes again, his hand gripping the cup in his hand so tightly his knuckles went white. ‘My best and only friend.’
Chapter Thirty-Five
Two young men, boys really, stand looking at each other against the backdrop of a crowded room. One is slim and dark-haired, the other stockier and fair-blond. They stand in the common room of an expensive, bustling inn, brightly lit glass and polished tables, windows open to a walled garden filled with the scent of summer flowers. A gathering silence spreads around them, eating away at the very walls.
The dark-haired boy holds a sword clutched in his hand. The blade of the sword is covered in blood. The fair-haired boy staggers backwards, sways on his feet, crumples slowly to the ground at the dark-haired boy’s feet. There is a great wound in his chest where his heart is. His eyes stare in confusion. The dark-haired boy stares back. The look on his face is impossible to describe.
The room is utterly silent now, save for the drip of blood from the sword. The few other people in the room sit frozen. The dark-haired boy stares and stares. Then he throws back his head and screams. The sound he makes is like the noise an animal might make as it is ripped apart. It echoes round the room. There is another silence. The dark-haired boy looks down at the blood on his hands, the blood that has burst out from the fair-haired boy’s heart. He raises his hands to his mouth and licks it off. Then he sinks down to the ground beside the fair-haired boy and begins to laugh. He is still laughing when men in green-tinted armour come to take him away. He does not resist, does not even look at them. Other men carefully lift the fair-haired boy’s body and carry it out into the sunlight. A woman’s voice rings out, wailing in pain. The men turn back to the room. Slowly, carefully, they kill every person there.
Chapter Thirty-Six
‘Why?’ Thalia asked after a long while.
Marith rubbed roughly at his face. ‘Because of what he was doing to me. Because otherwise he would have ended up killing me. Because I loved him. Because he knew me.’ I don’t know why, he thought. I don’t know why. I’ll never know.
Why do we do anything? he thought.
‘And your father banished you for it?’
‘My father couldn’t give a damn.’ Marith drained his cup again, his fingers hovering over the wine skin resting beside him. He refilled his cup, took a few sips then pushed it roughly away, so that it fell and the wine spilled out dark as blood in the dust. He watched the pool of wine spreading for a moment. ‘Carin’s father, however …’
He retrieved his cup, filled it again, drank again, scratched his face again. ‘My father would have ignored it, but the Relasts made too much trouble. They’re distant kin of ours, hold the island of Third, the nearest to the mainland. Powerful and rich. Lord Relast, in particular, is not a man even my father would want to cross. And I think … I think now he hated me even before. Lord Relast, I mean. I don’t need to think to know my father hates me. That all the kindness and generosity he showed me as Carin’s friend was part of the game. Sometimes … sometimes I think he put Carin up to it. Made him love me. Made him destroy me. Thought he could control me, through him. So then when I killed him … He played his most precious piece, and lost. And so he was angry. And my father had to appease him. And my father loathes me anyway, so he threw me away. He has another son, after all. One without my … problems. Nobody ever wagered hard coin on whether Ti would make it through the next half year alive and with his mind still intact. The odds of my surviving much longer, however, were so low it was barely worthwhile making the wager. My father just cut his losses early. Ended it.’
Silence. ‘Ended what?’ Thalia asked at last in a quiet, confused voice. ‘Why should he loathe you? Why shouldn’t you stay alive? Why should people wager on it? I don’t understand. Any of this.’
Beautiful, and proud, and certain, and full of joy. Somewhere far away Marith could hear something screaming. His voice. Screaming.
‘You haven’t realized?’ He laughed harshly. ‘But then you wouldn’t, of course. Ask Tobias. Ask him about how Carin ruined me. I’m sure he’d love to tell you everything about me and my secrets.’
She stood up, and Marith thought she was going to walk away. All gone, he thought. All lost. Sorrow and ruin. A dead man and a living woman, both too far beyond him to come back. For a moment he saw, not the woman, but Carin standing before him. There was dust where Carin’s heart should have been. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered, but his lips were too dry to speak.
Carin had known what he was. What he could be. What was inside him, clawing at him to get out. Help me, Carin, he’d begged over and over. Help me blot it out. I love you. Help me. And Carin had helped him. Oh, he had. Drink and drugs and ruin and all done out of such love. Kind.
Perhaps he’d killed Carin to spare him. So Carin didn’t have to see what he would become.
You must hate me now, I suppose, he’d said to Thalia. If you didn’t before. And you’d probably be right to. Everyone hates and fears me. What I am.
What I will be.
It’s better, he thought. If she walks away. Then she won’t have to see, either.
And then Thalia knelt down beside him, and placed her arms around him, and kissed his forehead that was hot and dizzy with pain. He shuddered at her touch: she held him and there was light in her, and the light burned. He did not want the light. He wanted to go back into the dark and stay there, where nothing could hurt him, where he belonged. I’ll kill you too, he thought. Keep away from me. She was silent, holding him. Her skin smelled sweet and warm. He was half unsure who she was, Thalia or Carin, but he clutched at her, burying his face in her hair.
She began murmuring something in Literan under her breath. Praying for him. Praying to her cursed God.
‘Dear Lord, Great Tanis Who Rules All Things, from the fear of life and the fear of death, release us. Dear Lord, Great Tanis Who Rules All Things, from the fear of life and the fear of death, release us. Dear Lord, Great Tanis Who Rules All Things, from the fear of life and the fear of death, release us. We live. We die. For these things, we are grateful. Dear Lord, Great Tanis Who Rules All Things—’
Marith twisted in her arms. Don’t pray for me. Don’t you dare pray for me. Don’t you know what I am, by now? Things screamed in the distance. Shadows crawling in his eyes and in his skin. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill us all. But she held him and murmured her prayers in a voice like candle flames.
Seserenthelae aus perhalish. Night comes. We survive. Her voice, and her heart, and the light, no longer burning. The light, shining out of her. He began to weep. Long, gentle sobs, like a child.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
You will say I am a fool.
He is beautiful. God’s knives, he is beautiful. Beautiful like nothing else in the world. And because of that, you will think me a fool, an innocent running from a prison, throwing herself into his arms because he is a man and a prince and as beautiful as the moon. You think me a stupid girl, love-struck and love-blind, clinging to poems and drea
ms.
I want to live, I decided after Ausa. I want to live and I will live. I would have lived in the Temple, I suppose, as much as I was able. It had a peace of a kind, and a power of a kind for me. Lived with gardens of flowers, and little children playing, and a thousand candles burning and the Great Hymn to the rising sun. Lived with the knife, and the Small Chamber, and the slaves waiting there with no names and no voices left to speak. Lived with Ausa, and Tolneurn, and Demmy. My guilt. My demons. Are they any worse than his? But as I conjured up the fear and the dark I saw something, a chance, a freedom, a world beyond.
So many dead men I have seen. And the Temple slaves, the priestesses, the worshippers, those who claim to serve the Temple and its God but who prostrate themselves before the fear of death and the fear of life. He need have no fear, of living or dying. He need fear nothing. He is so beautiful. So living. So filled with life. He blazes with it, sharp and terrible and alive. He is like the knife in the Temple, the blade shining in the dark.
I can see us both, in the dark, shining. Crowned in silver. Throned in gold. Radiant with light. Not a bad thing to see, surely?
But still, you will say I am a fool.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
They arrived at last at a small village, the last tiny forgotten vestige of Empire trade routes before the desert gave way slowly to the plains of Immish. Another five or six days’ hard ride, Tobias reckoned, and they should be safely across the border. The road they had taken was more direct than the route in, but no less empty and inhospitable. They had passed a few scattered dwellings, even the occasional ruined caravan inn. They had not stopped at any of them, Tobias urging caution. He seemed almost to flinch at the wind, now.
That afternoon, however, they had come upon the village, clustered around a small brackish oasis, caught up in the midst of some local celebration. Tobias, again, advised that they hurry on past, but the smell of food and wine, the sounds of laughter, music and song, made the other men pause. Thalia looked frightened, and wanted to go on, but Marith for once ignored her. She’d have to get used to noise and company and crowds.
Rooms were engaged, the horses stabled, dusty water heated for baths. Thalia put on the yellow dress, tight fitted to her body with full, swirling skirts, vulgar and cheap but pretty enough on her and flattering her luminous dark skin. It left her arms bare, so she wore a scarf of fine pale silk, embroidered in gold and pink flowers like a summer meadow, wrapped around her left forearm. Her hair hung down her back, long and straight like a fall of dark water. Her dress was cut low. Her eyes were nervous and brilliant. No one would look at her arms.
In the village square crowds had gathered in the sunset, hot and noisy with shouts and singing, pitch-soaked torches making shadows dance. Music struck up, couples dancing. Thalia had never seen dancing, was at first frightened by the whirling bodies and stamping feet. She looked around her, wide-eyed at the chaos swirling around them. The dancers leapt in circles, spinning and running, bending arms and heads in suddenly jagged twists and turns. They understand the brevity of life, here, Marith thought. How alone we all are beneath the vastness of the desert sky. He had been born and bred on an island, spent his life among men who sailed out on the pitiless sea. The same desperate clinging to life, knowing it was nothing, could be crushed out at any moment, nothing left. So they danced it out in the dust.
The music was stamping feet and drums and piping flutes that rose and fell in coils. It was familiar to Thalia, he felt her body sway a little to the rhythms, recognizing the beats and counter-beats, the pauses and sudden changes in tempo that sounded strange to his ears. Deliciously erotic, but something under it frightened him. How foreign she was to him. Knowing things he did not. One song within which he could just about make out the words ‘sun’ and ‘darkness’ made her shiver in his arms. ‘It is like—’ she began, then stopped and closed her mouth on the words. Marith shivered in turn. Like a song from her Temple. He had not thought, though he should have, that she would feel any regret at the leaving of it. He loved her. She had no right to feel nostalgia, or regret.
‘We should go back to the inn,’ he said in a little while. The air was heavy with the smell of drink; it was searing hot from the torches but also bitterly cold. The atmosphere growing thicker and wilder. Men leered at Thalia; Marith stared at them and they drew back. This was all a mistake, he thought. We shouldn’t have stopped here. This isn’t her place, or mine. She was so far above this mummery, whilst he … He watched the weaving figures, twisting in a long spiralling pattern of stamping feet around the square, dancing and shouting and singing while the darkness ate at them. You will all die, his mind whispered. This brightness is only the surface. Beneath is the darkness: you will all die.
‘Come and dance with me,’ Thalia said suddenly.
Marith started. ‘Dance?’
‘Yes, dance. I’d like to. That’s why we stopped here, isn’t it? I thought you probably enjoyed this sort of thing.’ She smiled at him almost archly. ‘From what little I know, most young men seem to.’
‘I do … I did … I mean …’
‘Rate seems to be.’ Rate was holding a large mug of something in one hand and a kebab in the other, eyeing a remarkably well-built young woman dancing in front of him. His face was lit with a vast grin.
‘Rate doesn’t …’ He stopped. ‘Come on then.’ Took her hand and whirled her into the twisting mass of figures. The dance was a fast one, half running, stepping out patterns as they crossed and re-crossed the beaten ground. The ribbon of dancers traced in and out of the torches, the light casting Marith’s face in crimson, Thalia’s deep gold. He began to laugh giddily, his breath fast as they went. Their feet pounded out the rhythm of his heart.
They danced for hours, not the descendant of Amrath and the High Priestess of Great Tanis but only a man and a woman enjoying themselves, swirling and stamping and jumping to the music’s roar. Marith drank strong, sour wine and local spirits that burned the throat until he was stumbling on his feet and tripping over his words and Thalia was laughing at him. The shadows were just shadows cast by torches. The people were just dancers, wild and alive.
Finally, Thalia was exhausted and Marith’s head was spinning and the torches were beginning to burn down. The celebrants were yawning, drunk and weary with aching feet. In the east, the sky was beginning to turn grey. Rate had disappeared on the arm of the woman he’d been leering at. Alxine and Tobias were nowhere to be seen. They went back to the inn, where Thalia helped Marith up the stairs, laughed pitilessly as she watched his fuddled attempts to remove his boots. They fell into bed laughing, Marith dimly aware it was him they were laughing at. He pressed his face into her hair and she kissed his forehead, her lips cool on his flushed skin. ‘That’s nice,’ he whispered muzzily. ‘Nice. Carin used to do that.’ His voice drifted. ‘We’ll have dances like that at Malth Elelane, when I’m crowned. When I make you queen.’
He fell asleep immediately, a deep calm sleep, his face soft and weary. Thalia lay a little while listening to his breathing, watching him in the faint light.
Nobody in the village woke early the next morning. It was almost noon by the time Marith wandered downstairs, to find Thalia sitting talking with Alxine at a table in the inn’s courtyard. He frowned at the sight of Alxine speaking to her, her face animated and smiling, honey and breadcrumbs on her lips.
‘Marith!’ She turned to him and his heart leapt at the way she spoke his name. She offered him bread, poured him a cup of water from a stone jug. Brackish and dusty, warm in the sun. He sat down on the wooden bench next to her. Put his arm possessively around her waist.
‘You came down without me,’ he said stiffly.
‘I didn’t want to wake you. You looked so peaceful.’ She giggled at Alxine. ‘And I needed some fresh air. My Lord Prince reeked of stale alcohol and was snoring fit to wake the dead.’
Marith frowned. ‘Where is everyone?’ he asked. Didn’t like it, her talking to Alxine like this. Sour in his head
. And something else pulling at him, a vague disquiet at the back of his mind, blurred by sleep and alcohol. There was a strong desire in him just to start drinking again and not stop for the rest of the day.
Alxine said, ‘Tobias is seeing to the horses. Rate is …’ He and Thalia both laughed. ‘Rate is upstairs, trying to avoid last night’s remarkably well-built conquest’s remarkably well-built husband.’
Their laughter softened him. He kissed Thalia, leaned his head on her shoulder. ‘Some things, you’ll have to get used to, Thalia, my beloved. You have possessed my heart and my soul, my love, but even for you, oh most beautiful, the sun will not rise again at dusk. Although that may in fact refer to something else. And don’t ever suggest I snore.’
‘The Altrersyr do not snore, then?’ said Thalia in a very solemn voice.
Marith laughed himself. ‘Be grateful my aching head is soothed by your sweet voice, my lady. I think you forget to whom you speak. The Altrersyr do not take such insults lightly. My father has killed men for less. No, we certainly do not snore.’
Thalia glanced around her and then said sweetly in his ear in Literan, ‘The High Priestess of the Lord of Living and Dying may insult whosoever she chooses. Especially when they still smell like a distillery.’
‘I’m sure I do, oh, most beautiful.’ Marith closed his eyes. ‘Drink, dance, enjoy yourself, you bade me. Can you be so cruel as to condemn a poor slave for obeying his mistress’s every command? And how you come to know what a distillery smells like, I shall refrain from enquiring.’ The world behind his eyelids was golden in the sun. Her hair tickled his face. He could almost hear her heartbeat and the blood pumping in her veins. She began to sing one of the songs from the previous night, very low and quiet, so gentle he could not make out the words, only the dull soft drone of the tune. Her voice was like honey. He dozed on her shoulder, his whole world her scent and her voice and the sunlight on his upturned face.
The Court of Broken Knives Page 28
