Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04 (63 page)

'In my hand and blood; but Dard has a history of its own, sieur,'
in your hand and blood
which he did not need to say, 'and I carry it regardless. Carry but do not use, I will not kill again. I have not, since that night.'

'Those who carry a sword should be prepared to use it.'

'So I'm told,' with a soft laugh, 'so another one keeps telling me. But for yourself, sieur, for Outremer, for all that
you believe - be ready to kill ‘
ifrit:, rather than men in the morning. See your weapons blessed, by men who can still be holy, and warn your people that there are beasts abroad. They fly, they swim, they come out of the earth; they are devils, as the Church has always taught us.'

'And so are the Surayonnaise, and so are the Sharai, as the Church has always taught us; heretics and unbelievers, greater dangers even than devils. And you are in league with all of them, Marron.'

'Not quite all, sieur. Only with the Sharai, and the Surayonnaise. And you. Esren, take me away from here.'

And Esren did, if Esren was a glimmer of gold against the night, sharper somehow than the firelight, a twisting string of brightness snared that appeared behind his shoulder a moment before he was lifted cleanly away into the darkness and out of sight, a bare two moments before a troop of brothers came running from the marshal's tents with their weapons drawn and their eyes agleam, their faces grim with the determination to face the wickedness and take the sinner, or die at their lord's command.

'Too late,' Anton murmured to their leader. 'Take me instead, I have words that must be delivered to our masters.'

Words that were nothing, ash and shadow, and what did he care? Monsters could come and drag him, drag them all to hell, and the world's loss would be less than his tonight. He touched his sword Josette and vowed that she at least should be blessed before the dawn, because he could do no other. If Marron had forsworn killing, that was all the more reason to kill, or ought to be. But he would do it dryly, with

dust upon his tongue; there could be no virtue in it, where there was no hope.

16

Blood
Follows
th
e
Blade

Of all the ways there were to distinguish rebel Surayon from the orthodox, the obedient states of Outremer, Elisande thought that this was prime, it spoke most clearly and most deeply to the heart and mind of her, to the memory and the soul. This was what she most missed, perhaps, when she was outwith the mountain borders: simply to stand - on her grandfathers terrace this morning, but anywhere within those borders would suffice although higher was better, highest was always best - and watch the light invade, see how the dark retreated as the stars faded first and then the lamplight at her back.

She had seen dawns in the desert, she had seen the sun rise over vast waters and distant ranges, she had seen storm-dawns and dust-dawns and dawns so
gentle
, so peaceful that even the birds had seemed surprised and hushed by the mystery of the moment. She'd seen a hundred, a thousand meanings of beauty in the many risings of the sun, each of them unique and each of them a wonder, but something

inside her always harked back to this, always yearned to be here.

An invasion, a retreat — the words held a bitterness this morning, and had never seemed more apt. In other lands, in other seasons the sun struck upward like an erupting fire and it seemed as though the dark fled in response, after the moment of its rising. Or else light flowed into the world as though from a jug spilt below the horizon, if light could flow like milk and run upward; and then it would meet the night and tangle with it, milk and ink, and the weight and currents of the light would dri
ve back the darkness as a salt ti
de drives fresh river-water back up its own channel for miles inland.

Here, not so. Here the change was slow and insidious. Daylight stole in like a thief, sneaking between the mountain-peaks and slithering down the river. The dense weave of darkness would be unpicked quietly, thread by thread until it chose to retreat — and every day it seemed indeed to be a choice, nothing forced, never a defeat — into the shelter of the valleys walls and caves where it could pool into shadow, curl like a beast inviolate and wait out the day's invasion.

Her grandfather would tell, had told his people that they could do the same, pull back into the high deep strongholds and wait, hold out, be patient, pray.

Some would do that, hide and hope, trust the wise and the strong and the powerful to work an unpredicted miracle between them. Others would fight, would have to fight; and of course the Princip depended on that resistance, he would gamble on being defied.

Herself, she could do neither. Her conscience wouldn't let her hide while her beloved country was in pain and its people were dying, while she blamed herself; no one, she had found, would let her fight. She hadn't even been allowed to go out last night with the others, on their various missions to plead for peace, for the opposing commanders in the field to raise their eyes and see the real danger. Her own djinni had refused to take her. She might have refused then to let it take any of them, except that she wasn't - quite — capable of such * pettiness in such a crisis, and in any case she'd been afraid that it would disobey her and take them anyway, and then it would truly not be her djinni any longer, oath or no oath, promises or none.

She hadn't tried to have it take her to a battlefield, any battlefield this morning. She knew already the result of such a hopeless order; it was inherent in the arguments she'd been having half the night with her grandfather, with friends old and new, with commanders and servants and everyone she came face to face with.

Women could die for Surayon if they were victims, it seemed, if they were farmers in flight or innocents abroad; not if they were armed and armoured, fit and trained for fighting.

In those circumstances all they could do, all they were allowed to do by a forbidding grandfather and watchful friends and a treacherous, unreliable djinni was to stand here on the terrace and watch the infiltration of the light and wonder if this would be the last day in Surayon, the last for all of them, friends and strangers, kin and kind
...

If all she was allowed to do was stand, at least she didn't have to do it alone, though honour required that she not show gratitude at the sound of a known footfall behind her: that she snarl, rather, to reconfirm the fuss she'd made last night.

'You don't have to make time for me, or waste the day here. I'm sure Esren would take you somewhere more interesting, if you ask it.'

Are you? I'm not. And you can't scare me with a scowl, so don't try it.' Julianne linked arms with her, tall and cool and easy in her friendship, something distant in her gaze. Something she'd carried since last night, that Elisande had not been allowed to witness nor to hear about since, except that she knew the boy Roald had been killed. That was something to be truly offended at, perhaps, that Julianne wouldn't share what had touched her deeply; but Elisande couldn't manage any true offence, she was too busily outraged already, too noisily disgusted with her lot.

It was a mood she needed badly, urgently to maintain as a wall against other moods that were building, beckoning, threatening to overwhelm her. It was hard when her friend wouldn't cooperate, so that the best she could manage was an ongoing state of high dudgeon with her djinni.

‘I
'd scare Esren, if it showed itself. If it dared. It swore, it
swore
to serve me, to obey me; and the djinn don't lie, but
...'

'Lie, perhaps not - but they do weasel, love, you taught me that yourself in the first hour of our meeting. They are
subtle
in their words, in a way that makes them liars beyond measure when they're dealing with us simple mortals; and they do see more than we do. If it says it serves you better by disobeying you, by serving us instead, you might try believing it instead of sulking. It did us all service last night, you're only furious because you were better kept busy here. Believe it, I wish you'd been with me instead, I do . . .'

Did she truly? Well, perhaps so, if she thought that would have saved the boy. Not as a witness to whatever passed between her and her own boy Imber, though. That for sure she wanted to keep private.

And was entitl
ed, and would be allowed. What could it matter, after all, on such a day? Tomorrow it might matter, if there were a tomorrow for Julianne, for Imber, for anyone. It might matter mightily to Elisande
to know just exactl
y what her friend had said or had
promised in exchange for Imber’
s service. Today, though, only that service had any weight at all. It was a day for battle, for alliances bought at any price; for men to be moved about the country, her country, like pieces in a game.

And for women to wait and watch and learn later what their fate would be, which brought her round full circle to her dawning mood this dawn.

Slow light, shapes out of shadow but no sunlight yet and not for a while yet. Perhaps she should not call it dawn at all when it was as deceptive and elusive as the djinn, creeping like water between rocks, insidious and secret. She used to appreciate that, to proclaim it as an image of Surayon itself, cloaked and masked but still inescapable as sun in cloud, its influence seeping throughout Outremer although the source was hidden.

No longer. The gates were down, the barbarians were riding and shadows offered no protection now. She ached for light and could not have it, could only see it like a rim of fire to the world where the sun burned on the mountains' peaks all around. She didn't want to think about fire.

She didn't want to think at all. She'd been teased all her life, that all her instincts were violent; but this was why, this was what they were for, this precise morning when she wanted to fling herself into a war precisely to stop herself thinking about its consequences.

'Elisande
...'

'What?'

'Call the djinni.'

Call it yourself
she wanted to say after last night, when it would come to her friends' calls and take them wherever they said, when it would not take her a frog's leap from her grandfather's hall although she had both begged and commanded in her exhaustion. But Julianne wouldn't take so much licence this morning, whatever she had taken last night, and Elisande wouldn't pretend to misunderstand her. So she contented herself with a surly, 'To what end?'

'To the end of taking you - or both of us, if you will have me - somewhere other than here, to do something other than stare at the creep of day while you paint it with your worst imaginings.'

'Yesterday you added your voice to th
e others', to have me stay exactl
y here while you all went off to do other things.'

'That was yesterday, and your staying was as useful as our going; how many people did you heal?'

She didn't know, she couldn't count; all she remembered was the ache of her body and the giddy maze of her mind as she poured herself into one stranger after another and still could never meet the need. 'Not enough,' she said, shrugging, 'and there will be more today. What makes you think I will be let leave, when I am so useful here?' And what was the point of healing, while the war went on wounding and wounding? She carried life in one hand, perhaps, but death in the other; and she had had enough of doing good.

'I don't believe there will be many wounded on the road today. Those who could flee have fled; the men who rode out in the dark' - the Princip among them, laying stern injunctions on his granddaughter not to follow — 'will live or die in the field, cut off from all help else. That's where we should be, if we do nothing more than tend them there.'

Which had been her own argument, more or less, which no one had listened to. She gazed up at her friend and said, 'Have you talked to your father about this?'

'No,' with a half-smile that might have meant anything. 'I am a married woman, a twice-married woman; I am no longer in his care. I might ask my husbands, either of them — but I would need to find them first.'

'We would need the djinni to take us, first. We'd never get past the men at the gates, I think they have orders to watch for me.'

'We've found a way out when we've been better guarded than this, my love. But let's try the djinni, it's so much easier.'

The day Julianne found it easy to be carried by a djinni would be a rare day indeed, and one worth celebrating. Elisande gave her a thoughtful stare, and then another shrug; she summoned the djinni, 'Esren,' with almost no expectation at all.

She was almost surprised, then, when it came. She still expected another refusal when she said, 'Esren, take us — oh, I don't know where. Take us somewhere we can be useful.'

Last night it had simply refused, the same request or one much like it. Today she felt its grip, she felt her body rise; and then, only then was she struck by another thought, an entirely new thought, 'What about Marron, should we take him too?'

The question was aimed at Julianne, and genuinely so; it was the djinni that replied. 'I have told him already, it will be better if he is here.'

Better for whom, she wondered, and for what? And could find no answer for herself, nor any way to ask that would bring her any answer worth the having.