food from Torquentine’s fat cheek.
“Indeed. What if his gain wears the same cloak as our loss, though?” He sighed. “We’ve little choice but to play the Shadowhand’s game for now. Make such arrangements as would be needed to move a man, in total secrecy, from here to Hoke. A blind man. Put some eyes on every warehouse used by the Goldsmiths, the Gemsmiths and the Furriers. We need to know every nook and cranny of whatever nocturnal routine the guards keep. And find someone in the Palace of Red Stone who can tell us what’s happening in there.”
“We’ve tried that before, without success. The Chancellor’s household is… tightly controlled.”
“Try again, harder. We shied away from too much risk in our previous attempts; now, we may bear a little more of it, I think. Desperate times, my dear. Also, examine all our plans for making a hasty departure from this burrow, as the Shadowhand saw fit to call it. Make sure they remain both sound and secret. And bring the best killers we know to Vaymouth-those who can be here within, say, three or four days. I want them close at hand. When troubles gather, it’s best to have troublesome friends within reach.”
“I will see to it all.”
“Excellent. Perhaps you could send me down some of those little apple tarts too? All this worry is terribly unsettling for my stomach. It needs some comforting, I think.”
Joy and despair contended for mastery of Tara Jerain’s heart. Her beloved husband was restored to her, and she longed to rejoice in that simple fact. So fearful had she been during those long days when no one could tell her where he was, or even whether he still lived, that she had felt like some fragile vessel of the thinnest glass: a single clumsy word, a single barb of spite, might have broken her. The nights had been the worst, contorted by the agony of ignorance, haunted by the fear of the coming dawn and the possibility that it might bring with it some ashen- faced messenger bearing the worst possible news.
And now that terrible shadow was lifted. But another had fallen, for the husband returned to her was not the one who had left her. Their lovemaking on the night of his return, which during his absence had been an imagined island of hope amidst despair, had instead been perfunctory: a thing of habit or necessity rather than love. Nothing in the days since had shown that to be an aberration. Something in him had changed. Something had gone, and with the recognition of its departure Tara found joy losing its ever more tenuous grip upon her spirits.
Mordyn was bent over a table, his shoulders lit by the candles that burned all around. The swan feather of his quill shivered as it scraped across parchment. There was no other sound. He was utterly engrossed in his work.
Tara watched from the doorway. This was a familiar sight. Many times she had seen her husband at work in just this way, in just this warm light. Yet all was not as it had once, so comfortingly, been. The hunch of his shoulders was narrower, tenser, than it used to be. His hand darted to and from the inkwell with angry impatience. Even the sound was different: harsher, cruder, as if quill and parchment warred. He had always had the lightest and most precise of hands. She felt an aching sense of bereavement as she noted each one of these tiny differences. Yet how could she be bereaved, when the object of all her affections was here before her, alive?
She walked forward, her slippers soundless on the floor. Mordyn was too absorbed in his labours to notice her approach. When she set her hands gently on his shoulders, in the way she had done countless times before, he started and gave a half-strangled grunt of alarm. He glanced up at her even as he covered over what he had been writing with blank sheets of parchment. Perhaps he thought Tara would not notice this petty act of concealment, but she did. He had never done such a thing before, never shown the slightest sign of distrust or secrecy. What pained her still more, though, was the way he shrugged off her hands with an irritated shake of his shoulders. With that single loveless gesture, he wounded her to the quick. Tara was startled to find her eyes moistening, a premonition of tears. This man bore the face and form of her husband, but she no longer recognised what lay beneath that surface.
“What happened?” she asked, standing limp and empty behind him.
He must have heard the hurt in her voice, for he twisted about in the chair to look up at her, and though his gaze was at first unsympathetic, it softened.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“You cannot have told me everything that happened to you. There must be more, to have changed you so much. If you won’t tell me, how am I to understand? How am I to ease whatever troubles you if you shut me out?”
“No, no.” The affection in his voice rang hollow to Tara. She did not believe it, and did not know what to do with the horror, the crippling fear, that disbelief engendered. She loved this man with all her heart, and had never doubted his equal love for her. Yet now… now, she felt terribly alone.
“It’s nothing,” Mordyn went on. “I am troubled only by the amount that must be done, now that I have returned. There are so many demands upon my time, my thought. I’m sorry. I do not mean to cause you alarm, or concern.”
“You’re so thin, so pale. You must be sick.” She could hope for that, in this horribly changed world; she could hope that her precious husband was sick, for it might explain, more gently and comprehensibly than any other explanation, why he had become a stranger to her. But he shook his head.
“I am well. Any pallor is only the mark of my travels, my tribulations. You will see: soon enough, I will have some fat back on these bones, some colour back in my cheeks. Do not worry.”
And he turned away from her again, bent back towards his writing table. That dismissal allowed anger to rise briefly through Tara’s confusion and sorrow.
“What are you writing?” she asked sharply.
“Tedious matters. Nothing of consequence.”
“May I see it?” She reached over his shoulder and lifted a corner of the covering sheet. He slapped it down again.
“Please. I am in haste. Let me finish this in peace.”
Tara left without another word, forcing herself not to look back as she went. She yearned to do so, to indulge the faint hope that she might find him gazing after her with all the old, profound love in his eyes, but she could hear that hateful quill scratching out its black path. He had forgotten her already, she knew; she, and all her concerns, had been expunged from his awareness in an instant. For years she had dwelled in the light of the warmest, most elevating sun imaginable. Now it was being extinguished, and the darkness descending upon her was all the deeper for the glory that had preceded it.
And, she reflected as she walked along a corridor of white marble, it had not even been his own hand in which her husband wrote. She knew his spidery, flowing script as well as she knew her own. Even that momentary glimpse of his work had been enough for her to know it was in another style altogether. He meant to conceal authorship of the text. Or his hand had changed along with his manner, his mood. His heart.
She paused at a narrow window that looked out over the rooftops towards the heart of Vaymouth. Gryvan’s Moon Palace loomed like a pale mountain over the city. Snow was falling, drifting down in a slow, tumbling dance. Where once Tara might have seen a certain austere beauty, now she saw only bleakness.
IV
The Lannis warrior writhed on Malloc’s spear like a great, impaled fish. Flopping around, he thought contemptuously. They die like animals. It was fitting.
The last of the Lannis men had fallen back to a bare knoll outside Kilvale. Only some thirty of them left now. The killing had begun before dawn, and carried on, in fits and starts, all through the grey morning. Most of them had died in the first hour, killed in their tents, beneath their blankets. Since then it had been more hunt than battle, the stragglers cornered in barns and orchards and ditches as they scattered. There had been, Malloc thought, perhaps two hundred of them when the cleansing began; now just these thirty, squatting atop the hillock, behind their wall of shields, their hedge of spears.
He ducked instinctively as arrows thrummed over his head. He freed his spear and trotted back to the Haig line. There was a great eagerness in him, so powerful it had him trembling, and it would be easy to give in to it, to go howling up the hill and throw himself at these traitors, these craven orphans of a shattered Blood. But he had
