even be legal heir to the earldom!”
“You’d better come down here, Jorg,” my grandfather said.
To my shame I had to be helped down with a ladder. The drop would have broken my legs and the inner walls of the great hall were plastered smooth. Clambering down a ladder arse first to the room wasn’t the most impressive of entrances, but I had just saved their lives.
“You think our food is poisoned?” Grandfather asked.
I took a silver fork and speared a slice of the potato. “Have Qalasadi brought here and see if he would like a taste.”
Lord Robert frowned. “Just because we’re at odds with Ibn Fayed doesn’t mean all Moors are out to get us.”
Earl Hansa nodded to the guardsman at his shoulder and the man set off on an errand.
“Even so, he is guilty,” I said. “And in such a manner that there is no proof other than to see if he will sample a little of your saffron.”
“The saffron?” the Earl asked.
“You’ll find you’ve recently had a new consignment come to the kitchens, properly sealed and kept safe both for its intrinsic value and for your protection. It is probably part of a larger supply that is busy killing rich folk up and down the coast. A seemingly random act of pointless destruction. But I know a man capable of calculating that part of this same consignment would end up on your table, Earl Hansa. A man who also knew my identity and thought I’d make a perfect villain, and that I would accept the blame with the good graces of my line.”
“Dig a deeper hole with your sword, you mean?” Lord Robert asked, a slight smile on his lips.
For a moment I wondered if Qalasadi had factored in even my arrival, wondered if I were not some chance victim to pin his crime on but part of some larger calculation. I pushed that thought aside as both unlikely and unsettling. “Our mathmagician made only one mistake. It’s unfair perhaps to even call it a mistake. I expect he considered the possibility and decided it remote enough to chance. He didn’t think it likely you would let the cooks waste such fine ingredients on mere guards.”
The man who left on Grandfather’s errand returned. “Qalasadi is not in his quarters, Earl Hansa, and neither is he in the observatory.”
It turned out Qalasadi left the castle as soon as news of the guards’ sickness reached him.
From The Journal Of Katherine Aps Corron
March 26th, Year 99 Interregnum
Rennat Forest. Late afternoon.
I had thought I might write about Hanna at her graveside. Sareth says I take this journal everywhere, that I have too little in my life if I can’t be without it. People who are truly living, she says, don’t need to write about it every minute-they’re too busy getting on with real things. But Sareth hasn’t left the Tall Castle in a year, and whilst that baby is sucking the milk out of her I’m sat in Rennat Forest with monsters!
There’s an ogre at least ten foot tall with a mouthful of sharp teeth and slit-eyes. It glanced my way at first but now it just stands carving a chunk of deadfall, not with a knife but with the black nail on a finger as thick as my wrist.
The second monster is just a little boy really. A skinny one but nearly naked and marked with patterns in red and black, like ripples or flames. He scampers from bush to bush, trying to keep hidden, watching me with big black eyes. When he runs you can see his claws.
I’m distracting myself. I don’t want to think about what Jorg said.
The monster-child is called Gog. He says Jorg named him, after those giants in the bible. I told him there should be a Magog too. He looked so sad at that and the forest felt too hot all of a sudden as if it were the highest of high summers.
“And what will you be when you grow up, Gog?” I asked him to take his mind from whatever had upset him.
“I want to be big and strong,” he said. “To make Jorg happy. And I want to be happy, to stop Gorgoth being sad.” He looked at the ogre.
“And what do you want for you?” I asked him.
He looked at me with huge black eyes. “I want to save them,” he said. “Like they saved me.”
Jorg’s men look as though they’ve never left the road. They’re bandits, not a king’s retinue. Sir Makin, who they say is a proper knight, is as filthy as the rest. There’s dried muck all over his armour and he stinks like a sewer. He has a way with him though, even with the dirt. Sir Makin has manners at least.
The one they call Red Kent tries to be polite, my lady this and my lady that, bowing at every turn. It’s quite comical. When I thanked him for the water he brought me he blushed from neck to hairline. I think I know how he got his name.
When he’s not waiting on me Kent spends most of his time whittling, carving away with his back against a tree and a black knife in hand. It’s a wolf he’s working on. It looks as though it’s climbing out of the wood, snarling at the world. He said he was a woodsman once. A long time ago.
And there’s a boy, Sim. Very delicate features like that stage player who performed in court last week. He looks kind, but shy. He won’t speak to me but I see him looking when he thinks I can’t see. He’s the cleanest of all of them. I can’t think he would be much of a warrior. Surely he’s too slight to swing that sword of his.
I know Sir Makin can fight. I remember that he put Sir Galen to the test when Jorg’s father set them against each other, though I think my Galen would have beaten him. Perhaps that’s why Jorg pushed over Sageous’s tree. To save Sir Makin.
The other two, the two Jorg warned Red Kent to watch, are killers through and through. You can see it in their eyes. There’s a giant called Rike who’s nearly as tall as the ogre and as broad as a Slav wrestler. He just looks angry the whole time. And there’s an old man, maybe fifty, skinny, gristly, with grey stubble on his chin and as wrinkled as Hanna was. They call him Row and he has kind eyes, but there’s something about him that says his eyes are lying.
And I’m sitting here scratching the paper with my quill to record rogues and vagabonds because my hand doesn’t want to follow where Jorg has gone, or to write what he might be doing, or to frame the words that are pounding through my head.
I tried to stab Jorg but it was like a dream. I both knew and did not know what my hand was doing. I didn’t want to hear his pain or see him bleed. I don’t recall picking up the knife to take with me. I told myself to stop. But I didn’t stop.
And now. If I had Friar Glen here. I would want to hear his pain and see him bleed. I would not tell myself to stop. But I would stop. Because for the first time in a long while my head feels clear, my thoughts are all my own, and I am not a killer.
March 27th, Year 99 Interregnum
Rennat Forest. Before noon. A high wind in the trees.
Sir Makin has been pacing. He doesn’t say it but he’s worried about Jorg. We saw a patrol ride by earlier, between the fields. They’ll be looking for me. Sir Makin says the more of them looking for me, the fewer for Jorg to worry about in the castle.
The big one. The huge one, really. Rike. He’s been saying they should go. That Jorg is captured or dead. Kent says Jorg helped them all escape the dungeons and if he’s stuck there in those same dungeons himself, they should go free him. Even Sir Makin says that’s madness.
The night was cold and noisy. They gave me their cloaks, but I’d rather be cold than under those stinking, crawling things. Everything moves in the forest at night, creaking, or croaking, or rustling in dead leaves. I was glad to see the dawn. When I woke up, the boy, Sim, was standing against the tree beside me, watching.
Breakfast was stale bread and bits of smoked meat. I didn’t like to ask what animal it came from. I ate it. My stomach was grumbling and I’m sure they could hear.
Jorg has come back. His men are more scared now than when they thought he was lost. He’s a wild thing, his hair torn and spiky with blood, he won’t look at anything, his eyes keep sliding, he can hardly stand. He’s got blood on his hands, past his elbows, his nails are torn, two of them missing.
Makin told him to sleep and Jorg just made this terrible sound. I think it might have been laughing. He says he won’t sleep again. Ever. And I believe him.
