Even before we had left the palace chaos had already begun taking over Isault’s duchy. City constables were roaming the streets, weapons drawn, though they had no clue what they were looking for. Along the outlying country roads small contingents of Shuran’s Knights patrolled in a more disciplined fashion, though there too it looked to be more for show than for any real purpose. We avoided them all. Our journey would have been easier if Shuran had given us traveling papers, but I could understand why he’d preferred the freedom to decide later whether he’d let us go free or that we’d escaped.
So we made our way through the back roads of Aramor, trading its wide, well-traveled routes for muddy cart tracks and forest paths. Word of the Duke’s murder was spreading slowly outside the capital, and most of those who noticed us just ignored us and went about their own business.
Despite Shuran’s assurances, I was anxious to see for myself that Valiana and Dari were unharmed, but by the time we arrived at the Inn of the Red Hammer late on the second evening, they were already gone.
The innkeeper was a young man with sandy blond hair named Tyne who was sufficiently mystified by the simple business of signing the ledgers that I suspected he’d not long held the job. After a fair amount of flipping pages back and forth along with a good deal of mumbling, he finally said, “They left two days ago.”
“Two days?” I asked. “That would have been only a day after they’d arrived. Check your records again.”
He did, looking genuinely concerned that he’d gotten it wrong, and then said again, “Two days.”
“Are you sure you aren’t mistaking ‘departure’ with ‘arrival’?”
Tyne gave a nervous giggle. “No, see, it says right here in the arrival column, ‘two beautiful women’ and the day they arrived. Then over here”—he flipped the page over and pointed with his finger—“right here under departure, the day later, ‘the two beautiful women’. Simple, see?”
“Why ‘two beautiful women’?” Kest asked. “Why wouldn’t you take their names down?”
The innkeeper shrugged. “’m not good with names, really. Besides, no one ever stays here long. It’s easier to just write ‘three burly soldiers’ or ‘crazy old man’.”
“You realize that Ducal Law in Aramor means you’re required to keep track of guests’ names in the register, don’t you?”
Tyne looked like he’d swallowed something too big for his throat. “Please, sirs . . . I didn’t know! I’m not . . . I mean, I’m still new at this job. My uncle only bought the place a month ago—he told me I was to run it and then he buggered off again back to Pertine.”
“Your uncle owns a lot of inns, does he?” I asked.
“Nah, he’s a Knight. Runs around fighting border wars with other Knights. Stupid job, really.”
“And yet he earns enough money to buy an inn?” Kest asked.
Tyne shrugged again. “I guess his Knight-Commander rewarded him for his service. Not that Uncle Eduarte ever seemed very reliable to me—Mum always says—Say, you’re not going to fine me, are you? I mean, I just work here. I don’t—”
I took advantage of his momentary panic to take the book from his hands. There were the two entries listed, separated by a single day. “Why would they arrive one day and then leave the next without waiting for us?” I handed the book back to the innkeeper. “Did they leave a message for us?”
“Who’re you?”
“Falcio,” I said. “Falcio val Mond.”
The innkeeper grinned. “That’s funny. Anyone ever tell you your name sounds a lot like Fal—”
“Just check for messages.”
“Don’t need to,” he said, pointing to a wooden box sitting on the counter behind him. “There ain’t none in the box.”
“Then why did you bother to ask my name?”
The innkeeper’s forehead furrowed. “Didn’t you just say I should be takin’ names?”
Kest pointed at the entry showing the next arrival at the inn. “Falcio, look, here. I suspect this explains why they’re not here.”
I looked down at the entry. The price was half what the innkeeper had told us we’d have to pay, but when I read the line that was supposed to hold the guest’s name, I forgave him.
Brasti looked over my shoulder and read the entry. “Shit.”
“Do you know where the ‘angry old woman’ is now?” I asked the young innkeeper.
“In her rooms, like as not. Hasn’t stepped out of here since she arrived, so far as I can tell. It’s upstairs, last door on the right. We usually keep that suite for nobles but, well . . . she sort of . . . and I just didn’t want—”
“I understand,” I said, and gave him my best sympathetic smile.
Kest, Brasti, and I straightened our shoulders and brushed ourselves down before walking up the stairs and down to the end of the hall. The last door was of stout oak planks, smoothed and bound in brass, decorated with proper brass fittings and with a brass doorknocker. I was about to use it when I heard a voice from inside growl, “Just come in, you fools.”
I opened the door and the three of us entered what was obviously the inn’s most palatial rooms, which is to say the receiving room was a little larger than the others, and there was a separate sleeping room behind a closed door at the far end. Oh, and there were large rugs on the floor and actual curtains at the window. The Tailor was sitting at a chair by the window with needle and thread in hand, sewing something that looked like a large handkerchief.
“How did you know it was us?” Brasti asked.
“I know where every thread starts and where every thread ends,” the Tailor replied without looking up from her sewing. “Besides, I could hear your footsteps coming down the hallway. The three of you walk like a cross between a drunken three-legged horse and a family of ducks.”
I sat at the end of the wide bench a few feet away from her. A quick lift of her eyebrows told me this irritated her, but I considered it a small advance on the annoyance she was probably planning to cause me. “Why did you send Valiana and Dari away?” I asked.
“I had things for them to do.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“If you like. I had important things for them to do.”
I sat there for a minute, unwilling to engage in the Tailor’s game. She had always liked to begin every conversation by establishing that she knew more than I did, that she had more power than I did, and that she alone would decide exactly what we would and would not discuss.
“What are you doing?” the Tailor asked.
I thought she was speaking to me but her eyes were focused over my shoulder and I turned to see Brasti halfway out of the door. “I’m going to find something to eat,” he said. “I’ll be back in an hour or two. Maybe by then Falcio will be done letting you cuckold him.”
“I don’t think cuckold means what you think it does,” Kest said.
The Tailor chuckled.
“Brasti has a point, though,” Kest said. “Duke Isault is dead and a Greatcoat’s been implicated in his murder. There’s at least one other assassin out there and we have no idea what this is about. This isn’t the time for games.”
“Well then,” the Tailor said, “since you know nothing, perhaps you could keep your mouths shut while I’ll tell you what you need to know.”
“You’ll tell us what you think we need to know,” I muttered.
“What’s the difference?”
Brasti leaned against the doorjamb with his arms folded. “You know what I’ve been thinking about lately, old woman? I’ve been thinking that maybe you never got over the fact that you were once wife to a King, with servants and retainers and all those ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ and the rest. I think you miss it. I think the closest you can get to all that now is to treat the rest of us like servants, and Falcio keeps letting you do it.”
Brasti’s tone was light, almost whimsical, but his eyes betrayed a deeper resentment than I’d seen before.
“Let it be,” I said. “We’re all allies here and—”
“That’s what you ‘think’, is it?” the Tailor asked, still staring at her sewing. “Because what I find interesting is the idea that a former poacher with a mind the size of a pea is under the illusion that what he thinks matters one bit to the world. You’re nothing but a wayward bastard, Brasti Goodbow. You’re a hanger-on to better men, hoping some kind of meaning will rub off on you from one of these other two fools.”
“Enough!” I shouted. “Brasti is a Greatcoat. He’s one of us and you will address him with the respect he deserves.”
The Tailor stopped her sewing and looked at me as if I were an errant puppy who’d taken to barking at her. “You would think that men who’d come close to death so many times would grow wary of it.”
“You would be wrong,” Kest said.
The creak of a door being opened rather tentatively interrupted us and a voice whispered, “What’s happening?” from the sleeping chamber.
In the crack between the door and the frame was Aline’s face.
“Falcio,” she said, her voice excited and yet muted at the same time, and she pushed open the door the rest of the way and ran clumsily toward me. “I was sleeping,” she said, her arms wrapping around me.
“I’m very sorry to have woken you,” I said, kneeling so I could embrace her properly. “We were playing a game.”
Aline took half a step back. “Don’t you all have much more important things to do than play games?”
My eyes caught those of the Tailor. “You know something? You’re absolutely right. We don’t have time for silly games.”
The old woman let out a small chuckle.
I looked back at Aline, trying not to let my growing sense of horror show on my face. Her skin was pale, almost ashen, and she didn’t look as if I’d awakened her from sleep—she looked as if she hadn’t slept at all, not for weeks. She was even thinner than when I’d last seen her, and her eyes had a sunken quality to them, and dark circles that had no place on the face of a thirteen-year-old girl. She fiddled with her hair, which looked thin and brittle. Her fingernails were chewed.
“What are you looking at?” she demanded, a little indignantly.
I forced a smile on my face. “A very unkempt young woman with her father’s gangly limbs and a nose that’s too thin and bony to make a proper Queen.”
“Well you don’t look like a proper Greatcoat, either,” she said, her hand rising self-consciously to her nose.
“That’s true,” I said, and hugged her to me once again. “But we’re all the world has to work with, so I suppose we’ll just have to do our best, won’t we?”
She gripped me hard for a second and then pulled away once again. “I’m very happy to see you, Falcio. But if it’s all right, I’m going to go back to sleep for a little while. I’m very tired today.”
“Sure, sweetheart.”
“You’ll wake me before you go, though, right?”
Aline’s hand was in her hair again, unconsciously tugging strands of it free. I reached out and pulled her hand away. “I’ll see you before I go. Get some rest now.”
When she smiled, it was as if all the energy had drained out of her. She turned and walked wearily back into the sleeping room, pulling the big oak door closed behind her.
I looked back at the others. I imagine the expression on my face matched theirs.
“She’s been drugged,” Kest said, his voice calm but still bearing the edge of accusation.
“Just to make her sleep,” the Tailor replied. “Or try to, anyway.”
Brasti looked as if he were about to explode. “What in all the hells is—?”
“Keep quiet,” the Tailor said. “Don’t make things any worse than they already are.”
Brasti’s fists clenched at his sides and he seemed to master himself. His voice became a whisper, lower in volume but no less fierce than before. “Saint Zaghev-who-sings-for-tears! What’s happened to Aline?”
I shared Brasti’s fear and frustration, but I already knew the answer. “War,” I said. I turned to the Tailor. “The battle in Domaris goes poorly, doesn’t it? That’s why you’re here.”
The Tailor nodded.
“How long?” Kest asked.
“Duke Hadiermo’s forces are close to being routed. My Greatcoats have been hitting Trin’s soldiers where we can, but all we can do is slow them now, not defeat them. Domaris will hold for another week, maybe two at best. Then Trin will move her forces south to the border of Rijou.”
“What does any of that have to do with Aline? Was she injured?” Brasti asked.
“Not by any blade.”
“Then what’s wrong with her? She talks like a child of seven, not a future queen coming into womanhood.”
“It’s exhaustion, you fool,” the Tailor said. Her voice was so angry and brittle that I realized she too was living under the weight of having failed Aline. “She’s a thirteen-year-old girl.”
“But it’s only been a few weeks!” Brasti’s voice was almost pleading, as if he was trying to negotiate for a better answer.
“No,” I said quietly. “For her it’s been months. This all started in Rijou, where she only narrowly avoided being burned alive along with the Tiaren family—the family she believed to be her own. Then we found her and immediately we went on the run. We were hunted by every killer the city had to throw at us until the Blood Week was over—and let’s face it, Rijou has never been short of murderous killers, has it?”
“And then we had to flee from Duke Perault’s Knights,” Kest added, his gaze far away, “all the way through Pulnam.”
I remembered my one meeting with Perault, Duke of Orison, and his barely subdued glee as he anticipated taking Aline and Valiana for his own sick pleasure.
The Tailor snickered. “If it makes you feel any better, Falcio, it turns out that Perault was insufficiently entertaining for Trin. She had her new lover kill Perault while he was enjoying his last ride with her.”
“None of this helps Aline,” Kest said.
The Tailor picked up her sewing. “And nothing can. She’s a good girl, our Aline, and a brave one. But she’s a thirteen-year-old, and there is only so much the mind of a thirteen-year-old girl can take before—”
A creeping sickness filled my belly and throat. “She’s going mad from fear.”
The Tailor kept her eyes firmly on her sewing but her lips pinched together for a moment. “Aye, that’s as true a way to see it as any.”
“But what are we going to do?” Brasti demanded. The fingers of his right hand were twitching as if they were trying to feel for an arrow. “We keep wasting our time with all this war and politics, and meanwhile the girl we’re supposed to save is fading away! How is she supposed to take the throne in this state?”
The Tailor’s hands moved the needle deftly through the fabric, back and forth. She remained silent. No angry retorts, no clever jabs, just the desperate stillness of a battlefield after the fighting is done.
“Tailor, are you telling us it’s over?” I asked. “Is there no hope of putting Aline on the throne?”
No one spoke. Kest looked around the room, his gaze flitting from wall to wall as if he were trying to find a pattern in the grain of the wood. Brasti’s eyes were filling with tears of frustration and sorrow, and I suspected mine were too.
“It’s over,” the Tailor said finally. She put her sewing on the windowsill and rose from her chair. “To answer your earlier question, the girls should be back later tonight. A dozen of Trin’s men caught our trail in Domaris and followed us all the way through Rijou, so Dari and Valiana are leading them on a merry chase right now.”
“Why not more?” Kest asked. “Why not send a hundred or a thousand, to get you once and for all?”
“Jillard has made it clear he won’t allow Trin’s forces to march through his duchy, so Trin can send only as many men as can sneak through the border.”
“So he’s holding up his end of the bargain?” I asked, a little surprised. “The Duke of Rijou is honoring the agreement with Aline?”
The Tailor snorted. “You should know better than anyone that using the word ‘honor’ in the same sentence as ‘Rijou’ is like handing wool to a sheep and asking him to knit you a coat. He’s just doing what all the rest of them are doing: holding out until Trin offers him a deal he can live with.”
“And when she does?” Kest asked.
The Tailor’s expression didn’t change at all, but we could all see the rage and frustration that boiled beneath the surface of her skin. “May every Duke in Tristia find themselves in their own personal hell,” she said. “That’s all I ask of the Gods now.”
“We have the decree,” Brasti said. “Can’t we use that to—?”
“To what?” I asked. “If it was just Isault who’d been killed, then his eldest child would have taken the ducal throne and he’d be bound by the decree, but—”
The Tailor’s eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about? Someone killed Lucan as well as Isault?”
I couldn’t stop myself from taking some small pleasure in the fact that, for once, the Tailor didn’t know everything.
“Not just him. Isault’s entire family was taken out.”
“Damn this country,” the Tailor swore, peering into each of our faces in turn as if to see if we were lying. “How is that possible? Were they with Isault?”
“No,” Kest said, “they were in their separate rooms when the assassin came for them.”
“Saint Laina-who-whores-for-Gods! What a mess.” The Tailor turned to me. “There’s a story going around that a Greatcoat was found in Isault’s throne room when he was killed. Is it true?”
I nodded. “Dara.”
The Tailor’s expression grew thoughtful. “Why in all the hells was she there?”
That was a question that had been burning a hole in me since we’d arrived, but I wasn’t sure if I was prepared for the answer.
Hells, I thought, will it really make things any worse if I know for sure? “Did you and the King ever discuss a plan to have Greatcoats assassinate the Dukes?”
“Paelis would never condone such a thing. You know that.”
“What happens now?” Kest asked. “If we can’t win a war against Trin, how do we proceed?”
The Tailor opened a cloth bag sitting on the windowsill next to her sewing. She pulled out three smaller bags and handed one to each of us.
I opened up my bag and saw a pile of small gold coins inside—more than thirty, I reckoned at first sight. “What are we supposed to do with these?”
“Retire,” she said.
“I don’t understand.”
“Go to Merisaw; it’s just outside the capital of Rijou.”
“I know where Merisaw is—but why would I go there?”
The Tailor’s voice softened. “Because she’s there,” she said. “She’s waiting for you.”
Brasti threw his hands up in the air, nearly losing hold of his bag of coins. “Will one of you please tell me what you’re talking about?”
A woman’s face came into my mind: dark hair framing pale white skin, blue eyes with tiny wrinkles on each side that you could only see if you were close enough to kiss her. A smile that promised the stars. “Ethalia,” I said. “Ethalia is there.”
The Tailor smiled. “Look at that idiot expression on your face, Falcio. I swear, in a better world I’d find it endearing. Take the back roads and make your way there. From Merisaw you can join one of the caravans going south; when you get to Baern you can get yourself a little boat. Go and spend your days in the Southern Islands. Trin will have little interest in them.”
“But what about us?” Brasti said.
“You? Take your money; go and live your life. There’s enough there to keep you in whores and ale until you get so drunk you shoot yourself dead with an arrow from your own bow.”
“I have no use for whores nor ale,” Kest said.
The Tailor walked over to him and put a hand on his face. “Ah, Kest. Your love may well be the noblest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s certainly the most pathetic.”
Before I could ask her what she was talking about, a more pressing thought entered my mind. “But what about Aline—what happens to her?”
“Aline will come with me,” she said. “I’ll keep her hidden. Trin will take the country and drive it into chaos and civil war, which is probably for the best.”
I started to object but the Tailor held up a hand. “Tristia can’t be saved, not as it is, and not with Aline too young to survive the throne. No, Trin will take power and ruin things even more, and before long she’ll find herself looking down at her headless body from the top of a spike. The Dukes will likely fall right alongside her and the country will be ready for a sane monarch. Until that day, Aline must be protected.”
I thought back to my conversation with Aline on the top of the little hill outside the village of Phan. “Aline comes with me,” I said.
The Tailor’s eyes were as flat and hard as black rock. “No. She does not.”
“I kept her safe in Rijou.”
“This is easier. I can—”
“You weren’t dying in Rijou,” the Tailor said quietly.
“What are you talking about?” Brasti asked.
“You haven’t told them?”
Kest and Brasti looked at me. They might have suspected, but they were still not sure. They knew I was suffering from the neatha, but I’d kept my thoughts about where the paralysis was leading to myself; insanely, I had still hoped there might be some cure. Now all I could think about was the number of days the journey from Pertine to Merisaw would take, and then how much further down to the Southern Islands.
“How long do I have?” I asked.
The Tailor’s expression was full of sorrow and pity, but her eyes were as hard as ever. “If you leave now, you may well get to see a sunset over the Southern Islands.”
“So it’s over, just like that?” Brasti asked. “Everything we did, everything the King talked about . . . it’s over? We don’t run or fight or judge. We just—”
“It’s over for you, that’s all. The world will continue. Aline will survive, I’ll see to that. But the three of you have done enough. Go and live out your days with whatever happiness you can find in this corrupt and broken world.” She reached over and put her hand on Brasti’s chest, a gentle gesture that made no sense to me, not coming from the Tailor. “This was never a land for heroes. The war that’s coming will have no place for you at all.”
I rose and stood with Kest and Brasti. Somehow it always came back to the three of us. Even when we journeyed apart, we always knew we would come back together again. For nearly fifteen years we had been the arrow and the blade and the heart of the King’s dream, but now the Tailor was telling us that we were finished, that everything we’d fought for was going away, that the path of the Greatcoats had been a dream, soon to be forgotten. We were being ordered to walk away from the fight.
Kest and Brasti and I looked at each other wordlessly, and after a moment we each nodded in turn. For one brief instant our minds were joined and we shared between the three of us an inescapable truth. We didn’t clasp hands, or hug each other. We didn’t say or do anything, in fact, for anything we might have done would have felt like a performance.
“All right, then. Good,” the Tailor said. She went over to the door of the bedchamber and opened it quietly before going in. I heard her gently rouse Aline from sleep and pick up her things. When they returned, I knelt down awkwardly by the bench so that the King’s daughter could put a weary head on my shoulder.
“The Tailor says we’re leaving, but you can’t come with us right now. Are you going on a mission?”
At that moment I realized I had never before lied to Aline. “Yes,” I said, “and it’s a very important mission. I’d tell you all about it, but it’s a secret and no one but Kest and Brasti and I know about it.”
She giggled for just a moment, then said, “You’re such a bad liar, Falcio.”
“That’s why I never lie to you,” I said. “Besides, if I did, Monster would bite my hand off.”
Aline’s eyes became soft and quickly filled with tears. “I had to send Monster away, Falcio. She was going crazy all the time—she even tried to bite me. She’s gone.”
“I . . . I’m sorry to hear that.” I pulled my King’s daughter to me, and over her shoulder caught the Tailor’s eye. Her expression confirmed what I suspected: Monster would try to kill anyone who hurt Aline—but how could the fey horse fight something as insidious as what was happening to the girl now?
I don’t pray often, you mad beast, but I pray you find peace for yourself. Dan’ha vath fallatu, Monster. I am of your herd.
The Tailor’s hand appeared on Aline’s shoulder and she gently pulled her away. “It’s time we go now, sweetness.”
Aline looked at me for a moment. “I’m going to smile now,” she said. “You smile too, and then we both close our eyes and keep them closed until I’m gone. That way we’ll always remember each other like that.”
“I . . . All right, Aline, we’ll do that.”
She smiled at me, and it was as if the whole world became bright, just for a moment. Then I smiled too, and closed my eyes quickly, afraid our smiles might break before I had them tight shut. I kept my eyes closed and a moment later heard the sounds of Aline’s light footsteps alongside those of the Tailor. I stayed where I was, leaning against the bench, and listened as they walked out of the room and along the hall, down the stairs and, ever so faintly, through the front door of the inn and out of my life.
Finally I felt Kest’s arm around my shoulders, pulling me up.
The three of us looked at each other, and no one was quite sure whether to speak or not.
It was Brasti who broke first. “So,” he said. “Do you think the Tailor bought it?”