Voyager

TO RIDE

HELL’S CHASM

Janny Wurts

To Ride Hell’s Chasm

For the warriors, may they keep their hearts open.

For those who make decisions and hold sway over others, may they do the same, only more so.

And for all who have given or lost their lives because one or the other fell short — this story.

Table of Contents

I. Disappearance

II. Audience

III. Craftmark

IV. Victims

V. Daybreak

VI. Morning

VII. Noontide

VIII. Afternoon

IX. Late Day

X. Sunset

XI. Twilight

XII. Evening

XIII. Night

XIV. Strike

XV. Charges

XVI. Pre-dawn

XVII. Sunrise

XVIII. Fatal Stakes

XIX. Cipher

XX. Quarry

XXI. Setbacks

XXII. Assault

XXIII. Fugitive

XXIV. False Refuge

XXV. Encounter

XXVI. Pursuit

XXVII. Trap

XXVIII. Cataract

XXIX. Shape-changer

XXX. Crossing

XXXI. Siege

XXXII. Widow’s Gauntlet

XXXIII. Chasm

XXXIV. Impasse

XXXV. Precipice

XXXVI. Ordeal

XXXVII. Trial

XXXVIII. Circle

XXXIX. Deliverance

Epilogue

Glossary

Acknowledgements

By Janny Wurts

Copyright

About the Publisher

I. Disappearance

The closet was dark, dusty, stifling, and the pound of her heart, ragged thunder in her ears. Her breaths went and came in strangling gasps. If death took her now, it would come filled with horrors, and strike without sound from behind…

IN THE LONG SHADOW OF THE MOUNTAIN SPRING TWILIGHT, UNDER THE GLOW OF A THOUSAND LANTERNS, ANJA, CROWN PRINCESS OF SESSALIE, failed to appear at the banquet to celebrate her official betrothal. The upset and shock caused by her disappearance had not yet shaken the lower citadel, though more than an hour had passed since the midnight change in the watch.

The public festivities continued, oblivious. Farmwives and tradesmen still danced in the streets, while the unruly crowds spilling out of the wine shops teemed and shouted, a hotbed for fist fights and arguments. Mykkael, Captain of the Garrison, kept a trained ear on the tone of the roistering outside. He listened, intent, to the off-key singers who staggered arm in arm past the keep. The noise ebbed and flooded to the tidal surge of bodies, jamming the bye lanes and thoroughfares.

The racket funnelled into the cramped stone cell requisitioned as his private quarters. Captain Mykkael sighed, rasped his bracer across the itch of two days’ stubble, then propped a weary hip against the trestle where his sword lay, unsheathed. The hard-used steel cried out for a whetstone and rag to scour a light etching of rust. Mykkael cursed the neglect, but knew better than to hope for the time to care for his weapon.

The taps in the taverns would scarcely run dry on this night. Landlords had stocked their cellars for weeks, while the folk from Sessalie’s farthest-flung valleys crammed into the citadel to honour Princess Anja’s brilliant match. Their exuberance was justified. A marriage alliance with the Kingdom of Devall promised them access to the coveted wealth of the sea trade. Yet if craft shops and merchants had cause to rejoice, no soldier who bore the crown’s falcon blazon was likely to rest before cock’s crow.

Twenty hours on duty, with no respite in sight, Mykkael grumbled, ‘At least on a battlefield, a man got the chance to lay down his shield after sundown.’

He stretched his knotted back, steeled himself for discomfort, then clamped iron hands around his thigh above the knee. A grunt ripped through his teeth as he raised the game limb on to the plank trestle that served him as weapon rack and desk. There, forced to pause, he blinked through running sweat, while the twinge of pinched nerves rocked him dizzy.

Mother of all thundering storms, how he ached! Far more than a man should, who had no trace of grey. Still young, still vigorous, Mykkael kept his sable hair cropped from blind habit, as he had through his years as a mercenary.

Nonetheless, his career as a hired sword was finished. Cut short, with the spoils and pay shares laid aside not enough to sustain him in retirement. His fiercely kept dream, of an apple-bearing orchard and a pasture to breed horses, lay as far beyond grasp as the moon.

‘Damn lady fortune for a cross-grained crone.’ Mykkael glowered at his leg, stretched across the tabletop like so much worthless carrion. His infirmity disgusted him. Three tavern brawls nipped in the bud, two street riots quelled, and a knife fight in the market started by a Highgate lordling who was fool enough to try to nab a cutpurse; scarcely enough exertion to wind him, yet the pain clamped down with debilitating force the longer he stayed on his feet.

‘Borri’ vach!’ he swore under his breath. The uncouth, rolling gutturals of the southern desert dialect matched his savage mood as he unhooked the looped studs at his calf. No help for the embarrassment, that canvas breeches looked ridiculous under his blazoned captain’s surcoat. Yet the more genteel appointments of trunk hose and hightop boots had proved to be too binding. Mykkael jerked up the cuff, laying bare his crippled knee with its snarl of livid scars.

Even in hindsight, he took little comfort from the troop surgeon’s final prognosis. ‘Powers be thanked, young man, you’re still hale and breathing. With a joint break like yours, and a septic laceration, I’d have dosed you senseless, and roped you out straight and taken that leg with a bone saw.’

Mykkael endured the lasting bitterness. Not to walk was to die. Even strapped in the mud of a drawing poultice, screaming half senseless with fever, he had kept that core of self-awareness. Others might cling to life, hobbling on crutches or a peg leg. For Mykkael, any handicap that rendered him defenceless would have wounded pride enough to kill him.

Alive enough to wrestle with his poisonous regrets, he groped through the clutter of bottles and remedy tins, while the cramps throbbed relentlessly through muscle and nerve, and the shattered bone that fastened damaged ligaments. Already the discomfort played the length of his leg. By experience he knew: the spasms would soon lock his hip and seize his back, unless the liniment just acquired from the nomad in the market could deliver him the gift of a miracle.

Hooves clattered in the outer bailey. Someone shouted. A burst of agitated voices erupted in the lower guardroom, fast followed by the rushed pound of feet up the stairwell.

Mykkael found the dingy tin and flipped off the cap, overwhelmed by the smell of crude turpentine. ‘Powers of deliverance,’ he gasped. Eyes streaming, he scooped up a sticky dollop. The unnatural stuff blistered, even through his layers of callus.

Regardless, he slathered the paste over his knee. Its raw fire scoured, searing through entrenched pain. Mykkael kneaded in the residue, his breath jerked through his half-closed throat. He had no peace to lose. The fresh bout of trouble bearing down on his doorway was unlikely to grant him blessed ease in a chair, replete with grain whisky and hot compresses.

A staccato knock, cut off as the latch tripped. Vensic poked his snub nose inside, and grimaced in startled distaste. ‘Captain, for the love of crown and country! This place reeks like a tannery’

Mykkael pointedly hooked the tin closer. ‘Should I give a damn who in the reaper’s many hells finds my off-duty habits offensive?’ He slopped another gob of liniment across his spasmed calf, and this time suppressed his urge to wince. ‘Whatever complaint’s come roosting this time, I’ll remind you, Sergeant Jedrey has the watch.’

Apologetic, Vensic stepped inside. He shut the door, his easy-natured, upland features braced to withstand his captain’s dicey temper. ‘Jedrey’s through the Middlegate, routing vandals from the merchants’ quarter. You notice anything irregular on patrol?’

Mykkael shrugged, still massaging his wracked limb. ‘The usual few brawlers and a bravo who got himself stabbed. A drunk was struck by a carriage. Dead on impact. The rest was all rumour, thankfully unfounded. Have you heard the crazy story that the princess ran away? Left her royal suitor abandoned at the feast, weeping on the skinny shoulder of the seneschal.’

Silence, of a depth to make the ears ring. Mykkael glanced up, astonished. The absurd notion of court curmudgeon and jilted foreign prince should have raised a howling snort of laughter. ‘Better say what’s happened, soldier!’

‘You have a formal summons. Brought in by a royal herald in state livery, though he’s masked his gold thread under a plain cloak.’ Unwontedly deadpan, Vensic added, thoughtful, ‘Shut-mouthed as a clam concerning the king’s word, though we warned him you’d be sharp if we had to fetch you down to the wardroom.’

Mykkael’s busy fingers stopped working in the liniment. ‘A crown herald! Below the Highgate? Has the moat watch gone bashed on cloud wine?’

But the stunned rabbit shine to Vensic’s blue eyes arrested his captain’s disbelief.

‘Of all the blinding powers of daylight!’ Touched by an odd chill, Mykkael slapped down his turned cuff. He snatched up the rag meant for oiling his sword, wiped his smeared fingers, then hauled his lame leg from the trestle. A useless point, to argue that Princess Anja never acted the tart, or lowered herself to go slumming. Unlike her rakehell older brother, she visited the lower citadel only for processionals, surrounded by the gleam of her palace guard retinue, sweeping through to join the hunt, or to settle the petty grievances in the outlying hamlets that had languished as the king’s health faltered.

‘No one’s mentioned an armed party of abductors in the wine shops,’ Mykkael said with biting sarcasm. Tiny Sessalie was too hidebound to harbour a conspiracy without the busybody matrons making talk. So hidebound and small that every shopkeeper and servant knew his neighbour’s close affairs, with half the blood in the kingdom related to itself by kin ties that confounded memory. ‘Hard pressed, I’d be, to arrest a single miscreant who’s sober enough to raise a weapon.’

Mykkael snatched up his naked blade, still loath to credit rumour. Princess Anja was beloved for her light-hearted spirit. Already, her compassion had earned the same reverence the queen had known before her tragic death. To Mykkael, she was an icon who demanded sharp respect. He had needed his crack division and fully half of his reserves to restrain the cheering commons when the handsome Prince of Devall had arrived with his train to formalize his suit for her marriage. Everyone had noted the princess’s flushed face. The trill of silver harness bells had shimmered on the air, as, radiant with joy, she had spurred her mount to welcome the match that young love and state auspices had favoured. The branding memory lingered, of the kiss exchanged upon the public thoroughfare. Her Grace’s greeting had burst all restraint—an explosive storm of passion more likely to invite a lusty midnight foray to her bedchamber.

‘Pretty foolish, if her Grace has stirred up the palace because she slipped off to the garden for a tryst.’ Mykkael’s amused chuckle masked the chilly ring of steel as he rammed his battered longsword into the sheath at his shoulder. ‘Jedrey’s better born, has the manners and diplomacy for that sort of social embarrassment.’

‘Well, nicety doesn’t man the walls, below the Highgate. If there’s been foul play, the merchants are likely to work themselves into a lather, bemoaning the loss of Devall’s ships. Suppose we faced a war?’ Flippant though he was, to broach that jibing comment, Vensic jumped to clear the doorway. ‘If the old king fancies he sees armies at the gates, he’ll want your field experience ahead of any uptown bravo’s breeding.’

Mykkael scotched the ribbing with his usual spiked glance, and prowled in hitched strides towards the stairwell.

‘You won’t have to go afoot,’ Vensic added, dismayed as he noted the exhaustion betrayed by his captain’s dragging limp. ‘The herald’s overbearing and snide with impatience, but his escort has a saddled mount waiting.’

‘Well, the walk’s the lesser evil,’ Mykkael admitted, bald-faced. ‘Bloody war’s my proper venue. Crown orders aside, the drunks won’t stay their knives. How in the reaper’s hells can I keep the peace among the riff-raff if I’m called on to the proverbial royal carpet to act as a frisky maiden’s chaperone?’

The wry conclusion stayed unvoiced. Taskin, Commander of the Palace Guard, was no more likely to appreciate a garrison man with desert-bred colouring treading on his turf above the Highgate.

Commander Taskin, at that moment, bent his ice-pale gaze upon the tearful maid who had last seen Princess Anja in her chambers.

‘What more is left to say, my lord,’ she despaired, her pink hands clasped and shaking. ‘I’ve told you all I know.’

Tall, gaunt, erect as tempered steel, with a distinguished face and frosty hair, Taskin radiated competence. His silences could probe with unsubtle, scorching force. While the distraught maid stammered and wept, he stepped across the carpet and bent his dissecting regard over the clutter on Anja’s dressing table.

The gold-rimmed hand mirror, the brushes and combs and tinted bottles of scent glinted under the flutter of the candles. No rice powder had been spilled. The waxed parquet floor showed no scuffs or other evidence of struggle.

In a cultured, velvet baritone that inspired chills of dread, Commander Taskin prompted, ‘The princess was wearing bracelets adorned with golden bells. Her slippers, you say, had silver heels and toe caps. No rare jewels, none of the crown heirlooms, but she would have made noise at every movement. What else? Could she have masked a change of clothing under her court dress?’

The nervous maid curtseyed, though the commander’s back was turned. ‘Her Grace’s gown had bare shoulders and laces down the front. Nothing underneath, but her thinnest silk camisole. Canna brought her smallclothes from the cedar closet. She stayed to empty the bath and gather towels while I helped her Grace with her wardrobe.’

Taskin added nothing, hands clasped behind his waist.

The maid swallowed and dabbed at streaming eyes. ‘Her Grace sent me out to fetch the turquoise ribbons and a pin she said had been her lady mother’s. By the time I came back, she had already left. Gone to the banquet, so it seemed, since nobody heard even a whisper of disturbance. If she’s never been so thoughtless, well, new love would make her giddy. Her intended has the looks to scatter reason.’

The maid’s distress was genuine. Anja loved a joke, but her style would not stoop to indiscretions that embarrassed her blameless servants.

Taskin prowled the chamber, his booted step silent as a wraith’s. An uneasy pall of silence gripped the cream and copper opulence of the princess’s private apartment. Such stillness by itself framed a stark contradiction to her tireless spirit and exuberance.

Anja’s zest for life met the eye at every turn. The plush, tasselled chairs were left in compulsive disarray by her penchant for casual company. Gilt and marble tabletops held a riot of spring flowers, with long-stemmed hothouse lilies forced to share their porcelain vases with the weeds and wild brambles plucked from the alpine meadows. On the divan, a book of poetry had a torn string riding glove marking its vellum pages. Abandoned in the window nook, a seashell scavenged from the beaches of Devall overflowed with a jumble of pearl earrings and bangle bracelets. The playful force of Anja’s generosity clashed with the constraints of royal station: the seneschal’s latest scolding had been blatantly ignored. The massive chased tea service kept to honour state ambassadors had been shanghaied again, to cache the salvaged buttons for the rag man.

Even Taskin’s impassive manner showed concern as he subjected the princess’s intimate belongings to a second, devouring scrutiny.

‘My Lord Commander,’ the maid appealed, ‘if Princess Anja planned an escapade, I never heard a whisper. Her maid of honour, Shai, was the one who shared her confidence the few times she chose to flaunt propriety.’

‘But the Lady Shai knows nothing. I’ve already asked,’ a voice interjected from the hallway.

Taskin spun. His glance flicked past the startled maid, while the elite pair of guards flanking the entry bowed to acknowledge Crown Prince Kailen.

His Highness lounged in stylish elegance against the door jamb, still clad in satin sleeves and the glitter of his ruby velvet doublet. Fair as his sister, but with his sire’s blue eyes, he regarded the ruffled icon of palace security with consternation. ‘Don’t dare say I didn’t warn you, come the morning. Anja’s surely playing pranks. She’s probably laughing herself silly, this minute, enjoying all the fuss. Ignore her. Go to bed. She’ll show up that much sooner, apology in hand. Did you really think she’d wed even Devall’s heir apparent without any test of his affection?’

‘That would be her Grace’s touch, sure enough,’ a guardsman ventured. ‘Subtlety’s not her measure.’

And the smiles came and went, for the uproar that had followed when her Grace had exposed the pompous delegate from Gance as a hypocrite. On the night he fled the realm, flushed and fuming in disgrace, she had asked the pastry cook to serve up a live crow inside the traditional loaf of amity.

‘Furies, I remember!’ But Taskin did not relax, or share his guardsmen’s chuckles of appreciation. Instead, his tiger’s stalk took him back to the window, where he tracked the distanced voices of the searchers beating the hedges in the garden. They met with no success, to judge by the curses arisen over snagging thorns and holly. ‘No harm, if you’re right, Highness. We’d survive being played for fools.’ The commander inclined his head, meeting the crown prince’s insouciance with deliberation. ‘But if you’re wrong? Anja taken as a hostage could bring us to our knees, drain the treasury at best. At worst, we could find ourselves used as the bolt hole for some warring sorcerer’s minion.’

An uncomfortable truth, routinely obscured by Sessalie’s bucolic peace: the icy girdle of the mountains was the only barrier that kept the evil creatures from invading the far north.

‘May heaven’s fire defend us!’ the maid whispered, while the nearer guardsman made a sign to ward off evil.

If not for the peaks, with their ramparts of vertical rock, and the natural defences of killing storms and glaciers, tiny Sessalie would not have kept its stubborn independence. The hardy breed of crofters who upheld the royal treasury would never have enjoyed the lush alpine meadows, which fattened their tawny cattle every summer, or the neatly terraced fields, with their grape crops and barley brought to harvest through the toil of generations.

‘Show me the sorcerer who could march his army across the Great Divide.’ The crown prince dismissed their fears with his affable shrug. A drunk hazed on cloud wine might dream of such a prodigy; not a sober man standing on his intellect.

Even to Taskin’s exacting mind, the worry was farfetched. The flume that threaded that dreadful terrain was nothing if not a deathtrap. Foolish prospectors sometimes came, pursuing gold and minerals. They died to a man, slaughtered by hungry kerries, or else drowned in the rapids, their smashed bones spewed out amid the boil of dirty froth that thundered down the mouth of Hell’s Chasm. Skilled alpinists occasionally traversed the high rim. Survivors of that route had been favoured by freakish luck and mild weather, since the arduous climb over Scatton’s Pass required altitude conditioning for a crossing that took many weeks. Yet where storms and exposure sometimes spared the hardy few, the ravine killed without discrimination. The relentless toll of casualties had extended for time beyond memory.

‘I thought you’d want to know,’ Prince Kailen said at length. ‘My father stayed lucid long enough to oppose the seneschal’s complacency. His sealed order sent for the Captain of the Garrison.’

Commander Taskin left the window, his brows raised in speculation. ‘Were you concerned I’d been pre-empted? Not the case. If you’re wrong, and your sister’s disappearance isn’t an innocent joke, then we could have unknown enemies lurking in the lower citadel. Had his Majesty not dispatched the summons, I would have done the same. Has the garrison man arrived yet?’

‘He should reach the palace at any moment.’ Prince Kailen straightened up and jumped to clear the doorway for Taskin’s abrupt departure. ‘I expected you’d wish to attend the royal audience.’

The commander hastened towards the stair, in unspoken accord that the seneschal ought not to be left in sole charge. All too often, of late, the aged King of Sessalie lapsed into witless reverie. ‘While I’m gone, Highness, have the grace to show my guardsmen every likely nook your royal sister could have used for a hideaway’

The gate guard who emerged to meet the herald’s band of outriders was the son of a noble, marked by his strapping build and northern fairness. His smart scarlet surcoat fell to his polished boots, which flashed with the gleam of gilt spurs.

‘Captain Mysh kael?’ His aristocratic lisp softened the name’s uncivil consonants. Cool, cerulean eyes surveyed the laggard still astride. ‘The king’s summons said, “at once.’“

‘Never seen a man limp?’ Mykkael barked back, refusing to be hustled like a lackey. Bedamned if he would jump for any lordling’s petty pleasure, aware as he was that his dark skin raised contempt far beyond the small delay for the care he took to spare his aching knee.

The guardsman disdained to answer. Once the captain had dismounted, he extended a gloved hand and brusquely offered a bundled-up cloak with no device.

Mykkael passed his winded horse to the hovering groom and received the hooded garment, his smile all brazen teeth. No one had to like his breeding. Last summer’s tourney had proved his deadly prowess. Crippled or not, the challenge match that won his claim to rank had been decisive. If the upper-crust gossip still dismissed the upset as fickle, he could afford to laugh. His strong hand on the garrison manned the Lowergate defences. That irony alone sheltered Sessalie’s wealthy bigots, and granted them their pampered grace to flourish.

Mykkael flipped the plain cloak across his muscled shoulders. The hem trailed on the ground. As though his slighter frame and desert colouring made no mockery of pretence, or the gimp of his knee could be masked, he gestured towards the lamplight avenue, its refined marble pavement gleaming past the shadow of the Highgate. ‘After you, my lord herald.’

No streetwise eye was going to miss the precedent, that the Captain of the Garrison came on urgent, covert business to the palace.

‘By every bright power of daylight, Captain! Try not to draw undue attention to yourself.’ Through a tight, embarrassed pause, the herald gamely finished. ‘The royal household doesn’t need a sensation with Devall’s heir apparent here to contract for his bride.’

‘His Majesty commands my oath-bound duty to the crown,’ Mykkael acknowledged. ‘But isn’t that golden egg already broken? To my understanding, we’re one piece short for promising the man a royal wedding.’

Served a censuring glance from the ranking guardsman, the herald gasped, appalled. ‘On my honour, I didn’t breathe a word!’ To Mykkael, he added, urgent, ‘You’d better save what you know for the ears of the king and his seneschal.’ He waved his charge along, taken aback a second time as he had to push his stride to stay abreast.

For Mykkael, the discomfort wore a different guise: beyond Highgate’s granite arch, with its massive, grilled gates, he shouldered no citizen’s rights, and no authority. Above the jurisdiction of the Lowergate garrison, he became a king’s officer, pledged to bear arms in crown service. His claim to autonomy fell under the iron hand of Commander Taskin of the Royal Guard. That paragon was the son of an elite uplands family, handpicked to claim his title at his predecessor’s death. His prowess with the sword was a barracks legend, and his temperament suffered no fool gladly.

A man groomed to stand at the king’s right hand, on equal footing with the realm’s seneschal, would have small cause to welcome an outsider and ex-mercenary, obliged to prove his fitness in a yearly public tourney until he scrounged the means to fund retirement.

‘I hope your sword’s kept campaign-sharp, and without a speck of rust,’ the palace guardsman ventured in snide warning. ‘If not, the commander will tear you to ribbons, in the royal presence, or out of it.’

Captain Mykkael raised his eyebrows, his sudden laughter ringing off the fluted columns that fronted the thoroughfare. ‘Well, thank the world’s bright powers, I’m a garrison soldier. If I wore a blade in his Majesty’s presence, rust or not, I’d be tried and hung for treason.’

Stars wheeled above the snow-capped rims of the ranges, their shining undimmed as the face of disaster shrouded the palace in quiet. On the wide, flagstone terrace, still laid for the princess’s feast, a chill breeze riffled the tablecloths. It whispered through the urns of potted flowers, persistent as the stifled conversations of the guests who, even now, refused to retire. Of the thousand gay lanterns, half had gone out, with no servants at hand to trim wicks. Silver cutlery and fine porcelain lay in forlorn disarray, where distraught lady courtiers had purloined linen napkins to stem their silenced onslaught of tears.

The staunch among them gathered to comfort Lady Shai, whose diamond hair combs and strings of pearls shimmered to her trembling. No one’s calm assurance would assuage her distress, no matter how kindly presented.

Prince Kailen’s suggestion of practical jokes had roused her gentle nature to fiercely outspoken contradiction. ‘Not Anja. Not this time! Since the very first hour the Prince of Devall started courting her, she has spoken of nothing else! Merciful powers protect her, I know! Never mind her heart, the kingdom’s weal is her lifeblood. She once told me she would have married a monster to acquire seaport access for the tradesmen. She said—oh, bright powers! How fortune had blessed her beyond measure, that the prince was so comely and considerate.’

A wrenching pause, while Shai sipped the glass of wine thrust upon her by the elderly Duchess of Phail. The ladies surrounding her collapse glanced up, hopeful, as Commander Taskin ghosted past on his purposeful course for the audience hall.

‘Any news?’ asked Lady Phail, her refined cheeks too pale, and her grip on her cane frail with worry.

Taskin shook his head. ‘Not yet.’

Lady Shai tipped up her face, her violet eyes inflamed and swollen. ‘Commander! I beg you, don’t listen to the crown prince and dismiss my cousin’s absence as a folly. Upon my heart and soul, something awful has befallen. Her Grace would have to be dead to have dealt the man she loves such an insult.’

The commander paused, his own handkerchief offered to replace the sodden table linen wrung between Shai’s damp fingers. ‘Rest assured, the matter has my undivided attention.’

He nodded to the others, found a chair for Lady Phail, then proceeded on his way. Ahead, a determined crowd of men accosted the arched entry that led to the grand hall of state. The stout chamberlain sighted the commander’s brisk approach and raised his gold baton. ‘Make way!’ His hoarse shout scarcely carried through the turmoil.

Commander Taskin lost patience. ‘Stand down!’

The knot cleared for that voice, fast as any green batch of recruits. The chamberlain pawed at his waist for his keying. ‘You’ve come at last. Thank blazes. The king is with the seneschal.’ Still too rattled to turn the lock quickly, the fat official gabbled to forestall the commander’s impatience. ‘His Majesty sent a herald to the lower keep and summoned that sand-whelped upstart—’

Taskin interrupted, sharp. ‘The Captain of the Garrison? I already know. He’s a fighter, no matter what she-creature bore him. His record of field warfare deserves your respect.’

As the double doors parted, Taskin did not immediately walk through. He pivoted instead, catching the petitioners short of their eager surge forward. ‘Go home! All of you. My guardsmen are capable. If your services are needed, I’d have you respond to the crown’s better interests well rested.’

Through a stirring of brocades, past the craning of necks in pleated collars, a persistent voice arose. ‘Is there crisis?’

Another chimed in, ‘Have you news?’

‘No news!’ Taskin’s bark cut off the rising hysteria. ‘Once the princess is found, the palace guard will send criers. Until then, collect your wives and retire!’

‘But Commander, you don’t understand,’ ventured the fox-haired merchant whose dissenting word rose the loudest. ‘Some of us wish to offer our house guards, even lend coin from our personal coffers to further the search for her Grace.’

Taskin raised his eyebrows. His drilling survey swept the gathering, no man dismissed, even the foreign ambassador from the east, with his bullion brocade and his pleated silk hat, hung with a star sapphire and tassel. ‘Very well. I’ll send out the seneschal. He’ll take down the list of names and offered services.’

Prepared for the ripple of dismayed consternation, Taskin’s lean mouth turned, perhaps in amusement. The rest of his bearing stayed glass-hard with irony. Now, no man dared to leave, lest he be the first to expose his underlying insincerity. Once each pledge of interest was committed to ink, the commander could winnow the truly loyal from the hypocrites at leisure.

Beyond the broad doors, the throne and gallery loomed empty. The bronze chandeliers hung dark on their chains, the only light burning in the small sconce by the privy chamber. Outside its thin radiance, the room’s rich appointments sank into gloom, the lion-foot chairs reduced to a whispered gleam of gold leaf, and the crystalline flares off the glass-beaded tassels a glimmer of ice on the curtain pulls.

Taskin’s brisk footsteps raised scarcely a sound as he passed, a fast-moving shadow against lead-paned windows, faintly burnished by starlight. By contrast, the clash of voices beyond the closed door raised echoes like muffled thunder.

Taskin acknowledged the six guardsmen, standing motionless duty, then wrenched the panel open without knocking. He sized up the tableau of three men beyond as he would have viewed the pieces on a chessboard.

In the company of the King of Sessalie and the seneschal, the High Prince of Devall claimed the eye first. He was a young man of striking good looks. The hair firmly tied at his nape with silk ribbon hung dishevelled now, honey strands tugged loose at the temples. Though he sat with his chin propped on laced hands, his presence yet reflected the lively intelligence that exhaustion had thrown into eclipse. He still wore banquet finery: a doublet of azure velvet edged in bronze, and studded with diamonds at the collar. His white shirt with its pearl-buttoned cuffs set off his shapely hands. The signet of Devall, worn by the heir apparent, flashed ruby fire as he straightened to the movement at the doorway.

Taskin bowed, but as usual, never lowered his head. While the seneschal’s ranting trailed into stiff silence, and the king’s prating quaver sawed on, Devall’s prince appraised the commander’s rapid entry with amber eyes, dark-printed with strain. ‘Lord Taskin, I trust you bring news?’

‘None, Highness. Every man I have in the guard is assigned. They are diligent.’

The seneschal shot the commander a scathing glance for such bluntness. ‘If you’ve heard about the herald dispatched to the lower keep, can I rely on your better sense to restore the realm’s decorum? We scarcely need to raise the garrison to track down an errant girl!’

Taskin disregarded both the glare and the sarcasm. He would have honesty above empty words and false assurances. Nor would he speak out of turn before his king, whose maundering trailed off in confusion.

‘Your Majesty,’ Taskin cracked, striking just the right tone. ‘I have no word as yet on your daughter.’

A blink from the King of Sessalie, whose gnarled hands tightened on his chair. His gaunt frame sagged beneath the massive state mantle with its marten fur edging, and the circlet of his rank that seemed too weighty for his eggshell head. Nonetheless, the trace of magnificence remained in the craggy architecture of his face; a reduced shadow of the vigorous man who had begotten two bright and comely children, and raised them to perpetuate a dynasty that had lasted for three thousand years.

An authoritative spark rekindled his glazed eyes. ‘Taskin. I’ve sent for Captain Mysh kael.’ Brief words, short sentences; the king’s speech of late had become wrenchingly laboured, a sorrow to those whose love was constant. ‘You’ll see soon enough. My seneschal objects.’

‘I find the choice commendable, your Majesty.’ Taskin kept tight watch on the foreign prince from Devall, and recorded the masked start of surprise. ‘Until we know what’s happened, we are well advised to call out every resource we can muster.’

The high prince slapped his flattened hands upon the tabletop, but snatched short of shoving to his feet. ‘Then you don’t feel her Grace has played a prank for my embarrassment?’

‘I don’t know, Highness. Her women don’t think so.’ Taskin’s shoulders lifted in the barest, sketched shrug. ‘But Princess Anja being something of a law unto herself, her ladies have been wrong as much as right when the girl played truant as a child.’

The seneschal thrust out his bony, hawk nose, his stick frame bristling with outrage. ‘Well, we don’t need a scandal buzzing through the lower citadel! Find the herald, do. Pull rank at the Highgate, and turn the captain back to mind his garrison.’

‘Too late.’ Already alerted by the sound of inbound footsteps, Taskin’s icy gaze fixed on the seneschal as he let fly his own sly dart. ‘In fact, your service is the one that’s needed elsewhere.’ Two crisp sentences explained the gist behind the courtiers held under the chamberlain’s watchful eye.

‘Your Majesty, have I leave?’ The seneschal bowed, shrewd enough to forgo his sour rivalry for opportunity. He thrust to his feet, his supple, scribe’s hands all but twitching for the chance to wring advantage from the merchants’ pledge of loyalty.

A short delay ensued, while King Isendon of Sessalie raised a palsied forearm and excused the gaunt official from his presence. As the seneschal stalked away, he peered in vague distress at the straight, stilled figure of his ranking guardsman, who now claimed the place left vacant at his right hand. ‘Commander. Do you honestly think we might be facing war?’

‘Your Majesty, that’s unlikely’ Taskin’s candour was forthright. What did Sessalie possess, that could be worth a vicious siege, a campaign supplier’s nightmare, destined to be broken by the early winter storms that howled, unforgiving, through the ranges? Only Anja posed the key to disarm such defences. Threat to her could unlock all three of the citadel’s moated gates without a fight.

Within the royal palace, her loss might break King Isendon’s fragile wits within a week, or a day, or an hour. Prince Kailen lacked the hardened maturity to rein in the fractious council nobles. The seneschal was clever with accounting, but too set in his ways to keep the young blood factions close at heel.

Sessalie needed the sea trade to sweeten the merchants and bolster a cash-poor council through the uncertainty of the coming succession.

Yet the petty slights and tangles spun by court dissension were not for Devall’s ears. Anja’s offered hand must not imply a bleeding weakness, or invite the licence to be annexed as a province.

Lest the pause give the opening to tread dangerous ground, the Commander of the Guard tossed a bone to divert the high prince’s agile perception. ‘The crown needs its eyes and ears in the sewers under Highgate. Captain Mysh kael may be a misbegotten southern mongrel, but he keeps the city garrison trimmed into fighting shape. Knows his job; I checked his background. We want him keen and watchful, and not hackled like a man who’s been insulted.’

The High Prince of Devall drummed irritable fingers, his ruby seal glaring like spilled blood. ‘I don’t give a rice grain if the man’s low born, or the get of a pox-ridden harlot! Let him find Princess Anja, I’ll give him a villa on the river, a lord’s parcel of mature vineyards, and a tax-free stamp to run a winery’

Commander Taskin had no words. His arid glance pricked to a wicked spark of irony, he had eyes only for the man in the plain cloak just ushered through the privy chamber door. The hood he tossed back unmasked his dark skin, the honesty a tactical embarrassment. Yet his brazen pride was not invulnerable. The soft, limping step—worse than Taskin remembered—was strategically eclipsed behind the taller bulk of Collain Herald.

That court worthy trundled to an awkward stop. Scarlet-faced, he delivered the requisite bows to honour vested sovereign and heir apparent. Blindingly resplendent in his formal tabard with its border of gold ribbons, and Sessalie’s falcon blazon stitched in jewelled wire, Collain announced the person the king’s word had summoned.

‘Attend! In his Majesty’s name, I present Mysh kael, Captain of the Garrison.’

II. Audience

AS THE COURT HERALD STRAIGHTENED FROM HIS BOW AND STEPPED ASIDE, MYKKAEL RECEIVED HIS FIRST CLEAR VIEW OF THE COURT FIGURES seated on the dais. They, in turn, measured him, while his tactician’s survey noted the Prince of Devall’s suppressed flinch. Apparently the princess’s suitor had not expected dark colouring, a commonplace reaction in the north. Mykkael gathered his own cursory impression: of smouldering good looks and tasteful, rich clothing, marred by a fine-drawn impatience. The proposed bridegroom seemed genuinely upset by her Grace’s disappearance. His statesman’s bearing showed signs of chafed poise as he paid deference to the reigning king of Sessalie.

As Mykkael must, also, though his war-trained awareness rankled for the fact Commander Taskin slipped away from his post and took position a half-step from his back. Mykkael had witnessed politics and intrigues aplenty, and court appointments far richer than Sessalie’s. Yet where the close proximity of wealth and power seldom ruffled his nerves, the senior guardsman’s presence raised his hackles. He felt newborn naked to be bladeless. Few kings, and fewer statesmen could size up his attributes with that trained killer’s astute eye.

A pinned mouse beneath the commander’s aggressive scrutiny, the garrison captain bowed. Foreigner though he was, his manners were accomplished enough to honour the crowned presence of royalty. Even when that worthy seemed a shrunken, dry armature, clothed over in marten and velvet. Sessalie’s failing monarch might appear weak, might seem as though his jewelled circlet bound the skull of a man with one foot in the grave. Yet tonight, the palsied jut of his chin suggested an aware determination. The eyes Mykkael recalled from his oath-taking were dulled with age, but not blank.

The garrison captain met the king’s wakened wits with the sharp respect he once granted to his war-bond employers. He assumed a patient, listening quiet, prepared to field the caprice of crown authority. Past experience left him wary. A ruler’s bidding could cast his lot on the wrong side of fate, and get every man in his company killed.

The king drew a laboured breath, too infirm to waste time with state language. ‘Captain. You are aware? My daughter, Princess Anja, is nowhere to be found.’

Mykkael inclined his head. ‘Your Majesty,’ he opened, his diction without accent, ‘until now, I had heard only rumours.’

‘You might wish to speak louder,’ the High Prince of Devall suggested with hushed compassion. ‘Of course, you would have tracked down the source of such talk.’

Mykkael paused. The king’s alert posture suggested he had heard very well. Rather than break protocol, the captain settled for a polite nod as acknowledgement that Devall’s heir apparent had addressed him.

Taskin smoothed the awkward moment. ‘This is Sessalie, where the commons have been content for generations. If Captain Mysh kael pursued every snippet of gossip, half the city matrons would be found guilty of treasonous words. His sleep might be broken five times a night, quelling false declarations that King Isendon was laid out on his death bier.’

The old monarch smiled and patted the prince’s elegant wrist. ‘My herald was forbidden from forthright speech.’ A sly, white eyebrow cocked up, while the clouded gaze regarded the officer summoned in for audience. ‘Even if Collain had broken faith, the crown’s bidding left no opening to launch an investigation. Is this so, Captain? You may answer.’

Not deaf, or a fool, King Isendon, despite the clack of public opinion; Mykkael chose honesty. ‘No need to investigate. I witnessed the source of the rumour myself in the course of a routine patrol.’ At the king’s insistence, he elaborated. ‘One of the flower girls is in love with the driver of a slop cart. She went to have her fortune told, hoping for a forecast, or a simple to bind her affection. The mad seer who lives in the alley by the Falls Gate mutters nonsense when she’s drunk. Her cant tonight said the princess was missing, but then, her talk is often inflammatory. Few people take her seriously’

Taskin stirred sharply, and received the king’s nod of leave. ‘You think her words carry weight?’

‘Sometimes her malice takes a purposeful bent.’ Mykkael hesitated, misliking the prompt of his instinct. Yet Taskin’s steely competence warned against trying to shade his explanation with avoidance. ‘I’ve seen her prick holes in folks’ overblown ambitions, or cause ill-suited lovers to quarrel. Occasionally, she’ll expose the shady dealings of a craftsman. Mostly, her ranting is groundless rubbish. But one watches the flotsam cast up by the tide.’

‘You will question this woman,’ commanded the king.

Mykkael raised his eyebrows, moved to tacit chagrin. ‘Majesty I’ll try. Until morning, the old dame will be senseless on gin. Cold sober, she can’t remember the names of her family. I’ll find the slop taker’s sweetheart, if I can, and see whether she recalls something useful.’

The king regarded him, probing for insolence, perhaps. Mykkael thought as much, until some quality to the trembling, lifted chin made him revise that presumption. Those fogged eyes were measuring him with shrewd intellect. Mykkael keenly sensed the authority in that regard, and more keenly still, that of Devall’s heir apparent, edged and growing jagged with concern.

Then Isendon mustered his meagre strength and spoke. ‘Captain, you are the arm of crown law below the Highgate. My daughter has vanished. By my orders, you will do all in your power. Find her. Secure her safety.’

Mykkael bowed, arms crossed at his chest in the eastern style, that gesture of respect an intuitive statement more binding than any verbal promise. He straightened, bristled by a sudden movement at his shoulder.

The Commander of the Guard now flanked his stance at close quarters, no doubt mistaking such silence, perhaps even questioning his professional sincerity. Taskin’s whisper was direct. ‘You will answer to me, on your findings.’

The garrison captain inclined his head, not smiling. He waited until the King of Sessalie granted leave with the gesture of a skeletal hand. The dismissal closed the audience. Yet the gaze of the lowcountry prince did not shift, or soften from burning intensity.

Mykkael had time to notice that the man’s hands were no longer clasped, but tucked out of sight beneath the tabletop. No chance was given to pursue deeper insight, or gauge the Prince of Devall’s altered mood.

Taskin demanded his attention forthwith. ‘We need to talk, Captain.’

Mykkael paid his respects to crowned royalty. As he turned from the dais, his words came fast and low, and without thought. ‘Don’t leave him alone.’

The commander stiffened. Only Mykkael stood near enough to catch that slight recoil. Taskin’s hooded eyes glinted, hard as polished steel rivets. Clearly, he required no foreigner’s advice. ‘We have to talk,’ he repeated, never asking which of the two royals had prompted the spontaneous warning.

That moment, the carved doors of the chamber burst open. A flurry among the guards bespoke someone’s imperious entry. Then a female voice cut like edged glass through the upset. ‘Her Grace isn’t hiding. Not in any bolt hole she used as a child, I already checked. Taskin! You can call your oafish officers to heel. They won’t find anything useful tossing through everyone’s closets.’

Belatedly Collain Herald announced, ‘Court worthies, your Majesty, the Lady Bertarra.’

‘The late queen’s niece,’ Taskin murmured, for the garrison captain’s benefit. ‘A shrew, and intelligent. She’s worth a spy’s insights and ten berserk soldiers, and the guards I have posted at the king’s doorway are loyal as mountain bedrock.’

Mykkael regarded the paragon in question, a plump, beringed matron who bore down upon the royal dais, her intrepid form hung with jewellery and a self-righteous billow of ribbon and saffron taffeta.

‘Best we beat a tactical retreat,’ Taskin suggested.

Mykkael almost smiled. ‘Her flaying tongue’s a menace?’

Taskin returned the barest shrug of straitlaced shoulders. ‘I’d have the report on the closets from my duty sergeant without the shrill opinion and abuse.’

But withdrawal came too late. The matron surged abreast, and rocked to a glittering stop in a scented cloud of mint. Mykkael received the close-up impression of a round suet face, coils of pale hair pinned with jade combs, and blue eyes sharp and bright as the point on an awl.

No spirit to honey her opinions, Bertarra attacked the obvious target, first. ‘You’re a darkling southerner,’ she accused. ‘Some say you’re good. I don’t believe them. Or what would you be doing here, standing empty-handed?’ Her glance shifted, undaunted, to rake over the immaculate commander of the palace guard. A plump hand arose, tinkling with bracelets, and deployed a jabbing finger. ‘Our Anja’s no hoyden, to be sneaking into wardrobes! Shame on you, for acting as though she’s no more than a girl, and a simpleton!’

Taskin said, frigid, ‘The closets were searched at her brother the crown prince’s insistence. Do you think of his Highness as a boy, and a simpleton?’

Bertarra sniffed. ‘Since when has a title been proof of intelligence? Prince Kailen will be drunken and whoring by morning. Simplistic, male adolescent behaviour, should that earn my applause?’ Her ample chin hoisted a haughty notch higher. ‘His Highness is a layabout who thinks with the brainless, stiff prod in his breeches. All men act the same. Here, our princess has been kidnapped by enemies, and not a sword-bearing soldier among you has the guts in his belly to muster!’

‘Who’s prodding, now?’ Taskin grasped that perfumed, accusatory finger, turned it with charm, and kissed the palm with flawless diplomacy. ‘Lady Bertarra, if you think you can stand between any grown man and his pleasures, you are quite free to curb the excesses of your kin with no help from my men-at-arms.’ He bowed over her hand, his dry smile lined with teeth. ‘As to enemies of the realm, give me names. I am his Majesty’s sword. In her Grace’s defence, I will kill them.’

Yet like the horned cow, the woman seized the last word. She slipped from Taskin’s grasp and fixed again on Mykkael, silent and stilled to one side. ‘That’s why you brought this one? To sweep our sewers for two-legged rats? What did you promise for his compensation? A well-set marriage to raise his mean standing?’

Mykkael’s slow, deep laughter began in his belly, then erupted. ‘Now, that certainly would not be thinking with my man’s parts.’ His dismissive glance encompassed the jewellery, then the cascade of ruffled yellow skirt. ‘A sick shame, don’t you think, to dull a night’s lust stripping off all that useless decoration? And, from some pale Highgate woman, who’s likely to be nothing but fumbling inexperience underneath? That should require an endowment of land as incentive to shoulder the bother.’

Bertarra’s mouth opened; snapped shut. She quickly rebounded from stonewalled shock. ‘Crude creature. Prove your mettle. Find our Anja and bring her home safely’

A gusty flounce of marigold silk, and the matron moved on to upbraid someone else on the dais. Taskin resumed his interrupted course, his stride as sharp as any spoken order that the garrison captain was expected to follow. A pause at the door saw the guard rearranged. Two men-at-arms were asked to stand inside, in direct view of the royal person. The petty officer was dispatched elsewhere, bearing the commander’s instructions.

That man angled his greater size and weight to jostle past Mykkael, standing withdrawn to one side. Taskin just caught the garrison captain’s blurred move in reaction, an attack form begun, then arrested, too fast for the trained eye to follow. The ex-mercenary had already resettled his stance, when the commander’s viper-quick reach caught the tall guardsman’s wrist, and wrenched him back to a standstill.

‘You give that one distance,’ he cracked in rebuke. ‘I won’t forgive you a broken bone because you’re careless on duty.’

The huge guardsman reddened.

Taskin cut off the flood of excuses. ‘Not armed,’ he agreed. ‘Still lethal. Blowhard assumptions like that get you killed. Now carry on.’

Then, as though such a shaming display was routine, he finished his rapid instructions. ‘I want to know who comes and who goes in my absence. If Bertarra leaves, or the seneschal returns, detail someone to fetch me.’

Moved off again, Mykkael’s limp dragging after, the commander turned down a side corridor and whipped open the door to the closet chamber furnished for the king’s private audiences. ‘Sit,’ he said, brisk, then rummaged through an ivory-inlaid escritoire for a striker to brighten the sconces. ‘My man was a fool. Please accept my apology.’

Confronted by a marble-top table, and gold-leafed, lion-foot chairs, Mykkael eyed the plush velvet seat he was offered. The scents he brought with him, of oiled steel, uncouth liniment, and greased leather, made strident war with the genteel perfumes of beeswax, citrus polish and patchouli. Since he saw no other option, he did as he was told; arranged his game leg, and perched.

Taskin chose a chair opposite, his squared shoulders and resplendent court appointments nothing short of imperial. His subordinate was dealt the same unflinching survey just given to his royal guards. ‘I’d heard you had studied barqui’ino, but not the name of the master who trained you.’

Mykkael seemed less relaxed than tightly coiled, under the strap of his empty shoulder scabbard. ‘There were only two living when I earned my accolade,’ he admitted, his shadowed gaze regarding his rough hands, rested loose on the table before him. ‘Both were my teachers, an awkwardness no one admits.’

‘They both disowned you?’ said Taskin, surprised.

Mykkael’s sardonic smile split his face, there and gone like midsummer lightning. ‘A northern man might say as much.’

‘A vast oversimplification,’ Taskin surmised. ‘A stickler might ask you to explain. I will not.’ With startling brevity, he cut to the chase. ‘Our princess is in trouble. What do you need?’

As close as he came to being shocked off balance, Mykkael spread his fingers, lined by the shine of old scars. He delivered the gist. ‘A boy runner, for a start, to ask my watch at the Middlegate to keep a list of who comes and goes. Next, I don’t know what her Grace looks like, up close. A view of her face, if she sat for a portrait, could be sent on loan to the barracks.’ He sucked a slow breath, then broached the unpopular subject dead last. ‘An endowment for bribes, and extra pay shares for men whose extended duties keep them from spending due time with their families.’

‘I expected you’d ask that.’ Taskin was brusquely dismissive. ‘The requisition to draw funds from the treasury is already set in motion. As to your runner, he’s not needed. My sentries at the Highgate record all traffic to and from the palace precinct. They’ll supply names until you can rearrange the Middlegate security to your satisfaction. As more thoughts arise, you’ll send me the list.’ Then, with a subject shift that rocked for its tactical perception, ‘Now, how do you think your resource can help me?’

Thinking fast, Mykkael closed his fingers. ‘If the Prince of Devall has foreigners in his retinue, I’d like permission to question them.’

Taskin sustained his stripping regard. Nothing moved, nothing showed. His aristocratic features stayed boot-leather still. ‘You want to try cowing them by intimidation? Or do you presume we’d miss some nuance of testimony out of our northern-born snobbery?’

Mykkael was careful to keep his tone neutral. ‘Actually no. But I might address them in their own language.’

Taskin laughed, a rich chuckle of appreciation. ‘My background check missed that.’ He raised a callused thumb and stroked his cheek. ‘I wonder why?’

‘As a mercenary, sometimes, the pay’s better if you let your employer believe you’re brainless.’ Mykkael watched the commander absorb this, pale eyes introspective with assessment.

‘No doubt, such a pretence also helped your survival.’ Unlike the speed of that formidable mind, the question that followed was measured. ‘How many tongues do you speak, Captain?’

‘Fluently? Five,’ Mykkael lied; in fact, he had passed for native, with eight. The slight caveat distinguished that in the three Serphaidian tongues written in ideographs, he was not literate.

‘I will see, about servants.’ The commander never shifted, but a change swept his posture, like a pit viper poised for a strike. ‘If you don’t trust Devall, please say so, and why’

Mykkael softened the cranked tension in his hands, reluctant and sweating under the cloak he had not snatched the chance to remove. ‘I have no feeling, one way or the other, for her Grace’s suitor, or anyone else. Just that cold start of instinct suggesting your king should not be left unguarded by hands that you know and trust.’ A straight pause, then he added, ‘It’s battle-bred instinct. The sort of gut hunch that’s kept me alive more times than a man wants to count.’

Yet if Taskin held any opinion on what his northern tradition considered a witch thought, no bias showed as he pressed the next point. ‘My runners will keep you apprised of all pertinent facts from the palace. Whatever you find, I want to know yesterday. My duty officer will arrange for a courier’s relay. The dispatches will be verbal. No written loose ends that might fall into wrong hands. If you stumble upon something too sensitive to repeat, you’ll report back to me in person. Wherever I am, whatever the hour, the guard at the Highgate will arrange for an audience.’

Mykkael stirred in a vain effort to ease his scarred leg. His scuffed boots were too soiled to rest on a footstool, though the chamber was furnished with several, carved in flourishes, and sewn with tapestry cushions. Barqui’ino-trained to fight an armed enemy bare-handed, he still felt on edge, stripped of his blades and his sword. His absence from his post unsettled him as well. By now, the Lowergate populace must be seething. The princess’s disappearance was too momentous to stifle, and the lives of Sessalie’s servants too prosaic, to keep such an upset discreet.

Taskin’s focus stayed relentless as he reached his conclusion, a summary drawn like barbed hooks from a spirit that placed little value on sentiment. ‘I don’t believe Princess Anja’s playing pranks. I’ve known her like an uncle since the hour of her birth. Tonight, I fear she’s in grave danger.’

‘Her Grace is Sessalie’s heart, I see that much plainly’ Where trust was concerned, Mykkael preferred truth. ‘I may not know and love her as you do, but as I judge men, no garrison will keep fighting trim with the vital spirit torn out of it. That does concern me. I’ll stay diligent.’

Commander Taskin slid back his chair and arose. A snap of hard fingers brought a page to the door, bearing Mykkael’s worn weapons. ‘If this kingdom relies on you, Captain, on my watch, you will not fall short. A horse is saddled for you in the courtyard, with an escort to see you through Highgate.’ As the nicked harness and bundle of sheathed throwing knives were returned, Taskin delivered his stinging, last word. ‘And clean the damned rust off that steel, soldier. Set against your war record, and your reputation, that negligence is a disgrace!’

The gelding in the courtyard was a raw-boned chestnut, fit and trained for war, but groomed with the high gloss of a tourney horse. Mykkael assessed its rolling eye with trepidation. Its flattened ears and strutting prowess might look impressive on parade. Yet in a drunken, celebratory crowd, its mettlesome temper was going to pose a nasty liability.

‘Commander said not to give you a lady’s mount,’ said the leather-faced stableman, the reins offered up with a sneer. ‘One that could stay in your charge at the keep, and not let you down under need. Your horsemanship’s up to him? Lose your seat, this brute’s apt to stomp you to jelly’

Mykkael took charge of the bridle, annoyed. The challenge pressed on him by Taskin’s guard escort rankled him to the edge of revolt. The smug urge, ubiquitous to men trained at weaponry, to test his mettle, was a trait he missed least from his years as a mercenary. Worse yet, when that puerile proving involved a tradition the more fiercely reviled: the handling of dumb beasts whose innate, trusting nature had been twisted to serve as a weapon.

The horse just straightforwardly hated. Conditioned for battle to use hooves and teeth, it swung muscled hindquarters under the torchlight. The chestnut neck rippled. A blunt, hammer head snaked around, lips peeled and teeth parted to bite.

Mykkael raised a bent elbow, let the creature’s own impetus gouge the soft flesh just behind the flared nostril. ‘Think well, you ugly dragon,’ he murmured, his expert handling primed with a taut rein as the horse tried to jib and lash back. The striking forehoof missed smashing his hip, positioned as he was by the gelding’s shoulder. For the benefit of the avid watchers, he snarled, ‘In hard times, on campaign, I’ve been known to slaughter your four-legged brothers for the stewpot.’

One vault, off his good leg, set him astride before the brute beast could react. A jab of his heel, a braced rein, and he had the first buck contained, then redirected into a surging stride forward.

Behind him, the belated guards set hasty feet in their stirrups and swung into their saddles to catch up. Their dismayed northern faces raised Mykkael’s soft laughter. ‘Who’s lost their beer coin to the rumour I can’t ride?’

Both men looked sheepish.

The garrison captain was quick to commiserate. ‘I’d buy you a brew to remedy your loss, if I had any loose coin myself.’

Yet the prospect of such camaraderie with a foreigner made the guardsmen more uncomfortable still.

Mykkael’s grin widened, a flash of white teeth under the cloak hood just raised to mask the embarrassment of his origins. ‘Think well on that,’ he murmured in the same tone used a moment before on the gelding. He led off, reined the sullen horse through the archway. The clatter of shod hooves rang down the deserted avenue, bouncing echoes off the mortised façade of the wing that housed visiting ambassadors. The four-quartered banner of Devall hung limp by the entry, its gold-fringed trim tarnished with dew. Nor did the pair of ceremonial sentries stir a muscle to mark the passage of Mykkael’s cloaked figure, attended by Taskin’s outriders.

The ill-matched cavalcade passed out of the bailey, into the grey scrim of the fog that rolled off the peaks before dawn light. Stars poked through, a scatter of fuzzed haloes, punch-cut by the spires of the palace. At street level, the torches streamed, their smeared light gleaming over the dull iron sheen of wet cobbles.

That moment, a raggedy figure darted out of the shadows.

Mykkael’s horse skittered, snorting. He slammed his fist into its neck, used the rein, and hauled its proud crest to the side to curb its lunging rear. His gasped oath slipped restraint, while the figure, an old woman, came on and made a suicidal grab for his stirrup.

Her hands groped and locked on his ankle, instead. ‘Young captain,’ she cried in a guttural, thick accent. ‘A boon, I beg you! Please, out of pity, would you lift off a short curse!’

Mykkael kicked her away. As she fell, shrilling outrage, he slammed his heel into the raging horse. Before its raised forehooves came down, he drove it into a clattering sidle. Once clear, he sprang from the saddle, flung his reins to the guards, then forced his racked knee to bear urgent weight.

In two steps, he reached the woman and caught her skinned hands. ‘I’m sorry, old mother.’ Her tattered clothes smelled of dust and floor wax, and her hands wore the callus of a labourer. A cleaning drudge, bent and stiff with arthritis; his heart felt nothing but pity. ‘My roughness aside, that horse would have killed you, leaving your family bereft. I regret also, for your disappointment. But I cannot lift any curses, short or long form.’ Through her hiss of displeasure, he reached under the outraged tension of thin shoulders and braced her attempt to sit upright. ‘Put simply, I lack the background.’

She rolled off a rude phrase in dialect; would have pulled away in her rage, had he let her. Instead, firmly gentle, he raised her to her feet, and steadied her through the shaken aftermath as she dusted her skirts back to rights.

The next question was his, spoken in the Scoraign tongue inferred by her lilting accent.

She raised filmed eyes, and stared at him, furious. The next insult she uttered was clipped.

While the guards watched, dumbfounded, Mykkael shut his eyes. He let her go. Masterfully calm, he repeated himself.

The drudge spat at his feet. She said five spaced words, then stalked away, the rustle of her threadbare garments lost in the muffling mist.

‘Why did you lie to her?’ The ruddy guard was forced to speak sharply to be heard through the gelding’s rank stamping.

Mykkael snapped up his chin, aroused from blind thought, his brow knitted in puzzlement. ‘Lie to her?’ Then his incomprehension broke. He swore under his breath. ‘I can’t raise curses! Powers of fury! I wouldn’t know a desert shaman’s singing if the spell weave it held slapped me breathless!’

When the guardsman stayed sceptical, and his husky colleague muttered a timeworn slur, Mykkael’s temper frayed. He limped forward, snapped up the chestnut’s rein, and glared in unvarnished disgust. ‘I was raised by an uplands merchant who spoke the same milk tongue you did.’

Silence reflected the men’s towering disbelief; Mykkael drew his irritation sharply in backhand, made aware by the ragged intensity of his feelings that he was bone-tired. Two nights on duty without decent sleep would fray any man’s judgement, never mind wreck the grace for diplomacy. He ignored the screaming twinge of his leg, fended off another snap from the horse, and, without mounting, marched it straight back towards the archway.

‘Captain! Where do you think you are going?’ Flustered again, no small bit annoyed, the pair of palace guardsmen spurred after him. ‘The Highgate is down slope!

‘So it is. But I’m going back to the bailey’ While the ornery chestnut slopped foam on his wrists, and lashed its tail in thwarted temper, Mykkael turned his head. This time his smile held no easy humour; only purpose keen as a knife’s edge. ‘Or don’t you believe Commander Taskin should be told that the storeroom closet where that drudge keeps her brooms has been scribed with a sorcerer’s mark?’

III. Craftmark

THE RICH TRAPPINGS OF FINE MARBLE AND CITRUS-OILED PARQUET DID NOT EXTEND TO THE WARREN OF STORE CELLARS UNDERNEATH THE king’s palace. Here, the close-set corridors had been chiselled into the mountain granite underlying the bedrock foundations. Cobwebs streamed from the soot-blackened ceiling, rippling sheet gold in the torch light. The floors lit by that flickering glow were rough stone, levelled with footprinted clay.

Mykkael lifted the flame of his borrowed spill and arose from his hurried survey. ‘No tracks here but servants’ clogs, and ones made by a heavyset fellow wearing hard-soled boots.’

‘That would be the wine steward,’ said the bearded soldier, standing with folded arms beside him. ‘He’s grown too fat for clogs. Can’t see over his huge belly any more. Bercie—that’s his wife—she bought him the boots. She feared he was likely to trip one day, and bash his old pan in a tumble.’

‘Wise woman,’ Mykkael murmured, cautious himself, as the yawning servant indicated the way towards a shaft with another frame stairway. The obstacle posed an unwelcome hazard for a man afflicted with lameness. ‘We go down here?’

The disgruntled lackey bobbed his tow head, the pompom on his sleeping cap a dab of bright scarlet amid the oppressive gloom. ‘For the store cellar, yes. Broom closet’s just past the landing.’

Mykkael caught the sleeve of the fellow’s striped nightshirt. ‘Thank you. Keep the light. Go on back to bed.’

As the surlier of the two men-at-arms drew breath to disagree, the captain silenced him with a glance. His clipped nod dispatched the servant on his way. Then Mykkael waited, while the wavering glow of the rush light receded out of immediate earshot. ‘You don’t want more gossip.’ His low voice emphatic, he added, ‘Don’t tell me, soldier, you aren’t under discipline to keep tinder and spill in your scrip?’

The other guard stiffened, affronted. ‘You don’t give us orders, you sand-bred cur.’

Mykkael ignored the insult. ‘Get busy with that flint! A sorcerer’s mark can smoulder like wildfire. You don’t leave one burning, once you know it’s there. If you’re frightened, just say so. I’ll go on alone if need be.’

‘But the light,’ the bearded guard blustered, his ruddy face lost amid gathering shadow as the servant set foot on the upper stair and continued his shuffling ascent. ‘We just carry birch bark. Burns out in seconds.’

‘Stall a bit more, then you’ll stand in the dark.’ Mykkael shrugged, sardonic. ‘Not a comfortable risk to be taking, where there might be a line of dark craft set at work.’

One balky man at last stirred to comply.

Patience gone, Mykkael reached out with blurring speed. He snaked a hand past the guard’s fumbling fingers, and dug flint and spill from the unbuckled scrip. ‘Don’t you trust your commander? I doubt very much we’ll expend what we have before Taskin arrives with pine torches. I hope he also brings men with strong nerves who will act without foolish argument.’

‘We should wait till he gets here,’ the surly guard snapped.

But Mykkael had already lit the rolled birch bark. He pressed the pace down the creaky board staircase, not caring if anyone followed. The recalcitrant guardsmen soon tramped at his heels, their grumbling stilled as they crowded the landing, and the broom-closet door emerged out of veiling darkness. The unvarnished planking had been inscribed: the scrawled figure demarked a crudely shaped lightning bolt, cut diagonally through an array of interlocked circles.

Mykkael loosed a hissed breath, rolled his shoulders, then forged ahead, resolute. He held up the spill. Bronze features expressionless, he traced the light over the wood, giving each chalky line his relentless inspection. No distraction moved him, even the fresh influx of voices and light, slicing down from the upper corridor. Taskin arrived. Five immaculate guardsmen marched at his heels, bearing oiled rag torches. Boots thundered on wood, the last stretch of stairway descended at a cracking sprint.

The commander rammed past the shrinking pair detailed as the captain’s escort. He reached Mykkael’s side in a glitter of braid and smartly polished accoutrements. There, he stopped, scarcely winded. His brushed grey head bent, stilled as filed steel, while the crawling progress of the hand-held spill inched over the outermost circle.

Then, ‘No informative tracks, left pressed in the dirt,’ Taskin observed in clipped opening.

Mykkael matched that brevity. ‘I saw.’ He pinched the flame out with his fingers, wiped the smutch of soot on his sleeve, then stated, ‘The mark is a fake.’

‘How are you certain?’

‘It was done with dry chalk, not white river clay’ Mykkael raised his wrist, blotted the beaded sweat from his brow, then swiped his thumb through the pattern. He sniffed carefully. ‘No spittle to bind it. No blood, or worse, urine. A sorcerer’s lines can’t hold any power without a minion’s imprint to lift them to active resonance.’

‘That’s detailed knowledge for a man who just claimed he lacked the touch to shift curses.’

Before the garrison captain could snatch pause to wonder how that fact had changed hands at short notice, Taskin’s glance shifted. He took merciless note, when Mykkael braced a needful hand to the wall to forestall a sharp loss of balance.

‘I can’t lift curses,’ the captain restated. He retreated an irritable, dragging step, not quite fast enough to shadow his fingers, which were splayed rigid and quivering. Taskin’s stillness continued to jab at his reserve. Hazed like a fresh recruit, Mykkael found himself pressured to give far more than the simple answer. That loss of control ripped through his aplomb, raising temper just barely leashed. ‘With luck, sometimes, I can ground them.’

Ice-cool, Taskin queried, ‘At what cost to yourself, soldier?’

Mykkael flung up his head. The spark of trapped light in his eyes was chipped fire, under the crowding torches. ‘I don’t know!’ Anger doused, he had less success with his exhausted, recalcitrant body. The seizing cramp from his overstressed knee rocked his frame through a running spasm. ‘Trust me, if that mark had been a live cipher, you don’t want the nightmare of guessing.’

A torch wavered, behind, as a man shifted grip to make a sign against evil.

The commander cracked, ‘Hold that light steady! The man who just faltered, fetch this one a chair!’

Someone else muttered, ‘That malformed get of a desert-whelped bitch?’

Taskin stiffened. ‘No chair, then,’ he agreed, his tone like taut silk run over a sharpened sword blade. ‘My inept torchman will now fetch a camp cot from storage. The man who was insolent will run to the west wing and roust out Jussoud. In minutes, I want him down here with his oil jars, if he has to be hauled from bed, naked!’

The pair jumped as though whipped.

‘You can open the door without penalty,’ said Mykkael, hoping the diversion might snatch him the interval to quiet his chattering teeth.

‘I’ll carry on,’ Taskin stated, not moving.

The camp cot pulled from stores arrived seconds later. The men set up the frame by the corridor wall with no talk, only brisk and relentless efficiency.

‘You’ll strip, soldier,’ the commander rapped out, his nailing regard still fixed on the garrison captain.

A sudden movement, snatched still, preceded the rage that rekindled in Mykkael’s dark eyes.

Taskin stayed glacially immobile, throughout. ‘You will remove your harness and peel your clothes to the skin. Then lie flat and stay there! My orders, soldier. On that cot, voluntarily. Or else my men will do that work for you, followed up by a lashing for insubordination.’

Mykkael forced a smile through hackled fury. ‘You’d lose some. Not nicely. Let’s duck the unpleasantness.’ He reached up, slipped the fastening on the borrowed cloak, then the tang of the buckle that fastened his sword harness. ‘After all, I did promise I would be diligent, and you have a princess to search for.’ He undid the iron fitting, and removed his weapon with a crack of withering emphasis. ‘The door is safe. Open it.’

The captain jostled a path through the closed ranks of the guards, and tried not to let sore embarrassment show as heads turned in riveted curiosity. Faced toward the wall, unflinchingly straight, he compelled wooden fingers to loosen the belt of his surcoat.

‘You men!’ snapped Taskin. ‘Eyes forward! Whatever duty you have to this realm lies ahead of me in this closet.’

Exhibiting sangfroid enough to uphold his own order, the commander turned his back on the victim confined to the corridor. He positioned himself in front of the doorway and reached for the string latch, decisive.

‘Don’t trust that desert-bred,’ blurted the red-haired sergeant who held the torch lighting his way. ‘How do you know he’s not lying?’

‘You’ll volunteer, then?’ Taskin stepped sideways, inviting the man to approach the marked panel himself. The pattern’s chalked lines glared a sinister white under the flare of the flames.

Bared to the waist, still unlacing his trousers, Mykkael observed the exchange. Unsmiling, he watched the burly sergeant shrink into the packed mass of his fellows. Just as uncertain, the others edged back, none among them prepared to shield him.

Taskin folded his arms, and regarded his finest with a glare to blister them pink.

Until Mykkael spun about. Half stripped and insolent, he shoved his way forward, and tripped the latch in their place.

‘Thank you,’ Taskin said, almost smoothly enough to mask his wound thread of unease.

Justifiable anxiety, which Mykkael forgave freely. The mountain terrain of the Great Divide kept Sessalie’s subjects far removed from the horrors engendered by warring sorcerers. Folk here had likely lived their whole lives, and their parents and grandparents before them, never having experienced a live craftmark. They would not have witnessed the twisted devastation such workings brought down on the lives of the people they ruined. Hideous experience would make a man flinch. Given a backdrop of frightening tales and the gross distortions of rumour, such sheltered ignorance would be all too likely to invent conjecture much worse.

Brown eyes met blue, and locked through a moment of unexpected, spontaneous understanding.

Then Taskin said, crisp, ‘That’s one stripe coming for rank disobedience.’

Mykkael laughed, his other fist clutching at untied laces to stay the cloth that slipped down his hard flanks. ‘No mercenary troop captain worth his pay would have slapped me with less than five.’ He dodged back, beat a lively retreat towards the cot. But the move went awry as his bad leg gave way without warning under his weight. His clumsy next stride was reduced to a stagger that exposed him, full-length, to the torchlight. Since no man could miss the stripes on his back, laid down for some prior offence, he salvaged the gaffe with ripe sarcasm. ‘Since I already know how the punishment feels, there’s no thrill of anticipation. Let’s spare the boring detail for later, why not? Quarter that broom closet, first.’

The shame-faced sergeant recovered his poise. He called a man forward to carry his torch, then drew his sword and shoved through the open plank door.

Brooms met him, their straw bristles struck upright in a barrel. The surrounding floor held canted stacks of hooped wooden buckets with rope handles. The torch light speared in, leaped across a second barrel stuffed to the rim with frayed rags.

‘Search everything,’ snapped Taskin. ‘Slowly and carefully, one bucket and one rag at a time.’

To the rest, who continued to view Mykkael’s disrobing with stifled whispers and outright suspicion, the commander stated flat facts. ‘Our garrison captain is not your enemy. You will all stop regarding him as a tribal barbarian, or some sort of singing shaman. Mysh kael’s parentage is not known. His adoptive father was northern-born, a civilized merchant who picked him up by the wayside as an infant foundling. You can see the hard proof; he bears no tattoos. That’s a rigid custom in the south desert.’

Left utterly stripped, made the merciless butt of eight strangers who pinned him with blue-eyed, superior scrutiny, Mykkael banished his last shred of pride. He sat, then lay back on the cot, and compelled himself to keep discipline. This hazing was not worth the grace of reaction. He had suffered far worse as a recruit. Iron-skinned under pressure, he did his practised best to support Taskin’s tactical effort. Distrust, after all, could do nothing but impede the search to find Princess Anja. Better to disarm that fracturing influence before petty dissent could spoil troop unity, or someone got needlessly hurt.

‘Your commander did his background check thoroughly’ Dry, sounding far more weary than he wished, Mykkael offered his wrists. The flesh on his arms and over his bared heart was clear brown, marred only by battle scars. ‘As you see, my mother failed to mark me at birth with the blessing of her tribe. Tradition is strict. That sign proclaimed me unfit.’

Mykkael stopped speaking, shut his eyes, and braced in distaste to endure through the subsequent, scouring inspection.

Yet Taskin cut that embarrassment short. ‘Unfit, likely due to an unsanctioned union. Not for a blemish or unsoundness.’

As the captain bore up, each over-strung muscle defined in the pitiless torchlight, no one could mistake that his crippling limp had been caused by a ruinous joint wound.

Easiest to tie off the final loose end, and force the review to its sorry closure. ‘Fathers of infants who are not blessed and marked leave their get to die of exposure.’ Mykkael finished, ‘I survived because mine was inept, or a coward, or else soft-hearted enough to ditch me in the path of a caravan.’

He rolled over then, and masked his hot face behind the bulwark of his crossed forearms.

Left staring at the damp snags of his hair, and the welted scars crossing his shoulders and back, the crowding men quickly lost interest. They pushed ahead to explore the broached closet, drawn to pursue the more gripping evil that might lurk in the drudge’s rag barrel.

They found Anja’s beautiful, jewelled gown; her silver-capped shoes, her exquisite wire bracelets.

A shimmering chime of miniature bells trilled through the dust-laden air.

The sound touched Mykkael’s ears with a sweet, haunting clarity, as he languished, face down on the pallet. He shivered, seized up as a cramp ripped his leg into mauling pain. Bared teeth hidden behind shielding forearm, he endured, exposed, but not bitter. At least he had Taskin’s forethought to thank, that the paroxysm had overtaken him lying down. Had he been savaged while still on his feet, he would currently be sprawled under somebody’s boots, curled into a whimpering knot.

Naked and cold, but held prone under orders, he could more gracefully withstand the public humiliation. While his hearing tracked the excited commotion unfolding inside the broom closet, more steps approached through the corridor above, then thumped down the dusty plank stair.

The arrival reached his side and stopped next to the pallet. Glass clinked, to the wafted fragrance of astringent herbs steeped in oil. Then a huge, warm hand closed over his shoulder, its touch trained and firmly knowing. ‘I’m Jussoud,’ said a voice of deep, velvet consonants, bearing the accents of the east. Cloth sighed with movement, as the speaker bent his massive frame and knelt on the rough stone floor. ‘I serve as physician and masseur for the guard.’

No hesitation occurred over skin tone. Only the tacit, professional pause as the hand became joined by another, probing one wire-strung muscle after the next.

Mykkael turned his neck, opened one jaundiced eye. ‘I’m sorry Taskin dragged you from your bed.’

‘And so he should have,’ that slow, cultured voice resumed. ‘You’re a mess, soldier. That liniment’s for camels; did you know as much when you bought it? The gum’s caustic, brings blisters. You’ll have weeping sores, if you’re stubborn and persist with its use.’

An inquiring poke near the hip socket raised a grunted oath from Mykkael. He continued to stare, anyway. He had the right, knowing just how it felt, to be foreign and billeted among northerners.

The giant looming over him was yellow-skinned, with black hair braided down his back. He had the flat nose, broad lips, and silver eyes of the steppelands, which fleshed out the clues to his origins.

Another fingertip contact, this stroke moth-wing gentle at the back of Mykkael’s thigh; except the result woke a nerve end, screaming. The garrison captain sucked an involuntary breath, half strangling the impulse to whimper.

‘For pity.’ But this time, the voice held compassion. ‘You’re a great deal worse than a mess. Without help, you’re not going to walk out of here.’

The touch melted back. Mykkael pulled in a shuddering lungful of air, while glass jars chinked near his elbow. Then scented, hot oil splashed and flowed down his back, and the hands began work in earnest. Their gentleness almost wrung him to tears. He subsided, smoothed down by an expertise that made him wonder if he was back in a coma, and dreaming. His chest unseized. Shortly, he was able to speak. In the language Jussoud would likely know best, Mykkael murmured, ‘How can I ever repay you?’

Jussoud gasped, his strong fingers shocked to a stop. ‘How is this?’ he exclaimed, overcome. Oblivious to the drama contained in the broom closet, he swept a searching regard over the desert-bred captain before him. ‘How can you know the motherland’s tongue?’

‘Taught. As a child. My stepfather traded.’ Mykkael raised himself on one elbow, straining to see what Taskin’s soldiers had unearthed.

Jussoud’s arm swiped him flat. ‘Do not spoil my diligent efforts, you impertinent upstart.’

Working a bruised jaw, just banged on the cot strut, Mykkael grumbled a filthy phrase he had learned as a boy from a drover. Then he added, through bliss, as those hands worked their magic, ‘Just don’t ask me to write your distant relatives a letter. I speak, but I don’t know the ideographs.’

‘I do,’ Jussoud stated, his dignity in place. ‘They take half a lifetime of patience to learn.’ He caught Mykkael’s elbow, planted a fist, then pressed down on one shoulder until something tight popped free in his client’s upper back. ‘Do you have patience, Captain?’

‘Only as I choose. Thank you, for that. I’m much better.’ Mykkael let his head loll in the crook of his elbow, warned as an icy shadow encroached that someone else came to stand over him. The near soundless step most likely meant that inimitable presence was Taskin.

The commander addressed Jussoud. ‘Can you do aught with him?’

Sweet oil licked a channel down Mykkael’s buttocks. ‘Oh, I think so,’ said the easterner, detached as a butcher who sized up the heft and weight of a carcass. ‘If the muscles are eased, the pinched nerves will subside. The limp can be made much less noticeable.’ His tone changed. ‘Hold now.’

The hands grasped his leg, applied traction and torque. A reaming, white fire tore through his hip. Mykkael crushed his face to his forearm, and scarcely managed to muffle a scream.

Then something crunched and let go in his pelvis. Pain laced his bad leg, then subsided. On his face, slammed limp, Mykkael tasted blood on his teeth. For that, he said more words. Ones that had once made the incensed drover chase after a sprinting small boy, waving a lead-tipped ox goad.

‘I can’t make him civilized,’ Jussoud admitted. Then he chuckled. ‘No. Don’t ask. I won’t translate.’ His hands moved, pressed a scar, testing with ruthless accuracy until a sharp flinch recorded the damage past reach of his skill. ‘I can’t ease the half of this knot of stressed tissue, certainly not overnight.’

‘Who expected that miracle?’ Taskin bent aside, clipped off an answer to somebody’s question, then considered the prone body, stretched out at his mercy on the cot. ‘If I send Jussoud down to the Lowergate barracks, will you make time for his services?’

Mykkael tipped up his face, disgruntled to be caught strapped with oil, and flat helpless. ‘Yes. If Jussoud will agree to start teaching me ideographs.’

‘That’s Jussoud’s choice.’ Taskin tapped his chin with an immaculate thumb. ‘Now, my choice. The whipping I owe you will wait. Can you stand yet?’

Mykkael flexed his leg with tentative care, then flashed Jussoud a glance of astonished gratitude. He shoved erect like a cat about to be served with a dousing, snatched up his dropped cloak, and covered his grease-shiny shoulders. ‘I can stand,’ he responded, running fresh sweat, but no longer wretchedly shivering. ‘Exactly what did you wish me to see?’

‘This.’ Taskin moved.

Mykkael stalked after him, barefoot, and entered the crowded closet.

They showed him Anja’s clothes, every one, down to the delicate, lace-sewn camisole, the fine, scented silk that had only hours ago kissed the girlish curve of her hips.

‘What do you think, Mysh kael?’ Taskin demanded.

The garrison captain blotted his stinging, split lip. ‘She took those off without help. Most likely willingly. Nothing’s torn. The lace isn’t hooked, or unravelled.’

‘Is that all?’

As though the words goaded like searing hot wire, Mykkael knelt. He fingered a bangle bracelet, to a musical clash of gold bells. Then he picked up a silver-capped shoe, and arose with the dainty, scuffed sole cradled between his rough hands.

Princess Anja came alive to him in that moment.

Her presence combed over him, mind and spirit, and infused his rocked senses with the intimate essence of her exotic perfume. The aromatic blend of sandalwood and desert flowers framed a memory so vivid and distant, Mykkael knew of no tongue that had enough life in its spoken phrasing to capture it.

He sucked in a breath, overtaken by storm. The young woman, Anja, assumed tangible weight, a ghost presence spun from his living contact with the slipper cupped in his palms. Witch thoughts, Mykkael realized, then understood further: Taskin was deliberately testing him for wild talent.

Despite his fierce anger, he could not fight back. His fragmented awareness already dissolved, sucked down by a vortex of terror…

…clogging fear, filled with the sweat scent of horses, and fog, swirling dank off the river…Soaked clothes, dripping and clammy cold…A woman’s heart pounding, her breaths jerked in gasps as she runs through the dark in hazed flight. She is desperate. Her taut hands grip damp strap leather, while behind her, the horses bump and jostle, their eager hooves clipping her lightly shod heels, and crushing the early spring grasses…

Drowning in horror, Mykkael wrenched his mind clear. Wrung dizzy, then falling, he spiralled back into the dusty cellar, and recovered his spinning wits. Enclosed by stone walls, and the scouring smoke thrown off the oiled rag torches, he crumpled. The shoe dropped from his grasp. It tumbled, clattering. Curled in a tight and shivering crouch, Mykkael fought back nausea, his nostrils clouded by the oiled sweat reek rising off his own skin.

His eyes were dry. Not blurred by a young girl’s salt tears, shed in shattered panic as she fled headlong through the night.

Someone’s fist clamped his elbow, jerked him back upright. The bruising grip savaged Mykkael’s slipped senses with a wrench like the bite of cold iron.

‘What did you see?’ Taskin hissed in his ear.

Mykkael shut his eyes, still battling vertigo. ‘Dark. She’s outside. In flight for her life.’

‘Witch thoughts!’ someone gasped, close beside him. Light shifted as a torchbearer recoiled. Boots grated on gravel, as other men stirred and exchanged rounds of sullen whispers.

Then another torch, flaring, thrust into his face. ‘What did you see?’ the commander repeated.

‘Country clothes. Lightweight shoes. She’s wet. Swam the river.’ A shudder raked Mykkael. He thought about horses, then flinched as a sharp flood of warning coiled through him. Pierced by an icy stab of raw instinct, he closed his mind, hard, and shook off Taskin’s probing. ‘Witch thoughts,’ Mykkael dismissed. ‘Only fools trust them. I might be seeing a moment recaptured from the princess’s early childhood. Or nothing more than a fanciful shadow, pulled in from one of her nightmares.’

‘You claimed you weren’t a slinking shaman,’ the red-haired sergeant accused.

Mykkael shook his head. He swallowed back nausea. ‘No shaman at all,’ he insisted, his leaden tiredness pressing his scraped voice inflectionless. ‘Not trained. Not brought up in tradition.’

Taskin’s relentless gaze still bored into him. Mykkael sighed. He forced his scarred knee to bear weight, then reached out, very gently, and pried off the commander’s insistent grasp. ‘I never said, did I, that I had not inherited a pack of unruly, fresh instincts.’

Mykkael sensed sudden movement at the corner of his eye. He surged into a spin, hands raised, while the draped cloak gaped open at his waist. He caught a man’s gesture to avert evil spellcraft, full on, then the sight of another signed curse, not completed. ‘I am no sorcerer!’ he cracked in fired rage. ‘Don’t you dare, in your ignorance, mistake that!’

Stares ringed him, unwavering. From men fully armed, and impeccably turned out, while he stood weaponless, half unclad, slicked in stale sweat and the itching residue of beast liniment and medicinal oil.

Mykkael uttered a word Jussoud would have appreciated, had the huge man still lingered in the corridor. Then, disgusted, he shrugged the slipped cloak back in place. To Taskin, he suggested, ‘Find that drudge. Question her. She might have seen someone snooping here, earlier. If a witch thought bears weight, her Grace was not overpowered, nor was she smuggled out, naked. I’d guess your princess might have made her own way, masked in a servant’s plain dress. See if someone else noticed the clothing.’

The ruddy sergeant bristled with outrage. ‘Princess Anja would never indulge in foolish pranks! Nor would she be childishly stupid enough to leave Highgate without an armed escort.’

‘Perhaps not,’ Mykkael agreed. ‘No harm, though, in checking.’

Taskin’s searing regard on him lingered. ‘The drudge has already been sent for,’ he allowed. ‘She could arrive in my wardroom at any moment. You ought to get dressed, or lie down before you fall over.’

Still fighting queasiness, Mykkael shot back a racked quip. ‘No order, which?’

‘Your call, soldier,’ Taskin said, less generous than rigidly practical. ‘If you drop, I won’t waste a man, picking you up off the floor. Jussoud’s gone home. He’s sent back to bed. Can’t lose the edge off him to exhaustion. Respect that, since I want you upright and alert, and for that, you’ll need his attention tomorrow.’

‘You do keep the rust polished off your swords,’ Mykkael dug back without rancour. He rallied, gathered the trailing hem of the cloak, then ploughed ahead on unsteady feet until he won free of the closet. His scathing reply floated back from the corridor. ‘You would have made a first-rate field captain, if you weren’t cooped up guarding a citadel.’

Two men snapped fists to their swords, for the insolence; the arrogant sergeant bit back another slur.

Taskin, rod straight, took the ribbing in his stride. ‘You serve under me, here above Highgate. Don’t forget that. Do you need a litter to reach your home turf? My groom can deliver the gelding.’

‘No litter, no groom.’ Caught with one leg thrust into his trousers, and his bad knee aching like vengeance, Mykkael unlocked the offended clench of his teeth. ‘And forgetting your style of service is right tough, you highhanded, pale-faced bastard.’

But his heated, last insult was respectfully masked, its phrasing couched in the intricate tongue spoken in Jussoud’s eastern steppes.

Two hours before dawn, the mist clung like wool, masking the snow-clad spires of the peaks that would restore her sense of direction. She huddled, shivering, in a pussywillow thicket, eyes shut to contain the fraught pitch of her fear, while patrols from the palace thundered past on the road, the smoke from their torches streaming…

IV. Victims

RETURNED TO THE PALACE ARMOURY, AND THE CANDLELIT ALCOVE THAT SERVED AS HIS TACTICAL HEADQUARTERS, TASKIN RESISTED THE URGE to run agitated fingers through his hair. Before him, spread flat, lay the list of merchants’ names and promises outlined in the seneschal’s fussy script. A second sheet, sent from the Highgate watch officer, detailed the traffic moving to and from the palace. Beyond the balcony, Taskin also commanded a view of the wardroom, below. At this hour, the chequered floor was crowded by the relief watch, donning surcoats and arms for the upcoming change of the guard.

A hovering aide raised a question over the jingle of mail. ‘Commander, you wanted the watch’s list sent on to the Lowergate garrison?’

‘To Captain Mysh kael, yes. No need to waste time for a copy’ Taskin selected the rice-paper sheet, which dutifully recorded his own dispatched messengers bearing the locked chest from the treasury, along with a wrapped oil painting; Mykkael himself, and his two-man escort; then disparate groups of Middlegate merchants with their wives, their grooms and their carriage teams. Each of those entries had been matched against the seneschal’s tally. The few names left over were accounted for: Crown Prince Kailen, off to visit the taverns by Falls Gate. The other contingent included a robed dignitary and six servants clad in Devall’s formal livery. They would be bound for the Lowergate keep, bearing the high prince’s offer of funding and men to further the search for the princess.

The gesture was a breach of crown protocol, and a slight against Sessalie’s aged king. Taskin assessed the move’s brazen overture, then measured its impact against the desert-bred captain he had just given high-handed dismissal. The upright seneschal would have flinched to imagine the course of the coming encounter. Devall’s smooth, lowland statesman might well fall prey to the brunt of Mykkael’s outraged temper. The ex-mercenary was seasoned. He had demonstrated his astute grasp of royal hierarchy. Even disadvantaged and set under pressure, he had handled his share of political byplay down to a subtle fine point.

Devall’s embassy was likely to suffer an unenviable reception down at the garrison. Not worried, his mouth almost turned by a smile, the commander slid the list across his marble-topped desk for dispatch through the messenger relay.

The aide left on that errand, and all but collided with an officer inbound through the alcove doorway. The arrival was early to be bearing word from the riders who quartered the riverbank. Taskin met the man’s urgent salute, braced for bad news and already up on his feet.

‘Report!’ he demanded.

The breathless newcomer wasted no words. ‘The palace drudge who discovered the sorcerer’s mark? We’ve found her. She’s dead.’

Taskin paused only to shout over the spooled rail of the gallery. ‘Captain Bennent! Get me a task squad. Now!’ To the winded officer, now forced to flank his commander’s clipped stride towards the stairwell, he added, ‘Take me there. I’ll hear your details on the move.’

The hollow report of the destriers’ hooves thundered over the planked drawbridge spanning the lower keep moat. To the rag men who netted for salvage on the bank, the noise posed a shattering break in routine. The Lowergate garrison were a division of foot. They used horses only for transport.

Not only the poor recognized the departure. As the breveted officer left in charge of the garrison, Vensic knew what his recent promotion was worth. By now made aware of the upset at the palace, he was at hand as the riders emerged through the dank swirl of fog at the gate.

The sultry glow from the bailey fire pans revealed them: two lancers leading in their immaculate palace surcoats, and a third man, cloaked and hooded, on a restive chestnut, whose slouched posture was not Mykkael’s.

Vensic surged forward. He caught the bridle of the ornery horse before one of his horseboys got mangled. ‘Where’s the captain?’ he demanded as the rider dismounted.

The palace guard escort startled, then stared at their charge, who flipped back the cloak’s cowled hood to expose the light-skinned, wry face of the Middlegate’s watch officer.

‘When the captain stopped to take reports and give orders, we changed places,’ the imposter confessed. His shrug as he slipped the cloak from his shoulders offered no grace of apology. ‘Mykkael’s habits force a man to stay keen. You’ll learn, if you’re here to serve under him.’

‘We’re Taskin’s, assigned to the messenger relay,’ one of the palace men rebutted. ‘Where’s your captain?’

‘Had business, an errand,’ said the officer, laconic. Then, to Vensic, ‘Mind that rogue’s ugly teeth. I’m told we’re to keep him. Remember the drover that Jedrey caught trying to pilfer the stores? Mykkael says that one’s appointed to tend him.’

Vensic laughed. ‘That’s just as likely to break his right hand as any formal sentencing.’

‘Won’t blight a man’s conscience, that way, Mykkael said,’ the gate officer explained in admiration. ‘Captain wished that hooved snake all the wicked joy of war. Hopes it can scare better sense into yon light-fingered misfit.’ Wary of the chestnut’s lightning-quick strike, he surrendered the reins, relieved to let the keep’s officer take charge, and muscle the brute through the bailey.

Vensic’s brisk shout pulled a man from the muster gathered to relieve the street watch. ‘Find a diligent boy who will keep the grooms clear,’ he instructed, then secured the surly chestnut to the hitching post with the sturdiest rope and shackle. ‘Someone from the armoury can have that pilferer brought up. Aye, the thieving little creep’s to meet his punishment.’

To the Middlegate officer still beside him, Vensic said, ‘Is the princess truly missing? Sorry prospect. What else did Mykkael give you?’

‘A right mouthful of orders.’ No smile, this time, as the Middlegate man assessed the yard’s milling industry, orange-lit by the cinders whirled off the fire pans. ‘First off, he wants you to double the street watch. No one’s pulled from patrol on the walls. Mykkael’s adamant, there. Draw a full reserve company, send them out straight away. I’ll tell you the rest when we’re settled inside.’

Vensic flagged the outbound sergeant, then belatedly noted the palace guards, who still trailed astride, looking miffed. ‘Why not get down? Come into the wardroom and breakfast on cider and sausage. Captain Mykkael will be back on his own, before long. Slip in when nobody’s looking, if he can, just to test if the men keep sharp watch.’

‘Slinks like a desert cur,’ agreed the guardsman on the grey, handing his mount off to a horseboy.

Vensic looked back at him, sober. ‘He can, when it suits him. But be careful how you say so. Our garrison has a healthy measure of respect for the captain’s outlandish habits.’

Mykkael, at that moment, was outside the town wall, standing knee-high in drenched grasses. The velvet shadow of spring nightfall masked him, heavy with mist, and the stench wafted up from the tannery. First overt sign of his presence, his sharp movement silenced the shrilling of peepers. The hurled flake of granite left his opened hand, sailed up in an evil and accurate trajectory, and cracked into a latched wooden shutter.

A painted slat splintered. The clatter of fragments wakened the dogs, kennelled in barrels behind him, and launched them into a frenzy. Chains dragged. The night quiet shattered to a chorus of barking.

Mykkael smiled, and waited. A moment later, the shutter slammed back and disgorged the irate face of a matron. If her hair was tied up in curling rags, her tongue was not bound. Keen as a troutman’s flensing knife, her curses shrilled over the racketing hounds.

Mykkael winced. Since the misty darkness no doubt obscured the falcon device on his surcoat, he half-turned, resigned, and uttered the yip the steppes nomads used to round up their wandering stock. The barbaric cry transformed the dogs’ snarling into yaps of riotous welcome.

‘Fortune’s pink, naked arse, it’s yourself!’ huffed the matron. The damaged shutter clapped shut.

Shortly, the downstairs door cracked, and a towheaded child admitted him. Mykkael ruffled her hair, then stepped into gloom redolent with wet hound, and the rancid aroma of ham and boiled onions. He said gently, ‘I’m sorry. Tonight, I haven’t brought butcher’s scraps.’

The upstairs voice shouted down and upbraided him. ‘You’ll pay for that burst shutter in coin, if the silver comes out of your pay share.’

Then the house matron shuffled down the beam stairway, mantled in mismatched wool blankets. The feet under her night robe were callused and bare, with the lumps of the curling rags hastily stuffed under a drawstring cap. Worse than mortified, she appeared outraged enough to snatch up a game knife and geld the importunate male who had rousted her.

Well warned as the spill of her pricket candle unveiled her purpled complexion, Mykkael spoke quickly. ‘Crown business, madam. Your husband is needed.’

‘Well, your murderer’s bound to evade the law, this time. Benj is no use.’ The woman plonked her broad rump on the settle, while the dutiful girl shoved the door closed. To Mykkael’s raised eyebrows, the matron admitted, ‘He’s drunk. Flopped in a heap in the smokehouse, with my oldest son snoring off whisky beside him. They sipped their fill off the crown’s largesse. Neither one’s likely to budge before noontide, when they’re finally driven to piss. They’ll loll about with sore heads, after that. Take brawn and a handcart to shift them an inch, and not worth the thumping bother.’

‘Where’s the handcart?’ Mykkael inquired, dead earnest.

The huntsman’s raw-boned, vociferous wife stared back at him, gaping.

‘Madam, tonight my quarry’s no murdering felon. Her Grace Princess Anja is missing. I want the riverbanks quartered, but quietly. Taskin has three squads of outriders searching, crown guards, sent from the palace. They have city-bred eyes, and might see what’s obvious, but for nuance, I need a trapper. Nobody other than Benj has the huntsman’s knowledge to track her.’ The pricket flame flared. Light brushed the cut angles of Mykkael’s set face, then subsided, cloaking him back under shadow. ‘I’ll heave your man into the moat if I must, to shake him out of his stupor.’

‘Benj’ll waken, if it’s for the princess.’ The goodwife adjusted her blankets and stood, too canny to test Mykkael’s barbaric temperament, or stall him with badgering questions. ‘Or else, as I’m born, I’ll help douse the layabout under myself.’

She shooed her girl off at a run to haul the handcart out of the shed. ‘We’ll just strap my man into a dog harness, first. Benj, bless his heart, doesn’t swim.’

The adrenaline prickle of raised hair at the nape was not a sensation Commander Taskin experienced often, although hazard had visited many a time through his diligent years of crown service. A poisoning attempt, or an assassin set on the run through the dark might unleash such a primal reaction. Taskin preferred the controlled clarity of sharp wits, applied with objective reason.

Yet the death that had followed Princess Anja’s disappearance roughened his skin with untoward nerves as he pushed open the door to the drudge’s cellar apartment.

The air inside smelled of hot grease and death, musty with closed-in dust. Straight as iron, Taskin peered into gloom scarcely cut by the flare of a tallow dip.

‘Commander? She’s here.’ A striker snapped, setting flame to a second wick in an alcove off to one side.

Taskin crossed over the threshold. He almost tripped as his boot heel mired in a throw rug braided from rags. That ill grace nettled him worse than the exhaustion brought on by a night of extended duty. He pushed past a curtain of strung wooden beads, and at last encountered his duty sergeant.

The man knelt by a box bed tucked into the wall. Taskin stooped under the lintel and squeezed his tall frame into the stifling, close quarters.

The old woman lay straight as a board on stained sheets. Her eyes were wide open, as though the horror that had pinched out her life still lurked in the airless dark.

‘Not a mark on her,’ the sergeant said, his voice pitched taut with unease. ‘Her extremities are cold and she’s started to stiffen.’ He pressed a palm over his nose and mouth to stifle the taint as he added, ‘You know the men claim she was taken by sorcery? They’ve noted the desert-bred captain was the last to be seen in her living company’

Taskin regarded those frozen eyes, gleaming like glass in the flame light. Again, gooseflesh puckered the skin on his arms. ‘They think Mysh kael did this?’

The sergeant shrugged. ‘Well, our northern stock doesn’t breed the rogue talent for witchery.’

‘We have other foreigners inside our walls,’ Taskin pointed out with acerbity.

‘True enough.’ The sergeant rubbed his bracers as though to shake off a chill. ‘But we have only one of them born to bronze skin.’

Taskin rebuffed that statement with silence. He bent, sniffed at the dead woman’s mouth, then resumed his unflinching inspection. Methodical, he pursued the unsavoury task, undeterred by the stink, or the whisper of draught that set the bead curtain clacking, and winnowed the glow of the unshielded candle.

The sergeant stared elsewhere, transparently anxious. ‘What do you want done with the corpse? She has no close family; we already checked.’

Finished examining the dead woman’s arms for a pox rash or signs of a puncture, Taskin gave his considered answer. ‘Roust the palace steward. Tell him I want the use of a wash tub to pack the body in snow. Then fetch the king’s physician. I’d have his opinion concerning this death, though the cause would seem to be poison.’

‘Who would wish her harm?’ The sergeant raised the candle, cast its wavering light over the poor woman’s ramshackle furnishings. Her work-worn mantle draped, forlorn, on its peg, alongside two raggedy skirts. ‘What did this drudge have that would merit an assassin who carried exotic potions?’

‘If she knew anything about the princess’s clothes, somebody wanted her silenced.’ Taskin straightened, and wiped his long fingers on the corner of the fusty sheet. The glance he delivered along with his summary was stern as forge-hammered steel. ‘If you overhear anyone else passing gossip, I want the talk stopped. No man mentions sorcery unless we have proof. The same rule applies to the matter of Captain Mysh kael’s integrity.’

Mykkael returned to the garrison wardroom in the black hour prior to dawn, but not with his usual style of cat-footed anonymity. His errand had left him soaked to the waist. No matter how silent, his presence brought in the miasma of green algae and raw effluent from the stockyards.

Sergeant Cade met him, broad-shouldered and dependable, his gruff face drawn with concern. ‘Bright powers, where were you?’ His wry survey took in Mykkael’s pungent state, and prompted a struck note of horror. ‘Don’t tell me you just dragged the Lowergate moat for somebody’s unlucky corpse?’

‘I was actually dousing a limp body under,’ Mykkael admitted without humour. He pressed ahead by brute will, his exhausted leg dragging, and his voice raised over the screeling wail as the garrison’s armourer refurbished a blade on the sharpening wheel. ‘Is Jedrey down from the Middlegate, and where’s Stennis? You did get my word, that I wanted the reserve roster called up for active duty?’

‘Day watch is already dispatched, with reserves. Jedrey’s back.’ Cade gestured towards a pile of loose slates, jostled aside on a trestle. ‘Assignments are listed for your review. You want them brought upstairs? Very well. I sent Stennis to head the patrol at the Falls Gate. The mad seeress you wanted to question wasn’t asleep in her bed. Since her family couldn’t say where she went, I presumed you’d want a search mounted, soonest.’

Mykkael gave the officer’s choice his approval, then added, ‘Not like the old besom, to wander at night.’

‘Well, you have an immediate problem, right here,’ Cade said, a nettled hand raised to shelter his nose from the stench brought in with his captain.

Mykkael stopped. He regarded his most stalwart sergeant’s dismay with a dawning spark of grim interest. ‘You’re suggesting I might change my clothing?’

Sergeant Cade gave way and threw up his hands, harried at last to despair. ‘You won’t get the chance. Devall’s heir apparent sent an accredited delegate with five servants here to receive you. They’ve been cooling their heels with bad grace for an hour. Since the wardroom’s too noisy to keep them in comfort, we put them upstairs in your quarters.’

The effort of dragging his game knee upstairs, weighed down by waterlogged boots, destroyed the lingering, last bit of relief bestowed by Jussoud’s expert hands. Mykkael reached the landing, streaming fresh sweat. As his hip socket seized with a shot bolt of agony, he stopped and braced a saving hand against the stone wall by the door jamb. There, wrapped in shadow, reliant on stillness to ease his stressed leg, he all but gagged on the wafted scent of exotic floral perfume. The fragrance overpowered even his soiled clothes. Mykkael’s first response, to indulge in ripe language, stayed locked behind his shut teeth. Cat-quiet, not smiling, he took pause instead, and measured the extent of his violated privacy.

Devall’s servants had disdained to use the clay lamp from his field kit. Accustomed to refinements and lowland wealth, and no doubt put off by fish oil, they had lit the garrison’s hoarded store of precious beeswax candles. The chest just ransacked to find them was shut, the lid occupied by a liveried adolescent, who buffed his fingernails with the snakeroot cloth Mykkael saved for polishing brass. More effete servants perched on his pallet. The largest pair had appropriated his pillows for backrests. Another one snored on the folded camp blanket, his pudgy hands clasped on his belly. The last rested boots fine enough for a lordling on Mykkael’s straw-stuffed hassock, uncaring whether the bronze caps on his heels might scratch the painted leather.

The captain might ignore those self-absorbed oversights. But not the barebones necessity, that the high stool by the trestle he required to relieve his scarred knee was currently unavailable. The Prince of Devall’s accredited envoy sat there, an older man with the arrogant ease ingrained by born privilege and crown office. His back was turned. The furred hem of a costly, embroidered robe lapped at his neatly tucked ankles, and his barbered head tilted with the air of a man absorbed by illicit reading.

The pain hounded Mykkael to a split-second choice, and efficiency overrode nicety. He drew his sword.

The grating slide of steel leaving scabbard whipped the dignitary to his feet. His raw leap of startlement whirled him around as the captain limped into the room, then sent him in stumbling retreat from a weapon point dulled by hard use.

Each dent, each scratch, each pit etched by weather lay exposed in the flare of the candles.

The servant on the stores chest gave a shrill squeak and dropped the polishing cloth in his lap.

‘Not to worry.’ Mykkael flashed his teeth, not a smile, snapped the cloth off the boy’s trembling knee, then hooked his vacated stool just in time. Since his last, staggered stride towards collapse would be seen as a loutish breach of diplomacy, he turned the effect to advantage. ‘This is a northern-forged longsword, as you see. Not a shaman’s weapon, that must be appeased by the taste of living flesh when it’s bared. I’ve only drawn it for cleaning, besides.’

While the High Prince’s delegation eyed his bared blade with incensed apprehension, Mykkael met and searched six flinching glances one after the next, without quarter. ‘Relax. Ordinary steel means nobody bleeds.’

As the dignitary smoothed down his ruffled clothes, and the servants nursed their shocked nerves, the garrison captain granted them space. He looked down, let them stare as they pleased while he scrounged after his oil jar. The interval confirmed his suspicion that his papers had been disarranged. So had his quill pens, the keep’s books, the ground pigments for inks, and his boxes of spare fletching and broadheads. Every belonging he kept on the trestle had been callously fingered and moved.

In deflected pique, Mykkael dipped the cloth and began to attack the rust on his weapon. The white snakeroot fibres quickly turned colour. To the untutored eye, the stains would appear indistinguishable from dried blood.

Soon enough, he was gratified by excitable whispers behind the servants’ cupped hands. While the dignitary dared a mincing step forward and floundered to salvage diplomacy, Mykkael scarcely regretted the uproar aroused by his ornery leg. Dog-tired, in itching need of a bath, he allowed his ill humour to ride him. ‘Since you didn’t come down from the Highgate for tea, what can the garrison do for you?’

Gold chains flashed as the foreigner peered down his cosseted nose. Mykkael captured the moment, as the watery, pale eyes flickered over his person, and dismissed him. The man’s shaved, lowland features showed his transparent thought: that Devall’s greater majesty owed no grace of respect to desert-bred stock, bound by poor fortune to accept the paid service of an isolate mountain kingdom. Devall’s suave overture would be dutifully delivered, though every word would ring hollow.

‘His Highness, for whom I stand as crown advocate, wished to offer his assistance with the search to find Princess Anja. Armed men can be spared from his personal retinue, and gold, as need be, to loosen those tongues you might find reluctant to talk.’

Mykkael raised his eyebrows, his attention apparently fixed on his work with the sword. ‘They’d crawl through the sewers at my command?’

The advocate stiffened.

The movement snapped Mykkael’s head up. His brown eyes shone like hammered bronze in the excessive flood of the candlelight. ‘Ah, there, don’t take affront. Gold braid and velvet won’t suit, I do realize. Why not offer Devall’s guardsmen to Taskin?’

Unfazed by the servants’ skewering regard, Mykkael watched, unblinking, while a man who was not thinking civilized words maintained his mask of state dignity. ‘Commander Taskin has been offered assistance as well. In his Highness’s name, I can say that gold braid and velvet are of trifling concern beside the royal bride’s safety.’

‘I agree.’ Mykkael raised his sword, and swung towards the nearest candle to sight down the business edge. He set down the rag, then recovered the whetstone he also used as a paperweight. ‘Tell your prince his generosity has my heartfelt thanks. If Sessalie’s garrison requires his assistance, his men, or his bullion, I will inform him by way of Commander Taskin.’

Devall’s envoy pursed sour lips. ‘You don’t care for her Grace’s security, outsider?’

Mykkael took his time, primed the whetstone with oil, then ran it in a ringing hard stroke down the length of his blade. ‘King Isendon, her father, cares very much. I work in his name.’ Another stroke; the battered weapon’s exceptional temper sang aloud with ungentle warning. ‘Better that his Highness of Devall should be reminded not to forget that.’

‘You were a mercenary, before this,’ the delegate observed in contempt.

‘Proud of it,’ Mykkael agreed, reasonable. Proud enough to know, in Sessalie’s case, that the keys to a kingdom were not in his purview to sell. ‘Are you done here?’

‘Apparently so.’ The royal advocate snapped irritable fingers and rousted his bevy of servants. The industrious one elbowed his fellow awake. The others rose, yawning and scattering the pillows. As his indolent retinue assembled about him, the dignitary bestowed a crisp bow, then gathered his robes and swept out. The ruffle of air stirred up by his exit streamed the candles, and wafted the sickly sweet odour of hyacinth.

Mykkael swore under his breath with brisk feeling. Then he braced his left hand on the trestle and pushed himself back to his feet. He was still snuffing candles when Vensic arrived, bearing a flat item wrapped in a quilt.

‘Come in, the door’s open,’ Mykkael snapped, resigned.

‘Breached, more like.’ The good-natured officer of the keep cat-footed inside, sniffed once, then grinned in farm-bred appreciation over the melange of bog reek and perfume. ‘You asked for something from the palace?’

Mykkael turned his head, saw the package brought up from the wardroom, then nodded. ‘A portrait. Her Grace’s likeness, don’t handle it carelessly’

Vensic noted the scattered sheets on the trestle, frowned, then settled for propping his burden on top of the rumpled pallet. ‘I see now why that dignitary left looking singed.’

‘In the hands, or the tongue?’ Mykkael finished his rounds, reached the stool, parked his leg. ‘No shame in him, sadly. Only self-righteous contempt.’ Since his fingers were trembling too severely to light the oil lamp, he was forced to waste, and leave the last candle burning.

‘You should rest,’ Vensic suggested in tentative quiet.

‘Not just yet.’ Mykkael clamped both hands on the trestle to stay upright as a cramp wracked his leg and shot fire through his lower back. The paroxysm subsided. He flipped through his papers, restoring their order, then paused. His fingertip traced down the list sent by Taskin, detailing the names of who had passed Highgate from the precinct of the palace. Prince Kailen’s name appeared near the top. The entry beneath had been altered.

Mykkael’s questing touch sensed the rough patch where someone had lifted the script. The name of a servant had been scribed in the blank, the ink on that line just barely fuzzed by the telltale hatch of torn fibre. The captain ran a testing thumb over the trestle, and encountered the trace grit of blotting sand.

That detail niggled. Here in the garrison, an erasure was more likely to be scraped with a knife, with the ink of an overstrike left to dry without any civilized niceties.

‘Something wrong?’ Vensic asked.

‘Perhaps.’ Mykkael resettled the whetstone on top of the list. Then he grasped his leg, hauled, and endured the flash of white pain as he propped the limb straight on the trestle. ‘Send for Jedrey. If he’s home, fetch him back.’

After a moment of expansive surprise, Vensic left on the errand.

Mykkael undid the bone buttons at his calf, jerked open his cuff, then ploughed his thumbs over the traumatized tissue knotted above his scarred joint. Given no better remedy, he reached for the tinned salve. Damn all to the fact he would hear from Jussoud, he had little choice but to keep himself upright and functional.

The night duty sergeant arrived at the threshold sooner than he expected. Born above Highgate, Jedrey was not wont to knock for the sake of a desert-bred’s dignity. Still dressed, but not armed, the lordly man had not shed his grimed surcoat, a sure indication he had been in the wardroom, and not at home with his wife.

A stickler for propriety, he never addressed his ranking captain outright, but waited in surly silence.

Mykkael did not look up from his knee, which appeared to consume his attention. ‘From the Middlegate sentry’s report, by your memory, at what hour did Devall’s party pass through? Say how many rode in that company?’

Jedrey scrubbed his chin with the back of one hand, to a grating scrape of blond stubble. He detested such tests. Yet he had learned along with the rest to handle the nuisance in his stride. ‘The man serves as crown advocate for Devall’s heir apparent. He passed the Middlegate with six servants in tow, just after his Highness, our Prince Kailen.’

Mykkael smothered his first impulse to look up. He said, through a grimace as the salve seared his skin, ‘They went together? Be precise, Sergeant.’

‘Perhaps.’ Jedrey shuffled his feet, barely able to rein back impertinence. ‘Devall’s advocate could have stepped back to allow his Highness due precedence for royal rank. If so, your common-born sentry might not have recognized the finesse of a well-bred man showing good manners.’

The predictable note of admonition was there, for the late, callous handling of the lowlanders who were the captain’s evident betters.

Mykkael stifled laughter, his face kept deadpan. Adept at keeping snob sergeants in line, he turned a drilling glance sideways. ‘Tell me, how many of that party just left?’

Jedrey flushed, a patched red that made his blue eyes flash like gem-stone. ‘I did not count their individual backsides. They were angry.’

‘Better worry quick on your own behalf, soldier,’ Mykkael said with edged quiet. ‘I am angry. Inside this keep, off duty or not, I expect a man to keep his eyes open.’

A pointless exercise, to argue that Sessalie was not at war; that such vigilance was unnecessary for patrolling town streets; Jedrey choked back outrage, then found himself off-balanced again by Mykkael’s next clipped question. ‘Why are you still here, Sergeant?’

Jedrey succumbed to the prodding at last, rage couched in his upper-crust accent. ‘You should be in bed. You’re not. That’s no man’s business but yours, don’t you think?’

Mykkael mopped the salve off his competent fingers, one mahogany knuckle at a time. ‘I don’t have a wife left fretting at home. That means you had business and purpose, for staying. Under this roof, soldier, you answer to me.’

No man in the keep contradicted that tone. Jedrey unburdened, his delivery professional. ‘Your seeress was found. In the moat, stone-dead, no mark on her, no foul play’ He curled his lip, his insolent regard sweeping over his captain’s stained surcoat. ‘But you knew that fact already, did you not?’

Mykkael shifted his lamed leg to the floor. ‘My swim happened outside the walls,’ he said, quite suddenly dangerous.

That gleam, in his eyes, shot chills over Jedrey. His overbred arrogance withered. ‘The news just came in, this minute. You sent for me. And I’ve told you.’

‘So you did.’ Mykkael’s tone was cut glass. ‘Since, for self-importance, you delayed the delivery, you can stay on duty and execute my orders. I want the old woman’s body brought here. Get Beyjall, the apothecary, also the physician who lives at the north corner of Fane Street. Let them see if the victim was poisoned or drowned.’

‘She was piss drunk,’ Jedrey stated, stiff under that peeling reprimand. ‘Her heart probably stopped.’

Mykkael shook his head, saddened. ‘The old besom hated and feared open water. Her family knows this. She never went near the moat, drunk or sober.’

‘Foul play?’ Jedrey said, his quick temper dissolved, as it must, to this captain’s deft handling.

‘I think so.’ Mykkael’s desert features were shadowed with pity, and an odd flash of recrimination. ‘Powers deliver her sad, crazy spirit, I think she died very badly’

‘You act as though you killed the old fool,’ Jedrey snapped.

He found himself summarily dismissed, and departed, brooding upon his captain’s fiercely kept silence.

V. Daybreak

SPRING SUNRISE BROKE OVER THE KINGDOM OF SESSALIE, THE PEAKED O ROOF OF THE PALACE A DIMMED GREY OUTLINE, MASKED OVER IN FOG. Inside the walled town, the streets lay choked also. The carved eaves of the houses plinked silvered droplets on to wet cobbles where the slop takers made rounds with their carts and their singsong chants for collection. If the seasonal mist shrouding the morning was normal, the spreading word of Princess Anja’s disappearance cast unease like a spreading blight. The lamplighters had snuffed their wicks and gone home, bearing rumour to garrulous wives. The taverns that should have been shuttered and closed showed activity behind steamy casements.

Talk moved apace. Disbelief became shock, churned to wild speculation as the craftsmen unlocked their shops. Women veiled in the damp fringe of their shawls clustered in the Falls Gate market, while the vendors commiserated and shook puzzled heads. There were no eye witnesses. Even first-hand accounts from the feast yielded no shred of hard fact. No one could imagine a reason to upset the match between Devall’s heir apparent and Princess Anja.

Least of all his Highness, Prince Kailen, who reeled in drunken, vociferous bliss up the switched back streets towards the Highgate. Ribald echoes caromed off the mansions as he was led homewards astride a palace guardsman’s borrowed mount.

The pair, immaculate man-at-arms and dishevelled prince, passed up the broad avenue, shattering the quiet and driving the ladies’ lapdogs into frenzied yapping on the cushions of their bowfront windowseats. The procession clopped past the palace entry. It crossed the bordered gardens of the royal courtyard, where the seneschal awaited, a wasp-thin silhouette in sober grey, arms folded and slender foot tapping.

‘Powers that be!’ the prince slurred from his precarious perch on the horse. ‘Why does it always have to be you?’

‘Importunate offspring!’ the seneschal huffed under his breath. He steadied the bridle, while Taskin’s guardsman helped the prince down and supported his weaving stance.

The next moment became awkward, as, knocking elbows, court official and palace man-at-arms exchanged burdens; the one reclaimed his loaned horse, while the other assumed the jelly-legged burden of Sessalie’s inebriated prince.

Too tall and thin to manage the load gracefully, the seneschal wrinkled his mournful nose. ‘Sorrows upon us, your Highness. Each day, I thank every power above that your mother never lived to see this.’

‘She’s in a better position than you to make herself heard on that score.’ Kailen laughed. His handsome, fair features tipped up towards the sky, which, to judge by his rollicking sway, appeared to be wildly spinning. ‘At least dead, with her list of queenly virtues, she’d be more likely to claim the ear of omnipotent divinity.’

But the Seneschal of Sessalie was too old and lizard-skinned to shock; and Kailen, that moment, was a young man too dissolute to shame.

The guardsman stayed professionally deadpan throughout. Bound to deliver the messages he carried from Captain Mykkael of the garrison, he remounted the moment he received his dismissal and rode off to make his report.

The seneschal turned Kailen around, then began the last leg of the journey to haul his charge to the royal apartments. He puffed, grunting manfully, taxed far beyond his frail build and aged strength. All his fastidious senses were revolted by the reek of the prince’s clothes—below town smells of urine and stale pipe smoke; boiled onions, trout stew and dark beer.

‘Why oh why do you do this, your Highness? Now, more than ever, we need your subjects to see you as your father’s trustworthy son.’

‘Need me?’ Prince Kailen snorted. ‘Need me? Nobody needs me! Only Anja.’ He flung out an arm muscled fit from the tourney, too sodden to notice the woes of the courtier who sweated and struggled to brace him. ‘Find my sister, get her wed.’ He tripped, gasped a curse, then maundered into the seneschal’s longsuffering ear. ‘You’ll have your coveted sea trade from Devall. My sister reigns as a wealthy queen over us, and I, her poor relative, steward no more than Sessalie’s dirt-licking farmers.’

‘You’ll marry one day,’ the seneschal chided, wrestling the prince’s incompetent bulk up the first flight of marble steps. ‘Who knows what alliance your betrothed might bring?’

Proceeding in comedic jerks and sharp stops, the mismatched pair passed the fountain at the arch, and missed falling in by a hairsbreadth.

‘Oh, my intended will wed for a bride gift of turnips,’ said Prince Kailen, morose. ‘Who sends the princess of anything here, to marry a king who counts out his year’s tithes in cattle?’

‘Just let us get you into the hands of your valet.’ Paused, gasping, the seneschal fumbled to grasp the bell rope, and summon a footman to open the door. He was tired himself, bone-weary of Sessalie’s thankless, long service. Under damp morning mist, plagued by the ache of a near sleepless night, he had no ready answer to give to ease Kailen’s maudlin grasp of the truth. ‘Only pray your royal sister is found safe from harm, or she’ll marry for turnips as well.’

At mid-morning, when sunshine struck through and shredded the mists into snags against the snow-clad peaks, Commander Taskin had rested and washed. Reclad in a spotless, fresh surcoat, he sat at his desk in the wardroom gallery, a light breakfast sent by his daughter reduced to stacked dishes and crumbs. The gold-leafed tray had been pushed aside. Folded forearms rested upon gleaming marble, Taskin listened to the guardsman who recited Captain Mykkael’s report.

The official version was short and concise, covering the seeress found drowned in the moat, then the ongoing search for the flower girl whose petition for augury had coincided with the first unsettled rumour. Street watch had been increased. Informers were being interviewed. Mykkael expected results in by noon, along with opinions on the seeress’s corpse from a reliable physician and a Cultwaen-trained apothecary.

The unofficial report ran much longer, and contained several unsatisfactory gaps.

This shortfall fell at the feet of the guard now sweating beneath Taskin’s scrutiny. Unhappy with his assignment to Lowergate’s keep long before Mykkael’s shiftless absence, the weary man suffered the grilling review, his embarrassed features flushed the same hue as his blazoned palace surcoat.

Taskin’s long, swordsman’s fingers were not sympathetic, tapping in scarcely muffled irritation as he posed his string of questions. ‘You say Mysh kael’s own men don’t know where he went, though he came back soaked from the moat?’

‘Well, the talk says the corpse might have something—’

Taskin interrupted. ‘I don’t want hearsay, or wild rumours from the lips of the disaffected! When I said I wanted that captain watched, I meant you to mind orders, soldier! I don’t give a damn how Mysh kael slipped your escort. Understand, and dead clearly: you failed in your given charge.’

‘You don’t trust that slinking desert-bred, either,’ surmised the shamed guard.

The rebuke came, keen-edged. ‘Trusting the man is not the same thing as knowing what he’s about.’

A door opened, below. Taskin’s relentless attention changed target to assess the arrival crossing his wardroom downstairs. The guardsman kept discipline, too chastened to risk a glance past the balcony railing. Faced forward, he made out the patter of slippered feet, approaching by way of the stairwell.

A gleam of sharp interest lit Taskin’s eyes. ‘At least now we’re likely to fill in one bit of guesswork raised by your inept watch.’ He grasped the papers stacked to his right, flipped them face down on his desktop, then weighted the sheaf with the warming brick filched from under the plate on his breakfast tray. ‘Stand aside, soldier, but mind your deportment. You’re not dismissed. My case with you will stay open until after I’ve settled the matter at hand.’

The man-at-arms moved, accoutrements jingling, and took position behind Taskin’s shoulder.

Seconds later, the gallery door swung open. A man in gold braid and maroon livery stepped in with the peremptory announcement, ‘His Highness, the heir apparent of Devall.’

Two more lackeys followed, then a rumpled-looking dignitary who appeared short on sleep. Next came a pageboy, groomed and jewelled, his costume topped by a tasselled hat that made him resemble a lapdog. At his heels, wearing costly black silk trimmed with rubies, the Prince of Devall stalked in like a panther.

The commander of King Isendon’s guard did not rise, which caused his royal caller a flare of stifled pique. The fact that no servant had been sent in advance should have said, stark as words, that the business that brought him was sensitive.

‘Your Highness?’ said Taskin. ‘I regret, without notice, steps could not be taken to seat you in proper comfort.’

There were no chairs. No fool, the Commander of the Guard did not volunteer to surrender his own. The High Prince of Devall swiftly realized he was required to stand, and his dignitary with him, like any other drill sergeant taken to task on the subordinate’s side of the desk. He met the challenge of that opening play with an unruffled smile, though his gold eyes showed no amusement.

‘I will not apologize for my inconvenience, your lordship.’ The heir apparent snapped his ringed fingers, and a lackey jumped, removed his velvet mantle, and draped the lush cloth over the railing that fronted the gallery. There, still smiling, the lowcountry prince sat down. Throughout, he stayed untouched by the rancour that smoked off his dour court advocate.

That worthy held to his bristling stance, his caustic glare fixed upon Sessalie’s titled defender. ‘We have a complaint,’ he announced, only to find himself cut off by the suave voice of his prince.

‘Not a complaint, Lord Taskin. Rather, I bring you a heartfelt appeal.’ Settled without a visible qualm for the twenty-foot drop at his back, the high prince handled himself with the aplomb of a sovereign enthroned in his own hall of audience. ‘Princess Anja would not have us at odds over quibbling points of propriety. She is precious to me. This scandal has already shadowed our wedding. Should I not want her found, and restored to my side with all speed?’

‘Precisely where do we stand at odds, your Highness?’ Taskin steepled his fingers before him, eyes open in unflinching inquiry.

Rubies flashed to the High Prince of Devall’s deprecating gesture. ‘Your response to the crisis has been diligent, of course.’ His handsome face shaded into uncertainty, a reminder that he was yet a young man, brilliantly accomplished, but with heart and mind still tender with inexperience. ‘I refer to the fact that my help has been rejected at every turn.’

The dangerous insult, by indirect implication, that perhaps King Isendon’s daughter had been fickle by design, had no chance to stay hanging between them. The smouldering advocate snatched at the opening to vent his affront.

‘Not simply rejected, my lord commander!’ Chalky, all but trembling, he served up his accusation. ‘Your gutter-bred cur of a garrison captain had the gall to draw naked steel in my presence. I want him punished! Let him be publicly stripped of his rank for threatening an accredited royal diplomat.’

‘He’s owed a stripe, I’ll grant you that much,’ Taskin said, unmoved rock, against which hysteria dashed without impact. ‘Not in public, however. In Sessalie, a soldier’s chastisement is always determined by closed hearing. Nor will I ask my king to remove the captain from his post. Mysh kael keeps his oath as a competent officer. Question that, though I warn, if you open that issue, you had better bring me hard proof.’

‘I will not mince words.’ The High Prince of Devall regarded his hands, clasped in jewelled elegance on his knee. ‘Captain Mysh kael came in from an unspecified errand, his clothing still wet from the moat. There, we are also given to understand, the seeress who started the rumour of Anja’s disappearance had been drowned. Her corpse was recovered soon afterwards. Scarcely proof,’ he admitted. His brass-coloured eyes flickered up to meet Taskin straight on. ‘Perhaps those events suggest grounds for an inquest, at your discretion, of course.’ His scalding censure suggested that in Devall, no ranking captaincy was ever made the prize of a public contest at arms.

Throughout, the commander maintained his taut patience. ‘Sessalie’s small, remote, and at peace for so long, our instinct for warring has atrophied. The Lowergate garrison in fact patrols the streets for thieves and disorderly conduct. An unsavoury pursuit, on our best days, and the crown’s pay for the job is a pittance. Not having strife, without conquests or prospects for further expansion, we’ve maintained the summer tourney as hard training to mature the ambitious younger sons of our nobility. We have never, before this, attracted any foreigner, far less one approaching Captain Mysh kael’s martial prowess. Believe me, the upset has caused dog pack snarling aplenty, and no small measure of chagrin.’

‘But now Sessalie has a missing princess, a tragedy also without precedent.’ The High Prince of Devall held the commander’s regard, no easy feat even for a man born royal. ‘Dare you trust her life that this is a coincidence?’

Taskin cut to the chase. ‘You’re asking me to allow your men leave to lead inquires below Highgate?’

His Highness eased at once with relief. ‘Can that hurt? You would benefit. If your garrison man is innocent, my outside observation will clear him. I, in my turn, seek relief from helpless worry. I can’t pace the carpet through another sleepless night! Not when we speak of the princess I would cherish as my wife, an intelligent partner befitted to rule Devall as a crowned queen at my side. Anja will raise the heir who carries my rule into the next generation. Her worth to me is beyond all price. Why should Sessalie stand on ancient pride, and refuse to acknowledge the fact that my future’s at risk?’

‘The authority you ask for must come from the crown,’ Taskin said, unequivocal. ‘Why did you come here, and not to King Isendon?’

‘Have you seen the press in the audience hall today?’ the prince’s delegate broke in, scathing. ‘His Majesty has been closeted with subjects all morning. Everyone from wealthy merchants’ hired muscle to uncultured farmhand’s sons—you have the whole countryside importuning the council for their chance to shoulder the adventure.’

‘Princess Anja is beloved,’ Taskin allowed. ‘Is Devall’s crown advocate surprised that Sessalie’s people should respond in heartfelt concern?’ He shifted his regard back to the distraught prince, then made his summary disposition. ‘I’ll give you one of my royal honour guards with a writ for Collain Herald. That should advance your Highness’s petition to the head of the line.’

The commander stood, a clear signal the interview was ended.

Yet his Highness of Devall made no move to arise. His page exchanged a surreptitious glance with a lackey, and the advocate stared primly straight ahead.

‘What else?’ Taskin’s frigid question met a pall of strained quiet.

Then, ‘His Highness, Prince Kailen,’ the heir apparent broached. Discomfited enough to have broken his poise, he twisted the rings on his hands. ‘I’m sorry. Bad manners. But Anja is threatened. Her safety demands forthright speech.’

Taskin’s mien softened, almost paternal with encouragement. ‘Say what you’ve seen. Where lives are at stake, plain words will do nicely’

The Prince of Devall quieted his fretful fingers, then unburdened himself in appeal. ‘Kailen went down to a Falls Gate tavern to make inquiries after his sister. He was still there, and sober, when the servant I sent to buy wine for my retinue saw him. That meeting occurred some time after midnight.’

Taskin absorbed this, each item of testimony set against the report from the rigid-faced guard at his back. The commander was, if anything, too well informed on the outcome of that disgraceful affray: Prince Kailen had been plucked from the Cockatrice Tavern by Mykkael’s duty sergeant, making his rounds. The royal person had been turned over to the palace guard, whence Sessalie’s longsuffering seneschal had seen his Highness to bed.

Devall’s heir apparent squared his neat shoulders, loath to dwell on the indelicacy. ‘I realize Kailen likes to prowl like a tomcat. I also know him as a friend. To speak plainly, he has too much intelligence for the confines of his station. He acts frivolously because the peace and isolation here don’t grant him any chance to test his wits. Appearances aside, I would credit his maturity this much. He loves his sister and this kingdom too well to have drunk himself into a stupor last night.’

‘I would have thought so,’ Taskin agreed, even that trifling confidence divulged with a reluctance that crossed his straight grain. ‘On that score, my inquiry is now being delayed. Let me dispatch an honour guard to see you—’

But the High Prince of Devall raised a magnanimous palm. ‘Spare your guardsmen, commander. I will seek Collain Herald myself.’

Taskin nodded. In person, the heir apparent would make himself heard, and receive the king’s ear without help. Forced to acknowledge the young royal’s earnestness, he unbent and ushered the contingent from Devall to the head of the balcony stair.

While the party made their way out through the wardroom, Taskin watched from the gallery railing. Once the lower door closed and restored his broached privacy, he addressed the guardsman his orders had held at attention throughout Devall’s interview. ‘What do you think, based on those facts you know?’

The man cleared his throat. ‘Facts only? No one saw where Captain Mysh kael went after he slipped our charge at the Middlegate. Prince Kailen was drunk when I set him on horseback. Sergeant Stennis had his Highness borne back to the garrison keep by two men culled from the street watch. No unusual report there—they’d scooped the prince from the arms of a whore, merry on too much whisky. The tavern was one of his usual haunts. Nobody mentioned him, sober.’

The commander held his stance, rod-straight and unspeaking as his survey combed over the vacated wardroom. Reassured that no bit of armour was out of place, and that each weapon rested keen on its rack, he attended the unfinished detail at his back with his usual cryptic handling. ‘Very well, soldier. For your incompetence last night, ride down and find Mysh kael, soonest. On my orders, you’ll tell the garrison captain he’s to see me in person and address each point where his report failed to meet my satisfaction.’

Taskin spun and prowled back to his desk, the buffed braid on his surcoat a scorching gleam of gold, and his censure as painfully piercing. ‘An unnecessary summons, had you kept your watch, soldier. You’ll suffer the fire of that desert-bred’s temper as your due penalty for slacking. If the creature is contrary or difficult, and he should be, keep your professional bearing in hand. Your orders stand: make sure the man comes. Recall that I hold the outstanding matter of the captain’s overdue punishment. When Mysh kael is finished with making you miserable, and only after you’ve brought him to heel through the Highgate, you can sting his pride with that fact, as you choose.’

‘You want him sent into your presence well nettled?’ the guard ventured, then caught Taskin’s glare, and leaped in chastened strides towards the doorway.

The Commander of the Guard subsided behind his gleaming marble desk. He restored the papers sequestered beneath the brick, then finished his vexed thought in solitude. ‘I’ll pressure those war-sharpened instincts, damned right. The captain will answer me straight, if he’s hazed. Easier to read through an unruly rage, and know whether he might be lying.’

Mykkael, at that moment, had not answered the thunderous knock that pounded the door to his quarters.

‘He won’t trust a lock,’ admitted the fresh young officer standing watch as Vensic’s relief. ‘No bar, either. The latch should open without forcing.’

‘That’s just as well,’ Jussoud answered, ‘since I dislike having to break things.’

The steppelands-bred foreigner seemed not to mind, that Highgate orders had assigned him to handle a demeaning round of service at the garrison. Nor had he asked for a lackey’s assistance. His huge frame was still burdened with his basket of oils, a satchel of strong remedies, and the round, wooden tub the keep laundress used to wash surcoats. With unruffled dignity, he nodded to the stableboys strung out behind, who carried yoked buckets dipped from the horse trough. ‘Open up, lads. We’re all going in.’

The ragged boys shrank back in wide-eyed hesitation, less afraid of the easterner’s slant, silver eyes than of the dire prospect of disrupting the captain’s peace.

‘Damn you for a pack of cowards, boys!’ snapped the officer to the column, that snaked halfway down the dim stairwell. ‘Captain’s not in, or quite likely asleep. And no wonder it is, if he’s out like the deaf. Crazy desert-bred hasn’t been off his feet for all of three days and two nights.’

‘Easy for you to say,’ the head stableboy sniped as his fellows jostled on to the landing behind him. ‘You’re not in front, and anyway, you were off duty the last time a man tried his luck barging in on the captain.’

Jussoud bared his blunt teeth in a grin. ‘He got Mykkael’s knife at his throat for presumption?’

The stableboy scowled. ‘No knife. No sword, either. Just the heel of a hand, fast as lightning. Broke the man’s nose all the same. Captain Mykkael didn’t waste words, wasn’t sorry. “Here’s a rag for the bleeding,” he said, “and what did the brainless grunt think he deserved, for crossing a doorway without taking soldier’s precautions.”‘

‘Here’s proper precautions,’ Jussoud said, agreeable, and offered the base of the wash tub as a shield.

Moved to awe, the skinny stableboy ducked inside the massive nomad’s protection. At Jussoud’s sly urging, he tripped the latch, and breached Mykkael’s guarded privacy.

The captain was asleep, his lean form sprawled like a tiger’s over the blanket that covered his pallet. His sword harness lay flat, at hand’s reach on the mattress beside him. Surcoat, shirt and trousers were cast off on the floor, the heaped cloth exuding the ripe odour of bog slime through a lingering fragrance of hyacinth. Stripped down to his smallclothes, Mykkael had flouted the customs of his forebears and used fresh water to wash. Even there, field habits had trampled over nicety: the grime had been sluiced off with a rag and bucket, left standing in the bar of sunlight that shone through the arrow slit.

Propped at his bare feet, unwrapped, the princess’s portrait regarded him.

Her exquisite likeness struck a note out of place in that rudely furnished chamber. The lush splendour of the oil paint glowed: the lucent sparkle in each rendered jewel, and the rich, velvet fall of her forest-green riding habit set into jarring contrast. Sessalie’s court painter had done the young woman’s grace more than justice; had captured the tilt of her refined chin, triangular as a waif’s beneath her netted blonde hair. The jade eyes all but breathed with inquisitive mischief, the glint that peeked through her midnight-dark lashes seeming entranced by the subject of interest—just now, a fighting man’s sculpted muscle, disfigured where mishap and the ravages of war had imprinted a uniformly brown skin.

The boys bearing the buckets stared agog. Then they elbowed and scrapped to claim the best view, amazed by a breathtaking display of scars no man born in Sessalie could imagine.

Unfazed, Jussoud set down the awkward wooden tub. He flipped back his long braid, shed the straps of his satchel and basket. As though he had ministered to lamed men all his life, he lowered the tools of his trade to the floor, not arousing a single plink from the glass. With the unhurried eyes of a healer, he read every sign of a man dropped prostrate from exhaustion. ‘You say your captain has not slept in three days?’

‘Near enough,’ the duty officer allowed. ‘The drunk and disorderly kept our hands full. We’ve been worked to the bone every watch, a night-and-day grind since the hour of Devall’s arrival. Here, let me.’ He pushed past, insistent. ‘I should rightfully be the one to try waking him.’

Jussoud’s huge hand shot out and caught the officer’s shoulder. ‘Not this way, you won’t. The wrong move with that man could get us both killed.’ Not pleased, as the stableboys burst into giggles, he took brisk charge and gave orders. ‘Set down those buckets. Quietly, mind! Then I want every one of you down those stairs, quick! Tell the cook to brew me a cauldron of hot water. After that, get on back to your chores.’

As the boys shed their burdens and bolted, the nomad steered the duty officer back towards the doorway. ‘When the water boils, you’ll bring it, alone. I’ll fill the tub and make ready, meanwhile. Best we let Mykkael sleep while he can. When the time comes, I’ll waken him wisely, from a distance with a tossed pebble.’

VI. Morning

FALLEN ASLEEP UNDER THE BLACK-LASHED STARE OF THE PRINCESS OF SESSALIE’S PORTRAIT, MYKKAEL LAY IMMERSED IN THICK DARKNESS. HE forgot he still breathed. Hurled beyond mere exhaustion, his clogged senses felt sealed in a deadening field of black void. The featureless stillness did not last, but quickened to the unruly prompt of a witch thought. An uncanny movement twined through his mind and unreeled a ribbon of dream…

He knew her, felt the pounding race of her heart. His awareness flowed into the well of her most intimate self, until he felt the raw skin of her heels, chafed to burst blisters through the exertion of her headlong flight. Emotionally buffeted, he rode the crest of her terror, then shared her mind through a breathless interval as she snatched shelter in a hidden glen, touched gold under east-slanting sunlight.

The moving tableau of her thoughts spun and circled, flinching back from examining the grievous discovery that had shattered her life like a flung stone. Threat to Sessalie drove her beyond care for herself. Although sorrow knifed through her, vivid enough to sap her will to keep living, she battled its cry of futility. Through the salt sting of tears, and the ache in her chest caused by hours of running, she laid her head against the sweated neck of the mare who nuzzled her, begging for sweets.

Throughout, the horses surrounded her with their inquisitive warmth. Missing their accustomed ration of grain, they demanded, exploring her with the hay-scented puffs of their breath.

‘You’ll want for nothing,’ she soothed, though her voice cracked.

The horses forgave the actual truth, that she had no such assurance to give. Their empathic herd sense stood as her mainstay against overwhelming despair. All three pairs, the horses’ innate nobility gave her a gift beyond price: the generous trust of their confidence. She bespoke them by name to steady herself Bryajne, the tall buckskin, who tucked his blunt, hammer head over the refined crest of Covette. She, a petite chestnut who flaunted the sculpted grace of her desert breeding; Vashni, the grey who carried on like the stud he was not; and Fouzette, whose stout forelegs still dribbled blood from a recent plunge through the briar; Kasminna, who delighted in nipping any creature caught unsuspecting, and Stormfront, whose dark coat gleamed with a silvery tarnish of dapples under the glare of the sunlight…

Then the flick of a pebble stung Mykkael’s exposed side. Witch thought and dream shattered like glass, hammered through by the prompt of blind reflex. From his prone state of oblivious sleep, an explosion of ingrained physical instincts hurled him half dazed, not yet wakeful, through the practised response of a consciousness tuned by barqui’ino.

He grabbed and threw in one sinuous move, his raw senses reacting without the encumbrance of intellect. Sword and harness flew. Sheathed steel and strap leather scythed with deadly force back along the pebble’s trajectory. The entangling missile slammed into the fast-closing wood of the door, followed hard by the throwing knife Mykkael always kept at close reach under his pillow. His schooled body hurtled after. Knuckles clenched and palms open, he poised the heel of his hand and the bone edge of his forearm to strike, while his bare skin sampled the flow of the air for the slightest warning of movement. He would kill by touch, his eyesight centred with absolute focus on the obstacles that could impede him.

He leaped the filled wash tub, one-footed, and landed without missing stride. Drill after drill, the brute course of his training had aligned his primal nerves to respond to what was, not what should be. Expectations were wrung still. The ferocity that propelled him was a high art: the unswerving clarity of an existence honed down to the pinpoint frame of the moment.

Mykkael reached the door, shoulder tucked to smash planks with a strength of will that ranged beyond flesh and muscle; and stopped. A hairs-breadth shy of destructive impact, hard breathing, he rocked on his heels and went still. The cold, feral force of his being became leashed. The change was distinct, as he released the taut stream of barqui’ino awareness and reclaimed the dropped thread of his reason.

The panel cracked open. Jussoud’s silver eye dared a cautious glance through, followed by white teeth as he managed a smile of shaken appreciation. ‘Two masters?’ he said. ‘I’d heard of one man who could claim that distinction.’

Mykkael pulled in a deep breath to arrest the jolting flash of adrenaline; his move almost casual as a sleeper just roused, but far too precise to seem ordinary, he braced a hand on the doorframe. The fingers, rock steady the instant before, now jittered with backlash withdrawal. ‘To my shame,’ he admitted.

‘I could guess?’ Jussoud dared. ‘The one who first schooled you was better, in name. But he could not teach the technique you just used to cut short an entrained attack.’

‘Certain steppelanders might suppose that.’ Mykkael stepped back, bent, hissed a breath through shut teeth as he grasped at his spasmed muscle and tried to limber the seized joint of his knee. When that effort failed, he uttered a curse, gave in to necessity and hobbled. He raked up his thrown sword and harness from the floor, and released the jammed swing of the door panel.

Touched sober, Jussoud stepped inside. The trailing sleeve of his robe fluttered as he reached out and freed the stuck knife. He handed the blade back. Then he paused. Cool in the pale silk of his eastern dress, he provoked with no more than his patient stillness.

Mykkael’s sultry glare met his silence like a slap. ‘You want to know, truly? I wouldn’t tell Taskin.’

‘You don’t have to tell me.’ Jussoud’s equable nature stayed limpid with calm. ‘Your privacy is your own. No one else needs to know you. I don’t give any man orders, whether or not he’s hell-bent to destroy himself, body and mind.’

‘I’m a practised survivor.’ But the admission rang bitter. A disjointed backstep saw Mykkael to the wash tub. He caught the rim, now trembling like hazed game, and managed to brace his rocked balance before he fell over. Pinned down throughout an obstinate pause, he stared in fixed quiet through the arrow slit. Then he said, ‘A beggar child wandered into the camp. One of the advanced aspirants was caught unawares. He reacted on reflex, and brained her.’ Mykkael swallowed and stared down at his hands, as though they belonged to a stranger. ‘I could not live with a memory like that. The shame of abandoning tradition was much easier. I broke oath and changed masters, left the first without asking permission for release, then spun lies to gain sworn acceptance with the second. I started again, on false pretext, as a novice. My first defection was found out, of course. Though I shared no secrets between the two do’aa, my name is still sealed with a death threat.’

He turned his head and regarded Jussoud, his pupils distended and black as sky on a starless night. ‘Assassins come sometimes to strike balance for the dishonour of my broken oath. Either they die, or I do. There’s no ground for compromise. Next time you waken a man with my history, call him by name before you toss stones. Much safer, that way. Unless you are addicted to thrill, and like taking an idiot’s risk?’

‘I was bred from wild stock,’ Jussoud reassured him, smiling.

Mykkael burst into sudden laughter. ‘Bright truth, like a spear point,’ he agreed, the idiom taken from Jussoud’s birth tongue. Indeed, every steppes nomad he had ever encountered seemed to court peril as an insolent pastime.

Embarrassed all at once by an unexpected intimacy, Mykkael glanced down at the steam that twined off the filled tub. ‘You want me in there?’

Before Jussoud’s reply, the captain peeled off his smallclothes. Naked, he made a desertman’s sign against sacrilege before he stepped into the bath. ‘That, for a man’s urgent impulse to rut, that bequeaths us the ties to our ancestry.’

Jussoud untied his sash, and hung his silk robe. Stripped to the waist, he settled to work with his remedies. Immersed in warmed water, soothed under his skilled hands, Mykkael slept, slack and trusting as a baby. Later, gently roused and moved to the cot, he listened with half-lidded eyes as the nomad scolded over the scalds on his skin left by the beast drover’s liniment. He slept again, under Anja’s painted eyes, but this time his dreams brought no nightmares: only the soft burr of curses spoken in eastern dialect, and the mingled, sweet scent of medicinal oils.

Roused at length by an officer’s tap at his door, the captain lay flat on his back and heard through the brisk list of the morning’s reports. Jussoud tucked his knee into a support wrap of clean linen, then sewed the ends taut with silk thread. ‘No more stupid doctoring with unguent for camels!’ he snapped as he packed up his needle.

Mykkael flicked one finger, curt signal to excuse his diligent officer. Then he cocked himself up on one elbow, the damp ends of his hair slicked above the eased muscles of his shoulders. ‘Thank you for your care of me,’ he said, his gratitude left unadorned.

Jussoud towelled the excess oil off his forearms, washed his hands, then recovered his robe and adjusted the fall of his waist-length braid. ‘I’ll consider myself thanked if and when you respect yourself enough to spare that knee from further trauma.’

‘What price, for the life of King Isendon’s daughter?’ Mykkael stated as he rolled on to his feet.

Jussoud paused, his hands burdened as he stoppered his oil jars and loaded them back in his basket. ‘You know she’s in danger.’

Mykkael nodded, unwilling to divulge the uncanny chill that witch thoughts had strung through his gut. ‘When you see Taskin to account for my treatment—yes, he gave such orders! Don’t insult that man’s competence with denials. When you call on the tyrant to give him your gleanings, could you pass on the gist of my officer’s report?’

Granted the willing assent he expected, Mykkael pawed into a clothes chest for a fresh pair of breeches and clean shirt. He dressed, still speaking, despite the discordant clamour of voices arisen in the downstairs wardroom. ‘Relate the details you recall, as you wish. But the particulars I insist on are these: the Falls Gate seeress was murdered by drowning. The flower girl who sought her fortune knows nothing. My informers drew blanks. The streets show no sign of suspect activity.’ He moved to the cot, retrieved mud-crusted boots. ‘I have three lines of inquiry yet to pursue, and one more point I plan to tell Taskin in person. He can expect me. I’ll be at the Highgate to meet him in three hours.’

The argument below subsided to grumbles, cut by the thump of someone’s feet, climbing the inside stairwell. Mykkael registered this as his fingers threaded the buckle that fastened his sword harness. Armed, now all business, he rebounded off his good leg, hooked the satchel of remedies from his path, and relinquished the obstruction into Jussoud’s startled hands.

That forthright flow of urgency saw the captain through the doorway, a moving flicker of pale shirt doused into the shadow beyond.

What happened next, no man saw.

Jussoud’s more orderly exit followed at Mykkael’s heels. Bearing satchel and basket, the nomad began his descent of the spiral stair. He gained no more warning than a sigh of stirred air, then an indistinct sense of blurred movement. At the next step, he blundered into the falling, limp bulk of a sandy-haired palace guardsman. The wretch was unconscious. His unstrung frame crashlanded into Jussoud’s dumbfounded embrace. The healer staggered. Half turned to save his precious oil jars from smashing against the stone wall, he narrowly managed to salvage his balance and sit with the dropped body sprawled in his arms.

‘Jussoud, he’s not harmed!’ Mykkael assured him from below. Unrepentant, he spoke in low-voiced eastern dialect, as direct and brutal an admission of fact that his pre-emptive strike was deliberate.

‘I’ll have to tell Taskin,’ the masseur warned, also using his native language.

‘Your loyalty demands that,’ Mykkael agreed. He stood his ground, all brazen, cold nerve, and sustained Jussoud’s glare without flinching. ‘Serve as my witness with the same honesty. You received my report, and heard out my intentions before this palace guardsman made his way over my threshold. Please see the fellow is properly cared for. My men downstairs will assist you. They’ll dispatch a litter, as needed, to bear him in comfort through Highgate.’

Under his healer’s questing touch, Jussoud felt the vigorous signs of an angry victim starting to rouse. ‘I will pray to my gods that you are a man who knows the full measure of trouble you stir. Little good comes of taunting the tiger.’

Mykkael spun without words. His step in departure made not a sound, a rare feat for a man who was crippled.

Jussoud sighed. As uneasy as though he had just sampled poison, he restrained the stunned guardsman’s thrashing. He could not regret leaving the captain at large. No safe method existed to detain Mykkael. As a killer, the man was chilling, for his speed and his unrivalled competence. He might be the linchpin the crown required to save Sessalie’s princess from danger. Yet if the contrary proved true: if the desert-bred was a traitor immersed in a covert conspiracy, the game piece haplessly caught in his path must survive to bear Taskin fair warning.

Prince Kailen suffered his punishing hangover immersed in his bath, the soaked hair at his nape crushed against the bronze rim, where he rested his pounding skull. Tendrils of scented steam rose about him, running sweat in rivulets down a complexion tinged greenish from nausea. When the crisp knock rattled the chamber door, Kailen whispered a curse. A crease stitched the corners of his shut eyes. Though he was in a sorry state to receive, the noise pained him worse than the prospect of unwanted company.

A dispirited flick of his Highness’s finger dispatched his hovering valet.

The manservant deferred to the prince’s condition. He moved on stockinged feet, and admitted the caller with hands that did their utmost to muffle the strident plink of the latch.

Cool air winnowed in. The draught puckered Kailen’s flushed skin, bearing the fashionable hyacinth perfume used by Devall’s court lackeys.

The Crown Prince of Sessalie decided his head ached too much to endure any lowlander’s penchant for ceremony. ‘The heir apparent of Devall may enter, as he pleases.’

The draught became a breeze as several bodies filed in.

Kailen cracked open bloodshot eyes. Through parted lashes, he sorted the blurred but sparkling impression of Devall’s maroon and gold livery. To the one pricked by the costly glimmer of rubies, he said, ‘They haven’t found any sign of her, yet. Not even that busy cur of a desert-bred, though he’s got the whole lower garrison scouring the town. All the inquiries they’ve run down, every whisper they’ve culled from the streetside gossip has drawn nothing but blanks.’

The Prince of Devall looked haggard, as though he, too, had not slept through the night. Composed by the grace of iron will and state poise, he inclined his groomed head to request the dismissal of the valet. ‘Might we speak of this privately?’

The fair royal in the bath tub shrugged streaming shoulders, then winced as his headache rebelled. He said testily, ‘What’s to hide? Every servant at court knows the details already. The kitchen maids bring back the lower town gossip on their return from the market.’

‘Even so,’ said the High Prince of Devall, his consonants considerately muted. ‘My words, and yours, bear more weight than a commoner’s.’ He waited, smiling in gracious tolerance, until the red-faced valet accepted the hint, and bowed himself out of the chamber.

The Crown Prince of Sessalie surveyed his immaculate counterpart, his inflamed eyes a troubled china blue, and his clenched fists couched in soap suds. ‘That’s all I know, in my servant’s hearing, or out of it. Nobody has a clue where my sister has gone, or what fate may have befallen her. We have no enemies, and no political significance to draw the interest of other nations. No one could have spirited her away without trace! Anja’s much too resourceful to pack up her nerve and submit. It’s not canny, to suppose she could have been kidnapped. Not in front of the nosy eyes of Sessalie’s inbred society.’

‘For myself, I prefer not to stand on presumption.’ The High Prince of Devall gave way to his frustration and paced, fastidiously skirting the puddles splashed on the marble-tiled floor. ‘Lady Shai is the princess’s closest confidante. Some change in habit, or a detail of Anja’s dress or mood may have caught her notice. An astute line of inquiry might prompt her recall. I wish, very much, to pay a call on her. Yet I need you along with me to observe propriety, do I not? Since the lady’s a maiden, titled and wealthy, and not yet promised by handfast?’

Given Kailen’s enervated sigh, the high prince’s manner turned pejorative. ‘You must come as I ask! I will not risk the least insult to Anja, or lend your court the mistaken impression that I would flatter another young woman with a visit in private company’

‘As if the sour opinion of Sessalie’s matrons could tarnish Devall’s reputation!’ Kailen managed a lame grin. ‘That’s laughable.’

The heir apparent stopped, his regard sharpened by a turbulent mix of sympathy and censure. ‘Her Grace is your sister, and the joy of her father’s old age. She is also the paragon of wit and good character I have chosen as our future queen. For my sake, and for the pride of my realm, you will honour her by maintaining appropriate form.’

‘Well then,’ Kailen sighed, his puckered fingers clenched on the tub rim as he arose, streaming soap froth in a cascade down lean flanks, ‘since I’m still too sotted to fasten my buttons, and you’ve excused my valet, your servants can kindly assist with my dress.’

Informally clad in his loose, white shirt, his sword harness and a labourer’s knee-length trousers, Mykkael threaded a determined course through the late-morning crush in the streets. Though the thoroughfares under Middlegate were narrow, the traffic parted before him. Passersby always stared at his back, no matter what hour he passed. Even lacking his blazoned surcoat, he drew notice, surrounded by fair northern heads and pale skin.

He met that difference straight on, and nodded a civil greeting to the matrons out shopping with cloth-covered baskets. He asked the foot traffic to pause, allowing the straining mules of an ale dray smooth passage as they toiled uptown. By the public well, he caught the scruff of a sprinting urchin to spare an aged man with a cane.

The oldster’s middle-aged daughter paused to thank him, then inquired after the princess. Mykkael gave his apology, said he had no news, then slipped like a moving shadow through the jostling press of women drawing water from the cistern. He kept a listening ear tuned to the snatches of talk that surrounded him: the idle speculation on bets for the summer game of horse wickets; complaints exchanged by servants concerning the habits of greatfolk; the chatter of young girls on the virtues of suitors; the irritation of a mother, scolding an unruly child. At random, Mykkael tracked the patterns of life embedded in Sessalie’s populace.

Princess Anja’s disappearance spun a mournful thread though the weave of workaday industry.

Mykkael let that tension thrum across his tuned instincts. Alert as a predator sounding for prey, he paused to sip a dipper of water in the shade, and overheard the Middlegate laundresses sharing news of a lost cat. His dark hand was seen as he hung the tin cup.

‘Captain!’ someone said, startled. Skirts swirled back as the women parted to give him space.

Mykkael nodded politely. Like most sheltered northerners, these folk met his glance with reluctance. If they had stopped challenging the authority he had never been seen to misuse, their hidebound tradition would not yet embrace the upset of a foreigner holding crown rank. Today, his appearance provoked a mixed reaction. While some folk still eyed him with outright distrust, or turned their shoulders to ward off ill luck, others met his presence with anguished appeal, as though the looming threat of a crisis forced them to a grudging trust. Now, his hardened experience offered them hope, that he might plumb their formless, uncivilized fears and retrieve their lost princess from jeopardy.

Mykkael surveyed faces, but found nothing suspicious. No furtive lurker dodged into the shadows. The crowd stayed innocuous. Nothing more than clean sun warmed the hilt of the longsword sheathed at his back. Only daylight nicked coloured fire through the women’s drop-glass earrings. To the bold matrons who approached him with questions, he answered: no, he had no further news of the princess; very sorry.

The captain moved on through the racketing din of Coopers’ Lane, where apprentices pounded iron hoops on to barrels. His step scattered a racing gaggle of children trying to catch a loose chicken. At due length, he reached the cool quiet of the gabled houses on Fane Street.

The physician lived on the corner, in a tidy two-storey dwelling with geraniums under the windows. Mykkael dodged an errand boy, hiked his strapped knee over the kerb, and chimed the brass bell by the entry.

A maidservant admitted him with punctilious courtesy and ushered him into a drawing room that smelled of waxed wood, and the musty antiquity breathed from the wool of a threadbare Mantlan carpet. Mykkael stood, rather than risk the pearl-inlaid chairs to the weapon slung from his harness. Hands linked at ease, he admired the animal figurines of carved ivory, then the ebony chests brought from the far south, with their corners weighted with tassels knotted from spun-brass wire.

The physician had been a well-travelled scholar, before he retired to Sessalie.

He entered as he always did, a plump, pink man with a myopic blink who moved as though shot from a bow. His clinical stare measured his visitor’s stance, then softened to smiling welcome. ‘Mykkael! You’re leg’s a bit better, today, is it not?’

The captain gave credit for that with his usual astringent humour. ‘Jussoud’s good work, not the bed rest your sawbones assistant prescribed me.’

‘Cafferty meant well,’ the physician apologized. ‘That’s his way of saying we don’t have a curative treatment.’ He glanced down, noticed his dripping hands, and sighed for the oversight that invariably made him neglect the use of a towel.

‘Your seeress drowned,’ he ran on, ‘though you know that already. My report would have reached you at daybreak. More questions? Ask quickly’ He darted a glance sideways. ‘I have a client waiting. A first pregnancy, bless her. She’s perched on the stool half unclothed, anxious and not at all comfortable.’

Mykkael nodded. ‘Quick, then. The apothecary agreed with your evaluation, but also concluded the old woman wasn’t poisoned.’

The physician stopped, caught the nearest carved chair, then sat down at the glass-topped table and folded his hands. ‘Oh dear. That’s not what we expected to hear.’ His brow furrowed under the combed fringe of his hair, gently faded to ginger and salt. ‘You now have a vexing mystery to solve.’

Mykkael raised his eyebrows. ‘Say on?’

The plight of his nervous client forgotten, the physician ticked off points on his fingers. ‘She drowned. In the moat. Lungs were sodden with water tinged green with algae. But she did not fall in while she was still conscious. She had long nails. None was broken, or dirt-caked. I saw no evidence that she ever attempted to claw her way up the bank or cling to the slime-coated rock of the wall.’

‘She could not swim?’ Mykkael suggested. ‘Sometimes panic sends that sort straight down.’

The physician blinked. ‘They always struggle. This one’s clothes were not torn or disarrayed. And she swallowed no water. Drownings do that, as they flounder.’ He paused to rub at his temples, as though the fraught pressure of his fingers might ease the troublesome bent of his thoughts. ‘Her stomach was empty, except for a pauper’s dinner of beans and bread.’ Silent a moment, he finally looked up, his mild face taut with sobriety. ‘Captain, I’m loath to be first to suggest this, but—’

Mykkael voiced the horror without hesitation. ‘Sorcerers can steal the mind, I have seen. Their victims are often reft of intelligence. A woman touched so might fall into the moat. She would not struggle, or swim, or cry out.’

The stout man at the table heaved an unhappy sigh. ‘She would simply breathe in cold water on reflex, unaware of the fact as it killed her.’

‘Thank you,’ said Mykkael. ‘I’m sorry to say you’ve confirmed my suspicions. At least the crown treasury will compensate you for the unpleasant service. The keep bursar will deliver your fee, at my order.’

Pale with distress, the physician stood up. ‘Oh dear. You think that mad seeress knew something about the princess’s disappearance?’

‘I heard nothing about that, and neither have you!’ Mykkael snapped. ‘Where a sorcerer hunts, that is wisest.’ On swift afterthought, he added, ‘Does the apothecary suspect?’

‘Master Beyjall?’ The physician thought carefully. ‘If he does, he stayed close-mouthed about it.’

‘The man learned his trade in the Cultwaen Highlands,’ Mykkael said, all at once pressed to urgency. Time fleeted past, while an unseen enemy moved apace. ‘Beyjall should have seen a sorcerer’s workings before this. He likely knows not to speak of such things and seed fear that might draw arcane notice. Listen to me. If you sense any creeping unease, or have the unsettled feeling you’re being watched, go and ask the apothecary for a candle to burn after dark. If he doesn’t understand what that means, or if he says he can’t help, go to my personal quarters in the keep. Bring him along with you, and both of you stay there until I come back. Can you do that?’

No coward, the physician straightened stout shoulders. ‘You have my promise. I’ll see you out. Wherever you’re going, I wish you bright guidance. I’ll say this also. If King Isendon doesn’t appreciate what you risk on behalf of his daughter, I do. We are fortunate to have you in charge of the garrison. Warded candle or not, I shall pray on my knees for your safety.’

‘Pray on your knees for your own,’ Mykkael snapped, then made his way out to the street.

The physician watched him go, professionally saddened by the halt in that fluid, athletic step. He stayed by the door until Mykkael’s white shirt rounded the sunlit corner, leaving behind an uneasy stillness, astringent with the breeze riffling down off the glaciers.

VII. Noontide

MIDDAY SAW THE COURT LADIES RETIRED TO THE SANCTUARY TO HOLD VIGIL FOR PRINCESS ANJA. THE MARBLE-FACED BUILDING, WITH ITS queer, triangular portals and gold spires, crowned the highest point in the city. From the pinnacle at the stairhead, the view encompassed the three tiers of the walls, with the banners over the Highgate streaming like snippets of scarlet yarn in the breeze. Above, the sky hung like a bowl, the horizon notched by the serried ramparts of the peaks, dazzling under the sunlight.

‘There, do you see them?’ Sweating out the dregs of his binge, his face ashen from the rigorous ascent, Prince Kailen pointed from his perch on the paw of the stone lion flanking the Sanctuary’s entry. ‘Kerries will pluck mountain sheep off the high cliffs. You can tell where they nest by the middens of bones piled under the ledges.’

Far off, two pairs of black specks circled, the outstretched curve of their wings delicate as pen strokes in the clear air.

‘They don’t threaten cattle?’ Devall’s heir apparent leaned on the lion’s tail, a touch breathless in his neat velvet. His retinue of servants, strung out below, still laboured to climb the steep stair.

‘They can.’ Eyes shut, since the stabbing brilliance played havoc with his pounding hangover, Kailen added, ‘For centuries, the guard’s archers fare out every spring to hunt down the fledgling young. Adults who lair in the close peaks are poisoned. Naught can be done with the mated pairs flocked in the rookeries over Hell’s Chasm. The country’s too rough to clean the nests out, so we’ll never be rid of the scourge.’

‘No boon to invaders,’ the Prince of Devall observed. He peered into the shadowed interior of the Sanctuary where lighted candles flickered like stars. ‘How long, before your court ladies retire?’

Kailen yawned. ‘Not long.’ He settled his broad shoulders against the lion’s stone mane in a vain effort to ease his discomfort. ‘The priest and priestess lead the prayers at midnight and noon. There, can you hear? They are ending the ritual.’

Inside, echoing under the cavernous vault, a male speaker cried praise to the powers above. Voices murmured in answer. Then the boys’ choir chanted the final verses pleading for intercession. The singing rang out with a purity to scald human heartstrings, the liquid-glass harmony braided into the spruce-scented hush of high altitude.

The Prince of Devall inhaled the wafted perfume of the incense, ringed fingers tapping his knee. While the first of his puffing lackeys arrived, he bent his hawk’s survey downwards. ‘Merciful grace! In such close-knit quarters, how can one woman whose face is well known vanish without leaving a trace?’

‘The king’s men will find her. They must!’ Kailen cradled his aching head, the heart of the realm he would one day inherit spread below like a model in miniature. The sun-washed tableau seemed peaceful as ever.

Only small details bespoke the grave trouble slipped in through the well-guarded gates. Taskin’s patrols came and went, double-file rows of neat lancers threading through the carriage traffic in the broad avenues above Highgate. In the queen’s formal gardens, amid lawns like set emeralds, two dozen tiny surcoated figures enacted the midday change of the guard.

The sun, angle shifting, sparkled off the polished globe of a flag spire. The slate and lead roofs of the palace precinct dropped in gabled steps downwards, in cool contrast to the terracotta tile of the merchants’ mansions, crowded in rows like boxed gingerbread above the arched turrets of Middlegate. There, the tree-lined streets ran like seams in patchwork, jammed by the colours of private house guards helping to search for the princess. Their industry seethed past the courtyard gardens, scattered like squares of dropped silk, and stitched with rosettes where the flowering shrubs adorned the pillared gazebos.

Farthest down, hemmed by the jagged embrasures of stone battlements, the lower town hugged the slope like a rickle of frayed burlap, the roofs there a welter of weathered thatch, and craftsmen’s sheds shingled with pine shakes. Mykkael’s garrison troops kept their watch on the outermost walls, the men reduced as toys, bearing pins and needles for weaponry.

Beyond spread the living panorama that was Sessalie, a terraced array of grain fields and pastureland carved into the sides of the vale, joined down the middle by the white tumble of the river. On the east bank, snagged by the planks of the footbridges, the trade road snaked towards the lowcountry.

The gong that signalled the close of the vigil sounded inside the Sanctuary Devall’s laggard retinue scrambled clear of the stair, while the priest and priestess filed out, bearing the staff with the triangle representing the trinity. After them, the veiled acolytes bore the symbolic fire in a golden pan lined with coals.

Prince Kailen clambered down from the lion’s stone leg, astute enough to pay the recessional a semblance of decorous respect.

Presently the court ladies emerged, the deep shade of the Sanctuary disgorging the sparkle of jewelled combs as they slipped off their white veils in the sunlight.

‘There’s Shai.’ The crown prince moved in with athletic grace, despite his wasted condition. He breasted the flower-petal milling of skirts, bestowing kind words and sincere apologies, while the High Prince of Devall trailed in his wake, drawing a ripple of admiring glances.

The woman they sought was slender and retiring, clad in a shimmering bodice of roped pearls and a dress the shade of spring irises. She had paused by the entry, perhaps to commiserate, surrounded by a cluster of merchants’ wives, who paraded their wealth in a peacock display of jewels and stylish importance.

For royalty, they gave ground with flattering speed. Swallowed into the pack, Crown Prince Kailen adroitly deflected their courteous murmurs of sympathy. ‘Pray excuse us, we came to seek cousin Shai.’

Just as adept, Devall’s heir apparent shed their female fawning with mannered good grace. As Shai turned her head, he captured her hand, his polished expression attentive and grave as he measured her burden of grief.

At close quarters, the famous violet eyes were inflamed, and the lily complexion expertly powdered to mask over traces of crying.

‘Forgive me, Lady Shai,’ the High Prince of Devall apologized. ‘Our intrusion is scarcely a kindness, I realize. But is there a place nearby for us to retire to? Your cousin and I would appreciate the chance to address you privately’

Shai touched her trembling fingertips to her lips. ‘Not bad news?’ Her eyes brimmed. ‘You haven’t brought tragic word of the princess?’

Hemmed in by the close press of women, and wary of Bertarra’s peremptory inquiry from the sidelines, Prince Kailen interjected, ‘Shai, no. We have no ill news. No word at all, in sad fact. Taskin’s men haven’t found any trace of my sister.’

‘That’s why we need you.’ The High Prince of Devall shifted his protective grip to Shai’s arm and drew her into the shelter of his company.

Prince Kailen took station on her other side. ‘The Sanctuary has a walled garden nearby, where the priesthood retire for contemplation.’

‘The garden should do nicely. Shall we go?’ The Prince of Devall inclined his head in salute to the hovering ladies. Then he smiled and moved Shai on through the press by the sovereign grace of his kindness.

In dappled shade, soothed by a natural spring that burbled from the flank of the mountain, the High Prince of Devall set Shai lightly down. He stood, Prince Kailen beside him, while she arranged the fall of her skirts over a marble bench. Her small hands flickered with filigree rings set with moonstone and amethyst. Neat as a doll, she could not have been more unlike the princess who was her friend and close confidante.

Where Anja was diminutively tough and outspoken, her frame slim as a boy’s from her manic delight in racing King Isendon’s blood horseflesh, Shai was like elegant fine china. She preferred her petticoats hemmed in thread lace, and her sleeves sewn with embroidered ribbons.

Once settled, she raised her beautiful eyes. ‘I’ve already told Taskin everything I know, which is nothing.’ She regarded the princes, her oval face drawn, and her intelligent, domed brow faintly lined with exasperation. ‘Her Grace scarcely spoke to me since your Highness of Devall’s arrival. Whatever thoughts she had on her mind, she had little opportunity to share them.’

The heir apparent knelt, his face level with hers. ‘Did the princess not seek your opinion concerning the clothes she would wear for the banquet?’

‘Powers, no!’ Shai set the back of her hand to her mouth and stifled a small burst of laughter. ‘That’s a detail she would have left to her handmaid. Writing poetry interested her Grace far more than fussing over her wardrobe. But even if that had not been the case, you must realize, she had no time!’

When Devall looked blank, Prince Kailen propped his back against a nearby beech tree and explained. ‘Since our mother Queen Anjoulie died, my sister has held the keys to the palace.’

‘She manages the staff,’ Shai went on, the veil she had worn in the Sanctuary caught up and wrung between her tense fingers. ‘For years, her Grace has made the decisions that run the royal household. The kitchen defers to her wishes. Visiting royalty meant stock must be slaughtered, with additional provisions bought in from the countryside, and perhaps a dozen village girls hired to help handle the chores and the linen.’

The High Prince of Devall absorbed this, then stated, ‘Could such women have insinuated themselves in the palace, then acted in covert conspiracy?’

‘Highness, no! They are no more than unskilled children.’ Shai’s tremulous smile came and went as she added, ‘The oldest of them is barely fourteen years of age. The girls make up beds, and sweep cobwebs from corners the older drudges can’t reach. The strongest ones haul the hot water for the laundresses, and probably stoke the fires under the cauldrons that scald your evening bath water.’

Prince Kailen agreed that the hirelings posed Anja no threat. ‘The girls are the offspring of farmers known back to the seventh generation. They don’t read or write. I doubt any one of them has travelled a step past the riverfront market, and Taskin himself runs the inquiry to make sure they are of good character.’

The heir apparent of Devall frowned and changed tack. ‘What about Princess Anja? Lady Shai, you know her, none better. Did she show no sign of tension, no change in habits?’

‘By glory, you men!’ Shai regarded her paired escort in amazement. ‘Princess Anja is madly in love! Every habit she had has been thrown topsyturvy, which left every one of us guessing.’

‘What about make-up?’ the foreign prince pressed. ‘Did her Grace use more powder or eye paint than usual, perhaps to mask signs of strain?’

‘Of course she would, silly! For excitement, not strain!’ Shai dealt the lowcountry prince’s wrist a light slap with her veil, as though he were a dense-witted brother. ‘Any maiden offered a match such as yours would take pains to maintain her best looks. Particularly her Grace, who never cared if she freckled from too much sun, or scratched her skin in the brambles.’

The Prince of Devall looked down, perhaps abashed, his ringed hands clasped in tight anguish. ‘I want her back, safe! You must know, she is dear to me. Scrapes and freckles notwithstanding, I love her for her sharp wits, and her reckless humour, and for the sterling kindness that makes Sessalie’s people adore her.’ He glanced up, his features drawn to wounded entreaty. ‘I could search my whole life and not take a finer woman to wife, or bring home a stronger queen for my realm. I need Anja because she has captured my heart, until I could look at no other.’

Shai touched her crushed veil to her lips; her violet eyes welled with tears. ‘Oh, your Highness, I see how you cherish her. Don’t you think I would give anything to restore her Grace to your side?’ Shoulders bowed, she struggled to master her grief. ‘Nothing I know could have caused the princess to leave us. Beyond any doubt, she must be in the hands of someone who seeks Sessalie’s ruin.’

‘You didn’t notice anything amiss?’ Prince Kailen pleaded, low-voiced and equally desperate. ‘Anything, Shai, no matter how small. That one little detail might hold the clue to safeguard the princess’s life.’

As the maiden shook her head in distress, the High Prince of Devall entreated, ‘Think carefully, lady. You may not be aware, but last night, one of the palace drudges was found dead, with no mark on her of natural causes.’

Shai widened filled eyes. ‘Mercy on that poor woman, and upon all of us, for our failure. I’ve told Taskin I know nothing again and again!’

Torn raw, Shai appealed to Prince Kailen. ‘Your Highness of Sessalie, I scarcely saw her Grace more than a moment, and only from a distance since the Prince of Devall rode with his train through our gates! On that hour, the princess was giddy, even breathless with excitement. I swear by every bright power above, she could not have suspected the least shadow of danger. She had but one thought, one dream, on her mind. That guiding star was the name of his Highness of Devall, who came to lay claim to her hand!’

‘That’s quite enough!’ cracked an intrusive aged voice. ‘Your Highnesses, yes! Both of you.’ A stick-thin old matron invaded the grotto, fierce carriage as upright as any commander laying into brash recruits.

‘The Duchess of Phail,’ Prince Kailen murmured, a wry curve to his lips. ‘Don’t let her fool you. She’s a treasure with steel principles, and an unbending penchant for kindness. Used to rescue the frogs I brought home in my pockets, and box the ears of the pages if she caught them at bullying spiders.’

The elderly woman bore in, her porcelain-fine frame stiff with outrage. ‘Can’t you rude brutes see a thing with young eyes? Lady Shai is already devastated. Your badgering questions just add to her heartbreak without helping the princess one bit.’

‘Lady Phail, we are going,’ Prince Kailen said, his hands raised in abject surrender. ‘Trust me, we respect Lady Shai and have no desire to savage her feelings.’

Lady Phail gave a snort through her patrician nose. ‘Well, that broth of tears has already been spilled!’

Her disgusted glance measured one prince, then the other, as though she debated which of the pair most deserved to be thrashed with her cane. In the end, Shai’s distress put an end to debate, inept male minds not being wont to give ground for any wise woman’s sensibilities. Lady Phail ploughed straight on past, clasped her frail arms over the weeping woman’s bowed shoulders, and delivered a glare like a lioness.

‘Get along, boys! You’re making things that much worse with your gawping.’

Hazed past the finesse of his lowcountry manners, the High Prince of Devall bowed and beat a retreat. Kailen, no fool, snatched his sleeve as he turned, and deflected his course down a bypath that wound through the shrubbery. The tactic was timely. Past the screening of leaves, a bouquet of coloured silk flashed in the midday sunshine. Bertarra’s carping rose loudest over the chorus as the other court ladies descended to console Lady Shai.

The heir apparent of Devall glanced over his shoulder in bemused appreciation. ‘Your sister rules that shark pack of harpies?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Kailen grinned. ‘With all of our mother’s cast-iron charm.’ As though his sore head had begun to relent, his blue eyes brightened with fond memory. ‘Bertarra’s scared green of her.’

‘Well, I see how your sister acquired her strong will.’ Broken out of the fringing border of evergreen, the Prince of Devall approached the stone arch leading back to the sanctuary courtyard. ‘We’re no closer to finding where Anja might be.’

‘Well, you’ve satisfied one point,’ said Kailen, dispirited. ‘Lady Shai doesn’t know anything.’

‘That,’ said the high prince, ‘or else she’s a consummate actress.’

‘Lady Shai?’ Prince Kailen glanced sideways in unbridled surprise. ‘She’s intelligent, and no fool. But she’s never dissembled, not once in her life.’

The gate’s shadow fell over them. Gloom darkened the heir apparent’s maroon velvet to black, and muted the shine of his rubies and gold studs. His profile, trained forward, showed no expression.

‘The suspicion’s unfounded,’ insisted the crown prince. ‘When my sister played pranks, it was always Shai’s face that got her Grace into trouble.’

‘Not this time, to our sorrow.’ The heir apparent of Devall stalked towards the steep stair and began his descent, his fierce steps ringing on the carved granite. ‘You do realize, I will find her Grace, no matter the means or the cost. If an enemy has marked her out for a target, I shall not rest until they are smoked out. Your realm’s honour and mine are as one in this matter. As Devall’s High Prince, I promise this much: when we catch the man who has dared to lay hands on my beloved, I will see him sentenced to the ugliest death allotted by law in my realm.’

By the change in the watch, Commander Taskin had questioned the wine steward’s boys and ascertained that none had seen the sorcerer’s mark on the broom closet. The bottled vintage brought upstairs for the feast had been fetched in the late afternoon the day prior. No one but the drudge who swept and mopped tables had occasion to visit the cellars during the evening. The old woman who was dead of an unknown cause, since the king’s most learned physician had encountered no proof of a poisoning.

The patrols ridden out to search by the river had lamed a good horse, finding nothing. By now, any trail would be chopped to muck, since the seneschal’s move to involve the crown council had posted an official note of reward. Brash adventurers from all walks of life scoured the brush, and talk of a scandal ran rampant. Princess Anja’s plight was bandied by drunks in the taverns, while half of the Middlegate merchants tied black streamers to their doors, given over to premature mourning.

Taskin, short of sleep, weighed out his next options. He dreaded to face another interview with the king, with nothing conclusive in hand. The prospect of forcing a house-to-house search raised his temper to an edge that his officers knew not to cross. They shouldered the orders he saw fit to dispatch, and assigned men to the tasks without grumbling.

Jussoud sensed the subdued atmosphere in the palace wardroom upon his delayed return from his morning call at the garrison. The commander, he learned, had sent the day sergeant to grill the gate watch for the third time.

‘Bright powers, they saw nothing,’ the wizened old servant who polished the parade armour confided. Evidently the gallery above was not occupied, which loosened his garrulous tongue. He spat on his rag, dipped up more grit, and talked, while the helm in his hands acquired the high shine expected of guards in the palace precinct. ‘Last night was a botch-up. All those carriages, coming and going, filled with greatfolk, and each one with their grooms and footmen and lackeys? Can’t keep tight security on the occasion of a royal feast. Anybody forewarned and determined could have slipped in through Highgate unremarked.’

Jussoud set down his burden of remedies, hot and out of sorts from his uphill trek through unusually crowded streets. ‘Where can I find the commander?’

‘Himself?’ The servant returned a glance, bird-bright with sympathy. ‘He’s up the east tower with Dedorth’s seeing glass. You think you’re going up there?’ The oldster pursed his lips in a silent whistle. ‘Brave man. Tread softly, you hear? Last I saw, our commander was in a fit state to spit nails.’

Dedorth’s glass, at that moment, was trained on the fine figures cut by two princes, descending the steep avenue of stairs leading down from the Sanctuary Taskin addressed the officer who stood in attendance without shifting his eye from his vantage. ‘I want a watch set to guard Lady Shai. Also get two more reliable men and assign them to stay with the crown prince. Right now, soldier! As you go, tell the sergeant at large in the wardroom I plan to be down directly’

‘My lord.’ The officer strode off down the steep, spiralled stair, armour scraping the stone wall as he gripped the worn handrail. His footsteps, descending, faded with distance, then subsided to a whisper of echoes.

Alone in the observatory’s stifling heat, as the noon sun beat on the bronze cupola, Taskin swung the seeing glass on its tripod stand. Its cut circle of view swooped over the alpine meadows, then the scrub forests that clothed the rock pinnacles under the glare of the snow line. He scanned the folds of the glens, then the deep, tumbled dells with the leaping, white streamers of waterfalls. Deer moved at their browsing, tails switching flies; hunting peregrines traced their lazy spirals on outstretched slate wings. A mother bear drowsed near her gambolling cubs. Of human activity, he found none.

The trade road, repeatedly quartered, had yielded nothing out of the ordinary, and Dedorth, closely questioned, had been little use, immersed through the night in his vacuous habit of stargazing. The old scholar had not learned of the upset at court until his sleepy servant had fetched up his breakfast at sunrise.

By then, Princess Anja had been over ten hours gone.

Taskin laced frustrated fingers over the bronze tube of the glass. His circling thoughts yielded no fresh ideas; only rammed headlong against his enraging helplessness. Accustomed to direct action, and to successes accomplished through competence, the Commander of the Guard chafed himself raw. Scores of men at his fingertips, and an open note on the king’s treasury, and yet, he could find no lead, no clear-cut outlet to pursue.

King Isendon’s anguish tore at the heart. Taskin fumed, empty-handed, stung to empathy each time he encountered his own daughter, secure with his grandchild at home. Never before this had the quiet realm of Sessalie been rocked to the frightening rim of instability. The very foundation underpinning his life seemed transformed overnight to the tremulous fragility of cobwebs. Nor had the gossip of merchants and farmwives ever carried such a poisonous overtone of potentially treasonous threat.

The bitter sense gnawed him that he dispatched the king’s horsemen over black ice, with no point of access to plumb the deep current that endangered the firm ground under their feet.

‘Powers!’ Taskin whispered, prisoned by the close air, with its bookish must of dried ink and unswept cobwebs, ‘let me not fail in my duty to Isendon, to keep his two offspring from harm.’

Far below, the latch on the outer door clanged. A deliberate tread entered the stairwell. Taskin marked the step as Jussoud’s, the muted slap of woven rush sandals distinct from the hobnailed soles of his guardsmen.

Loath to be caught in maudlin vulnerability, the commander spun the glass and reviewed the vigilance of the garrison watch on the crenels of the lower battlements. He found no man slack at his post, under Mykkael, which lent him no target upon which to vent his trapped anger when Jussoud reached the observatory.

Unmoving, his attention still trained through the glass, Taskin opened at once with a reprimand. ‘You are late, by two hours.’

Jussoud leaned on the door jamb, his empty hands clasped. His reply held slight breathlessness from his climb, but no surprised note of rancour. ‘If you’ve been at the glass since the midday gong, you’ll have seen the press, above Middlegate.’

‘I need not see, to imagine,’ Taskin answered, now stubbornly combing the warren of streets by the Falls Gate. ‘The seneschal’s been very busy, all morning, setting stamps upon royal requisitions.’

‘So I observed,’ said Jussoud. ‘Every man with a grandsire’s rusty sword is abroad, seeking reward gold and adventure. They’ll be clouding your evidence.’

‘If we had any,’ Taskin snapped, suddenly tired of watching the anthill seethe of the commons. ‘Two leads, both of them slipped through our fingers. A dead drudge and a drowned seeress. The loose talk claims Mysh kael killed them. Did you listen?’

‘To what purpose?’ Jussoud sighed. ‘Could his talents enable a sorcerer’s work? I don’t know. Logic argues the desert-bred’s not such a fool. Capable of setting a death bane, or not, why should a man with his training strike to kill in a way that would cause a sensation? As for the seeress, he had been in the moat. I saw his damp clothes cast off on the floor where he left them. For a murderer who supposedly drowned an old woman, he had taken no trouble to hide the incriminating evidence.’

Taskin lifted his head, his regard no less ruthlessly focused as he abandoned the seeing glass. ‘Mysh kael’s true to his oath to the crown, you believe.’

‘If I had to set trust in surface appearances,’ Jussoud admitted, reluctant, ‘the debate could be carried both ways.’

‘I sent down a lancer to bring the man in. He is also delayed, by now well beyond the grace of a plausible excuse.’ Taskin straightened, all business. ‘Do you know what became of him?’

Jussoud stared back, his grey eyes unblinking. ‘He waylaid Mykkael in a darkened stairwell.’

‘Fool.’ The commander’s long fingers tightened on the seeing glass, sole sign of his inward distress. ‘He’s alive to regret?’

The healer nodded. ‘Unharmed, and unmarked, in fact. Mykkael stopped him cold with a blow that stunned the nerves that govern involuntary reflex. Then he used direct pressure and cut off the blood flow through the arteries to the brain only long enough to drop your guardsman unconscious. I find that sort of efficiency chilling, a precision far beyond any nightmare I could imagine.’

‘Barqui’ino drill alters the synapses of the mind.’ Taskin stepped back, leaned against the stone wall, while the pigeons cooed in liquid murmurs from their roosts in the eaves overhead. ‘Then you’ve seen this desertman use skills that can kill, and leave no telltale bruise on the corpse.’

Jussoud said nothing. His sallow skin shone with sweat in the spilled glare of sun off the sills of the casements.

‘Where is my guardsman?’ Taskin said, his probe delicate.

‘On his feet, under orders, as far as I know still searching the town for the captain.’ Reliant on trust earned through years of intelligent service, Jussoud dared a tacit rebuke. ‘Shaken as your guard was, and exhausted after a night of rigorous duty, he was more afraid to return empty-handed. His search at this point will scarcely bear fruit. Mykkael left the garrison, masked under your officer’s purloined cloak. The garment was found later, draped over the drawbridge railing. Even the keep gate watch could not say where the captain went, or what he pursued on his errands.’

Taskin grimaced. ‘I’ll have that guard recalled. How many more men should I send to accomplish the charge of fetching Mysh kael uptown for review?’

‘None.’ Jussoud absorbed the commander’s surprise, unsmiling. ‘You won’t have to collect Mykkael, even if his stiff-necked pride would allow it. The captain asked me to deliver his report from the garrison, and to add, he will meet you himself at the Highgate. You can expect him in person by mid-afternoon.’

The older campaigner’s silvered brows rose. ‘How arrogant of the upstart, to dictate to me. What facts has he chosen to deliver, meanwhile?’

Jussoud recited, choosing Mykkael’s own words, and clipped sentences that did not elaborate. The close details he had overheard from the garrison’s watch officer shed no more useful light on the knotted problems at hand.

‘Nothing and nothing,’ Taskin snapped, eyes shut through the pause as he gathered himself. His ascetic face looked suddenly drawn against its lean framework of bone. Then his eggshell lids opened. Direct as forged steel, he said. ‘So much for bare facts. Now say what you think.’

Prepared for that command, Jussoud nonetheless chose his honest words with reluctance. ‘I think Mykkael knows, or is hardset in pursuit of firm evidence that will reveal the fate that’s befallen her Grace. He said she’s endangered. Not why or how. I’d hazard two guesses. That he’s loyal, but has a strong reason not to trust where he shares his information. Or else he’s involved with an ugly conspiracy, and doing a magnificent job for the party that wants to obstruct us.’

Taskin nodded, relieved, his respect for the healer grown to the stature he would have accorded a peer. ‘We aren’t wont to warm to a man of his breeding. The court gossip condemns him. His background checks clean, but he was a hired sword and a mercenary. He might have been commissioned a long time in advance, and sent here to win his key position through the opening of our summer tourney’

‘He is a weapon, well sharpened to spearhead whatever cause buys his service,’ Jussoud agreed in blunt summary. ‘He could be the best chance we have to find Princess Anja, or he might be the cipher to cast Sessalie to the wolves that would tear her succession asunder.’ A fraught moment later, he braved the soft inquiry, ‘Will you leave the man free, or restrain him?’

‘I don’t know,’ Taskin answered, his trim shoulders set to withstand an unprecedented burden of uncertainty. ‘You’re an astute judge of character, Jussoud. What do you feel this case merits?’

The commander watched, primed and sharp as a predator, and captured the nomad’s split-second hesitation. ‘Ah, Jussoud, you have doubts.’

The easterner sighed. ‘Just one. Not substantial.’ Mykkael had not said his own hand had killed a child; but the flicker of fear that had crossed his dark face well suggested the chance that he might have.

‘No need to elaborate,’ Taskin excused. ‘As always, your thoughts and mine seem to move in lock step. I value that, even if, with this desert-bred, the waters are dangerously clouded.’

‘Then what will you do?’ Jussoud asked, well aware he might not receive a straight answer.

Yet Taskin chose to share his rare confidence. ‘Let’s first see if Captain Mysh kael keeps his promised appointment at Highgate. If he comes in by free will, I plan to hear him. Should he have sound reasons for today’s behaviour, I’ll wait to see whether he chooses to disclose information I can use. The facts he delivers to my discretion had better hold value and substance. Once those hurdles are crossed, last of all, I must weigh the manner in which he answers to justly earned punishment.’

At Jussoud’s wary glance, Taskin said, starkly grim, ‘Oh yes, I will have to take that risk, won’t I? The brazen creature has made sure he’ll be tested. I have no choice but to handle him now that three counts lie against him, with only one of them mine, for an act of direct insubordination. He’s incurred a diplomatic insult, formally registered, that for the realm’s honour, I cannot ignore. You’ve just witnessed the third, a far more serious charge of striking a crown guard in obstruction of a royal duty.’

‘Bright powers avert!’ Jussoud warned. ‘I respect your prowess, my lord, and your sound grasp of command, but I’ve also seen Mykkael in action. Do you actually know he can kill you, that fast, on the strength of an ingrained reflex?’

Taskin drew in a shuddering breath. ‘I doubt my imagination falls short on that score. But Princess Anja’s survival may come to rely on this southern barbarian’s raw instincts. Either he’s our best hope to recover her, alive, or he’s a loose bolt of lightning, too deadly for any man’s hand to restrain. If he’s too volatile to bide under a crown soldier’s discipline, loyal or not, we can’t risk such a weapon among us.’

As the sun’s rays slanted through the early afternoon, she huddled in the dank gloom of a rock cave. The tied horses rested with closed eyes and cocked hips. Chilled and exhausted, she snatched sleep in catnaps. Yet each time she drifted, fear stabbed her awake, sweating from the recurrent nightmare: of familiar faces tirelessly hunting her, their changed eyes ice-hard with cruelty…

VIII. Afternoon

THE GARRISON SENTRY ON WATCH BY THE FALLS GATE SCARCELY SENSED THE WHISPER-LIGHT STEP AT HIS BACK. BEFORE HE COULD TURN, OR set hand to his weapon, a small, furry bundle arrived on his shoulder, its sharp claws digging for balance.

The startled man-at-arms closed one hand on the scruff of what proved to be a young cat. Then he realized just who had crept up behind him. ‘Captain!’

Mykkael flashed a smile from under the penitent’s mantle that covered him from head to foot. He had been to the butcher’s, to judge by the fly-swarming contents of the osier basket slung from one casual hand. ‘Have that kitten sent up to the Middlegate watch officer, along with my updated orders, could you please?’

By now accustomed to the odd ways in which the captain saw fit to assert his command, the sentry secured the unsettled creature thrust into his grasp: a nondescript tabby with white paws and pink nose, sadly bedraggled, but bearing a braided cloth collar. ‘Someone’s lost darling?’

Mykkael nodded. ‘Belongs to the little girl who lives on Spring Street, the house with blue shutters and stone walls smothered in grapevine.’ He kept himself masked in the shadow of the keep, out of sight of the carters who jockeyed their drays past the foot traffic on the planked drawbridge. Through the cries of the vendors peddling grilled sausage, and the hoots of two sotted roisterers, he added, ‘Tell the child not to let her pet wander again. I found him in the hands of the rat killer’s boys.’

‘Powers!’ swore the guardsman, correctly faced straight ahead. ‘I thought you’d ordered a stop to their cruelty?’ Before Mykkael’s tenure, such boys had trapped stray cats in the alleys, and lamed the poor wretches for rodent bait.

‘As of today, those boys have received their last warning.’ The captain’s face hardened beneath the coarse hood. ‘If they persist with their mishandling of animals, here’s my updated word: the next offenders will be culled with a warrant. See that the change gets through to my sergeants.’

The guardsman on duty returned a clipped nod.

‘Now,’ Mykkael resumed, brought around to the business assigned to the watch by the Falls Gate. ‘You have the information I wanted?’

The man’s answer was prompt. ‘The recent list of the seeress’s clients, or at least the ones that her family recalls? The descriptions are scant. No one could agree on the numbers.’

‘I don’t care if the details were mixed up.’ Mykkael measured the sun angle, his cloaked stance touched to scalding impatience. ‘Report.’

The guard understood what his pay share was worth. He delivered the paltry summation. ‘The old besom hosted a wide range of visitors, most of them commons who came to buy charms for luck in love, or talismans for prosperity and safeguard. Yesterday’s list included five to eight merchant women from the Middlegate, all of whom came to her heavily veiled. Beyjall the apothecary visited once, perhaps to ask for a scrying. He often sought readings to locate rare herbs, but since the granddame kept her sessions private, the family can’t swear the presumption in this case was accurate. They all remembered the page from the palace. He came, they said, in a craftsman’s rough smock. But his shoes were a rich boy’s castoffs.’

Mykkael’s question slapped back, fast as ricochet. ‘When?’

Taken aback by a stare of driving intensity, the guard breathed an inward sigh of relief that he was prepared with an answer. ‘Two days ago. The night of the High Prince of Devall’s arrival.’

‘Well done. That will do.’ Mykkael adjusted the hang of his sword blade beneath his voluminous mantle, a sure sign he had concluded the interview and now made ready to depart.

‘Anything else, Captain?’ Given a negative gesture from beneath the enveloping hood, the guardsman cast a distasteful glance over the clotted offal heaped in the basket. ‘You’re off on some errand outside the gates? Surely you aren’t taking that as a gift to feed the blind storyteller who begs by the crossroad market?’

Mykkael tapped his chest, where he had a second wrapped packet stowed, beyond easy reach of the lower town’s scourge of street thieves. ‘The scraps are intended for somebody else. I’ll be back in an hour, two at the latest. Tell your duty officer to have a saddled horse waiting, I expect to be in a hurry.’

Asleep in the sun after quartering the hills through most of the night with a hangover, old Benj the poacher stirred to the jab of a toe in his ribs. The sawing snore that rattled his throat transformed to a grunt of displeasure.

‘Benj!’ screeched a female voice that wrought havoc with his sore head. ‘Benj, you damned layabout, wake up.’

The carping as usual belonged to the wife, shrill as a rusted gate hinge. The toe, which dug in with nailing persuasion and unleashed the fireburst of a pressed nerve, was no woman’s. Benj shut his slack mouth on a curse. Aware enough to interpret the delirious yap of his dogs, he answered without opening his eyes. ‘The only trail that matched your description runs into the western ranges. Six horses, led by a slight person who wore lightweight shoes, with soles stitched by a quality cobbler.’

‘Benj, you rude wastrel, get up!’ The wife caught his limp wrist with a grip like steel pincers and hauled. Her brute effort toppled him sideways off the kennel barrel currently used as his backrest. ‘Benj, at the least, you can hold conversation within doors, like a civilized man of the house.’

‘I’m not civilized,’ the poacher protested. He opened bloodshot grey eyes, peered through his oat-straw frizzle of hair, then winced as the sunlight stabbed into the lingering throb of his hangover. To the cloaked desert-bred who crouched, feeding guts to his fawning hound pack, he appealed, ‘I can talk just as well lying down. We don’t need to go anywhere, do we?’

‘In fact, we do.’ Teeth flashed in the captain’s face, though his grin showed no shred of apology. ‘I’m a bit pressed, and would bless the favour if your woman could heat up a cauldron and boil a slab of raw beef.’

‘You don’t intend to feed a good cut to those dogs!’ the woman yelped in shocked horror.

Mykkael laughed. ‘Evidently not, since the thought seems to threaten you with a stroke! Here, let me.’ He tossed the last gobbet from the basket, wiped his smeared hands on the grass, then replaced the wife’s grip upon Benj’s slack arm with a muscular pull that hoisted the lanky man upright. ‘Come on, my fine fellow.’ He braced the poacher’s wobbling frame and steered a determined course through the dog piles dotting the yard. ‘You’ll be more comfortable inside, anyway, since those beef scraps will draw clouds of flies.’

The mismatched pair trooped into the house, the wife clucking behind, concerned for her rugs and her furnishings. Yet Benj arrived without mishap in his favourite seat by the hearth. Perched on the threadbare, patchworked cushion, he scowled at his feet, perplexed by the fact that the old nag had not forced Mykkael to pause and remove his caked boots at the threshold.

While the woman bustled to hook the cauldron over the hob, the poacher nestled his thin shoulders against the ladderback chair.

Mykkael sat on the settle. At home enough to push back his hood, he washed the suet and blood from his hands in the basin fetched by the poacher’s tongue-tied little daughter. He did not press with questions. A rare man for respect, he stifled his need and waited for Benj to order his thoughts.

As always, that tactful handling caused the poacher to give without stint.

‘Your quarry’s holed up quite high in the hills. As you asked, we did not haze or close in. Just followed the trail from a distance. Good thing you forced me to start tracking last night. With every damn fool out there beating the riverbank, not even my dogs could unriddle the hash that’s left of the scent.’

As though the report were as ordinary as the drone of the bees outside in the melon patch, Mykkael surrendered his packet of meat for the wife to stew over the fire. ‘No one noticed you? No crown riders picked up on your back trail?’

Benj shook his head, cleared his throat, then demanded, ‘Does a guest get no tea or hospitality in this house?’ Before the wife could draw breath and sass back, he answered the captain’s question. ‘No one’s wiser. I left my son in the hills, keeping watch. He will lay down fresh deer scent to turn any dogs, as you asked. If the searchers come near, he’ll divert them.’

Mykkael released a deep sigh in relief. ‘Benj, you’re a hero.’ While the wife scoffed at the untoward praise, the captain accepted the buttered bread set out by the towheaded daughter. He broke the hard crust between his scarred fingers, then raised eyes grown suddenly piercing. ‘Listen to me, Benj. This business is dangerous, more than I ever imagined last night.’

The wife snorted again, bent to poke up the coals. ‘Huh. What else is new? Benj has lived with the threat of the noose all his life, and damn all to sate his taste for the king’s summer venison.’

But the captain shook his head, the bread chunk between his deft hands all at once a forgotten afterthought. ‘No, Mirag, believe me. A hangman’s rope would be merciful beside the perils that stalk Sessalie’s princess.’ His edged words cut the quiet like fine, killing steel swathed out of sight under satin. Without warning, his lean figure seemed set out of place, a jarring wrong note amid the fragrance of sweetfern brought in by her husband’s jaunt through the brambles.

The small daughter retreated and clung to her mother’s flax skirts. Mirag folded the child into a wordless embrace, and regarded the creature who ate bread on her settle, his poised calm transformed to a predator’s stillness, a heartbeat removed from raw violence.

Mykkael made no effort to dismiss the fresh fear blown in like a chill wind between them. ‘Already, two people have died for far less than your husband knows now. Keep your family at home. Talk to no one. Leave your son in the hills, under cover, and for your life’s sake, hold to the very letter of my directions.’

‘So long as I can sleep off the whisky that’s pounding my brain to a pulp,’ Benj said, wise enough to pretend to complacence before the wide eyes of his child. He tipped back his head, hands laced in his lap. ‘That boy on the run, that’s made off with the horses? He’s somehow involved with the fate of the princess?’

‘Her life may depend on what happens to him,’ Mykkael admitted, unflinching.

Benj nodded, satisfied. ‘Then I’ll be here, for when you have need of me.’

By the time the water boiled, he was out cold and snoring. Mykkael snacked on bread and honeyed tea while his meat cooked, and Mirag badgered him to part with a chunk to enrich her stewpot for supper. The girl-child slipped out to play with the dogs, while Benj twitched in whisky-soaked dreams. Mykkael sat in thought, the odd finger tapping, while time fleeted past, and the sun slanted gold through the shutters.

‘Meat’s cooked almost through,’ Mirag said at last. Since she had successfully cadged the best portion, she helpfully wrapped the remainder in yesterday’s bread heels, then tied up the package with cheesecloth.

Mykkael arose. He extracted a filled purse from under his cloak and solemnly exchanged bundles. ‘Here’s compensation for the burst shutter, and the fee for Benj’s tracking. There’s more added on to cover additional service. Mirag, listen clearly. The coin stays in your hands until I send you word, do you hear? No drink for Benj. Keep him home and cold sober, with the dogs close at hand on their chains. I’ll come back tonight with instructions.’

This once, the shrewd matron hesitated before she tucked the silver away under the lid of her milk crock. ‘Captain, the danger to us has always walked with the power of your crown authority. I won’t see my man hang for coursing royal game. Promise me this! Whatever happens, though you face your own downfall, you won’t expose Benj’s name, or say that he had any part in this.’

Mykkael pulled up his hood. ‘I doubt that King Isendon would value a few deer above the murderers your Benj has helped the garrison bring back to justice.’

But the poacher’s wife remained adamant. ‘Captain, your promise! For my son’s interference with Taskin’s lancers alone, we could all lose our heads for crown treason.’

Sober now, sharply aware the woman before him was trembling, Mykkael reached out and gathered her clasped hands. ‘You are brave as a tigress, and for that, on my honour: there is no act of treason in safeguarding the king’s daughter’s life.’

When Mirag’s fear did not settle, Mykkael bowed his head briefly. Then he laid the chapped skin of her knuckles against the sword belt slung over his heart. ‘Madam, hear my oath. No man in Sessalie knows your husband has ever worked with me in liaison. Nor will they, I swear by the blood and the breath that keep the life in my body’

The Seneschal of Sessalie received no warning beyond the desperate string of entreaties from Collain Herald, outside. Made aware he confronted an imminent invasion, but given no chance to order the scatter of state documents under his hand, he turned his head, lips pursed in harried forbearance. Then the latch tripped. The door to the chamber reserved for the king’s private consultation wrenched open with a force that snuffed all the candles.

Bertarra charged in, turquoise skirts spread like sails, and her round face flushed with agitation. ‘Guards, guards, guards, guards!’ she burst out. ‘Can’t step an inch without tripping over the boots on their blundering feet.’ Unabashed by the presence of four more men-at-arms posted by Taskin’s select order, she marched hellbent towards the table where the seneschal marshalled the sheets of the afternoon’s sensitive business.

‘A waste of crown effort, guarding the barn door after the stock has been stolen,’ the late queen’s niece ranted on. ‘I’ve counted a dozen or more brutes standing idle who ought to be outside the gates, scouring the countryside for kidnappers.’

The seneschal knew when not to waste his breath, arguing. He pushed up the spectacles slipped down his beaked nose, while the lady rocked into a belated curtsey before the chair that supported the king.

She addressed him at an ear-splitting shout: ‘Your Majesty!’

Fortunate among men, King Isendon kept snoring, his eggshell-frail head tipped backwards against the throne’s tasselled headrest. A bead of drool clung to his ruffled state collar. The thin hands on the chair stayed motionless, the sparkle of rings frozen still as jewellery set on a corpse.

The realm’s seneschal fell back on longsuffering patience. ‘Lady Bertarra, as you see, the day’s trying events have left King Isendon overcome.’

The court matron narrowed her blue eyes and peered at the slackened face of her sovereign. ‘His Majesty’s fallen witless again?’

‘Fast asleep, lady’ The seneschal sighed. ‘He was wakeful, last night, fretting over the fate of his daughter. If you care to entrust me to deliver your message, I’ll try to address his Majesty on your behalf when he wakens, if he is lucid.’

Bertarra sniffed, the jutted flash of her diamond combs lending emphasis to her disdain. ‘No need to speak. Just give him this.’ She uncurled the arm tucked over her bosom and slapped a rolled parchment on to the tabletop. Then, her errand accomplished, she spun and marched back towards the doorway.

At the threshold, she was jammed on her thundering course by the inbound arrival of Taskin. Fast on his feet, the commander nipped past her without snaring himself in her acres of ribboned petticoats. Before Bertarra regaled him with carping, he caught her plump elbow in a steering grasp, and murmured a gracious good afternoon as he backed her bulk clear of the chamber. Then his neat, swordsman’s reflex closed the door in her blustering face.

Leaned back on the latch, one imperious boot heel wedged to jam the shut panel, he ignored the pounding commotion that ensued on the opposite side. His steely glance first raked over the king, then settled in nailing regard on the seneschal. ‘You look like a pulped rag. Isn’t Prince Kailen fit to relieve you?’

The seneschal poked up his spectacles again, and peered down the pinched flange of his nostrils. ‘His Highness is closeted with the Prince of Devall, a wise enough choice, for the moment.’

Taskin folded his arms, a curt snap of his head indicating the rumpus that shuddered the wood at his back. ‘What pearl of wisdom did Bertarra deliver?’

‘Let’s see.’ The seneschal unfurled the parchment with fussy precision. ‘A petition, signed by prominent court ladies and a select circle of merchants’ wives. They send an appeal for a royal writ, demanding Captain Mysh kael’s arrest.’ A blink of myopic, watery eyes was hard followed by the accusatory tap of a finger. ‘You know the talk brands the man as a murderer.’

‘Talk is not proof,’ Taskin stated. The assault on the door at his back stopped abruptly, replaced by a furious screech. The commander laid a testing palm flat on the panel, too wise to shift his braced weight prematurely. ‘She’s broken a thumbnail, or bent one of her rings. Care to speculate which? We could wager.’

But the seneschal declined the diversion. ‘We have a woman dead of a sorcerer’s mark. Such a horror has never happened in Sessalie. The people are demanding to know what’s been done in response.’

Tired himself, Taskin looked hackled. ‘I don’t arrest anyone for the clamour raised by hysterical servants. Nor will I act on the demand of an outcry that’s fuelled by unfounded gossip.’

The seneschal squared off in earnest. ‘Well, this particular document cannot be taken as hearsay’ He lifted a parchment from the welter of papers, one bearing an imposing wax seal and ribbons in Devall’s crown colours.

‘Diplomatic complaint, for Captain Mysh kael’s misbehaviour?’ Taskin pushed erect. His clipped signal summoned one of his guards to stand by the doorway in case the Lady Bertarra renewed her attempt at forced entry. ‘I know about that one. It’s being addressed. Be assured that my own hand will administer the punishment. Its severity will justifiably match the offence. This concerns an offender under my right to remand into discipline. Not even for Devall will I subject a man to the lash without weighing his word on the matter beforehand.’

‘What about this, then?’ The seneschal passed across another state document, also set under Devall’s royal seal. The writ underneath framed a formal request to King Isendon, asking grant for the High Prince’s honour guard to exercise autonomous authority to conduct a private search for Princess Anja.

Taskin glanced at the king, still asleep, his circlet tipped askew over hanks of thinned hair, and his wristbones poked like bleached sticks from the glitter of his elaborately embroidered sleeve cuffs.

Sorrow and regret softened the response the commander returned to the seneschal. ‘Lord Shaillon, don’t set Sessalie’s seal to Devall’s request, not just yet. At least hold off until after I’ve had the chance to question the Captain of the Garrison. Although you hold the man in contempt, Mysh kael may have had a sound reason for drawing his steel on the high prince’s advocate.’

‘No reason can excuse a rank breach of manners,’ the seneschal fumed. ‘Let me remind you, the official your desert-bred cur has insulted is an accredited royal ambassador! The wrist-slap penalty you’re proposing is child’s play! In Devall, by law, for the same offence, the wretch would lose his right hand.’

Taskin contained the quick flash of his temper. ‘I’ll remember, some time, to show you a man whose back bears healed scars from the whip. No pretty sight, I assure you, Lord Shaillon, with the sensible benefit that afterwards, the soldier can still bear arms in the kingdom’s defence!’

‘We speak of an outlander,’ the seneschal bristled. ‘Not one of our own, but a mongrel of low background, and questionable habits. Since when do we look to a desert-bred’s brawling to conduct our affairs of state? How dare you suggest such a creature should taint a decision concerning a prince who stands to become our pledged ally, joined to our kingdom by the kin ties of wedlock!’

Yet even for royal protocol, Taskin refused to back down. ‘Captain Mysh kael is a red-blooded man, invested by oath, and in service as one of Sessalie’s crown officers.’

‘A mistake we should rectify. Should have done so, and long since. Shame on us all, that a penniless adventurer should be allowed to take rank advantage of the opportunity presented by our summer tourney. We cannot afford to risk a misjudgement. Not when the man might be the paid agent for some unknown enemy’s plotting.’ As Taskin took umbrage, the seneschal raised a stabbing finger and ranted straight on. ‘We are faced with a crisis! At the least, such a foreigner ought to be set aside under lock and key. He must be removed from his post at the garrison, and a trusted man set in his place.’

‘Fury and rhetoric will not grant Devall your endorsement, Lord Shaillon.’ Taskin’s gaze flicked past the seneschal’s shoulder, towards the sovereign slumped in the state chair. ‘The command to discharge Mysh kael must arise from the hand of King Isendon himself.’

‘A mumbling dodderer who drools in his sleep,’ huffed the seneschal. ‘When his Majesty wakens, confused, be sure I shall get the permission I need to set Sessalie’s seal on these edicts. I’ll have others drawn up in sensible language that will take steps to protect our security.’

Taskin gave back a wolfish smile, his posture held at smart attention.

‘But I’m not asleep,’ interjected King Isendon. ‘Nor am I drifting, just at the moment.’ He straightened his trembling shoulders, imperious, and snapped his fingers sharp as a whip crack. ‘Give over those documents held in dispute. Yes. Set them in Taskin’s hands. I leave the matter of Devall’s complaints in his charge to address as he sees fit.’ The damp, weary eyes tracked the seneschal’s sullen capitulation until the requisite papers changed hands.

‘That will do, Shaillon,’ said the king, dismissing all argument.

‘Commander,’ he continued, ‘you have mentioned a forthcoming inquiry over the conduct of Captain Mysh kael? That is well. Treat with him fairly. If he brings any news of my daughter from the garrison, I expect an immediate audience.’

Taskin bowed. ‘Your Majesty.’ He tucked the state documents under his arm. By the time he turned in smart strides towards the doorway, the king’s gaze had already lost focus.

The seneschal surged at the commander’s heels in a bothered flutter of velvets. Ever determined to snatch the last word, he found his officious presence impeded by four immaculate crown guardsmen.

‘Bertarra is right,’ he snapped under his breath. ‘All these sentries are a nuisance in the royal chamber.’

‘Necessary every man of them,’ Taskin retorted as he breezed on his way down the corridor. ‘King Isendon’s safety is my bailiwick, Seneschal, and no subject for you or Sessalie’s chancellors to lay open to mauling debate.’

The crossroads market outside the town wall was a noisy, sprawling event that bloomed on a patch of packed earth with each dawn, and melted away every sundown. The throng of itinerant pedlars, freebooting hucksters and farmwives who traded the odd head of livestock held no crown licence to sell. Too shiftless to maintain a stall in the town, they simply gathered and spread out their wares, or pounded in stakes for their picket lines. The result clogged the verge where the trade road met the cart track which snaked down from the alpine vales.

The regulars hunkered under rickety awnings, an ill-fashioned jumble of pegged burlap and canvas that fluttered and snapped in the breeze. Packs of raggedy children screamed and ran wild, through the singsong patter of the hawkers. On fair days, the blind beggar who told stories spread his blanket under the shade of the ancient oak that also, infrequently, served as the royal gallows. The dented tin bowl he set out for coppers always sat on the plank where the hangman’s stair mounted the scaffold.

The hour, by then, approached mid-afternoon. Slanting sun fell like ruled brass through the branches. The odd scattered dollop licked the head and shoulders of the man in the hooded penitent’s robe. He sat, one leg crossed and the other extended, in the dust at the storyteller’s feet. The pair of them shared companionable talk, and a meal of bread crusts and boiled beef.

‘Ah, then it’s horses, now?’ the beggar said, his rich voice slipped into the broad Trakish dialect learned from his mother in childhood. ‘You’re wanting to bet? That was the hot topic, rightly enough, until this sad tale of the princess overshadowed all else.’ Paused for a sigh, he rubbed grease from his fingers, then recovered his dauntless, sly smile. ‘Do you fancy the races, or maybe the outstanding team for the match of steed wickets next month?’

‘Perhaps both, maybe neither,’ said Mykkael in the same tongue. He folded the last slice of meat in a bread chunk, and laid the offering into the storyteller’s outstretched palm. ‘If I wanted to locate an animal of a certain description, perhaps to inquire if it was for sale, who would be likely to know where to look?’

‘A rascal.’ Moved to bursting laughter, the storyteller turned his face, sightless eyes bound with a scarlet rag to keep his affliction from upsetting the children. ‘Vangyar, the horse thief, could answer your question. Knows every creature with hooves in this valley, and speaks like a breeder’s textbook. Won’t be so easy for you to approach him.’ The beggar rapped the scaffold post at his back. ‘Crown law sends his sort to dance with the rope.’

Mykkael shrugged. ‘I don’t know of any man or woman in Sessalie who is forced to steal out of hunger.’ Hands clasped over his tucked-up knee, he waited until the beggar stopped chewing before he finished his thought. ‘I’m seeking a horse with particular markings, not pursuing a writ for arrest.’

‘Fair enough.’ The storyteller dusted crumbs from his lap. ‘Vangyar often drinks at the Bull Trough, by Falls Gate. One of the girls there’s his favourite. If you can corner him, he’ll know your horse. But I’ll lay your king’s silver against one of my tales, you don’t catch him to pitch the first question.’

‘Oh, you’re on.’ The garrison captain grinned under his hood. ‘But I’ll need a forthright description to have a fair shot at the take.’

‘From a blind man? That’s a joke.’ But the storyteller delivered from the stock of detail he was wont to pick up from overhearing stray talk.

Mykkael listened, his sharpened gaze caught by the sudden moil of activity that swirled through the gaggle of potters, the stacks of grass basketry and the hunched cluster of women who laced oat straw into cheap pallets.

When a shout punctuated that burst of disturbed movement, the captain uncoiled to his feet. ‘My friend, we have a sealed wager between us. For now, I regret, I must leave you.’

The beggar returned a companionable nod, content to resume spinning tales from his dusty blanket.

Mykkael strode downhill. With brisk hands, he peeled off the penitent’s robe and flagged down the man from the garrison, just reined in from a gallop, and towing a second mount on a lead rein.

‘Captain! Thank the powers that be, the gate watch said you might be here.’ Sergeant Cade spun his snorting, bald-faced gelding, and tossed Mykkael the bridle of the riderless grey.

‘What’s amiss?’ Mykkael settled the reins and vaulted astride without touching the stirrup. Wheeled back towards the town, he heard out his sergeant’s breathless report.

‘Physician from Fane Street’s showed up at the keep. They’ve got him in your private quarters, you asked that?’

‘I sent him.’ Mykkael pressed the horse from a walk to a canter, then dug in his heels for more speed. ‘Only one man? The apothecary’s not with him?’

Sergeant Cade spurred his lathered mount to keep pace. ‘The apothecary’s dead, and your physician’s not coherent. No one’s been able to get him calmed down to explain how the tragedy happened.’

Mykkael swore. His face drained to a queer, greyish pallor, a precedent no man from the garrison had seen through any prior disaster. ‘No help for the setback, I’m going to be late for my promised appointment with Taskin.’ He hammered his dappled horse to a gallop, still shouting his fast-paced instructions. ‘Go through the Falls Gate, pick up a task squad of eight men. I want the apothecary’s house sealed off. No one goes in, do you hear me? No matter what seems to have happened inside, I want nothing disturbed by the ignorant.’

‘Too late for that,’ the sergeant yelled back, his words breathlessly pitched over the rolling thunder of hooves. ‘There’s been a small fire. Burned like merry hell. No brigade dumping water could douse it. Went out by itself, finally, and left an unnatural, smoking crater that destroyed the back wall of the house.’

‘Get the bucket brigade out.’ Mykkael leaned over his mount’s wind-whipped mane, still urgently snapping directions. ‘Take a list of their names. Round up each one. Force them to step through the smoke of a cedar bonfire, then bathe head to foot in salt water.’

Sergeant Cade stared. ‘Have you gone mad?’ The cost of pure salt, this far inland, was extortionate.

‘No, soldier. Forget about questions. Just follow my plainspoken order!’ Mykkael balanced his horse, then changed its lead to sweep right at the moat and take the main road through the Lowergate. ‘I’m off to the keep to settle the physician and secure his immediate safety. If you can, dispatch a rider to Highgate. Tell Taskin I’ll be delayed.’

‘Done, Captain.’ Cade veered his mount and set off.

Mykkael urged the grey underneath him still faster, railing at fate in snatched curses. Beyjall’s sudden death carried damnable timing. The chance was slim to non-existent that a message passed through the watch at the Falls Gate could be relayed uptown in time to defer Taskin’s rendezvous. Mykkael resigned himself. The reprimand he would earn for the lapse seemed hellbound to become an ordeal of savage unpleasantness.

IX. Late Day

HOT, SOAKED IN SWEAT, MYKKAEL FORCED HIS GAME KNEE AT A RUN UP THE KEEP STAIR, THEN BURST THROUGH THE DOOR TO HIS QUARTERS. He swept the chamber with one raking glance and fixed on the forlorn figure perched on the edge of his pallet.

Sadly rumpled, the physician slumped in his shirtsleeves. He looked like a fluffed robin blown in by a storm, elbows set on his knees, and hands pressed to his brow.

The scuff of the captain’s lame step aroused him. He bounded upright with a cry, palms raised in startlement. Behind the skewed glass of his spectacles, his china-blue eyes were dilated to black from the adrenaline jolt of his terror.

Mykkael stepped back. Checked to thoughtful calm, he tipped his head past the lintel and directed a shout down the stairwell. ‘Vensic! Send one of the armourer’s boys up here at once with a torch!’

Relief suffused the physician’s blanched face. ‘Light of deliverance!’ he gasped, all but sobbing. ‘On my soul, now I know you’re not one of them.’ His wobbling knees gave way all at once. Dropped back to his seat on the captain’s coarse blankets, he rushed on in breathless hysteria. ‘At least, the word goes that most sorcerers’ minions will avoid the sight of a natural fire.’

‘Some will flinch from an unshielded flame,’ Mykkael agreed. He watched with the fixated stare of a lynx, his wary hands poised at his sides. ‘Except for the oldest, and most powerful. But even ones bound to the dark arts for centuries can’t abide the smoke from green cedar.’ Cued by the tap of the boy’s running footstep crossing the landing downstairs, the captain spun and moved back past the threshold. He returned in an eye blink, a lit torch in hand, which he touched to the frond of cut evergreen, stashed out of sight on his hurried way in.

Smoke billowed as twigs and needles ignited. ‘Forgive me,’ Mykkael snapped, as the resinous fumes caught the draught. The scented blue smoke billowed up in a cloud and wafted over the rattled physician. ‘I had to make certain you carried no taint.’

‘No bother at all,’ croaked the neat little man, lightly coughing. ‘Precautions are nothing but rock-hard good sense. Dear me. Until now, I thought Sessalie lay too far north to be threatened by demonic plotting and craftwork. That’s why I chose to retire here. Very peaceful.’ But horror had shattered his idyllic complacency. He trembled to realize that his days of tranquil practice might be for ever undone.

While the cedar smoke thinned in the breeze through the arrow slit, the physician removed his fogged spectacles. He buffed the glass with a limp handkerchief pulled from his waistcoat pocket. Shaky fingers restored the wire frames. Behind thick lenses, his bright, blinking gaze tracked the desert-bred captain, each move. Mykkael doused the torch. Then he crouched by his pallet to drag out a strongbox tucked underneath. The lock had no key, but worked through a puzzle array of brass levers fashioned by artisans from the far east.

‘You seem to possess an impressive experience,’ the physician observed at due length. ‘That’s most reassuring. I suppose, in your past, you were probably hired to fight in a sorcerers’ war?’

Mykkael nodded, terse, head bent and hands busy sorting the contents of his opened coffer. ‘Against the Sushagos, yes, and after them, Quidjen and Rathtet.’

‘You fought against Rathtet?’ The physician dropped his crushed linen, startled. ‘I didn’t know any defenders had survived that unspeakable bloodbath.’

‘Very few,’ Mykkael said, his voice cranked and tight. ‘A miserable, unfortunate few.’

‘Oh dear. Not a subject you like to dwell on, I see.’ The tactful pause lingered, while the physician recovered his dropped handkerchief. He was a worldly man, informed well enough to know that mercenaries steered clear of countries invaded by sorcerers. Lavish pay lured only the brashest young fools. The ones who signed on were quick to regret. Spellcraft could inflict worse than ruinous losses. Scarred veterans, returning, were wont to avoid a repeat of their wretched mistake.

Mostly, such conflicts levied trained troops from the far south, where skilled viziers could grant them defences. Aware his repeat record of paid service was unusual enough to seem suspect, Mykkael gave a short explanation. ‘My contracts were arranged by a barqui’ino master, who considered high risk and extreme danger to be part of an aspirant’s training. The eastern despots always hired. Paid swords were preferred, even prized for their use in covert reconnaissance. The ones who fell into enemy hands couldn’t be tortured to spill secrets they didn’t know to begin with.’

‘Yes, I see that.’ The physician huddled into his sweat-dampened shirt. ‘You would have been valued for that sort of work, dark-skinned as you are, and facile with your gift of languages.’

Mykkael straightened up, bearing a worn leather sack with a drawstring. He fished inside, and withdrew a grimy copper disc strung on a scraped length of rawhide. The thong had been cut more than once, and rejoined. Three mismatched knots interrupted its contiguous length. ‘Here,’ said the captain. ‘Wear this for protection.’

The physician gave the token his dubious inspection. Under verdigris tarnish, the wafer of metal had been finely scored with overlaid circles, interlocked through a series of triangles. The leather looped through it was darkened with stains, faintly rancid with a dried rime of sweat. ‘What is it? These are bloodstains?’

‘Talisman,’ Mykkael answered, ‘a potent charm, fashioned to guard against the assault of cold-struck sorcery’ He had his fingers thrust deep in the sack, apparently counting the contents. ‘These were made for the foot troops who fought Rathtet.’ Confronted by the physician’s masked shudder, he said in offhand reassurance, ‘Yes, they’re still potent, dried blood notwithstanding. The men who wore these died of arrows.’

His inventory complete, Mykkael closed the drawstrings, then tied the sack on to his belt. ‘Don’t change the knots. They were ritually done to protect against theft and mishap.’

As the physician’s unease progressed to reluctance, the captain stepped close, lifted the artefact from the man’s shaken grasp and slipped the thong over his head. ‘There. Relax, now. You’re safe. Wear that talisman next to your skin, and don’t take it off when you wash.’

Mykkael stepped back. The physician watched with mollified eyes as the captain eased his game leg on the stool beside the plank trestle. The keep officer had left a pitcher of cold water on a tray. Mykkael poured, not troubled by the lesser scars on his arms as he offered the terracotta mug. ‘Drink?’

The physician refused, still afflicted by over-strung nerves.

Mykkael sucked down a deep draught for himself. ‘Now,’ he said calmly. ‘Tell me what happened to Beyjall.’

The little physician’s poise crumbled utterly. ‘I didn’t see much,’ he confessed. Shaking hands clasped, he cleared his throat, and manfully started explaining. ‘When I finished the last of my morning appointments, I went round to ask for a candle. Not that I needed one. I hadn’t sensed trouble. But better, I thought, to apply for the remedy before the onset of first symptoms.’ He trailed off, his dough face flushed to crimson.

‘Go on,’ Mykkael urged. ‘What’s done is over.’

The physician braced up, his eyes glassy with recall. ‘When I arrived at the apothecary’s shop, the door was ajar. That was not usual. He liked to have customers let themselves in. But when I mounted the steps, the front room was empty. The iron-strapped door to the stillroom was closed, a surprise, since the place appeared open for business. That’s when I first realized something was wrong. I called Beyjall’s name. When he failed to appear, I looked closer. Scribed on the plaster beside the door’s lintel, I encountered what looked like a sorcerer’s mark.’

The narrative ground to a painful halt. Mykkael waited, stone-patient.

‘Glory preserve us,’ the physician gasped. ‘You know how it feels to encounter pure evil?’

‘I know,’ Mykkael answered. Just that; nothing more.

The physician shook his head, shivering. ‘Powers forgive me, I ran in blind panic’

‘Well you should have,’ Mykkael said with bracing force. ‘Such craft-marks are volatile and unspeakably dangerous!’

The physician huddled, forlorn on the pallet, unable to shake off his misery. ‘Dear me, to my sorrow, so I have seen. Those voracious, unnatural flames, and the smell—one doesn’t forget.’ He swallowed, then mustered frayed nerves and faced the garrison captain straight on. ‘The apothecary was alive, and most likely locked in. He must have realized someone had entered. I heard his cries, and his pounding as he begged for help to escape.’

Mykkael showed the wretched survivor nothing but sympathy. ‘You came straight here?’

‘Directly’ The physician dabbed moisture from behind his fogged lenses. ‘Captain, I hoped you might know what to do.’

Mykkael paused through a dreadful, brief silence, run through by awareness that his men from the garrison had responded; the squad that had rushed to the apothecary’s rescue had shouldered that lost cause in disastrous ignorance. By the narrowest margin, they had missed being swept to their deaths in the explosive first conflagration.

Only the choking press in the streets and the gift of blind luck had preserved them.

At uneasy length, the captain said gently, ‘Beyjall died, very horribly. You couldn’t have helped him. Nor could I, had I been present. That mark you saw was pre-set to ignite within a matter of seconds. You are more lucky than you know to be here at the keep, safe and breathing. Caught out of his depth, let me tell you, Doctor, the wisest man first saves himself.’

The physician braced up. Sound sense notwithstanding, his torn heart would take more convincing. ‘Poor Beyjall. You believe he was murdered because of the drowned seeress we examined?’

Mykkael shook his head. ‘Not entirely, no. I think he was killed for his knowledge. Just as she was. They were the two people in this placid realm who were first to notice the works of a sorcerer afoot.’

‘Dear me.’ The physician blinked, his prim, worried glance on the captain. ‘The unnatural creature might strike at you next.’

‘I expect that he will.’ Mykkael drank the last of his water and stood. ‘You’ll be all right? One of my men will escort you home, and stay to keep watch at your doorway’

The physician rose also, and hooked up his crushed jacket. His bobbing stride trailed the captain’s lamed move to depart. ‘Will he carry a talisman like the one you gave me?’

Mykkael stopped. He turned his head, the tigerish glint in his almond-dark eyes crushed out by the force of his pity. ‘I don’t have enough of them to go around.’

The physician sucked a breath, raised to chilled understanding. ‘Thank you for that honesty. I can manage well enough on my own. Heaven preserve us! What a sorrowful thing, that such evil should invade these quiet mountains and stake out a foothold in Sessalie.’

‘My task,’ snapped Mykkael, ‘is to see such power thwarted. You’ll go home with my man-at-arms as your escort, and sleep with him guarding your doorstep. On your way, would you stop on an errand for me? You knew the apothecary better than most. Someone must pay a call and inform Beyjall’s widow the crown will pay for his funeral.’

Eight centuries past, one of Sessalie’s queens had desired a rooftop garden. She had grown sunflowers to feed gleaning birds, and shared their winged company through hours of contemplation. The king who was her great-grandson added topiary, and an array of formal flowerbeds, which, years later, the kitchen staff claimed to grow herbs under glass for winter seasoning. No one recalled which subsequent sovereign had added the turrets, and planted the first of the trees.

By Isendon’s reign, the oaks had grown ancient, their gnarled trunks halfway fused with the stonework that vaulted the entry. A confection of wicker tables and chairs scattered under the shaded branches now became the afternoon refuge for Sessalie’s ranking courtiers. Just now the primary occupants were royal, Crown Prince Kailen and the heir apparent of Devall, attended as usual by the deferent circle of his liveried retinue. Only the saturnine advocate was absent, dispatched on an unspecified errand.

On the table, banked in a bowl of shaved ice, a serving of strawberries sweetened their conversation. The Prince of Devall had asked for red wine. The gold tray held a bottle of the famed cloud grape, just emptied. Another one had been opened to breathe, when the seneschal arrived, puffing from his three-storey ascent from the council hall.

‘My Lord Shaillon, you look as tried by the day’s frustrations as any man on two feet,’ greeted Devall’s heir apparent, his dauntless good cheer a brave effort to lift the elderly statesman’s flagged spirits.

Prince Kailen sighed and pushed back the blond hair tumbled over his forehead. ‘Still no word on my sister.’

The seneschal nodded, exhausted beyond platitudes.

Too polished to show disappointment, Devall’s heir apparent lifted the bottle, selected a clean goblet from the tray, then poured in a dollop, and swirled it. ‘Sit, my good man. You’re just in time. We needed someone with a fresh palate to taste this superlative vintage.’

The seneschal drew out a chair and perched like a mournful sparrow. Polite to the bone, he accepted the wine, then cast a frowning glance on the emptied glass next to Prince Kailen. ‘His Highness ought not to be drinking after last night’s indulgence.’

Devall’s heir apparent smiled with sheepish charm. ‘The lapse is my fault. I can’t be truly sorry. Your kingdom produces exceptional wines. Bereft of my bride, who can blame me for seeking such exquisitely seductive consolation?’

Sessalie’s seneschal tasted the sample, then nodded his reserved approval. While the Prince of Devall filled his goblet in earnest, he asserted, ‘A wine haze won’t help Princess Anja’s recovery.’

‘No,’ Kailen murmured. ‘But it does dull the ache.’ He bunched up his napkin, wiped the dregs from his glass, then slid it forward, inviting a refill.

The foreign prince complied, then set down the bottle. His tapered fingers still nursing the goblet that stood all but untouched before him, he broached softly, ‘What news of my current petitions to King Isendon?’

‘They have not been refused outright.’ But the seneschal’s braced posture suggested an edge of stonewalled exasperation. ‘I could wish the issue had been handled differently’

‘Why don’t you address my documents of appeal and their outcomes one at a time?’ suggested the Prince of Devall.

‘The diplomatic complaint cannot be ignored. There will be a punishment extracted. However,’ the seneschal qualified stiffly, ‘the garrison captain who enacted the offence will be dealt with by military discipline.’

‘That means Commander Taskin’s been appointed to call the damned desert-bred on to the carpet.’ Kailen dashed down a swallow of wine, and grimaced. ‘That upright old stick doesn’t cut an offender much slack. He’ll execute the verdict along with the sentence, and won’t relinquish his right to keep privacy inside the ranks of his guardsmen.’

The heir apparent of Devall said baldly, ‘The commander won’t consent to an extradition.’

‘Never.’ Prince Kailen gave a tight laugh, drained his goblet, then fixed haunted eyes on his counterpart. ‘Powers above, this is Sessalie! Here, we hang only murderers and livestock thieves. Our dissenters certainly don’t include traitors. What brangles we settle between foreign diplomats are mostly disputes over how much of our best wine should be sold for export. We don’t have the occasion for criminal extradition, far less any precedent concerning the inequities of law that exist between outside kingdoms.’

‘Your Highness, you can’t have the desert-bred captain turned over to Devall’s bailiffs,’ the seneschal summed up with acidic dignity.

‘Are you trying to tell me he won’t be locked up?’ Brows raised by incredulity, the heir apparent sipped wine to douse the fire withheld from his language.

The seneschal sighed. ‘Taskin maintains his crown soldiers to fight. He keeps malcontents in line with the lash, and remands them for state prosecution only if they have incurred a direct threat of injury to a person of the royal family’

‘But this captain is the mongrel get of a darkling southerner!’ Kailen burst out in protest. ‘Surely a citizen’s entitlements won’t apply?’

‘They shouldn’t.’ The seneschal sustained both princes’ regard, his expression bitter as ice. ‘But Taskin stepped in at a sensitive moment. He stood on his prerogative to handle the trial, and King Isendon charged him to redress the misconduct with fairness.’

‘Well, no blood was drawn,’ the High Prince of Devall admitted. ‘Short of a dead advocate, I cannot submit an appeal to the primary complaint. No, the case must rest. If the outcome is lenient, I will placate my ambassador. He’ll receive my reminder that he shouldn’t expect formal protocol when dealing with low caste on errands.’

Gracious in capitulation, the heir apparent offered the last of the strawberries to brighten the seneschal’s mood. ‘Now, what of my appeal to help search for the princess? Surely that met with a warmer reception?’

‘Sadly not.’ The seneschal declined the blandishment, the deep, sour lines that bracketed his mouth hardened to dole out more bad news. ‘The king has made disposition and given the request over to Commander Taskin’s discretion.’

‘Then the writ will die there.’ Sessalie’s crown prince jammed aggravated fingers through his corn-silk blond hair. ‘Taskin’s nothing if not a cast-iron despot. Never has fancied anyone’s boots trampling over his turf. Devall’s honour guard will not be permitted to deploy, no matter how sensibly competent.’

Devall’s heir apparent absorbed this, pressed at last to withdrawn silence.

The seneschal fell back on aristocratic poise, grasped his goblet, then used the wine to ease his dry mouth. ‘On a good day, the commander would pose an obstructive impediment.’

‘A good day!’ The High Prince of Devall shoved the berry bowl aside. Bolt-upright and incensed, he pulled in a deep breath, but could not quite rein back his lit temper. ‘There’s more?’

‘Oh, yes.’ When balked, the seneschal could deliver a setback with vicious brevity. ‘Taskin made plain he’d withhold all opinion until after his appointment with the Captain of the Garrison.’

Crown Prince Kailen rocked out of his chair, swaying and flushed. ‘Mysh kael! What does Mysh kael have to do with this? My sister is missing, and past doubt in grave danger, and Lord Taskin takes pause to consult with an outlander concerning Devall’s right to assist?’

The high prince grasped Kailen’s strained wrist, bristling with autocratic authority. ‘Sit down!’

‘Bright powers above!’ The younger royal dropped rigidly into his chair. He accepted the filled wine glass pressed into his hand, and knocked back a vengeful swallow. ‘Taskin ought to be down on his knees, singing praises for Devall’s generosity.’

The high prince set down the bottle, not shaking. His rage stayed ice-cold, and his bearing immaculate. ‘I’m worried. Very much so, for Anja’s sake.’ He locked eyes with the seneschal in earnest regret. ‘I don’t like to suggest what may be spurious nonsense, but has anyone raised the question of whether your southland captain may have connections to a sorcerer? If your staunch commander appears to be acting outside of the ordinary, if in fact he’s shielding a criminal, that could be the first sign of warning. A man who wields craft might start off by casting spells of influence over another to further his nefarious ends.’

‘Mysh kael could well be the catspaw of such an enemy,’ Kailen broke in, morose. ‘Defend us from evil! Lord Shaillon, I’m not the only one to suggest that Anja’s abductors might be aligned with a demon.’

The seneschal inclined his groomed head. ‘It is true, near enough, that two women have died of questionable circumstances since yesterday. There is evidence pointing to Mysh kael, but no actual proof. The danger, as you correctly infer, is that the case might lawfully fall to Commander Taskin to prosecute.’

The Prince of Devall interjected the first breath of fresh air. ‘Well then, in good sense, something must be done to instil a proper avenue for oversight.’ His attention encompassed the seneschal, the need in him suddenly piercing. ‘For the princess’s safety, could I trust you to appeal as my emissary to King Isendon? I could offer my crown advocate to stand in on proceedings to guard against biased judgement.’

‘His Majesty has retired to bed,’ said the seneschal. ‘He’s unlikely to entertain anyone’s audience before morning. Taskin would be the exception, bearing word of the princess. Only the duchess, Lady Phail, attends the royal person throughout his informal light supper.’

Prince Kailen banged down a fist, upsetting the dregs in his goblet. ‘Balefire and damnation!’ While the wine spilled and ran, bleeding drips through the wicker, he added, ‘If that desertman’s a killer, Anja could already be dead! Powers preserve, we can’t wait till tomorrow.’

‘No,’ the heir apparent agreed in leashed quiet. ‘But we dare not tip our hand, or arouse a dangerous traitor’s suspicions by running roughshod over Sessalie’s court protocol. If Anja’s alive, such thoughtless action might actually kill her.’ He righted Kailen’s glass, spread his napkin over the spill, then tucked the crown prince’s unsteady hand over the stem of his own goblet. ‘Drink, settle down. We shall handle things quietly. If Mysh kael’s not honest, he will have a past. Unearth one incident that casts doubt on his word, or demonstrate that his record lacks integrity, and we can build a case to strike him from his post upon grounds of his questionable character.’ Devall’s heir apparent caught the seneschal’s nod of approval, and responded with an affable smile. ‘We’re agreed, then. My servants are trained to be expert at listening. My honour guard, as well, is on forced, idle time. The generous man would allow them a night’s liberty to sample the joys of the town. Let them visit the taverns in plain clothes, and see what seamy facts they might garner.’

The seneschal arose, his censure directed at Kailen as he collected the half-finished wine bottle. ‘You’d do well to get started, though if fortune favours, you may not need to look far afield.’

Devall’s high prince stood also. While a servant restored his pert velvet cap, with its ruby brooch fastening and pheasant’s barred tail feathers draped stylishly over his shoulder, he asked, ‘Is something afoot?’

‘We’ll see,’ said Lord Shaillon, Crown Seneschal of Sessalie, leaving the garden with purposeful strides. ‘Taskin was scheduled to meet with the desert-bred captain two hours ago. So far as I’ve heard, the slinking cur hasn’t shown up.’

On station at the Highgate, now nettled down to his blue-blooded bones to be forced to wait upon Captain Mykkael’s delinquent appointment, Commander Taskin had not passed the stalled time in idleness. As late day shadowed the mansions fronting the avenue that led uptown from the Middlegate, he had seen his contingencies covered both ways. Behind the walls, a task force was positioned to ride down a fugitive and make an arrest; at his side, a dependable sergeant attended, equipped with shackles and a whip in a canvas bag.

Since the breathless message sent from the garrison brought word of the captain’s delay, nothing changed, except that Taskin ceased his wolfish pacing.

Subsided into a glacial stillness at the arrow slit fronting the belltower, he held on to see whether the errant offender would bend desert-bred pride and ride in.

At streetside, no telltale sign showed to reveal any change in the gatehouse watch roster. The sergeant was bored, and displeased by the prospect he might have to manhandle a commoner. Hot in his surcoat, he stood at attention until his boots pinched, and his patience frayed into rags.

‘The wretch isn’t coming,’ he insisted at last. ‘Why should we waste the whole day? You can’t honestly expect proper conduct from a dog who was bred on a nameless chit in a sand ditch.’

Taskin said nothing. His narrowed eyes measured the activity in the avenue as the late afternoon press of foot traffic and carriages began thinning out before sundown.

‘There,’ he whispered under his breath. ‘Sadly late, but not lacking honour.’

The distempered sergeant belatedly sighted the horse, driving uphill at a prudent trot that would cover ground, but not threaten unwary pedestrians. Its rider was not wearing Sessalie’s hawk surcoat, nor did he use his crown rank to commandeer a more timely passage. Mykkael was clad in a sweat-damp, plain shirt, his preferred longsword slung from his shoulder. The casual dress at first seemed a statement of raffish effrontery, which regarded lightly the stature of a crown commission. Yet as the foreign captain breasted the rise, that impression was undone by his air of rapacious concentration.

Watching him, Taskin felt the hair on his arms rise up in primal warning.

Then the horse bearing Mykkael flung up its head, jerked short by his hand on the bit. It curveted sideways, while its rider raked an irritable, sharp glance over the sun-washed gatehouse.

‘Bright powers curse him!’ the sergeant remarked. ‘He’s noticed our archers. I’ll have the fool whipped whose careless move has served him an idiot’s warning.’

‘That’s my crack division posted up there,’ Taskin murmured in instant correction. ‘Not one of those bowman twitched a finger. Probably nobody had to, given Mysh kael’s experience. Any veteran who ever mounted a siege would measure those gatehouse embrasures. Were they empty or full, he would take pause to assess his exposure.’

Down the thoroughfare, Mykkael cranked the horse’s head sideways. Rein and heel used in concert, he dragged its weight into a wheeling rear.

‘That’s not a man acting on possibilities!’ the gate sergeant snapped in dismay. ‘If our nerve-jumpy quarry saw no sign of threat, then he’s sure as daylight running flat scared out of guilt.’

‘Do nothing!’ said Taskin, his tone scraped to ice. ‘If we react, we’ll never see how this man handles himself under the check rein of lawful authority!’ Beyond that cryptic statement, the commander chose tact. Now was scarcely the moment to mention the desert-bred captain’s predisposition for witch thoughts.

Downslope, the horse skittered on clattering hooves, its rider a blurred form masked behind a tossed flag of black mane. The pair sidled into an oncoming dray, whose six-in-hand team shied aside and milled over a fruit seller’s handcart. Its upset freight of melons tumbled and rolled, to a chorus of curses as chaos unravelled the peace. The dray team bucked in blinkered panic, while spilled fruit bounced and smashed, slicking the cobbles with crushed pith. The two carts behind entangled themselves to avoid trampling down hapless bystanders. While the watch in the gatehouse was diverted by the course of unfolding disaster, the lone horse re-emerged. It trotted a zigzagging, riderless course, with trailing reins looped under its forehooves, and vacated stirrups thudding its ribs.

‘He’s gone!’ yelled the sergeant. ‘Fled belly-down for the gutter.’ He drew in a breath to signal the archers, only to have Taskin’s hand clamp with bruising restraint on his wrist.

‘Do nothing, I said!’ the commander cracked, urgent. ‘A show of armed force will only unleash that man’s lethal instincts. Stay here. Hold hard! I won’t risk a bloodbath. Nobody moves on that captain before I’m dead certain he’s running.’

The sergeant stared aghast at the Commander of the Guard, whose granite face displayed tension, but not yet any fire of alarm. ‘You’re possessed!’ he exclaimed.

But Taskin spared no breath for debate. ‘Soldier! Mind orders! Pull all the archers out of the battlement. Yes, every one! Assemble them in the bailey beyond Highgate. Keep them quiet and prepared. Wait for my express signal to disband, or deploy through the streets as a search party!’

X. Sunset

AS THE ARMOURY SERGEANT STAMPED OFF TO MIND ORDERS IN SELFRIGHTEOUS DISAPPROVAL, COMMANDER TASKIN INSTRUCTED THE GATE watch to handle the fracas outside by routine procedure. The brute effort became theirs, to unsnarl the bunched wagons that obstructed the royal roadway. Crown men-at-arms lent their muscle to unlock jammed wheels, redirect the stalled traffic, and to round up the runaway horse.

The residual chaos was sorted with dispatch. While the recaptured mount was tied to a hitching rail, the most vocal dissenter passed under Taskin’s critical review. ‘Tell that benighted vendor to stop howling! At my word of surety, the crown treasury will bear the cost to repair his smashed handcart. If he’s going to miss supper, the gatehouse strongbox can settle the loss of his fruit.’

The Highgate petty officer knew that tone too well, and jumped forthwith to comply.

The upset was contained, and the ale dray’s riled team coaxed to work its way clear of the thoroughfare. Guardsmen remained to steady their bits, while the driver jumped down to make stopgap repairs to torn harness. The inevitable bystanders paused to assist. Laughter lightened the atmosphere of chagrined frustration. Like the shine of a jewel, casually dropped, Taskin saw the qualities that made Sessalie flourish set into brilliant display. Simple gifts, born of an abiding deep peace, where life was not required to pass in a rush; where taxed tempers could be vented through teasing and jibes, and lost time was unlikely to harm anyone’s long-term prosperity.

Set under the shadow of unknown threat, Taskin bore the burdensome charge of his office as never before. If he failed to uphold crown security, these trusting folk would be shattered. An open-handed generosity instilled over thousands of years would be undone by fear and the horrors of bloodletting strife.

While the lowering sun burnished the gate spire’s brick belfry, the carriages with locked wheels were untangled, and set rolling back on their way. Foot traffic resumed. The strutting pigeons that fed on squashed melons wheeled aloft as the carters behind whipped up their idle draught teams.

Taskin held firm, lightly sweating, in the masking shade of the sentry’s box. His tense inspection measured the servants, returning uptown from market, and the bakers’ women with their wicker baskets, who sold scones in the palace precinct. He scrutinized each of the lampblacks’ boys, and made sure of their pale skin and fair hair. He eavesdropped upon conversations, as well, until the first team and vehicle rolled past. The grinding barrage of iron-rimmed wheels raised deafening echoes in the stone passage that pierced through the gatehouse battlement.

Throughout, the errant Captain of the Garrison failed to make an appearance.

The palace commander wrestled his unsettled disappointment. The staked risk was unthinkable, if he should allow his intuitive judgement to lead him too far. A realist to the bone, Taskin faced his self-made disaster. He had no bird in hand. Nothing remained but to bow to defeat, and shoulder the round of rough consequence. Once the dray passed, he must take direct action: order his archers to hunt down a fugitive whose motives were now highly suspect.

‘Merciful bright powers!’ he swore, pitched to anguish. He would have to weigh the ugly choice quickly, whether to spend lives and attempt to bring in the desertman living; or if he should cut losses and have the guard shoot to kill on first sight.

The dray rattled clear of the uptown archway, admitting the blued haze of the late day. Braced by the clarity of mountain air that seemed strangely unsullied by peril, Taskin gave in and retreated through the Highgate. He entered the icy shade of the passage, hardened to bitter resolve.

‘Commander Taskin,’ said a quiet voice by his ear. A ghost-light hand tapped his shoulder.

Taskin whirled, sun-blind, and peered into the gloom.

There, Mykkael stood, close as shadow itself, his features veiled under darkness.

Surprise snapped all poise. Taskin clamped a fast hand to his sword hilt. Shocked reflex had the blade halfway cleared from the scabbard before he recovered control.

‘Peace,’ said Mykkael. ‘I had requested a scheduled appointment?’ Palms turned outwards, he added, ‘If I’d wanted you down, you’d be dead. My knife would have just cut your throat.’

Bristled like a hazed hornet, Taskin relinquished his grip on his weapon. The well-oiled blade slid home in its sheath, ringing counterpoint to his dry speech. ‘You’re past two hours late, soldier! That’s slipshod timing. Better bless your freak luck that I am still here to receive you.’

‘Evidently not without a few righteous doubts,’ Mykkael stung back. The spring-wound alertness instilled by the placed archers did not fade through the first flare of contact. In bald-faced disregard of his senior officer’s antagonism, he dared to lower his hands. His nonchalance remained too dreadfully crisp as he rubbed a film of greased grit off his knuckles, then assessed the pith stains splashed on his shirt.

Taskin watched, not amused. ‘You clung all this time to the jackknifed dray’s undercarriage?’

‘Not without penalty. Yes.’ Mykkael scrubbed a scraped knuckle on his breeches, then fixed his raptor’s regard on the immaculate crown officer before him. ‘We need to talk. Somewhere in strict privacy. Where? Choose quickly. I haven’t much time.’

Taskin’s strained equanimity recoiled. ‘Soldier, your nerve is past tolerance! Just what gives you the right to dictate your meaningless preference to me?’

Mykkael stared back, unsmiling also. If he had the urge to slash back with argument, no such heated blood moved him. ‘You’ve trusted me this far. I thank you for that.’ Then he waited, hands empty, in silence.

‘Damned well, you know I need information,’ Commander Taskin relented. ‘I will grant what you ask, with conditions.’ He signalled for the captain to march ahead through a sallyport. Beyond lay an arch with a strapped wooden door, and the steep spiralled stairway that mounted the Highgate belltower. ‘Go up to the top. I’ll join you there, shortly’

Mykkael’s piercing quiet showed he was not fooled to complacence. Nonetheless he went willingly. As his gimping stride assayed the steep stair, Taskin redressed his near failure, and tightened his iron-clad sureties.

He set a sentry on guard by the sallyport, then halted the traffic that flowed through the gate. After, he crossed back through to the bailey, where he collared his waiting sergeant.

The huge man was dispatched to stand watch with the sentry, alongside a quartet of the troop’s most accomplished bowmen. Though night had not fallen, Taskin had torches set alight in the wall brackets. He asked to take charge of the shackles and whip. Then he laid final emphasis on his precautions. ‘I’m going up alone to speak with the captain and to mete out his sentence in punishment. If I call you by name, you will join me directly. No one breaks that instruction. The stair won’t be climbed without my express order. I expect to return with Mysh kael in my company. If he comes down alone, have these men loose to kill. No mistakes! Drop him fast, with a heart shot. You’ll have no second chance. If he’s alive, and inside arm’s reach, believe this, you’re going to be dead men.’

‘What if the sly lizard scales the stone of the belltower?’ the sergeant objected, taken aback.

But Taskin had already matched that contingency with a shocking array of brute force. ‘I have the remainder of your company of archers posted outside to prevent him. If Mysh kael bids for escape down the wall, he’ll hit the ground as a riddled corpse.’

‘What does that leave you?’ the squad sergeant pressed.

‘Your duty comes first,’ the king’s commander declared. Then he set off through the belltower’s entry without second thoughts, or a pause to look back.

Taskin mounted the winding stair, careful to measure his pace and arrive without being winded. He had cut off the bell ropes, two storeys up, the foresight an act of solid good sense, or a move made in rampant paranoia. The debate was moot: the desert-bred he proposed to meet on equal footing posed too dangerous a cipher. Even a minor misjudgement might trigger a deadly reaction in consequence. If the crown’s first commander chose to risk his own person, he would not hazard the wellbeing of the realm. He backed his position. No man set to flight could jam the rope and climb down. If he tried, he would find himself stranded.

Yet even the most stringent set of precautions failed to ease Taskin’s nerves. Like a cat caught mincing across a hot roof, he wrung small assurance from logic: that if the war-hardened creature Sessalie’s need must put to the test had not asked in good faith for this conference, he would scarcely have consented to be trapped like a rat inside a cordoned keep.

The closed granite gloom of the stairwell gave way at due length to the airy, gold slant of the westering sunbeams that pierced through the tower’s cupola. Taskin emerged on the landing beneath the last risers that accessed the trapdoor to the belfry. Ruled by ruthless caution, he stashed the shackles and whip. Then he squinted upwards, letting his eyesight adjust to the flood of the outdoor light. No sound came from above, where Mykkael awaited. Taskin surveyed the gaps in the planked platform tied into the brick walls by hewn beams. The lit cracks showed no telltale shadow to reveal where the desertman might stand to meet him.

Warning gooseflesh prickled across Taskin’s skin. The hitched breath caused by smoke touched his senses that half instant too late. Before he could react, a blazing frond of evergreen plummeted downwards and landed, shedding sparks at his feet.

He yelled, leaped forward, and stamped out the blaze before the dry boards ignited.

Coughing through clouded fumes, he scrambled up the last steps and snapped hoarsely, ‘What damn fool act of idiocy was that?’

Mykkael was seated above, on the brick sill of one of the arches. His back to the sheer drop outside, and an insolent foot dangling over the beams that hung the brute weight of the bells, he answered, ‘I don’t trifle with foolery. Forgive me. There’s a sorcerer’s minion at large, and no space left for mistakes. That sprig of lit cedar was my act of surety, to test beyond doubt you’re not one of them.’

‘And are you quite done?’ Taskin grated, irritably slapping out the live cinders that seared holes through the hem of his surcoat.

‘You still have your archers,’ said the desert-bred, reasonable. ‘Call out the order to shoot, as you wish. But I had to be certain the commander who can order me killed is one I can trust, and not tainted.’

Taskin rubbed at his neck, found the muscles strained rock-hard with tension. ‘You realize you’re treading on dangerous ground, soldier.’ Irate enough to attack out of hand, he planted his stance on the platform and regarded the deadly creature above him. ‘Nor have I posted my bowmen at whim. Jussoud warned straight out you could drop me.’

Mykkael faced him, not arguing. His defenceless back stayed presented towards the open arch of the belfry. An archer’s prime target, in his sunlit white shirt: the only assurance in his power to offer, to back the credential of Taskin’s security. One that, even still, fell woefully short. Keen hearing would warn if a shaft launched to take him. The steep arc as it flew would grant time for evasion, long before its flanged point could strike home.

His dark face turned downwards, unreadable, Mykkael stated, ‘We all tread upon dangerous ground.’

‘Then are you the snake set into our midst?’ Taskin ripped back in blunt challenge. ‘Have you failed to notice that’s what the court factions are claiming? No one holds any scrap of hard evidence against you. But you realize, at this point, that’s not a clear-cut reason for me to stand down the outcry for your arrest.’

Mykkael snapped an oath in some guttural dialect that ground on the ear like scraped gravel. ‘Let me say what I know. Your princess is in dire peril this moment. For her sake, hear me through. As we go, you can ask me whatever you wish. I will answer as your subordinate.’

‘You can spare me my reasonable doubts on that score!’ Yet Taskin stepped back. He braced his squared shoulders against the brick wall, still flushed with fury. Only his gesture suggested the chance he might balance his options by listening.

‘All right.’ Mykkael expelled a stiff breath. ‘Protections, first.’ He shut his eyes, turned his face away to disarm any inference of threat. With placating, slow movement, he untied a wash-leather bag from his belt, then removed something strung on a stained rawhide tie. He dropped the object with a metallic clink on the platform at Taskin’s feet.

The commander dragged the thong close with his boot toe. Still without touching, he examined the queer pattern of geometry etched into the green copper disc. ‘What’s this?’

‘A talisman,’ Mykkael answered. ‘You’ll wear it next to your skin night and day, do you hear? Ignore what I’ve said at your peril.’

Taskin looked up, his eyes like forged steel. ‘Where did you get such a thing? Whose hand made it?’

‘That’s the vizier Perincar’s working.’ Mykkael swallowed. As though the words burned him to undying bitterness, he answered as he had promised. ‘The artefact came from the wars with Rathtet.’

Taskin raised startled eyebrows. ‘But I thought no survivors—’ His breathing hitched through a disastrous pause, as the most likely bent of plausibility ran a grue of dread straight through him.

‘No!’ Mykkael shook his head, looking anguished. ‘I never fought for Rathtet! No mercenaries did.’ Again, he closed his eyes; not to blunt hair-trigger reflexes, this time, but visibly wrestling an unutterable weariness. As though the forced explanation seared him to inward pain, he met Taskin’s bidding and qualified. ‘Eighteen of us lived. I fought at the side of Prince Al-Syn-Efandi. He died with his head in my lap.’

Merciless, the commander snatched the opening to interrogate. ‘If that’s the truth, then what were his last words?’

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