‘You keep bringing up fairness,’ Gil said. ‘As if fairness has anything to do with politics. We were happy when you and Sol Kardis were keeping each other occupied. It left us free to focus on our own plans. We protected Ayla from assassination, three years ago, because we did not want Sol Kardis getting stronger. We tried to prevent you making an alliance with them because we did not want you to be too strong either. But we failed.’ He smiled. ‘As I said, you have changed the balance. You have chosen strength. And the thing about strength is, you have to be prepared to prove it over and over.’
Caraway looked at him in silence.
‘Tomorrow, I will be dead,’ Gil said. ‘But Parovia will not be. His Majesty wants the secret of the Change, and his agents will not rest until they have procured it for him. You might believe you have won, but you came within a hair’s breadth of disaster on our very first attempt, and we will only become cleverer. Take that as a warning, if you will.’
‘Why?’ Caraway snapped. ‘So I never trust anyone again?’
‘You are in charge of Darkhaven’s defences. Ayla Nightshade’s protector. Father of Mirrorvale’s future. Given who you are, it would be foolish to trust.’
Caraway shook his head. ‘Given who I am, it would be foolish not to.’
‘A trite reply, Captain,’ Gil said. ‘Do you have an argument to back it up, or are you just throwing empty words at me?’
If I don’t trust my people, they won’t trust me. If I don’t trust Ayla, I might as well abandon her now for all the good I can do her. If one man in a hundred is a traitor, and I allow that knowledge to close my heart to the other ninety-nine, who is the winner then?
Suddenly, Caraway found that his need to hold this conversation was over. Straightening up, he smiled: a sad smile, but a smile nonetheless. ‘I don’t have to explain myself to you.’
‘You mean you cannot.’
‘I mean I see no point in trying. Ayla and I, our children, the Helm – all of Mirrorvale – we’re as far beyond your understanding as you are beyond mine. You sought to take something from us because you were envious and afraid, and now that you’ve failed, you want us to be afraid too. But in the end, love will always be stronger than fear.’
The physician scoffed. ‘Love? You are a fighting man, Tomas. Surely you know love is just another form of weakness.’
‘Anyone can hate,’ Caraway said. ‘It’s love that requires courage.’
Zander lowered the most recent letter from his father to stare blankly at the opposite wall.
‘Well?’ Ree asked. ‘Has he disowned you?’
The words might be flippant, but her voice was anxious. She genuinely cared about the answer. Beside her, Penn wore a small frown. A smile fought for control of the corners of Zander’s mouth, but he managed to keep his expression blank.
‘I’ll read it to you.’ Raising the piece of paper in front of his face once more, to hide his irrepressible amusement, he began the letter in solemn mockery of Marco Lepont’s rather pompous tones.
Alezzandro –
I am not sure what you expect from me. You left home against my express wishes. You stayed away for three years, despite my repeated requests to return. And when you finally did come back to the country that made you, it was out of concern for Mirrorvale, not Sol Kardis. Clearly your godless new friends mean far more to you than your own blood, so much so that you are willing to take a job the sole purpose of which is to protect the unnatural magics we Kardise have long abhorred. What else can I do but disown you?
I have considered this question long and hard, and come to the conclusion that I might have been too hasty. You are a wilful, disobedient boy, but you have far more intelligence than your tutors led me to believe. I realise, now, that perhaps you have not been completely wasting your time these past three years. After all, the support and respect of the most powerful woman in Mirrorvale has to count for something, unnatural magics or not.
Thus you have my permission to stay in Arkannen and be a Helmsman, for now. By the time you are of an age to leave soldiering, you will just about be of an age to start learning the business of running my estate. But if Sol Kardis and Mirrorvale should come to war again in the meantime, Zander, I expect you to stay out of it. That is an order.
Marco Lepont
Zander put the letter on the table in front of him and raised his eyebrows at his friends.
‘You have his permission?’ Ree said, but she was smiling. He grinned back at her.
‘Let him give me his permission if it makes him feel better, the old windbag. He’s accepted my life and he hasn’t cut me off. That’s a huge concession as far as he’s concerned.’
‘Guess you’ll be around a while longer, then.’
‘Guess so.’ Zander glanced at Penn. ‘Think you can cope with that, Avens?’
‘I suppose I’ll have to,’ Penn said. ‘Reluctantly.’
And he too smiled.
The day of the execution dawned bright and clear. Ayla saw it happen; she’d been awake since well before first bell, pacing between her bedroom and her children’s until, finally, she’d made herself stop. Made herself settle in the deep window seat and watch the sky change from ink-dark to grey to blushing blue, and not think about what lay ahead of her.
It could have been two executions. Some of the Helm had called for Miles’s head, as well as Gil’s. He’d been passing on Darkhaven’s secrets for years, they’d pointed out. He could have stopped the war, but he hadn’t. And he’d been the one to kill their colleagues and friends, however unwittingly. Gil might have given the orders, but Miles was the one who had carried them out.
Ayla could see their point. Part of her agreed with it. Yet she thought it was probably more complicated than that. He had saved Tomas’s life and helped him to rescue the children. He had helped her break free in the wreckage of the Windsinger. He was a traitor, yes, but at least he hadn’t been a willing one. She herself had felt the impulse to protect her children at all costs, even if it meant abandoning her people to war. She knew what it was like to be caught between different kinds of love.
Sitting on the window seat, watching the sun rise, she found herself remembering a conversation she’d held with Miles, once, while they were doing research together. While he was researching her.
Love is like alchemy, he’d said.
What do you mean?
The combination of two distinct elements to make something completely new. Something stronger than either of them alone. And more than that … the same two elements can react in different ways, depending on the environment. Love is not a single predictable reaction. Even between the same two people, it changes and mutates over time. New love is not the same as long-standing love. But if the elements are compatible enough, they will never repel each other, no matter what the circumstances. He’d frowned. Really, love is such a vague word as to be almost meaningless. It is a whole collection of different emotions and experiences, tied together with a messy bow.
She’d thought about that. Certainly her love for Tomas, which was passionate and complicated and fluid, was quite different from the love she felt for their children: something fierce and fundamental that lived deep down at the heart of her. Her love for Myrren had been another kind of animal again, a love born of history and shared experience, a love patterned in her bones. And yes, Miles was right: each of those emotions had evolved over time to become something richer and more complex than it had been before. But there was more to it even than that. She could see, in that complexity, how easy it would be for darkness to creep in and turn love to hatred. Because it was the people you loved who had the greatest capacity to destroy you.
She’d expressed that thought to Miles, who had nodded.
That is like alchemy, too. Often the elements that are strongest in one configuration are also the most explosive in another. The potential for the greatest acts of creation comes hand in hand with that for the most terrible destruction.
Do you have a famil
y back in Parovia? she’d asked, suddenly curious. Suddenly wondering why she’d never asked before. His mouth had turned down at the corners.
Not any more, Lady Ayla.
She wanted to hate him, but she couldn’t. He had done terrible things – she would never trust him again, let alone forgive him – but he had done them to protect the people he loved, and that was something she understood far too well. Besides, he still lay in the infirmary, treading the knife-edge between life and death, and no-one could yet say with any certainty whether he would recover. If he did, all she could say with certainty was that she hadn’t signed a warrant for his execution. Whatever else his future held would have to wait.
Gil, on the other hand, was a very different case.
There has been a lot of death already, she’d said to Tomas, trying to make sure she was being as fair to Gil as she had been to Miles. Trying to compensate for her own hot desire to exact a drawn-out and bloody vengeance by setting herself on the side of mercy.
Most of it his doing, Tomas had replied.
And that was all. That was as far as the conversation had gone. Both of them knew there was only one appropriate punishment for a man who had used his position as a trusted physician to commit mass murder and betray the children under his care to a foreign power. And both of them also knew it must be for that reason alone, and not as a result of their own desperate, seething emotion, that the sentence was carried out.
Perhaps that had been a benefit of her father’s approach to such things, Ayla thought. His judgements had been bloody, but at least they had been quick. Acting with decision, rather than impulse, had also given her time to become inventive. Some of the execution methods she’d found herself contemplating had shocked her with their cruelty.
That couldn’t be right. She didn’t think so, anyway. If she wanted it to be justice, and not murder, she had to make it clean.
She couldn’t eat. She wasn’t hungry. She stayed at the window, looking out at the sky, until the second bell rang. And then Tomas came to fetch her, and it was time.
Side by side, they walked down to the cells. There was no Helmsman on duty; no doubt the man who would have had that task today was dead. Shuddering, Ayla stopped with her hand on the cell door and looked at Tomas.
‘You know I’ve never done this before. At war, yes, and in self-defence, but not an execution in cold blood …’
‘No,’ he said simply. ‘But I’m with you.’
Their former physician was sitting on the narrow bed in a corner of the cell, elbows on his knees, manacled hands dangling between them. He looked up as they entered, his expression composed and a little grave. As if he had just lost a game of skill. He didn’t say a word as they escorted him out of the cell and up the steps into the daylight.
The surviving members of the Helm waited to one side of the central square. They didn’t rush the traitor physician and beat him to death, as Ayla had almost expected they would. Not so much as a hiss disturbed the silence. Only their grim, set expressions revealed the extent of their feelings. On the other side, the housekeeper and the servants had gathered – all except Cathrin, up in the nursery with the children. They too had lost friends. They too were here for justice.
Tomas touched Ayla’s hand. Neither of them needed to speak. He led Gil away from her, into the middle of the open space. Then he retreated to join his men.
‘Well?’ Gil straightened his shoulders, but the hint of a quaver touched his voice. ‘Get on with it, damn you!’
Ayla looked at the man in front of her for what felt like an eternity. He had been her physician. He had tended to her and her children. Because of him, good people were dead. Because of him, countless more lives had been destroyed. Because of him, she felt nothing even close to whole.
And yet, she found that most of her anger had drained away. She was just very, very tired.
She summoned the Change, letting all her muddy human thoughts fall away. For the first time she saw alarm in the man’s eyes, but it gave her little satisfaction. It was simply a relief to feel clean emotions again; to know what was right.
She lowered her head, and pierced him straight through the heart.
Acknowledgements
This one is for everyone who knows how much harder it is to achieve anything with a one-year-old in tow.
You go through an entire day doing everything one-handed because she refuses to be put down. You spend nights on end snatching half an hour of sleep at a time because he’s sick and needs constant comfort. You sing the same lullaby until you’re hoarse, read the same book until you can recite it from memory, and watch the same show until you’ve forgotten the world is populated by anything other than multicoloured animals with strangely enormous eyes. Occasionally, you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror and are surprised at the sight of an actual adult human, albeit one with dishevelled hair and an unidentified crusty substance smeared across its shoulder. Sometimes you wish for a little light swordfighting and a life-or-death situation or two … you know, just so you can have a bit of a break. And yet you’ll get up and do it all again tomorrow.
My heartfelt gratitude goes to Marc, Nikki and all the team at my local Waterstones, for being unfailingly supportive and making me feel like a real writer.
Also to Harriet: for the generous gift of her time and intelligence, for performing an impressive act of last-minute alchemy, and (which is very important) for telling me not to panic.
And finally, I suppose, to the original ‘Gil’. What doesn’t kill us, etcetera.
About the Author
A.F.E. Smith is an editor of academic texts by day and a fantasy writer by night. She lives with her husband and their two young children in a house that was apparently built to be as creaky as possible. She can be found on Twitter @afesmith and online at www.afesmith.com
Also by A.F.E. Smith
The Darkhaven Novels
Darkhaven
Goldenfire
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