by Glenda Larke
“How the blithering acorns am I supposed to know that?” the knife sharpener asked. “You better learn to keep your questions to yourself, my man. Them fellows have short tempers and quick reactions. Sensible men keep their chops shut and their tongues still.”
He nodded, and glanced over towards the inn, wondering if he ought at least to approach the woman. As he watched, the man in black went to help her, offering to take the child as she dismounted, but the look she gave him was pure ferocity. She beckoned to the ostler and handed the lad down to him instead, then climbed from the saddle by herself, almost toppling when her feet hit the ground. She clung to the stirrup for a moment, then moved to take her young’un.
No. He wouldn’t speak. Not while the Fox fellow was anywhere near.
By the time they reined in their horses in front of the inn on the market square of Beck Crossways, Bealina could barely think straight. Her whole body ached with fatigue and her distress at Garred’s misery was overwhelming. His skin was chafed and raw in patches and he hadn’t been eating well.
At first, she’d believed they were bound for Throssel and King Edwayn, until the sorcerer – she thought of him as the Foxcub – told her he’d lied, and they were only retracing her steps as far as Gromwell. She guessed then that they meant to use her and Garred to force Ryce to surrender, but she was wrong.
“Valerian Fox has no interest in making a martyr of Ryce,” the Foxcub said. “Better that the prince sit in his holdfast, looking like the weak peahen he is. After all, Pontifect Fox now has the pawn he really wants: your little mewler.”
The whole point of the return to Gromwell was a simple cruelty: to show Ryce that her flight had been in vain. Their true destination was Vavala. She was being taken to Pontifect Valerian Fox.
She wept when she heard that.
Va, she hated that whey-faced son of a sorcerer with a searing venom. One day, she promised herself, I’ll kill you. And I don’t care if I have to slice you up piece by piece…
Finally, after a horrible night spent beside the road, they were in Beck Crossways, and she was following him into the inn, Garred in her arms, her chin held high even as her eyes blurred with tears. Inside, he paid for a room for her and another for himself. She was vaguely aware that other guests had to be moved to give them rooms, but as she mounted the stairs behind him, she didn’t care.
The servants lit a fire and prepared a bath in her chamber, but the Foxcub remained with her the whole time they were about their tasks. After they’d left, she asked, “Are you going to stay in the room while I bathe?”
“I have no interest in your body,” he said. His indifference was chilling rather than reassuring. “Just remember, there will be guards outside the door. You aren’t going anywhere.”
He left her then, and she luxuriated in the clean hot water of the tin bath, and in the joy that brought her son. After she was dressed again, she lifted him out of the water, rubbed him dry with the fire-warmed towel, and tucked him into bed. He was asleep immediately.
She opened the door and looked outside. Two guards lounged against the opposite wall. “Ask the servants to remove the bath,” she said, ignoring their open sneering.
Garred had splashed water everywhere with his enthusiastic play, so when the menservants came to take the tub, she asked them to send someone to mop the floor. While she waited, she sat on the bed, and thought of Horntail. She wanted so badly to believe that he would rescue her, but her last sight of him had appalled her. He had looked befuddled. So ensorcelled.
When the Foxcub entered, accompanied by a maid with rags and bucket, Bealina stood up. She felt safer on her feet. The sorcerer leaned against the mantelpiece at the side of the fire watching the girl as she knelt to wipe up the pool of soapy water. She was young, a grubby skivvy with lank, greasy hair, who ducked her head rather than look at either of them.
“Thank you,” Bealina said when she had finished. “You may go now.”
The girl bobbed a curtsey. Lugging the bucket to the door, she had to pass the Foxcub. He whispered something in her ear. She gasped, clutched at her throat and dropped to the floor.
Bealina gaped. There seemed no reason for her sudden collapse. “Are you all right?” she asked, words she knew to be absurd even as she gave them voice. The girl was far from all right.
She knelt beside her, taking up her hand. “What happened? Can you sit up?”
The skivvy tried to speak, but could not draw breath. Her eyes begged for help, and then, abruptly, filmed over. Her face still registered her terror, but her eyes – in her eyes, there was nothing. Nothing at all.
She couldn’t believe it. The girl had died?
Still kneeling, still holding that grubby hand with its broken nails and rough skin, Bealina looked up at the Foxcub – and he smiled.
She knew then; it had been his doing.
“Why?” she asked. Her body started shaking and she dropped the lifeless hand. “Why would you do something so – so utterly pointless?”
“To show you I can. To remind you what your situation is. You look for ways to escape. You look for people to help you. Do you think I don’t see it?”
She was shaking so hard now, she couldn’t reply.
He smiled at her, but there was no humour in it. “Remember this. Remember how easy it is for me. And how little I care. I was told to keep Prince Garred alive and well – and you are a convenient instrument to do that, but you aren’t essential.” He sounded tired, not triumphant.
She clenched her hands into fists in an attempt to control her trembling, and noticed the bloodless white pallor of his face and the way he was still propped against the mantel.
“Every time you use your power, you are closer to dying,” she said. In one of her communications before she’d disappeared, Pontifect Fritillary had told them that much. “You can feel your life slipping away, can’t you? Valerian is using you up, burning you like a candle, and once the wick ends, the candle dies. He does that to all his sons. He’s the flame that sucks you of all life.”
For a long time she knelt there, shaking, incapable of climbing to her feet, unable even to wonder if her words would have a disastrous effect, or work to her advantage. How could she ever know what thoughts occurred in the head of a sorcerer’s son?
“I’m my father’s heir,” he said. It was scarcely more than a whisper.
“That’s what you all think,” she replied. “He has many sons.”
He pushed himself away from the fireplace to open the door, then spoke to one of the two guards outside. “Get rid of this body, will you?” he asked. “Fresh meat.”
She wouldn’t have thought the evening could get any worse, but when she saw the guard’s face light up with an expectation of pleasure, she remembered a story she’d heard of a scribe, a man called Clary, who had been cooked and eaten. The meaning of the guard’s anticipation filtered through to her understanding, and her gorge rose. She bent over the bucket, heaving until there was nothing left in her stomach. When she raised her head again, the guard and the girl were gone.
The Foxcub stood, his hands hanging loose by his sides. “You’re a fool,” he said.
“P-probably,” she agreed, shivering as she sat back on her heels. “I’m not very old. Seventeen, still. I’ve seen little of life outside my safe little world. But I think I know not only why you never killed the farmers who helped me, but why you never asked your Grey Lancers to kill them either. You’re not sure you can control them around dead bodies, are you? Each time that you have to coerce them into obedience takes a little more of your life.” He stared at her, the hatred seeping from every pore. She could smell it.
“You need me,” she said. “If I die, you’ll never bring Prince Garred safely to Vavala. Your men would—” She swallowed hard before she could say the words. “What? Eat him the moment your back was turned?”
He left her then, slamming the door behind him.
She doubled over where she was, rocking her body and cryin
g. She had no idea whether she had made things better, or worse, for herself.
12
The Different Man and His Executioner
Peregrine Clary always thought of his father before he killed. He would remember his smile, his slow way of speaking, his red-tongued shoes… Then he’d remember the smell of burned flesh, the horror of knowing the Grey Lancers had eaten his father. The memory gave him permission to do the work Pontifect Fritillary had asked of him and Gerelda Brantheld: kill sorcerers. Valerian Fox’s sons, the Gaunt Recruiters.
They were on the trail of their tenth sorcerer. Perie had found the first four in Valence, where they’d been leading troops of Grey Lancers. The next two had been killing Primordials and attacking shrine keepers and shrines along the Ardronese border, in the Shenat Hills.
Soon after that, all the shrines had vanished, and he and Gerelda had set off to Melforn and Boneset in the east, searching for more of the Fox progeny where the Prime’s family had manor estates. There, he killed another couple where they’d been enticing farm folk into joining the Grey Lancers. They’d headed to Hornbeam then, where they’d heard the lancers were killing Shenat clerics. They’d killed the leader of the troop, another Fox son.
When they’d heard that Prince Ryce was under siege in Gromwell Holdfast, they decided to investigate whether a sorcerer was involved. Just out of Melforn, though, Perie had picked up the stench of the tenth sorcerer travelling the road north several days ahead of them, and the trail had led them to Oakwood, not Gromwell.
“We are close to him,” he said to Gerelda after they’d ridden into the town and stabled their horses at a livery. “He’s here somewhere.”
“Just the one man?”
He nodded, then frowned. “That’s odd, isn’t it? But I can’t smell any Grey Lancers here, none. Just him.” He called it a smell, but it wasn’t really. It was a smutch he could sense, but not with his nose. With his witchery. He shouldered his pack and looked up and down the street, in an attempt to trace the direction of the taint. They were still standing outside the livery, and the strong, rich odour of horse sweat and manure swamped much of his witchery perception.
“Up that way, I think,” he said, and turned in that direction. “This town is a strange sort of place. I’ve never seen buildings like these before.”
Along one side of the cobbled roadway, houses of three or four storeys were squashed up against one another, the frontage of each not much wider than the length of two horses standing head to tail. In fact, each was so narrow that the stairs had been built on the outside. On the opposite side of the road, the buildings were completely different, long and unadorned, with only one narrow door and many shutters that could be propped open to let in air and light. He thought they looked more like barns.
“Oakwood’s more university than town, and you’re in the heart of Shenat country,” she said. “That makes a difference.”
“Where’s the university?” he asked as they walked on into the heart of the town.
“Everywhere. There’s no single building.” She pointed to the barn-like structure. “That’s a student doss house, the cheapest place to stay. If you’re a bit richer, then you rent a room with a family. If you’re really wealthy, then you arrange to stay with one of the professors.”
“So where do students go to learn?”
“Classes are held in the teacher’s house, usually. Tutorials, they’re called. Some of the poorer tutors hold a class in a tavern and charge less.”
“Then the most popular teachers are the best and they charge the most?”
She grinned. “That’s the theory, but as I recall, classes in a tavern were top in popularity.” They had come to a cross street, so she stopped and looked at him. “Which way?”
He took a deep breath, tasting the air and that awful smear of tarry vileness that was a sorcerer’s taint. “Down there,” he said, pointing along the broader thoroughfare.
“Might have guessed,” she said, turning that way. “This leads to the better side of town. Our sorcerer wouldn’t be stopping in the run-down section.”
“What would he be doing in a university town anyway?”
“I don’t know. But somehow the idea scares me.”
The town was a labyrinth of winding lanes, some of them noxious and drear, some opening on to wider thoroughfares, even tree-lined boulevards. And everywhere there were students, many of them wearing black gowns with coloured sleeve bands that proclaimed their allegiance to one of the five disciplines: theology, science, mathematics, law or history. Peregrine had already decided that students came in all shapes, sizes and ages. The one thing they had in common was that they all carried something – books, scrolls, slates, pen-and-ink sets or writing tablets. As both he and Gerelda were carrying their packs, they fitted right in, especially as Gerelda was keeping her sword out of sight under her cloak.
Perie touched the side of his thigh where his own weapon was hidden. He had long abandoned any attempt to master swordplay. His weapon of choice was now an assassin’s blade called a spiker, a slender, tapered dagger that was easy to slip into a man’s chest, or into his back, to the heart. It was light to carry, simple to conceal – and a stab from it resulted in little mess.
Nine men, dead on its blade. Number ten was within reach…
“They like their ale, don’t they?” he asked as they passed yet another noisy tavern full of students.
“Cheaper than a meal if you don’t have money,” she remarked.
“Were you one of the poorer ones at your university?”
“Indeed I was. But I had good friends. I got by.” And she smiled, as if remembering something pleasant. “It’s important to have friends,” she added.
He’d never had friends, at least not since he’d started travelling with his Da. Nine years old, he’d been then, and a boy couldn’t find a friend when they were always on the move. He frowned, wondering what he’d missed. Would a friend be better than Gerelda on this quest of his – to kill as many sorcerers as he could? He doubted it.
Although… maybe Gerelda was a friend. He would not have liked it if she left him. Was that what having a friend was?
“How close is he, do you think?” she asked as he guided her into a wide street of handsome colonnaded homes.
“Very. Do you know this road?”
“I do, as a matter of fact. The head of the university’s professorial board lives in that house on the right, the one with the tree outside. He conducts lectures in law on the ground floor. I attended them for one term.”
“You told me you went to university in Lowmeer!”
“Yes, I did. My degree is from Grundorp. But a lot of students do a term or two at other universities, especially if there’s a particularly good scholar giving the lectures. That’s how I met Saker Rampion. He turned up in Grundorp.”
“I’ve heard you mention that name before. Or was it Fritillary who spoke of him? Who is he?”
“Oh, never mind. This is the street where all the richest academics live. Let’s walk down and see if you can work out where our sorcerer is.”
They ambled along as if they weren’t looking for anything in particular, and no one gave them a second glance. At the end of the street, he told her they had to retrace their steps because they’d passed their quarry.
“That’s the house,” he said at last, pointing. “He’s in there. I’m sure of it.” He nodded at an elegant mansion accessed by broad steps up to an impressive doorway. Even as he spoke, one side of the doors opened and ten or so students spilled out, laughing and chattering down the steps.
“Is he one of those?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“Let me find out who lives there,” she muttered. Smiling, she waved to one of the students. “Hey, my friend, is this the house of Marmot Crake, professor of law?”
The young man halted, with several of his friends lingering as well, to wait for him. “No, he lives in that one with the tree. This is Professor Hoddiso
n Rork’s house, professor of theology. You must be visiting students?”
“That’s right,” she said, her smile widening. “Not long in Oakwood. Rork. I was going to take his course as well. I heard he’s a fellow with a beard down to his waist, who mumbles all the time?”
“That’s him. But this month, he’s not giving the tutorials. He’s turned over his course to someone else for a term. Arbiter Camber Fox.”
“Oh!” Gerelda glanced at Perie with an expression of dismay before turning back to the student, “Should we be disappointed? I mean, we were looking forward to benefiting from Professor Rork’s expertise, and to have a replacement—”
“He seems to know his stuff,” the student replied. “He gave his first tutorial just now. Young fellow, but entertaining. Hard to believe he’s an arbiter!”
Gerelda pursed her lips. “I didn’t come all this way to be entertained! I want someone with experience, who can give me theological guidance. Tell me, does he advocate putting Shenat teachings before Va-chapel sermons?”
One of the other students, a woman, laughed. “Hardly. He’s the Pontifect’s nephew, for a start. Which probably explains why he’s an arbiter already, when he can’t be more than twenty-five, if he’s a day.”
“So what course is he teaching?”
“‘Va-faith Renewed’, he calls it. The next tutorial is at ten tomorrow morning. And he was enlightening. Made good sense to me.”
The students went on their way and Perie looked across at Gerelda. She was biting her lip and frowning.
He said, “He’s used sorcery on them, just a bit.”
“To coerce them?”
“No. Not exactly. More to—” He thought about it. “What I sense is not evil enough for that. More to charm them, I think. Do you think he’s really Valerian’s nephew?”
“More likely his son. As Pontifect, Valerian can hardly admit he’s sired tens of sons from one end of the hemisphere to the other.”
“I suppose not.”
“Think of the damage this Camber fellow could do teaching a whole term of the theology course, twisting Shenat customs and beliefs until it sounds like a perversion instead of something that protects the land and forests and rivers. He could have those students – most of whom will one day be clerics – calling for the death of witchery and shrine keepers.” She drew in a heavy breath. “Tomorrow we’re going to be students of his. We’d better find somewhere to stay for the night.” She looked down at herself. “Not a doss house, I think. Somewhere with a bath.”
