The King's Assassin (Thief Takers Apprentice 3) (15 page)

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.’

‘He told you
what
? That
we
were coming?’ So it wasn’t just a well-kept watch. And they’d not seen another ship on their whole trip up the coast, which meant that word had come from Forgenver before Talon had even set sail! Berren took his foot off the boy and walked briskly towards her. He grabbed her by the arm and dragged her towards the woods. ‘This man, who is he? When was the first time he came here?’

‘Winter before last,’ she said. She didn’t try to pull away from him. He saw her wave frantically at the boy though.
Run, run!
‘Was a hard winter and food was scarce . . .’

‘What does he wear? Big horse, fancy clothes, fancy sword, that sort of thing?’ He looked at her, but that wasn’t it. Something else then. A horrible thought struck him. ‘Does he wear grey?’

His eyes drifted back towards the village. Glimpsed through the trees he could see galloping horses. Lots of them, with soldiers on their backs. He let the woman go and she and her boy were gone in a flash, running full pelt away across the beach. If she’d answered, Berren didn’t hear, but he didn’t bother chasing her; instead he raced to the edge of the woods and then stopped. A hundred yards of open field lay between the trees and the village. He’d meant to dash across it, taking his chances in the open to join his cohort, but the horsemen were too close now. The trees gave a measure of safety and so did the houses in the village, but the open ground between them? That was a killing field. At least there weren’t as many riders as he’d feared. Perhaps thirty, certainly far fewer than Talon’s company, but in the open they still had every advantage. Anyone who crossed the fields would be slaughtered.

They were from Aria, he realised. Soldiers from Deephaven. It wasn’t just the armour they wore or the familiar way they carried their lances either; when they passed close to the woods, Berren could see their faces. Their skin was dark like his, used to the sun, not ghostly white like Tarn and almost every other face he’d seen since Kalda. They were the men who’d attacked Talon there, on the horses he’d seen in Tethis, but how did they come to be here?

He watched more closely. They’d claimed the ground between the village and the wood and split the Hawks in two, but they weren’t doing anything more. They weren’t charging in among the houses and burning out the men hidden there.

Then one rode out from the middle of them. He stopped and turned his horse around on the spot, showing off, threw back his head and roared, ‘Talon! Where are you?’

Berren froze. Talon came running out of the village waving his arms. The horseman jumped down, but not for a fight. Berren watched the two men embrace and knew he couldn’t be wrong. It was a voice he’d recognise anywhere and it struck him like a thunderbolt. The thief-taker. Talon’s brother. Master Sy.

17

BEER FIXES EVERYTHING

I
n Forgenver the Fighting Hawks had more than two hundred soldiers, with nearly another hundred camp followers, mostly boys desperately pretending to be old enough to fight, but also a smith and his apprentices, two cobblers and an ever-changing posse of women who served as seamstresses and nurses when required, but whose true purpose Berren had slowly come to understand.
Comforters
, Tarn called them. There was also a victualler and his boys, a sun-priest, a scribe and at least a dozen others. These were the people who mended swords and boots, bodies and souls. Most of them had stayed in Forgenver while Talon packed as many soldiers into his ship as it could carry.

On their way here they’d been cramped, men tripping over one another at every step. Now, on their way back, they were somehow to carry another thirty men and their horses and so there was a lot of grumbling and shouting and arguing; but Berren had eyes and ears for none of that. There was one thing on his mind and one thing alone. Master Sy. The thief-taker. The man who’d taught him so much and the man who’d cut down his Tasahre. He couldn’t get close – didn’t dare, he didn’t know what he might do – but he couldn’t keep away. Master Sy looked at him once or twice, but his gaze swept by with no flicker of recognition, and the two princes were constantly going back and forth from the shore to the ship, trying to arrange how everyone would fit. Berren paced restlessly while the rest of the Hawks lounged on the beach and twiddled their thumbs, all of them wondering what to do with themselves.

‘Oi, Berren!’ Tarn was standing beside a collection of barrels and boxes piled up in the middle of the beach, supplies taken off the ship to make room for Master Sy and his horsemen. Beside him was another soldier, taller than Berren but skinny, with a sharp pointy beard and an angry scowl on his face. Tarn waved Berren over. They were leaning against an open barrel of beer.

The other soldier looked Berren up and down. His scowl deepened. ‘Well,’ he said after a bit, ‘I hardly expected a common peasant.’

He took a couple of steps closer and stared haughtily down his nose. Behind him, Tarn straightened. ‘Um, Hain? Not a good—’

‘Why don’t you piss off back home where you came from, dark-skin? Why are you still here?’

Berren stared back at this soldier he’d never seen before. He cocked his head and then punched him on the nose. Hard. The soldier reeled, clutching his face.

‘You cess-eater!’

Satisfaction spread through Berren.
Someone
had had this coming from the moment he’d seen Master Sy. He took another step forward. ‘I’m Berren,’ he said. ‘I fought on this beach this morning. I killed six men. Did you?’ He left a moment for his words to sink in while the other soldier stared at him in surprise, both hands clutching at his face. ‘Who are you anyway?’

The soldier raised a finger at him. ‘You can sit on this, you can, dark-skin.’ He stormed off, wiping the blood from his nose. Tarn let out a great sigh.

‘That was Hain of the Yorkan family,’ he said. ‘Probably not the best person to punch in the face. He’s squired to Prince Syannis of Tethis. I thought you two might want to get to know each other. Apparently not.’

‘No.’ Berren spat and rubbed his knuckles. He breathed out hard and slumped against the barrel. ‘He was right, though. I should just leave. Get my things and go. Go home, wherever that is. I don’t belong here.’ He glanced across the beach. Master Sy and Talon had two clusters of soldiers around them now. Both were gesticulating angrily. ‘But he’s right here now! I need to know. I need to know why he did it.’ His head was a whirl. First the fight on the beach, then the old woman he’d killed, now this. It was too much. Made him want to run. Run away long and far and just hide.

Tarn slid down the barrel to sit beside him and offered Berren a wooden beaker half filled with ale. ‘You belong here as much as you belong anywhere, I reckon.’

‘No, I don’t. You’re about the only person who doesn’t wish I’d quietly disappear.’

‘Not true.’ Tarn shook his head. ‘That might have been so this morning, but not now. Look, I know things have been hard. You don’t mess with warlocks, you just don’t, but you did it anyway, and it’s thanks to you that I’m alive. I’ve seen the others giving you the evil eye, but that was before they saw you fight. You’ve stood with them now. You fought the enemy and some of us died and some of us didn’t, but you didn’t run. You proved yourself. Seen any of those warding signs since?’

‘A few.’ He’d felt a change in the air right after the battle, though, that was true. Right in the aftermath. Was that enough? Would they accept him now, the dark-skin, the necromancer’s boy?

‘Not from any who were on the beach with you, or I’ll break their heads!’ Tarn looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘Hain had a bit to say that you might have liked to know, before you broke his nose.’ He stood up and took another beaker and filled it from the barrel. The ale was good, brought all the way from Kalda, not the horse piss they’d had to endure in Forgenver. Pity to waste it, just leaving it on the beach to make space for some horses. Berren drained his cup and passed it up to Tarn for some more.

‘Meridian’s hired two companies to hunt us down. He brought these horsemen from across the ocean.’

‘The same soldiers we met in Kalda?’ Berren asked. ‘The ones who tried to kill us with one of those glass balls of fire that the sun-priests make for the Taiytakei to put on the end of their rockets? Or didn’t they happen to mention that.’

‘Same ones, but Prince Syannis has turned them to
our
cause. Or bought them. Same difference, really.’ He shook his head. ‘Meridian must be desperate. Never mind the gold this must have cost him; if word ever reaches the courts of Brons and Caladir that someone is bringing in soldiers from Aria, there’s bound to be trouble. After all, if an upstart like Meridian can hire a few dozen, what’s to stop someone else hiring a few thousand. Or a few
tens
of thousands. The gods know there’s certainly enough of you over there.’ He chuckled. ‘So you and Talon’s brother – are you going to have a fight or how’s this going to end? You can’t keep looking at him like that and then not do anything about it, that’s for sure.’

‘I told you – he killed someone.’

‘Yes, you did. Your sword-monk. You loved her. He didn’t know. Harsh. Stop staring at him and do something about it. Say whatever needs to be said.’

‘He let me down.’ Berren stood up. Then he stopped. He still wasn’t sure whether he wanted to murder his old master or cry at his feet. Gods be damned, and he still kept seeing Tasahre, only now she was all muddled with the slave he’d whipped in Tethis and the old woman he’d killed, and he couldn’t see one without the others all piling into his thoughts. He pressed his fists to his head and screwed up his eyes. ‘I was a rubbish apprentice,’ he said. ‘All I wanted to do was learn how to fight. I couldn’t leave things be. Didn’t listen. Didn’t see how good I had it.’

He downed another cup of beer in one long gulp. ‘I’ve spent the best part of two years thinking about what Syannis did back in Deephaven. I wanted to kill him, slow and painful. Now? I don’t know. Some of the things I blamed him for were more my fault than they were his. Even . . .’ He still couldn’t say Tasahre’s name without a pause to force it out. ‘Even what he did at the end, that was Syannis being what he was and fate placing her in his path. All she was to him was another enemy, another thing in his way. I can’t hate him for being evil or malicious because he wasn’t, but that doesn’t make everything right. Gods! Took me long enough to realise that, but when you’re a skag, you have a lot of time on your own to think about how you got there. I still hate him for throwing me aside, but maybe even that’s not fair.’

He refilled his cup again, thinking of the last time he’d seen Master Sy, standing on the edge of Radek’s ship, one foot over the rail, hand out, calling to him to run. ‘Thing is, the other thing you get to do as a skag is stare at death. I wanted to kill him and I wanted to loathe him, but in the end I couldn’t. I hate him for letting Radek matter more than I did. I despise him for killing Tasahre. I’m afraid of him for the madness that drives him. I never knew, until now, that I wouldn’t fly into a rage if I ever saw him. But we’re not done, him and me. He was the closest thing I ever had to a father, and I need him to hear it, and I need to hear it back.’ He raised his cup to the bemused-looking Tarn.

‘Well,’ said Tarn after a moment of silence. ‘I don’t think I really followed any of that. Just go. Say what needs to be said and get it done.’

Berren shrugged. ‘Have another beer with me, Tarn.’ Getting drunk seemed the best thing. He’d never told anyone except Talon what had happened in Deephaven, and Talon had listened politely but he hadn’t wanted to know, not most of it, not how it
felt
. When he’d been a skag, the sailors would only have laughed and jeered at him. But Tarn . . . for some reason, Tarn needed to know. He filled both cups.

‘It’s all changed,’ grumbled Tarn. ‘This whole business with these slavers, that’s not what’s really happening at all. I don’t understand any of this any more. I thought Prince Syannis and Prince Talon had made their peace with Meridian.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘I didn’t even know Radek was dead until you showed up. Or rather, I did, but I didn’t know how and I certainly didn’t think Talon or Syannis had had anything to do with it. Now Meridian’s hired two companies to hunt us, we’ve been suckered out here and they’re probably only a day away. The lancers were supposed to take us by surprise and cut us off from the sea and then the others would finish the job. For all I know there never were any slavers and the Duke of Forgenver’s in on it too.’ Tarn scratched his chin. ‘Hain said something else, something about Syannis seeing his future in the blade of a knife. Don’t think that made any more sense to Hain than it does to me. Sounds like more death-magery.’