by Steven Poore
So much, and none of it had any immediate reason or explanation. The portion of Malessar’s goods the Watch had tried to seize were only the most obviously valuable things: silver plates, golden-edged frames, odd instruments with sharp edges and handles of whitened bone. Even Rann Almoul had never owned such beautiful objects.
Cassia leaned upon one of the tables and regarded the heap of clutter – there was no other word for it, really – with mounting frustration. “There’s nothing in here,” she muttered.
Leili almost smiled and Cassia raised one hand.
“Please, don’t say it again. Gods, why couldn’t he tell me what to do? I’ll have to try upstairs.”
“The balcony is unsafe,” Leili said. “More of it fell off last night.”
Cassia took the bundle from her. The clothes were a mixture of old and new: some her own, that the Watch had not gathered up; others, smelling musty and of old wicker, presumably belonged to Leili herself. Thick wool and heavy cloth – winter clothes, she thought. She peeled off the clinging court dress there and then, letting it slough down to the floor. The winter clothing was ill-fitting and itchy. Cassia hitched a pair of leggings up around her waist, searching for the ties to attach it to her shirt, cursing under her breath. Well-tailored clothes were a luxury she had come to appreciate during her relatively short time in Galliarca.
As she wound a leather belt tight about the waistline of the shirt that was nearly long enough to be a dress, there was a disturbance out in the garden. The sound of men marching through the hallway from the alley beyond, one of them calling her name. Cassia heard Craw rumble from the rooftop, and the men shouted curses and warnings. Steel rasped against leather and the metal lips of scabbards.
Still barefoot, Cassia hurried to the door, Leili close behind her. Rais – who else? – stood at the far end of the garden, his hands raised to hold back the half-dozen palace guards who accompanied him. All of them stared upwards, their faces white with fear. Two of the guards carried spears. If they launched those at Craw he was likely to kill them all.
“Stay where you are!” she shouted. “All of you!”
Rais glanced down at her, his smile thin and forced. “This is not the welcome I had hoped to receive,” he said.
“I never said you were welcome.”
“True enough.” Rais made a soft backwards motion with one hand; then repeated it, with more force. The guards around him, torn between duty and orders, began to back away. Cassia suspected they were more than happy to get beyond the dragon’s sight. “True enough indeed. But no way to greet a prince bearing gifts.”
Cassia glared at him. “I don’t have time for this, Rais. Your games almost caused my death back at the palace. Your father was too irritated to see sense.”
“Meanwhile, you summoned a dragon. Hardly a way to get around his temper.”
She turned away, exasperated. It was time to attempt the balcony – to reach Malessar’s bedroom. Part of what she needed was definitely up there.
“And you haven’t asked about the gifts.”
There was an edge of petulance in his voice. He was a young man used to getting his own way. The ways of the palace and the courts therein made him what he was; they made him act in this spoiled fashion. He wouldn’t be the one who had to face the High King, or the wraiths of Caenthell.
“You aren’t going up there, are you? It isn’t safe.”
“I already told her that,” Leili snapped. She flapped her ragged sleeves at him, advancing like one of the ghosts Cassia had fought. “Begone! I was promised four more days! Some prince you are, if you will not keep your word!”
Cassia smothered a grin as she started up the stairs to the next level of the dhar. She thought she heard Craw laugh at the back of her mind as well. The scene had to be worthy of a story in itself.
Once she reached the balcony, however, her good humour disappeared. If the footing was unsteady at the top of the stairs, it was even worse only a few steps from the landing. There was a thin ledge along the wall, but the rest of the balcony had either fallen away entirely or appeared so unsound she doubted it would take her weight, and she wasn’t about to test it. There was no way she would be able to reach the door without rigging some sort of scaffold beforehand. But there was a window just a short distance along the ledge. If she could hold onto the wall for long enough she might be able to slip through that window. She could think about getting out again later on.
Rais was still arguing with Leili. Under different circumstances, she would have liked to hear the outcome of that particular contest, but for now she needed to block out the raised voices and concentrate hard on her balance and exactly where she was placing her hands. This wasn’t so different from scaling the walls behind Keskor’s market, in some respects, but the consequences this time if she fell would be crippling. The stone churned up beneath her would break her back.
The space between the landing and the window was too wide for her full, outstretched reach. She wedged her left hand into a crack sorcery had gouged into the wall, and pulled herself carefully along the ledge. Even drawing a breath would unbalance her. A second such movement brought her, limbs trembling with adrenalin, to the window itself. She hauled herself over the sill with relief, gasping for air.
Given the chaos and destruction the dhar had been subjected to, Malessar’s living space was peculiarly undisturbed. The doors had been blown open, of course, and the window on the far side was splintered, the sill destroyed by a blast of magic, but much of the room was just as she had last seen it. It was much tidier than the study and workroom below – and she knew exactly what she was looking for.
There were alcoves set into the back wall, most of the shelves holding more than one ancient figurine or painted face-mask. One of the shelves closest to the bed-curtains displayed only a single figurine: a young queen seated on a throne, gazing out at an invisible audience with a bearing that was distinctively Northern. Aliciana, of course – Jedrell’s young queen, Malessar’s lost love, Cassia’s own far-distant ancestor. And the cause, in truth, of all of this.
It was not what she had come for, but she paused anyway to pick it up and examine the figure again. The sculptor must have known his subject well. There was the ring of truth in the design, not least because Cassia now recognised those features that she had in common with Aliciana. She felt the weight of the figure in her hands, felt the weight of time upon it, and then replaced it on the shelf.
Further along the shelves were a small cohort of near-identical figures, unpainted and dull next to the others in Malessar’s collection. They had not drawn Cassia’s eye when she first saw them, but afterwards, with time to reflect, she’d remembered them and placed their significance.
They were soldiers: solid behind breastplates and armoured skirts, cloaks hung over one shoulder, a pair of spears held upright in one hand. Plain helmets disguised their features, but Cassia imagined that behind that metal all the soldiers had exactly the same features. Pronounced and regal features, just like Meredith’s. In the shadowed alcove, away from direct sunlight, they looked like miniature versions of the dormant shieldmen she had seen in the shrine on the western borders of Hellea.
She raised her hand to touch one gently, and a ghostly tingle of power rippled up her arm. Such things were happening a lot more now. Since her visit to Karakhel, she had become far more sensitive to the presence of sorcery. And there were the drums too – constant reminders of something she could not escape.
Cassia shook her head to clear her thoughts and went to the bed to strip a sheet from it. She rolled the figures one by one into the sheet, and then wrapped the whole package into another sheet to keep it all together. The bundle was bulky, but not as weighty as she had feared.
Now she just had to get it safely downstairs without breaking it – or herself.
Ths argument had finished, she realised. She crossed to the window and looked out. Rais and Leili stood side by side in the courtyard, waiting for her. Craw still
dominated the dhar from above.
The Galliarcans are bringing bowmen onto the rooftops, the dragon observed. Cassia Cat’s-Paw, I will not allow them to fire upon me.
“Rais!” she shouted down. “Tell the Watch to stand clear!”
He looked disgusted. “I have – but this is my father’s city, not mine. You’ll have to hurry if you want to get clear.”
She had no intention of transporting her cargo of figures along the ledge outside in a hurry. Rais clearly had at least a little intelligence, as he stooped to fetch up a coiled length of rope, weighted at one end with half a brick.
“Stand clear!” he called up, stepping forward and swinging the rope in a loop over his head.
Cassia ducked aside just in time as the weighted rope came sailing through the window and smacked into one of the tables. She grabbed at it before it could begin to snake backwards, and cast about for somewhere to tie it off. The most likely anchor was the foot of Malessar’s bed – a piece unlikely to be shifted by her less than considerable weight. Just before she snatched up her bundle, she glanced over at the figure of Aliciana again.
I’ll have no use for it, she thought. But her instincts made her less certain of that. She regarded it and chewed her lower lip. Malessar would understand. It went – very uncomfortably – down the front of her shirt, held in by her belt.
Descending the rope hand over hand was awkward, given her load, but it was much less dangerous than any other way out would have been. She stopped for breath at the bottom and rubbed her palms together, wincing at the way the rope had chafed them.
“Why are you here, anyway?” she asked the young prince, before Leili could begin fussing.
There was that smug look again. “I told you. I bear gifts.”
She had not noticed the other bundle at his feet. It was longer, and less padded than the one she had brought down. When he nudged it with one foot she heard metal move against metal. “What – swords. My swords?”
“You did say you wanted them back,” he reminded her. “And if this . . . this dragon is taking you back to the North, then I may not have another opportunity to return them.”
“Thank you,” she said, aware of how awkward those two words sounded.
Cassia.
This time Craw’s reminder felt more forceful, like the drums that persisted in her head. She looked up. “One moment more, please, Craw. I have a few things to settle with Rais first.”
Then hurry.
The dragon was not normally so terse. Trouble was coming. Leili had brought her a pair of battered boots and she knelt to pull them on and tighten the buckles.
“Make me this promise,” she said to Rais. “Malessar must come home to recover. And he must remain free from persecution by the king and the Court. Leili will take care of him.”
“And if I do that?”
“He will not interfere in the city,” she said. “He has told me that already. It is not his wish to influence your father. He only wishes to live here in peace.”
“But what is in that promise for Galliarca? What’s in it for me?”
She blinked in shock. “You?”
“You were indebted to the Court of the Watch,” Rais said. “Now that debt is to me, remember?”
Cassia did remember – and the memory of that subterfuge still angered her. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”
“Because you are not a prince of Galliarca,” Rais said. If his smile had been intended to take the sting from the words, it failed completely. “I can do these things – inasmuch as anything I do has any weight with my father – but your debt will increase.”
“Fine,” Cassia snapped. “Another burden to shoulder. I can do that. What’s one more thing on top of saving the entire North from Caenthell’s wrath, after all?”
Rais’s smile widened. “You agree? Good!” He whipped around and beckoned to one of the guards waiting out of sight in the hall. “Sarmics! You heard all of that? You witnessed our agreement? Excellent. You may inform my father and make the arrangements.”
The guard – clearly Rais’s adjunct – looked distinctly unhappy at his orders. Cassia could not blame him for that. Jianir, in her short experience of him, was not an easy man to bring bad news to.
“Now,” Rais said, businesslike once more, “let’s get you away from our fair city.” He picked up the long bundle that held her weapons, and looked up to the rooftop. He did a fair job of concealing his unease of Craw, but he could not hide it completely. “The stairs are in the hall, I think.”
Cassia tied the larger of the two bundles to one end of her staff, which made it much easier to carry up the stairs. The carving of Aliciana still dug into her stomach, and she winced with each step, staring at the prince’s back and cursing him silently but vehemently.
The rooftops of the neighbouring dhars looked deserted at first sight, but Cassia caught the twitching of men hidden in the gardens there. Gathered to watch and wait . . . or to fire upon the dragon and attempt to drive it out of the city. But Craw would not stand for that; it was all too easy to imagine the rooftops bathed in gouts of flame. The city would burn to the ground before anyone could contain the fire.
Mankind tests my patience, Craw said. I was not aware that you would require me to take passengers.
Cassia stared at the dragon, and then at Rais. The young prince smiled and shrugged. He thumbed the straps of the backpack he wore. “For one who proclaims herself the Heir to the North, you really are quite unobservant.”
I had noticed that myself, Craw put in.
Cassia folded her arms. “Why do you think I’m going to take you with me? For Pyraete’s sake, you’re a prince of Galliarca! Your father—”
“My father will part the seas with his bare hands to retrieve me,” Rais said. He sounded absurdly proud of that. “But isn’t that the point? To bring Galliarcan forces to defend Hellea?”
She could only shake her head in disbelief.
“And besides,” he continued, “you keep forgetting that you have a debt to me. And that account is mounting up. I would be a fool not to defend my interests.”
“Then you are a fool indeed,” Cassia retorted, but the insult was half-hearted. It was not just that.
He thinks I am his property.
She turned her concentration to remounting the dragon’s back before anger got the better of her, her bulky collection of Malessar’s figures hard against her back. It would act as a bolster between Rais and herself, make it easier for her to ignore him. And thank the gods for that too. If he said anything more about indebtedness she would cheerfully knock him into the sea and he could swim to Hellea.
Craw swung its head from side to side. It is time to leave.
It lifted itself high on the rooftop and spread its wings wide. Cassia heard fresh cries of fear from the streets below. And an indistinct, terrified mutter from behind her that might have been a prayer.
Craw leaped into the air once more. For a half-breath it seemed the dragon would fall, dragged back to earth by its own weight, and then the air cracked with the sound of beating wings and Craw lifted away from the city. Cassia stared up at the sun and the clouds and could not help but laugh out loud. A Barbarian Queen of the North, indeed.
6
Cassia was glad she had taken the time to change her clothing. The dress she had worn to the Court of the King would have offered no protection against the winds, nor against the strength of the sun that sank towards the western horizon. The thick layers she had borrowed from Leili, on the other hand, covered her against both heat and cold. Her hands were frozen stiff and she warmed them one at a time under her armpits while steadying herself with the other. She felt the heat of the sun on her cheeks and forehead and guessed that unless they came upon a sudden storm her skin would be red and peeling by the time they reached land again.
She ventured a glance over one shoulder to check on Rais, who had been uncharacteristically quiet since leaving the Galliarcan coast. The young
prince was hunched up behind her, forced to use her silhouette as a shelter from the elements. Still dressed in his finery rather than clothes suited to travel, he looked cold, miserable, and utterly uncomfortable. His eyes were squeezed tight as though he was afraid to look down.
I didn’t ask you to come, Cassia thought with quiet satisfaction. This was all your choice. You’re either brave or stupid.
Perhaps both, Craw suggested, clearly amused.
“You’re reading my mind again,” Cassia said sharply. “I don’t like that.”
You’re riding on my back again, Craw retorted, still with that edge of amusement.
“All right,” Cassia said after considering that for a moment. “But you never answered my question earlier.”
The dragon was silent, as though inviting further comment.
“You wanted all of this to happen, didn’t you?”
The question seemed quite rhetorical, Craw said at last.
“So, answer it.”
Not every question must have an answer.
“I believe this one does.”
Persistent girl.
“I’ve been called worse,” she said.
The silence measured another two long downstrokes of the dragon’s great wings. After reaching a height it found comfortable, Craw had glided for much of the journey, as though conserving itself for later effort. Every so often it would push itself into a burst of flapping to gain more height, but aside from those times it seemed content to ride the winds towards Hellea. They were travelling much faster than any ship, but there was no sense of urgency in what Craw did. That realisation had made her think more about the dragon’s motives for agreeing to help her.
“You and Malessar are old friends,” she said at last. Her lips felt cracked and numb.
