The Gully Snipe (The Dual World Book 1) (44 page)

He spent time walking aimlessly through the cobbled streets and dirt roads of the quiet city, his head spinning so fast he could not grab and hold onto a thought long enough to try to make any sense of it.

Eventually, he found himself in front of a door, and he knew the one thing he needed to do, no matter how painful it was.

He stared at the family crest on the double doors and tried to build the courage to do what he had to do.

He wiped his sweating hands on his surcoat and then beat them noisily on the door.

“Goodsir Allerdaain! Sir, you must open the door!” he bellowed loudly, his voice cracking in pain.

He shouted and pounded his fists on the door and then waited in turns until he finally saw a single candle moving through the windows of the first floor of the townhouse.

When the door opened, and a frightened housemaid poked her nose out of the door, Gully did not give her the chance to close it again.

He shoved the door open and shouted into the interior of the house, loud enough so that even those on the upper floors would hear the commotion.

“Goodsir Allerdaain! You must come down! I must speak with you,
now
!”

The small maid looked terrified and whispered, “Do not shout! The master will strip the skin from me bones if he’s awakened so!”

Gully told her, “I’m sorry if that happens. This cannot wait!”

He shouted again up the grand staircase, “I must speak with you now! You must come down!”

The maid tried to close the door on him and lock it, but Gully refused to let her. He was about to begin shouting into the house again when he heard a very angry voice coming from up the stairs.

“Now you’ve done it! I’ll be sacked before dawn!” she moaned.

Candlelight appeared at the top of the stairs and the master of the house appeared in a haphazardly donned velvet robe. He came storming down the stairs, his hair askew, and he almost knocked over a gilded table with a beautiful statue of a Belder horse sitting upon it.

“I’ll flay you alive myself! Whoever you are breaking into my house at this hour, it’ll be the last thing you do!” he yelled.

As he got to where he could see through the door, he stopped a moment, his eyes squinting at Gully’s figure standing there, who held his chaperon hood in his hands out of respect for the bad news he brought.

“You!” shouted the goodsir. “Back here again! Why, the arrogant temerity you show by setting foot in my doorway is—”

“Goodsir Allerdaain!” shouted Gully over the man’s apoplexy.

Gully was forceful enough that it stopped the words from the man’s mouth for a brief moment.

“I’m sorry to wake you, I truly am. And I would not darken your doorway under any other circumstances,” said Gully while he had the chance, even though his voice now felt like he had swallowed ashes from the fireplace. He wiped his arm across his eyes again, trying to dry them. “But you must go to the Folly, right now! You
must
go to the Nighting Chapel.”

Goodsir Allerdaain’s brow furrowed in confusion.

Gully choked a moment and then continued, “It is in regards to your daughter, Mariealle. There has been an accident. She... well...”

He tried to say it, but the words took more strength than he had. They sank back down in him, almost suffocating him.

Before he could force them out, the merchant’s anger exploded again and he shouted at Gully, “Stop speaking of my daughter! If I hear her name cross your lips one more time, I’ll run you through with a dagger myself and leave you on the street for the honeywagon to collect! My daughter is asleep upstairs in her room, where she has been all night! Go away, leave my family be, and
never return
!”

Gully’s eyes began to pour their tears out. The man spoke of driving a dagger into his heart, but he didn’t realize there was one already there. If he knew of the dagger that was even now lodged in his chest, the head of the Allerdaain family would be on the step crying with him.

“Mariealle has been killed!” shouted Gully through his miserable tears. The maid standing off to the side gasped and her hand shot over her mouth.

Goodsir Allerdaain could take no more. He stormed through the door and grabbed Gully by his surcoat violently. He spat in Gully’s face, “Your lies and your presence are not welcome here! Ever!”

He dragged Gully and physically threw him down the front steps. Gully landed hard on his shoulder, crying out as he landed and sobbing from the pain in his heart. The pain shot through him, and he slowly rolled onto his back, tears streaming from his eyes as he grimaced in agony. By the time he sat up, Allerdaain had emerged again from his front door, this time with a horse crop in his hands, ready to come after him and to beat him in the street with it. The merchant muttered under his breath about flaying the skin from his worthless bones.

Gully scrambled to his feet and ran, the shouts and threats of Goodsir Allerdaain chasing him down the road. He sniffled and rubbed at his sore shoulder as he ran. He gave up on the merchant, knowing that the maid, if no one else, would go to check on Mariealle and find that she was missing. Then they would understand and go to the Nighting Chapel to learn of the calamity that he had tried to explain to them.

He limped off, holding onto his shoulder, and was no longer sure of what he should do or where he should go.

Gully wandered for hours, aimlessly, his mind a disjointed collage of images of Mariealle falling, Krayell holding a knife to her neck, Almonee screeching nonsense at him, his own bloodied hand, and the black emptiness on the other side of the arcade wall where Mariealle had fallen. Over and over the images stabbed into his eyes and his heart until he could see or feel nothing else.

When he took true notice of the world around him again, he found himself in front of the oratory tower nearest the Swordsman Market. The sky was still dark and no one was around, and Gully stared blankly at the tower for a long time. It had been years since he had been up to the top of one, back when he was still small enough that Astrehd, his foster mother, would make him go with her and Roald.

The elocutor had long since left and the tower was empty of any supplicants, so Gully entered and slowly climbed to the top of it.

At the top, he sat in the middle of the prayer space and did something else he had not done in many years. He took the pendant from around his neck and held it in his hands and stared at it. In the starlight from above, he stared at the reflections and refractions that it seemed to capture and hold for a moment before releasing them out into the world again. He rubbed his fingers along the smoothly carved curves forming its circles.

He was so tired, and his shoulder hurt like fire, and he wondered what was the meaning beneath everything that was happening to him.

Why is this happening to me?
he thought.
Why is my life being pulled apart from so many different directions?

Off near the horizon, he spotted the Trine Range constellation about to fall from view for the night. He wondered if it was really possible that his father was one of those bright stars — King Colnor veLohrdan, Fifth of the Name. He wondered if the line of kings that stretched back for generations was the family of his whom he never knew about, were the family he never wondered much about because he was perfectly content with his father, Ollon. He wondered if Thaybrill truly could be his brother, his twin.

Whatever doubts he might have tried to cling to in all of this dissolved when he thought back to seeing his face next to Thaybrill’s in the mirrored glass.

He felt the pendant in his hands again and wondered at it, about the patriarch’s story that Ollon had to have been the last of an imperial family of an empire that hadn’t existed for hundreds and hundreds of years.

He couldn’t be something like that. He couldn’t be royalty, of any sort. The whole idea was preposterous. A petty thief was what he was, raised in a one room cabin tucked into the bogs, destined for no more than time spent searching for his lost father until caught and hung at the end of a rope in the Bonedown.

He wondered if maybe what had happened to Mariealle was his punishment. He wondered, if he really was Thaybrill’s twin brother, if Mariealle’s death was Colnor’s punishment from on high for his life of thievery, for degrading the veLohrdan name. He wondered if Colnor was the kind of man that would callously kill someone as kind and pure and wonderful as Mariealle just to punish a wayward son. If that was the kind of man that the old king was, then Gully wanted nothing to do with him. He was happy with his life the way it was, and Colnor could go stick his head in a bucket for all he cared. He was glad he had been an orphan if that was the measure of his supposed father.

Gully looked down at the pendant in his hands again and felt ashamed. He was trying to blame a man he had never known for the tragedy that had befallen Mariealle. It was
his
choice to be a thief. It was
his
choice to allow Mariealle to accompany them this evening rather than send her home. He felt ashamed for trying to shift the burden of her death to someone else.

He let the weight of the pendant rest in his cupped hands. At that moment, he would have traded every day that remained in his life for only a few minutes with his father, Ollon, to try to understand what was happening to him. He would have given anything for a few brief moments with his father to ask him whom he was supposed to be.

~~~~~

Dawn began to appear behind Kitemount, and Gully wandered carelessly through the streets that became more and more crowded with the arrival of the new day. He paid little heed to those around him — the delivery of bags of flour to bakers from the gristmill outside the city, market masters haggling with peddlers for stalls in the market for the day, poulterers hauling cages of geese and pheasants from inn to inn to supply them. He was too drawn into his own head to pay heed to any of the thousand activities taking place around him, activities that paid him no heed in return.

At some point in the day, a platoon of the Kingdom Guard came marching through the city, pushing aside everything else as they came down the street on their return from their frivolous search for a prince who had already been returned safely. Gully reacted instinctively out of fear of being spotted by a passing guard and recognized as the Gully Snipe, and he faded back into the crowd pushed to the sides of the boulevard as the platoon passed.

He was tired, and hungry, and would have gone to the solitary comfort of Roald’s apartment to rest, but he was afraid he would be found there when he was still unable to face anyone after the events of the night. So he drifted from one spot to another in the city, lost and exhausted.

He thought about leaving the city, about disappearing into the Ghellerweald and to his cabin, abandoning all else behind, all the people, all the troubles, all the things pulling at him. But he could not bring himself to do that, no matter how much he wanted it. He had a remaining responsibility that he could not disavow and would not shirk, no matter what else may happen.

It was why, hours and hours later as the sun disappeared beneath the horizon at the end of an aimless and painful day, that he found himself standing beneath the old city gate that opened up onto Bonedown Square. Before him, a crowd had begun to gather, and in the middle of the throng was the open space, in the center of which was a flat stone slab half a man high. The stone table was black and sooted from use over the years, and tonight it would be put to use yet again. The pyre, with Mariealle’s body crowning it, had already been built on top of the table for her burning.

Over the heads of the people gathering, he could see the dark auburn-red silk sheeting draped across her body as she lay on top of the wood and tinder, a color chosen by her family to go with her hair. The last rays of the sun hit her final bed from the west, making it seem as if she was already on fire. Gully’s insides twisted again and his knees trembled as he slowly drew himself closer.

Whispers snaked through the crowd of curiosity seekers, and mouths murmured with all the gossip that had begun to spread through the city that day and drawn all of them to the burning. Word that the prince had been returned safely, word that His Highness’ own chief advisors were behind his abduction and had been arrested and not arrested, word that the Allerdaain girl about to be burned was somehow involved in it, and the most scandalous of all — word that the crown prince might have a brother of whom no one knew. The words of the whispers and gossip reached him in bits and pieces, but they passed across his ears unheeded as he stared at the cloth on top of the pyre. It rippled in the breeze every so often, giving only a hint to the beautiful, tragic heroine who lay beneath it.

The light fell from rose to purple to deep blue and the stars began to appear overhead as the elocutor’s voice rang out with the memorial comments he had prepared at the request of the family, given before the rites of release and her nighting. A couple of interpreters slowly walked around the pyre table, their incense bowls in hand giving off a dark, smoky scent as they mumbled supplications on her behalf.

Gully pulled his hood around his face and stepped into the crowd. The elocutor spoke, and Mariealle’s father sat as stone, hollow and haunted. Mariealle’s mother cried and cried in misery for the loss of her only daughter. A curious bystander next to Gully turned to him and asked him if he knew how the girl was involved in the prince’s return. Gully ignored him and continued to stare unblinkingly at the crimson draped body on top of the carefully stacked wood. He could still feel her fingers slip from his as she fell. He held up his hand in front of his face and his knees almost gave out under him at the sight of her dried blood left behind, the stain of where he had failed her still upon his hand.

At the conclusion of the elocutor’s panegyric, the pyre was lit. Mariealle’s mother began to sob openly as the flames crept up around her daughter’s body, and the goodsir remained immobile and expressionless, so statue-like as to appear dead himself.