The Undertow was a small bar. It was wedged into a corner that had been formed when Vaeasa had expanded, decades earlier. Built from thick timber, it was a simple building with a sloping slate roof. Its door was made from heavy wood and was held open by a plump purple bag filled with sand. Inside were two moderate-sized rooms, divided not by a step, as in other bars Heast had seen, but by a long counter with a door’s-width gap in it to allow people to pass between the two rooms. A fat middle-aged man with dark olive skin stood behind the counter, cleaning glasses. When Heast and Anemone entered, he glanced up once but with no interest. It was more attention than those around him paid: the chipped and nicked chairs and tables were half filled with soldiers, and not one of them raised their heads as the two walked past.
Heast found the guard in the shaded garden out back. There, a handful of soldiers sat quietly at tables around him and, like those inside, did not glance up as the new arrivals made their way to where the guard sat.
‘Mind if I sit?’
‘I was hoping that you’d be another fifteen or twenty.’ Beneath the foliage of the tree, the guard looked older than he had on the gate, the lines across his face deeper. ‘The night is a long shift.’
‘I’d buy you another drink, but the one you have is already bought, is it not?’ Heast pulled back one of the chairs, while beside him, the witch took her seat. Earlier, he had told her that she did not have to come with him to The Undertow, but she had shaken her head in response. No, she had said, you will need me. Heast said now, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Seon.’ The guard stared at the half-filled, dirty glass in his hand. After a moment, he said, ‘You’re right, it is paid for.’
‘And the guards?’
‘Lord Tuael said nothing would fool you, Captain.’
Heast stretched out his steel leg but did not drop his hand to it. ‘Where is he?’
‘Across the road, waiting.’ Seon stood and drained the glass in two long gulps. ‘After I refill this, I’ll walk across and he’ll walk back. He’s not real happy with you and he won’t be so happy to hear that you brought your witch with you.’
‘I have a name,’ Anemone said evenly. ‘I can tell it to you, if you want.’
‘I already know it,’ the guard said sourly.
The atmosphere in The Undertow changed after Seon stepped through the door. The pretence of being off-duty fell away and the half-dozen men and women who had been sitting across from Heast rose from their tables and chairs. They tightened the straps of their scabbards before reaching for their cloaks. Not one of them wore a sign of rank on their uniform, which Heast took to mean that they were all part of Lord Tuael’s private guard.
‘How many warlocks?’ he asked casually.
‘Four,’ the witch replied. ‘They are across the street with their lord.’
Heast had told her, before they entered the bar, that they would not be greeted warmly. He had told her that they would be met with a display of force and that they would be under threat from the moment they entered The Undertow. That is why you will need me, Anemone had said to him. It is my job to protect the soldiers of Refuge.
Heast heard the door at the front of the inn close, the key turning in the lock. A moment later, the Lord of Faaisha, Jye Tuael, stepped out of the bar and into the garden.
He was a handsome man who carried himself with a comfortable authority. He did not wear a sword, nor did he wear leather and chain. Instead, Tuael was dressed in simple, lightweight brown pants and a long-sleeved shirt of hand-spun green that bore no hint of sweat or stain upon it. With a carefully manicured hand that bore only one simple ring of gold, he took the chair that Seon had sat in and, without waiting to see if either Heast or Anemone would rise to honour his presence, sat. He looked at them both silently until, with a hint of self-deprecation, he said, ‘It is a pleasure to see you again, Aned.’
‘You look well,’ Heast said.
‘It is early in the day yet,’ the Lord of Faaisha said. ‘At the end, I may feel much older than I am. If I do, I will lay the blame squarely at your feet.’
‘It was you who wrote to me.’
‘Did I ask you to kill Kotan Iata and steal his soldiers?’ He shook his head. ‘The other Lords of Faaisha have been urging me to deal with you, despite the fact that we are in the middle of a war. They said that I have invited a second invasion by Muriel Wagan. Most of them didn’t even like Iata, but he was holding out against the Leerans. Tell me that he at least raised a sword against you, Aned. That he threatened you. Give me something that I can take back to the Lords.’
‘You have a traitor,’ the Captain of Refuge said.
‘I have at least half a dozen,’ he said without pause. ‘Come now: I did not like Iata, but you will hang from a gallows for what you have done if you—’
‘Your traitor is a Marshal Faet Cohn.’
That, Heast saw, had not been expected.
‘You have proof?’ Lord Tuael asked, after a pause.
Slowly, Heast pulled the letters out from where he had stuffed them in his belt, careful not to startle the soldiers who watched the exchange between their lord and the foreign captain carefully. The ringed hand that took the parchment did not tremble and the gaze that read the lines did not lift from the words until the end.
‘A lot of people have questioned what happened in Celp, but no one suspected him of losing the city because of simple greed.’ Tuael began to fold the letter along its creased lines with slow movements of his index finger and thumb. ‘All that we face right now, all that we struggle with, and he indulges in avarice. Some men simply do not understand the virtue of restraint.’
‘Did you suspect him?’ Heast said.
‘Of this? No. I am even surprised. Do you know how rare it is for me to be surprised?’ He let out a sigh, as if something had been drained from him. ‘I knew Cohn pushed for the slave trade with Gogair to begin again. His family made their money in flesh two generations ago and the pot has long smelt sweet to him.’
‘I’m surprised that he became a marshal, then.’
‘Tactically, he is quite an interesting man, but personally, he struggles to acknowledge that the world has drifted away from what it once was. He does not see that people do not want slavery. He does not see that freedom has become a currency that they want to indulge in and that they are happy with any rule that allows them this. I would not have thought it before this moment, but it appears that Cohn is so divorced from reality that he cannot see one of the horrors of this war is to be sold in Gogair. If this was to get out, he would be torn apart – literally, I suspect.’
The if of the last sentence had not escaped Heast. ‘He can’t remain a marshal, surely?’
‘No, he can’t. But the question is, can I allow this to be made public?’ The letter folded, Tuael laid it on the table before him. ‘Cohn has his supporters, even after Celp. He did not become a marshal without them. They will stand beside him, especially if it is revealed that the captain who killed Kotan Iata delivered this.’ A note of resignation entered Lord Tuael’s voice. ‘But I imagine that you already knew that. My father had the greatest respect for you, Aned. Years ago, when we first met, when you had ridden into Vaeasa as no more than a simple mercenary and I hired you, he took me aside. He knew who you were. He had heard of both you and Refuge. He told me that you were not a man to be treated as anything but an equal. My father said that! I know it means nothing to you, but he viewed no man as his equal. Yet, he said I was to treat you as one.’
Heast made no attempt to reply. Jye Tuael’s father had been a man whose dreams had been of expansion, of owning the entire continent that the Kingdoms of Faaisha sat upon. He had known it was an impossible idea, but in the final years of his life, it had turned him bitter. In a meeting that Muriel had attended in Faaisha, two years after he had taken the position of Captain of the Spine, Heast had seen that resentment for himself. The meeting had been to introduce Muriel to Jye, who was succeeding his father, but the old man had asked for a private meeting with Heast. There, he had stared at him with eyes that had turned yellow with the final stages of his cancer and had spoken of campaigns he had not ordered, his bitterness sharpened by his closing death.
‘I will do you the honour,’ his son said, ‘of assuming that you do not mean to reveal this in public.’
‘A weak Faaisha does not help me,’ Heast said. ‘But I have need of a few things.’
He laughed. ‘I am letting you live.’
‘My life was never yours to take.’
‘Look around you, Aned.’ Behind him, the soldiers in the garden waited, their hands on their swords. ‘Your life is the payment I offer.’
‘Do you know what was drawn on that letter you sent me? Did Baeh Lok explain that to you before he left?’ Heast still had the letter, hidden at the bottom of his pack in the hotel room. It was a letter with a simple badge drawn upon it, its background half red, half black, with a colourless globe of the world over it. ‘You called for Refuge.’
‘Yes, but there is no . . .’ The Lord of Faaisha paused. ‘The Captain and the witch,’ he said softly. ‘The sergeant said that to me, before I crossed the road. Seon. I thought it a peculiar phrasing and nothing more.’ He turned to the young witch, as if seeing her for the first time. ‘You do not look like your grandmother, Anemone. Tell me, are my warlocks still alive?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Do you fear them?’
‘No.’
‘I once offered your grandmother a position here,’ Tuael said. ‘Would you like to hear what I said to her?’
‘I have heard what you said to her.’ Anemone was polite, but within that politeness there was a coldness she did not bother to hide. ‘I am the Witch of Refuge. There must always be a Witch of Refuge.’
‘So there must.’ He turned back to Heast. ‘Am I to believe also that the men and women from Maosa are your soldiers?’
‘Yes.’
‘You make it difficult for them to return home.’
‘They have no home,’ the Captain of Refuge said. ‘You and the other Lords abandoned them months ago. But they’re still fighting for you. I am fighting for you, as well, and what we both need is coin. Coin is the price for what I brought you today.’
‘I don’t have the coin you need.’
‘I have not even given you a number.’
‘Any number is too high.’ Tuael raised his hand before Heast could speak. ‘Faaisha is at war. Our finances are tied to that. But I have something else that I can give you. Something that is very fitting, in a way. I can introduce you to a benefactor.’
‘And who would that be?’
‘The First Queen of Ooila,’ he said. ‘Zeala Fe.’