sank to his knees, hands clasped before him. ‘If God delivers Prince Jorg from the fire then—’
Makin took off, skirting around the building toward the small door at the rear that would once have given access to the choir loft. A nine-year-old boy in the grip of delirium would need more than prayers to escape the conflagration.
Cries rang out behind him but with the roar of the fire at the windows no meaning accompanied the shouts. Makin reached the door and took the iron handle, finding it hot in his grasp. At first it seemed that he was locked out, but with a roar of his own he heaved and found some give. The air sucked in through the gap he’d made, the flames within hungry for it. The door surrendered suddenly and a wind rushed past him into the old church. Smoke swirled in its wake, filling the corridor beyond.
Every animal fears fire. There are no exceptions. It’s death incarnate. Pain and death. And fear held Makin in the doorway, trapped there beneath the weight of it as the wind died around him. He didn’t know the boy. In the years Makin had served in King Olidan’s castle guard he had seen the young princes on maybe three occasions. It wasn’t his part to speak to them – merely to secure the perimeter. Yet here he stood now, at the hot heart of the matter.
Makin drew a breath and choked. No part of him wanted to venture inside. No one would condemn him for stepping back – and even if they did he had no friends within the castle, none whose opinion he cared about. Nothing bound him to his service but an empty promise and a vague sense of duty.
He took a step back. For a moment in place of swirling smoke he saw a line of brittle blue sky. Come morning this place would be blackened spars, fallen walls. Years ago, when they had lifted him from that ditch, more dead than alive, they had carried him past the ruins of his home. He hadn’t known then that Cerys lay within, beneath soot-black stones and stinking char.
Somehow Makin found himself inside the building, the air hot, suffocating, and thick with smoke around him. He couldn’t remember deciding to enter. Bent double he found he could just about breathe beneath the worst of the smoke, and with stinging, streaming eyes he staggered on.
A short corridor brought him to the great hall. Here the belly of the smoke lay higher, a dark and roiling ceiling that he would have to reach up to touch. Flames scaled the walls wherever a tapestry or panelling gave them a path. The crackling roar deafened him, the heat taking the tears from his eyes. A tapestry behind him, that had been smouldering when he passed it, burst into bright flames all along its length.
A number of pallets for the sick lined the room, many askew or overturned. Makin tried to draw breath to call for the prince but the air scorched his lungs and left him gasping. A moment later he was on his knees, though he had no intention to fall. ‘Prince Jorg …’ a whisper.
The heat pressed him to the flagstones like a great hand, sapping the strength from him, leaving each muscle limp. Makin knew that he would die there. ‘Cerys.’ His lips framed her name and he saw her, running through the meadow, blonde, mischievous, beautiful beyond any words at his disposal. For the first time in forever the vision wasn’t razor-edged with sorrow.
With his cheek pressed to the stone floor Makin saw the prince, also on the ground. Over by the great hearth one of the heaps of bedding from the fallen pallets had a face among its folds.
Makin crawled, the hands he put before him blistered and red. One bundle, missed in the smoke, proved to be a man, the friar’s muscular orderly, a fellow named Inch. A burning timber had fallen from above and blazed across his arm. The boy looked no more alive: white-faced, eyes closed, but the fire had no part of him. Makin snagged the boy’s leg and hauled him back across the hall.
Pulling the nine-year-old felt harder than dragging a fallen stallion. Makin gasped and scrabbled for purchase on the stones. The smoke ceiling now held just a few feet above the floor, dark and hot and murderous.
‘I …’ Makin heaved the boy and himself another yard. ‘Can’t …’ He slumped against the floor. Even the roar of the fire seemed distant now. If only the heat would let up he could sleep.
He felt them rather than saw them. Their presence to either side of him, luminous through the smoke. Nessa and Cerys, hands joined above him. He felt them as he had not since the day they died. Both had been absent from the burial. Cerys wasn’t there as her little casket of ash and bone was lowered, lily-covered into the cold ground. Nessa didn’t hear the choir sing for her, though Makin had paid their passage from Everan and selected her favourite hymns. Neither of them had watched when he killed the men who had led the assault. Those killings had left him dirty, further away from the lives he’d sought revenge for. Now though, both Nessa and Cerys stood beside him, silent, but watching, lending him strength.
‘They tell me you were black and smoking when you crawled from the Healing Hall.’ King Olidan watched Makin from his throne, eyes wintry beneath an iron crown.
‘I have no memory of it, highness.’ Makin’s first memory was of coughing his guts up in the barracks, with the burns across his back an agony beyond believing. The prince had been taken into Friar Glen’s care once more, hours earlier.
‘My son has no memory of it either,’ the king said. ‘He escaped the friar’s watch and ran for the woods, still delirious. Father Gomst says the prince’s fever broke some days after his recapture.’
‘I’m glad of it, highness.’ Makin tried not to move his shoulders despite the ache of his scars, only now ceasing to weep after weeks of healing.
‘It is my wish that Prince Jorg remain ignorant of your role, Makin.’
‘Yes, highness.’ Makin nodded.
‘I should say, Sir Makin.’ The king rose from his throne and descended the dais, footsteps echoing beneath the low ceiling of his throne room. ‘You are to be one of my table knights. Recognition of the risks you took in saving my son.’
‘My thanks, highness.’ Makin bowed his head.
‘Sir Grehem tells me you are a changed man, Sir Makin. The castle guard have taken you to their hearts. He says that you have many friends among them …’ King Olidan stood behind him, footsteps silent for a moment. ‘My son does not need friends, Sir Makin. He does not need to think he will be saved should ill befall him. He does not need debts.’ The king walked around Makin, his steps slow and even. They were of a height, both tall, both strong, the king a decade older. ‘Young Jorg burns around the hurt he has taken. He burns for revenge. It’s this singularity of purpose that a king requires, that my house has always nurtured. Thrones are not won by the weak. They are not kept except by men who are hard, cold, focused.’ King Olidan came front and centre once more, holding Makin’s gaze – and in his eyes Makin found more to fear than he had in the jaws of the fire. ‘Do we understand each other, Sir Makin?’
‘Yes, highness.’ Makin looked away.
‘You may go. See Sir Grehem about your new duties.’
‘Yes, highness.’ And Makin turned on his heel, starting the long retreat to the great doors.
He walked the whole way with the weight of King Olidan’s regard upon him. Once the doors were closed behind him, once he had walked to the grand stair, only then did Makin speak the words he couldn’t say to Olidan, words the king would never hear, however loud-spoken. ‘I didn’t save your son. He saved me.’
Returning to his duties, Makin knew that however long the child pursued his vengeance it would never fill him, never heal the wounds he had taken. The prince might grow to be
