the bottle in his hand sloshing wine onto the cobbled courtyard. The Fief Lord was dishevelled, unshaven and, judging from the slur of his words, considerably more drunk than usual. “Let them rot! You hear me, brother! Sinnersh are not buried in Cumbrael, oh no! Hack off their heads and leave them for the crowsh-” He staggered onto a patch of still slick blood and slipped heavily to the cobbles, dousing himself in wine. He swore extravagantly, slapping Caenis’s helping hands away. “Let those sinners rot, I say! This is my keep. Prince Malsiush? Lord Vaelin? This is my keep!”
“ Who is that man?” Sherin asked. “He seems… troubled.”
“ The Cumbraelins’ rightful Fief Lord, Faith help them.” He gave her a smile of apology. “I should go. My regiment will remain here awaiting orders from the king. I’ll have Brother Commander Makril provide an escort to take you back to your Order.”
“ I would prefer to wait here for a while. I think Sister Gilma would be glad of the help. Besides, we’ve barely had time to exchange news. I have much to share.”
The same open smile, the same ache in his chest. Send her away, his inner voice commanded. Only pain can result if you keep her here.
“ Lord Vaelin!” Fief Lord Mustor’s cry dragged his attention back to the courtyard. “Where are you? Shtop these men!”
“ I have much to share also,” he said before turning away.
At first Fief Lord Mustor raged at Vaelin’s refusal to stop the burial of the bodies, loudly restating his ownership of the keep and the primacy of his authority in his own lands. When Vaelin replied simply that he was a servant of the Faith and therefore not bound the word of a Fief Lord, Mustor’s mood degenerated into a baleful sulk. After his appeals to Prince Malcius earned only a stern look of disapproval he took himself off to his dead brother’s quarters where he had amassed a large proportion of the keep’s wine cellar.
They remained at the High Keep for another eight days, anxiously awaiting word of the war’s end. Vaelin occupied the men with constant training and patrols into the mountains. There was little grumbling, morale was high, boosted by triumph and the shared spoils of the keep and the dead which, though meagre, fulfilled a basic soldierly desire for loot. “Give ‘em victory, gold in their pockets and a woman every now and again,” Sergeant Krelnik told Vaelin one evening, “and they’ll follow you forever.”
As Sister Sherin had promised Alucius Al Hestian recovered quickly, waking on the third day and passing the basic tests that showed his brain was not permanently damaged, although he could remember nothing of the battle or how he came by his wound.
“ So he’s dead?” he asked Vaelin. They were in the courtyard, watching the men at evening drill. “The Usurper.”
“ Yes.”
“ Do you think he gave Black Arrow the letters of free passage?”
“ I can’t see how else they could have fallen into his hands. It seems the old Fief Lord went to great lengths to protect his son.”
Alucius wrapped his cloak tightly around his shoulders, his hollowed eyes making him seem an old man peering out from behind a young man’s face. “All of this blood spilt over a couple of letters.” He shook his head. “Linden would have wept to see it.” He reached inside his cloak and unhitched Vaelin’s short sword from his belt. “Here,” he said, offering the hilt. “I won’t need this anymore.”
“ Keep it. A gift from me. You should have a souvenir of your time as a soldier.”
“ I can’t. The King gave you this…”
“ And now I’m giving it to you”
“ I don’t… It shouldn’t be given to one such as I.”
Seeing the way the boy gripped the sword-hilt, the tremble of his fingers, Vaelin recalled the red slick that covered the blade when he had been pulled from beneath the pile of corpses near the gate. The face of battle is always most ugly when seen for the first time. “Who better to give it to?” he said, putting his hand over the hilt, gently pushing it away. “Put it on your wall when you get home. Leave it there. I will not take it back.”
The boy seemed about to say more but restrained himself, returning the sword to his belt. “As you wish, my lord.”
“ Will you write about this? Is it worth a poem, do you think?”
“ It’s worth a hundred, I’m sure, but I doubt I’ll write any of them. Since my awakening, words don’t seem to come to me as they once did. I’ve tried, I sit with pen and parchment but nothing comes.”
“ It takes a while for a man to return to himself after a wound. Rest and eat well. I’m sure your talent will return.”
“ I hope so.” The boy gave a faint smile. “Perhaps I’ll write to Lyrna. I’m sure I can find some words for her.”
Vaelin, who had plenty of words of his own for the princess, nodded and turned back to the drill, venting his sudden anger at a man who held his pole-axe too high in the defensive formation. “Lower it, lackwit! How are you supposed to gut a horse with your weapon stuck up in the air? Sergeant, an extra hour’s drill for this man.”
Each evening was spent in Sherin’s company. They would sit in the lord’s chamber exchanging stories about their experiences over the last few years. He discovered she had travelled far more widely than he, visiting Fifth Order missions in all four fiefs of the Realm, even taking a ship to the enclave in the Northern Reaches where Tower Lord Vanos Al Myrna ruled in the King’s name.
“ A lively place, despite the cold,” she told him. “And home to so many different people. Most of the farming folk are in fact exiles from the southern Alpiran Empire. Tall, handsome people with black skin. Apparently they angered the emperor and had to take ship or face extermination, fetching up in the Northern Reaches more than fifty years hence. Most of the Tower Lord’s Guard is made up of exiles, they have a fearsome reputation.”
“ I met the Tower Lord once, and his daughter. I don’t think she liked me much.”
“ The famous Lonak foundling? She was absent when I visited, away in the forest with the Seordah. They seem to revere her and her father greatly. Something to do with the great battle against the Ice Horde.”
He told her of his months in the Martishe, sharing the painful memory of Al Hestian’s passing, feeling like a coward and a liar for leaving out his murderous scheming.
“ It was a mercy, Vaelin,” she said, taking his hand, reading the guilt in his face. “Leaving him to suffer would have been wrong, against the Faith.”
“ I have done much in the name of the Faith.” He looked at the scarred flesh of his hand next to the pale smoothness of her own. Killer’s hands, healer’s hands. Faith, why does she feel so warm?
“ All any of us can ask of ourselves is have we done wrong in the name of the Faith,” Sherin said. “Have you Vaelin?”
“ I’ve killed men, men I didn’t know. Some were criminals, some assassins, scum really. But some, like the deluded fanatics who dwelt here, were men who simply followed another belief. Men who may have been my friends if we’d met in a different time or place.”
“ The men who dwelt here were murderers. They slaughtered an entire mission of my Order merely to take me captive. Could you ever do the same?”
She doesn’t see it, he realised. Doesn’t see the killer in me. “No,” he said, for some reason again feeling like a liar. “No. I couldn’t.”
As the days passed he began to indulge in the dream that the King and the Order might allow them to remain here, a permanent garrison in Cumbraelin lands. He would be master of the keep, a reminder to any Cumbraelin fanatics of the price of rebellion. Sherin could establish a mission to administer to the sick in this remote and bitter land and they could serve the Faith and the Realm in happy isolation for years. Although he recognised its impossibility the dream lingered in his mind, a bright and enticing hope that grew with every deluded imagining. Caenis would take over the keep’s library, establish a school for local children, teaching them letters and the truth of the Faith. Barkus would occupy the smithy, Nortah the stables, Dentos would become Huntmaster. He would bring Scratch and Frentis from the Order House to join them. He knew it was a delusion, a lie he told himself after every evening spent in Sherin’s company. Because he didn’t want it to end, because he wanted the peace he felt in her presence to last for as long as he could make it. He even began to compose a formal proposal to Aspect Arlyn in his head, rephrasing it over and over but putting off the moment when he would ask Caenis to pen it for him. Speaking it aloud would reveal the absurdity of it, and he preferred the dream.
The scale of his delusion became apparent on the morning of the ninth day. He had woken early, briefly
