by Julia Knight
A clank of a plate from Eder behind him.
“And of course just your reputation should have this Skull quaking in his boots,” Imanol ran on over her attempt to interject. “Everyone is very excited. Kacha and Vocho of the guild in our poor trade house! I hope that you’ll consent to dine here tonight, and also consent to tell us some of the stories first hand, as it were. So excited, so excited. I feel sure you’ll succeed where the prelate’s men failed.”
Eder’s cup rattled on the table. He stood up, turned on his heel and left. Kass watched him go with a twinge of sympathy.
Imanol waffled on some more before, at last, he got a boy to lead them to their room. Two beds about the size of boats, covered in wools and furs and down-stuffed bolsters and bedspreads so that Kacha wondered if she might drown in hers when she slept, the cold of the winter kept out with voluminous drapes that she could hardly shift. It was stuffy, musty and overhot from the too-generous fire, but a damn sight better than another night under canvas, being kept awake by her own shivers.
Maybe Voch had been right about it just being the cold that was bothering his leg–he was moving more smoothly now they were in the warm, and the pinch to his lips had gone, leaving him in fine fettle. He spent the next hour regaling her with stories of his exploits as though she’d never heard them. His eyes were bright, just a shade too bright, and his left eye had begun to twitch.
“Voch,” she said when she could get a word in. “Are you all right?”
“Never better,” he replied with an expansive wave of his arm. If she didn’t know better, she’d say he was drunk. “Did you see the look on Eder’s face when Imanol kept going on about the failure of the prelate’s men? He looked like he’d swallowed a pig whole.”
Yes, she had noticed, and she didn’t think it boded well at all.
Chapter Seventeen
One month ago
Petri put the glass down with great care but still managed to spill what was left of the drink in it–some eye-watering concoction Kepa said was a mountain speciality for keeping warm in winter which he’d liberated during their last raid. Petri wasn’t sure about keeping warm, but his toes seemed very far away so that was all right. He blinked owlishly at Kepa, sitting across from him in the mess.
“Sorry?”
Kepa, being more of a drinker than was Petri’s usual habit, was far steadier despite the dent they’d made in the bottle. “I said that Morro fella’s got some good ideas, for all he’s a magician.”
“Can’t trust them,” Petri replied, banging the table with his glass to make his point. “Not ever. Bunch of snakes, all of them. Almost finished Reyes, didn’t they? Tried to kill Bakar, tried to assault the city. Tried everything. Bunch of snakes.”
“I don’t know.” Kepa took a thoughtful sip that turned into a grimace as the stuff hit his tongue. “Like I say, he’s got some good ideas. You got to admit he’s helped us out with the raids and all, clearing the snow, sending more to stop ’em tracking us after. We’ve got bigger, and better.”
“In return for what? He’ll be after something, mark my words, and if it screws you into the ground, he won’t care.”
“Makes him no different to anyone else then, does it? I been screwed into the ground my whole life. But him, his plans… he could unscrew the lot of us. Make us kings of this mountain!”
That splashed across Petri’s face like a bucket of icy meltwater. King of the mountain–hadn’t Morro offered him that? Petri had been watching, as always, keeping quiet and seeing how things played out. He’d been keeping an especial eye on the magician but had yet to see the man do anything untoward, yet to see him bare his hands to anyone except Petri. But he was doing something. He had to be.
“Did he show you his hands? Show you any pictures while he was spinning this nice future for you?”
“Naw,” Kepa said. “He just made sense. We got the power up here, if we want it. All them mines all around, cut off now–can stay cut off too with us having Morro and his snow. We got the power. Why not use it? Can’t go on the way we was, we’ll starve. So we got to try something new. Bigger, better, for all of us.”
“And I bet he’s just the man to help you, correct?”
Kepa and his cronies nodded happily, more or less gone on the spirit that fumed out of the bottle on the table. Kings of the mountain, got to try something new, bigger, better. Words that had been creeping into Scar’s talk these last weeks. And she swore, they all did, that Morro had never shown his hands, never made pictures dance in front of their eyes. Yet Petri was ever surer that he was working something on them, some twisted magic for his own ends. Nowhere left for a magician to go beyond either Reyes or Ikaras, and neither was a safe home for magicians just now. Nowhere except here, where the only law was theirs, because who else wanted this godforsaken bit of snow-scoured rock that didn’t even have the decency to have a seam of coal? A place as unloved, as unwanted as they were. Only they wanted it, needed it because there was nowhere else to go. Them, only them. And now Morro.
The spirit bubbled in his stomach, and he lurched to his feet, suddenly sure he was going to be sick and just as sure he didn’t want to do it in front of Kepa or the rest. They’d forged an uneasy truce these last weeks, built on their fear of his sword and, since Petri had started raiding, a grudging admiration from both sides. The valley felt like his first true home, just in time for a magician to rip it to shreds.
He made it outside the mess before it all came up in a hot rush, leaving him dizzy and stumbling. Scar’d have words with him when he got back, but not many. Too pleased that he was getting on with her crew at last, too engrossed in planning what she was going to do next. And what was that, exactly?
Kepa staggered outside after him and pissed, holding himself up against the wall with one outstretched hand. When the pair of them had done, they fell into step along the pathway that magic had cleared for them. No snow fell now, not here. Elsewhere it piled up in mountains of its own, draped itself in pristine ranges that on a sunny day could spear the eye with white blindness. But while snow still lay about, a thin crust over frozen churned-up ground, it no longer snowed in the valley.
“Him did that,” Kepa said, and no need to say who. “And he dulls the wind too, sure of it, so’s the barn is warm as spring. Going further tomorrow, right down near the plain.”
A prickle of alarm through the warming spirit. “Near the plain?” The first he’d heard of that. The plain–Reyes proper, where farmers had more and clutched it harder to themselves. Where no one much had any sympathy for men and women fallen by the wayside, who didn’t reckon they’d likely lose a sheep to the wolves anyway so, if they were going to, why not to the human wolves? Where people didn’t freeze to death and guards were in abundance and more likely to catch anyone fool enough to raid there. “Since when?”
Kepa stopped dead, a hand clapped over his mouth as though trying to drag the words back. “I… er… maybe I didn’t hear right?” In the face of Petri’s stare, he faltered. “Wasn’t supposed to say nothing, was I? A surprise. She’ll tell you soon enough. You won’t tell her I let the cat out of the bag?”
“No.”
Kepa seemed reassured by his terse answer and stumbled off to find his place in the barn, leaving Petri churned up and walking his slow way to Scar’s hut. She’d not be so stupid, surely? Be subtle and live, that had been her watchword. Take a bit here, a bit there, not so much the guards need bother with her crew overmuch. Now they’d raided a town, not just a gathering of rambling farms or isolated hamlets. They’d stolen all they could carry from a mine, which might almost be enough to get Bakar worried and send guards all on its own. Now the plain, crowded with fat farms, little market towns that bustled and thrummed with life. The plain, full of people and guards, and no hope to move unseen, magician and his snow or not. Bold enough, and she’ll come. His hand shook as he lifted the latch to Scar’s hut, but whether from fear or anger or just the spirit he’d drunk not even he could say.
/> He opened the door and shut it quick before all the precious warmth could leak out. He shook out his new good wolf fur and turned to the fire and where Scar would be…
And found Maitea instead, sitting still as stone. Scar was nowhere.
He came forward slowly, watching Maitea watch him, and sat down opposite her. If anything, she was quieter than he was, had said almost nothing to anyone that he’d heard. Just those questions of him when they’d gone to see her father, and silence since. He wondered if she’d accepted Morro’s plans for herself, or just pretended to.
He noted her hands were gloved, recalled Dom saying, “Just like her mother,” and shivered. Maybe her mother had looked this bland once, this innocent.
“I’m supposed to try my magic on you,” she said. “I’ve been practising on my father but now I’m supposed to practise on you too.”
Petri raised an eyebrow at the baldness of it, even as his stomach shrivelled. “Practise doing what?”
She shrugged. “Trying to get you to do what I want.”
“And will you?”
A delicate frown. “I don’t think so. I’m supposed to try to influence you–that’s what magic is for, Morro says. But I’m not very good at it, and besides it’s wrong.” She looked at him, face utterly calm and without feeling. “He’s with Scar.”
A curl of fear in Petri’s stomach, but she had only confirmed what he suspected anyway. “Is he using his magic on her? To do what? What does he want?”
The faintest hint of disgust in a curl of her lip. “Maybe. I’m not certain. I’ve never seen him use his magic on her. And he wants somewhere to belong, he says. Here’s where it is, along with all the other outcasts. Ikaras won’t have him, and neither will Reyes. Nor me, if he makes me into a magician. But Scar will, this valley will. And if here is all that he can hope for, he wants it to be more than just living on scraps. He’s had enough of living like that and he has… ambition. He doesn’t care what it costs anyone else.”
Petri leaned forward. “And why are you telling me?”
She cocked her head and looked him dead in the eye. “My father told me about you. Not much, but enough. He said you were an honourable man once but that you’d been led astray. I think so too, so it seemed right to tell you. Warn you. Morro sees you as the biggest threat to what he wants–a comfortable life here in this valley, or anywhere that will take him if this fails. He’ll have no compunction doing something about you, if he has to.”
She stood up and smoothed down the front of her skirts.
“Your father…” Petri began, but she cut him off with a look.
“My father kills people for a living. He killed my mother.”
“But?”
A faint and troubling smile. “But he’s my father. I can’t love him but I can’t deny him either.” She threw her cloak around her shoulders. The dim scent of cooking blood wafted from her, and her cloak wasn’t just made of fur, but of shadows too, which wrapped around her like lovers until Petri could scarcely see her. “Be careful,” she said, and the shadows made for the door.
He sat and thought for a long time in front of the dying fire, wondering why she’d really come or if this was just some ruse of Morro’s, some kind of warning. What was lurking behind Maitea’s bland face? A magician, like her mother. Plans of her own, like her father?
The door opened and shut gently behind him, and Scar threw on a bright grin that didn’t fool Petri for a moment.
“He kept his gloves on,” she said when she caught his look. “I made sure of that.”
He nodded and didn’t know what to say. She was changing, was already changed, and he thought he knew why, but what could he say when he had nothing to show her to prove it? No proof at all except what Maitea had said, and he doubted she’d say anything to Scar or she’d have to face Morro over it.
“What did he want?” he asked instead.
“We were going over where we’d strike next.” Scar, always so sure of herself, so confident in everything she did, now hesitated.
“Do we need to strike anywhere? We’ve food enough for weeks, wood, even coal from the mine we raided over the mountain. We’ve enough, more than enough to see us to the thaw and easier living.”
She began her pacing, the familiar rhythm of it a soothing sound against troubling thoughts that chased each other around his head.
“Why stop now?” she said, one hand balled into a fist. “Why stop just when fear of us is at its peak? There are things out there for the taking, names for making, Petri. Do you want to stay in this pathetic valley the rest of your life when we could have so much more? Be so much more? We could be king and queen of this mountain.”
Those words again, a dreadful repetition that shook Petri’s bones. “You didn’t used to want that. You used to want to be subtle and live. If we keep on, Bakar will have no choice but to send guards, as many as he thinks he needs, and he’s no shortage. We’ve no hope against that.”
“We have a magician, Pet. We have someone who can conjure the weather to his will, who can burn men with cold and bury them with snow. We’ve every hope.” The pacing stopped, and she knelt by him, a hand on his trembling with some inner drive. Some need to make him see, perhaps. “We’re heading down towards the plain tomorrow. Fat little villages ready to be picked, down towards Elona.”
“No,” he said. “That’s too much. Too far. You’re overreaching.” Something the old Scar would never have done–too canny for that, too concerned with keeping her crew safe.
The hand was removed, and Scar moved to sit in the chair opposite him, cold of a sudden where an instant ago she’d been warm.
“I thought you’d like that, raiding your old estates–show them all, take back a little of what was once yours. I thought we were in this together.”
“We are.” Or we were. Now I’m looking just to survive the only way I know how.
“Then be with me.” She looked away, into the fire, her face as still and blank as he’d ever seen it. “Do you think of her?”
“What?”
“Kacha.” She spat the word into the flames and turned to face him. “Do you think of her still? Do you hate her? Or miss her?”
The questions caught him off guard, so unexpected he flinched, and something died in Scar’s eyes at that. What could he say? That sometimes, when he woke in a bleak dawn, for a moment he thought he was back in Reyes, that he was whole again and the warm woman beside him was Kass. That when he shifted and felt the rope of scars outlining one cheek, or opened his eyes to find he had only one… when he realised, it would leave him speechless for long minutes, fighting an aching longing for what had been and a consuming rage that it wasn’t now. That sometimes he saw Kass’s face on hers and was floored by the hatred that coursed in every vein. That sometimes he dreamed of her, saw her standing before him, always just out of reach, but when he tried to scald her with his raging words, hold himself up and say “This is who I am now, this is the man you threw away” his throat was choked with ice, and she would turn away without ever seeing him.
“I think of her sometimes,” he said at last. “Not kindly.”
“I’m doing this for you, for us, all of us. Bold enough and the guild will come. She will.” Scar watched him with her usual intensity, which he now found hard to stand. “Morro said to me that you think of her, and not unkindly. That you’re only here, only with me because no one else will have you. That you’re using me, using all of us, and that if the guild comes–she comes–you’ll turn on me like a beaten dog turned savage. I don’t want to believe him.”
“Then don’t.”
A faint smile, a rueful shake of her head. “Not so simple, Pet. It never is, is it?”
She sat quiet after that, her intensity banked like a neglected fire quenched in a doubt that made something turn over inside him. Maybe he could undo whatever Morro was doing to her. He owed her that. This time it was he who laid a gentle hand on an arm.
“I am here, with you, because
I want to be. You showed me who I could be when I doubted I could be anything. If they come–she comes–then I can show her what you made me and be glad of it. But I think of her less and less, and you more and more. But not the plains tomorrow, not for me. Not for anyone.”
A sudden beatific smile that turned his insides again, but in a different way. And new thoughts to tangle into the old ones. Morro was changing things his way, slowly and subtly but changing them nonetheless. Time to be careful. But not right now, when that smile was turned on him, the warmth of it melting the edges of the ice inside.
Chapter Eighteen
Now
By the time it came to dinner, the syrup Vocho had sneaked into his drink had begun to wear off. With that came the feeling that he was sinking and a growing ache in his hip. Not to mention he now noticed the looks Kass kept giving him, like she knew he was up to something; it was just she couldn’t figure out what it was.
Still, a decent dinner was something to look forward to, and his hip wasn’t too bad now they were out of the cold. As he went down the stairs he was feeling pretty good.
Right up until halfway through dinner. Imanol sat at the head of the table, naturally, being the leader of the traders who ran the house as well as being stand-in mayor. To his right was Kass, and to her right Eder, both their faces sour like they were sucking on lemons. Vocho was placed to Imanol’s left, which was perfect. Except to his left was Carrola, and… and… and he felt a bit odd about that. She hadn’t been the same since they’d spoken in the stables: she’d done her best to keep away from him, had striven not to catch his eye since they’d left the inn, had been strikingly cold and aloof. Perhaps Eder had stuck his oar in again. Still, it was nothing Vocho the Great couldn’t handle, and maybe he could catch her away from Eder later on and find out. He turned up the charm, gave her a beaming smile that brought not much more than narrowed eyes and settled in.
