Knight's Shadow (27 page)

‘Only the Dukes aren’t trying to keep the peace, not this time,’ I said.

‘They can’t – that woman, Duke Roset’s wife? She was right, Falcio. The Knights have to create so much fear that once word spreads no peasant will even
think
about rebelling against their lord – otherwise how will the Dukes be able to resist Trin’s armies when they come?’

Beytina’s words echoed in my mind.
What must a weak man with a sword do when those around him begin to question his strength?
I turned and looked back down the path where Brasti was walking slowly, looking closely at each corpse, like a painter planning to create a portrait of each one. ‘Kest, go and get him.’

Kest’s expression was uncertain. ‘Falcio, I’m not sure he’s—’

‘Now,’ I said. ‘Brasti can lose his mind later, but right now I need him and his bow and his anger. He wants to kill Knights? I’ve got dozens for him.’

Kest took off at a jog down the path.

Valiana knelt down next to a boy no older than twelve years old, his face cleaved by a single blow. In his hands was a steel sword that was probably too heavy for him even to lift properly. Valiana carefully pried his fingers apart and took the blade, then she drew her own weapon and placed it in his hand.

‘That’s a lot heavier than yours,’ Dariana said.

‘I’m stronger now, and if we’re going to fight men in armour then I’ll need something heavier.’

‘Well now,’ Dari said, a little smirk on her face, ‘glad to hear you’ve finally discovered the virtue of revenge.’

‘It’s not about revenge,’ Valiana said. ‘If the southern Dukes are trying to make sure the peasants don’t consider rebellion an option, they’re not going to stop at massacring one village.’

‘Why should they stop?’ Brasti asked, leaning on Kest as though his legs wouldn’t hold him up any longer. ‘Why would any of them stop? They killed our King and we did nothing. They took the country and we did nothing.’ He shrugged off Kest’s arm and knelt down next to the body of the boy from whom Valiana had taken the sword, reaching over awkwardly to smooth the child’s hair. ‘Now they’ve . . . Now they’ve done this. Why would they stop when there’s never a price to pay for their deeds?’

I looked at Kest, counting on his support most of all, but even he couldn’t meet my eyes. ‘There are too many of them, Falcio. Trin, the Dukes, the Knights, even the Dashini . . . we don’t even know who all of our enemies are any more. There’s just . . . what do you want us to do?’

They all stood there staring at me, their faces as cold as the dead of Carefal. How could I ask this of them now? Valiana was barely trained, holding a sword too heavy for her. Dariana was as vicious a fighter as any of our enemies, and probably just as trustworthy. Kest, the Saint of Swords, could lose himself at any moment. Brasti, the laughing rogue; his mind was even now shattering into a thousand pieces as he cried over the burnt remains of the villagers. And me: a dying fool fighting his last few bouts with an enemy I couldn’t see, never mind defeat. We were five broken people trying to hold together a broken country. But we were all that was left.

‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘there are too many of them and too few of us. Plots within plots, and assassins coming at us from all sides – but you know what? I don’t care any more. You say we don’t know who our enemies are. I say, they don’t know who
we
are. Maybe this is a hopeless fight.’ I looked at Kest and Brasti and, despite the flat looks on their faces, I smiled. ‘But hopeless fights just happen to be our specialty.’

For a long time there was nothing but the quiet breeze blowing against the embers of scorched homes.

It was Brasti who spoke first. ‘Where would we even start?’ He said it cynically, dismissively, and yet that tiny spark of hope was the first shred of warmth I’d felt in a long time.

‘We hunt them,’ I said.

‘Hunt who?’ Valiana asked. ‘The Knights?’

‘The Knights. Trin. The Dashini. We hunt them all.’

Dariana snorted. ‘And when we find them, then what?’

I smiled, perhaps because I knew it would annoy her, perhaps because, no matter how broken these people were, they were people I loved, or perhaps simply because smiling in the face of death is what you do when there’s nothing else left to try.

‘That’s the easy part,’ I said. ‘We teach them the first rule of the sword.’

INTERLUDE

In the heart of Castle Aramor sits a small private library known as the Royal Athenaeum (or, as Brasti used to call it, ‘that funny little round room where the King liked to take noblewomen to show them how clever he was’). Not long after the Dukes took the King’s head, they looted most of his books – probably because they too had noblemen and women to impress with their brilliance. However if you search long enough among the refuse that the Dukes left behind, pushing aside the unswept dust and thick cobwebs, you might chance upon an unimpressive-looking tome entitled
On The Virtus of Knights
.

Now, you might suppose that such a book would be one of the very first that any pompous arse of a Duke would desire to see sitting proudly on his mantel. After all, what nobleman doesn’t bloviate, self-righteously and to considerable extent, about the honour and loyalty of their Knights? (Not to mention the money spent on them.) Surely such a book so auspiciously titled
On The Virtus of Knights
ought therefore to have been desired and fought over by the Dukes?

Alas, the cover of this particular tome happens to be rather worn and rubbed, its colour faded, and its considerably foxed pages imbued with a not-especially-pleasant smell of mouldy leather overlaying that of the rotting paper.

Had one of those Dukes chosen to pick up the book, however, he might have noticed that the author was a man named Arlan Hemensis, and even the briefest time spent on research into that name would have yielded the fact that Arlan was a former clerk of a minor noble’s household who had spent many of his later years in prison as a result of a dispute with a Ducal Knight. The Knight in question had been aggrieved over the old man’s steadfast refusal to pay for a replacement tabard after the blood of Veren Hemensis, Arlan’s only son, had stained it beyond redemption. The tabard had been bloodied during the Knight’s duel with young Veren . . . it mattered not one jot that the boy, who was only seven and a half years old, thought he had been playing when he challenged the Knight to the duel. After all, the duel is one of the Ducal Knights’ sacred obligations.

When Arlan was finally released from prison at the age of sixty-seven, he lived just long enough to write his little book.

On the surface, the book lauds the honour and effectiveness of the Knighthood, though a more detailed study might raise a few questions in the minds of more cynical readers. My favourite passage is the very last one, which reads thus:

Chapter Twenty-Four

The Saint of Mercy

We five weary, desperate Greatcoats rode in bitter silence towards the northern village of Luth, chasing after forty Ducal Knights. Kest reckoned they had a full day’s head start on us, despite the great weight of armour they were lugging around. Whenever sleep threatened to overtake me, I pictured the men we pursued as grinning jackals, gleefully tearing innocent villagers to pieces. In truth, the slaughter was likely done quite methodically, dispassionately. These were Ducal Knights, after all: men who were just following orders – oh, and the dictates of what they considered their own honour. I planned to kill every last one of them.

Our enemies were making no effort to mask their trail: every hoof-print was like a smile etched into the dirt, inviting us to follow. Whenever I looked behind us, I could almost see the dead of Carefal following close behind – the men, women and children staring at me with their flat, empty eyes. I imagined them mouthing the words ‘
coward
’ and ‘
traitor
’ over and over, as if by so doing they might force me to greater speed, but we were already riding as fast as our horses and the rough road would allow, alternating between galloping and walking; it was that, or risk the beasts dropping dead of exhaustion.

Dariana and Kest took turns leading, constantly checking for any signs of the Knights deviating from their northern route. That first day Brasti didn’t say a word, and he refused to look any of us in the eye. It was Valiana who broke through to him in the end. She’d ignored his silence and ridden alongside him, not saying anything, just being there. The next day she did the same, and after a few hours I thought I heard him mumble something – I couldn’t hear what, but she didn’t react, whatever it was. I kept my distance, but after a while I could hear Brasti talking, then railing, then sobbing, and through it all Valiana said nothing. She just listened. And when at last he fell to silence, she didn’t try to solve his problems or correct his thinking or tell him he was being a fool.

‘Go on,’ she said.

I wanted to join them – to say something clever or funny that would, if only out of reflex, force
our
Brasti to return, to bring back the laughing, arrogant bastard who usually kept the rest of us sane. But I was pretty sure any words that came out of my mouth would just make things worse, so I kept my eyes on the road ahead and my mind on the problem at hand.

Someone was murdering my country.

This can’t just be about keeping order
, I thought.
The assassinations of Duke Isault and Duke Roset and their families must be connected to the uprisings in the villages.

It would have been easy to pin this all on Trin: we all knew she was depraved enough to command such a thing, and she’d certainly revel in the results – but if she had that kind of power and influence in the region, why hadn’t she taken control of the country already? And if she did drive Tristia into the chaos of a civil war, what would be left for her to rule?

I cursed every single Saint in turn.

I needed more information. I needed to talk this out, to get the jumble of images and words out of my head and see how they sounded to someone else. Valiana had spent her whole life next to Trin and knew more about her and her ways than anyone else, but her attention was firmly fixed on Brasti. I knew I would need him in the battle ahead so I left them alone.

‘I wanted to hate her, you know.’

I turned to see Dariana riding next to me.

‘I’d heard of her, of course,’ she said. ‘Word was that she was quite the stuck-up bitch: the high and mighty daughter of the Bloody Duchess, the girl who all her life believed that Patriana was going to make her Queen. And when Trin was revealed, I waited to see this Valiana make herself the wounded Saint. But she didn’t.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘she didn’t.’

‘She gets handed a sword and a coat and she just . . . You know, she isn’t even angry? I mean, she wants Trin dead, of course, but mostly because Trin’s trying to kill Aline.’ She looked back at Valiana. ‘How do you figure that? All the trappings of nobility, all that power gets taken away from her and she becomes . . .’

‘Noble?’

Dariana snorted. ‘I suppose.’ For a few seconds she said nothing, then, ‘She should be out of her mind with anger! She should be trying to kill everyone who ever . . .’

Her voice faded away and we rode in silence for a few minutes before I said, ‘It’s true, isn’t it? What Nile said? You’re the daughter of Shanilla, the King’s Compass.’

Dariana’s eyes narrowed. ‘Would it matter if I was?’

‘I only met her a few times,’ I said, picturing the small, red-haired woman with the deep green eyes. ‘The King named her to the Greatcoats while I was judging a case in Domaris, so we weren’t all that close, but I knew her well enough to respect her.’

‘And do you see much of her in me?’ Dariana asked.

‘I . . .’

Shanilla had been one of our best magistrates. Her mastery of the vagaries of the King’s Law was second to none – not even Kest could match her. She’d been a competent swordswoman too, though it wasn’t her greatest strength. ‘You have a little of her look around the eyes. But no, I can hardly imagine two more different people.’

Dariana smiled. It wasn’t a happy smile. ‘Good.’

There was a fragility in the hard set of her jaw, and it made me feel like I had to try to connect with her somehow. Shanilla had never set out to make an enemy of anyone; she usually tried her best to avoid conflict. And yet some Duke or Margrave or Lord, angered over how she had judged a case or outfought his champion to enforce a verdict, had resented Shanilla enough to send a pair of Dashini assassins to kill her one night, barely a mile away from the safety of Castle Aramor. ‘You were young when she died, weren’t you?’

Dariana nodded.

‘What, fourteen or fifteen?’

Again she nodded, declining to be more specific.

I thought about Valiana and how she’d managed to reach through to Brasti. Maybe I could do the same for Dari. ‘It’s all right to talk about it,’ I said, as gently as I knew how.

‘Could I ask you a question, Falcio?’

‘Of course.’

‘Your wife died about fifteen years ago, didn’t she?’

‘Yes.’

‘Would you mind describing every detail of the day she died? And perhaps some of the days afterwards? Did she scream your name when she was being killed?’

My hands tensed around the reins. ‘Why would you—?’

Dariana leaned closer. ‘She was raped too, right? Have you played out in your mind what they did to her? Every indignity and violation they performed on her body? Do you imagine the faces of each man as he—’

‘Stop!’ I shouted. ‘What in all the hells is wrong with you?’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I suppose the memories would only bring you pain.’

‘They bring me pain every day, damn you.’

Dariana leaned in until her face was near mine. ‘Good. Think on your wife if you want to re-open old wounds so badly. Leave mine the fuck alone.’

She gave her horse a nudge and trotted away.

A few minutes later Kest pulled his horse up beside mine. ‘I don’t think she likes you.’

‘We were just talking,’ I said.

‘No, you don’t understand: when she looks at you, there’s a fierce anger in her stare – maybe even hatred. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen it.’

‘You think she means me harm?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, but I’d keep an eye on her.’

I thought back to all the fights we’d been in together, from the attack by Trin’s scouts in Pulnam to the mêlée with the Luthan Knights in the Inn of the Red Hammer just a few days ago. ‘She’s had plenty of chances to kill me if she wanted to,’ I pointed out. I hadn’t forgotten the morning I’d awakened from my paralysis to find her knife at my throat. ‘She could’ve done it when we were alone, too.’

‘True,’ Kest said, ‘and yet . . .’

‘I know. She hates me. There’s a lot of that going around these days. I’m sure everyone will think better of me when I’m dead.’

A normal person might have let that hang in the air a while before speaking, but Kest never likes to waste time. ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked, his eyes boring into my face as if he could see through my skin.

‘Fine, I guess. I’m a little slower than usual, I think. My mind drifts off more. Mostly, I just wake up so terrified I could piss myself, except even that’s paralysed.’

Kest nodded. ‘So . . . not all bad, then.’

A chuckle escaped my lips. ‘Oh, everything has a bright side, even death by paralysis. For example, I won’t have to worry about getting old and wrinkled.’

He looked me up and down with a perfect semblance of serious examination. ‘I do believe you’ll make a fine-looking corpse, Falcio.’

‘Well, see, that’s the paralysis: I’m getting plenty of beauty sleep each day.’

‘I’ve heard that insomnia and sleepwalking are remarkably common ailments.’

‘Not for me, they’re not.’ I raised an imaginary glass in the air. ‘To Duchess Patriana and the many unexpected splendours of neatha poisoning.’

He raised his own phantom glass. ‘Not the least of which is that it killed her first.’

Both of us laughed then, ignoring the strangeness of riding out of violence and into violence, moving seamlessly from a massacre to a battle with only the briefest moment of comfort – each other’s company – to break the pattern. Still, when these little sparks of happiness break through the darkness, you try your best not to ruin them. That’s why I waited a few minutes before I asked the question I’d been avoiding for days. ‘How long do you think I have?’

His eyes flickered to mine and then to the road ahead. ‘I’m not a healer, Falcio. I don’t know—’

‘Come on,’ I said, ‘you spend your time calculating the difference between how much longer it takes to draw a sword in the rain than when it’s dry. You work out the odds every time a man so much as looks at us the wrong way. Are you telling me you haven’t figured out when the neatha is going to kill me?’

‘It’s . . . I don’t know all the factors. Certainly you’re longer in the paralysis each time, and the longer you’re in, the shallower your breathing gets, and sometimes your throat goes into spasm, as if it can’t quite open enough to—’

‘How long?’

Kest looked at me and took in a deep, laboured breath, almost as if thinking about my symptoms was affecting his own breathing. ‘Six days, I think. It could be seven.’ He turned his head away again. He always does that when he doesn’t really believe what’s about to come out of his mouth. ‘And there might be medicines which could make a difference. Or the poison could start leaving your system. It might get better if—’

‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘Six days.’

‘Maybe seven.’

‘Maybe seven. So in that time I need to figure out who killed two Dukes and their families, and why two hundred villagers lie dead in Carefal.’

‘They might not be related, you know,’ he pointed out. ‘Nile thought it was a Dashini who killed him – whoever these Knights are, I doubt they’re Dashini.’

‘They could be working for the same people,’ I said, though the words rang false to my ears even as I said them. ‘No, somehow that doesn’t make sense.’

‘Why not?’

‘The Dashini are precise: they’re quick and deadly, like a stiletto blade. They’re a tool to be used when subtlety is required – like a whisper in the dark.’

Kest gave a curious smile. ‘A whisper in the dark? Have you taken up poetry in your spare hours?’

‘It’s that damned Bardatti rubbing off on me!’ I complained. ‘But think about it: Knights are all blunt force and fury: a mace hefted by a strong arm. Using them is a statement, something you shout from the rooftops.’

‘So the villagers are trapped between the sharp blade of the Dashini and the heavy hammer of the Knights.’

‘Now who’s taking up poetry?’ I teased him. ‘But it’s more than that: someone’s been arming the villagers – and not just once but
twice
. The first time was before we’d ever even heard of Carefal – and then blow me, they get armed all over again as soon as we confiscate all their steel weapons.’

‘Someone really wants to drive the country into civil war,’ Kest said.

‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s already headed that way – it’s been going in that direction for years. Someone is trying to speed it up.’

‘Trin is still the obvious choice.’

‘But why? She wants to
rule
Tristia, not just sit on a pretty throne and watch the country tear itself apart.’

‘She
is
crazy,’ Kest said.

‘She’s crazy. She’s not stupid.’ I looked down the road, focusing on the tracks of the men we were pursuing. ‘Kest, someone is deliberately leading this country into chaos. Someone wants to see it burn.’

*

Every hour we rode became its own kind of poison over those next two days. It was making me tired and careless – I spent so much of my time trying not to fall asleep that I’d miss bumps and holes in the road, jerking from an uneasy doze and scrambling to grab the poor horse’s neck to keep from falling off. Time was malleable: first shrinking, with half a day disappearing in a blink, then at other times stretching unforgivably as my mind conjured up images of the horrors the Knights who’d massacred Carefal might be planning for their next target.

‘There’s someone ahead,’ Brasti said, shaking me from my thoughts.

We reined in and I lifted my hand to shade my eyes from the sun. ‘How many?’ I asked.

‘Just one. A woman,’ he answered.

‘Is she carrying a weapon?’ I drew one of my rapiers and squinted at where Brasti was pointing to. I’d always envied him his distance vision, though I supposed it was only fair; I couldn’t see a nearsighted archer doing too well in a battle.

‘How do you manage with such rubbish eyesight?’

‘By stabbing people who bring it up. Answer the question.’

He leaned forward on his horse, peering out at the road ahead. ‘I don’t see a weapon. She’s just standing there. Her hair is blonde, almost white. She’s wearing a pale dress that . . . I don’t know . . . it flows about her like sheer curtains billowing in the evening breeze.’