“It has to be one of the Hundred. Nations won’t follow monsters like me. They’ll follow a lineage, divine right, the spawn of kings. So we who have taken our power from the places where others fear to reach… we play the game of thrones with pieces like Count Renar, pieces like your father. Pieces like you, perhaps.”
He reached out to touch the bow. The air around it shimmered as if the mouth of a furnace had opened.
“Yes. I rather like that idea. Let Sageous have King Olidan, let him work to bend your father to his will, and I will have the firstborn son.”
The fear had sunk low enough to let my anger rise. I pictured the old man dying on a blade, my hand on the hilt.
“Let the wilds temper you, and if you weather it, in time the prodigal will return, a viper to his father’s bosom. Pawn takes king.” He mimed the chess-board gesture. “You might become something, Briar Prince. A piece to win the game.”
Corion took the bow as if it weighed nothing. Raising it to his lips, he whispered a word, too soft for hearing. Five paces took him to the door and he set the bow on the steps by the Nuban’s head. “A black knight to guard my pawn.”
“And you, boy. You will forget the Count of Renar.”
Like hell I will.
“Turn your vengeance anywhere you choose, share it with the world, spill some blood; but never return to these lands. Set no foot upon these paths. Your mind will not wander here.”
I could only watch him. He came closer. He knelt beside me, took my collar, and drew my face to his. I met his blank eyes. I could feel the horror rising, a flood that would carry me away. And worse, I felt his fingers cold inside my skull, erasing memories, turning aside purpose.
“Forget Renar. Take your vengeance to the world.”
Renar will die. “By… my… hand…” Somehow my lips spoke the words.
But already he’d taken the conviction from me. I could no longer say how I’d reached the tower, or even name him.
The old man smiled. He bent to whisper in my ear. I remember his breath on my neck, and the smell of rot.
Then I heard his words and all reason left me.
Worms writhed behind my eyes. Nothing remained of him in my thoughts, just a hole where I couldn’t look. Renar became a name without weight, and my hatred a gift for anyone and everyone.
I fell, through darkness, deafened by my own howling. Unknown hands locked around my throat, and in the darkness my own hands found a neck to throttle. The grip tightened, and tightened again. The screams died to a hiss, a rattle, and then silence. I squeezed. My hands became iron hooks. If I could have squeezed harder, my finger-bones would have snapped like dry twigs.
I fell through darkness, through silence, only the hands on my throat, and the throat in my hands, and the hunger for air, my heart beating sledgehammer blows.
I fell through years. I’ve been falling through my life…
I hit the ground. Hard. My eyes opened. I lay on a stone floor. A purple face stared at me, eyes distended, tongue protruding. Daylight streamed in from a high window. My heart hammered at my breastbone, wanting out. Everything hurt. I saw hands on the neck below that face. My hands. With great effort I unlocked them. The white fingers had little inclination to obey.
Still the pain swelled in me. I needed something, but couldn’t name it. My vision pulsed red, dimming from one moment to the next. I touched a stiff-fingered hand to my neck and found hands there.
I didn’t recognize the face. A woman?
The world grew distant, the pain less.
Renar… The name rose through me, and with it a whisper of strength. The hands that prised the strangler’s fingers from my neck didn’t feel like mine. Renar! My first breath whistled into me, as if sucked through a reed.
Air! I needed air.
I choked, heaved but nothing came, hauled in breaths through a throat grown too narrow for the task.
Renar.
The purple face belonged to a woman with grey hair. I didn’t understand.
Renar. And Corion.
Oh Jesu! I remembered. I remembered the horror, but it burned pale against the cold fury that ate me now.
“Corion.” For the first time in the four years since that night in the tower, I spoke his name. I remembered. I recalled what had been taken, and for the first time in forever, I felt whole.
I found the strength to lift myself up on my arms.
I was in a chamber in a castle. Beside a bed… I’d fallen out of bed. Whilst an old woman tried to throttle me.
The door shook. Somebody rattled at the latch. “Hanna! Hanna!” A woman’s voice.
Somehow I stood before the door opened.
“Katherine.” My voice escaped a bruised throat as a squeak.
There she was. Beautiful in disarray. Mouth half open, green eyes wide.
“Katherine.” I could only get her name out as a whisper, but I wanted to shout, I wanted to scream so many things at once.
I understood. I understood the game. I understood the players. I knew what had to be done.
“Murderer!” she said. She took a knife from her sash, a sharp bodkin long enough to run a man through. “Your father knew best.”
I tried to tell her, but no words would come now. I tried to raise my arms, but I had no strength.
“I’ll finish what he started,” she said.
And all I could do was marvel at the beauty of her.
41
In a duel, man to man, sword against sword, it can be a lack of skill that gets you killed. Often as not, though, it’ll be a matter of luck, or if it goes on too long, then it’ll be the man who tires first that tends to die.
In the end it’s about staying power. They should put that on headstones, “Got tired.” Maybe not tired of life, but at least too tired to hold on to it.
In a real fight, and most fights are real, not the artifice of a formal duel, it’s fatigue that’s the big killer. A sword is a heavy chunk of iron. You swing that around for a few minutes and your arms start to get ideas of their own about what they can and can’t do. Even when your life depends on it.
I’ve known times when to lift my sword was the equal of any labour of Hercules, but never before I faced Katherine’s knife had I felt so drained.
“Bastard!”
The fire in her eyes looked fierce enough to burn until the deed was done.
I looked for the will to stop her, and came up empty.
A knife is a scary thing right enough, held to your throat, sharp and cool. The thought echoed back to me from that night when the dead came up out of their bog-pools around the Lichway.
The glitter along that knife edge as she came at me, the thought of it slicing my flesh, piercing an eye maybe, these are all the sort of thing that might give a man pause. Until you realize what they are. They’re just ways to lose the game. You lose the game, and what have you lost? You’ve lost the game. Corion had told me about the game. How many of my thoughts were his? How much of my philosophy was filth from that old man’s fingers?
I’d swum in the darkness too long. The game didn’t seem so important any more.
With the embers of my strength I raised both arms. I stretched them wide, to receive the blow. And I
