by Glenda Larke
Terrified, she grabbed at the fan to push it away, but the Regal whisked it out of her reach.
“Never touch it. Never. Do you understand?”
His anger slammed into her and she sank back on to the pillows. He sounded like a man possessed, wild. She nodded dumbly. Shivers of ice tingled across her skin.
Slowly he stood up and took the fan back to the chest. When he reached it, he turned and said in a puzzled fashion, “Put the jewels away, and put on your nightgown. It is not meet to be thus undressed and adorned.”
Not even in front of my husband, at his own request?
Once the chest was locked, he appeared more like his normal self, and she was back on the bed in her nightgown, still trying to keep the fear from her eyes. She gave him a weak smile.
“Let us make a Vollendorn heir tonight,” he said, as if nothing untoward had happened. “That is your duty.”
He knelt on the bed and lifted her gown.
Mathilda was in such a state when she returned several hours later that Sorrel knew something had shaken her to the core. When she heard the story, she couldn’t make sense of it.
She’s exaggerating, surely. Everything I’ve heard tells me Regal Vilmar is not the addle-pated fool she’s just described.
“I tell you, Sorrel, it was as if he was a different person. Someone whose sense had been driven from his pate by a cudgel blow. And then, just as suddenly, he was normal again. Well, as far as Lowmians are ever normal,” Mathilda added bitterly. “I’m married to a lackwit!”
“Perhaps he was just drunk?”
She shook her head. “He was quite sober at dinner.”
“Milady, everything we’ve ever heard about Regal Vilmar tells us he’s an astute ruler.”
“Then he must be bewitched. There was something … uncanny about those feathers. That – that must be what it was. There’s witchery afoot. And I don’t mean a Va witchery. Those plumes never came from Va-cherished lands. We don’t have birds as large as – as cows!”
“Don’t repeat any of this, to anyone,” Sorrel said. “Don’t trust anyone with your secrets.”
“Of course not! I’m not the one who’s lackwitted,” she said, yawning.
Sorrel tucked her in, and in moments the Regala was sound asleep.
30
Exiles in Lowmeer
Va-blast. The stench of a village caught in the grip of Horned Death, the putrid smell of people rotting before they died. It clung to his clothing, to his hair, to his skin. Soaked into his mind.
He’d never be able to erase the memory.
Children dying, their parents already dead. The words, the filth of language that poured from their mouths as though the disease was eating every shred of decency before it killed them. Saker had done what he could to ease their deaths, but it was precious little. Every piece of information he garnered, he recorded in the hope that it might make sense in the end, because it certainly didn’t now.
He trudged up the only street in the village of Dortgren on the far southern coast of Lowmeer, heading away from the Juyrons house. When he’d first met the family, they’d numbered three: Tomas Juyrons; his wife Yosanda; their fourteen-year-old son Hannels.
Tomas had died earlier that night. Hannels was close to death, while Yosanda was yet in the early stages of the disease. When she’d asked to be alone with her son, he’d respected her wishes, even though he wondered if she meant to kill the lad. He’d nodded at her, and walked out into the night. What right had he to tell her she must watch the horns burrow through the bones of Hannels’ skull, knowing all the while that cutting them off just prolonged the agony?
Walking up the hill towards his lodgings in the shrine, the horror of the night etched itself into his memory like acid into bronze. He’d never forget.
He took a deep breath, appreciating the freshness of the smell after the sour stench of the sickroom. Fog was rolling in from the port, and the tang of salt and seaweed and wet fish-baskets came with it. Birds cried into the night, gulls. He paused and turned back to look towards the ocean.
And the lascar’s dagger flapped in his robe pocket like a stranded fish.
Oh, Va. What now?
Nervously, he looked around.
At first, they were just shadows in the mist. Then men, striding from the direction of the tiny fishing harbour, silent, grim, their faces wrapped in dark cloth, their lanternlight softened by the moisture in the air. They must have come by boat, slipping in on the tide.
Not fishermen, that was sure. The dagger wouldn’t care about fishermen. Bandits, then? Hardly likely in a poor fishing village like this one. He stayed where he was, intending to warn them they risked their lives entering the village.
“Va’s blessings,” he said as they approached.
Their silence was unnerving. They surrounded him, swords drawn, but he felt no direct threat. Not yet.
“Good sirs,” he said, “this is no place to linger. The Horned Death is on the prowl in Dortgren.”
One of the men stepped forward. Like the others, his black velvet hat had a black rooster feather as a cockade, but it was an insignia that held no meaning for Saker. “That’s why we’re here,” he said. For a moment Saker thought he recognised the voice, then realised it was more just his familiarity with the accent of the university-educated.
He held up his own lantern to see better, but the man had his lower face well wrapped against the chill of the night. Instinct made Saker stay in character; he’d come to the village in the guise of an itinerant assistant cleric, no one of much importance. “A poor reason,” he drawled in the accent common to southern villagers. “You’d best not stay.”
“Oh, we’re not staying. We are – tax-gatherers here on the Throne’s business. Who are you?”
The Regal’s tax-gatherers? They were like no tax-gatherers he’d ever seen. Too alert, too grim, too anonymous, too well armed. “A man of the Way,” he said. “Come from Grote to succour the dying.”
The man did not reply immediately. His forehead creased in a frown and his gaze drifted from Saker’s face to his cleric’s clothes and back again. Then he said softly, “You’re thus just the man we need, for surely you know the village and its tragedy. How many households have been affected?” As he spoke, he flicked his fingers at another of his group. Long, white fingers, ungloved even in the chill of night. “Record this, Bren.”
One of the other men stepped forward, shook his cloak back over his shoulder on one side and readied what looked to be a schoolboy’s slate and soapstone pencil.
“Eight,” Saker said, trying to ignore his sense of the absurdity of the scene. A clerk tallying up the dead in the main street of a village in the middle of the night? “Thirty-eight dead.”
“All buried?” the leader asked. His gaze never left Saker’s face.
“Ay.”
“Slaked with lime?”
“Ay.”
“How many more will there be?”
He nodded towards the Juyrons house. “The last two are there, one close to death. No new cases in four days, so the contagion has probably run its course.”
Once again a flick of the leader’s fingers. This time it sent three of his followers to the Juyrons home with their lantern. “Walk with me,” he said to Saker, “and show me the other seven households affected. We need to delete their names from the census sheets.”
“At this hour o’ the night?” He believed not a word of it.
“Better by darkness. What people don’t see, they don’t fear.”
Saker glanced around the village. All the houses were shuttered against the wind and the cold. Not a beam of light showed through a crack anywhere. No one to witness what might occur in the middle of the night.
Down in the harbour, though, something had disturbed the sleeping gulls. They screamed and cawed, eerie sounds muffled and distorted by the fog. He shuddered, chilled not by the mist nor by the wailing cries, but by the coldness of the leader of the men, by the lack of emotio
n in his tone, by the uncanny silence of his cohort. For a moment he wondered whether he was dreaming, having a bizarre nightmare. Whether he might wake to find he could hardly remember any of it.
“The Federhorn house,” he said, pointing. “The first to be emptied by death.” He frowned as another two men peeled off in that direction.
“Don’t look so worried,” the leader said. “I need to check to see the houses are really empty.”
“I’ve no cause to lie,” Saker said mildly. They headed towards the empty pothouse, where the innkeeper and his family had succumbed. “My name’s Zander Tench,” he added, using the name he’d assumed for this mission. “Might I know yours?”
“What matters a name? But if you want one, you may call me Dyer.”
That’s not his name. His own skills as a liar made it easier for him to recognise another.
They walked on until he’d indicated all of the deserted houses. Of the twenty or so men who had come up from the harbour, only Bren and one other now remained with Dyer. “What d’your men want inside those houses?” he asked, knowing he could not trust the answer.
He was beginning to think they were raiders. Looters of the dead, following the rumours of pestilence to grab what they could. “They could be risking infection,” he warned.
Behind them, a sound of splintering wood cut through the quiet. He jumped, and whirled. The door to the last house had evidently been barred and one of the men had just wielded a cudgel to break it open. Down the street, the Juyrons house burst into flames.
Without thought, he turned to run towards it. Yosanda and Hannels, they’ll burn to death. He’d thought no more than that, moved no more than a pace, when Dyer grabbed his arm and spun him around to face him. His grip was tight. Saker raised his lantern to see him better; the man’s muffler had slipped to display his lower face.
A handsome man, not young. Forty or fifty years old; lean, weather-beaten features. Piercing dark eyes that narrowed as they stared into his own, puzzled and thoughtful.
“No,” the man said softly. “They are better off dead. You know that.”
“No one is better off burning to death!”
“They are already dead, my supposedly Lowmian friend. My men, they kill quickly and mercifully.”
Supposedly? Fear rippled through him. He dropped his lantern and slipped his gloved hand into his pocket for the dagger, cursing his decision to leave his sword behind at the shrine where he was lodging. Oak-and-acorn, field-and-forest, save me. Somehow I gave myself away.
“Now what would an Ardronese witan be doing here, posing as a man of the Way of the Flow?” Dyer asked softly.
As his fear built, the sound of the gulls grew louder. An owl flew low overhead, its wingbeat silent, wingtip so low it brushed Bren in passing. The man’s slate disappeared under his cloak.
Dyer didn’t appear to notice the birds. His grip on Saker’s arm tightened. “You are another unlucky one tonight.”
“I don’t know what you mean…”
“I regret this is necessary, Witan Rampion. I don’t know why you’re here, or why you’re pretending to be someone else, but the result is unfortunate for you.” Once again those long white fingers fluttered. “Evann, dispatch this unfortunate cleric.”
He knew his execution had just been sealed. And he had no idea why. No idea who Dyer was, or how he knew his name.
His dagger was in his hand and pressed to Dyer’s ribs as swiftly as a smile could vanish. The Chenderawasi kris. The move offered nothing but a brief reprieve; he was surrounded by armed men, two of whom were only an arm’s length away, and all he had was a single dagger. And his wits, plus a possible misconception. If they thought he was a cleric, they’d also think he was unused to a fight.
“Let me go,” he said, addressing Dyer, “or this dagger goes into your chest.”
Dyer released his arm, raised his hands in a gesture of surrender and took one step back. Bren and his companion, Evann, decided that was an invitation to approach, swords drawn. Fighting men, both, from their stance. Another house was burning now, and then another. The mist dissipated as the flames heated the air and sparks spiralled upwards in pinpricks of light. The villagers began to emerge from their houses, some of them already clutching buckets, ready to fight the fires. Dyer yelled at them, “The Dire Sweeper is here! Get back inside.”
Dire. Dyer. Oh, merciful oak. Juster had mentioned them. The Regal’s assassins…
He slung off his cloak and began to whirl it around. The men closing in were momentarily disconcerted. Another precious moment gained, to savour his life, to seek an escape route. At the edges of his vision, he saw the villagers obey the shouted command. Within moments, their doors were shut tight and their lamps extinguished. They were leaving the rest of the village to burn, and him to die. Dire Sweepers. The Regal’s men. Better not to see anything.
They were going to kill him. Their leader knew him as an Ardronese, knew his name. Recognised him…
There was no time for wonder. He flung the cloak over Dyer’s head and ran. A bare sword blade brushed his sleeve as he tore past Evann. His strides ate up the street, his feet winged by terror.
There’s no way I can escape. Evann’s bare blade was but a pace or two from his back. Perhaps if he turned, he could take the man by surprise and ram the dagger into him…
The kris ripped out of his hand. For one absurd moment, he thought Evann must have knocked it from him with his sword, but then he heard its distinctive whir through the air, which was even more unlikely. He looked over his shoulder to see Evann falling, clutching at his chest. His sword tumbled free.
He stopped short, gaping, as Evann died in front of his eyes, the lascar’s dagger buried in his breast.
And then, like a bore tide from the sea, a line of gulls swooped out of the mist, their wingbeats swirling the fog into tendrils, their shrieks ripping the air apart. Men screamed in panic. Birds attacked them, up and down the street. Hundreds of winged assailants, clawing, pecking, slashing, screeching. Not just gulls, either. He saw owls and goatsuckers, a nighthawk and herons, even an eagle. A few died on sword blades, but not many, and still they came. Men began to fall under the onslaught of talons and beaks, the cries of eviscerated birds indistinguishable from those of blinded, bleeding men. Mercifully, the darkness swallowed much of the detail, because where flames illuminated the horror, he was beyond sickened.
Dear Va, so much blood.
Appalled, he shouted, “Stop it! No more!”
And as one, the birds lifted into the air, and were gone.
He turned and fled out of the village and up the hillside beyond, pushing his way through the scrub, tearing his skin and his clothes on brambles.
A dream. It had to be a dream.
But it wasn’t.
He hid on the hillside, watching as the eight houses burned to ash, and silhouettes of men carried away their dead and injured. By the time dawn light stained the sky, the village was empty of the visitors. Out to sea, the dark shape of a ship edged away from the harbour, towed by its own longboat, its sails still hanging loosely in the morning stillness. No flag flew from the mast, and Saker suspected there was no name painted on the prow.
A sea eagle drifted over his head. He looked up, to see that it clutched something in its talons. He assumed it was a fish, until the bird dropped it. The object tumbled towards him. He watched, unmoving, as it fell to the ground barely a pace away, and buried its wavy blade in the ground as far as the hilt.
Shit.
Sorrel could always tell when Vilmar had been playing with his fan in the presence of the Princess. When Mathilda returned to her bedchamber, the expression on her face, a mixture of fear and bewilderment, said it all. Intrigue and schemes held no fear for a princess of Ardrone, but the Regal’s bizarre behaviour left her disturbed and anxious.
One night, not quite three months after their arrival, Mathilda climbed back up the staircase and sat wearily on the edge of her bed. “He scares me,” she
said. “Every time it’s the same. He appears to forget who I am, who he is – everything! Sorrel, he’s ensorcelled.”
“I wonder if we should speak to somebody about it. To Lady Friselda, perhaps. Or one of the other ladies-in-waiting. What about his manservant? Torjen might know something.”
“He’s never in the room when Vilmar brings the fan out of the chest.” Mathilda shivered and pulled the covers up to her chin. “I don’t want to say anything to Lady Friselda or any of the others. They’re like a bunch of hawks waiting for me to make a mistake so they can fly in and rip me apart. Tattletales, just watching for the right time to tell the Regal something salacious about me. I stare at men too much, or laugh too loudly, or pray too little. There’s always something about me that doesn’t please them! How can I ever survive in this – this prison?”
Sorrel sat on the edge of Mathilda’s bed. “Both Aureen and I think the time has come for you to tell the Regal you’ve not had a moon’s bleed since arriving here. Once he knows you’re breeding, he won’t allow a word to be said to your detriment.”
Mathilda nodded in agreement. “He’ll notice I’m increasing soon anyway. But first, I want you to see the fan. I want you to tell me what it is and whether it is a danger to me, or to my child.”
“Va above, what makes you think I can tell you anything about such an – an exotic thing?”
“Because you have a witchery, of course!”
“That doesn’t mean a thing. Besides, how could I open the chest? I have no key!”
“Well, we know where it is, don’t we?”
“If you think I’m going to steal it from around the Regal’s neck, then I can only say that something has made mush of milady’s brains.”
Mathilda clutched her hand and said urgently, “It’s not around his neck at the moment. He fell asleep before he put it back. It’s on top of the chest where he keeps the fan. And what’s more, he was still asleep when I came upstairs, so I left the door at the bottom ajar. We can go back, both of us.”
“What? If I get caught in the Regal’s bedchamber, I’ll be dead tomorrow morning.”
