Knight's Shadow (5 page)

An explosion of muscle and rage nearly shook me from Monster’s back, but I clung on for dear life as her hooves began tearing up chunks of dirt, sending dust and sand in the air as she raced across the burnt grass plains outside of the village and towards the mountains. The Greathorse had murder in her heart.

So did I.

Chapter Five

The Captive

The Knights had made a poor job of covering their tracks. Wherever there was a fork in the wide dusty trails that passed for roads in this part of Pulnam, they’d gone a few dozen yards in the wrong direction before circling back. I wasn’t fooled, and from Valiana’s tracks I could see that she hadn’t been deceived either, which meant she was going to reach them before I caught up with her.

We’d gone about ten miles from the village when I counted five horses off in the distance. I was fairly certain one was Valiana’s grey mare, which meant the body I saw in a heap on the ground must be Valiana herself. One of the Knights was holding her down with his foot while his fellows were fending off the sweeping attacks of a young girl wearing a yellow dress made brown by dust. The girl was swinging a blade nearly as tall as she was, which she must have taken from one of the Knights. She wielded it with impressive skill despite its weight, but there were four Knights and I doubted she could keep them off her for long and I was still too far away.

‘K’hey!’ I called to Monster, drawing one of my rapiers.
Fly
.

The great beast gave a growl that broke through the distance between us and our quarry and I saw one of the Knights turn to us as we bridged the gap. He wasn’t wearing his helmet and by this time I was close enough to enjoy the wide-eyed look of fear in his eyes as he caught sight of the creature charging for him. He should have kept his attention on the girl. She swung her stolen warsword and, with a single stroke, the Knight’s head flew from his body.

I leapt off Monster’s back and engaged with the man who was holding Valiana down, making a thrust for his face that forced him to step back. Valiana didn’t rise, and a quick glance told me that she was unconscious. The Knight evaded my next strike, only to be struck down by Monster’s hooves. I had to jump out of the way as the beast began crushing the Knight beneath her.

One of the remaining Knights was gaining the advantage on the girl in the yellow dress. Strong as she was, I could tell she was beginning to tire from wielding the heavy blade. As he prepared for a downward strike, I grabbed his sword arm from behind and pulled it back as hard as I could, hoping to make him lose his balance. Knights in armour don’t do well on their backs. When he felt the resistance from my hand he struck back with his elbow. I turned my head – just in time – but he struck my collarbone with a force that made me thankful for the bone plates inside my coat.

I struck at his face with the pommel of my rapier – he was wearing a full-face helmet but I managed to ring his bell hard enough for him to stumble. Unfortunately, the girl had moved into position behind him and as he fell she went down beneath him.

‘Don’t worry about me, you idiot,’ she shouted as she wriggled a hand holding a dagger out from beneath the Knight’s bulk while he struggled to flip himself around. ‘The other one’s getting away! If he escapes with her then the whole plan fails!’

In my peripheral vision a blur passed by me: the remaining Knight had grabbed Valiana and was making for the mountains off in the distance on a black horse.

I ran to Monster. I’d barely leapt onto her back when she began racing towards the Knight on his black charger. The other horse was fast, but Monster was all speed and fury and we overtook them in a flurry of hoofbeats. Monster barrelled into the side of the other horse, throwing the Knight and Valiana to the ground and reminding me once again that there is always a price to pay for using a creature as dangerous as a maddened Greathorse.

The Knight recovered enough to get to his knees and reached for a mace attached to his waist, but by then the point of my rapier was at his throat, carefully placed above the protection of his gorget and just under his chin. ‘Yield,’ I said.

The Knight moved his hand away from his mace. ‘I yield,’ he said.

Keeping my point on him I turned to glance first at Valiana, who looked stunned but was now conscious, then back to see the girl walking towards us, dagger in hand. Several yards back her opponent was on the ground with the others, presumably already dead.

‘You have to kill him,’ the girl said. ‘No one can know what happened here.’

‘He yielded. He’s our prisoner.’

She kept walking towards us. I could see now that calling her a girl was inaccurate. She was young, to be sure – perhaps twenty; no more than twenty-five, certainly – and she was short for a woman, only a little over five feet, no taller than Aline. Her face was youthful enough to make it plausible for her to pass as a teenage girl. But one good look in her eyes removed any doubt of her being a child.

‘I said kill him—’

‘And I said he’s my prisoner. Now tell me your name and—’

The girl walked right by me, so casually that I was surprised when she knocked the blade of my rapier aside and, without so much as a glance at me, drove her dagger into the Knight’s throat. She pushed slowly but surely, forcing his body backwards until, with a sudden twist, she yanked the blade free. Blood fountained from his neck as he died.

I was horrified by the indifference with which she’d killed a man who’d already surrendered, but I wasn’t looking for a confrontation. Not yet. ‘Who are you?’ I asked again. She didn’t offer a response and I didn’t wait for one. Valiana was sitting up now, but she still looked dazed. I knelt down to examine her for wounds. ‘Valiana, it’s me, Falcio. Are you hurt?’

‘My name is Dariana,’ the woman said from behind me. ‘And the girl is not half so hurt as you’ll be if you ever get in my way again.’

Valiana had a bruise on her cheek and looked as if she’d taken a hit to the head but I could see no blood. ‘You’re not half the size you’d need to be to make good on that threat,’ I said.

I felt the point of a blade at the back of my neck. This Dariana was smart. If she’d reached around to put the blade at my throat I could have grabbed her arm and thrown her over my shoulder. This way she was in control.

‘Haven’t you heard?’ she said. ‘It’s not how tall a man is that matters, it’s how long a blade he wields.’

‘You’re working for the Tailor so I assume you’re one of her new Greatcoats. Perhaps you should be acting like one.’

‘A Greatcoat?’ I heard the woman spit. ‘Why would I want to be a fucking Greatcoat?’

If Kest had been there he could have suggested half a dozen ways of deflecting the blade, followed by their respective odds of success, followed by a reminder that I should not have turned my back on someone I had just met in the first place. But I ignored his sage, if imaginary, counsel and instead reached down to lift Valiana up off the ground. If this woman wanted to kill me, she could. I was tired and sore and angry and sick of being tired and sore and angry. ‘I’m taking Valiana back to the village,’ I said. ‘You can help or not.’

The sharp pressure on the back of my neck disappeared. ‘I’ll get the other horses,’ she said. ‘Try not to screw anything else up while I’m gone.’

Chapter Six

The Betrayal

Hours later I was back in my cottage, collecting my belongings and preparing for our departure in the morning. The Tailor believed that if we continued to harass Trin’s troops we could box her in long enough for Duke Erris to rally his own forces; all we had to do was deny Trin victory long enough for her generals to lose faith in her. From there we might even be able to convince them that a naïve thirteen-year-old girl on the throne was preferable to a psychotic eighteen-year-old murderer with exotic tastes in torture.

I wondered what would become of this small village once we abandoned it. The cries of those few men still alive but beyond saving had all but faded now. Their families had come down from the mountain hideaways to witness the destruction that had fallen upon a place that, until the Greatcoats had come along, had survived border raids and territorial disputes for hundreds of years. The women and children had been so full of shock and fury that I’d feared they might attack us then and there. But in the end, we had the numbers and the weapons, and so they had simply taken their dead and dying and made their way back into the mountains, cursing us all the while.

The memory of their faces had shaken my faith in my King, maybe for the first time in my life. All those years he’d spent planning and plotting, developing strategies and tactics to bring peace and justice to this broken, bitter country, and in the end, what had he left us with? None of us, even those who had been closest to him, knew his plan. Instead, in the days just before losing his throne and his head to the Dukes, Paelis had given each of us a secret and individual command and scattered us to the winds – a hundred and forty-four men and women, dispatched on a hundred and forty-four different journeys – never to know what became of the others.

For five years I had searched for what Paelis had called the ‘King’s Charoites’, despite having no idea where they might be, nor, in fact, what a charoite was other than a kind of rare precious stone. Finally, I had found Aline: the King’s secret daughter. His blood. His heir. The rarest jewel of them all.

And what was I supposed to do now? Put Aline on the throne?

Was that the entirety of your plan, you gangly limbed, half-starved excuse for a King?
We had shared a dream, he and I. At first it was just the two of us, but we’d tricked others into believing it too. Every one of the original Greatcoats could recite the King’s Laws by heart; we could all sing them well enough that even a drunken farmer could remember our verdicts word for word a year later. How many of them still believed in all that talk of law and justice and an easing of sorrow? How much did Brasti and Kest and the other original Greatcoats, wherever they were, still believe?

How much did I?

I removed my coat and set it aside on the bench next to my swords. I would sleep reluctantly tonight, as frightened of my own guilty dreams as I was of finding out what Patriana’s poison had in store for me when I next awoke.

A soft, tentative knock at my door interrupted my thoughts. It was strange that I immediately knew it was Aline. Maybe it was because of those days we had spent together on the run in Rijou – always quiet, always fearful that someone would hear us and raise the alarm. I opened the door and she came in, still wearing the faded green dress.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked, looking outside to see if anyone was watching. ‘If the villagers—’

‘The villagers have all gone away,’ she said. ‘Besides, it’s done now. Trin will know her men failed.’

‘You should be asleep,’ I said.

‘I should be dead.’

I knelt down and looked her in the eyes. She was more haggard than scared. ‘What’s happened?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Then why—?’

‘Nothing, except that someone powerful sent men to kill me. Again. Like they always do. Like they always
will
.’

I stood up and went to pour us each a cup of water from the jug in the small kitchen. ‘They failed,’ I said, handing her a cup.

She drank, and I took that as a sign things might not be so bad and did the same.

‘Thank you,’ she said, handing me back the cup.

‘Do you want some more?’

She shook her head.

‘Did you want to sit and talk?’

Aline looked towards the still open door. ‘Could we go for a walk outside? I’d like to see the stars.’

The Tailor wouldn’t like that, nor would her Greatcoats. I was tired and not looking for another fight. But Aline was the heir, not our prisoner, and by now the Tailor’s men would have set up a proper perimeter.

Also, as the King used to remind me on an almost daily basis, I’m belligerent.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Just let me grab something.’ I retrieved my coat and rapiers and found a thick woollen blanket that I wrapped around Aline’s shoulders.

We walked down the main path, the flickering candlelight escaping through the cracks in the shutters lighting our way. Occasionally we could hear the sounds of other Greatcoats talking inside.

‘Where shall we go?’ I asked.

‘Can we go up the little hill outside the village?’

That was an awkward request. I really didn’t want to take her outside the protection of our camp, but we were unlikely to be attacked again – Trin had made her attempt, and her men had paid the price for it. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘but just for a little while.’

Aline took my hand and we made our way down the path, passing a group of six of the Tailor’s Greatcoats. They didn’t bother to greet us, but I saw they noted our presence. As long as we didn’t go far they’d likely not complain. I ignored the soft footsteps not far behind us. They had been there since we’d left the cottage.

We crossed the wide trail that passed through the strange rock formation called the Arch. Beyond it was the Eastern Desert and the curved north–south trade route called the Bow that led to Rijou.

Rijou.

The memories of that place still make me shudder.

‘Are you cold?’ Aline asked.

‘No, just thinking.’

‘That happens to me too when I think,’ she said.

‘Oh? What do you think about that makes you shiver?’

She looked up. ‘I like the stars,’ she said, ignoring my question. ‘You could see some in Rijou, but never as many as here. It’s as if they’re right near to us. Come on. I want to get closer to them.’

We made our way up the hill along a narrow path. At the top the terrain flattened out and we sat at the edge. Small animals scurried about in the dark, not quite obscuring the other sound that trailed us.

‘She follows me everywhere I go,’ Aline said.

I was surprised at first that Aline could hear the footsteps, but then, she was a smart girl and she’d become used to paying attention to things around her. ‘She’s wounded,’ I said. ‘She should be resting.’

‘You could tell her, but I don’t think she’d listen. She’s lost, Falcio.’

I looked at Aline’s face to find some clue as to her meaning but she was still just looking up at the stars. ‘What do you mean?’

‘They’ve taken everything away from her,’ she said. ‘She spent her whole life being a princess and now she’s just a girl. I spent my whole life thinking I was just a girl and now they tell me I have to be a queen. It doesn’t seem fair.’

‘To whom?’ I asked.

She turned to me and put a hand on my arm. ‘I don’t want Valiana to die for nothing, Falcio. Will you protect her?’

‘What do you mean, “for nothing”? Saving your life isn’t “nothing”.’

She leaned back on the ground and looked up again. ‘Can you see this many stars in the Southern Islands?’

‘I . . . I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I suppose so. I think it’s mostly a function of how many clouds there are and how much light down here there is – that makes it harder for us to see the stars.’

The answer seemed to satisfy her. ‘So if we weren’t in a big city and it wasn’t cloudy we should see a lot of stars from an island too, right?’

‘Aline, what’s this about?’

‘Do you think about Ethalia, Falcio?’

That took me by surprise. Of course I still thought of Ethalia – every day. It hadn’t been so long ago that she had healed my wounds and saved the last little part of my soul.

‘I do think about her, yes,’ I said carefully.

‘That morning when you were in her room – when she sent me downstairs,’ she started, then admitted, ‘I didn’t go all the way. I stayed near the door and I heard what she said to you.’

For an instant I was back in that small room, the smell of clean sheets and simple food, of morning flowers and, above all, of her.
‘Don’t you think it at all possible that you are meant to be happy, that I am meant to be happy, and that our happiness can be found together?’

I had known Ethalia one night and in that short time had fallen in love for only the second time in my life. Minutes after she had said those words I had left her there, alone. Weeping.

‘Why are you telling me this, Aline?’

‘Do you think she’d still take us to that island that she mentioned? She said I could come too, right?’

‘I . . . I’m sure one day, when you’re tired of being Queen, I mean you could . . .’ I knew I sounded like an idiot so I didn’t bother to finish.

‘No,’ Aline said, ‘I mean, now. If we went back there now – not all the way to Rijou, I know we’d need to get a message to her – but if we could, do you think she’d still take us to that island?’

‘Aline,’ I said, ‘you’re the daughter of King Paelis. You’re going to be Queen of all Tristia.’

She shook her head. She wasn’t crying, though. It was as if she’d played this conversation over in her head and was ready for my objections. ‘I don’t have to be Queen, though. No one can force me to be Queen.’

‘I don’t always want to be a Greatcoat but I do it anyway. Where would you be if I’d stopped?’

‘Dead,’ she said plainly. ‘I’d be dead. Just like when Shiballe’s men tried to kill me, or when the bully-boys found us. Or when Laetha and Radger betrayed me, or when the Dashini assassins came. Or today.’

I felt a fool. I kept forgetting how young she was, still a child, and already she’d faced as much death as any soldier. ‘I’ve kept you safe, though, haven’t I?’

‘Yes, you have. You killed Shiballe’s men and the bully-boys and those fake Greatcoats and the Dashini. And today you killed more men for me. How many people will you kill for me, Falcio?’

I took her hand. ‘I’ll kill as many as it takes, Aline. I’ll kill them until they stop coming for you.’

She pulled her hand away and jumped to her feet. ‘You don’t understand
anything
! I don’t
want
you to kill people for me! I don’t want Valiana to die to protect me. I didn’t want the villagers to betray us and then be killed because of it! I’m only thirteen, Falcio, and already I’ve caused the death of more people than I can count. I don’t want it!’

I rose to my feet. ‘We don’t always get—’

‘No! It’s not the same. I don’t want to be a Queen. And you’re not a Greatcoat because you have to be, Falcio – you’re a Greatcoat because you don’t know how to be anything else.’ She turned and ran off.

She was right, of course. It
wasn’t
fair. She deserved better; she deserved to be a child, to laugh and cry and get angry and run off into the darkness and pout. But the world hadn’t been fair to her up to now and it showed absolutely no signs of relenting, and that meant I couldn’t let her go off by herself to pout in the darkness.

So I ran and caught her before she could reach the path down the hill.

‘Leave me alone!’ she screamed.

‘Stop,’ I said, taking her arm. ‘Stop and tell me what it is you want. Do you want me to take you away from here? To take you south, to see if Ethalia would still have us?’ Aline’s arm was shaking – no, it wasn’t her. It was
me
. It was the thought of what might be if she commanded me to take her from this place.
Oh Gods, say yes, and in that yes shake me of the bonds that bind me to your father. You gave me no instructions, my King. You just said to find her, and I did that. If she asks me to take her away I will and to the hells with whatever plans you made but never bothered to tell me.

But she didn’t say yes. It was as if she could tell I would have taken her south that very instant if she asked. Instead, she said, ‘I want to stop being afraid,’ not knowing that it was the bravest thing she could have said just then.

‘That’s not the same thing. I’m not sure that’s even possible.’

She started crying. ‘Why do I have to be Queen?’

‘You don’t,’ I said. ‘The country can carry on as it has. The Dukes can keep doing what they’ve been doing. Trin can take the throne.’

‘Mattea – the Tailor – she said there were others.’ Her voice was full of frustration. ‘Why didn’t you find one of them?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t know they existed, or that you did. But I don’t think any of them are left, Aline. Patriana hunted them all down.’ I thought about that a moment. Patriana had held Aline in her clutches. She had beaten her and tortured her – and yet she hadn’t killed her, preferring instead to use her to torment me. And now I thought about it, she’d kept asking, over and over, ‘Where are the others?’ At the time I’d assumed she was talking about the other Greatcoats but in hindsight it was more likely she had been seeking the other heirs, the ‘Charoites’, as the King had enigmatically called them. What if there
were
other heirs still alive?

‘Aline, if there was another, would you want them to take your place?’

‘I . . .’ Tears were dripping slowly down her cheeks and I wanted to hold her, but I knew she didn’t want to be touched. So we stood there until she finally looked up at me. ‘They would have to deal with the same things I do, wouldn’t they?’

I nodded. I didn’t speak, for I could see that her heart had made its decision and now her mind was catching up to it.

‘And . . . and it would be worse for them, wouldn’t it? Because they won’t have faced the things I have. It’ll all come down on them at once.’