I left my master to return to the Low Tower and slipped away into Ceadoc town. I’d had enough of Ceadoc Castle and wanted to escape it. Finding the wise woman that Missel had mentioned was as good a reason as any to get away. I was also curious about those in the city who claimed Darsese still lived, I could see no reason why anyone in the town would care for the high king: he had certainly cared nothing for them.
The heat of the day clung to the city, making the air still and soupy with stink. Sound carried through the muddy streets in the night—the sound of couples making love in shacks far away, or it could have been the dying moaning their last in the dark alleys between buildings. It was hard to tell.
I became a ghost, slipping from shadow to shadow, making use of my skills so they did not become rusted and cracked with disuse. There were people about, as always in towns, no matter the time: refuse pickers, thieves and pleasure sellers walked through the darkness. I avoided streets that were well lit, though there were few of them. It was good to employ my skills. It felt like sloughing off the weight of the castle and the mysteries it held.
I followed a corpsers’ cart. The two corpsers, a woman and a young man, were dressed in long black robes as they led a limping dray mount through the streets. In the poorest areas the ritual of death was different, instead of leaving gifts for Xus that the priests would take along with the corpse, they simply marked a white X on the door. The corpsers would come and take away the body, leaving a small amount of coin in return. Though their work was necessary the corpsers were shunned: corpser families lived apart and arranged marriages between themselves. It was rare for most to see them and the cart existed in a bubble of silence, none wished to witness death at work and avoided it where possible. The corpsers did not speak as they went from house to house, looking for their marks. I had imagined they would be coarse and full of jokes, but they were not and they handled each corpse as if it were a loved one of their own. Only when they handled the dead did I hear their voices: “Easy there.” “Watch ’er arm.” “Lay ’em gentle now.” I found a strange solace in these two tender figures. This was the work of the god I knew: quiet, gentle and remorseful.
As I watched, several figures came out of the shadows, all dressed in black rags and led by a tall man.
“Elsire,” said the man in the corpser’s robes, tapping his partner on the shoulder and pointing down the street, “they’ve come.” The other turned, then took something from the cart, a club.
“Well, Padris, we knew they would.” Her words were a sigh. I watched from the shadows, curious.
One of the ragged figures came forward to speak to the corpsers.
“Youse were warned,” he said. In his hand something sharp glinted.
“It ain’t for anyone to interfere in this,” said Elsire, her voice soft. “This is the god’s work.”
“Our god,” said the ragged newcomer.
“Xus comes to all, Gargit,” said Padris.
“There’s a charge to take bodies in Ceadoc now.”
“Never been the way for the poorest,” said Elsire. “Won’t be now.”
“Youse were warned,” said the ragged man, Gargit, again and he stepped forward. He had about ten others with him. “The Children of Arnst have domain over death in Ceadoc, and soon the Tired Lands over.”
“This is our lives, and our families’ lives before us,” said Padris.
“You could have had new lives, somewhere else,” said the ragged man. “Somewhere you would not be outcasts. Now you will end up riding your own cart.”
“If Xus calls,” said the other corpser, Elsire, quietly, “we will answer.”
“And now you blaspheme,” said the ragged man. He sounded pleased with himself and raised his voice. “They blaspheme. Using our own words against us.” His little group raised makeshift weapons, scythes and hoes.
It disgusted me: the needlessness of it, the greed of it. People scraping a living and being forced to fight among themselves. The casual cruelty of the Children of Arnst, a casual cruelty that I and Rufra had helped give life to. I wanted it to end.
“Stop,” I said, appearing from the shadows, and the shock of what I was, a walking representation of death, caused the Children of Arnst to halt.
“A jester,” said Gargit. “Why are you here, Jester?” I walked past the corpsers, the knife in my left hand spinning.
“Your leader, Danfoth, does not call me Jester. He calls me the Chosen of Xus,” I said. “I am Girton Club-Foot. I am death walking and those behind me,” I pointed with my knife, “do the bidding of my god.”
Gargit stared at me. “I have heard of you, a man given a great honour, right enough.” He turned to his people, a smile on his thin face. “And yet he denies it. He refuses to join with us.” His hand slid into his robe and beneath his rags I saw the glint of armour and the hilt of a sword. “Maybe he is not so chosen after all, eh?” His people laughed and I wondered at how I had missed what he was. I should have seen it from the way he moved, Gargit was clearly a warrior, not some poor citizen of Ceadoc.
“If I am not worthy, maybe you should try and take my title,” I said. “But if you cannot, these people,” I pointed at the corpsers, “will be left alone.” Gargit stepped forward. Now there was the prospect of a fight his whole attitude had changed.
“Tarst, Benil,” he said, “circle round ‘the Chosen.’” Two more broke from the pack. Both had longswords and the elastic walk of the well-trained fighter. White-blond hair had escaped from below the hood of the man Gargit called Tarst.
“You are Meredari?” I said. The blade spun in my hand: turn and turn and turn.
“We are all the children of Xus,” said Gargit. He dropped into a crouch and his two fellows did the same. The rest backed off. “We are all Chosen.” He grinned at me and I nodded back.
“Let’s find out if that’s true then, eh?” I said.
We circled. I had never fought Meredari but knew that, like a lot of the tribes, they favoured one-on-one fights rather than banding together to rush an opponent, something which suited me fine.
Tarst came in first, with a roar. He must have been the least experienced as the others stood off, watching me. Fourth iteration: the Surprised Suitor. Jump back from the downswing of his sword. It thuds into the mud where I had been and he looks surprised, shocked, that I am no longer there. He has time to look up, see me. I am on him. Smashing down my foot on the side of his rusted sword, breaking it in half. He stumbles forward, suddenly denied the weight he is so used to, and my Conwy blade slides into his throat. With a flick I pull the blade out to the side, spraying a crescent of blood over the mud of Ceadoc.
As Tarst fell to his knees, clutching his throat and choking out his last, I returned to the position of readiness midway between Gargit and Benil.
“He is not the Chosen,” I said.
Gargit watched me and nodded.
“And you are like no jester I have ever seen.” I brought my hands up, framing my face, using my blades to mimic the gesture of surprise.
“You noticed?”
They came at me quickly, Gargit high, Benil low and angling for behind me so I could not use the same move I had used to avoid Tarst’s sword.
Fortunately, I have many moves.
Sixth iteration: a Meeting of Hands. I catch Gargit’s sword as it comes down. Benil’s blade is coming round to cut at my legs and I jump, breaking the meeting, left sword beating Gargit’s blade away. With my right I punch Gargit in the face with the hilt of my Conwy blade, sending him reeling backwards. I land behind Benil’s sword after it cuts through the air where I had been and curse silently. If I had landed on his sword the move would have been perfect—I have not named it yet. Benil staggers, still surprised that I was not where he expected me to be. He is all fury and little skill. I cut back with my Conwy blade across his face and he drops his sword, hands coming up to where I have opened his face. I extend my reach. Legs apart, arms outstretched, and the tip of my blade cuts into his throat, finding the artery. Move. Blood. Death.
Gargit stands as his fellow falls face first in the mud.
I return to the position of readiness.
“He is not the Chosen either,” I said, as Gargit stared at the second of his men to die. “Do you still think you are?” He comes at me with a scream of rage, mouth open, the saliva between his teeth twisting as the air from his lungs hits it. He holds his blade at hip height, double-handed for a gutting thrust. He comes on, and he is already dead, he simply refuses to admit it. As he thrusts. I sidestep, refusing him the beauty of the iterations, and his rage takes him past me. I lash out with a fist, the basket on the hilt of my left stabsword hits him in the temple and he stumbles, runs into the side of a house, his steps giddy and drunken.
I am angry—angry with the whole of Ceadoc and its casual cruelties. It is a cold anger.
“Get up,” I said. He held up a hand. His sword shone between us where he had dropped it and I picked it up and threw it over so it landed by his feet. “Get up,” I said again and he did: struggling, groggy, in no state to fight me. I turned my back on him and addressed the rest of the children. “If Xus has chosen him,” pointing my blade at them, “or any of you, then you cannot lose.”
He comes at me when I turn my back on him, as I knew he would. Feet pumping in the mud and I spin to meet him.
He slashes at me. I deflect the cut with my right blade and slice the fingers from his hand with my left. His blade falls. He falls. Crashing into the floor and tumbling, once, twice. Then lying still, wrapped around the pain of his hand, moaning.
“Get up.” He did not do so and I said it again, louder. “Get up!” Nothing. The more I shouted, the more people gathered to watch. Where they came from, these sad and ragged people, I did not know. They had not been there a moment ago and they seemed unreal. “Prove yourself as Chosen by Xus, if that is what you say you are!” I was screaming the words. “Get up!”
He pulled himself up, but did not pick up his blade. He backed away, keeping his gaze on me, one hand wrapped around where I had severed his fingers, dark blood flowing down his arm. Then he turned and ran. I took two steps, a throwing knife sliding into my hand, and as I let the small blade loose I shouted after him, “None can escape Xus!” And he fell. Dead the moment the steel cut into the back of his neck.
I turned to the black-clad Children of Arnst, who remained silent, as they had been throughout the short fight.
“I knew Arnst,” I said. “He was a rapist and a murderer. A cheap con man who could not even hold down a place in the priesthood. To connect his name with Xus makes me sick. If I hear these people,” I pointed at the corpsers, “have been touched I will find you—” I pointed my blade at them “—each of you—and send you to the dark palace in pain and blood. Do you understand?” They stared, saying nothing, and I roared at them, “Do you understand?” A couple of them nodded. “Go then,” I said. “Just go.”
I stood, watching them leave, scurrying into alleys and away, until I stood alone on the dark street. I heard footsteps, slow and gentle, approach me from behind.
“That was well done,” said a voice, and I thought it to be the corpser, Elsire.
“No,” I said, suddenly tired. “No, it was not. I denied that man a quick death for nothing but my own anger at what he represented.”
“You did it because he betrayed what you believe in, surely?”
“Did I?” I said. “Sometimes I am not sure what I believe in any more. Or if I ever believed anything.”
“Well,” said the voice, soft and gentle. “You protected my people, and for that I am thankful.” It felt, suddenly, like all the aches and pains of the day were lifted from me, tiredness fled and the dark and stink of Ceadoc were chased away by the sun. It was as if I walked through a fresh spring day. I turned to find who I spoke with and Ceadoc’s night flooded back. I stood in a dark street once more. The corpsers’ cart was gone, as if they had never been there. In fact, there was no one there at all. Not up or down the street, and where the mud should have been churned up by the fight or those watching, it was undisturbed apart from two sets of footsteps: one set my own, the other in absolute parallel to mine. I heard the harsh call of Xus’s black birds, though I could not see them in the darkness, and I had never heard of them flying at night.
I walked away from there, leaving three bodies behind me, and decided to head back to the Low Tower. I had hoped to speak to people in the town but news of what I had done would run ahead of me like fire through dry grass. Dressed as I was I could hardly claim to be a different Death’s Jester to the one who had cut down three men like they were unschooled children. I had let my temper run away with me, and my sense of justice had been outraged by their casual cruelty. I did not regret it, but I could hear my master’s voice: “Think past the moment, Girton.”
As I dawdled my way back to the Low Tower I came across the tracks of the corpsers’ cart once more. They had not gone far, simply continued on their slow and careful way. They probably presumed I would not want to speak to them, so few ever did. I followed the tracks until I came across their cart.
“Wait,” I shouted. The corpsers turned. The woman, Elsire, raised her throat to me in the old salute.
“Death’s Jester,” she said. “We owe you our lives.”
“The Children of Arnst do that a lot?”
“Aye, but this was the first time the threats were serious. We are safe now, I reckon, while you are at the castle at least.” Her smile was a small sad thing. “I think it is time for Padris to marry.” She was older than I had thought.
“But, Mother—” he said.
“You have been here too long, Padris. It is not safe here for us. Our time has passed.” I did not know what to say in the face of her sad acceptance.
“Torelc’s legacy is a cruel one,” said Padris and his mother nodded.
“I need some help,” I said. “I have heard people shout, ‘Darsese lives,’ in the town, what do they mean by that?”
She shrugged.
“We have heard it too,” said Elsire, “but do not know any more than you. We are seldom included in the town’s business, unless it involves a death among the poor, and Darsese was hardly that.”
“What happened for his funeral?”
“They didn’t invite the likes of us.” She smiled. “Were a big fire at the castle. Landsmen put the town in mourning, but the forgetting plague had only just ended, so that weren’t much work. The plague had the unseen busy in Ceadoc, some nights we filled two carts and the swillers were turning away bodies, said the pigs were too full to eat ’em. Can’t really help you much, Blessed.”
“Well, thank you for your time anyway,” I said, and I was about to walk away when I saw the cart and had an idea. “I need clothes,” I said, “so as not to be recognised.” I pointed at the bodies on the cart. “I can pay.”
“No need,” she said. “We owe a debt, clothes is the least we can give you.” She had Padris strip a corpse of about my height—a youth, barely out of his late teens—and pass me his ragged clothes and cloth cap. The clothes stank and the cap felt like it moved in my hand, so full was it with lice.
“Thank you,” I said, “and I need to find a well, and an inn, one where they may know about those who speak of Darsese.”
Directions given I stripped from my motley, armour and blades. The Conwy I strapped to the inside of my leg, it would be difficult to get at but I would not let it out of my sight. The rest I gave to the corpsers with instructions to take them to the Low Tower portcullis and put them into the hands of Merela Karn and no other. I described her to them and had no doubt they would do as I asked. They were honest folk.
At the well I tore a rag from the clothes the corpsers had given me, it would hardly spoil the cut of them, and wet it, using it to clean the make-up from my face. Though I would not look clean I would look no more dirty than any other denizen of Ceadoc town. From there I headed to the drinking hole Elsire and Padris had directed me to, it was not the nearest, they said, but was more likely to accept a stranger than some of the others. Though they were at pains to point out this still did not mean I would be welcome.
The place was called the Dead Mount, and it had a poorly drawn picture of a mount with a spear sticking out of its front and a rider whose expression may have been horror or hilarity, it was difficult to tell. Inside, the place was thick with people and noise, fragrant miyl smoke filled the air and made me feel light-headed. The conversation slowed to a stop as I entered and made my way to the plank of wood where a heavy-set woman and a man, who could have been her husband or brother, possibly both, were serving.
“Perry,” I said. The woman stared at me. I wondered how old she was. Probably not as old as she looked.
“We don’t serve mage-bent.” She spat when she talked. “Brings bad luck.”
I put two bits on the table, probably more money than all the perry in the bar was worth. It smelled more like vinegar than anything people would want to drink.
“Then serve everybody.” She stared at the money. “I am sure they will see that as good luck.”
“You steal that?”
“Do you care?”
A smile crept on to her mouth.
“No.” She raised her voice. “Everyone, this is the first lucky mage-bent youse’ll ever meet. He’s bought youse all drinks.” A roar went up and men and women jostled me, many shook my hand. Eventually, after much slapping of my shoulder, I found myself at a corner table with a young man and woman who found my money attractive enough to ignore the ill luck sitting with one of the mage-bent may bring them.
“So, what brings you ’ere then?” The boy put his hand on my leg and the woman slipped her arm around my neck. They both stank so strongly of the vinegary perry that I suspected they may have been bathing in it.
“My master is a trader in Maniyadoc,” I said. It was not entirely untrue, though our trade was the production of corpses. “I have been sent to look around Ceadoc, find her a place to stay, spy out what trade is like.”
“Trade is yellow as Coil,” said the boy, “ain’t no one got anything.” I crossed my legs to stop his hand getting any nearer my groin.
“Is she rich, this master of yours?” said the girl, leaning in. There was nothing I could cross to stop her smushing her lips against my cheek. I thanked Xus she at least missed my mouth as her teeth were black and her breath like running into a brick wall.
“Rich enough,” I said. “Tell me something.” The woman was staring intently at me, or trying not to fall from her stool. It was hard to tell.
“We’ll tell you anything, lovely,” she said. I had no doubt she would.
“Aye, anything, lovely,” echoed the boy while trying to force his hand past my crossed legs. He was not one to pick up a subtle hint.
“I thought the high king had died,” I said, “but I have heard many say Darsese lives while I am here and—” The boy removed his hand from my leg and the woman gave up her fight with gravity and sobriety and fell from her stool. Then she crawled away and vanished into the crowd.
“You from the castle?” said the boy, “or the Children?”
“Neither. I—”
“You don’t ask about the old king,” he said. “Not in public. That’s all you need to know.” As he finished speaking I realised everyone in the hole was staring at me.
“You should leave, mage-bent,” said the serving man, and he pointed at the door. “We ’as talked, and we ’as decided money can’t buy off ill luck.”
“Very well.” I stood. I considered knocking my drink to the floor and saying something cutting, but there must have been twenty or thirty people crammed into the stuffy little hole and that was more bodies than I was comfortable leaving behind me. I slipped out of the door and into the warm darkness. The truth was I had expected little else but a cold reaction to my questions, especially as I had seen those who had shouted about the high king being hauled off by Landsmen. Answers would come though, I had no doubt of it. A stranger wandering into town, flashing money about and asking questions without any subtlety was sure to attract attention.
I visited a few more drinking holes, asking the same questions, receiving similar reactions, and I let myself be thrown, physically, out of more than one.
They found me, those people whose ears were open for such questions, as I rounded the end of a street. By the time I was halfway up it they filled the gap in the houses before me—another ragged group of men and women carrying hoes and clubs. They were not in the black of the Children of Arnst. These were in the mud-spattered, faded browns and grey of every day. I turned, behind me was another group. A lone figure left them and walked toward me, not coming too near, and behind the figure the group closed in. I counted fifteen of them, six in front, nine behind.
“Who are you?” At first I thought it the woman who had sat with me in the first drinking hole, but this woman was not drunk, and though there was a familiar resemblance she had a hardness about her the drunk woman had lacked.
“I am sent here by—”
“Blue Watta curse your lies, mage-bent. We’ve lost enough to the Landsmen and the Children. Tell us the truth or we’ll leave you broken and mewling for your masters to find in the midden heaps, if they are even bothered enough to come looking for you.” I almost replied with “You couldn’t,” but bit back the words. I wanted information, not violence.
“I am a servant of King Rufra ap Vthyr,” I said. “He has heard talk of Darsese still living and he has sent me to investigate this.”
“He is the pretender who wishes to take Darsese’s place,” she said, her words gaunt and hostile.
“Not if the high king still lives. Rufra obeys the laws of the land. He has no wish to go against them.”
“What is your name, servant of Rufra?”
“Girton Club-Foot,” I said. I am not sure why I chose to tell the truth. Maybe I thought it would scare them enough to talk.
“I have heard that name, you are the jester assassin? You do not look like a jester.”
“It is a very poor disguise and has already found me trouble once today,” I said.
“They say Girton Club-Foot is a mighty warrior also,” she said, “and you do not look like a mighty warrior either.”
“I am not a warrior. I am a killer.” She held my gaze. “It is different.”
“We could end you here.”
“You could not,” I said. I felt myself loosening up, muscles relaxing at the thought of violence.
She must have sensed some change in me.
“Will you let us test you?” I did not think “no” would get me very far and I nodded. “Afrin,” she shouted and a huge man lumbered forward holding a hoe.
“Is he your best?” I asked.
“He is our biggest.”
“That is not the same.” She studied me further and I decided she had been a soldier at some point, the smile when I said that big was not the same as good gave it away.
“Janil,” she said. The smile was in her voice now. “Test him.” A smaller woman stepped forward. Seeing I was unarmed she started to sheath the blade she held but I shook my head.
“No.”
“No?” Janil looked to the woman who led them.
“It would not be fair,” I said.
“Not fair?” said their leader. “In that case, Janil, you can kill him for the insult.”
“She can try,” I said.
Janil came forward quickly, her sword held loosely in one hand. She was angry. She thought I had been calling her unskilled when I had said to keep the weapon, though I had meant nothing of the sort. As she came within striking distance I fell into the position of readiness. She feinted, a pretend thrust at my stomach. She expected me to be careful, to be wary of her blade. That was not my way. Speed and surprise are the weapons of the assassin of Xus’s black bird. Third iteration: the Maiden’s Pass (variant). One foot around the other and a step forward. Shock on Janil’s face as I step inside her guard. She reaches for the stabsword at her side. Too late. Twenty-fourth iteration: the Boatgirl’s Twist. Spinning along her outstretched arm, at the point I am about to come face to face with Janil—she wears a sweet perfume and has eaten something sharp and sickly—I grab the wrist holding her sword. Fifth iteration: the Boatgirl’s Dip. Going under her arm without letting go of her wrist, twisting it against the joint. She drops the sword, gasps with pain and then I am behind her and she is on her knees in front of me. Arm bent backwards, head being forced down. I hear a wave of sounds, whispers of shock at how quickly the best of them has been put on the floor.
“She is good,” I said. “She is a soldier and a warrior. Do not let what I have done detract from her skill any, but I am Girton Club-Foot and she is not trained to fight someone like me.” I looked up to meet the eyes of the woman. “Very few are.”
“Are you going to kill her?” said the woman.
“It is not my intention,” I said. “I only wished to show you I am who I say. Now, will you answer my questions?” I let Janil go and she stood, rubbing her shoulder. “It will be sore for a day,” I said. “Find something cold to put on it, if you can in this heat.” She nodded, and lifted her head, exposing her throat to me before she went back to stand by the woman.
“My name is Govva,” said their leader. “I apologise for the way we have acted, Girton Club-Foot, but those of us loyal to the high king are hunted, and we become fewer by the day.”
“Then maybe we should get off the street?” I said, and wondered what made these people loyal to a man they had probably never seen, one I knew had been a monster. She nodded, leading me away to a ramshackle house where torches were lit and questions could be answered.
The building we sat in was made of mud bricks and I could see though the walls in places. The breeze this allowed in felt like a blessing in the heat, but in the winter I imagine the house was barely warmer than outside. On one wall was a painting, it looked like it was done using fingers rather than brushes, but the long red hair left no doubt about who it was meant to be: Darsese. Govva poured me a cup of vinegary perry and I sipped at it, doing my best not to grimace. There was something in the room that set me on edge, but I did not know what. There was a subtle scent in the air that I could not place—and just at the moment I thought I knew where I had experienced it before, Govva interrupted my thoughts.
“You don’t have to pretend it is good,” she said. “We know it is not.”
“Small mercies from dead gods.” I placed the cup on the table. “I do not like perry much even when it is good.” I wanted to talk of Darsese with them, but they were jittery and thoughts of that smell hung in my mind. So I left a silence, let them fit in what words they chose.
“We heard the plague did not come to Maniyadoc,” said Govva.
“It did, in some places. But it was not as severe.”
“Did you see cases?” she said and took a swig of the perry. She made no attempt to pretend she liked the taste of it.
“No, thankfully.” I took a deep breath. Thoughts of darkness suspended in the air with that scent.
“It was awful. Two out of every three died. Whole families were wiped out. It started with shivering.” She wrapped her hands around herself, as if she were cold. “Every time I got a chill I thought I was finished. After the chill came the rash, rings around the arm, the neck, lines over the face. The skin would become papery and tear easily. I saw children and men crying in their beds, afraid to move because of the pain. There was blood everywhere.” She moved and a breeze passed through the room, stealing away the scent that had set me on edge.
“You lost someone?” I said.
She stared at the floor.
“Husband. My youngest child.”
“I am sorry.”
She lifted her head, met my gaze.
“Why? It was not your fault.” Took another swig of perry. “It could have been worse. Two of my children got on the caravans, I have that solace at least.”
“Caravans?”
“Aye, near the end Darsese made provision for the strongest to leave Ceadoc. I stayed to nurse the dying, but it was good to know my girls escaped.”
“When do they return?”
“They do not, but we knew that. When I have paid my debt to Darsese I will go to join them.” She was quiet for a moment, thinking of her children no doubt, then she continued. “After the paperskin came the worst bit, the forgetting. At some point, it could be after days or after hours of the paperskin starting, the ill would go to sleep. And when they woke, something of them would be missing. Then more sleep, they would drift in and out and each time they woke more of them would be gone. At the end you were left caring after a body, after only flesh with nothing of the one you loved in it.”
“And how did they die?”
“We killed them. Better that than let them starve when they forgot how to eat.”
“But what does this have to do with Darsese living, or you owing him?”
“You know of the great cure?”
That scent again, drifting through the room.
“I have heard rumours, nothing more. Fantastic stories to account for a disease burning itself out.”
“They are not fantastic. They are true. We went to the walls of Ceadoc every day, begged the high king to help. And he did. He were cruel, Darsese was, and like many I hated him once. But when it mattered he came through for his people. First he provided carriages, great big carts to take people away from Ceadoc, to the safe place, and people fought to get on them. But still the plague ravaged us and we thought we would all be lost. Then he, somehow—do not ask me how—he cured us. It were inexplicable. The air of Ceadoc lost its filth, smelled of spices and honey and time seemed to …” She stopped speaking, as if confused. As if there were not words to describe what she had felt—and I knew there were not, as I had experienced such things myself. Sorcery. “Well,” she said quietly, sipping from her awful drink, “what I say will sound like madness, but time seemed to stop. For a second, in the dead of winter, it felt like summer. And then my second son, he was far gone, another day and I would have had to open his wrists, he woke. And others woke and when they did they were back with us.”
“And why do you think this has something to do with Darsese?”
“Because everyone who woke in Ceadoc said the same thing. They sat up in their cots, from the floor, in the street, wherever they were, and they said one word: ‘Darsese.’”
“That does not mean he—”
“If he does not live, why do they take away those that say he does? Or lie to us about his family? And why does she—”
“Lie?”
“They say that Darsese’s sister Cassadea was sent far away and died in the mountains, but they lie. They brought her back.”
“They did?” Until this moment I had not even known Darsese had a sister.
“She came here. I saw her.”
“How can you be sure it was her?”
“Because I was a guard once, and I guarded her. Besides, only the high king and his sister had such red hair.”
I sat back, wondering what this could have to do with events in the castle, although I knew where the souring had come from now. Magic had cured these people and I would need to speak with my master about it. Could the same man who had so little respect for life that he had created—and enjoyed—the menageries also have cured his people? It did not make sense.
“Thank you for telling me this,” I said. “And you are sure?” Suddenly the scent that had only been a hint earlier flooded the room: wildflowers and summer.
“Yes,” a voice from behind me, familiar but out of place. “They are sure because they have a source in the castle.” I turned, my hand going to where my blade would usually be, because I knew who I would see. Arketh, the torturer.
“Why are you here?”
“I lead these people, Girton Club-Foot. I provide funds. I provide information because I am loyal to the high king. Is there anything else you wish to know?”
“If Darsese lives, where is he?”
Arketh shrugged.
“Ceadoc Castle is big, Girton Club-Foot, and I am just one woman. I had hoped to find my king quickly, but it has not proven easy, and the numbers of those loyal dwindle as the Children tighten their grip.” She stared at me with something she must have imagined looked like a smile on her face. “But now you are here, and you are famously curious.”
“You want my help?”
“I helped you, in the menagerie.”
“And I thank you for it.” I stood. The presence of Arketh unsettled me and I wanted to be away from her. “But I must go now.” I needed to think about what her being here might mean—and I was not at all sure it meant the high king lived. Then I remembered something—Berisa. “Yes, there is one other thing. There is a wise woman. She lives near where the shepherds drink. Do you know of her?”
“A wise woman? Do you jest?” said Arketh. She let out a little giggle.
“No, I was told—”
“Someone is trying to trick you, Girton Club-Foot. The Landsmen wiped out every wise woman in Ceadoc a decade ago. Even a sniff of herbs was enough to get you put in a blood gibbet or on my table, weeping out sad little secrets. Gifting me teeth.”
“So there are no wise women at all in Ceadoc?”
“No, Girton Club-Foot, not a one. Or maybe so many would not have fallen to the plague before Darsese saved us all, eh?”
I nodded, but it seemed that my life did nothing more than increase in complexity.