'Leave me alone.'
'But I want to come with you.'
'I don't even know you.' Jostan started to get up, but now the other rider grabbed hold of him and pulled him back down with all the fierce strength of the very drunk.
'Nthandra of the Vale.'
Jostan sat slowly back down. He looked the woman carefully up and down, wondering if she was lying. Nthandra of the Vale. Everyone in Southwatch knew the name. Nthandra of the Vale, whose father was King Valgar's knight-marshal, whose brothers and sisters were his honour guard, whose betrothed was his adjutant. Nthandra of the Vale, whose entire family had died at King Valgar's side on the Night of the Knives. Nthandra of the Vale, who was said to roam Southwatch like a ghost.
'Nthandra…?'
She fell across the table and then turned her head to leer at him. 'You know what they say about me?'
'Your brothers… your father… your husband… They all died.'
'All dead, all dead, all dead. So what else do they say about me?' She reached out a languid arm and stroked his cheek. Jostan swallowed hard.
'I don't… I don't know.'
'Don't they say that I gave myself to the man I was to marry before we were wed?' 'I…'
'Don't they say that I'm carrying his child inside me?' 'Urn…'
'Don't they say I'm a drunk who'll give herself to any man who takes her fancy as freely as the autumn wind plucks leaves from the trees?'
A strange feeling crept over Jostan, starting from his feet and rising slowly. A numb sort of paralysis. 'I haven't heard such things…' He couldn't take his eyes off her. That was the drunk inside him, throwing care and caution to the wind.
'Don't they say that I lay with three riders in one night on the day that I learned my betrothed was dead?'
'I…' Jostan didn't know what to say, but that didn't seem to matter. Nthandra's face screwed up and she started to sob.
'When I'm alone, all I think of are the dead.' The hand on his cheek moved to his shoulder and gripped his shirt. 'Don't leave me alone. I can't be alone. Use me like a whore or hold me like a baby, I don't mind, but please, please don't let me be alone.'
Jostan's tongue seemed to have swollen so it didn't fit in his mouth any more. He had to work hard to make words come out. He took hold of her hand. 'There's a place we can go.'
The sobs went away and her eyes gleamed. 'There are lots of places we can go.'
'No. There's a place for forgetting.' He staggered to his feet and pulled her up after him. She could barely walk so he put one of her arms around his shoulders and half dragged her away to the door. Eyes watched him go. Other riders. He didn't care what they thought. All the time he'd spent serving one mistress and then another. He'd nearly died, back in the caves with Jaslyn. Yes, could easily have died. And what does she do? She throws me away. Whatever Semian said or did, I didn't do anything. I just held her when she needed to be held. When that mask of stone cracked for a moment. And the thanks I get?
He looked at Nthandra of the Vale, glassy-eyed, head flopping from side to side, barely even conscious. She didn't look much like a princess, but somehow he saw Jaslyn's face anyway.
'I'm not just going to hold you,' he muttered.
'I don't care.'
You should. So should I. But he didn't. He took her to the door of another place. A place where drunkards lay sprawled in the street and two heavy men in thick leather coats lounged by the door. A place where he knew, from the smell of the air, that they could both forget.
One of the men stepped away from the wall and blocked his path. 'Rider.' He nodded. Jostan nodded back, not knowing what he was supposed to say. The other one was standing straighter now, only pretending to be bored.
'Got gold?' asked the first. Jostan nodded. He leaned forward and fumbled in his boot, where he kept a few gold dragons. Nthandra slipped off his shoulder and fell gracelessly into the dirt. The men in the leather coats both laughed.
'You sure you need to go in?' asked the second one. Jostan shot him a filthy look and gave the first one a coin. That wasn't enough, so he felt around and fished out a second one.
'Gold,' he said. The man nodded again and went back to propping up his wall. Jostan hauled Nthandra to her feet. She was gone now, completely gone. He took her in anyway. As soon as he walked through the door, the smell of Souldust hit him like a brick in the face. Souldust fresh from Evenspire where men freely offered it in the streets. Semian would never speak to him again if he found out, but as much as anything that was why Jostan was doing this. You can all screw yourselves. I don't have to do anything for any of you any more.
Inside, he could barely see a thing. A single dim candle lit each room. Bodies lay strewn about, some of them sleeping, some of them sitting, eyes glittering in the candle flame, open-mouthed and motionless. Some of them seemed to be naked, but in the darkness he couldn't be sure. From a few rooms deeper in came the grunts and moans of some couple. Here and there, as he stepped over legs and arms, faces glanced up at him. They were all empty. Empty, yes, and he wanted to be exactly like them.
He eventually found a room that was a bit less crowded than the rest, where there was space to sit down. This was where the sounds of the man and the woman were coming from, growing louder as they slowly approached their climax. The air smelled of sweat and musk. Only, as he realised after a few minutes, it wasn't a man and a woman but a man and another man. They ignored him, lost in their own world, and Jostan did the same. He propped Nthandra up beside him and held her tight, sucking in deep breaths of the dust-laden air. It didn't take long before the drug and the gallon of ale he had inside him took him away, far away.
Sometime in the night he became aware of something moving, and then a sensation of exquisite pleasure. He wasn't sure when he opened his eyes, for the candles had long gone out and the room was as black as pitch. Filled with snores too. Something soft brushed his lips. His skin was tingling, his heart thumping. He was intensely, painfully aroused. As he shifted, he realised that someone had their hand in his trousers.
He jumped, thinking of the two men who'd been there when they'd come in earlier.
'Shhh.'
Nthandra pressed her lips to his, while her hand continued to work. Jostan moaned.
'Did you mean what you said?' she whispered. 'About the Red Riders?'
His hand reached out and touched skin. As he explored her, he found she was almost naked, her clothes hanging loosely, every button and fastening open. He reached between her legs, but she batted him away.
'Did you mean what you said?'
'Yes,' he said. 'But I don't have a dragon.'
'But you can find them.'
'Yes.' He had no idea how, but it was the answer she wanted and that was enough.
'I have a dragon,' she breathed.
3
Deep among the dry pine valleys that edged up to the Worldspine north of the Purple Spur, Hyrkallan watched two dragons land. One of them he knew because it was his own: B'thannan, an immense war-dragon who could make the earth shake merely by looking at it. The other one was a stranger, a long slender hunter. An unexpected stranger at that. Hyrkallan watched from a distance, always cautious until he was sure there was no trick. He sniffed the air, sweet with resin and fallen needles. Then he crept cautiously out from the undergrowth. As he came closer, his back straightened, his strides grew longer and he lowered the heavy crossbow he had gripped to his chest.
'Knight-Marshal!' One of the riders on the back of B'thannan had spotted him. Hyrkallan squinted. There were
