The King's assassin

sword.

They passed a hut whose door was hanging broken from its frame. Tarn went straight past, but Berren thought he caught a flicker of movement, and when he stopped and looked again, he saw a pair of eyes looking back at him from the far corner of the floor. At first he couldn’t understand what he was seeing, but when he took a step through the doorway, the eyes rose and a woman scrabbled to her feet, showering cold ashes everywhere. She was dressed in rags, old and with a bad leg. Someone who couldn’t run. She had a knife and she was pointing it at him, holding it as far away from her as she could. She’d hidden in the firepit, covering herself with ash and half- burned wood and they’d almost missed her.

For a second they stared at each other and neither said a word, and then the woman lunged at him, stabbing at his face with her knife, hissing. Berren stepped around the knife and flicked the tip of his sword at her throat. Blood sprayed across the room and she collapsed where she stood. A stroke of mercy, he thought, but as he stared at her lying on the ground in a pool of blood all he saw was Tasahre on the deck of Radek’s ship, and she was shaking her head at him, and the last light in her eyes as they died was full of sadness. Action without thought. An old woman with a blunt and pitted knife. There were so many ways he could have spared her and yet his instinct had killed her. He looked at his hands. They’d betrayed him. They’d shown him who he really was.

‘What did you do that for?’ asked Tarn behind him. Berren turned his back on both of them and walked out of the hut. Outside, the search of the village was largely over. He walked blindly through it. I’ve become him, he thought. I’ve become Master Sy.

‘Hey!’ Tarn came after him. ‘Who made you the bloody judge of life and death?’

Berren didn’t answer and the killing was forgotten before long, at least by everyone else, but the name would stick to him for ever. The Bloody Judge.

16

THE STONES BY THE SEA

The village was no raiders’ camp after all. Women and children had lived there, though they’d fled before the Hawks arrived. They’d had livestock and poultry which they’d hurriedly driven away. There were farm tools. It had been a village, a living village and not some summer camp like the one the Hawks had left outside Forgenver. As the rest of the soldiers landed from the ship, Talon called a company council. This sounded like a grand thing to Berren until he saw that it was simply Talon and all the cohort sergeants getting together for a chat, and anyone else who wanted to join in was perfectly welcome. Berren left them to it. Slaughtering women and children, razing villages, salting the earth, all these things were anathema to a soldier, or at least they were supposed to be. Berren had no idea whose kingdom they were in but this place surely belonged to someone. There would be consequences for what the Hawks had done here.

The old woman he’d killed haunted him. He wandered away from the village looking for some solitude, and took a path that went back into the woods towards the beach. It led him to the sea by a cluster of boulders, some as big as a house. The ground underfoot was sandy and he could hear the waves and taste the salt in the air. He found himself a slab to lean against, warm in the sun, and stared out across the sea, out to the ship that had brought them here.

Why did you do it? Why? He couldn’t even begin to answer. Before today he’d killed two men: Radek of Kalda because the warlock Saffran Kuy had made him do it, and he’d killed the sailor Klaas. Klaas had been a pig and a bully, a thief and a coward who’d got exactly what he deserved, but Berren had still thought about what he’d done for weeks afterwards, wondering if there could have been some other way. Maybe he could simply have run? Before that he’d barely even been in a fight, unless you counted the childhood fisticuffs with Master Hatchet’s boys. And now, today, he’d killed half a dozen men he didn’t even know, who didn’t know him, and he’d killed a woman too.

What troubled him most was how he remembered it. Everything was a blur, even the woman. He remembered exactly what he’d done but as though he was watching someone else do it, the same way he’d felt in the battle. He’d killed her but he couldn’t begin to say why. Because she’d come at him with a knife, yes, but what sort of reason was that when he was a soldier, armoured and with a sword, and she’d had almost nothing? Instinct, that’s what it was. Simple instinct, and his had been to kill, because that’s what they’d all taught him, one after the other: Master Sy, Master Silvestre, even Tasahre, although she would have wept at what he’d done today.

There’d been another man in the battle, too — he remembered now. They’d exchanged blows, and then Berren had lunged. He’d felt his sword hit something but then another soldier had barged into him, almost knocking him flat, and when Berren had looked up, the man he’d been fighting was gone. Now he was left not knowing whether the man was even injured, and the not-knowing bothered him. Was there someone out there who would forever see scars on his belly and think of that dark-skinned wiry short-arse on the beach?

A movement in the corner of his eye shattered his thoughts. He dodged sideways in time to see a hammer smash into the rock where his head had been. He grabbed hold of the hand that held it and pulled, yanking a man even smaller than he was out into the open. For a few seconds they wrestled, Berren and a shrieking, swearing fireball of elbows, knees, feet and fists, until he managed to smack his attacker’s head into a rock and put an end to it. Berren had his own dagger in his hand at once, then stopped. The stunned man groping in the sand at his feet wasn’t a man at all — he was a boy, maybe eleven or twelve years old but no more.

Another figure appeared from a crack between the rocks — a woman, much older. ‘Please, sir! Please!’ The crack was tight and she was having trouble getting out. Berren watched her and all the while he rested one foot on the boy’s neck to make sure he stayed on the ground. The flash of bloodlust that had made him draw his dagger was gone now.

The woman freed herself from the rocks and stopped where she was. ‘Please don’t hurt him! He’s all I have. Oh please!’ Berren cocked his head, waiting to see what she would say next. The woman’s eyes glistened. Tears began to roll down her cheeks. ‘We don’t have anything. I swear! Nothing!’

‘Is there a harbour here? A big one?’

She shook her head.

‘But ships come here, yes?’

This time she nodded.

‘What happens when they come?’

‘The men go away.’ As terrified as she was, Berren saw a moment of hesitation. She was wondering whether to pretend she didn’t know or perhaps make up some lie about where they went. He put a little more pressure on the boy’s neck, making him gasp. The woman bowed her head.

‘And what do they do when they’re away?’

She didn’t answer until Berren forced another whimper out of the boy. ‘They go fighting,’ she said.

‘They go looting, pillaging and plundering?’ The woman wouldn’t look at him. ‘Slaving? Do they go slaving?’ Yes, that got a flicker out of her. ‘I’m not going to kill your boy for that,’ he said. ‘Lie to me and that’s another matter. How long are the men gone?’

‘Between planting and harvest time.’

‘So the ship would be coming for them soon, then? Or has it already been?’

She shook her head, but no, of course the ship hadn’t come already otherwise the men he’d fought this morning wouldn’t have been here. It would come soon, then, to take them away to raid the Duke of Forgenver’s coast. Had they been looking out for it? Was that why they’d been so quick to strike at Talon’s company — because they’d been watching for a ship all along?

‘How do you know when?’

‘A man comes to the village and tells us.’

‘What man?’

‘I only saw him once.’

‘When does he come?’

‘He came already. Yesterday. He said you were coming. He said to be ready.’