ANNA SMITH SPARK
The Tower of Living and Dying
Book Two of The Empires of Dust

Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperColl‌insPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperColl‌insPublishers 2018

Copyright © Anna Smith-Spark

Map by Sophie E. Tallis

Jacket design Micaela Alcaino © HarperColl‌insPublishers Ltd 2018

Jacket illustration © Shutterstock.com

Anna Smith-Spark asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008204082

Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008204105

Version: 2018-06-01

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my family, Jamie, Ianthe and Neirin.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Part One: Sunrise

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Part Two: A Wedding Party in Sorlost

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Part Three: Fires

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Part Four: Wound Scars

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Part Five: The Wonder

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Part Six: The Temple

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Chapter Sixty-Three

Chapter Sixty-Four

Part Seven: The Place of the Dead

Chapter Sixty-Five

Chapter Sixty-Six

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Chapter Sixty-Nine

Chapter Seventy

Chapter Seventy-One

Chapter Seventy-Two

Chapter Seventy-Three

Chapter Seventy-Four

Chapter Seventy-Five

Chapter Seventy-Six

Chapter Seventy-Seven

Acknowledgements

Also by Anna Smith Spark

About the Publisher

PART ONE

Chapter One

In the tall house in Toreth Harbour, the High Priestess Thalia lay awake in the darkness, listening to her lover’s breath. Faint noises outside the window: a woman’s voice calling, drunken singing and a shriek and a crash. Laughter. The wind had risen again. She could hear the sea, the waves breaking on the shingle, the gulls.

I have seen a dragon, she thought. I have seen a dragon dancing on the wind. I have seen the sea. The sky. The cold of frost. The beauty of the world. I have felt the sun on my face as it rose over the desert. I have felt clear water running beneath my feet. I have known sorrow and pain and happiness and love.

She sat up and brought a candle to burning. The man beside her stirred at it, clawing roughly at his face. She smoothed her hand over his forehead, and he sighed and relaxed back deeper into sleep.

King Marith Altrersyr. Amrath returned to us. King Ruin. King of Shadows. King of Dust. King of Death.

Dragonlord. Dragon killer. Dragon kin. Demon born.

Parricide. Murderer. Hatha addict.

The most beautiful man in the world.

She went over to the wall where his sword hung, took it up, walked back to the bed. For a moment her hands shook.

A kindness, she thought.

The gulls screamed at the window. Shadows crawled on the walls.

She raised the sword over his heart.

Looked at him.

A kindness. To her. To him.

But he’s so beautiful, she thought.

She put the sword down and curled back beside him.

Slept.

Chapter Two

Full morning. The green moors above the town of Toreth Harbour. Grass and wild flowers running down to the cliff top, dark rocks, weathered stone, the steep drop to the churning sea. Grey sky. Grey earth. Grey water. A rent in the world, a scar, a sore, where the tower of Malth Salene had stood proud above the town and the water, where a battle had been fought, where a young man had been crowned king.

Marith Altrersyr stood on the cliff top, looking at the ruins. In the light of day the battleground was a desolation. Rock and earth and flesh and blood that had cooled and set like poured glass. A sheen on it, also like glass. In places human faces stared up through the surface, drowned and entombed. A great fortress had stood here. Bedchambers, feasting halls, the chapel of Amrath the World Conqueror where Marith had knelt to receive his ancestor’s blessing as king. Treasures, beautiful objects, silks, tapestries, gold, gems. In a few hours, the army of the Ansikanderakesis Amrakane had destroyed it utterly. His soldiers’ horses snorted and shifted uneasily at the death stink. Even the gulls and the crows had flown.

I did this, Marith thought. So strange, to know that. I did this, I made this. This ruin, this triumph of ending: mine. The summation of my life, perhaps. I killed a man and razed a fortress to ashes and thus I must be a king.

Or nothing at all. A ruined building. A bit of burned ground, where men will rebuild the walls and the grass will regrow.

It was the most wonderful thing I have ever seen, he thought then. Seeing it fall. Destroying it. The most wondrous thing I have ever done.

The memory of it, burning: the walls had run with fire, liquid fire pouring over it; it had shone with fire like stones shine soaked in water, like rocks on the tideline washed with the incoming sea. Its walls had glowed, they had burned so brightly, the stone had been red hot and white hot. Banefire shot from trebuchets, hammering the walls to dust, eating the rocks and the dust and the ground beneath. The men fighting around it, over it, inside it: armed men of his father’s army, his own pitiful host from Malth Salene, unarmed servants, old men, kitchen girls. Struggling with each other, killing each other. Tearing down the walls of the fortress. Killing the animals in the courtyards. Cutting down the trees in the orchard beside the south wall. Such utter destruction. He remembered the trees burning, their branches red with fire; they had looked like a glorious forest of autumn beech trees. Sparks rising. Filling the sky. Blotting out all the stars. The earth churned with mud, black in the firelight and the evening darkness. His men dancing and clashing their swords, shouting for him, singing out his name, their faces stained with blood and smoke.

Glorious. Astonishing. Beautiful beyond all things.

They did this at my bidding, he thought. For me. I killed so many of them. They killed, they destroyed, they followed me. I killed them, he thought. And still they followed me.

And the killing. The killing, the fighting, it had been … ah, gods, it had been sweet.

He had left this place once with his best friend’s blood on his hands. Come back here bound and humiliated, a prisoner, contemplating his own death. And now here he was made king. I didn’t used to think I wanted to be king, he thought.

A strange thing to think.

A voice called, loud in the still cold air. ‘We’ve found it.’

Ah, gods. Marith turned, walked to where his soldiers were moving. He walked slowly. His heart beat very loud.

‘My Lord King, we’ve found it.’

Marith rubbed at his eyes. Looked down. Looked away. Looked down.

His father’s body was stretched on the earth before him. Face down in the dust. Broken apart. Torn into shreds by his son’s blade, like hands devouring consuming him. I killed him, Marith thought again. I killed him. Ah, gods.

Marith bent, knelt by the body, stared. Dead eyes stared back at him. A look of astonishment on his father’s face. Had not believed that Marith would do it, even as the sword came down and down and down.

‘Talk to him,’ Thalia had said to him, one night only a few days ago, standing on the walls of Malth Salene looking at his father’s besieging campfires. ‘Can you not talk to him?’

He killed my mother. He told everyone that I was dead. He hated me. He was ashamed of me. What could I say to him?

The air hissed and writhed around Marith. Darker, colder air. The sound of waves crashing on the rocks of the shore beneath. His own heartbeat, like the beating of a bird’s wings or the thunder of horses’ hooves.

‘Bring the body down to Toreth,’ he ordered the soldiers. ‘Preserve it in honey. We will return it to Malth Elelane. Bury it with honour there.’ Malth Elelane, the Tower of Joy and Despair, the seat of the Altrersyr kings. Home. My father’s father’s grave, he thought, and his father’s before that … All the way back to Altrersys, and to Serelethe herself, the mother of Amrath. The mother of a god. She who began it all. Who doomed me to this. Dragon born. Demon kin. The bloodline of the Altrersyr, whose very name is a whisper of pain and hate.

The air hissed and writhed around him. His father’s dead face. Flies were crawling on its open lips.

‘Marith,’ his father had cried out, as he killed him. He remembered that. Bringing his sword down, again, again, again, his father breaking, falling, shattered into pieces, crying out his name as he died. ‘Marith. Please.’

Can you not talk to him? Killing and killing. His sword so bright. The crash of bronze, his sword blade on his father’s armour; his father had tried to defend himself against him, tried to strike him back, the two of them hacking at each other, so close to each other, strike and strike and the ring of bronze. ‘Marith. Marith,’ his father had cried to him. And he’d struck his father so hard, feeling his father’s body break beneath his sword blade, flesh and fat and bones and bloodshed, his father’s body opening up red and ruined beneath his sword strokes. Tear him into pieces. Hurt him. Empty him. Blood and blood and blood.

A king, Father! Look at me! I am a king!

Marith thought: he must have hated me.

Marith turned away from the body. The soldiers were lifting it awkwardly, in pieces, falling, flopping about, the head flopping back, black dried blood crusted on its throat. He thought: don’t run; in front of the soldiers, my soldiers, don’t run. And there in the burned earth before him a pile of tumbled stone, smudged with colour beneath the smoke, the mark of carving still clearly visible, the smooth curve of polished stone. The head of the statue of Amrath from the chapel, perfect and unharmed, cleanly severed at the neck.

He thought: don’t run. Not in front of the soldiers. My soldiers. Don’t run.

He went back towards his horse, stopped, stared round him, walked across the ruined ground north towards the cliff edge and the sea. There on the headland the ground was undisturbed, grass still growing, purple heather, the last yellow flowers of gorse, all the petals ragged and browned from the recent snow. A man’s body, a dagger clutched in a raised hand. A child’s body, eyes open to the sky. A mound of dark earth, topped with a stone carved with the crude image of a horse.

Carin’s grave. It had watched the battle, seen Carin’s murderer wade through blood triumphant and victorious, seen Carin’s family and Carin’s home destroyed.

‘I’m sorry.’ There was a flask of wine at his belt: Marith poured a libation over the gravestone. ‘You … perhaps you deserved this, Carin. That you did not have to see this. What I have done.’

The stone gave no answer. But they had always avoided speaking of what he was. Marith rubbed his eyes. All done here. All that had held anything for him here was dead and gone. He mounted his horse, rode down the golden paved road back to Toreth. The soldiers followed, carrying his father’s body on a bier, the eyes still staring up astonished into the grey sky. The air hissed and writhed. On the sea, the shadows of clouds ran. The sea was as cold as iron and the light did not dance on the waves. At the gates of the town the cheer rang out to greet him.

‘King Marith! Ansikanderakesis Amrakane! Death! Death! Death!’

A single ray of sunlight broke through the clouds. Shone on Marith’s silver crown.

Chapter Three

A king? He wore a crown, men knelt at his feet, he was first-born heir to the White Isles and his father the last king was dead. But the house of the king was far away on another island, his younger brother sat there on the throne of Altrersys in his place, the men of the White Isles believed him dead. King of a single town, a fishing port, his seat a fish merchant’s house with tall narrow rooms and worn floors. So glorious a place from which to reclaim his own.

Perhaps, Marith thought for a moment, it had been possibly foolish to raze the one fortress he had possessed to the ground. Burn the world and piss on the ashes and end up sleeping in a lumpy old bed with mildew stains on the wall. A triumph indeed.

There were sea-worn stones and bird feathers hanging on leather thongs beside the house’s doorway. They rattled as he went past. The owner of the house, the future Lord Fishmonger, the wealthiest herring merchant in Toreth Harbour, knelt like the rest as Marith entered. His hair was greasy, dandruff caught on his shoulders, beneath the perfume Marith was certain he smelled of fish. But he’d handed his house over so happily, so gladly, his face had been all bright with eagerness to let a blood-soaked boy throw him out of his lumpy old bed. Surely the greatest honour a man could ever have, that.

Lord Fishmonger looked nervous. ‘My Lord King,’ Lord Fishmonger said nervously. Marith thought: I must find out his name, I suppose. ‘My Lord King …’

Thalia came down the stairs. The sun came in through a window onto her face. She wore a white dress with pink and green flowers on it: in the golden light, with her brown skin and black hair, she looked like a may tree in bloom. Marith closed his eyes. Opened them. Too bright to look at. The sunlight was bright on her, and her face was nothing but light.

She was holding her cloak in her arms.

She looked at him for a very long time. Seemed about to speak.

He thought: she is leaving me.

He thought: I have made it safe for her to leave me. And now she will go. The realization struck him: she did not choose to come here with me. I rescued her from a stranger’s violence; she came here with me as a prisoner; she was trapped with me in a fortress under siege. And now that I have broken the siege she will turn and walk away.

She’s too good for me, he thought. Parricide. Vile thing. King of Death.

Lord Fishmonger, edging around beside him, said, ‘My Lord King …’

A cloud passed over the sun. The light faded. Thalia’s blue eyes dark and cautious. She did not speak. In the shadow, she looked like the stone on Carin’s grave.

Marith said, ‘Thalia?’

She looked at him. A very long time, she seemed to look at him.

‘Marith,’ she said. She seemed uncertain. I don’t … I don’t understand, he thought. Look what I’ve done for you. All of this, Thalia, all of this I did for you. To give you all that you deserve. To make you queen.

She was the High Priestess of the Lord of Living and Dying, Great Tanis Who Rules All Things, the One God of the Sekemleth Empire of the Asekemlene Emperor of the Eternal Golden City of Sorlost. She who brings death to the dying and life to those who wait to be born.

She knew that he was lying, if he thought he had done any of it for her sake.

‘Thalia,’ he said again. ‘Don’t go. Please. I love you,’ he said.

Her eyes narrowed. She held out her hand.

He said, ‘Please stay.’

She smiled. ‘For now,’ she said. ‘As you ask me so well.’

Hardly an answer. Yet his heart leapt.

But things to do, the ragged soldiers of his army must be addressed, some plan must be made. Very well, Marith, you are king of one town on one island, you have an army of fishermen and servant girls, you have a borrowed horse and a borrowed sword. Your father left his ships at Escral a day’s march to the west of here, perhaps even now more of his men are coming for you. You can destroy a tower, yes, granted. Such a display of power, to break mortared stones and bring down a place of peace. But can you hold against warriors, in battle? Killer of babies, you are, Marith. Women. Old men. What can you really do?

The thoughts drumming in him. Horses’ hooves again, thundering. Beating wings. His eyes itched like fire. He stared at the walls, trying to see. Thalia sat opposite him in silence. A room that smelled of mildew, and a lumpy bed. All this, for you!

I was going to take you to Ith, he thought. To my uncle’s court there, to make you a princess, dress you in gold and diamonds, we could have spent our days riding in the forests, reading side-by-side by a warm fire, talking and dancing and drinking and fucking and doing nothing at all every day. That dream is over. And what have I got for it?

Again, he felt her about to speak.

A confusion in the corridor outside. Knocking on the door, urgent, timid. A relief, even, that someone had come to break the tension, make something happen, give him something to do. Lord Fishmonger, I really must find out his name, Marith thought, Lord Fishmonger at the door with a message: one of the lords of Third Isle had come, Lord Fiolt, with thirty armed men. Said he wished to do homage to his king. Said indeed that he was the king’s particular friend.

Well now. Thalia looked up, confused. Carin Relast was my only friend, he had once told her, my only friend, and he is dead.

Marith got up. ‘Osen Fiolt? I will see him in the main chamber, then. Have wine brought for us.’ He tried to look away from Thalia. ‘I should see him alone.’

She frowned. Thinking.

‘I need to be sure of him,’ said Marith, ‘before I risk anything.’ Again, he knew that she knew that this was not true.

She nodded. All so fractured and strained. Perhaps she should have left him. He could give her a bag of gold and a horse and send her on her way somewhere.

He went down the stairs to meet this man who named himself his friend.

Osen Fiolt was a young man, only a few years older than Marith. Dark haired, dark eyed, handsome, with a clever face. He knelt at Marith’s feet, his sword held out with the hilt toward Marith in offering. Had the sense at least not to look at the crudely carved chairs, the plastered walls, the pewter jug and clay cups.

Osen said, ‘You have my loyalty and my life, My Lord King. My sword is yours.’

Osen’s voice half frightened, half mocking. Marith Altrersyr, crowned ‘king’.

‘Your life and your loyalty. Your sword.’ Marith raised his eyes, looked at the ceiling. A stain up there where the winter storms had got in. The king’s own particular friend. ‘Yet you did not come, My Lord Fiolt, when my father was besieging Malth Salene. One thousand men and seven trebuchets and a magelord, and you did not come to my aid. So should I not kill you? For abandoning me? For not coming to my aid? Where was your sword then? Your loyalty? Your life?’

Osen’s face went white. ‘I … Marith … My Lord King … Marith …’ He blinked, his hands working on the blade of the sword. He’d cut himself in a moment, if he wasn’t careful. ‘I …’ All the mockery gone out of his voice. Marith Altrersyr, crowned king.

Men’s voices drifted in through the windows, soldiers being drilled into some pathetic semblance of order. The army of Amrath. Marith’s army. Marith’s loyal and beloved men. Osen raised his eyes to Marith’s face and Marith could see the thoughts there moving.

Osen said slowly, ‘I am the Lord of Malth Calien. I am sworn to Malth Elelane, to the throne of the White Isles, as a vassal of the king. I swore an oath to your father. While he lived, was I not bound to keep it? Whatever my true feelings might have been? Without loyalty, there is chaos. So where does a man’s loyalty lie, then, if not to his king above all else?’

Marith thought: we were friends, once, I suppose. I killed Carin. I killed my father. I suppose I may need some friends. He looked down at Osen. Tried to smile. Sitting at a table once, him and Osen and Carin, talking, joking, Osen’s half loving half mocking envious eyes. ‘I don’t trust him,’ Carin often said.

‘As far as I can remember, we decided it rather depended on the king.’

Osen tried to smile. ‘And on the all else.’ Pause. ‘Though as far as I can remember, we never reached a definitive conclusion, since we had to break off discussing it for you to be sick.’

Young men drinking together. Drawing plans and dreams in spilled wine on the table top. ‘I’ll need some other lords around me,’ Marith had reassured Carin, ‘when I’m king. Irlast’s a big place just for me and you.’

His eyes met Osen’s eyes. The tension broke.

Friends.

Marith reached out and took the proffered sword. ‘Indeed. Very well then, My Lord Fiolt. I take your loyalty and your life and your sword.’ He laughed. ‘Want to drink to the fact I’m still alive?’

Osen sheathed his sword. Laughed back. ‘Like I drank to the fact you were dead?’

‘You drank to my being dead?’

‘Drowning my sorrows. It’s what you would have wanted, I’d assumed. No?’

They grinned at each other and sat down by the fire, and Marith sloshed wine into two of the cups. ‘It’s utterly vile, of course. Half vinegar. But it was this or goat’s milk … We’ll be in Malth Elelane soon, and then we’ll have a proper feast to celebrate.’

Osen looked around the room. The rough furniture, the crude wall hangings, the ugly bronze lamp. ‘We can have a proper feast quicker than that, at Malth Calien. My loyalty, my life, my sword, and all the contents of my wine cellars, I’ll pledge you.’ Raised his cup. ‘King Marith. May his sword never blunt and his enemies never cease to tremble and his cup never be empty of wine. May my sword never blunt and my life’s blood be shed for him.’

‘And your cellars hold better things than this muck.’

‘That I can pledge you unfailingly. If we ride today, I’ll have you drinking hippocras by my fires tomorrow evening.’

He had friends here. Of course he had friends here. He lived here. Friends and lovers and drinking companions and people who’d known him since he was born. A world.

Chapter Four

Thus in the pale afternoon sun they marched out of Toreth, a long thin column of men in armour, with their king and queen at their head. Marith made a speech praising the soldiers’ valour, calling them the first, the truest of his warhost, the army of Amrath that would dazzle all the world. The soldiers beat their swords on their shields, shouting, cheering him. ‘King Marith! Amrath returned to us! King Marith! Death! Death! Death!’ The townspeople mourned to see them leave, the shining new young king who had been made before their walls.

Familiar to Thalia, marching and riding and the creak and clash of armour and men’s voices grumbling and the tramp of boots. All she really knew of the world of men. She found some comfort in it, riding into the light and the wind. Marith’s face too was brighter, at peace, eyes glittering, looking out over the high curve of the land and the vast sky. The bier carrying his father’s body followed behind them, the horses drawing it stamped, tossed their heads.

She turned to look at the soldiers. The survivors of two battles against King Illyn, who had fought to make Marith king. She thought of them as like the priestesses in her Temple. They did as was required by Marith, as the priestesses had done as was required by the God. They died as was required, as the people of her city had volunteered themselves to die under her knife for the God. Life and death balanced. Those who need death dying, those who need life being born. She touched the scars on her left arm, where she had cut herself after every sacrifice. Rough scabbed skin that never fully healed.

She looked at them, and for a moment, a moment, she thought she saw a face she knew. Tobias, she thought. Tobias is here. And I thought, did I not, that I saw him last night. She closed her eyes. When she opened them, she could not see him. Men in armour, marching, helmets over their faces half covering their eyes. Tobias is probably on the other side of Irlast, she thought, with the money he made when he betrayed us. The men shifted position as the road widened coming down into a valley and yes, there was a man who looked a little like Tobias but was very clearly not him.

‘Look,’ said Marith, pointing. ‘The woods we rode in.’ Brilliant red leaves clung to the beech trees, but the snow had brought the other trees’ leaves down.

Thalia smiled, remembering. They went through the wood for a while. The ground was soft and pleasant, their horses’ hooves made a lovely sound in the dried leaves and the beech mast. Thala saw a rabbit, its white tail flashing as it ran from the soldiers, and squirrels in the trees. Rooks cawed overhead.

‘I like woodland,’ she said to Marith. ‘I like this place very much.’

As he had done when they rode in the wood before, he turned his horse, rode to a beech tree in glory, brought back a spray of copper leaves. She placed them in the harness of her horse, like a posy of flowers. Soon after, they came to a river, forded it with the horses up to their knees. The river was very clear, the bottom smooth and sandy. Marith pointed out a place in the bank upstream where he said there was an otter’s nest. There were yellow flowers still in bloom on the further side of the river, and a mass of brown seed heads covered in soft white down that caught on their clothes and on the horses’ coats.

‘This is a good place for fishing,’ Marith said.

Then the land rose, the trees ended, they came out across the moors, riding into the wind. Thalia’s hair whipped out behind her. Marith’s vile blood-covered cloak billowed like a flag. In the last of the evening sun the hills were golden with sunlight, purple with heather flowers; a great number of birds turned and wheeled in the sky. This too, thought Thalia, this too is a beautiful place. They followed the banks of a stream for a while. In one place the water made a song as it rushed down over rocks.

I thought I could live here with him, Thalia thought. I don’t know, I don’t know … Why did I let him live? Not just for his beauty. For the beauty of this place?

They slept that night in a way house, built down in a valley between the sweep of two bare hills. The men set up the few tents they had or slept wrapped in their cloaks with fires against the cold. All so familiar. The god stone by the entrance made her shudder; she saw some of the men nod their heads to it, place little offerings of pebbles or a coin, a lock of their hair. But the things that walked on the lich roads were silent and afraid.

A crown, she thought. For that? Only for that?

A soldier came running, eager-eyed, with a dead hare still warm as a gift. They had brought food up from Toreth, bread and wine and meat, but Marith smiled in pleasure, ordered it prepared for cooking, thanked the man. You can keep the skin, he said cheerfully. Make yourself some good mittens out of it. You’ll need them, on campaign. Gets cold guarding the king’s tent at night. Guarding the king’s tent? the man echoed, breathless and radiant. Oh, I think you’ve earned that, don’t you? The man’s face lit like a lover’s. What’s your name? Tal? A good name. Start tonight?

They are falling in love with him, Thalia realized. There was a light to Marith’s face as he spoke to them, savouring the fact that they bowed to him, gazed at him with rapture, their beloved, they looked to him already as something fixed and certain, King Marith, Great Lord Amrath, Ansikanderakesis Amrakane. She remembered the people of Malth Salene hailing him as king, clapping their hands and chanting his name. The people of Toreth Harbour, throwing flowers, cheering his entry through their gates with his sword still dripping his father’s blood. A few months ago he was believed to be dead. But they followed him now as though they had done so for years. As though all this was natural and real.

A bed was made up for them, blankets piled up on the hard stone bench of the way house. Outside the soldiers fussed, talked, sang, cooked food. Tal proudly served them the hare, roasted whole on the blade of his knife. Marith and Osen Fiolt ate it off the bones, licking grease from their fingers, laughing as they ate.

‘It’s better than the ground,’ Marith said cheerfully. ‘And only for one night.’ He would have pressed on, she thought, marched them through the dark, except that he had seen her tired face. ‘When we get to Malth Calien we’ll be able to arrange things properly.’

Unless you decide to burn that too, Thalia thought for a moment. The shadow of the godstone loomed in the firelight like it was burning. The fire rose up and the flames flickered on the thin silver band of Marith’s crown. Osen and Marith passed a wineskin, laughing. Poked at the fire to send up showers of sparks. Outside Thalia could hear the men talking, the stamp of horses, the clatter of bronze. Some animal cry, off in the dark: she started fearfully, then heard the men laugh. This darkness, alive and heavy with life. There was a smear of fresh blood, a tiny pile of entrails, at the foot of the godstone. She tried to look away from it, up through the doorway at the stars. So many stars.

‘Open another wineskin?’ Marith said behind her, to Osen.

‘It tastes like goat’s piss,’ Osen replied. ‘And you need to get some sleep, My Lord King. Save yourself for tomorrow night.’

‘Oh, dull. All right, it does.’ Marith poured the last dregs of the wineskin onto the fire, sending up a cloud of acrid black smoke.

‘Oi!’ Osen shouted. Laughing. ‘What—?’

‘I didn’t realize there was that much left,’ said Marith. His eyes were watering. He poked at the fire with a stick, trying to make it burn up again. ‘Sorry,’ he said to everyone and no one. The man Tal came forward to rebuild the fire.

Yesterday he was at war killing his own father, Thalia thought.

The country grew wilder the next day, grey rocks clawing up out of the earth, coarse grass and a harsh wind. The mountain of Calen Mon rose up to the south. Its peak shone gold in the pale sun. They marched on fast, meeting no one, following the old straight track of the lich roads across the moor. No people. Where were the people? Thalia wondered. This land was emptier than the desert. An empty land and an empty king. Behind them, the bier of the old king Marith’s father followed, drawn on a cart with a red cloth covering the barrel in which the body lay. A dead land and a dead king. She could see, though she had not seen it, the rotting crow-eaten face lying in the barrel, just visible through thick black-yellow honey, eyes open, drowned.

Did I let him live out of pity? she thought.

Around midday it began to rain, a fine grey damp that misted Marith’s hair and the filth of his cloak. Rainwater glistened on the men’s armour, blurred Thalia’s vision, vile and cold. The peak of the mountain disappeared in cloud. They marched on and the rain ceased; she could see off in the distance where it fell on the hills behind them, like a great dark stain.

Coming on towards evening they crested a ridge. Lights below in the gloom: Osen pointed, shouting triumphant. The road fell away steeply; beneath in the shadow of the hill a town huddled, gathered around an inlet fringed with marsh. The sea beyond shone silver dark, a hump of land rising in the distance that must be another island off to the south. On a hummock of dry land out in the marshes, the high walls of a fortress keep.

‘Malth Calien!’ Osen shouted. ‘The Tower of the Eagle! Malth Calien! I offer it to you, My Lord King!’

Another hour’s hard marching and they were in the marshes, picking their way with care along the winding causeway that led through them up to the tower. It was made of wood, slippery underfoot, narrow enough that they could walk only two abreast. On either side the reeds grew up high as a man’s shoulder, rustling in the wind. A strong, dank smell of salt. A heavy, pressing silence, save the whispering of the reeds. They cut the skin if you brushed against them. And then breaking the silence the honk of geese flying white over them, shaped like an arrow pointing out into the sea.

The causeway crossed a creek busy with wading birds. A few men, too, picked their way across the banks, lanterns bobbing, bending to poke in the mud with long sticks.

‘Lugworm gatherers,’ Marith explained to Thalia, seeing her look at them curiously, black with mud, bent over, filthy wet sacks over their backs. ‘Razor clams. Samphire. Good eating, samphire.’ Mud worms? Thalia felt her stomach turn.

Reed beds again, then the path broadened and rose and they were on dry land, a round hill rising clear of the marshes, bigger than it had looked from a distance, crowned with a stone tower, a dark palisade of sharp spikes. On the other side, the hill ran down into mud flats and the sea.

In through the wide wooden gates. A handful of men cheered their coming with a crash of bronze. They pulled up to a stop before the gates of the central tower, where a woman in a green gown stood waiting, a jewelled cup in her pale hands. She sank down to her knees as Marith dismounted.

‘My Lord King. Be welcome here.’ The woman’s voice was thin and sweet, like the chatter of birds. She held out the cup to Marith, who drank deeply then passed it to Osen who also drank. A servant came to help Thalia dismount. After the muck and emptiness of the marshes, the sudden contrast was startling: the woman, young and rosy fair, her dress worked with silver, jewels at her throat; the doors thrown open to show a chamber hung with bright tapestries; servants with fireside warmth pouring from their coats in the cold outside air. Osen took Thalia’s arm and led her in after Marith, an antechamber and then a great room with high carved beams, small narrow windows to keep out the wild of the marsh. She stood gratefully by the fire while the men of the place knelt in turn to Marith, kissed his hand as king. Then up to a high-roofed bedroom at the top of a steep spiral stair. Gloomy, with a strong scent of beeswax candles that made Thalia shiver, more small narrow windows giving glimpses of dark sky.

She assumed they would sleep now, her head was spinning with tiredness after the long ride, but a maidservant laid out a dress of blue velvet for her, a shirt and leggings and jacket for Marith. They were ushered down into the main chamber, where a feast was spread, hot smoky air reeking of meat and alcohol and sweat and salt water, a huge fire casting flickering shadows, cheering faces livid in the flames. The king’s soldiers, the men of Malth Calien, Lady Fiolt and her women, all rose and bowed their heads as Marith entered, and the cry went up hailing him. Lady Fiolt placed a cup in his hands, smiling; she was dressed now in scarlet, with red jewels in her hair and at her throat. Marith drained it, gave it back.

‘King Marith,’ Lady Fiolt said.

Chapter Five

I cannot leave him.

Cannot? Will not? Do not want to?

Who can tell?

But there is pleasure, is there not, in being loved by a king?

Chapter Six

Darkness. A narrow passage closing around her like a fist. For a long time now it had tunnelled downwards, creeping deep into the earth. Worm lair. Grave pit. She had felt, for a long time as she crawled, the anger and hate following her. The earth ringing with the crash of stones falling. The world being ruined.

The tunnel dipped again. Sobbing, she crawled on, the rough ground cutting her hands. Her family’s death riding on her back. She was tired now. So tired. Her grief came quicker. Grief and guilt and rage. She was hungry, she began to realize. She had no idea how long she had been crawling. Hours. Minutes. Days. Her mouth was dry with thirst. Her head hurt, where the mage fire had struck her. She desperately needed to piss.

The tunnel flattened, then began to rise. A smell came into the air, damp and fresh. A ghost of light ahead of her. A sound. Her pace slowed to inching forward, desperately eager, terrified of what she would find. Get out, escape this. Stay here in the dark of the tunnel, where nothing is real. Out there everything is ashes. Everyone is dead and the world is burned. She came on slowly to the end, where the mouth of the tunnel opened as a hole in the cliffs, shielded by tumbled rocks. The sea beat on the beach below her, making the shingle sing and sigh. The last light of evening, a few stars being swallowed by rising cloud. She crawled out of the tunnel gasping, clawing at the air that smelled of the sea. Alive. The grief in her turned to laughter, that she had beaten him. Alive!

Landra Relast, the eldest daughter of the Lord of Third Isle, kin to the Altrersyr and the Calborides and the kings of Bakh, descendent of Amrath, a great high noble lady of the White Isles. Landra Relast, whose brother and sister and mother and father had been murdered, whose home had been destroyed, who had watched Marith Altrersyr her promised husband burn everything she had to dust. Landra Relast, who alone had escaped the power he had over them, the glamour of King Marith who was Amrath returned to them, the madness of their glorious hunger for killing and death. Landra Relast, who had fled from him, wormed her way through the old secret tunnels beneath Malth Salene, away from banefire and mage fire and sword strokes, to the safety of an empty stony beach.

Landra Relast, who had nothing left.

She pissed behind a rock, though there was no one about to see her. Rinsed her hands and face in the sea, the salt on her wounds searing pain. Her dress was torn to shreds, she must stink of smoke. Dreaded to think what had happened to her hair and scalp.

It was very cold. The wind was picking up, the waves pounding the shingle. Thin, bitter rain. Landra tipped her head back, licked the water from her face. Her head was aching.

There should be a village ahead of her. An hour’s walk, perhaps. Her legs were shaking with hunger so she would go slower. The shingle was hard to walk on, slipping under her feet, after a while she took off her shoes thinking it might be easier, then put them on again when the stones cut her skin. So dark, the sea roaring half invisible beside her. Finally, ahead, the lights that must be the village, the creak and chatter and smell of human life.

Landra sat down on the shingle and began to think.

Lady Landra Relast. Someone would recognize her. Impossible that they would not. Even if they did not recognize her, it would be obvious where she came from, with her fine dress and her burned skin. Impossible to guess how they had taken all that had happened, or what side they might be on.

But there was nowhere else.

The first house was in utter darkness. At the next a light burned, thin lines through the gaps in the shutters. A string of stones hung from the doorpost. Hagstones, wards against the powers of dark. A good omen. Landra knocked. Through the shutters she could hear voices whispering, a clatter of metal and then a silence, and then the door opened a crack. A man stared out. In his hands a long rod of iron, black in the night.

‘I’m unarmed,’ Landra said urgently, showing her white lady’s hands cut and bloodied and burned and rubbed raw. ‘I need … I ask your help. Please. Shelter. Food. I can pay.’

‘Help?’ Pale eyes stared at her fearfully. Saw her burned hair and burned face. The door moved to close.

Not back out into the night. The dark. Her legs almost buckled. So hungry. So thirsty. So tired. Not back out into the night. ‘Please.’ She almost screamed it. ‘Please. I am Landra Relast of Malth Salene, Lord Relast’s daughter. There has been fighting … You will know, I suppose. Please, I beg you. Food and water. Help.’

‘Lord Relast’s dead,’ the man said. ‘They’re all dead. Malth Salene’s smoking ruins. The king’s dead there. There’s a new young king come.’ He studied her doubtfully. ‘Well, you’ve the look of him, the young lord that died in the springtime. Lord Carin, Lord Relast’s son.’ Turned his head back to the warmth of the house, muttered something to someone, then opened the door wide. ‘You’d best come in, then, whoever you are. Not a good night to be outside stone walls.’

The house was tiny, one room for living and sleeping, a beaten earth floor beneath the rushes, the ceiling hung with fishing nets. In the light of the hearth fire Landra saw that the man was young, not yet thirty, fair haired and fair skinned. A woman sat by the fire, also young, darker haired. A cradle stood in the corner, painted with the image of a deer.

The man set the iron rod back beside the hearth. ‘I’ll get you something hot to eat. There’s some stew left, Hana?’

The woman Hana nodded. She got up and helped her husband fetch a cup of water, a bowl of fish stew, a hunk of bread. Landra ate, frowning at the rough salty taste. Her hand shook exhausted on her spoon. The sound of wind and sea came loud through the shutters, over the sound of the fire and the calm soft rhythm of the child’s sleeping breath. The man and woman watched her eat, fear in their eyes.

‘My name’s Ben,’ the man said at last. ‘This is my wife, Hana. My son, Saem. She says she’s Lord Relast’s daughter, Lady Landra.’

Hana stiffened, then nodded. Turned kind eyes on Landra. ‘I’m sorry, then.’

‘You saw it? The battle?’

Ben shook his head. ‘We saw the light in the sky where it was burning. Men up on the moor with swords.’

‘Some men from the village went to look,’ Hana said. ‘Five, there were, went up there. Two came back. Said the other three … the other three weren’t coming back.’ Frightened eyes. Blinked, looked away.

‘We’ll make you a bed up,’ Ben said. ‘Get Alli the Healer to look you over in the morning.’

Grief and guilt and rage. She’d never sleep, worms gnawed at her heart. The bed was heather branches covered with a wool cloth, probably infested with fleas, poking at her, smelling of fish. She fell asleep immediately she lay down.

Woke again with a start. Grey faint dawn, the first traces of light clawing their way through the shutters, the sound of the sea very loud. Disorientating, the room unfamiliar, full of the sound of others’ breathing, the smell of damp. Earth smell from the floor. A great shriek of gulls came up suddenly, wild and angry, filled with pain. Something else behind it. Landra sat up, jerking her head around in fear. A roar like laughter. Silent out beyond the sky. The child whimpered in its sleep, the man and the woman stirred fretfully. Then quiet again. The rhythmic sounds of sea and seabirds and the world waking as the light came. The house waking, Hana making oaten porridge, the child awake singing, spilling its cup of watered milk down its clothes, Ben sitting down with a mug of weak ale to mend his nets. Does it not concern you? Landra kept thinking as she watched them. That the king is dead? My father is dead? That the world is changed?

A little before noon, a man from the village came calling. Ben told Landra to hide herself in the half-loft where they kept their stores while he stayed. The visitor and Ben and Hana spoke in low voices so that Landra could not hear what was said. But when it was safe again they told her, and she saw then that they were concerned. The king was dead indeed, they said. His son was king now in his stead. Marith, whom rumour had had it was dead. He was known on Third, Prince Marith, visited often, a friend of the Relasts, he’d be a king they knew, where Illyn his father had been a stranger. Almost an enemy, indeed, old King Illyn: the Murades, Queen Elayne’s kin, were not loved on Third, being long the sworn enemies of Lord Relast. The fighting was over, for the meantime. That mattered most of all to Ben, that it had not spread beyond Malth Salene to encompass his tiny corner of the world.

Concerned, yes. They looked grave as they spoke of it. Fear in their eyes. But Landra understood with slow puzzlement that for them the world was not changed.

They would not let her stay another night. Too dangerous, Ben said sadly and shamefacedly, looking not at Landra but at his son playing on the shingle throwing stones. If the king’s men came …

‘I’m nothing,’ Landra said, ‘nothing. The Relasts are all dead.’

Ben shrugged. ‘Riders are out on the road already, proclaiming the new king, calling troops. Can’t risk anything.’ He was young and strong enough to be a soldier, Landra realized then, looking at him. Any danger, however remote, however small, any voice mentioning there was a stranger at his house, his name being spoken to anyone, anywhere, must be avoided.

‘We’ll get your wounds looked to,’ said Hana, ‘but then you must go.’ She too looked at the child. Landra heard in her voice both the kindness and the threat.

Alli the Healer was the village wise woman, witch woman, bone charms at her neck, hagstone beads over her breasts, the green of leaf juice ground into her skin. Kind face. Kind, thoughtful eyes. She smeared a greasy ointment on Landra’s burns. It smelled meaty and fishy and bitter, stung her, shimmered on her arms like a slug’s trail. But she had to admit it soothed the pain a little. The raw red wounds looked softer, afterwards. When this was done the woman rubbed a switch of green marsh hazel over Landra’s scalp, muttering prayers and healing words. Toth, that is the cold of water. Ran, that is the peace of evening. Palle, that is smooth sheen of a calm sea. Broke the stick in two, gave one half to Landra. The other half Alli took herself to cast away into the waves. ‘Keep it safe,’ she bade Landra. ‘Keep it safe and it will help your skin heal.’

Hana gave Landra a cloth to bind up her head, making her look like an old shy widow woman. A dress, also, far too tight at the chest and waist. Stocky plain-faced Lady Landra. Never been pretty and her appearance had never been anything to take pride in and she’d never cared. A great lady, trained to rule a great household, raise a lord’s sons or the sons of a king. A beggar woman, half bald with no home and no name.

‘What will you do?’ Ben asked her. ‘Where will you go?’ he meant, encouraging her to leave. Or perhaps he feared she would throw herself into the sea.

She had tried to think of this. How can I live? Where can I go? What can I be? She said, ‘I’ll go to Seneth. To Morr Town.’

‘Morr Town?’ Ben looked at her sharply. Sadly. ‘That’s where the new king will go.’

Landra looked back sharply. Sadly. ‘Yes. I know.’

Thoughts moved in his eyes. ‘I can take you to Seneth. But not Morr Town. The coast to the south, somewhere well out of sight. You can take the road across the moors.’

Honoured guests disembark from their ships at Toreth Harbour and ride the golden road to Malth Salene. Murderers and outcasts and dead men take the lich way, and come in through the back gates where the middens are piled. So she had told Marith, bound and filthy, her prisoner, when she brought him back to Malth Salene, sealing all their doom. Such scorn in her voice. Cruelty. It had been a cruel thing. And Marith had bowed his head with shame.

‘Tonight, then?’ she said slowly.

Ben nodded. ‘Tonight.’

Hana gave her bread cakes, salt fish, a hard small round of goats’ milk cheese. She gave them in return the gold bracelet she wore at her left wrist. In the dark Ben took her over to Seneth, seat of the kings of the White Isles, where her ancestors Serelethe and Eltheia and Altrersys had once come ashore seeking shelter after the death of Amrath the World Conqueror, the King of Shadows, the King of Dust, the King of Death. Dark and cold, the only sound for long hours the slap of water against the hull, the creak of the oars. No light, for fear another boat would see them. The water in the darkness looked solid like black stone. Had to drop anchor and wait a little, when the mass of Seneth appeared half visible before them, Ben would not risk the cliffs and rocks in the dark, though he seemed to know the water without needing to see.

The light was breaking. A faint lifting of the night. Landra could see the land ahead of them, details in the cliff line, the slump of rocks.

‘You sure?’ Ben asked.

Morr Town, where the new king will go. She almost laughed. ‘Yes. No.’

The oars dipped again. Light enough to see the water churned up before Ben got into his rhythm again. The cliffs in front of them looked like faces. Vast grey stone, sheer up to the sky.

Ben rowed south along the coast, past the first beach they came to, round a sheer point where seals slept. The cliff dipped, scrubland running down to meet the sea. As they rowed closer, Landra saw a rough path scrambling up. Seabirds circling in the morning air, riding the dawn wind. A few seals sat on the rocks and stared at them as they came in. The boat crunched against the shingle. Wave breaking round the sides.

‘You sure?’ Ben asked again. Landra clambered awkwardly out into the water. Cold up to her waist. She gasped at the cold. Sting of the salt on her legs. Ben handed her the bundle of food.

‘Thank you,’ Landra said awkwardly. Ben was already pushing the boat off back into the sea with the oars. She dragged herself over the shingle through the water, her dress clinging heavily around her legs. Slipped stubbing her foot against a rock and plunged her left arm into the water, the salt stinging her burns. Got up onto the steep rise of the beach, climbing upwards like climbing a hill. The pebbles moved down around her feet in a landslide. A thick band of rotting seaweed, alive with hopping flies. Cuttlefish bones and a dead jellyfish, glistening silvery red, tentacles splayed out. Looked like bones and a dead heart. The grey cliffs stared down like faces. Old gods watching. The old things of the land. The gulls circled, screaming at her.

Landra turned to look out to where Ben’s boat was already disappearing into the sea. Raised her hand and waved. Pointless. But he’d been a kind man.

Eltheia. Fairest one. Keep safe. Keep safe. Him, and Hana, and the child.

She sat down on the shingle. The pebbles pressed uncomfortably into her skin. She picked up the first pebble her hand rested on. A hagstone, grey-greenish, the hole blocked by a smaller pale grey stone. An omen? She threw it wide into the sea. Made a lovely deep sound. She chewed a little bread, drank from the skin of water. Nasty, fishy, stale taste.

She got up and began to walk stiffly up the cliff path, a weary peasant woman in an ill-fitting dress, smelling of fish and tallow and herbs.

Chapter Seven

A month, they stayed at Malth Calien.

‘What are we doing here?’ Thalia asked Marith, after a few long dull days.

‘Waiting.’ He smiled with terrible heavy sorrow. ‘Calling in all who will come to me.’

‘For what?’ she asked, feeling her ignorance. The place bustled with men, soldiers, business; a ship had gone out at dawn the first morning and Marith chafed after its return, watched the sea every day.

Marith said slowly, ‘To claim my throne.’

‘But … you are crowned king.’ A crown of silver in your shining black-red hair.

‘King of what, exactly?’ Irritation in his face, that she did not understand this world of his. ‘Third Isle is one island of the White Isles. The seat of the king is Malth Elelane, on Seneth, the Tower of Joy and Despair, the tower raised for Eltheia, the tower from which Altrersys ruled as the first king. There is my throne. My crown. My home. I have told Ti that I am coming. That I am king, returning home. Ti and … and Queen Elayne. They do not answer. So I must come with swords and spears, and make them kneel to me as king.’

‘They thought that you were dead,’ said Thalia. ‘They may not even believe that it is really you. Tiothlyn only saw you so briefly.’ You killed your father, she thought. What else are they likely to do?

‘They never believed I was dead,’ said Marith. ‘That would have been too much for them to hope for, that I was dead.’

So bitter. So bitter his voice. But what do I know, she thought, of family? I who was given up at birth to the God. And yet … the petty rivalries of the Temple, the little slights over nothing that grew and festered over the years into mortal wounds. Yes, she thought, perhaps I do know of these things.

She said after a while, ‘And if they do not kneel?’

He laughed bitterly. ‘What do you think? But they will.’ His eyes rolled in his head, he looked mad as he said it. She shivered. So vile. So much hate in him. Kill him, she thought then. You are wrong to feel for him anything but disgust. But he woke that night sweating, whispering his father’s name. Thalia gave him water, stroked his face. His eyes burned like fever. ‘But I had to do it. I did. I did. He would have killed me. Killed you.’

‘Yes. You did.’

He had been drinking heavily at dinner, as he did every night, laughing and shouting with his lords in Malth Calien’s great hall, rough and violent, a thing she hated and thought from everything he had said to her that he would hate, but he seemed so caught up with them, a man among men, a king in his court, a warrior boasting of his deeds. He sucked up their adoration, the envious among them raised endless toasts to Marith the War Leader, Marith the Conqueror, Marith who would outshine even Amrath; he laughed about it to Thalia, mocking them, but it pleased him, his pale flushed face shone; the next morning he would smile and tell her they were empty craven fools and then in the evening he would drink it up again with his wine and come stumbling to bed filled with their praises, laughing with pride.

‘He hated me.’

‘Yes.’ She thought: he did not hate you. I saw that, I who have never known a father. He did not hate you, any more than you hated him. But there is nothing else that can be said. If we repeat the lie, it is true, is it not? Without that lie … without that lie, we are nothing.

I could have stayed in my Temple, when the men came to kill me. Woken the other priestesses. Called the guards. I did not call for help. I ran. Two slaves died. I ran.

‘I’ll bury him with all honours.’ Marith rubbed painfully at his eyes.

He is almost pitiful, Thalia thought. And I … I do pity him. So indeed we shall be happy. If pity and lust together can make love and happiness.

‘All honours.’ He was drifting back towards sleep. ‘He would have killed you … He told everyone I was dead … King Illyn …’ he muttered again, rubbing at his face, ‘King Illyn Altrersyr …’ The walls of the Great Temple rose up in Thalia’s mind, high and huge, the faint glimpse of golden domes and silver towers, the sound of voices talking about things she had never seen. High great walls, shutting out the world.

The weather changed, becoming bitter cold, hard frosts, one morning a faint dusting of snow. The marshes froze over, a thin skin of ice that cracked beneath the weight of a man’s foot. The reeds stood out bare and black. The birds fled with the ice, the last flocks of them gathering on the roofs of Malth Calien and flying into the west like long plumes of smoke. Lone deer picked their way through the frozen landscape. The trees bent furred under the frost. The last few lords of the furthest islands came, of those who would come, and the news ran down from Seneth that Tiothlyn was crowned king at Malth Elelane and was raising his own troops.

‘Why does he hate him?’ Thalia asked Matrina Fiolt, Osen’s wife. At first Thalia had not liked her at first, golden haired with deep, heavy breasts and round cheeks, making eyes at Marith, smiling with him as a woman who had known him for longer, who knew how to say things that Thalia did not understand but that made him laugh. ‘My Lady’, she called Thalia, but with something in her voice that Thalia recognized from her Temple, meekness cutting like knives. But it was so dull, sitting in this cold place looking out at the marshes with nothing to think of but what was to come.

‘Who? Hate who?’

‘Marith. Why does he hate his brother? And the queen?’

Matrina put down her embroidery, a long fine girdle patterned with flowers. Frowned. ‘I … Most brothers hate each other, a little bit, I think … And Marith and Ti … I don’t know, I’ve never met Tiothlyn. But it must have been hard, I suppose, the two of them, with so much before them … Being Marith’s brother … Did you not have brothers or sisters you were jealous of? Saw yourself less than or better than or different to, and thought your parents loved the more?’

No. Nothing. Only the God, Great Lord Tanis Who Rules All Things, whose power reached to a small dark room and a knife. Thalia thought: life and death I know. Light and dark. Killing. Nothing in between. Nothing that means anything in the living of a human life.

‘I quarrelled with my brother all the time when I was a child,’ Matrina went on, ‘we fought like cats and dogs over everything. I love him, of course. But I was glad to leave and come here. And they are so close in age, and so similar, and Marith — and the king’s birth mother—’

‘She is dead,’ Thalia said. ‘His father killed her.’

Matrina coloured a little, then laughed. ‘Look at me!’ She shook her head. ‘There’s no reason not to talk about it, any more. She died when Marith was still only a baby, and the king, the old king, I mean, King Illyn married Queen Elayne so soon after that. These old things, they get forgotten. What does it matter? Twenty years, she’d been dead. But then Marith started talking about it, stood up before his father and accused him of having his mother killed. My father and brother were there, they saw. And Tiothlyn was so angry back. And the king too, of course. Marith had to apologize, say it was lies. Who knows? But young men quarrel with their fathers, and their brothers, and take against their stepmothers. My father and my brother quarrel. My father wasn’t even sure he meant it.’

On and on. So far back, the shadows that ate at him … Thalia shuddered. Saw it all before her, and the old king again, eyes and mouth jutting open, golden with honey. Killers and murderers, all of them. Death and hate. On and on and on.

A clatter from the courtyard, a harsh voice shouting, ‘Faster! Again! That slow and you’ll be dead, the lot of you! Again!’ A flurry of fine powdery snow blew in at the window. Sand and dust had blown in occasionally, long ago in the Temple when all things were different.

‘Seneth is a beautiful island,’ Matrina said. ‘Perhaps Osen will take me to live there, if the king keeps him close to him.’ She frowned again, took up her embroidery and set back to her work. ‘I wish my father would come. It’s so awkward like this.’ Marith had explained it to Thalia: Matrina’s father Lord Dair sat in his hall on Belen Island, torn between astonishment at his daughter’s husband’s good fortune and his own loyalty to the Murades and the queen. The complexities of it all made Thalia’s head ache. Always, it came back to killing their own kin.

‘This is war,’ Marith said wearily later when she asked him. They stood together on the outer wall, watching a column of men march in under the gate. ‘That is what war is.’ His face was pale, following the soldiers’ progress with hungry eyes. Scarlet armour and dark spears, white pennants fluttering with the great blaze of an orange sun, come up from ships beached on the mud flats, black timber and white sails and red painted eyes on the prow. Almost the last, he thought, Stansel of Belen with three hundred men and five ships. Not a huge host gathered, though enough to fill the halls of Malth Calien twice over, camped in the orchard and the horse yard, eating the castle and its villages out of everything in their stores, hunting and fishing the marshes bare. It would be a hard winter, for those left behind. The earth around the castle was fouled with sewage that would spread disease.

They must leave soon. Marith must know it. The men cooped up in the fortress grew restless, eager for war. Ghost lights flickered out on the marshes. Shadows circled the towers of Malth Calien. Bright dead screams in the evening. Kill and kill and kill and kill. Death! Death! Death! It would be better for him when they were moving, Thalia thought. Away into clean air. Away into doing. He sat in the hall at night and let them praise him and call him king and conqueror, and most times he laughed with them and believed it, but sometimes now he would mock them and curse them to their faces, and once he had broken down and wept. Get him away from these things. If they could be alone, themselves … He and she stood together alone on the walls and he smiled his sad smile and looked more what he had been, beautiful and desolate as the frost on the marsh. They would leave for Malth Elelane. They would bury his father, kill his brother and his stepmother. They would marry and he would crown her as his queen. And then perhaps he would have some kind of peace.

He turned with his beautiful dead eyes and his smile as the last men came under the gateway, a voice calling out the order to bar again the gates. ‘That is the last of them. Soon. Very soon.’

Men’s voices shouted from the courtyard, commands, greetings, cheers. They came down from the walls into the midst of it, men and horses and servants, Matrina Fiolt with an anxious face trying to order her household in the face of something almost like a siege.

Marith said, ‘Let’s go and look at the forge.’ He liked to watch it, the ringing of the great hammer, the shattering showers of sparks, the white metal hissing and writhing and turning black as it cooled, the cauldron where the light of the sun blazed, pouring liquid fire more brilliant than the light itself. Almost something sacred, the way his eyes danced with the sparks, the noise of it so loud it blotted out thinking. They kept the old ways, the men of the Islands, brought gifts of ale and honeycomb and green willow leaves for the men of the forges, bowed their heads to them in reverence at their power of making and burning and raising up death things from the gleaming light. Half gods with their blackened hands pricked with scar tissue, glittering scales of metal embedded in their skin. Magicians. Death summoners. Dragon men.

‘They’ve almost done,’ Marith said happily as they came to the low doorway of the smithy. ‘The sword.’ The hammer started up with a stink of metal and his voice was lost. They stood and watched in silence as the master ironsmith beat out a long sword.

Drew the sword from the anvil, plunged it into a bucket of water with a great hiss of steam. Turned it in his hands, tossing it to feel the weight. Held it out to Marith. ‘It still needs much work. But if My Lord King would like to try …?’

Marith took it carefully, looked it over, turned and moved it as the smith had. Brought it up and struck down at the hard stone of the floor. Ringing song of metal. Sparks. Dirty and unfinished. It gleamed in his hand.

‘A good sword, I think. The weight seems good.’ He passed it back to the smith. ‘How long, do you think?’

The smith considered, shifting the sword again from hand to hand. ‘A few days, perhaps … Three? Four? It must be retempered and beaten and retempered again. The final cooling in horses’ blood. Sharpened, the jewels set, the runes made … Five days.’ His face was anxious. ‘Does that satisfy My Lord King?’

‘There’s not much I could do if it didn’t, is there? I expect we can wait that long. Five more days in a soft bed, at least. Five more days Tiothlyn can pretend to be king.’

Five days. Two days and two nights of wild feasting, the men drinking themselves to dropping in the hall, fights breaking out over a woman or a slurred word or nothing at all, three men dead and one injured near enough to dying, the hall running with chaos and filth. Singing the paeans and the war ballads, wilder and angrier and with such perfect eager joy. A day and a night of calm, Malth Calien grey and silent, sleeping, servants creeping through the hallways scrubbing it clean. The snow came, white to cover the ruins, as it had snowed over Malth Salene to cover the dead.

Then a sudden great rush of activity, the place churning like a rats’ nest, rushing, shouting, everywhere carts and armour and swords. Out of the chaos an army forming, eight thousand men armed and ready, horses, ships, supplies. Tearing its way to life like a child birthing. Coalescing like bronze in the forge. A night’s rest, Marith restless, muttering in his sleep, finally in the dark before dawn settling a little, his face buried in Thalia’s hair. The dawn of the fifth day, and servants come to wake them and dress them and bring them down to the Amrath chapel, to make the prayers asking blessing on their war.

The lords of Marith’s army stood assembled in full armour. Outside in the courtyards the soldiers lined up in long rows. Still, strained silence. Marith alone beside the statue of Amrath, the stone face looking out beside him so like his own.

Osen came forward, knelt at Marith’s feet holding up the sheathed sword. A scabbard of dark red leather, worked all over in silver lacework, dragons writhing to swallow their own tails. A hilt of dark silver, plain unworked metal with a single great ruby at the pommel. Marith drew it. The blade hissed in the air.

‘I am Marith Altrersyr, Lord of the White Isles and of Illyr and of Immier and of the Wastes and of the Bitter Sea. The heir to Amrath and Serelethe. The Dragon Kin. The Demon Born.’ He lowered the sword slowly, turned to face the statue. ‘Amrath! I go now to reclaim my throne, that was Your son’s before me, to restore the true line of Your children, to take my rightful place as Your heir, as lord and king. Where the people of the White Isles once welcomed Eltheia Your consort, I will stand and be welcomed as king. I will be king.’

The crowds in the chapel went down onto their knees in a clatter of armour and a sigh of heavy silk. A deep indrawn breath, held for a moment with the tension of breaking rain. And then a great roar: ‘All hail Marith Altrersyr, Ansikanderakesis Amrakane! King Marith! King Marith!’ White fire leaping and running the length of the blade, rushing like water, surging over Marith’s hands, gilding him, covering him, tracing the lines of his bones and his hair, his fingers clenched on the hilt of the sword, white fire pouring down his skin, alight and liquid, brilliant as the dawn sun. He stood looking at them, his people, still as the statue beside him that did not burn but sat dark and silent with its face so like his own. Thalia wondered, even, if he knew he burned.

He sheathed the sword. The fire faded. Smiled across at Thalia. Joy in his eyes. Look! Look! Look what I am! Look what I’ve done!

The court rose to their feet, hailing him again as king. ‘All hail Marith Altrersyr, Ansikanderakesis Amrakane! King Marith! King Marith!’ Out of the chapel in procession, down to the shore where the ships bobbed at anchor or were drawn up on the mud. Marith held Thalia’s arm, his eyes raised, not seeing. Somewhere far away, in the fire and the light. His hand was cold as cold metal. Behind them came the lords and ladies, breathless, still cheering his name. The soldiers followed, the servants, Malth Calien emptying of people, rushing out onto the mud flats where the ships waited, craning their necks to see the king. ‘All hail Marith Altrersyr, Ansikanderakesis Amrakane! King Marith! King Marith!’

A bonfire burned on the shoreline. Men had sat all night watching, guarding the fleet from the powers of sky and sea. Now in the glitter of morning Thalia saw long shadows curl around the masts. Ghost lights flickered out on the marshes, visible even in the light of day.

Marith stopped on the sand near the bonfire, the furthest running of the waves touching at his boots. Again, he drew the sword.

A horse was led up, richly harnessed with ornaments of gold. It stepped high and proudly, the smooth movements of its flanks like water curving over stones. At the last, as it came up to Marith, it realized. Its nostrils flared, snorting, rolling its eyes. Marith reached out his hand for it and it stilled again, sank down on its haunches before him, head bowed. The cut was gentle. Blood pumping out onto the sand, running into the sea. Silence. Then from a thousand throats a great wordless shout of triumph, swords clashing against shields.

When the horse was dead it was raised up on wooden spikes set in the water, the men cheering as they worked. ‘Amrath! Amrath and the Altrersyr! Victory to the king!’ Gulls and crows came immediately, shrieking. Death drawn. Death things, like the swords. The hot stink of the blood made Thalia tremble. Memory. Grief. Pride. So many had she killed, in her Temple, to bring death to the dying, life to those who needed to live. She could feel blood on her skin. The horse flopped on its spike, bleeding into the water, black against the silver-black sea. The tendrils of blood in the water were like the curls of Marith’s hair.

Trumpets sounded. The slow beat of drums. The men moved together, a churning mass on the shoreline, coloured tunics, coloured armour, the colours of their pennants. Iridescent beetles. Flowers blooming. Women dancing in swirls of cloth and gems. Trudging out to the ships, swords and shields and helmets, waiting faces, coming on in neat long lines beside the dead body of the luck horse, splashing out into the water boarding the black ships with their red gazing eyes and the water flowing with the tendrils of the horse’s blood, mud and silt rising with the smell of salt and salt-rot, the bright fresh light on the waves.

Servants helped Thalia up onto the ship. Her feet slipping on the wet planks. Wet heavy skirts pulling around her legs. Cold and vile, like clinging dead skin. On another ship they were loading horses, kicking out and neighing, making their grooms curse. Her own fear like the horses’ fear, even as Marith took her arm, smiled, called her queen. Blood on his hands that the seawater had not quite washed away. She could smell the fresh blood on him, over the scab filth of his cloak. Osen handed him a gold cup, he raised it, threw it out into the waves. It flashed in the sunlight, wine spilling out into the water with the blood.

‘May the sea not spite us! May the sky not spite us! Victory!’

The wordless cheer back at him. The clash of swords on shields.

We may be going to war, Thalia thought. Such an absurdity. To war! She had told him that she was going, she would not stay here in the marshes sitting and waiting for him. She had ridden away from the battle at Malth Salene, and men had died in pain for her. She had been the High Priestess of the Lord of Living and Dying, the holiest woman in the Sekemleth Empire. She would go now as the army of Amrath’s queen.

‘Do you think,’ she had asked him, ‘do you think that I am afraid?’

‘Of course not.’ He tried to smile. ‘But I am afraid, for you.’

‘You don’t need to be.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

He said, ‘It will all be well, anyway.’

On the shore men struggled with the barrel holding King Illyn’s corpse, loading it carefully onto the ship. The dead face still staring with its eyes and mouth open, shocked. It had all honours now, indeed, his father’s corpse. Kill him and curse him and bury him with gold and love.

The ships hung ready, troops lined up on the decks. Matrina and her women on the shore beside the dead horse. Wind-blown faces. Black mud on their fine skirts. From the king’s ship flew the deep red banner of the Altrersyr, white cloth soaked red with blood. Bright sails, swollen and hard with the wind. The ship juddered. Moving. Marith stood in the prow wide-eyed. Pink fever flush in his cheeks.

A great wild scream cut the air like a sword drawn. A shadow moving over them. An eagle. Black against the sun. It turned overhead, circling the fleet. Men’s eyes and the red painted eyes of the ships and the dead eyes of the sacrifice, watching it. Screams. Swooped low over the ships. High into the sky with the light flashing on its wings. Something fell from its talons, spiralling in the air, falling and twisting, landing at Marith’s feet. Soft crumple sound. The eagle screamed and was gone.

At Marith’s feet was a foal, new born, matted with blood and fluid, shimmering inside its caul.

A strange smell of birth and bloodshed. It twitched a moment, as though it were still alive.

‘The luck horse! The luck horse!’ Voices on the ship whispering, awed. Hands moving in signs of wonder, signs against great magic and god things. ‘The luck horse!’

Marith stared down at the pitiful body, up at the sky, his eyes straight unblinking into the sun. ‘The luck horse.’ He took Thalia’s hand. ‘You see it? You understand?’ The men on the ship bent to kneeling. Marith lifted the vile thing in his arms. ‘Raise it up! Raise it on the mast!’

They tied it above the sail, sailors scrambling upwards like lizards, treasuring the burden one carried bound to his back with long fine legs flopping like he had grown some fragile leprous wings. Still it shimmered, black and rainbowed in the sun. Thalia tried to turn her head away but the only other place to look was the body of the sacrificed horse on the shore. She thought: do I understand? Any of these things?

Under a banner of dead horses the fleet sailed fast across the bright water, red painted eyes staring hungrily ahead.

Chapter Eight

‘The isle of Third is a fine land,

Her corn rising high like maidens dancing,

Her fat flocks, her fat cattle,

Her green meadows and her green forests,

Her rivers sweet and clear.

But still I say nothing is more lovely,

More joyous, more worthy of praise,

Than a great host girded for battle,

Bronze swords bright in the sunlight,

Young men’s faces raised and eager,

Red banners proud in the wind.’

The marsh and the banks of the estuary slipped away behind them. Ahead, the dark sea and the darker smudge of Seneth Isle. The wind blew fair in the sails. Scant hours, before they made land.

‘That’s the biggest load of cock I’ve heard in days,’ said Tobias.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘That bloody song. A load of crap. Third’s a shithole, and an army’s a load of ugly sweaty buggers ready to rip someone’s guts apart.’

‘Watch your mouth,’ said Brand. ‘Third’s his kingdom, and we’re his army, and it’s bloody glorious.’

‘Oh, bloody glorious.’

‘I said watch your mouth, Immishman.’

Fuckhead romantics. Tobias went back to looking at the water. Maerlk, the man who had started it by singing, went back to looking at his sword. He seemed quite astonished to be wearing one. Tobias kept feeling an itching need to tell him which end you held it by.

Back on a bloody ship. Spent years successfully avoiding ships. Never get involved in amphibious warfare. One of Skie’s old maxims. Suddenly made a hell of a lot of sense. Just never, Tobias. One thing this company’ll never bloody do.

Never do a lot of the things he’d somehow done in the last little while.

It was all cloudy in his mind, making him irritable. He’d hated the king, once. Before he realized something. Something. And now the great coming battle, to decide who got the crown and got to say he was better and everyone loved him more. He hadn’t wanted the king to win, once. Had wanted … something else for him. Kind of hard to remember what. Just still a nagging sense of pointlessness, that there was no real reason for any of this. That he should just turn around. Run.

A little house and a girl to clean it and a pint of Immish gold of an evening and a fat soft gut. That had been … been a really good good idea he couldn’t quite shake. He’d done a bad thing, hadn’t he? Something bad. To the king. Hadn’t wanted … something to happen.

He looked across the water and the king was there, standing at the prow of his ship, looking straight ahead. So tiny, a stick of black with a red cloak, maybe a flash of light where his crown was, but you knew him. They all knew him, even without seeing him. The ships moved slightly, changing formation; the figure was gone. Light snow furring the deck, making it slippery. Hands cold and raw on the hilts of their swords. He’s the king. We’ll make him king. His kingdom and his army.

Bloody glorious! Yeah!

Third was still an ugly freezing damp shithole, though. And his army was still a load of ugly sweaty buggers ready to rip someone’s guts apart. Bloody wounds and oozing sores glorious.

Yeah.

Seneth was coming properly into sight, grey rocks and green hills rising up clear ahead of them, blurred in the snow. Huddles of houses down on the shoreline; you could even see the smoke of hearth fires. Didn’t look any different to Third.

Tobias had kind of expected they’d be making land soonish, camp for the night and then march. Instead, the ships turned, moving north following the line of the coast, the king’s ship taking position at the front. Another hour’s sailing, slow in a weak wind. The snow had stopped, thank the gods. But still bloody cold. Rations of bread and meat and beer handed out, they ate crouched on the deck, eyes on the shore. Could feel people on the shore looking back. A couple of fishing boats sailing panicked before them, tacking and darting to get away. An army looks like a dragon to peasant men, Tobias thought watching them. Gods alone know what an army of ships must look like, when you’re out on the dark pitiless sea. They sailed on, then a shout came from one of the ships ahead of them, orders relayed back whipping on the wind, voices calling like the gulls, the sound of the waves slapping against the hull, the men craning to hear.

‘Furl the sails! To oars!’

A movement of men to the mast, a great creak of canvas and rope thrashing like snakes. A space in the sky where the sail had been, the mast standing useless like a dead winter tree, rough splintered wood with the bowsprit across it like wide-spread arms. Like that stupid sodding stake they stuck the stupid sodding dead horse on. Oars striking out into the water. The sound of the ship now the crunch and crack of men’s bones.

‘Strike the drums! To arms!’

So they were moving much more slowly now, crawling along with the land bedside them, a high rugged headland, harsh black rocks. Something looking from the top of the cliff a moment, a flash of white. And then the ships turned and the land fell away, and before them was a great bay with smooth clear water, the towers and roofs of a town rising up behind a thick harbour wall, a crowd of black ships.

The King of the White Isles said, ‘We go straight to Morr Town. Land at harbour.’

Lord Bemann said, ‘They’ll be waiting for us. Closed the harbour. Have ships out. We need to land in the wilds, come to Malth Elelane overland. Somewhere they can’t predict.’

The King of the White Isles said, ‘I am their king. I am Lord of Malth Elelane. I will not creep into my own home. Morr Town will open her gates and her harbour to me gladly.’

Lord Fiolt said, ‘My Lord King … Malth Elelane is indeed yours. But …’

Lord Stansel said, ‘What he means, My Lord King, is that sailing straight into Morr Bay would be … unwise.’

Lord Fiolt said, ‘What I mean, Marith, is that sailing straight into Morr Bay would be suicide.’

The King of the White Isles said, ‘Malth Elelane is mine. Morr Town is mine. She will open her gates and her harbour to me. She will.’

Swords ready. The sound of the waves slapping against the hull. Drumming. Gulls.

Oh fuck, Tobias thought, watching the line of ships grow nearer.

Tiothlyn’s ships were moving towards them, the same black ships with red painted staring eyes. The drums coming up from them also, the same dull beat to keep the oarsmen steady, loud over the water calling the oarsmen to their work. The only sound they could hear in the world. The dark water between the two lines narrowed. Trumpets began to blow in the ships and on the shore. Trying to frighten the other side off. But there was nowhere for either other side to go. The town, and the cliffs, and the sea. In the sea things were beginning to move and surface, drawn by the drums.

‘Archers: draw!’

‘Archers: loose!’

A flurry of arrows from the leading ships. Beautiful, like the shuttle of a loom. But too early: they fell short, floating on the water, bobbing on the waves. Tiothlyn’s men jeered. We meant that to happen, we’re just doing this to taunt them. Aren’t we? The figure of the king standing in the prow of the first ship with the sunlight on his silver crown. He is death. He is ruin. He is Amrath reborn. He will be victorious. The dead body of the luck horse, the sky’s offering, hangs from the mast as a sign. The enemy’s ships are fewer. Weaker. Bloody glorious. Bloody victorious. Kill and kill and kill until the water heaves with bleeding. Kill them all! But the arrows float on the water, bobbing on the waves. Sticks. Long green fingers reached and pulled one under, snapped it. Flaccid fucking sticks. We meant to do that. Miss everyone. Didn’t we?

An enemy arrow clattered onto the deck of Tobias’s ship. Hissing. Burning. Green. Fire. Green tendrils rushing across the planks, scouring channels as they went.

Oh gods and demons, not again. Not again. Not a-fucking-gain.

‘Earth! Get earth on it! Now!’ Men ran forward, throwing mud from a barrel. The flames died in a choking sputter, stinking wet smoke for a moment and then gone. Another arrow shot past, dripping flames. Then a rock. Dripping flames.

Salt-soaked pitch-soaked well-seasoned damp wood is … astonishing when it explodes.

Two more rocks: the ship jolted wildly as waves hit it from both sides. Boiling waves. Green waves. On fire waves. The ship’s timbers smelled kind of funny, hot like singed wood. The hull was beginning to smoke.

So, what, King Marith just clean forgot Morr Town had two massive banefire shooting trebuchets set up on the harbour in the entirely unlikely event anyone ever decided to invade an island kingdom by sea?

Or never noticed them?

Thought they were purely decorative?

‘Archers: draw!’

‘Archers: loose!’

Patches of green twisted on the water, fighting with it, the sea churning and boiling at this unnatural thing searing into it, fire it cannot quench, steam rising with a hiss of clenched teeth. The ship the rock had hit was sinking almost to the mast top, spewing out steam and fire and dead men. The mast of another ship was burning, crackling and hissing, sparks of salt and the crack of old wood, green and blue flames. Gnawed apart, swaying as the banefire tunnelled into its veins.

‘The oarsmen! Aim for the oarsmen!’

Another shower of banefire arrows. Another volley of burning rocks. More frantic scrabbling with mud until the flames died. The burning mast came down, shattering the side of its ship. Still burning. The stricken ship tilted down into the water. Long fine fingers like coiled skin reaching up for it, pulling. Men leapt screaming into the sea, then screamed louder and began frantically trying to crawl back onto the burning ship. The water was stirring. Thrashing about. Something down there. Screams. Men’s arms trying to cling to anything to get out. A whirlpool, and for a moment maybe you saw eyes. A fountain of blood shot up from the water, bits of flesh and bone bobbing. Higher than the masts of the ships. A nasty crack that might be someone’s spine breaking. A sound like the gnashing of giant teeth. A man with another man’s innards floating round his neck, as though some kind soul had thrown him a rope. Actually he did seem to think some kind soul had thrown him a rope, from the way he hung on a moment before he realized what it was and screamed and let go and something pulled him under. Bubbles. Then no bubbles. Then another fountain of blood. Screams.

Still they were pressing slowly forward, another volley of arrows from each side crossing each other in the sky, the sea on fire, voices in the sea laughing. Long fine fingers probing the planks of the hull. The king in his silver crown.

More ships. We’ve still got more ships. Stronger men.

‘Archers: draw!’

‘Archers: loose!’

‘The oarsmen! Aim for the oarsmen!’

The two fleets finally came together, the first ships meeting, men screamed and the voices in the water laughed. Ramming each other, swords clashing. Like a cavalry charge, really, Tobias saw then. Two big things driven straight at each other in the desperate hope one breaks. The red eyes of the ships staring at each other, and suddenly the eyes were alive, the ships were dragon things in the water, twisting and fighting, and he saw that the men didn’t control them, the ships were fighting among themselves, taking their crews with them down into the water, enjoying it as they fought. The planks of Tobias’s ship groaned as it surged forward. Came up alongside one of Tiothlyn’s ships, rushing fast towards them, there was a channel between them in the water and then the ships met and men were fighting across the gap trying to board, lashing out with swords, the oars meshing and striking together, each shoving at the other ship, trying to pull it in and push it away. Like a beast with too many legs, scrabbling at itself.

Tobias swung his sword at the figures facing him. Very little art to this with the world moving and the men really too far away to hit. The deck tipped, suddenly he was near enough, got a man on the arm. Blood dripped into the water. A crash as the two ships collided. He was fencing for a moment with the man he’d just injured, up very close, got hit himself on the shoulder leaving a hard pain through his armour, then the ships moved apart again and he was looking across grey water at his opponent, their swords flailing at each other across the gap. Again like a thing with too many legs, like a louse on its back scrabbling.

Maerlk shouted as the ships moved, lost his balance, fell. His head was visible in the churning water. Blood in the water. Long fingers, curling around his legs. Screaming like someone might stop to throw him a rope. The ships came together. He was gone between them, wood closing over him like doors shutting, trying to claw his way up through the hull, buried alive in the dark as he drowned.

‘In oars! Board her!’ The men scrambling across the sides. A crack of wood as an oar was crushed between them, the rest pulled back up into the body of the ship. Tobias leapt and scrambled with the others, got across, picked up fighting again with the man he’d left off before Maerlk died. Brand was across too, pushing hard at an enemy soldier, blood on his face, smiling. Never get involved in amphibious warfare. Never. Never. Never. Just don’t. The bloke Tobias was fighting almost got him in the neck and Tobias moved backwards and whacked his leg on an oar and suddenly he was up against the side of the ship and there really wasn’t anywhere to go that wasn’t either into a sword blade or into the sea. This was not fun fighting. This was fucking nightmare fighting. This was about the worst fighting Tobias could remember, possibly barring the dragon, or the Sorlostian Imperial Palace, or the first battle of Malth Salene, or …

Or pretty much anything involving King Marith. The sea was on fire. The ships were on fire. The ships were sinking. The trebuchets were slinging stones around not really caring which side they hit so long as they hit something so that it died. Men were thrashing about in the water, weighed down by their armour, and you could see the arms reaching round their necks to pull them down. Crunching teeth. Hot blood.

Pretty much anything involving King Marith …

The ship jerked and moved of its own accord, swinging round, the ship they had come from wedged into it locked by oars and ropes and dead men’s bodies; for a moment he saw King Marith on his own ship, fighting, shining, his sword flashing silver-white.

Pretty much anything involving King Marith.

The snow was getting heavier, settling on the deck, making it slippery, hissing and steaming where patches of banefire still burned. Can’t see. Snow and smoke and I can’t bloody see. They shouldn’t have engaged us, Tobias thought. Should have just stood back and shot green fire at us until we were all floating in the sea with our skin melting off our faces, nicely cooked. He fought on relentlessly with gritted teeth. Just survive. Just survive. He slipped on the wet wood of the deck, almost fell, got his balance back, killed someone.

The ships looked like wrestlers tussling together. It looked like a tavern brawl, these vast dark shapes gripping, moving, shoving, giving way, coming together again. Cheers and screams one against the other. Impossible to tell who was winning or losing, except that Tobias had a strong sudden feeling that they were losing on this one ship. Brand seemed to be fighting with the wrong hand and his right hand was a mass of blood. Maerlk had drowned lifetimes ago. Lots of other soldiers with them fighting but there seemed to be a lot more trying to fight them off. A bloke called Janis went over the side, one of the enemy’s lot went down too, another two came at Tobias together seeing him as a good dangerous threat. Definitely seemed to be more of them.

This was hard. Getting really fucking hard. He was getting tired, the voyage wearing on him. Hacked and parried and the men he was up against were just better than he was. Maybe not on a good day. Maybe certainly not on a good day, rested and ready on dry land with the confidence of what he was doing at his back. But not after everything else. Not like this here.

Wasn’t thinking all this, not really, not thinking anything except trying to stay alive and to kill the men trying to kill him, but it was squirming around burrowing at the back of his mind, some new kind of release and wondering. Why? Why? Why? Why am I here and why did I want Marith to be king, and why am I doing this? Echoing out to the rhythm of sword strokes, the creak of the ships, the hammer of iron on bronze. A sword got into his arm, bruised him and ripped his armour apart at the elbow, blunting the enemy’s blade but now he was vulnerable in the sword arm that was weaker already from Sorlost. His leg was aching too, giving under the constant movement of the ship that made him slip and work. Not good. Not good. He lashed out, hit one bloke in the shoulder, the bloke went back with a groan looking hurt but the other came again at him seeing his damaged armour and the grey sweat on his face. Not good. Oh fuck. Fuck, fuck. I don’t want to die, Tobias thought. I really don’t want to die.

Wasn’t anywhere else to go that wasn’t either into a sword blade or into the sea.

Jumped.

Cold water tasting in his mouth like blood. Oh gods he couldn’t see anything just churning dead water, salt and froth and waves, his eyes stinging, the cuts on his body stinging, the weight of his armour pulling him down, cold vile metal shifting against his skin in the water, wet leather dragging on his shoulders, arms and legs thrashing to keep afloat, fingers dancing around his ankles, images of great curving teeth closing, thrashing wildly, down under the surface where it was so dark and the water wormed at his mouth. He pulled his head back above into the air spluttering with salt burn, spitting, his eyes stinging, tugging at his legs and the weight of the armour carrying him down, the things with teeth fuck he could see them circling, the water’s a maelstrom, patches of burning fire stinking, hissing, snow beating on the surface, where it lands on the fire it boils off into steam. He sank down again into the dark and pulled himself up again choking, kicked at something he maybe felt reaching for him, fuck I’m going to die, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, oh fuck. It was so dark beneath the surface like a fucking tomb, not just dying but being buried alive. I should have let them stab me. I’d rather die of a stab wound quick and bright with red blood. The bulk of a ship moved near him huge like a black wall curving outwards the red eyes staring at him, and it’s more alive than anything he’s ever seen and the water was in his mouth again worming through his lips and his clenched teeth and he felt something reaching pulling at his legs and long cold fingers curling at his arms.

Half an oar bobbed past him, smouldering at one end. It’s on fire, he thought, then grabbed hold of it anyway desperate with a glorious wonderful feeling of victory. Kicked his legs a little and he could even move. Still very low, his head half underwater, the sea slashing at his mouth and nose, not really moving in any one direction to speak of and yeah, the thing he was holding on to was definitely on fire, but no longer actually drowned.

Someone’s arm bobbed past him, blood spiralling out of the cut off end. Then a bit of planking, also on fire. Then a bit of something that could have been pretty much anything, red and black and white and pulpy-looking. Someone’s head? Then another broken-off oar. A bit of rigging. Tobias looked up. Another of the ships was sinking, its prow and mast burning, a ragged great hole in its side that looked like a torn mouth. The red eyes still stared, hopeless. Men were scrabbling up the burning mast, clinging to the burning prow. It made a sucking noise like an old man drinking as it went down. The sea boiled. Still burning. Light flickered up from underwater. Bubbles of air, then nothing. Men floating clutching bits of wood. Another ship came towards them, the men shouted and waved and then arrows loosed and one of the men sank and disappeared, and the ship rowed over the men floating on straight towards a third ship, moving fast, the men on the third ship shouted and Tobias realized it was going to ram them. The crash made the water rush up in waves, slapping him in the face. He was spun round blinded and choking, clutching his burning oar. When he could see again the rammed ship was sinking and burning.

The swirls of the water pulled him round, caught in spiralling eddies of moving ships and sinking ships. The strength of the water astonished him. The snow still getting heavier, a wind getting up, whipping up the waves. White foam. Laughter in the water, long arms, long hair, long teeth. A ship sank in the water with the men on board screaming and the white horses rode over them and pounded them down to the depths where the other things waited for them. Two other ships charged each other, smashing planks and oars. Men fighting across decks slippery with blood and snow and banefire. The sky getting dark with the yellow and grey of a bruise.

If Tiothlyn wins, it occurred to Tobias, he may not be entirely magnanimous in victory.

If Tiothlyn wins, it occurred to Tobias, I’m probably pretty much entirely fucked.

If Marith wins, it occurred to Tobias, I’m also probably pretty much entirely fucked.

Seeing as I sold the boy out to Landra Relast and all.

Why the fuck am I fighting for him? I wanted to kill him. He almost certainly wants to kill me. I almost certainly would.

He’d say the thought hit him like a bucket of cold water, but given his current position that would be too much like a nasty joke.

That fucking poison bastard Marith. That sick, vile, diseased, degenerate fucking bastard. His head felt odd, like a weight lifting from it, like a cloud moving off and the air changing from cold to hot.

I wanted to kill him. I wanted him dead.

What am I doing fighting for him?

Began to kick in the water, trying to move himself along in one clear direction. Preferably the direction of something resembling land. Preferably not the town. Preferably not anywhere with the battle between it and him. Which kind of left as the only option some jagged black rocks on the headland cradling the bay, very sharp and very nasty looking and really, again, you couldn’t help thinking about teeth. Like some huge fucking thing had sat down there and opened its mouth. Dragon rocks.

The thing about rocks, though, the thing about rocks, right, is that they’re dry land. People very seldom drown on rocks. If they can get onto the rocks. If he could get onto the rocks. He kicked and thrashed about with his burning bit of wood sinking further under the water still glowing with fire. His armour was so, so heavy. Felt sick in his stomach from the salt water he’d swallowed. Getting cold, too. Cold as ice, the water. Where it wasn’t boiling hot. The wind freezing on his wet hair. His teeth were beginning to chatter, a numb cold pain was jabbing at his legs. Squeezing his chest. His arm hurt. His leg hurt.

Shouts of triumph from a ship to his left, presumably captured by a boarding crew. Half Tiothlyn’s men were on Marith’s ships. Half Marith’s men were on Tiothlyn’s ships. Just somewhat unlucky perhaps that the other half were drowned. The shouts turned to yells as another ship bore down on it, drumming to get the oars going fast to ram. Splinter of wood as the two collided. The ramming ship moved to pull back but was stuck somehow, her prow locked into the shattered wound in her victim’s side. Desperate voices, figures running and pushing, the crew of the stricken ship clambering over with swords. The wounded ship was sinking, pulling the other down with her. Hugging and refusing to let go.

The water moved. Tobias had to look away from the battle, kicking and panting, splashing to keep his head up, wrestling with waves cold and heavy as dead muscle, again that sheen on the water, the slickness like the slickness of a muscular body moving that made you think the sea was a creature flexing itself, the smooth roll of its flank and then the broken white of the waves and it was almost a shock that his head sank in it, the water flooding over his mouth and eyes and up his nose making him shudder and choke and almost sink again. He shouldn’t be able to sink in it. He should be able to ride on its surface, glossy and moving like muscle and skin. Churning like a body convulsing in pain.

When he looked back the two ships had disengaged, the rammed ship was sinking, the ramming ship, her prow broken and letting in water, was moving back off in a judder of oars while men fought on her deck. Sailors scrambled up the mast, cutting at the ropes that held the sail furled. It opened, took the wind, the ship lurched forward with the oars flailing. The wind was blowing stronger. Blowing the ships away from the land. The snow covering them.

I’m freezing, Tobias thought. Freezing and drowning. He thought for a moment of trying to wave down the ship. But nobody would come. Nobody could see. Nobody cared. He kicked and wrestled and sank and got himself moving properly again, torn away from the magical spectacle of the black ships fighting, huge black dragons birds horses whales, fighting relentless. If I hadn’t seen a dragon, he thought, if I hadn’t seen a dragon, I’d think this the strangest and fiercest thing I ever saw. He kicked and wrestled, sank, floundered, suddenly a tide got him, pulling him moving in a rush of strength until the black toothed rocks were up gnashing towards him, the water white on them, their points like knives.

The waves took him. Dashed him towards the rocks. Oh gods and mercy and fuck. I should have been stabbed. I should have died by the knife. A soldier’s death. A warm death. A death where someone might feel some pride that you’re dead. Instead I’ll be torn up on a rock by the sea and no one will ever know and by gods it will hurt and be cold and lonely and cruel.

The waves took him. Dashed him towards the rocks. Hands, lifting him. The water broke in a great jet of spume. A hollow beating like the sound of his heart. He spun around trembling, his ears roared with water. The rocks tore gashes in his legs. Long slippery tendrils of green stuff that whipped his face; he tried to cling on to it but it slid through his fingers feeling vile as raw meat. And then suddenly his face clear of the water, the rock pulling back under him, he clawed and pulled, dragged himself and he was out of the water on a little ledge of rock tilting away from the sea. Water slapped over it when the waves broke, but he rolled and crawled and the water seemed to be receding and he scrambled up rock rough with encrusted shells and collapsed gasping and panting to look back and see ships sailing fast out of the bay away to the south, some maimed and limping, some smouldering still on fire, others making their way fast back into the harbour of Morr Town similarly smashed and broken, others still sinking and dying in the water before him, spreading slicks of planks and oars and dead men.

The battle was over. Marith had lost. Knew him, still, felt the draw of him, a tiny figure on one of the last ships fleeing the harbour, the rage and shame in him radiating out like the beams of the sun, the way you could see light on far hills in the dusk.

Failed! Ha!

You’re fucking delirious, Tobias thought to himself, and collapsed on the rocks of the headland soaking wet and wounded and still just sort of alive.

Chapter Nine

The ships pulled back raggedly, like crows flying up from a field when the farmer comes out with a sling and a pouch of stones. Moving fast, with a wind driving them. Sixty had departed from Malth Calien. Perhaps thirty remained. They straggled down along the coast, hugging tight to the line of the cliffs. Looked smaller, weaker, the planks of their sides crushed in like the flanks of a broken-down old horse.

The king’s ship was the last, as was fitting. It sailed blindly, the king looking back staring blindly, the dead thing that was a portent of nothing flopping from the mast with the crows and gulls fighting over its unborn eyes and the blue tongue lolling in its unborn mouth.

There is no plan to get out. There never was. You didn’t really think this bit through, did you?

Luminous creatures rose from the deep of the water, called up by the setting sun. The surface of the sea shimmered, solid as metal to a man’s fooled gaze. Usually they only came in deep water: Marith had only seen them this close to the land a handful of times, and seldom this bright. They’d gone out in a little boat once, him and Carin, paid a fisherman to take them. Sat floating on the water pulling up pure colour hand over hand over hand. It ran through the fingers like milk curds. Smelled sweet as rotten fruit. Eltheia’s tears, the shore people called them. The tears she wept for joy and for sorrow, that her husband was dead.

There is no plan to get out. There never was. Not for any of us.

But he hadn’t thought he could fail. Everything had been so easy. The black ships dancing, the wind strong in their gleaming sails, coming in all together with the men’s armour flashing in the light. The dead foal had seemed such an omen. He had seen them staring, calling it for luck, awed whispered voices as they pointed. Eagles. Horses. The old, old things of the White Isles, even before his ancestors came. Sacred things that knelt at the king’s feet. The men in their coloured armour like a flock of birds on the decks of the ships, his men who would fight for him forever, onwards and onwards forever to be king. They would die for him. They would kill for him. Bright they raised up their voices and shouted the paean, drew their swords to take the enemy, certain in their faith in him. Two battles he had fought for his crown. Two battles he had won. All the men of his father’s army had turned in their allegiance to come to him. They loved him. They knew him. Saw what he was. Ti’s men should have loved him. Known him. Thrown down their swords to bring him joyously to harbour, cheering his name. Bid him welcome to his hall in clouds of dried flowers to place his crown on his head.

And then the fighting! His soldiers fierce and confident, Ti’s ships meeting them in flights of arrows, the water lurching, the fire, but still he’d been so certain he would win. Kill them! Kill them all! So wondrous, fighting on the cramped confines of the deck, penned with nowhere to go, slaughtering. Sending a man crashing down into the cold water, bleeding into the water, the hungry sea claiming him, the white fingers taking him, his body too weak to keep himself afloat, the look of panic in his eyes as he bled and drowned. Wondrous. Fighting pure and without thought. Nowhere to go. No one who could come. One false step and the water beckoned. Nothing could be controlled; he could not even order his men. Maelstrom like the water. Death like the breaking waves. So certain he would win.

Thalia had seen him fighting. That would have been a good thing also, that she had been there and seen. Her kiss of welcome as he turned back to her, perfumed with his enemies’ blood, raising her hand with his as they came into harbour, leading her up the roads of the town to his home, the people acclaiming him, her face bright with pride and desire; ‘Be welcome to your home and the home of our children, my beloved,’ he would have said as the doors were thrown open, the men and women and servants kneeling in the blare of silver trumpets, a victory feast and then up to his bedchamber with crimson hangings, the windows open to the sea, her eyes wide.

That was what it should have been. Not this. He could not even bear to look at her.

A splash, the iridescent colours of the water rippling. A body, thrown overboard from the next ship. It sank straight as a stone. Coated and covered in luminous colour. He remembered his own hands, out in the rowing boat, dipped in it, the tiny things sticky and shining, a thin film like dipping his hands in the honey in which his father’s body lay. Carin’s hands covered in it. Carin placing his hands sticky and shining over his heart. The water closed, the ripples stilled. They couldn’t keep the dead on board the ships. Weren’t going to take them with them to wherever they were headed for. A pile of corpses, lined up on the decks. A pile of the dying, needing water and aid. Throw them over into the deep. Forget them. The iridescent colours of the water. The red painted eyes of the ships. Kill them! Kill them all! Dead’s dead.

He’d killed so many, fighting on the ships. Seen one of his brother’s ships holed and sinking, sinking with men jumping screaming from its sides. Oh gods, that had been beautiful and worth seeing! The great crack as the wood shattered where two ships met, the water rushing in hungrily, the enemy’s ship lurching and mawing and breaking, coming apart into pieces, disembowelled. An animal gutted, its life pouring out in thrashing bodies. Life spilling. Men as the entrails of some great blind beast.

Thalia had been in danger, then, Ti’s soldiers coming over the sides with swords while he stared at the dying. He should never have taken her. Left her safe with Matrina to wait on her and teach her good eastern ways, had her brought over in triumph, crowned and robed in gold. But she had insisted. Said she would be safe. And he had so wanted her to see. And the fear in him, when Ti’s men came at her, there were so many between him and her and the thought for one moment that she might die, her beautiful body sliding down into the water, lost to him, and the thought of what he’d do to the world if she died. He’d come running, killing as he came towards her, killing everything, Ti’s men, his men, the things in the air, the things in the shadows calling him as king. All the blood coming down. She had saved herself, blazing up in light, the men falling back from her, falling into the water, screaming down on the planks of the deck with their eyes buried, so that he’d killed them where they lay, Ti’s men and his men, until she was safe, and he knew then that he’d kill everything in the world that ever was and ever would be, apart from her.

Fighting. Killing. Nothing but killing. Perhaps that was when it had started to slip away from him. And his men had been fighting. And he had been fighting. And the ships had crashed and holed each other and fought as living things. And the swords had been bloody. And the water had been bloody. And his men had been fighting. And somehow, somehow the battle had been lost. The ships had turned in panic with Osen cursing him pointing out he’d been wrong, and he hadn’t had a chance to kill anything more. And he’d lost his kingdom and his crown and his father and his mother and his brother, and everything in the world that had ever mattered, apart from her.

Chapter Ten

‘Do you need anything else doing in the village, Ru?’ the woman Lan asked. ‘While I’m down that way?’

Ru thought. ‘Not the village. But you could check on the goats. Saves doing it later.’

‘I will, then.’ Lan adjusted her headscarf and went out. Took a deep breath of air after the smoky tallow damp of the house, that was one more thing she could not get used to. Physical weariness. Hunger. Her skin itching, her hair itching, her clothes itching. She had a grim and certain horror that she had become infested with lice.

‘If the young one’s a bother, slap him on the nose and tell him “no”,’ Ru called after her. Lan called back yes. Her hands were rough and callused, broken nails, red scabbed raw knuckles. Slap him on the nose. She walked quickly down the track leading to the village, that ran out over the cliffs over Telorna Head.

A bed by the hearth and three meals a day and a clean dress. What Ru gave her, in exchange for work. She checked on the goats, did her errands in the village, went back to Ru by the fire to cook them an evening meal. Thought about walking on to Morr Town. Never did.

On the first day Lan had walked on shaking legs up the beach over the moorland of Seneth, following smoke from a village where she thought she might get directions to Morr Town. And the villagers had been kind enough, given her directions, if not to Morr Town then to a town called Ath west along the coast from where the road ran off towards Morr Town and the seat of the king. She knew the name, she thought. And that had been good and easy, along a well-made road banked with beech trees fiery with dried leaves, beech mast crunching pleasantly under her feet. On the second day her body shook and her mind screamed and she could not walk for seeing fires burning, and she had stumbled down the road off into the wilds, and there she had found a rundown house, and an old sickly woman, who was called Ru.

‘Did the young one bother you?’ Ru asked.

‘Yes. But I hit it on the nose as you suggested.’

‘He’s the next to be slaughtered. When needs be. Difficult, that one.’

Lan served the food. They sat quietly to eat.

Ru said when they had finished eating, ‘I’ll teach you to spin, if you want. If you’re staying here.’

‘I can’t stay,’ Lan said.

‘My husband died,’ Ru said. Lan looked up at her, confused. ‘A long time ago. Years. Years and years. Still young, he was. I was young. He died in a brawl in a tavern, the innkeep said he was attacked by thugs, but … He died and I stayed here, learnt all the things I needed to learn, did what needed doing, worked hard. It’s not much of a life. But he had locked my skin away somewhere, you see, and I never found it. So I have to stay. I’ll teach you to spin and cook and work if you want. If you’re staying.’

This thin tired old woman bent double from her work. A selkie. A sea maiden. A god thing. She swam in the sea as a seal, shed her sealskin and danced on the shore as a woman, until a man came and stole away her skin. And while the man had her skin she must stay with him. Marry him.

Ru said, ‘Always, for someone, the world is being broken, Lan, girl. I’m not so resigned to it. Still long to go back to the sea. Dream it. But it was a long time ago. So many years.’

They stared down at their empty plates. Lan said, ‘My brother was murdered and I couldn’t bear the grief of it. So I went far away to try to forget. And while I was far away I walked out of a shop doorway and saw my brother’s murderer’s face. And I dragged my brother’s murderer all the way back here with me to punish him. And everyone I ever cared for died as a result. If I hadn’t walked out of the doorway. If I hadn’t seen his face.’

‘If,’ said Ru. ‘If.’

‘I could search the house for you. For your skin.’

‘I’ve searched. You think I haven’t? It’s not here. Wherever he put it, it’s hidden somewhere fast. Under a stone on the shore. Buried in a box in the cold earth.’

‘Let me search. Please.’

Ru said, ‘And what would I do, if you found it? Go back to the sea?’

This thin tired old woman bent double from her work, her hands gnarled and shaking, her eyes half blind. Seals swimming, lithe and glossy and beautiful, twisting and diving in the water, wild and nameless and free.

Ru said, ‘Don’t search for it.’

Ru said, ‘There are a thousand cruelties in the world, Lan. Cruel dead things. Monsters. Chance. Tidy the plates away. Then I’ll teach you to spin.’

The woman Lan nodded, took the plates away to the slops bucket and the bowl of water for washing she had been heating on the fire. Hot water, lye soap that made her hands dry and sore. The soap was a new thing, like the bread, got from the village where she had taken the wool Ru spun. Great massed coils of it, fine for weaving, thick for knitting blankets and mittens and caps for the winter cold. Ru had spun it and saved it, unable now to reach the village on the other side of Pelen Brook to trade. So some tiny good comes from my ruin, Lan thought. Someone’s world kept alive. The cottage was filthy where Ru could not see the dirt. The goats were wild with uncombed coats where Ru could no longer walk to them. If I leave she will die, Lan thought.

They sat in the half-dark by the fire, and Ru taught her to spin.

‘I will show you a special thing,’ Ru said a few days later when Lan had returned from milking the goats. She went to a cupboard at the back of the house by her bed, brought out a bundle wrapped in leather. Unfolded it carefully and there on the leather was a piece of yellow cloth. Fragile as cobwebs, with a sheen like a child’s hair. Ru held it up. It shone and glowed and blazed. Not just lit from the sun but lit from itself. Like mage glass. Like magic fires. Like laughing eyes.

‘Oh!’ Lan cried. One beautiful thing. Such a beautiful thing. ‘Is it … Is it magic?’ Mage cloth, worked from dreams. A princess shining in the light of her own gown. Eltheia herself must have worn such things.

‘Smell it,’ said Ru.

Lan bent towards it, carefully, fearful she might damage it by breathing, so delicate it seemed. It should smell of spices and honey and the petals of new flowers. It should smell, she thought with a pang of rage, like Thalia’s hair. She breathed in the scent of leather, the worn skin smell of Ru’s hands. And under it … Salt. Seaweed. Fish. She looked up, shocked.

‘Sea silk,’ said Ru. ‘The threads of tiny sea creatures. In the sunlight it glows. If left in the sun it will glow at night. Touch it.’ Soft as thistle down. So soft Lan could barely feel it. Glowing. But the smell of the sea. A dress for a mer princess, perhaps, a selkie to dance on the sands in the moon. No human woman would wear it, smelling like that.

‘Is it yours?’ Lan asked. She imagined Ru as a young beautiful sea maid, silvery haired and slender ankled. This the last precious fragment of her gown.

‘I wove it,’ said Ru. ‘I gathered the silk. Wove it with my own hands.’

‘But I’ve never heard of such a thing.’ There would be a way to take the stink out, and all the lords and kings and queens of Irlast would want such a fabric. Eltheia and Amrath, shining like the sun. Landra Relast should have had wardrobes full of it.

‘I made it,’ Ru said again. ‘The most beautiful fabric in the world. No one else knows how to make it. It took me forty years to make.’ Held it to the sun again and again it glowed. ‘If you stay, I can teach you.’

An image for a moment, the two of them, the sea witch and the burned woman, bent at their work, weaving dreams and light into cloth that would never be enough to use and that smelled of salt and sea and fish so that no one would wear it even if they ever made enough to wear. Bolts of shimmering, stinking gold falling through their hands. All the lords of Irlast could not conceive of such a treasure.

‘I can’t stay,’ Lan said. Still mesmerized by the silk, but the silk made her think of other things. Silk gowns, gold bracelets, the glitter of drinking cups in her father’s hall.

‘No.’ Ru wrapped up the leather again, placed the bundle back in the cupboard by her bed. I have just told her she will die this winter, Lan thought. Without me here she will die. ‘I didn’t think you would. You want to go. You want and you don’t want. But you will.’

‘I could stay here the winter. Find someone to take care of you. I could look for your skin.’

‘I don’t want my skin, Lan, girl. Not now. If you found my skin I’d ask you to burn it, and then I’d die. But you wouldn’t burn it and you won’t find it. And I won’t die.’

‘I’ll stay a few weeks more. Get you supplies in. Make things easier for you. Find someone to help you, maybe.’

‘I managed before you came without that. Daresay I can manage again. Though it’s kind of you to think of it.’ Ru’s rheumy eyes flickered. ‘Don’t go looking for revenge, Lan.’

‘Revenge?’

‘The sea and the sky have blood in them. A great wrong was done to you. But don’t go looking for revenge.’

Why not? Lan thought, and Ru looked at her hearing it in her face.

Ru picked up her spinning. ‘Come and sit and we’ll try the thick thread for knitting again.’

But what else have I got left, Lan thought, except revenge? That’s why I left the rest of them to die, isn’t it? So I could avenge them? She said in a rush, like water pouring out, ‘I watched my sister dying. I watched my mother dying. I ran down into the dark and hid. Ran away. Left them dying. To be revenged.’ In her mind the crash of breaking stonework, the roar of fire rushing in waves, the screams. More than men screaming. Claws in the sky. When she thought of it now she saw bloody eyes.

‘I brought him back here for vengeance,’ Lan said. ‘That’s why I brought him back here. To be revenged. To destroy him. And that’s why all this came about. Because I brought him back.’

All this, because Lady Landra couldn’t live knowing he was living. All this, because Lady Landra was filled with the need for revenge.

Silence.

Ru said, ‘You hold it gentle, with a loose wrist. See? Careful. Get the softness in the thread as you turn it. Good soft cloth. A bone spindle’s best. Gives the luck. Strong and supple as young limbs, we want it. Strong and supple and soft. Horse bone’s best of all, of course, if you can get it. That’s it, hold it loose, see? You feel the difference now?’

The spindle turned. A small worm of greyish thread. The woman Lan nodded.

‘Hel, for warmth and comfort. Benth, that is safety from disease. Anneth, to ward off the lice. Say them as you spin. Hel. Benth. Anneth. Hel. Beneth. Anneth. Warm the cloth. Soft the cloth. Warm the wearer. Soft the cloth.’

Keeping someone warm and keeping them comfortable. Keeping them safe and free from lice. Worse things in the world, surely? And more useful than most things.

‘Hel. Benth. Anneth. Hel. Benth. Anneth. A cloak to shelter in the winter. A blanket on a cold night. A bed to sleep and bear children. A winding sheet for an old man’s corpse. Hel. Benth. Anneth. Hel. Benth. Anneth.’

Lady Landra had stepped out of a shop doorway in Sorlost and seen Marith’s dead face walking past her. Not been able to look away. ‘I’ll kill you,’ she’d screamed at him. He’d looked back at her and said, ‘You’re the ones who’ll die.’

If she’d stepped out of the doorway a moment earlier. A moment later. Dismissed her glimpse of his face as an illusion. Looked the other way from him.

Left him alone.

Marith has to die, she thought.

Lan said, ‘I have to leave, Ru.’

‘So you said. Stay a few weeks to get some supplies in for me.’ Ru broke off the spinning, set down the thread. ‘Someone from the village to help me would be a kindness. To look after the goats, tend the field by Pelen Brook. But don’t look for my skin.’ Ru took up the spindle again. ‘And don’t go looking for revenge.’

So it was settled. A farmer in the village had a daughter who would go to Ru, live at the house, do the work, take the place as hers with Ru living there to spin wool and sleep in the corner where Lan had slept.

Ru gave Lan the stinking yellow gold cloth. ‘There’s no purpose to it,’ she said to Lan. ‘I can’t go down to the shore now, even, to gather more of the threads.’

‘You could teach Kova, when she comes.’

‘I could.’

I did all I could do, thought Lan. Kova will work the farmstead better than I ever could. Manage the goats better, cook better food. Kova will maybe find a man to marry, has a man in the village already maybe, they’ll have children and Ru will look after them like a grandmother. They’ll bury her nicely on the seashore when she dies.

And gold and silver pieces will blossom over her grave and they’ll all live happy in a marble palace, thought Lan, and the sun will always shine. Kill them all and burn them and spit on the ashes. The world’s a cruel place.

‘Have this too,’ said Ru. She pressed a small bone spindle into Lan’s hands. Lan looked at it. ‘Horse bone,’ said Ru. ‘My husband’s father made it.’ Worn and yellowed. Old.

‘How old are you, Ru?’ Lan asked, while she thought of the tales of the sea folk she’d heard. Deathless. Ageless. Gods. Carin had been fascinated by them, but they’d never much interested her. Peasant people. Sea things. Men things, also. Rape and kidnap and desire. Keeping something you shouldn’t.

Weak things.

‘Old,’ said Ru.

I don’t need to worry she’ll die, thought Lan suddenly then. Fool! She put the yellow cloth and the bone spindle away in her pack beside the willow wand. Hel, for warmth and comfort. Palle, that is smooth sheen of a calm sea.

Kova came next morning, strong and plain with strong green eyes. Seemed kind enough, Lan thought, judging her with a new way of judging that Landra Relast had not known. Her hands were strong, used to work. Her face was meek. She looked a little afraid of Ru. Maybe she knew what Ru was.

‘There’s soap and candles in the cupboard by your bed,’ Lan told Ru. She did not say that she had traded the silver ring she had worn for them. To Kova she said, ‘There’s bread in the pantry, flour and butter in the crocks. I milked the goats this morning. They don’t give much. There’s a nice bank of winter mint on the path down to Pelen Brook, near the big ash tree. Ru likes it in the stew.’ She took Kova out to the vegetable garden behind the house, all bare now apart from black kale ragged like leather. ‘She tries to do more than she should,’ Lan said to Kova. ‘Thinks she’s stronger than she is. Care for her and she’ll be kind.’ Kova looked at her with strong green eyes and strong hands used to work and a meek face. ‘I’ve a sister who’s marrying a fisherman, mistress,’ Kova said.

Some, some in this world must be kind.

So that was that. Lan set off slowly down the path into the village.

There were rumours flying in the village of things happening in the lords’ halls, ships and soldiers summoned to Malth Elelane, mutterings of war. Lan walked with slow steps along the coast road. Walking the road again alone was the worst thing. Without her name and her wealth she was nothing. How strange it was. This was how Marith had been, she thought dully as she walked. Nameless and powerless. She remembered Thalia on the moorland stumbling in the cold, the way Marith’s eyes had been when he looked at her. Little wonder he felt so angry now. But this was also what he had wanted, she thought. To be nothing. To be the thing that was hurt, not the thing that did the hurting. ‘I was happy,’ he’d said. ‘I didn’t ask to come back. To be king.’ Briefly, she thought, briefly he had escaped.

She walked on all day. She tried not to think of Ru in the damp dirty house that was warm. She stopped in the evening in a way house, huddled in the corner furthest from the doorway, frightened someone might come. Cold greasy trimmings of meat, bread, water: she placed some of each carefully before the godstone at the entrance, saw its gratitude in its blank faceless eyeless face. Before she tried to sleep she got out her pack and looked at the things she had. A horse-bone spindle. A scrap of yellow cloth. A broken twig that was bound to her skin. A gold ring stamped with a bird flying, her father’s crest.

‘Eltheia,’ she prayed as she curled up on the stone ledge to sleep, ‘Eltheia, fairest one, keep safe, keep safe.’ She slept with the bone spindle in her hand, dry and smooth and chipped at the edge, old yellow bone riddled with tiny holes where it was chipped, carved from the shoulder bone of an old broken-down farm horse that she heard galloping in her dream. The things that walked the lich roads walked past her, and let her be.

‘I am not going looking for revenge,’ she said aloud when she woke to frost crisp white-silver on the dark ground. ‘I am going to make him nothing. As he wanted to be.’ A bird flew up cawing from the trees behind the way house. ‘Not revenge.’

The things that walked the lich roads walked past her. Laughed.

Chapter Eleven

A body was lying on the beach in the sand, face up to the rain. It was lying in the tideline, the ebb and flow of the waves making its head roll back and forth. Its skin was very white.

Thalia watched it for a while. It shook its head and shook its head and there should be something meaningful in it. Just a dead thing, she thought. Just a dead thing bloated up and eaten by the water. Swollen and salt-filled. There was a jagged hole in its chest, where it had been dead before it drowned. The sea had taken its blood.

‘Here’s another!’ a voice called across the beach. Two soldiers came down near her, took the body by the arms, dragging it away up to the pyres that burned on the shore where the sand was dry. Driftwood and reeds and dead flesh. The salt crackled, burned up a brilliant yellow; they fed the fire with pitch to keep the flames high even with the wet bodies in the rain. Thalia watched them drag the body up, its feet making ruts in the sand.

Osen Fiolt came down the beach towards her. He stopped, nodded his head to her.

‘The raiding party has come back,’ he said.

‘And?’

‘They’ve got some bread. Dried fish. Beer. We won’t die hungry, at least.’

‘We will not die,’ Thalia said. We will not. We will not. I will not.

Osen’s face flickered, looking across the beach where the men worked at the pyres, feeding the flames with pitch-soaked wood. The bones of the ships, consuming themselves. ‘We can’t sail, in this wind, and Tiothlyn can’t sail either, and that’s the only luck we have. But he’ll come. And we’ll all be dead.’

‘We defeated’ — she did not quite know how to say it, ‘his father’, ‘his brother’, what do I know, she thought again, what do I know of fathers and brothers, these foreign words, even in my own tongue I have never spoken them, meaningless words, and yet to say them, it hurts me, to say what it is he did — ‘we defeated King Illyn. We can defeat Tiothlyn.’

‘Whatever happened at Malth Salene …’ Osen shook his head. ‘I wasn’t there, of course. So perhaps you could ask him to do whatever he did again? I’m surprised Ti hasn’t come already, in all honesty. King Illyn would have marched the men overnight immediately we turned tail on him, followed the ships along the coast. We’re less than a day’s march from Morr Town.’ He gestured at the smoke from the pyres. ‘It’s not exactly like he can’t know where we are.’

‘So we will destroy him.’ Thalia thought: I saw what Marith did, at Malth Salene. I saw every man who opposed him die. I know what he is. What is in him. I will not die here. I will not.

‘Destroy Tiothlyn? He’ll cut the men’s throats like dogs, Thalia. Those that haven’t already fled. But no – that will be why he’s waiting. Why kill us himself when our men can do it for him?’

The men were slumped in ragged shelters frozen in the wind, breathing in the smoke of dead flesh. But they would fight. She knew, looking at their faces, she who had seen Malth Salene fall. They would fight for him. Or she would make them fight, if she must. But perhaps they would die, even so. More broken bones on the shoreline, buried in the sand like the wreck of the ships. She looked across at the litter of shelters, like plague sores on the grass beyond the sedge. No one, she thought then, no one thinks that they will die. I do not suppose that his father thought that he would die. His father, his brother – they must have thought, also, that they would win. Remembered the eyes of the sacrifices bound to her altar, staring up at her, she stood before them with the knife in her hands, the High Priestess of Great Tanis, and still, in their eyes, the certainty there somehow that they would not die, that her knife would not truly kill them, even as she killed them.

But I will not die here, she thought. I will not.

‘Why are you still here, then, Lord Fiolt?’ Thalia asked. ‘Why have you not already fled? Or killed him?’ Some little of the dignity game in the Temple, drawing her old status as the God’s hand and the God’s knife. If this is ended, if I am broken and dying here, I can at least have that.

‘Because …’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘I could ask that same question of you, High Priestess Thalia.’

You could. They looked at one another. Each pitying the other, perhaps, Thalia thought. For being caught in this. Not able to leave. Drawn to what was offered. Kingship! Victory! Glory! The promise in Marith’s face.

Osen looked away from her. Looked again at the bodies burning in sparks of salt and pitch. Breathed in deep, and Thalia could see his nostrils flare, breathing in the smell of the smoke. Put his hand on the hilt of his sword. Caressing it.

‘Anyway. Here we are. The raiding party has come back,’ said Osen again. ‘There’s food, at least, now. That’s all I came to tell you. I’ll have something brought to you. And to him. Our Lord King. I’ll have watches set tonight. Hopefully we won’t be slaughtered in our sleep, at least.’ He rubbed his face again. ‘Bread and beer and dried fish. Some of the men might even stay here to die with us, if we feed them.’

‘Thank you, Lord Fiolt.’

I will not die, she thought. I spared Marith’s life, only a little time ago.

The promise in Marith’s face …

She went back to the shelter they had built for him as king. Sail cloth, ship’s timbers, branches. The sand was soft under her feet, then the crunch of pebbles, up over the dunes, down though the sedge to the coarse bare flat grass. Men’s faces followed her as she walked. The man Tal sat before the ragged flap of the tent doorway, wrapped in his cloak, his sword on his knees. He bowed his head as Thalia entered.

‘Marith?’

He was sitting staring at the wall, where the canvas was ripped to let in a beam of half-light.

‘Thalia?’

‘The men took some food in the village. Osen Fiolt is having something prepared for us.’

No answer. She sat down next to him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘I thought … I thought … They should have welcomed me. They were there. My brother. My mother — my stepmother. They should have … they should … I’m sorry. Ah, gods.’ Spat out a laugh. ‘I told you I was afraid for you to come. But I really thought … She’s my mother. How could she not welcome me back?’

Memories: his face in the desert, his eyes soft and sad and filled with light like stars; his face in the golden morning, bright and living and filled with joy and love and pride. And she remembered also Ausa, the priestess in the Temple, her friend, whom she had punished and maimed and ruined, and who had asked after her in friendship when it was done.

Perhaps, she thought. Perhaps they would have welcomed him back, even despite everything, if he had been able to see them. Perhaps they still would.

Marith said, ‘Hilanis the Young skinned his brother alive, you know? His wife wore a gown made of the skin on the day he was crowned. My great-great-grandfather. Skinned his older brother alive. I found an old leather robe once, tucked away in a cupboard, I thought for years it was Tareneth’s skin. There was a mark on it I even thought was a bloodstain. Until Ti pointed out he would have had to be five feet wide and four feet high.’

Or not.

Pain like knives stabbing. The filth of these people. The filth of this world.

Marith closed his eyes. ‘Let Ti have it. Have all of this. I’ll go down to the beach and die there. You should go back to Sorlost. To your God. Be free.’

Pain like knives stabbing.

The walls of the Temple closing around them. Blotting out the light. I ran from that, she thought. I will not go back.

‘You should be sorry,’ she said.

The doorcloth of the shelter jerked open. Osen stood there, the man Tal behind him, frightened and elated both at once.

‘Marith — My Lord King — Ships. There are ships in the bay.’

Marith’s eyes blinked slowly open. ‘Ships … how … how many?’

‘Ten. War ships. Large. But they’re not Ti’s ships. Not from the Whites.’

‘Not Ti’s … Whose, then?’

‘I … I’m not sure. It’s hard to tell, in this gloom. And they’re coming … They’re sailing against the wind. Not oared. Sailing.’

Marith got up, rubbed at his face. ‘Against the wind?’ He frowned. ‘Get the men drawn up.’

He raked his fingers through his hair, did not wait to put on his armour but belted on his sword, fastened his bloodsoaked cloak at his neck. Thalia followed him out, Osen and Tal following behind. The camp around them was an ants’ nest, men scrabbling to arms, meals abandoned, dice and drink scattered beneath their feet, voices shouting for order and discipline. The chaos trying to pull into something like the army of a king as they passed. On the beach the sedge whispered and shivered. A group of men stood watching the sea. Lights on the water, the ships coming in. Black shapes like clots of shadows. Silent. No oars indeed, sailing with sails swelling the wrong way to the wind.

A shout from the first ship, the splash of an anchor. A rowing boat came across, the oars making flashes as the water caught the light. It met the breakers on the tideline: men leapt out, ran it forward up the sand, beaching it clear of the waves. A man got out carefully, flanked by servants. Came across the sand to Marith, and Marith came across the sand to him.

The man smiled, his face livid in the torches. ‘King Marith.’

Marith tried to smile back. ‘Uncle Selerie. Welcome.’

Chapter Twelve

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago now, there was a young king who needed a wife. And the wife he chose was called Marissa, and she was the sister of Selerie Calboride the King of Ith. She had yellow hair and grey eyes and she was sweet natured and gentle, kind and fair and wise and good. The young king, King Illyn, his name was, he sailed over the wine dark sea to her, and he married her in great splendour in her brother’s fortress, and he brought her back with him to his own kingdom, and crowned her queen with a circlet of diamonds and silver on her beautiful head.

So, nine months after the wedding, Queen Marissa gave birth to a baby boy. The boy was beautiful, a shining child, strong and healthy, with bright clever eyes. The whole kingdom rejoiced, that their king had an heir, and such a beautiful baby at that. The queen was filled with joy, she loved her son, doted on him, cherished him. Oh, such a loving mother! Oh, such a happy child she had!

But the king her husband was a bad man. Or, better, perhaps, say that he was a cruel man, for he did not love his wife Queen Marissa, for all that she was so fair and so gentle and so wise and so good. He was a bitter man, and a harsh one, and before he ever married Marissa he had had a mistress, Elayne of the Golden Hair, who was as hard and harsh and selfish as he himself. And Elayne was filled with jealousy against Queen Marissa, who was queen and mother and so bright with happiness.

And Elayne and King Illyn between them killed poor Marissa. They poisoned her. And King Illyn married Elayne and made her queen.

But no matter how she tried, Elayne could never manage to harm Marissa’s son, the prince, the heir to the kingdom, left motherless when still a baby before he could even speak his mother’s name. Though Elayne longed for his death with all her heart, to make her own son king. Though King Illyn longed also for this.

Marissa’s brother Selerie had loved his sister. He had rejoiced when she bore her child. Thus when the boy was grown into a fine youth, strong and clever and healthy and beautiful to look upon, King Selerie invited him to visit him in Ith. And this is the story which he told him.

Chapter Thirteen

Selerie Calboride’s war tent was blue and silver leather, the colours of Ith, gold leaf round the doorway, a standard capping it in the shape of a golden stag with antlers shifting into eagles’ heads. Fur rugs on the floor, two light folding chairs, a table in silver gilt, a brazier beneath the smoke hole, the dividing curtain to the sleeping place beyond drawn back to show a bed made up. Even a woman, dressed in shimmering green velvet, her hair braided with gold, holding a tray with a jug of mulled wine on it, steam rising to fog the light of her eyes.

‘Nephew.’ Selerie rose from his chair. ‘Would you care to sit?’

‘Uncle.’ The beautiful backdrop, the king in his jewelled robe, the girl. Utter humiliation. But a flush of pride crept into Marith also, that his uncle felt him worth enough to want to humiliate. He sat down and stretched out his hands to the fire.

A strange man, Selerie Calboride, King of Ith. Some people said he was mad. Though they said most Calborides were mad. Tall, reddish fair, with pale grey wide bulbous eyes. It was the eyes that made the madness convincing. Nothing like Marith’s father’s eyes, and he did not remember his mother to whom he had been told there was a close resemblance. But Marith felt self-consciously as though it was his father who looked at him.

The girl stepped forward to offer him a drink. Marith took it. Felt his hands shake. Very good wine, naturally. The warmth spread pleasantly through his fingers. The cup was almost empty suddenly. His hands were shaking and he almost dropped it. Tried to keep himself from staring at the girl with the jug.

Selerie raised his own cup. ‘As one king to another, then, Marith of the White Isles.’

‘One king to another, Uncle.’ Tried to look at his uncle speaking to him. ‘You’ve come, I’m sure, to congratulate me on my success. Such a triumph! But of course you always knew what I had in me to do.’

Selerie shifted in his chair. I hate you, Marith thought. I hate you. I am a man, a king. ‘I came to offer you my aid,’ Selerie said slowly. ‘Hail you as a fellow king. Promise alliance. The old sacred bonds between Calboride and the Altrersyr, back even to Amrath and Eltheri, that your father spurned. Help you kill the whore’s son who claims to be heir in your stead. I came to confirm with my own eyes that my only sister’s only child was still alive. My sister would weep with shame, were she to see you now.’

So it’s lucky then my father killed her. You think I don’t weep with shame myself? Marith said, ‘It was your decision to come, uncle. I was perfectly happy sitting in my tent in the filth. My soldiers had just found something alcoholic for me to drink, I’m told.’

Selerie said crisply, ‘Happy, were you? Perhaps I’ll leave you be, then.’ They looked away from each other, both caught. Can’t leave. Can’t tell you to leave. Can’t ask you to stay. Can’t ask you to ask me.

‘Your brother the whore’s son has claimed the throne,’ Selerie said at last. ‘That is why I have come. There are some things I will not permit. The whore’s son wearing the crown of Altrersys is one of them.’

I …

‘My brother the whore’s son is claiming the throne,’ Marith said dully back.

‘And you seem to have done a most wonderful job of opposing him.’

Marith looked away at the walls. Shadows. Hate. Pain. Leave me alone, he thought. Just leave me alone.

Selerie said, ‘Don’t fret, dear Nephew. War’s a difficult game at which you’ve had very little practice. I’m sure even Amrath himself made mistakes occasionally. You’ll learn.’

‘I’m sure I will.’ His cup was empty again. Held it out to the girl for more. Her eyes flicked to Selerie. Selerie’s eyes flicked back. She stepped backwards away from them, leaving Marith’s cup hanging.

‘It’s a very fine rug you’re sitting on,’ Selerie said kindly. ‘I wouldn’t want it spoilt by you vomiting on it.’

Felt like being back being raged at by his father for turning up falling-down-dead drunk at some important event. Felt like being laughed at by Skie for killing a dragon and it somehow being embarrassing that he had. ‘I’m the king, Uncle. Not Ti. A greater king than you are, indeed. King of the White Isles and Illyr and Immier and the Wastes and the Bitter Sea. Ansikanderakesis Amrakane. You’re only king at all because my ancestor spared yours. I should make you kneel at my feet.’

Selerie said nothing. Looked around him with his bulbous mad eyes. The gilded leather. The fine furnishings. The furs and the wine and the jewels and the girl. Marith twirled the empty cup in his fingers. Gold. Don’t pretend you didn’t want this, Uncle. You sit in your tower drinking quicksilver and seeing the same things I do. Days, it takes, to get from Ith to the White Isles, even with magic in your sails: you sailed well before my failure at Malth Elelane, to join me, secure me as king. You must have been readying your troops since first you heard I was still alive. Look at this tent, these fittings, the men with bright bronze spears outside the door. Why else did you come, if not for this?

Selerie looked away at the walls, seeing something there in the leather in the corner where the light from the brazier hardly reached. ‘And what would you do, King Marith of the White Isles and Illyr and Immier and the Wastes and the Bitter Sea, Ansikanderakesis Amrakane, parricide and dragonlord and dragon killer and despoiler of the holiest woman in Irlast, if I knelt at your feet?’

Tell you my father was right to kill my mother. Tell you it’s lucky indeed neither of them are alive to see what I’ve become. Tell you to kill me and bury me beside Carin in one grave. You might even do it, I think, perhaps, Uncle, you who once gave me an old sword with a ruby in its hilt like a clot of blood.

Marith said, ‘You know what I’d do.’

Selerie gestured to the girl to refill Marith’s cup. ‘Do I? Do you?’

‘I’d ask you to give me your ships, and your men, and your allegiance.’

‘And why would you do that, then, Nephew?’

Marith looked at him. ‘You know why.’

Selerie smiled back. ‘I remember you when you were a child, Nephew. You seemed so very bright. Full of laughter. Yet one might have guessed, even then, that this would be where you’d come to in the end. King Ruin, I hear they have named you. King of Death. Very well then. I’ll give you my ships. And my men. And my allegiance.’ Sipped his wine. ‘But I do not think that you will thank me for doing so.’

Marith thought: no. I do not think perhaps that I will. I told you, I was perfectly happy sitting in my tent.

Selerie rose to his feet, placed his cup back on the tray the woman held. ‘I have another ten ships riding at anchor around the next cape. Twenty ships in all. Two thousand men. We’ll meet again this evening, then, to discuss. You’ll bring your woman to dinner afterwards, perhaps? I would be most interested to meet her, this holy and incomparable creature who gave up god and empire for you. For this.’

Hateful old man. Selerie’s eyes like his father’s eyes again. Yes, I failed. Yes. I know. But next time … Marith tried to think of other things. Thalia. Dinner. Plans. There’d be better fare for her here than whatever his soldiers had managed to hunt up in the marsh and the village huts. A few hours’ warmth in a dry tent. A pretty dress and some jewels and a chance for her to be treated as she deserved. Oh, she’d looked so perfect, seated beside him in the high seats of honour at Malth Calien, radiant by firelight with the men all eying her with jealous desire in their hearts.

Selerie said, ‘I have a man with me whom you may I think be interested to meet, given your current circumstances.’

‘A hatha merchant, is he?’

Selerie’s face went dark with anger. ‘A weather hand.’

‘A weather hand?’ Marith started. Never met one. Half convinced they didn’t exist. Just lucky men. And not loved, on the Whites. Storm-bringers, death-dealers, things you scared fisher children with. But he’d seen the ships last night, sails swelling against the wind. ‘Really? That might be … handy.’

Selerie snorted. ‘So I thought when I found him. Handy. Though lacking his right hand.’

Marith got to his feet. ‘At sunset, then. Osen had better come as well; a couple of the other lords. There’s a fishmonger somewhere here who lent me his house and everything in it after I tore apart his liege lord’s fortress. I said I’d give him some high post somewhere.’

Selerie said nothing. Looked away at the gold and the furs and the girl.

Hateful old man.

He stopped outside his uncle’s tent watching the Ithish soldiers raise the last section of a scrubby palisade. All neat and efficient. One thousand Ithish men here. Another thousand coming in. And then they were ready. Done and sealed and too late. I wish Carin was here, he thought suddenly. He hadn’t thought about Carin so much recently. Getting weaker in his mind. Harder to remember his face, the exact colour of his hair and eyes. Carin would have stopped all this. Dragged him off for a drink so he forgot all about it. King Marith the Unmemorable, who did absolutely nothing at all. King Marith the Incapable, too stupefied to pick up a sword. Hard to think really properly seriously about killing people when you’re slumped in the gutter covered in puke and piss and drool.

Gods, you were good to me, Carin, he thought.

But this time I won’t fail.

The man with the weather hand was called Ranene. A middle-aged man with a wart on his nose, who could call the wind and make the sea change and bring a ship safe to harbour in any storm. Black skin and hair, the accent of Allene. He spoke in a hoarse whisper like a rustling of dead leaves, where his throat had once been cut. Wore a collar hung with seed pearls to hide the scar. He had brought ships to safety and ships to drowning for hire, trading a ship’s fate to the highest bidder, before Selerie found him and made him his man. Safer that way, at Selerie’s court guiding the king’s ships. Sailors feared and hated a weather hand, knowing what they could bring a ship if their mood turned. Marith found him rather agreeable. He grinned cheerfully back at Marith when Selerie introduced them.

‘I’ll bring you across the sea as my king, My Lord,’ he said in his quiet scratched voice. ‘What comes when you come to shore … I don’t even have a hand.’ He paused: Marith had to strain to hear him. ‘But if your brother comes out to meet you with his ships … High winds and high waves might be handy. Does your brother have a weather hand, My Lord?’

‘No.’ King Illyn had never had one. Rare. Almost a myth. Hated. Feared. ‘No.’ Marith shut his eyes at the thought of the sea in storm. The greatest storm he had seen as a child, he had been ten years old, watching from his window awed as the waves shattered the rocks of Morr Head and the roofs of Morr Town. Ships smashed on the headland, bodies washed up far inland as the water rose over the streets of the town, trees and walls ripped away. Like the fire at Malth Salene, scouring the coastline clear. The air had stunk of seaweed and dead bodies, pallid puffy fish things dragged up from the depths, the broken stones of old cities far out beneath the sea. Sand and salt had been blown even onto the high balconies of Malth Elelane.

A ship out in that. A ship out in that …

‘You could do it?’

‘I could.’

‘How?’

Ranene said, ‘I feel the waves. I feel the water. I feel the sky.’ Pause. ‘I have no idea how I do it, My Lord. Especially as I was born a month’s walk from the sea.’

Well, that was disappointing. But then he’d asked Thalia how she made the light and she could only say ‘I do’. ‘Magic’s a subtle thing’. ‘Magic’s a complex thing’. ‘Buggered if I know’ had at least the virtue of honesty.

‘Do it, then.’ Destroy them. Shatter them to pieces, smash them, break them. They had refused him. They should have opened the city to him. Welcomed him in. His brother! His mother! His home!

Destroy them. Break them. Drown them. Curse them.

Ranene bowed his head. ‘As My Lord commands.’ Looked happy as anything. Couldn’t imagine a weather hand got the chance that often to really let himself go.

‘The whore’s son’s ships will be broken, then,’ said Selerie. ‘Well and good. You will have command of the sea. But you will need to take Malth Elelane. Morr Town.’ He looked pointedly at Marith. ‘Ideally without either of them being entirely reduced to smoking ashes. Unless you think otherwise, Nephew, of course?’

‘We bring the ships in at night down the coast,’ said Lord Bemann. ‘March on Malth Elelane with the dawn. Order them to open the gates.’

‘No.’ Lord Stansel. A poor man, who held a poor island with few men to fight. A cripple, bound to his wheeled chair. But a clever man, with a reputation for good sense. ‘If we were taking a foreign city, even any other town on the Whites … But Malth Elelane … We are not coming as invaders. We are coming to bring our rightful king to his throne. We are coming to bury the last king in the tomb of his ancestors, where Altrersys himself lies. We do not sneak in the darkness like outlaws. We do not threaten. We do not cajole. Tiothlyn’s ships need to be destroyed. Yes. We send storms in the night to shatter the ships, frighten the people. We come into harbour with the dawn, beneath the banners of Amrath and King Marith His heir. Where Tiothlyn the Usurper has brought the sea’s anger, Marith the true king will bring strength and a favourable wind. The town and Malth Elelane will yield graciously to us as is our right.’

‘And if Morr Town doesn’t yield graciously to us? If Morr Town starts chucking banefire at us again? If Master Handy here somehow can’t whistle up a storm?’

Somewhere in the barrel of honey the dead king stirred, moving. Shadows beating on the walls of the tent. Selerie looked about, almost seeing them. Fear in his eyes for what he’d begun. Marith took a breath. Say it. Say what must be done. ‘Lord Stansel is right. We sail straight into Morr Town harbour. And this time they will welcome me as they ought. Malth Elelane will yield. It was built for the kings of the line of Amrath. It is mine. Thus it will yield to me. Morr Town will yield or it will resist. If it resists, it will be destroyed. Morr Town is nothing. It can be rebuilt. Or I will build a new city elsewhere, leave the ruins as a warning.’ He looked at his uncle. ‘Morr Town has banefire. Very well then. It is only a liquid that burns. Morr Town has defenders. Very well then. They are only men with swords. We have an army. If half of that army falls, they also are only men. Men die. We need only enough left alive that the gates of the city are opened and my brother’s body hung above them in chains.’

The men shifted. The lords of the White Isles. The king’s captains, the chosen companions of the Ansikanderakesis Amrakane. Thugs and chancers, men with younger brothers themselves, men who hungered for chaos and bloodshed, men who clung blindly to the right of the eldest born son as heir. Faces smiling. Rictus grins of terror. What did you think, Marith thought, what did you think it was we were to do? Osen shivered, looking from Marith to Selerie to Ranene. Fear in all their eyes. Seemed also to realize, suddenly, at last, what it was they were about.

‘Master Handy here can certainly whistle up a storm,’ said Ranene. His voice piped like a hollow reed blown between a boy’s hands. Profoundly irritating. But you could hear something in it. This one has power, Marith thought, looking at the man’s lumpy, warty nose. ‘The greatest storm you island men have ever seen. My Lord Selerie has seen some small amount of my powers. But for the king here, this king who is lord of death and shadows and ruined things … For him, I will raise such a storm as will never be forgotten. I will raise a storm that will shake the island of Seneth to its roots. The men of Morr Town will open their gates to him with joy and rejoicing. Those few that are not drowned.’

Eyes watched him weak with horror. The shadows blinked and laughed in the corners of the tent.

‘A storm, then,’ said Selerie lightly. ‘Then I think we are dismissed for the night. Dinner is I think prepared and waiting. My Lords of the White Isles. Master Weather Hand. Till tomorrow.’ Selerie got to his feet. ‘A drink, Nephew, while we await your lady?’

Selerie had somehow brought white bread and sweetmeats and cured venison over with him on campaign as well as wine and gilt chairs and a girl.

‘Amrath campaigned rough with his men,’ Marith said defensively when Thalia raised her eyebrows at it all. ‘You can’t move fast, with all this lot to lug around. We keep the proper ways of war here on the Whites.’ He thought of Skie’s bare tent, where the fact that it didn’t stink of mildew had been sign enough of power. A bedroll. A cloak. A change of shirt. A day’s ration of bread. Nothing else had seemed necessary. Nothing else had been necessary. ‘Yes, well, yes, I could, possibly, have put some more thought into the logistics.’ First course was apples baked in honey. The smell of the honey was making him nauseous. The spoon dug into the fruit and he couldn’t not think of his father’s head. Folds and folds of skin, the soft brown dapples like winking eyes; his father floating like an unborn baby, all soft and unformed … ‘Any thought into the logistics. But Osen didn’t think about it either. And he was almost sober some nights.’

‘I have something for you,’ Selerie said to Thalia. ‘Here.’ He gestured; the girl stepped forward, held out a little wooden box. Cedar wood, carved with a delicate pattern of flowers, a few last fragments of gold leaf. The more beautiful, for being old and use-worn, the wood smoothed and darkened by careful, loving hands. Thalia opened it slowly. In her perfect fingers a short chain of silver, set with sapphires almost the same colour as her eyes.

‘Oh!’ She held it to the candle flame to make it glitter. Blue stars. Blue fire. Blue lights shining in the sea.

‘I am the nearest kin my nephew has,’ Selerie said. ‘It seemed apt therefore to welcome you as such.’

Thalia smiled at Selerie kindly. The girl disappeared with the empty box. Servants brought cold cured meat and hot bread. Spiced greens. Cimma cakes. Hippocras. Even keleth seeds in a silver bowl. It was a pleasant enough evening. They wandered back afterwards in the light of a torch flickering on Tal’s armour. Stopped a little while to look at the sea. Again before their tent to look at the stars. Clear and cold, their breath puffing out white. A hard frost.

Till tomorrow, then.

A child, a youth of thirteen, when he sailed to Ith, to visit his uncle. A child, strong and happy, climbing trees in the orchard, scrumping sour apples, running and running through the wild country of his kingdom, running into the sun with the wind in his hair. Even then, he knew, the shadows followed him. Felt them. Knew them. Shadow eyes that watched him. Longed for him. A child, a youth of thirteen. Dreaming such dreams. His brother was less than two years younger; he loved him so dearly, looked after him, his best friend, ‘when I am king’, he would say, ‘and you are my closest adviser, my second in command, the captain of my armies – you and I, we’ll conqueror the world, won’t we? I’ll win you a kingdom too, Ti. A really big one. Rich and grand. We’ll share out the world.’

He went to visit Ith.

Selerie told him things.

He came home.

His brother was waiting there for him.

Chapter Fourteen

On the sand of the beach His wonder worker raises his arm. Speaks words that mean nothing. Empty sounds. His face is calm, still like the smooth water. His eyes are closed. Sweat trickles slowly down the line of his jaw. The wonder worker, the weather hand, the vessel of His hopes. The weather hand grasps at the sky before him. Lowers his arms. Speaks meaningless words.

He opens his eyes. Looks at the calm clear water, the calm clear sky, the pale liquid light. Birds dance on the horizon. The marsh reeds whisper behind him in a soft breeze. His weather hand speaks. Shouts.

The air shimmers. The storm comes. Vast black clouds pile on the horizon, rushing in on a warm, strange, savage wind. He watches the rain coming, a wall of black water, the sea churned and shattered with the weight of it, so heavy it rips the canvas of His army’s tents, breaks down branches, bruises the skin. The ships dragged up on the beaches tremble in it. Like iron falling from the sky. Like the stars are falling. Like there are no stars left in the dark.

Hours. Days.

Waves batter the rocks high as buildings. Their crests are furious white with foam. Sea bulls, His men call them. As the storm goes on He begins to see things floating on them. Tree limbs. Bits of boats. Bits of houses. Dead things. In a lull in the storm some of His men find the bloated carcass of a horse, its hooves painted in gold. They eat it raw, the wind being too strong to kindle fires. Two men die of it. Should not take that which belongs to the old gods. Sea and sky and earth and stone. And it’s bad meat, being drowned.

He sends men over the cliffs of the headland, to spy out the land nearer to the storm’s heart. For they are only on the edge of it. Shielded. The men go on hands and knees in the darkness, heads wrapped in leather against the rain and the earth blown by the wind. He has promised them their own bodyweight in gemstones if they bring back news of His enemies. They cannot get far, in the storm, the first stream they come to is a raging torrent, the path up the high steep cliff is a knife blade, three of the ten slip and fall. The sea at the cliff’s foot boils like a cauldron. They are hurled around in the water and the rocks show briefly red. Three go back, shaking. Four go onwards, reach the top of the climb where the land sweeps down to a wide golden valley and a river mouth. A long view across the lowlands, before the sea-girt hills and then the forests that rise slowly to the north. They cannot see beyond the length of a spear thrust, in the wind and the rain and the whipped-up spray. The waves are tall as battlements, their white caps huge as drifts of snow. When they break on the fields they shatter rocks and tear the earth. Lightning rolls and roars and hangs as cracks in the world through which another light burns. Stormspirits shrieking, dancing with long teeth and long nails. His troops cower in their shelters. He stands on the shore with His face in the rain.

The sky is boiling. The sea is boiling. There is no sky. No sea. No earth. All that exists howls in the wind.

Days. Nights. No sun. No dawn. No dusk. Men drown standing on the cliff top, from breathing in the rain. The waves are huge as towers. Sea dragons. Harder than stone. The air is screaming. A man’s mouth opens, pleading, and he cannot hear his own voice. The rain is rock and metal, crushing, shattering down the world. There is nothing left.

And then calm.

The storm fades to stillness. Slow, heavy beat of the wind. A heart slowing. The rain stops and the air is fresh and sweet. Cold. Pure. Washed clean. The land is transformed by wind and water, raw holes in the land, broken stone where the earth is ripped open like a miscarried womb. Piled mounds of muck and filth. Scar tissue across the landscape. Pus. Timber and flesh litter the beaches, stranded by the outrunning tide. The sky and the earth are silver, shining water that laughs musically as it runs back down into the sea.

The shattered remains of ships begin to float in at the mouths of the marsh channels. Black wood. Red painted eyes. Dead men in armour, heads and limbs. Ripped metal, its surface pitted by the rain. Dead women. Dead babies. Broken walls.

He walks the tideline, wondering. Bids His men ready their own ships for sailing. Today He will come into His own.

The sea is choked with rubble. Dead people. Dead animals. Broken trees. Broken houses. Broken ships. They sail slowly, prows brushing through the bobbing ruins of lives. The wind is against them, but the sails fill and they sail.

They come again around the headland. A flash of white on the high cliff. The smooth waters of the bay open before Him. Winter sunlight. The sea welcoming Him home. His fortress rises before Him. The harbour is broken, its wall shattered into pebbles, not a single ship remaining whole. The war engines are missing. The houses and taverns of the lower town have been swept away like sand.

On the broken stones of the harbour His people are waiting. They cheer Him, receive Him kneeling, throw open every door and window of their town as a sign. He walks up the high road to His fortress, the whalebone gates that were raised for Him a thousand years before He was born. The grey towers of Joy. The golden tower of Despair. His fortress. The stones bid Him welcome. His fortress, built for Him and Him alone. His servants kneel before Him in a blare of silver trumpets, holding bloody offerings in outstretched hands. They spread the victory feast before Him. Wine and honey and plates of gold. His soldiers raise the paean, shout His name. Victory! Victory and triumph! Rejoice! Rejoice! And then His bedchamber, with the crimson hangings and the windows open to the sea, and the woman with her eyes wide.

And He is home.

PART TWO

Chapter Fifteen

A wedding party in Sorlost.

It was painfully hot. Yellow dust piled in the streets, thick with dead insects, dead leaves. The skin felt grimy, gritted by the heat, eyes stinging, bodies sticky and overripe; people clung to the shadows, poured lemon scented water on the parched flagstones, drank tea under wilting trees. Birds hung in cages from heat cracked branches, singing out notes to cool the ear. The street sellers sat by the fountains, kohl stained faces rank as peaches; at dusk the knife-fighters grappled, sodden with each other’s sweat, warm metal slipping over warm bone. In the corners bodies mounted: firewine drunks and hatha eaters and beggar children, mummified and wet lipped. The air moved sluggishly. Dust in the shafts of light. Curse this city in her burning. Her body and her soul are silver mirrors, heated with solipsistic lust. Like a dog she pants and scratches, the sweat of her lovers coalescing on her azure tiles. In her dust is her voice harsh as trumpets. Her dust chokes me as it fondles my mouth. Hot dry air of the furnace, drawing out all of my waters, salt fingers sucking me dry. In her desiccation her stones drip perfume. In her desiccation I am entombed in ecstasies of rain. Her rough stones enfold me, the arid depths of her passion, her kisses an abrasion dry as desert sand. Oh city of shit and sunlight! Oh city of dawn and the setting sun! In your embrace I dream of water. In your embrace I am withered to broken straw. Curse you, and yet I will lie forever in your burning, my body wracked with the heat of your love.

Serenet Vikale, The Book of Sand. New and popular, much quoted, certainly caught the sensation of the current heat. But, if one were feeling uncharitable, one might be inclined to ask questions about the state of the man’s private life.

Anyway. A wedding party in Sorlost. The meeting of two great families, a symbol of peace and stability in an uncertain time. That the two great families concerned were the cause of that instability is to be ignored. Get some money moving around the city, largesse distributed, gifts and jewels and silks bought. Demonstrate to the masses that all is secure and perfect. There is no reason to be concerned. Why should anyone in Sorlost be concerned?

Whisper it: there is discord in the Sekemleth Empire of the Asekemlene Emperor of the Eternal Golden City of Sorlost. Two high lords, Orhan Emmereth and Darath Vorley, conspired against their Emperor, hired assassins to kill him and all his court. The Emperor survived their manoeuvrings. The assassins all died in the attempt. But Orhan is now Nithque to the Emperor. The Emperor’s hands and eyes and mouth. He has the power to rebuild the Empire’s armies, restore its glory, rehouse its starving poor. Inevitably, such power has brought opposition. Enemies. For a brief few days, there was fighting in the city streets. The price of Orhan’s power is the sacrifice of Darath’s brother Elis to a rival nobleman, March Verneth. The weapon of choice is March’s daughter Leada’s wedding veil.

Thus, a wedding party in Sorlost.

Elis Vorley wore an ivory silk shirt fastened with diamond buttons, a long cloak trimmed with seed pearls, an arm-ring of wrought gold. Sweat trickled down his forehead, matting his hair beneath a garland of hyacinths and copperstem leaves. Darath and Orhan, similarly garlanded, stood and watched while a body servant made the last careful adjustments to the groom’s clothes.

‘Are you finally ready?’ asked Darath.

Elis gestured hopelessly at the body servant. ‘Ask him.’

‘He’s fine,’ Darath told the body servant. ‘He’ll do. We need to leave.’

Another delicate sweep of the man’s hands over folds of red and gold silk fine as breathing, an iridescent sheen on it like wet stone. ‘He is ready, My Lord.’

‘Good. The bride will have run off with one of the flute players before we get there at this rate.’

Elis started to speak. Darath held up his hand. ‘Don’t say it, dear brother. Peace and concord and all that, remember? We all make sacrifices. I have a scar on my stomach the length of my hand; Orhan has the job of Nithque. You just need to poke a not unattractive young woman a couple of times.’

Another servant brought forward a dish of salt and honey. All three ate a mouthful. Salt and sweet: the grief and pleasure of this brief, pitiful life. Before battle. Before marriage. Before death. Before birth. The Emperor ate of it every morning and evening, to remind him that immortal as he was he was but a man. Outside the door a new litter waited, built of whale bone and silver lace. All things done as they ought.

‘Come on then.’ They climbed into the litter. A procession formed up around them, guardsmen and servants and hired celebrants crowned in copperstem, shaking rattles made of walnut shells. At the front of the procession a man danced in gold ribbons, life and light and the joy of the rising sun. Crowds had gathered to watch, shouted out luck songs to the groom. So hot, sweat seemed to rise from the flagstones. Everything shimmered in the heat, luminously unreal as the sheen on Elis’ cloak. A flute piped tunelessly. A street woman swayed on bound ankles in a tinkle of tiny bells.

Orhan thought of his own wedding procession, the bitter irony of the singing, the cold, sad sorrow in Darath’s eyes. The two of them in the litter, hands clutching, knowing it would all be different, saying it didn’t matter but it did matter, trying to see how beautiful each looked in his wreath of flowers, fiddling with the clasps and folds of their cloaks. It had been hot that day too.

The curtains of the litter were open to display the groom but there was still no air. Under incense and perfume bodies were already rank with sweat. Orhan wiped his forehead, damp and clammy, a smear of pollen coming away on his hand. Some petty magery kept the flowers from collapsing into mush. Save safe charms: useful for preserving meat and keeping dead things in bloom. The petals had an odd crusted feel to them like they’d been coated in broken glass. Darath smiled at him, deep blue hyacinths and pale pink roses against his gold-black hair and copper-black skin, sweat on his forehead like drops of honey, glints of longing in his silver-black eyes. Remembering the same thing.

‘Nice comfy litter,’ said Darath. ‘But whale bone? Somewhat eccentric for you, I’d have thought?’

Elis groaned. ‘Eloise insisted on it. Said it had more cachet. Certain people’s sisters have set the stakes in litter fashions remarkably high. I keep thinking I can smell bloody fish when I look at it. And as for the cost … do you have any idea how much people charge to carry a dead whale for a month through high desert? But Eloise went on and on. I have no particular objection to marrying Leada. It’s the fact I seem to be marrying her grandmother as well that’s going to cripple me.’

‘You should be filled with gratitude Eloise judges her granddaughter such a jewel. You wouldn’t want a wife whose own family thought her only worth a cheap knock-off job.’ Darath said, ‘You’ve got something on your face, Orhan. Come here. No, stay still … Pollen. Stop poking at your garland or you’ll be yellow by the time we get there.’

‘It itches.’ A stem of something, rubbing arhythmically against his left temple. Sure to be there nagging at him all day.

They reached the gates of the House of Silver. More crowds, gathered to peer at the brilliance of the spectacle. Also March had probably paid them. Shouts of ‘hurrah’ as the litter swept past.

‘Here we are then,’ said Darath with an encouraging smile at Elis. ‘Marital bliss.’

‘Taking one for the team,’ Elis muttered. ‘I expect some very good New Year gifts from you two.’

‘Oh come on. She was meant for you. If she takes after her father, there can’t be two people in the city better matched. Stupid, venal, fat arsed, terrible taste in clothing … Who else were you planning to marry, anyway? That bath girl you like with the wonky nose?’

Litter servants came to hand them down carefully, stepping them onto a man’s broad thick back. Another final rearrangement of clothing; Orhan pushed at the garland in the hope it would stop digging into his head. Then looking up at the House of Silver that glittered before them, its doorways crowned with orange blossom, walls suppurating in the heat.

So here is the man who wants to kill me, Orhan thought. The last time he’d been here … the last time he’d been here had been the night of Eloise Verneth’s party, when Tam Rhyl had mocked him and Darath had begged to be involved in the conspiracy to kill the Emperor. Such complex patternings. Orhan thought: I think maybe I sealed your death that night, March.

Inside the first atrium the air was thick with perfume. Rose. Jasmine. Cinnamon. Mint. Paper blossoms floated in silver bowls. Outside in the courtyard shouts and the jangle of rattles. A murmur of voices from the room beyond. Elis tossed his head. Darath and Orhan led him through into the wedding chamber, where all the great families of the Sekemleth Empire were gathered. Hot, sweaty stink beneath their oils, reeking of life and the glories of human flesh. A mass of light and colour. Shifted as the guests turned. Fluttering of silk sleeves, jewelled feathers nodding, painted faces opening in panting smiles.

Leada Verneth was sitting on a high golden chair at the very end of the room, swathed in a silver bridal veil. Black skin and hair showed through vaguely, like a shadow of a woman, very still but if you looked you could see her head moving, her gaze shifting from guest to guest and then to her bridegroom as he walked down towards her. She stood awkwardly; Elis lifted her veil and folded it back. Not an unattractive young woman, indeed, and could carry her wedding splendour, swirls of gold paint over her cheek bones, diamonds on her forehead, pearls the size of pigeon eggs hanging from her ears. She looked at Elis and smiled.

Darath as the groom’s kinsman was given a dish of bread and oil, came up to them, broke the loaf in half, dipped each half in the oil, gave a piece to each. Bride and groom solemnly ate a small mouthful, put the rest back on the dish. March as bride’s kin repeated the same with a sweet cake dipped in wine. The couple sat on their matched chairs and the women of the house sprinkled them with water. Sighs. Muttered cheers. They stood and clasped hands and walked together back down to the perfumed atrium, out and into the lace and bone litter with its dancers and flurries of noise.

The sacrifice is made. Married.

Orhan travelled back to the House of Flowers with Bil in their own litter. Rather have gone with Darath, but … He felt himself more accommodating towards Bil. Less pitiful in her pride, perhaps, now he and she, Lord and Lady Emmereth, the Nithque and the Nithque’s wife, were the centre of the Sekemleth Empire, the most powerful of all the inhabitants of Sorlost. Ten guardsmen with drawn knives marched around them. It had been a horrible scrum of bodies as the cream of high society scrambled for their litters. Jamming the streets as they processed to the groom’s house for the bridal feast. The litter kept having to stop: Orhan shuddered each time, feeling Bil on edge too beside him. Vulnerable, prostrate within their silk curtains. Not that long at all since a mage had brought down fire in an attempt to destroy Orhan. Killed several of his guards. The litter curtains would go up in streams of white silent burning. Knives and swords and magery tearing around Orhan and Bil as they sat …

‘March didn’t want to kill you, Orhan,’ Darath had reassured him. ‘He only wanted to humiliate you.’

‘I’ll tell that to the bereaved families.’

‘He’ll hardly likely try anything on his own daughter’s wedding day, will he?’

‘No,’ Orhan had agreed. Of course not. Carried entombed in silk through slow crowded streets, Bil’s swollen body beside him, he thought: of course not, of course not.

Darath had excelled himself arranging the wedding banquet, decking the walls with silk ribbons, finding some wonderworker to make the ceilings swirl with coloured lights. A soft murmuring sound like the fluttering of wing beats or the drumming of heavy rain.

‘Not … not …?’

‘No, of course it’s not the same mage, Orhan! March sacked him and drummed him out of Sorlost.’

Low couches spread with green brocade clothes were arranged in intimate groups of four or five diners, each with its own sweet-faced young table servants to attend: they would be dining in the old high style, reclining, titbits eaten with fingers, small shallow bowls for the drink.

Behind the newly-weds, Elis’ bridegifts were arranged on a canopied dais. March should be well content there, at least. Stacked up four deep with so much carved gem work they seemed to be giving off sunlight but carefully judged to indicate that the Verneths were the wealthier. Bil flared her nostrils daintily as she looked at them.

‘Tasteless.’

‘Most of them, yes. It’s meant to be something of a joke.’

‘How?’

‘Because March won’t see how tasteless they are.’

They were led to their couches, very close to Elis and Leada, in a group of four with Darath and a friend of Bil’s. Orhan squirmed a moment. Waiting for Bil to say something bitter. She frowned then smiled at Darath. The bright carapace she had drawn up around herself, hard and polished and silent, unreadable as glass. Or no, let us be charitable, thought Orhan: a child coming, and such power and status in her hands. It was like this a long time ago, Orhan thought, the three of us, and I hoped it would work then, and perhaps it can work now. Ameretha Ventuel said words praising the beauty of Bil’s dress, got on to asking about the preparations for the nursery, had Bil decided on clout cloths yet, who was making the Naming Dress, what about filling for the bedding, lilac petals or rose? Bil smiled more sweetly and relaxed herself, though Orhan could see Darath next to her burning into her and her nerves edgy underneath; but he would not give up sitting next to Darath any more now for her so she would have to manage, the three of them would have to manage, because love and pride and honour and happiness; he would not break his heart again after what he had done and made Darath do.

‘They make a charming couple,’ said Ameretha, twisting a long white neck towards the bride and groom on their couch. ‘Look almost as though they’re enjoying themselves.’

‘Elis protests too much,’ said Darath, ‘they’ll be fine.’

The sweet faced servants brought them dishes of candied dogs’ hearts, green lotus roots stewed in red vinegar, cold boiled doves’ eggs three days off hatching, cimma fruit with sandfish cutlets, unborn goats’ tongues in jellied hot sauce, iced wine (as the heat mounted Darath had toyed with the idea of scrapping the prepared menu and serving only roast meats and hot punch). March made a long rambling speech about marital harmony, visibly licking his lips at his daughter’s new home. Elis toasted his bride and managed to get her name right. The dogs’ hearts in particular were superb.

‘I want to go home now,’ said Bil. She was getting more and more tired in the hot weather, but complained every morning about being unable to sleep. The swell of her body seemed to be sucking at her like a stone drawing up heat.

‘If you like.’ Darath was drinking too much and rolling his eyes at the speeches, and the wreath was still poking Orhan in the side of the head. A good time being had by most and sundry, so yes, fine, time to go home.

‘We’ve only just finished eating,’ said Darath as Orhan got to his feet. ‘You can’t slip off before the bride and groom.’

‘Bil’s exhausted.’

‘Oh, Bil can leave.’ Darath gestured to a server to refill his cup. ‘No, go. Virtuous as you are, escorting your wife home. Such a good man, isn’t he, Bilale? I’m sure Elis will be the same.’ His face changed, the same endless strained weariness Orhan felt. Concern in his eyes. ‘Take care, going home.’

The heat dust was almost obscuring the stars, so that for a moment Orhan hoped it had clouded over and might rain. If the heat breaks, he had begun to find himself thinking, things will settle again. It seemed some kind of wager with himself: if I can just get through until this … until that … Beneath the closed drapes of the litter, with Bil’s pregnant body, after several cups of drink, it was stifling. Sweat ran down Bil’s forehead, gathered in the hollow between her breasts. In the darkness, her scars were less visible: many men, Orhan supposed, would find the traceries of her body attractive, there in the hot dark. She seemed heavier, graver, like an old statue, her skin so white and her hair so beautifully gloriously red. She blew air onto her face in an attempt to cool it, smiled wanly at him.

‘Did you enjoy it, then?’

‘I suppose so. As these things go.’

‘Darath did well with the food, I thought. I should get the recipe for the goat’s tongue.’

‘Yes.’

‘Retha says rose petals, for the bedding. Better for calm temperament.’

‘Oh? Yes, I suppose they would be.’

Bil said, ‘Is March really our enemy, Orhan? Was he really conspiring with the Immish against Sorlost?’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Celyse.’

Naturally. Why even bother to ask? Orhan said, ‘Celyse shouldn’t be telling anyone.’

‘That’s not an answer.’

‘I don’t know,’ Orhan said. That’s not an answer either, he thought. His head was hurting. He thought: I need another drink.

Such slow going, with the swarm of guards around them with knives out. Bizarre and absurd, that they could possibly need that many. Orhan had a knife, too, tucked quietly beneath the litter cushions, his hand resting on the hilt. Patterned metal slick with sweat. Yet it still felt … absurd, to need so many guards. Orhan shoved off the wreath; the flowers were sagging despite the enchantments on them, petals crushed and brown. They felt grainy, like they’d been crystallized and left to go rotten, unpleasant, like rotting ice. A funny smell to them now. It filled the litter. Maybe cover the scents of sweat and wine and two people’s bellies over-stuffed with food. Bil sighed and stared out through the green curtain, giving up attempting to talk. I wonder if she’ll take one of the new guards as a lover? Orhan thought. Or already has? The gates of the House of the East swung open before them, the litter passed through, the gates shutting again noiselessly, sealing themselves. Relative safety, unless an assassin could climb a wall. The litter servants helped them carefully down, guards still flanking them, watching, torches raised to check for shadows that might be men with drawn blades. Elis might be taking Leada up to bed by now, Orhan thought. Darath no doubt cheering as he followed behind. He handed Bil carefully in through the pearl doorway.

‘Good night, Bil.’

She frowned. ‘You’re going back out?’

‘I am.’

‘Where?’

None of your business. Where do you think? We agreed, once, that we wouldn’t ask these things, either of us. She sighed, walked away. She wasn’t sleeping with any of the new guards, Orhan thought.

‘Be careful, Orhan.’

‘I’ll go in the litter. With half the guards. Order the rose blossom tomorrow, then, if you like.’ His head was aching. The litter was foetid with sweat and flatulence. Candied dogs’ hearts gave a man truly terrible wind.

The litter bearers went slowly. Tired out, like everything. The streets still swam with people. In the heat sleep was painful, so they wandered endlessly around the city day and night. At the House of Flowers the wedding feast was ending. Feathers and sequins and gemstones and flakes of paint and flower petals were scattered over marble floors. The detritus of beautiful wealth. Servants smiled in the corners, had probably made bets on whether he’d come back. Darath smiled in his bedroom doorway, held out his arms.

The bride and groom went the next morning to pray and light candles at the Temple; Orhan and Darath and March and Eloise went with them as bride and groom’s kin. The mad-eyed child High Priestess knelt ragged before the altar as she did now even on days when there was no sacrifice waiting, chewing on long fingers red ragged bloody at the tips. Glorious omen! But people tried now not to care. Days passed: Darath hung around Orhan’s bedroom complaining of the strangeness of having a woman living in his house; Bil slunk in her chambers, brittlely restless, swollen like a bluebottle in the heat. The hot weather continued, the world red and sweat-sticky, dust in heaps on the pavements, trees withering in the heat. Stone walls too hot to put a hand on. Plaster and gilding crumbling into more dust. Orhan stared dully at old ledgers in the palace offices, dictated letters, tried to govern an empire of one decaying city in a desert of yellow sand.

And then ten days after the wedding Darath came to Orhan’s study to tell him in triumph that March was dead.

‘How did he die?’ Orhan asked. He hadn’t heard anything. Must have been sudden. Or his spies were even more useless than he’d thought. But it still must have been sudden. Celyse would have been round to tell him otherwise. She’d already passed on the news that Elis had bedded Leada four times so far and the girl had very much enjoyed every moment of it. So that was something else Orhan would now go to his grave unable to forget.

‘He technically hasn’t. Yet. Soon. Tomorrow, maybe the day after. By Lansday, anyway, or I’ll sue the man who sold it me for false trade.’

‘That’s—’ Orhan looked up at Darath’s glittering eyes. ‘God’s knives, Darath, what did you use?’

‘I told you I’d take care of it. I have. You really want to know?’

‘No! No. Yes.’ Dear Lord. Dear Lord. Great Tanis have mercy.

‘Deadgold leaves and sysius root and beetle’s wings and bear’s gall and powdered lead.’ It sounded like a lullaby. ‘Poured in his wine with his lunch today. He complained of the sour taste but the man who gave it to him told him it was the heat affecting his tongue.’

‘I …’ God’s knives, Darath. ‘I mean …’

‘You mean: “thank you, beloved of my heart, for killing the man who tried to kill me so I don’t have to do it myself”.’

‘I … Yes … But … I mean …’ But, I mean: it’s such a horrible, horrible way to die.

‘This way everyone will think it’s heat flux. You would have done it all nicely with something cool and sleep-inducing and obvious like sana fruit? Would that have made you feel better about it?’

‘I …’ Silence. The ox heavy on Orhan’s tongue.

‘Your plans, Orhan my love, have led to my brother saddling himself with an unwanted wife. Your plans have led to me being stuck with said wife strolling round my house like she owns the place. Your plans have cost me a great deal of money and almost seen both of us fucking killed. If I want to do something to help you the way I want to, you should thank me.’

And there’s nothing to say to that. Orhan looked at Darath and Darath looked at Orhan.

‘Thank you.’

‘Oh, your gratitude is like music.’

‘Thank you.’ Orhan took Darath’s hand, held it to his cheek. Hot and angry. His face and Darath’s hand. Long drawn silence, where they could hear the click of a house servant somewhere going about the house with a bucket and broom. The drapery at the windows fanned out with a snap. The air changing. A hot wind. In the central gardens the birds in the lilac trees felt it, rose up a moment all together in a puff like a skein of silk unravelling then came back to roost.

‘You’re welcome.’ A grunt. Grudging. Darath sat down again, leaning back in his chair. Orhan sat again also. The wind banged at the windows again, the open shutters creaking, hiss of sand blowing onto the marble floor. In her desiccation I am entombed in ecstasies of rain. Doesn’t some poet say somewhere that life is like the sand wind, blasting heat teetering on the edge of a storm from which one will never get relief? A house servant came hurrying in to close the shutters, the room dark for a moment before the candles were lit.

‘We hired a troop of sellswords to assassinate the Emperor,’ said Darath. ‘We killed hundreds of people, we killed Tam Rhyl, we almost burned the palace down. We desecrated the Great Temple. We’ve told so many lies I can barely keep up. We did all that because you told me March Verneth was conspiring with the Immish, that the Immish would invade the city, that the world would be over if we didn’t do something. Remember? Remember, Orhan? All those things you told me? “The city’s dying, Darath. The Empire’s a joke. The Immish will come with twenty thousand men and a mage, and we’ll fall in days.” “We’re too weak, the way we are, sitting on our piles of gold pretending nothing exists beyond our walls. We need to be ready. And yes, that does mean blood.” Remember?’ Pause. Cold eyes. ‘And now you’re getting squeamish about March dying?’ Slammed his fist down, hard, on the arm of his chair. ‘I could have died that night, Orhan. Stop claiming morality at me.’

God’s knives, thought Orhan, God’s knives, Darath, what have I done to you?

‘I—’

Darath shouted, ‘Stop bleating “I” like a bloody goat.’

They sat and looked at each other. The wind smashing on the shutters. Flickering candlelight.

A tap on the door, an anxious-faced door keep. Orhan snapped at him, ‘What?’

Poor wretch. Hardly his fault, he’d had to come up this moment, hear this. Terrified fear in the man he’d be punished. Dismissed. ‘Excuse me, My Lord. My Lords. Lady Amdelle is waiting downstairs.’

Celyse. Dear sister. Thank her and curse her for turning up now. Orhan rubbed at his eyes, wiping away tears. Celyse came in in a sweep of satin, rearranging dusty hair.

‘Lord of Living and Dying, it’s horrible out there. My bearers were being blown around like flagpoles and the curtains were almost ripped off. I should have gone back home, sent a note.’ She stopped when she saw Darath and Orhan’s faces. ‘Shall I leave again?’

Darath got up with a crisp, angry smile. ‘No need. I was just leaving myself anyway.’

Her face changed. Recognized Orhan so very much wanted Darath to stay, perhaps. A clever woman, his sister. Even sometimes a kind one. ‘You’ll want to hear this too, Darath. March is sick. Took to his bed this hour past with a fever. Very sudden, it came on.’

Darath said, ‘Do they know what it is?’

‘The rumour among the servants is heat flux.’ Celyse said after a moment, ‘But you two know exactly what it is and so I’ve come to ask you.’

And there’s nothing to say to that. Orhan looked at Darath and Darath looked at Orhan.

They sat and looked at each other. Wind smashing on the shutters. Flickering candlelight.

‘You really think people aren’t going to guess?’

‘It’s heat flux,’ said Darath.

‘You could at least act like you’re surprised.’

‘There’s nothing particularly surprising about a man getting heat flux in this heat.’

‘Does it matter what people think?’ said Orhan. ‘Nothing can be proved.’ Darath shot him a look that was part confusion, part sneer. Why are you pretending you did it, Orhan my love? his face said. Just to be even more superior and make me feel even more ashamed? Orhan made a movement with his lips, turned his head away. Why am I pretending I did it? But in the end which is more shameful: killing someone, or asking my lover to kill someone for me because I’m a better person than him and too good to do it myself?

I’m the thing at the centre of this, he thought. The knife. But I’m only trying to build a better world. Make things safe. Make us good again.

And so does Marian Gyste compare love to the storm that is the soul of those few who suffer damnation. Raging heat and noise and madness, not for them the cool eternity of death. Not for me. God lives in His house of waters; Tam and March are dead and gone and damp rot. We who live: we’re the ones who’ll burn.

‘He got to see one of his daughters married,’ said Darath. ‘It would have been very sad if he’d sickened before that.’

‘Is that supposed to be a consolation?’

‘Oh come on, Celyse. You know how this works. Such things were done once without anyone raising an eyebrow. Them or us. You know that.’

‘Them or us because my brother was stupid enough to start this.’

Orhan said, ‘Them or us because things would have gone to pieces in fire if I hadn’t. Them or us to save Sorlost.’

Celyse opened her mouth, closed it again. Wind smashing against the shutters. Hot dry storm without rain or relief. The sky outside would be so dark now like the death of the sun. Sand clouds black-golden like Darath’s hair.

Celyse laughed. ‘My dear fastidious brother. Even you can’t keep your hands clean any longer. You killed people so you could get power. That’s all you did. Kill people. For power.’

Darath laughed.

A tap on the door and Bil came in, heavy and tired and her scars standing out on her face. The heat still sickened her, she spent long hours floating in the cool bathing chamber where her body blurred into the oily water. The skin on her hands was wrinkled, odd white.

‘News,’ she said. ‘March Verneth is sick. Heat flux, they say, or that Lord Emmereth poisoned him at Leada’s wedding feast.’

Celyse clapped her hands to her mouth.

Chapter Sixteen

When they had all left, Orhan went to his books, tried to work. The ancient tomes of the Imperial ledgers. Give himself something else to worry about.

Any fool could assassinate someone, if they really put their mind to it, as the history of Irlast so often proved. Making things better. That took effort. That was the work. March Verneth is dying. So what? The weary business of remaking the world, that must still go on. This city is dying, the richest empire the world has ever known, her beggars wear silk and satin, eat rotting scraps off plates of gold. Immish and Chathe and the other great powers laugh at us and do not bother to cover their mouths. Sorlost is a dead man’s dreaming. A useless heap of crumbled rock. Weak and defenceless and worn down. But I, Orhan lied to himself every night in the dark, I am a capable man, a learned man, I can change that.

Several streets had been destroyed in the rioting that had followed the attack on the palace. Fine, lofty shops and town houses, and, behind them, tenement buildings with broken-down walls and ceilings, floors running with human sewage, whole families crammed into single windowless rooms. ‘Tear them all down,’ Orhan had ordered, ‘rebuild them, clean them up.’

‘And the cost, My Lord Nithque?’ Secretary Gallus had asked him.

‘Levy a tax on something. Appeal to the goodwill of the high families. Borrow it.’

‘And the cost of expanding the Imperial army, My Lord Nithque?’

‘Levy a tax on something. Appeal to the goodwill of the high families. Borrow it.’

‘We do not need an expanded army. We do not need to rebuild a few ruined houses. This is Sorlost!’ the Emperor and the Emperor’s High Lords told him curtly, when he suggested any of these things.

The outbreak of deeping fever in Chathe had flared up again. Worse than before. The gates must be closed again to Chathean travellers, trade would suffer, everyone from the hatha addicts in the gutters to the High Lords who refused to fund his army would complain.

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