The wildness in the Nuban, the bonds between these men, the focus on what will make the difference – no matter what the situation – all of it echoed in me.
From the corner of my eye I caught sight of the cell door opening. The click had been the key turning.
Lundist held my shoulders and made me face him. ‘You’ve no place with these men, Jorg. You can’t imagine the life they lead. They don’t have the answers you want.’ He had such intensity to him, I could almost believe he cared.
A figure emerged from the cell, stooping to come through the doorway. I’d never seen a man so big, not Sir Gerrant of the Table Guard, not Shem the stablehand, nor the wrestlers from The Slavs.
The man came up behind Lundist, quick, a rolling storm.
‘Jorg, you think I don’t understand—’ The sweep of a massive arm cut off Lundist’s words and sent him to the stone floor with such force I’d have winced even if he hadn’t taken a handful of my hair with him.
The man towered over me, an ugly giant in stinking rags, with his hair hanging down in matted curtains. The scale of him mesmerized me. He reached for me, and I moved too slow. The hand that caught me could almost close around my waist. He lifted me level with his face, and his filthy mane parted as he looked up.
‘Jesu, but you’re one hideous offence to the eye.’ I could tell he was going to kill me, so no point in being tactful. ‘I can see why the King wants to execute you.’
Even from the anonymity of the cells the laughter was hesitant. Not a man to mock, then. Nothing soft in his face, just brute lines, scar, and the jut of bone beneath coarse skin. He lifted me, as if to dash me on the stone, like throwing down an egg.
‘No!’
I could see under the giant’s arm, an old man and a red-haired youth had followed him out and were now helping the Nuban to his feet.
‘No,’ the Nuban said again. ‘I owe him a life, Brother Price. And besides, without him, you’d still be in that cell waiting on the pleasures of the morrow.’
Brother Price gave me a look of impersonal malice, and let me fall as though I’d ceased to exist. ‘Let them all out.’ He growled the words.
The Nuban gave the keys to the old man. ‘Brother Elban.’ Then he came across to where I’d landed. Lundist lay close by, face to the floor, blood pooling around his forehead.
‘The gods sent you, boy, to loose me from that table.’ The Nuban glanced at the torture rack, then at Lundist. ‘You come with the brothers now. If we find the man you want dead; I kill him, maybe.’
I narrowed my eyes. I didn’t like that ‘maybe’.
I looked to Lundist for a moment. I couldn’t tell if he were still breathing. I sensed a ghost of the guilt I should perhaps have felt, the itch from an amputated limb, still niggling though the flesh has long since gone.
I stood beside the Nuban, with Lundist at my feet, and watched as the outlaws released their comrades. I found myself staring into the orange heat of the coals, remem-bering.
I remembered a time when I lived in the lie. I lived in a world of soft things, mutable truths, gentle touches, laughter for its own sake. The hand that pulled me from the carriage that night, from the warmth of my mother’s side, into a night of rain and screaming, that hand pulled me out by a doorway that I can’t go back through. We all of us pass through that door, but we tend to exit of our own volition, and by degrees, sniffing the air, torn and tentative.
In the days following my escape and illness, I saw my old dreams grow small and wither. I saw my child’s life yellow on the tree and fall, as if a harsh winter had come to haunt the spring. It was a shock to see how little my life had meant. How mean the dens and forts in which William and I had played with such fierce belief, how foolish our toys without the intensity of an innocent imagination to animate their existence.
Every waking hour I felt an ache, a pain that grew each time I turned the memory over in my hand. And I returned to it, time and again, like a tongue to the socket of a missing tooth, drawn by the absence.
I knew it would kill me.
The pain became my enemy. More than the Count Renar, more than my father’s bartering with lives he should have held more precious than crown, or glory, or Jesu on the cross. And, because in some hard core of me, in some stubborn trench of selfish refusal, I could not, even at ten years of age, surrender to anything or anyone, I fought that pain. I analysed its offensive, and found its lines of attack. It festered, like the corruption in a wound turned sour, drawing strength from me. I knew enough to know the remedy. Hot iron for infection, cauterize, burn, make it pure. I cut from myself all the weakness of care. The love for my dead, I put aside, secure in a casket, an object of study, a dry exhibit, no longer bleeding, cut loose, set free. The capacity for new love, I burned out. I watered it with acid until the ground lay barren and nothing there would sprout, no flower take root.
‘Come.’
I looked up. The Nuban was speaking to me. ‘Come. We’re ready.’
The brothers were gathered around us in ragged and ill-smelling array. Price had one of the warders’ swords. The other gleamed in the hand of a second giant of a man, just a shade shorter, a shade lighter, a shade younger, and so similar in form that he could only have been squeezed from the same womb as Price.
‘We’re going to cut a way out of here.’ Price tested the edge of his sword against the short beard along his jawline. ‘Burlow, up front with Rike and me. Gemt and Elban, take the rear. If the boy slows us down, kill him.’
Price threw a look around the chamber, spat, and made for the corridor.
The Nuban put a hand on my shoulder. ‘You should stay.’ He nodded to Lundist. ‘But if you come, don’t fall behind.’
I looked down at Lundist. I could hear the voices telling me to stay, familiar voices, but distant. I knew the old man would walk through fire to save me, not because he feared my father’s wrath, but just … because. I could feel the chains that bound me to him. The hooks. I felt the weakness again. I felt the pain seeping through cracks I’d thought sealed.
I looked up at the Nuban. ‘I won’t fall behind,’ I said.
The Nuban pursed his lips, shrugged, and set off after the others. I stepped over Lundist, and followed.
Assassination is just murder with a touch more precision. Brother Sim is precise.
14
So we rode out from Norwood. The peasants watched us, all sullen and dazed, and Rike cursed them. As if it had been his idea to keep them from a Renar bonfire and now they owed him a cheer as he left. We left them the ruins of their town, decorated with the corpses of the men that ruined it. Poor compensation, especially after Rike and the brothers had stripped the dead of anything of worth. I reckoned we could make Crath City by nightfall, riding hard, and be banging on the gates of the Tall Castle before the moon rose.
I shouldn’t have been turning for home, picking up my old ways, and thinking once more about vengeance upon the Count of Renar. That’s what instinct told me. But today instinct spoke with an old and dry voice and I no longer trusted
