The Copper Promise (50 page)

‘It’s certainly
private
enough,’ said Wydrin.

‘What is this game, then?’ he said, ignoring the look she was shooting him over the rim of her glass. ‘Is it, by any chance, a game you can play by yourself without bothering me?’

‘All the best games involve two players, as well you know,’ said Wydrin. She picked up one of the tokens and placed it carefully on the board. It was carved from yellow crystal and shaped like a monkey. All the pieces were monkeys of differing colours. ‘Chik-Chok can be played with two or more players, and the aim of the game is to wipe your opponent’s pieces from the board. It’s called Chik-Chok because of the noise it makes when you put a piece down.’ She demonstrated by dropping the token onto the marble board, where it made a flat clacking sound, but Frith didn’t look up from his work. ‘My dad taught me to play, a long, long time ago. He kept a set in his cabin, and when there was a storm he’d lose all the pieces. Never a set as pretty as this one, though. How much do you suppose these crystals are worth?’

‘Your father owns a ship?’

‘Owned. He was a merchant sailor. With a touch of piracy on the side, when my mother was about.’

Frith looked up.

‘Your father is dead? I am sorry.’

Wydrin chuckled.

‘You don’t pay too much attention to anything outside that handsome head of yours, do you, princeling? He’s dead. He sailed off to investigate some wild tales and never came back.’ She shifted in her seat. Like so many things in Verneh, it was covered in silk and her bottom kept threatening to slip off. ‘The sea is unforgiving.’ She shrugged. ‘He’s swimming with the Graces now.’

‘Which wild tales were these?’

‘Oh, the usual stuff.’ She waved a hand airily, nearly knocking her drink over. ‘It’s said that there is a beach where every grain of sand is a tiny jewel, and the natives carve their homes from giant pearls.’ She burped. ‘It’s all bilge, really, but if there was a chance of a new trade route then my father would have been the first one up there.’

‘He sounds like an interesting man,’ said Frith, his eyes drifting back to the eggshell pieces. ‘If the maps are anything to go by, then it seems my father was more interested in wild tales than I ever—’ His words stumbled to a halt. He pushed two shards together, and then a third piece, as big as the palm of his hand. He frowned.

‘What is it?’

‘There’s a new word here,’ he said. ‘Jolnir didn’t teach me everything, it seems.’

‘Can you read it?’

‘Of course I can. It is the word for
seeing
.’ He reached into his belt and pulled out the ink and brush. ‘From what I can make out, this part of the spell allows you to find your quarry wherever they might be.’

Wydrin thought of Roki, leering over her in the night. Frith was unwinding a length of fabric from his belt.

‘You’re not going to do it here, are you?’ she said, surprised at the sudden clench of alarm in her stomach. ‘What if the dragon senses you, or something? It could be dangerous.’

‘I won’t try it with Y’Ruen, no. Where is Sebastian now?’

‘He’s mooching around the city.’ Wydrin hadn’t been happy about it, but Sebastian seemed singularly uninterested in her opinion these days. ‘Said he wanted some fresh air.’ Why you’d need fresh air after flying around a bloody mountain on a bloody griffin, she did not know.

‘Then I shall try with him.’ Frith deftly copied the word onto a long strip of the linen, and tied the bandage to his left hand. Wydrin watched his face become utterly still as he concentrated. After a few moments he muttered, ‘Sebastian.’

‘You should get some silk while you’re here. More fetching than those bandages …’

There was a flicker of dusty light in the air above the table and her words died in her throat. The light hung in the air like a ball of bright cloud, and there were pictures moving on it. She could see a tiny version of Sebastian, as though she was looking down at him from some great distance. He was standing outside a temple, watching as a crowd filed through the door. Wydrin couldn’t tell whose temple it was – Ede was rife with gods and demons and nymphs – but it wasn’t for want of detail. She could see tiny brown clay lanterns in the dirt either side of the door, and fish carved into the stone of the roof. After a few seconds the light flickered out and was gone.

‘Now that is a useful trick.’ She was grinning with the wonder of it. ‘Imagine the trouble you could cause with this spell! The blackmail opportunities alone …’

But Frith wasn’t listening. She knew what he was about to do before his lips began to form the name.

‘Are you sure that’s wise?’

‘Fane.’

And there he was. The man who had ordered the murder of the Frith family, who had tried to kill them all in Pinehold, the man who had worn a demon-enchanted helm to cheat death …

He was a little thinner than Wydrin remembered, his chin shadowed with stubble, but he was smiling and laughing. He sat in a tall throne carved of some dark wood, and there were grey stones rising behind him, partially covered by a ragged standard showing a black tree against a pale blue background. There were small white shapes in the branches that could have been fruits or stars.

‘He is in my home!’ Frith stood, sending the Chik-Chok board and its pieces flying. The vision of Fane stuttered and vanished.

‘Hold on a minute, princeling.’

‘He is in my castle.’ Frith’s face was contorted with rage. ‘I would know that throne anywhere.’

He threw the curtains back and stormed out.

‘You can’t just go!’

Swearing loudly, Wydrin hurriedly gathered the pieces of the eggshell together and threw them back into their sack. She stumbled out of the booth in time to see Frith leaving through the front doors, his back rigid.

‘You are leaving so soon?’ The man with the jewelled face appeared at her side.

‘It looks that way, doesn’t it?’ Wydrin pressed a handful of coins into his perfumed hand and ran out the door.

Outside it was early evening and the streets were full of Verneh’s citizens just starting their night of revelry. She saw Frith some distance away, spotted the flutter of black wings descending towards him.

‘Oh, great.’

There was a rush of wind and several startled screams from onlookers, and the griffin rose out of the frightened crowd at an alarming speed. Frith didn’t look back as he rose into the sky like an errant shooting star, and then he was lost in the gathering clouds.

Wydrin, the sack still clenched in one fist, raised her arms and then dropped them. ‘Oh,
great
,’ she said again. She had a moment to note that only one griffin had left with Frith when something sharp jabbed her in the lower back. She spun, Frostling drawn in her free hand, to find herself face to face with Roki once more.

‘Oh no. Was that your pretty lord leaving you all behind?’ he said. His face was oddly yellow, and she wondered if he was ill until she realised it was simply the light from an oil lamp. Wherever he was truly, he was standing near one. ‘Maybe you’ll be mine to play with now.’

The crowd were still gathering where the griffin had appeared, none of them taking any notice of the two people with their weapons drawn. Sebastian was out there somewhere, but he was too far away to help.

‘I don’t have time for this. Why don’t you just piss off, Roki?’

‘And why should I do that?’ The sleeve of his shirt on his wounded arm was pulled right up, so she could see the red ruin of the stump. It didn’t look like it had healed properly at all. ‘I can find you wherever you are. You can use those weird feathered creatures to go to the furthest corners of Ede, and I’ll still be able to find you. I can haunt you for ever.’ He raised the stump, and Wydrin grimaced.

‘It’s true I wouldn’t relish having to look at your ugly face every day,’ she said, keeping Frostling pointed towards him. ‘It must have been doubly annoying for your brother, having to look at your face and his face in the mirror every day, poor sod. At least he doesn’t have to put up with that any more.’

Roki nodded. Not in agreement, but in acknowledgement that he expected nothing better from her.

‘As annoying as that would no doubt be,’ continued Wydrin, ‘I still don’t see why you don’t just kill me. I know you can do plenty of damage, even in that form.’ She nodded towards the sword in his left hand. ‘So why not just kill me?’

Roki shifted his weight, his lips twisting as though he chewed a tough piece of gristle.

‘It is better to haunt you, to slowly pick at your mind, and experience the pleasure of watching you fall apart. You’ll never know a moment’s peace, and I will enjoy every—’

‘Hold on.’ Wydrin gestured with the dagger. ‘I don’t buy it. You wish to irritate me to death from a distance, when you could just run me through with that sword? No, I don’t believe it.’ She took a couple of steps forward, putting herself in range of his weapon. It was dangerous, but it would confirm what she suspected. ‘Is it because you can’t smell me, Roki? Because if you kill me now, in this fog form of yours, you’d never get to taste my blood, or feel my heart slow under your fingers?’

She saw from the way his eyes widened that this was the truth.
This could be useful
, thought Wydrin
. I need to draw him out into a real fight, one where he’s solid and I can run him through.

‘Wouldn’t that be best, Roki?’ She leaned in as though about to kiss a lover, close enough for him to see the pulse in her neck, and stopped. He could strike her down, but if she was right, he wouldn’t. He would miss too much. ‘You like to taste the fear, don’t you?’

‘You know nothing about me!’ There was sweat on his forehead now, yellow under the lamplight.

Wydrin stepped back. ‘I don’t think you’re anywhere near us now, not with the effort it’s taking you to reach me. Am I right?’

Roki said nothing.

‘Come and meet me in the Blackwood, Roki,’ she said, her voice soft. ‘I will be there, waiting. Come and find me there, and bring more than this ghost version of you. Then we’ll have a
real
fight.’

His lips twisted, as though he wanted to say more, and then he vanished. Wydrin let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding, and pushed Frostling back into its scabbard.

‘Just one disaster at a time,’ she muttered. ‘That’s all I’m asking.’

The Blackwood passed below him like a storm-darkened sea. There was a roaring in his ears, although whether it was the wind or the churning of the Edenier, Frith couldn’t tell.

He is in my home
.

The vision seemed to hang in front of his eyes, immovable. The man who had ordered the invasion of the Blackwood and the murder of his family was now sitting on the Blackwood throne.
My father’s chair
. Lord Frith had sat there, listening to the concerns of his people, or reading documents, or doing any of a hundred tasks that demanded his attention. And Leon should have sat there next, and then his sons, if he had them, or Frith, if he did not. Instead, his brother had bled to death in his own dungeon. In the vision provided by the Edenier, Fane had been lounging in the chair, grinning at his guards and whoever else he’d assembled there.
Grinning
, thought Frith,
because he got away from me. Because he escaped before I could have my vengeance. I could have killed him in the tower at Pinehold, I could have, but the opportunity was snatched away from me.

He dug his fingers into the thick black feathers around the griffin’s neck, urging the great animal onwards, until he saw it; Blackwood Keep rising out of the ocean of trees, grey as the skies above it, a solid formation of smoke-stone and glass, flags and lead.

‘Home,’ said Frith. The word was torn from his lips and scattered to the wind, but it remained on his heart.

They flew over the smattering of buildings that nestled outside the castle, beyond the first set of tall grey walls and landed lightly in the outer keep. There were shouts from the guards on lookout, and one or two arrows shot past Frith to clatter against the flagstones, but they seemed oddly distant. The griffin became a bird again and flew up to the higher reaches of the main tower, and Frith absently threw a wall of flickering white force up to the men with the arrows. There were screams, followed by a handful of thumps and crunches as they landed in the forest beyond.

Frith flexed his fingers, and remembered.

They had been taken entirely unawares. Lady Bethan’s men were experienced woodsmen, travelling through the trees in silence, their faces smeared with mud and hidden easily under a cloudy night sky. There was a fierce fight at the southern gate, waking him from a deep sleep – Frith had been out late that night, and had fallen asleep still clothed – and he’d gone running to the window. He’d seen the carnage in the courtyard below and stared, unbelieving. It had seemed unreal, like a waking nightmare.

Now, as he stood in the courtyard of a home he hadn’t seen for months, a guard came straight at him, a spear gripped tightly in both hands. Frith looked at the man’s face, oddly constricted under the leather cap he wore jammed down over his ears. Had he been here, that night? Had he charged the inner keep’s doors? Had he been the one to drag Tristan from his bed?

Frith saw the word for Fire in his mind and that seemed right, so he held up his hand and the guard was a churning mass of light. Frith heard the screaming, could even smell the flesh boiling off the man’s bones, but distantly, distantly.

He moved on. The gate to the inner keep had already lost its small contingent of guards – they’d seen what was coming and had quite wisely decided to relocate to another part of the castle – but it was a thick, heavy door, and barred from behind. Frith stopped to consider it.

On that night he’d run down the great stairs and found his father and his brother Leon in the main hall, both hurriedly strapping on armour. Lord Frith was shouting instructions to the castle’s men, and the huge door was shuddering as something enormous pounded on it from the outside. Frith had seen swords shining under the lamplight and felt instantly foolish. Where was his sword? His armour?

‘Aaron,’ his brother had called. ‘Go and find Tristan, he’ll be frightened.’