The King's assassin

that smelled of blood and piss, when Syannis had been nothing more than a thief-taker with three dead men scattered at his feet. He remembered how he’d wanted to be like that, to fight like that. He’d wanted it more than anything. He’d have given his soul.

Maybe he already had. The woman he’d murdered after the battle on the beach still haunted his dreams.

Would Tarn have come back for him? Or Talon? Yes. But he’d never have thought Syannis would, because the thief-taker saw the world in a different way, where men and friends were sacrificed for some greater end. With regret, yes, but without remorse. The thief-taker had taught him that too. He’d taught Berren everything; now, too late, Berren found that that wasn’t who he wanted to be.

All the things the thief-taker had done for him and all the things he’d taken away. Yet this time Syannis had come back.

He forded a river in the middle of nowhere. The road — not much more than a muddy line through the hills — wound back to the coast. He stayed for a night in a tiny town that smelled of fish and filled his belly with something that wasn’t dry bread. Three days later he was outside Forgenver. Talon had always been decent to him. Talon deserved to know about Syannis. Then maybe he’d look for that ship.

‘Hey! Berren!’ he hadn’t even reached the tents before Tarn was waving at him. The two of them embraced. ‘Glad to be back?’

‘Hard to answer, that.’

‘Talon said you were in Tethis. He looked none too happy. So how’s the enemy’s strength?’ He frowned. ‘You know we’re at war with Meridian now, right?’

‘Yeh, I worked that one out.’

‘I’ve heard he has the Mountain Panther and the Black Swords hired to his cause.’ Tarn laughed. ‘Throw in the king’s guard, that’s sixteen hundred men. So is it true? Is that what he’s got?’

‘Yeh. The Mountain Panther was in Tethis. The Black Swords shipped in the day we left.’

Tarn grinned and clapped Berren on the shoulder. ‘Talon says they spent a week up the coast near Taycelmouth hunting for us until they realised we’d slipped away and taken their lancers too. Path of the Sun! That’s too many to face in the field! And they have archers and heavy armour. I reckon Talon has to sit tight for the rest of the season then. Meridian will have to let at least one of them go, and by next year we could have a company of five hundred. That’s what I’d do. At least the walls around Tethis aren’t up to much.’

Berren snorted, thinking again of the vast half-hidden city walls of Deephaven. ‘That’s true enough.’ Then he looked out of the camp, over to the town of Forgenver which had no walls at all. ‘Better than here, though. An army coming at Tethis from the north by land would have to cross the gorge and the river. If you came by sea, you’d have to fight through the town.’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘There are some big ships in Tethis harbour. I’d be more worried about them coming here.’

‘Don’t you worry, soldier.’ Tarn caught his eyes. ‘They come here, we’ll have a palisade wall up in no time and we’ll shred them. Talon’s promised us a hundred brand new crossbows.’ He led Berren towards a large hut in the centre of the camp, half made of wood, half pieces of scavenged canvas.

‘As long as they don’t come from the armoury in Tethis.’ Berren smirked. At least they’d done something useful.

‘What we need is a hostage. But if it comes to fighting, we’ll just have to rely on our swords as always. Talon’s in the. .’ He waved at the wood-and-canvas thing. ‘That.’

Berren watched Tarn turn and walk away. The priests in Deephaven had tried to teach him things about warfare. Strategies and numbers of soldiers and how so-and-so had held such-and-such a place against an army of ten thousand for weeks or days or however long it was. Probably with six blind swordsmen and a one-armed archer who fired arrows with his teeth. Berren didn’t remember too much of any of it, only that the heroically outnumbered defenders generally came to a bad end. But still. . They’d taught him about the civil war. How Khrozus Falandawn, with half Emperor Talsin’s strength, had seized Deephaven despite its walls and Varr despite its armies. He’d wrestled the empire away from Talsin, and how had he done it? He was good with cavalry, he was brutal and ruthless, but mostly what Berren remembered was that Khrozus had had sorcerers, that he’d used magic. He smiled. He could still see the other novices shrinking and shrivelling into their stools, almost not wanting to hear what was to come. The priest banging on about the dangers of sorcery, how it was the path to wickedness, while Berren had sat wide-eyed, listening with rapt attention. Khrozus had won his battles with sorcery. He’d cheated. ‘Hey, Tarn!’ he shouted with a laugh. ‘We need a wizard! Get us a wizard!’

Tarn turned back to Berren and made a sign to ward off evil. ‘I’ll trust my sword, thanks.’

Sterm. That was the priest’s name. Sterm the Worm. Remembering made Berren smile for a while, and then the smile faded as he remembered how things gone for him when it came to wizards and their ilk, and the whiff of rotten fish he’d smelled as he’d plunged into the sump; and then other memories came too: the woman he’d killed, as always, and standing in the yard of Tethis castle with a whip in his hand and tears on his cheeks. Deephaven seemed so long ago. He’d been such a fool. So naive.

With a heavy sigh, he went and did what he’d come to do. Found Talon and told the Prince of War that his brother was gone. When he was done, Talon shook his head and sent him away without a word, though his face was pale and stony and his eyes were cold and hard. No blame, no pointed finger demanding to know how it was that Berren and Berren alone had returned. Almost as though Talon had expected it.

‘Meridian won’t kill him. Not while Talon’s here,’ said Tarn when the news finally spread around the camp. ‘But he’ll be happy enough to hold a hostage.’

The weeks passed and dragged into months. Berren stared out at the sea, watching ships come and go from Forgenver, telling himself that the next one, always the next one, would take him away. Talon recruited every man he could get. Each day wagons went back and forth, full of supplies. Most of it was food, but sometimes there were arrows or spearheads or boots, and when a hundred brand new crossbows arrived just as Talon had promised, the camp buzzed with the news for days and even Berren slunk across the camp to look at them. Every morning, as he woke up, he wondered if that would be the day he’d finally vanish back to Aria; and every night as he fell asleep in the same place once more, he realised that he had nowhere else to go; until, as the weeks rolled by, the thoughts began to fade and he knew, for better or for worse, that this was his home now, and the men around him were his family.

News came from Tethis now and then. Talon spoke of it with glee. Meridian had prepared an attack. He’d sailed two fat-bellied ships into Tethis harbour and filled them up with soldiers. They’d been ready to sail when the skies had darkened and the worst storm for twenty years had struck. One ship had broken apart and sunk right where it was, and the other needed months of repair. Dozens of soldiers, perhaps a hundred, had drowned. They heard too that Syannis wasn’t dead and was Meridian’s hostage, just as Tarn had said. Rumours shot through the camp like wildfire after this: every week there was a new story about how Syannis had escaped, or which bit of him had been cut off and sent to Talon as a warning this time.

Meridian tried again late in the summer, sending his soldiers northwards on foot. His army marched a day past Galsmouth and then found their food infested with rats, rot and blight. They had no choice but to turn back. From the accounts that reached Forgenver, Meridian had been so furious that he’d had the quartermasters from each company hanged.

The seasons turned and the weather began to change. The days grew cold and wet, the nights dark and long. In Tethis the Black Swords were rumoured to have sailed south for the winter, leaving only two cohorts of archers. Outside Forgenver the Hawks had swelled their numbers close to the five hundred that Tarn had predicted. The autumn rains set in, driven by a biting wind while Talon drilled them ever harder; unrest spread among the older soldiers, used to spending their winters in milder climes. Day after day of rain turned their camp into a sea of mud, and still Talon ordered his grumbling companies out of their tents to march back and forth until they were soaked, to practise their formations until mud covered everything and no one knew who was who any more. Berren began to think there might be a mutiny, but just when he thought that even he might revolt and run away, Tarn barged into their tent, shook the rain off his coat and beamed with glee. He threw a coin at Berren.

‘Two rest days and five silver crowns for each man.’ He hauled Berren up off his pile of blankets, where he’d been savouring the ever-present smell of sodden earth and listening to the thrum of rain on canvas, the pitter- patter of drips where it found its way inside their tent. Tarn was still grinning. ‘And then we march!’ He rubbed his hands. ‘Forgenver’s not going to know what hit it. We’ll drink the whole town dry!’