The King's assassin

her go.’

Talon hissed. ‘Fool.’ He strode past, pushing Berren hard, almost knocking him down, and picked up the whip himself.

The first three strokes were vicious. Berren heard the woman gasp as the first one struck and her skin split. After the third, she was hanging from the whipping post by her wrists, whimpering uncontrollably. Talon turned to Berren. He held out the bloody whip. ‘Ten strokes,’ he said. ‘Seven left. You or me. If it’s me then I will make every one as hard as the first. Now do your duty, soldier.’

Berren stared, hating Talon at that moment because he knew the prince meant it. Savage. He shook his head. Talon clenched his teeth and lashed the woman again. Hard. She spasmed and screamed. Then he turned back to Berren and snarled and held out the whip again. ‘Do you want me to kill her? You are not a boy now, Berren of Deephaven. You are a man and a soldier of the Fighting Hawks. Like it or not. Now do what must be done!’

Berren had tears in his eyes now. His feet felt like lead, the earth like quicksand sucking him down and holding him fast, but he forced himself to move. He walked to Talon and took the whip. His face was numb and his voice shook when he spoke. ‘I’ll remember that you made me do this.’

Talon pointed to the woman’s back. ‘And I will remember that you made me do that. Now finish!’ He stalked back to the waiting wagon.

Berren closed his eyes. He tried to think what Tasahre would do, what she would say. She wouldn’t do this, that was for sure. She would refuse and find a way to stop Talon too. She would stand up for what was right, no matter what. And he couldn’t. Couldn’t find that strength she had.

He howled as he cracked the whip. The stroke made the woman cry out and he felt her agony as deeply as his own. He was killing a part of himself by doing this. Stepping away from the man Tasahre had seen in him and towards Saffran Kuy. The last five strokes were weak, as light as he dared, but he made them, and each one left a bloody mark on her back. When he was done, he was sobbing. He moved closer and whispered in the woman’s ear.

‘I will kill any warlock I see. Always. I will do everything I can to stop them.’ He didn’t know if the woman was even conscious any more.

‘Come on!’ That was Talon rushing him back to the wagon. As he left, Berren couldn’t take his eyes off the body, slumped and bloody against the whipping post. For all he knew she might even be dead. And when he closed his eyes, he kept seeing Tasahre with sadness on her face.

‘And we’re gone!’ said Talon loudly as they sat down. ‘Fighting Hawks on the march.’ The wagon began to move. No one seemed to be in any hurry to cut the woman down. Berren stared transfixed until they rounded a corner and the whipping post passed out of sight.

15

THE BLOODY JUDGE

‘We could have gone by sea,’ Talon said. ‘It would have been quicker, but I thought it might be useful to see the lie of the land.’

He said it on the second day out of Tethis, in a joking idle sort of way. Berren thought nothing of it at first, but as the days passed the words rattled around in his mind. Whether he’d meant it or not, Talon was thinking of coming back one day with the Fighting Hawks. All of them.

Forgenver lay one kingdom, one duchy, seven rivers and nine days away from Tethis. They arrived to find the rest of the Hawks already settled and barracked outside the city and in high spirits from a first skirmish with the enemy. By chance, a half-cohort sent to scout the coastal villages near the town had arrived as a raid was coming in. The raiders were caught in their longboats in choppy seas. The Hawks had rallied the villagers and together they’d repelled the boats with a mixture of stones and crossbow fire and a great deal of shouting from the beach. It hadn’t amounted to much and from the sound of things no one on either side had even been seriously hurt, but the boats had been turned away and it had pleased the duke.

Word of Tarn’s recovery spread too. No one said anything to Berren’s face, but a rumour spread like wildfire that Tarn had been dead and that Berren had brought him back to life again. No matter how much Tarn told them that was all rubbish, when Berren came by, conversations ended. Soldiers who were supposed to be his comrades made a sign against evil and slipped away. When he carried the stone that Princess Gelisya had given him, the skill to make potions was lodged in his head, there whenever he sought it. If he put it aside then the memories went away, but a part of him went with them. He felt that much more now. He’d carried a numbness with him ever since Deephaven, a dull lack of feeling that came back to him now whenever he didn’t carry the stone. As a ship’s skag, he hadn’t known any better — wasn’t this how all skags felt? But now. . But he couldn’t explain it, couldn’t even begin to describe what Saffran Kuy had done to him, so all anyone saw was that he carried it with him wherever he went, whatever it was.

‘They’re afraid of you,’ Tarn told him one day.

Berren shrugged. ‘Maybe they’re right.’ The two of them drew their practice swords and for half an hour they fought, Berren losing himself in the pattern of the blades and the interplay between them. This, this was when he felt at peace, with a sword singing in his hand. Block and riposte, parry and strike, one motion to the next, and all with the calm stillness in his head that Tasahre had taught him. Action without thought. This, and never anything else.

While Talon’s spies worked their way closer to where the raiders were coming from, the cohorts of the Hawks spread themselves in pairs along the coast and waited. In the mornings Berren and Tarn walked together sometimes, exploring the lands nearby and the village they were watching. In the afternoons Tarn stayed in the camp, talking and joking with the other men. At first Berren joined them, hoping for their acceptance, but it never came, and so as the weeks passed he drew apart. He spent more time than the rest standing watch, staring out at the sea, and when he wasn’t watching he practised alone. He taught himself to shoot a crossbow, quietly trying to forget the ten minutes he’d spent learning with Master Sy. He practised and practised until he was as good as any of them. He tried other weapons, learning their weight and their balance and how they felt in his hands, although the short stabbing sword that the thief-taker had taught him and the slightly longer cut-and-thrust blades of the sword-monks remained his first loves. Sometimes, when he was lucky, Tarn or one of the other soldiers would spar with him, but mostly he trained alone in the way of the monks of Deephaven. It took him a week or two to be sure, but one on one he could outfight every single one of them. Tasahre had given him that. A gift or a curse? He wasn’t sure.

Sometimes, late at night when it was dark, he would slip away into the village alone and quietly drink himself into a stupor. More and more his night-time dreams filled with the bondswoman from Tethis and the bloody weals he’d given her. Except her face wasn’t veiled and when he turned her towards him she was a stranger.

Talon came by twice, moving constantly up and down the coast to watch over his company. The second time he came, he sparred with Berren himself. By the end neither of them was quite sure who had won.

‘Deephaven soon,’ Talon said afterwards. ‘I’ll find you a ship just as quickly as I can, but it looks like you’ll be fighting with us again first.’ He bared his teeth. ‘I’ve tracked the enemy down at last. Again. This time they’ll not get away.’

‘Where’s Syannis?’ asked Berren, but Talon only wagged a finger and shook his head.

They struck camp and set off back to Forgenver the next morning. Berren watched the first wave of excitement sweep through the soldiers as they packed their tents and loaded their mules. He looked at them, milling and laughing and drinking around him, strangers nearly all, and wondered why they were here. What brought a man to a foreign land, far away from the place of his birth? What made them want to pick up a sword or an axe or a spear? They had their reasons, each of them. For their last night together in Forgenver and the two days at sea that followed, he could only watch them and wonder: How could they sing and laugh and cheer and joke when some of them must soon die? Or was that exactly why they did it? Was it the thought of death that made them so full of life? A lot of him wanted to join them, raucous and crude and merry, but he couldn’t.