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 it. I wanted to go home, perhaps because it felt as though something else required that I did not. I wanted to go home and if Hell rose up to stop me, it would make me desire it the more. We took the Castle Road, up through the garden lands of Ancrath. Our path ran alongside gentle streams, between small woods and quiet farms. I’d forgotten how green it was. I’d grown used to a world of churned mud, burnt fields, smoke-grey skies, and the dead rotting on the ground. The sun found us, pushing its way through high cloud. In the warmth our column slowed until the clatter of hooves broke into lazy thuds. Gerrod paused where a three-bar gate led through the hedgerow. Beyond it, a field, golden with wheat, rolled out before us. He tore at the long grass around the gatepost. It felt as if God had poured honey over the land, sweet and slow, holding everything at peace. Norwood lay fifteen miles, and a thousand years, behind us.
‘Good to be back eh, Jorg?’ Makin pulled up beside me. He leaned forward in his stirrups and drank in the air. ‘Smells of home.’
And it did. The scent of warm earth took me back, back to times when my world was small, and safe.
‘I hate this place,’ I said. He looked shocked at that, and Makin was never an easy man to shock. ‘It’s a poison men take willingly, knowing it will make them weak.’
I gave Gerrod my heels and let him hurry up the road. Makin caught me up and cantered alongside. We passed Rike and Burlow at the crossroads, throwing rocks at a scarecrow.
‘Men fight for their homeland, Prince,’ Makin said. ‘It’s the land they defend. The King and the land.’
I turned to holler at the stragglers. ‘Close the line!’
Makin kept pace, waiting for an answer. ‘Let the soldiers die for their land,’ I said to him. ‘If the time comes to sacrifice these fields in the cause of victory, I’ll let them burn in a heartbeat. Anything that you cannot sacrifice pins you. Makes you predictable, makes you weak.’
We rode on at a trot, west, trying to catch the sun.
Soon enough we found the garrison at Chelny Ford. Or rather they found us. The watchtower must have seen us on the trail, and fifty men came out along the Castle Road to block our way.
I pulled up a few yards short of the pikemen, strung across the road in a bristling hedge, double-ranked. The rest of the squad waited behind the pike-wall, with drawn swords, save for a dozen archers arrayed amongst the corn in the field to our right. A score of heifers, in the field opposite, saw our approach and idled over to investigate.
‘Men of Chelny Ford,’ I called out. ‘Well met. Who leads here?’
Makin came up behind me, the rest of the brothers trailing in after him, easy in their saddles.
A tall man stepped forward between two pikemen, but not too far forward, no idiot this one. He wore the Ancrath colours over a long chain shirt, and an iron pot-helm low on his brow. To my right a dozen sets of white knuckles strained on bowstrings. To my left the heifers watched from behind the hedge, complacent and chewing on the cud.
‘I’m Captain Coddin.’ He had to raise his voice as one of the cows let out a low moo. ‘The King signs mercenaries at Relston Fayre. Armed bands are not permitted to roam into Ancrath. State your business.’ He kept his eyes on Makin, looking for his answer there.
I didn’t care for being dismissed as a child, but there’s a time and place for taking offence. Besides, old Coddin seemed to know his stuff. Putting Brother Gemt out of his misery was one thing, but wasting one of Father’s captains quite another.
I had my visor up already, so I used it to pull my helm off. ‘Father Gomst!’ I called for the priest, and the brothers shuffled their horses aside with a few mutters to let the old fellow past. He wasn’t much to look at. He’d hacked off that beard he grew in the gibbet-cage, but grey tufts still decorated his face in random clusters, and his priestly robes seemed more mud than cloth.
‘Captain Coddin,’ I said. ‘Do you know this priest,
